English language and literature studies

¶ … imagery help evoke emotion in this poem? Choose three images from the poem and describe the emotions that the images evoke. Explain how the images are connected to the emotions.

The beginning of Matthew Arnold's poem "To Marguerite -- Continued" creates an image of isolated islands in the midst of the sea, paralleling the isolation of the island with that of humans in the world. The loneliness and impossibility of finding a connection with another human being is mirrored in nature. In the second stanza, Arnold creates an image of nightingales singing. Their song has a longing to it, as if they are remembering how the world was once a single continent and they are sending their song out to their fellow birds, in other areas of the world. Similarly, humans remember this kind of primal connection although it is now lost, suggests Arnold. This sense that the world was once a unified whole, but is now broken, is paralleled in the lives of every individual, who seek to find satisfying connections with others they can never fully achieve.

Q2. How does "London" reflect the issues and characteristics of the Romantic period?

The Romantics were extremely concerned about the discrepancy between what they saw as a purer, truer, pastoral era of the past, and the horrific effects of urban industrialization in the present. In the streets, Blake sees "weakness" and "woe." Blake's perspective reflects the Romantic preoccupation with freedom -- personal as well as economic. One of the reasons the Romantics were so preoccupied with industrialization is that they perceived it to be a threat to individual autonomy, versus the facelessness of the collective misery of cities. Within people's faces Blake sees "mind-forg'd manacles" and the image of the miserable soldier sighing suggests an individual impressed into service by the state. People in the new London are oppressed by the government, detached from nature, from all that is good in life, and detached from social connections with others, from God, and from their own, inner truth. Even infants -- for the Romantics, childhood innocence was holy -- weep with sadness, in awareness of the misery to come.

Q3. Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been criticized for portraying Africa through the eyes of a European colonist rather than through African eyes. What images does Conrad use to portray the setting of the Congo River? How does the setting imply the clash between European and African cultures or world views? How might Africans portray Africa differently than Conrad's Marlow?

Conrad portrays the Congo as monstrous, wild, and unearthly, versus the conventional image of Africa's form as a shackled monster. Everywhere there is the drumbeat of the natives, and the ominous reminder of the presence of untamed native life. Blackness is the dominant image of the Congo in Heart of Darkness -- whirls of black limbs, the black water -- all of which suggest that the environment is anathema and destructive to white civilization, as manifest in the persona of Kurtz. The natural beauty of the land, its colors, and the nuances of local cultures of tribes that would be perceptible to an Africa blur into a singular image of darkness in Conrad's prose.

Q4. Some critics argue that you can only fully understand a piece of literature if you understand the historical events that were ongoing when it was being written. Others argue that each piece of literature is independent of its historical context and you should not have to look for information outside the text to understand it. What do you think?