Exam answers notes

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Verse means a metrical line, not a holy sentence. Blank means the line-ends do not rhyme. An iamb is a weak beat plus a strong beat; five iambs make pentameter, so the usual line has ten syllables with five lifts.

Macbeth’s opening line is a clear sample: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” Marlowe’s Helen speech in Unit 2 uses the same unrhymed five-beat “mighty line.” Do not call this free verse: free verse drops the regular iambic pulse that Shakespeare and Marlowe keep.

A conceit is an extended, often surprising comparison that argues as well as it pictures. Abrams’s glossary treats it as the Metaphysical habit of yoking unlike things so that the mind must follow the likeness, not merely admire an ornament.

Herbert’s “The Pulley” is the set example: God’s blessings are poured from a glass, but rest is kept back so that weariness will toss man to God. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 treats Death as a person who can be tried in court and called a slave. Both images do work; they are not decoration stuck on afterwards.

A simile compares two things with a joining word such as like or as. A metaphor says one thing is another, without that joining word. Abrams keeps this old distinction; both are figures, but only simile announces the comparison.

In Macbeth Lady Macbeth says Macbeth is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way, and she would have him look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it — that flower/serpent pair is simile. “Life’s but a walking shadow” and “a poor player” are metaphors: life is the shadow and the player; there is no like. Do not label “poor player” a simile.

A soliloquy is a speech spoken by a character who is alone on the stage, or who believes himself alone, so that the audience hears the mind working. It is not a dialogue and not an aside to one other person. Tragedy uses it to show hamartia before the deed is public.

In the set play, Macbeth’s dagger speech — “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” — is the clear example. The “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech after the cry of women is another: life is called a walking shadow and a poor player. Both are blank verse, not rhyme.

An allegory is a narrative in which persons and places stand for moral or spiritual meanings as well as for themselves. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, is the set example: Christian leaves the City of Destruction for the Celestial City; Evangelist, Worldly Wiseman, and Vanity Fair are names that preach. It is not a secret code only: the journey is a story first.

A lyric is a short poem of a single speaker’s feeling or thought, originally tied to song. Spenser’s Amoretti 75, Donne’s falling-star song, Herbert’s “The Pulley,” and Dryden’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day are lyrics on this paper. A lyric may be a sonnet, but a sonnet is a counted form; “lyric” names the kind of voice, not the line-count.

Hyperbole is deliberate over-statement, not a lie told to cheat, but a figure that stretches size so the feeling is heard. Marlowe’s Helen has a face that “launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium”: one face is made to carry a war and a city. Donne’s falling-star song stacks impossibilities in the same spirit.

Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant sound at the openings of nearby words. Macbeth’s “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” binds f in foul/fair. The witches’ “fair is foul, and foul is fair” does the same work in a chant. Name the sound and the words; do not say only “it sounds musical.”

Tragedy, in Abrams, is a serious dramatic action in which a high or strongly placed person falls through a hamartia — a tragic error or flaw — into suffering and usually death. Pity and fear are the old effects; the English stage also allows comic relief, as in the Porter, without turning the play into comedy.

Macbeth is the set tragedy: a thane, then king, murders his way up and is destroyed. The hamartia is not only ambition; it is the choice to trust the witches’ words and to kill Duncan. Soliloquy, the supernatural, and the last metaphor of the walking shadow belong to this definition, not to a separate essay on “sad stories.”

A sonnet is a poem of exactly fourteen lines. In English it is usually iambic pentameter, and the end-words follow a locked rhyme. Abrams and Harpham, the glossary named for this paper’s literary terms, refuse the loose classroom sense “any short love poem.” A definition that forgets line-count, metre, and type is incomplete for eight marks. The letters a, b, c are not algebra. They mark which last words rhyme: two lines that share a letter share a sound; a new letter is a new sound. So abab means line 1 rhymes with line 3, and line 2 with line 4. The sums 8+6 and 4+4+4+2 only count groups of lines; they add up to fourteen. They are not a formula for Macbeth. The English couplet at the end is two rhyming lines, not a Hindi doha of 13+11 matras.

Three skeletons live in Abrams, and they are three ways of building the same fourteen-line lock, not three extra poems. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet is 8+6: an octave, often abbaabba, then a sestet, often cdecde or cdcdcd. Near line 9 the thought turns; that turn is the volta. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 works in that spirit: eight lines deny Death’s pride; the later lines call Death a slave and a short sleep. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is 4+4+4+2, rhyme abab cdcd efef gg: three quatrains with fresh rhyme-pairs, then a couplet that snaps the argument shut. This paper sets no Shakespeare sonnet. The name still matters because it is the glossary’s main English pattern; it does not mean a speech from the set play. The Spenserian sonnet keeps 4+4+4+2 but chains the quatrains: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The last rhyme of one group becomes the first rhyme of the next, so the thought is stitched rather than cut into three boxes.

The set poem, Spenser’s Amoretti 75, is this Spenserian type. Its end-words run strand / away / hand / prey / assay / immortalize / decay / likewise / devise / fame / eternize / name / subdue / renew — abab bcbc cdcd ee on the page, not only in a handbook. The lover writes her name upon the strand; the waves make it their prey; she says mortal things cannot be immortalized; he answers that his verse will eternize her name and that love will renew even death. The problem occupies the quatrains; the claim for poetry occupies the couplet. An eight-mark note therefore names fourteen lines, the three types, the volta or couplet-turn, and Amoretti 75 as the paper’s instance. Without the set sonnet, the term remains a diagram.

Unit 1 names one stretch, Elizabethan to Jacobean, 1558–1625, because the literary air is continuous even though the crown changes. The Elizabethan years run from Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558 to her death in 1603. The Jacobean years run from James I (Latin Jacobus) in 1603 to his death in 1625. The Norton Anthology (Greenblatt, volume 1) and Drabble’s Oxford Companion keep these reign-dates; this paper’s syllabus prints the same frame. A two-mark answer can stop at the years. An eight-mark answer must say what the two halves share and where the temperature changes, using only texts this paper sets.

What they share is the English Renaissance on the public page: humanism, print, the professional playhouse, blank-verse tragedy, and the sonnet as a locked lyric. Spenser’s Amoretti belongs to the Elizabethan courtly book; Marlowe’s mighty line belongs to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Jacobean (first years of James), yet it is still Renaissance tragedy in unrhymed iambic pentameter, with soliloquy, the supernatural, and a high man’s fall. Bacon’s essays, in Kiernan’s edition, are Jacobean civic prose built on the same humanist wish to make knowledge useful. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama treats the playhouse as one institution across both reigns, not as two separate theatres.

The change of weather is real and should be named. Elizabethan writing, in the set lyrics, still trusts ornament, courtly praise, and the poet’s power to immortalize a name, as Amoretti 75 claims. Jacobean writing, in Macbeth and in Donne’s holy argument, is darker, more inward, more willing to put death, witchcraft, and conscience on the stage or in the sonnet. James’s court, the Gunpowder Plot air, and a thicker interest in ambition and equivocation colour the tragedy. Donne’s “Death, be not proud” is not an Elizabethan love-toy; it is a late-Renaissance mind prosecuting Death. An answer that says only “Elizabethan is happy and Jacobean is sad” is too coarse. The right sentence is: same Renaissance tools, a graver Jacobean use of them, inside the single syllabus span 1558–1625.

The Metaphysical school is named in Unit 1 among the movements of this paper. The word does not mean, in Abrams, that the poets write a textbook of metaphysics. It means a seventeenth-century lyric manner whose mark is the conceit: an extended, often surprising comparison that argues. Samuel Johnson later complained of heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence; the glossary still uses that history. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics treats the conceit as thought in image, not as a flower added after the thought is finished. On this paper the school is not a free list of anthology titles. It is Donne and Herbert in the set lyrics, read beside the sonnet and beside Puritan seriousness.

Donne’s song “Go and catch a falling star” proves by a stack of impossibilities that a true woman will not stay true till the traveller returns. The conceit is the search itself: catching a star, impregnating a mandrake, hearing mermaids, all treated as tasks in one argument. Holy Sonnet 10 turns the same prosecuting mind on Death: Death is told not to be proud, compared to sleep, called slave to kings and desperate men, and finally told that after a short sleep Death shall die. Herbert’s “The Pulley” is quieter and more homely. God pours strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure from a glass of blessings, then withholds rest, so that weariness may toss man to God. The pulley is the conceit: man is lifted toward heaven by the very lack that looks like a curse. Both poets think; neither merely sighs.

The school sits beside Renaissance and Puritanism, not instead of them. The sonnet lock, humanist argument, and learned wit are Renaissance tools. The turn toward last things, conscience, and a God who bargains with the heart is close to the religious weather of the early seventeenth century, which Puritanism also breathes. Dryden’s later St Cecilia ode is public harmony and rhyme, not a Metaphysical lyric, and should not be dragged into this school. An eight-mark note therefore defines the conceit, names Donne’s two set poems and Herbert’s Pulley, and refuses extra pieces such as “The Flea” or the compass. Those poems are famous; they are not this syllabus.

Unit 1 prints two related labels: Puritanism as a movement, and Caroline to Commonwealth, 1625–1660 as the political stretch after James. Caroline means the years of Charles I (Latin Carolus), from 1625 to his execution in 1649. Commonwealth names the republic and Protectorate that follow, until the Restoration of 1660. The Norton Anthology and Drabble’s Companion keep these dates; the syllabus copies the same window. Puritanism is older than 1625 and not identical with the Commonwealth, but in this paper the two belong in one note because the moral weather of the mid-century is Puritan even when a lyric is not a sermon.

Puritanism, in the literary sense this glossary-course needs, is a severe Protestant demand for a felt, scriptural, inward religion, suspicious of theatre, of idle ornament, and of a church that looks too much like Rome. It is not a synonym for “no poetry.” Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, is the set Puritan narrative: a plain allegory in which Christian flees the City of Destruction, is warned by Evangelist, is misled by Worldly Wiseman, and must pass Vanity Fair. The names preach; the journey is still a story. Herbert’s “The Pulley” is not a Puritan pamphlet, yet its God who withholds rest so that man will not adore the gifts instead of the giver belongs to the same seriousness. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 prosecutes Death before resurrection — last things, not court compliment.

Caroline court culture still had masque and polish; the Commonwealth closed the public theatres in 1642 and kept them shut, which is why this paper’s tragedy is Macbeth, an earlier Jacobean play, not a 1650 stage hit. Dryden’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day is 1687, after the Restoration; it looks back at harmony as a public art, and should not be dated 1625–1660. An eight-mark answer therefore (1) gives the Caroline and Commonwealth dates, (2) defines Puritanism as inward Protestant severity rather than as “hatred of all verse,” and (3) ties Bunyan, and the religious lyrics of Donne and Herbert, to that weather. Milton is not on this syllabus and should not be imported to pad the movement.

The word Renaissance comes from the French for rebirth. In literary history it names the revival of Greek and Roman learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century and reached England later, under the Tudor monarchs and the first Stuarts. This paper’s Unit 1 places the English flowering inside the years 1558–1625 and still colours the Caroline decades that follow. Humanism is the intellectual heart of the movement: it studies the human being as a centre of value without throwing God away. Printing multiplied books. The Reformation split the Western Church. England’s Protestant settlement under Elizabeth I shaped what poets might praise on a public page. Abrams and Harpham’s Glossary of Literary Terms, the Norton Anthology edited by Greenblatt (ninth edition, volume 1), and Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion treat these as the conditions of the English Renaissance, not as decoration around the poems. A slogan that says only “rebirth of art” is too thin for twenty marks. The term is a European event with English literary results, and those results on this syllabus are the sonnet, blank-verse tragedy, and the essay.

The first English fruit that this paper sets is the sonnet. Spenser’s Amoretti 75 is a Spenserian sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameters, chained rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee. The lover writes a name upon the strand; the tide wipes it; verse, he claims, will write the virtues in the heavens so that death itself is subdued and love is renewed. That faith in the made line is humanist craft married to courtly love. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 uses the same fourteen-line lock for argument rather than for a lady’s name: Death is told not to be proud, compared to sleep, called a slave, and finally promised that after a short sleep Death shall die. Abrams’s three types — Petrarchan 8+6 with a volta, Shakespearean 4+4+4+2 with rhyme abab cdcd efef gg, Spenserian chained quatrains — are Renaissance form-knowledge. This paper sets no Shakespeare sonnet; the English type is still named because the glossary names it. Without line-count and scheme, “sonnet” collapses into “short poem,” which is not the Renaissance sense.

The second fruit is blank-verse tragedy. Marlowe’s Helen speech — “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” — is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the “mighty line” of the public stage, swollen around one face by hyperbole. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the whole play of Unit 4, is Jacobean tragedy in the same metre: soliloquy, the supernatural, the fall of a high man through hamartia. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama describes the professional playhouse as the institution that made this verse audible to a mixed audience. Comic relief, as in the Porter scene, belongs to that English stage, not to Aristotle alone. Blank verse is not “empty poetry.” It is unrhymed five-beat speech, close to talk yet still a pulse. Witches’ chants and porter-prose are exceptions that prove the rule by sounding like another world. A Renaissance definition that never reaches the theatre has left out England’s most public art.

The third fruit is the essay. Bacon’s “Of Studies” and “Of Travel,” in Brian Vickers’s moment and more precisely in Michael Kiernan’s Harvard edition of the Essays (1985), treat reading and travel as tools of civil life. Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability; some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. Montaigne’s “Of Friendship,” in Donald Frame’s Stanford translation (1958), is the French model from which English prose learned the form: one perfect friendship, Etienne de La Boétie, a fusion of wills that ordinary alliances cannot match. Both essayists are Renaissance prose; they are not the same temper. Bacon is civic, aphoristic, useful. Montaigne is inward, personal, sceptical of a second such friend. Bunyan’s later allegory is Puritan narrative rather than a court essay, yet it still uses personification and the journey, tools that allegory had already given the age.

Renaissance, then, is larger than a revival of statues and sonnets. It includes humanism, the classics, print, the Reformation, the professional stage, and these English results. Puritanism and the Metaphysical school grow beside it in the seventeenth century; they do not cancel it. Metaphysical poetry, in Donne and Herbert, argues in images as a scholar argues, which is itself a humanist habit turned toward God or toward a bitterly untrue world. Caroline and Commonwealth writing (1625–1660) still lives in that air even when the theatres close. Dryden’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day, printed 1687, looks back at harmony as a public art after the Restoration; it is late, but it still treats music as a civil and cosmic order, a Renaissance inheritance in another metre. A full twenty-mark answer names the European meaning, the English dates 1558–1625, and ties Spenser, Marlowe or Macbeth, and Bacon or Montaigne to the definition, with Abrams, Norton, and the named companions as the paper’s books. Without a set text, Renaissance remains a slogan. With a set text, it becomes a method: count the lines, hear the blank verse, and watch prose teach a civil use of books and travel.

Two mistakes should be refused in the last paragraph. The first is to write a history of Italy and never reach England. The second is to pour in extra names this syllabus does not set — Milton’s epic, Cavalier lyrics, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Julius Caesar — as if a longer list were a better answer. The paper has already chosen the examples. Renaissance on this course means the rebirth of classical learning as it shapes the locked lyric, the unrhymed tragic line, and the essay of use and friendship. Keep the dates, keep the three fruits, and the long answer will stand.

The line opens Edmund Spenser’s sonnet 75 of Amoretti, the lyric set in Unit 2. The speaker is a lover; the beloved is Elizabeth Boyle in the sequence. The picture is the sandy shore: he writes her name; waves wash it; he writes again; the tide makes his pains its prey.

The form is a Spenserian sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameters, chained rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee. It is not a Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg) and not a Petrarchan 8+6. Unit 1’s term “sonnet” is this poem in practice. The last couplet claims that verse will eternize her name and that love will renew later life.

The couplet is the opening of Christopher Marlowe’s Helen speech in Doctor Faustus, the set extract, not the whole play. Faustus, whose years of the devil’s bargain are almost spent, asks to see Helen of Troy. Ilium is Troy. Topless towers are walls so high they seem to have no top.

One face is stretched until it can launch a fleet and burn a city: that is hyperbole. The metre is blank verse, Marlowe’s “mighty line.” The irony, which a two-mark note should still name, is that this beauty cannot save him; Helen here is desire, and he is already contracted to hell.

The poem is a song of three nine-line stanzas, not a sonnet. The speaker stacks tasks no one can do — catch a falling star, get a child on a mandrake root, tell where past years are, hear mermaids — and treats finding a woman both true and fair as one more impossibility.

Stanza two stretches the search across ten thousand days and nights. Stanza three allows a small if: if you find her, write; by the time the letter arrives she will have been false to two or three. Beside Spenser’s faith that verse can hold a name, this lyric trusts no duration. The voice is Metaphysical argument, not a love-story.

Reference. These are the opening lines of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet 75 in Amoretti, the lyric prescribed in Unit 2 and carried in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Dustoor’s Poet’s Pen, and the Norton Anthology (Greenblatt, volume 1). The poem is a Spenserian sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameters, rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee. The speaker is the lover; the beloved, in the sequence, is Elizabeth Boyle. An RTC answer that names only “a love poem” without poet, book, and form is incomplete.

Context. The first quatrain is a physical scene on the sandy shore. He writes her name; the waves wash it; he writes again with a second hand; the tide makes his pains its prey. Time, as sea, wins the first round. In the second quatrain she answers him: “Vain man,” you try to immortalize a mortal thing; I myself shall decay like that writing, and my name will be wiped out likewise. Her argument is common sense: flesh dies; letters on a beach die. The chained rhyme (prey / assay / decay) sews her speech to his act, which is why the Spenserian chain is not an idle pattern here.

Explanation. The two lines therefore do two jobs at once. They give the picture — strand, waves, a name that will not stay — and they open the problem the rest of the sonnet must solve: can anything mortal be made to last? His answer, after her doubt, is the Elizabethan faith in verse. Let baser things die in dust; she shall live by fame; his verse will eternize her rare virtues and write her glorious name in the heavens. The couplet closes: when Death subdues the whole world, “Our love shall live, and later life renew.” Sand is weak; printed or remembered verse, he claims, is not. The volta is this turn from her doubt to his boast for poetry. Hyperbole lives in “eternize” and in writing a name in the heavens; the metaphor of the tide as hunter (“prey”) belongs to the first quatrain. Place the extract in Unit 1’s term sonnet and in the Elizabethan half of 1558–1625. Do not drag Donne’s falling star or Macbeth’s witches into this shore.

Reference. These are the first two lines of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10, the sacred lyric set in Unit 2 beside the falling-star song. Palgrave, Dustoor, and Norton print it among the Holy Sonnets. It is a fourteen-line argument, closer in spirit to the Petrarchan turn (octave, then a new attack) than to Spenser’s sand-and-fame story. Death is personified and addressed as “thee,” as a person who can be told not to swell.

Context. The octave continues the prosecution. Those whom Death thinks he overthrows do not die in the Christian sense: the soul is not ended. Rest and sleep are pictures of Death, and they give pleasure, so Death’s real stroke should give more rest, not less. Good men go with Death soonest, because rest of bones is delivery of the soul. That is still the first movement: Death is weaker than the names “mighty and dreadful.” The volta comes when Death is called slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and is said to dwell with poison, war and sickness. Poppy or charms can make us sleep as well as Death’s stroke, and better. Why then be proud?

Explanation. The extract therefore names the poem’s method in two lines: apostrophe, personification, and the denial of Death’s reputation. The last couplet completes the conceit of faith: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” If dying is only sleep, waking into eternity kills Death. Metaphor (Death is a slave; Death is sleep), hyperbole in the world’s old titles for Death, and conceit (a sleep that ends Death) all sit in these fourteen lines. The same blunt address as “Go and catch a falling star” is now used in belief. Place the poem in the Metaphysical school of Unit 1 and in the Jacobean religious weather; do not import “The Flea” or the compass, which this paper does not set. An RTC that stops at “Donne is not afraid of death” has not explained the conceit.

George Herbert, an Anglican priest, published The Temple in 1633, in Caroline England, before the civil war. “The Pulley” is the lyric set in Unit 2: four stanzas of five lines, not a sonnet. The whole poem is one Metaphysical conceit, quieter than Donne, equally exact. Abrams’s glossary and the Princeton encyclopedia treat such a conceit as thought in image: workshop and altar yoked until the doctrine is precise. Palgrave and Norton carry the poem among the paper’s named books. An eight-mark note that says only “God gives gifts but not rest” has the plot and not the machine.

When God first made man, a glass of blessings stood by. “Let us pour on him all we can.” Strength made a way; then beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure flowed. When almost all was out, God stayed. At the bottom of the treasure lay rest. If He gave that jewel too, man would adore the gifts instead of God, and rest in Nature, not in the God of Nature. Both would be losers: man would stop too soon; God would lose the creature’s love. So man may keep the other riches, but with “repining restlessness.” Let him be rich and weary, that if goodness does not lead him, weariness may toss him to God’s breast. The argument is theological and homely at once: rest withheld is not cruelty; it is a means of love.

Now the title. A pulley is a wheel with a rope. You pull down on one side; the load on the other side goes up. God withholds rest so that tiredness becomes the downward pull that lifts the soul. The soul is not a sack of grain, yet the image is taken from the workshop and made to carry last things. That yoking is the Metaphysical mark of Unit 1. Herbert is Caroline devotion, not a Puritan attack on bishops, and not blank-verse tragedy. Beside Donne’s prosecuting of Death and Spenser’s faith in fame, this lyric trusts a God who bargains with the heart by keeping one blessing back. Name the glass, the withheld rest, the pulley, and the toss to God’s breast, and the eight-mark answer is inside the set text.

John Dryden’s ode was written for 22 November 1687, the feast of St Cecilia, patron of music. Unit 1’s named ages stop at 1660; this lyric is Restoration public music, printed in Palgrave and the Norton volume named for the paper. It is not a Metaphysical conceit-poem, not a sonnet, and not blank-verse tragedy. The form is a ceremonial ode: stanzas of unequal length plus a grand chorus — still a kind of lyric in Abrams’s sense, because one public voice sings feeling and thought. An eight-mark answer that dates the poem 1625–1660 has misplaced it. An answer that drags Donne’s Death or Macbeth’s witches into the ode has mixed units.

The argument has three rooms, and they should be walked in order. First, creation: “From harmony, from heavenly harmony / This universal frame began.” Nature lay under jarring atoms; music ordered them into cold, hot, moist, dry, and last into man. Jubal, the first musician in Genesis, is named so that music is as old as humankind. Second, the passions: each instrument moves a different feeling — trumpet for war, flute for lament, violin for love, organ for devotion. Cecilia is said to have invented the organ and drawn an angel down by that sacred sound. Third, the end of the world: the last chorus looks to the last trumpet, when the dead rise and “music shall untune the sky.” So music made the frame, music sways the heart, music will unmake the frame. That is the whole ode.

What to hold for the paper: Dryden treats harmony as a civil and cosmic order, a late inheritance of Renaissance ideas of correspondence, now sung for a city feast after the Restoration. Alliteration and the swelling stanza are the sound of ceremony, not of a private conceit. Beside Spenser’s strand, Marlowe’s face, Donne’s argument, and Herbert’s pulley, this poem is public music. Name the date 1687, the three rooms (create, move, unmake), Jubal, Cecilia’s organ, and the last trumpet, and the note stays inside the set text. Do not write Dryden’s whole career; the syllabus sets this song only.

The official text in Unit 2 is not Marlowe’s whole tragedy. It is the Helen speech near the end of Doctor Faustus, in blank verse, printed among the paper’s anthologies. Faustus, a scholar, has sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure. The years are almost spent. He asks to see Helen of Troy, the woman for whom Greece sailed to burn Ilium. What the eight-mark answer must explain is the speech, its metre, its figures, and why beauty here cannot save him — not a scene-by-scene retelling of the entire play, which this syllabus does not set.

The famous opening is hyperbole built on a face: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Topless means towers so high they seem to have no top. One face is made large enough to launch a fleet and burn a city. He asks a kiss to make him immortal — “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss” — then feels her lips suck forth his soul and begs the soul back. He would build a thousand altars; heaven can wait. The line is Marlowe’s “mighty line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter that can swell like a wave. Unit 1’s term blank verse is this extract in the ear. Alliteration and the swelling pentameter make the praise sound like a spell, which is part of the danger.

The irony is the frame you are not asked to retell in full, but you must know it exists. Faustus is already contracted to hell. Helen on this stage is a spirit of desire, not a wife who can redeem him. The more beautiful the face, the clearer the damnation: he chooses the image instead of repentance. Hold four things and the answer is complete: blank verse; hyperbole of the face and the thousand ships; kiss and soul; beauty that does not save. Place the speech on the Elizabethan stage described by the Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. Do not import Shakespeare’s Helen, or Donne’s falling star, or a full plot of Faustus’s other scenes. The paper has cut the extract for you; keep the cut.

John Donne is the head of the Metaphysical school named in Unit 1. The word metaphysical, in Dryden’s slight, in Johnson’s life of Cowley, and in Abrams and Harpham’s glossary, does not mean that the poet writes a university textbook of metaphysics. It means a seventeenth-century lyric manner whose mark is the conceit: an extended, often surprising comparison that argues. Heterogeneous ideas are yoked so that the mind must follow the likeness. The voice is colloquial, not Spenser’s honeyed line. Images come from crafts, the body, law, and theology as readily as from roses. This paper sets two Donne lyrics, both in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and in the Norton Anthology (Greenblatt, volume 1): the song “Go and catch a falling star” and Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” A twenty-mark essay must work from these two, not from “The Flea,” the compass, or a biography of Donne’s marriages. Famous extra poems are not this syllabus.

“Go and catch a falling star” is a cynical lyric in three stanzas of nine lines, not a sonnet. The speaker stacks impossibilities: catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root, tell where past years are, who cleft the Devil’s foot, teach him to hear mermaids, keep off envy’s sting. Each command is hyperbole. The hidden claim is that finding a woman both true and fair is as impossible as these tasks. Stanza two stretches time: travel ten thousand days and nights till age snows the hair, and still nowhere lives such a woman. Stanza three allows a small if — if you find one, let me know; I would go — then turns: by the time the letter arrives she will have been false to two or three. Constancy dies in the time it takes to write. The Metaphysical mark is the argument: experience is treated as evidence. The poem does not sigh; it proves, unfairly, that constancy will not last. Beside Spenser’s Amoretti 75, which trusts verse to hold a name against the tide, Donne’s song trusts no duration. A student who only says “Donne is a love poet” has not read the set song. The set song is anti-romantic on purpose.

Holy Sonnet 10 turns the same arguing mind toward death. It is a fourteen-line sacred lyric, closer in spirit to the Petrarchan 8+6 with a volta than to Spenser’s chained quatrains. Death is spoken to as a person: “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Those whom Death thinks he overthrows do not die in the Christian sense; the soul is not ended. Rest and sleep are Death’s pictures, and they give pleasure, so Death’s stroke should give more rest, not less. Good men go with Death soonest: rest of bones, delivery of the soul. The volta humiliates Death: slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men; companion of poison, war and sickness; poppy or charms can make us sleep as well as Death, and better. The last couplet is the conceit of faith: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” If dying is only sleep, waking into eternity kills Death. Personification, metaphor (Death is a slave; Death is sleep), hyperbole in the old titles “mighty and dreadful,” and conceit (a sleep that ends Death) all sit in these fourteen lines. The same blunt “thou” as the falling-star song is now used in belief.

Taken together, the two poems show why Unit 1 lists the Metaphysical school beside Renaissance and Puritanism. Donne’s wit is Renaissance humanist argument: a mind that prosecutes, lists, and turns. His holy sonnet is Protestant last things, close to the religious weather that Puritanism also breathes, yet it is still a sonnet, a Renaissance lock. Herbert’s “The Pulley,” also set in Unit 2, is the same school in a quieter key: God keeps rest back so that weariness will toss man to God’s breast. Donne is sharper and more dramatic. Dryden’s St Cecilia ode is public harmony after 1687 and should not be forced into this school. Marlowe’s Helen speech is blank-verse tragedy, not a conceit-lyric. Keep the neighbours in their rooms so Donne’s two lyrics can be heard.

Method on the page, then, is what the long answer must name. Direct address; a list that works like proof; a turn (the letter in the song; the volta in the sonnet); an image that does theological or cynical work, not ornamental work. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics calls this thought in image. Abrams follows Johnson’s history of the school. Palgrave prints the lyrics the examiner will quote. That is the paper’s method, not a free essay on Donne’s life or on every poem in an advanced anthology. Count the stanzas of the song; count the fourteen lines of the sonnet; quote the falling star and “Death, thou shalt die”; and the essay stays inside ENGL4.5 DCCT12.

Two mistakes should be refused at the close. The first is to treat both lyrics as the same poem in different clothes. They share a voice — blunt, arguing, fond of “thou” — but one denies constancy in the world and the other denies Death’s pride before resurrection. The second is to pad with extra titles. The Flea, the compass, “Batter my heart,” and the Anniversaries are not set. Twenty marks on this paper are won by explaining conceit, argument, and the two prescribed texts, with Herbert named only as the quieter companion of the same school. Keep those limits and the long answer will stand.

The line is from Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Studies,” in Michael Kiernan’s Harvard edition of the Essays (1985), the book named on this paper. Reading fills the mind with matter; conference — talk with others — makes the mind quick to answer; writing forces exactness, because a sentence must choose its words.

The three verbs match Bacon’s three uses of studies: delight, ornament, and ability. A two-mark note should add that studies are perfected by experience, or they become a scholar’s dream. This is civic Renaissance prose, not a poem and not Bunyan’s allegory.

In “Of Travel,” Bacon says travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. A young traveller should have some entrance into the language, and a tutor or grave servant, and should keep a diary.

He must observe courts, churches, fortifications, libraries and rarities; not stay long in one city; not keep only his own countrymen. After return, travel should appear in discourse, not in clothes. The counsel is practical Renaissance education: the world is a book to be read with order.

Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” is the first prose text of Unit 3, printed in Michael Kiernan’s Harvard edition of The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1985), the book named on the syllabus. The essay moves by short, balanced sentences — aphorism: one thought, then its pair, then a third. Open it in that order so the answer is not a heap of quotations. Studies serve three uses. Delight is private pleasure in retirement. Ornament is the grace of conversation. Ability is judgement in business and affairs. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: natural wit is a plant that must be pruned by study; study itself must be bounded by experience, or it becomes a scholar’s dream. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them. Use, not display, is Bacon’s Renaissance ethic.

How to read is the second movement. One should not read to contradict the author, nor to believe blindly, nor to find talk, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted — sampled; others swallowed — read through; some few chewed and digested — read with care and made one’s own. Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man. Different studies train different powers: histories make men wise; poets witty; mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Each study also repairs a defect of mind, as bodily exercises repair the body. The essay is a civil handbook: books exist to make a person fit for the world, not to hide from it.

Place the essay beside “Of Travel” and beside Montaigne. Bacon is civic, useful, English. Montaigne’s “Of Friendship,” in Frame’s translation, is inward and personal. Both are Renaissance essays; they are not the same temper. Bunyan’s allegory is Puritan narrative, not this aphoristic counsel. An eight-mark note that only copies “tasted, swallowed, digested” without the three uses and the warning about experience has the proverb and not the argument. Keep Kiernan’s Bacon, keep the three uses, keep full / ready / exact, and the answer stays on the paper.

Bacon’s “Of Travel” is the second essay set in Unit 3, again from Kiernan’s 1985 Harvard Essays. It is counsel for a civil traveller, not a landscape poem and not a diary of Bacon’s own journeys. The opening distinction must be stated: travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. A young man should have some entrance into the language of the country, and a tutor or grave servant with him. He should keep a diary. Without language and a grave companion, travel becomes idleness abroad, which Bacon will not praise.

The middle of the essay is a list of what to observe, and the list is the argument. Courts of princes, courts of justice, churches and monasteries, walls and fortifications, harbours, antiquities, libraries, houses of state, armouries, warehouses, exercises, horsemanship, comedies, treasuries of jewels and robes, cabinets and rarities — these are the pages of the world as a book. Do not stay long in one city. Change lodging. Do not keep only the company of your own countrymen. Seek acquaintance of secretaries and employed men, and see the best persons of the place. The Renaissance humanist here is still Bacon the civil servant: knowledge is for use in affairs, not for a costume.

The close is as practical as the opening. After return, let the travel appear in discourse, not in clothes or gesture; let the traveller sit still rather than be still travelling in his talk. The world has been read; it should now season speech, not dress. Place the essay beside “Of Studies”: both treat an activity — reading, travel — as a tool of education and ability. Place it beside Montaigne: Bacon will not pause to elegize a friend; he will tell you whom to meet. An eight-mark answer that only says “travel is good” has missed the diary, the list of places, the warning against countrymen-only company, and the return in speech not in clothes. Those four are the set essay.

Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Friendship,” in Donald M. Frame’s Stanford translation (1958), is the French Renaissance essay set in Unit 3 beside Bacon. It is a meditation on one perfect friendship, not a civic handbook on how to choose useful companions. Common companionship, the bond of father and son, of brothers, and of marriage all have their uses and their limits. Perfect friendship, for Montaigne, is not utility, not kinship, and not the marriage bond. It is a fusion of wills. He writes of his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie. The famous reason is not a list of qualities: it was because it was he, because it was I. That sentence is the centre of the essay and should be in the eight-mark answer.

Such a friendship cannot be multiplied. Two such souls are rare; a third would crowd them. The friend is another self. After La Boétie’s death the essay becomes an elegy: half of Montaigne’s being is gone. The tone is inward, personal, sceptical of finding a second such friend. Frame’s English keeps that intimacy; the syllabus names Frame so that the student quotes this version, not a random paraphrase. Beside Bacon’s “Of Studies” and “Of Travel,” the contrast of temper is the point of setting both essayists. Bacon tells you how to use books and travel for ability. Montaigne tells you what one human bond was, and that it cannot be replaced. Both are Renaissance prose; they are not the same voice.

Do not turn the essay into a general sermon on “friends should be honest.” Do not import Bacon’s aphorisms into Montaigne’s grief. Do not drag Bunyan’s Faithful into this French friendship: Faithful is an allegory of faith on the road, not La Boétie. An eight-mark note names Frame, names La Boétie, distinguishes this fusion of wills from kinship and marriage, and places the essay as inward Renaissance beside Bacon’s civic counsel. That is the set text, and that is enough.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in the Penguin Classics text named by the syllabus, is the Puritan narrative of Unit 3. The paper sets Part I: Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Part II, Christiana’s later road, is not set and should not be told as if it were. An allegory, in Abrams’s glossary and in Unit 1 of this paper, is a story that makes sense as a journey and, at the same time, as a map of the soul. Persons and places keep their story-names and preach a second meaning. Christian is a man on a road; he is also the soul fleeing judgement. The burden on his back is a pack; it is also sin. Vanity Fair is a market town; it is also the world’s show. A twenty-mark answer that only lists names without walking the chain of the road has the dictionary and not the book.

Christian lives in the City of Destruction, reads that the city will burn, feels the burden, and leaves — even wife and children — when Evangelist points to the Wicket Gate. He sinks in the Slough of Despond, despair as a bog; Help pulls him out. Mr Worldly Wiseman sends him toward legality and Mount Sinai, being saved by the law instead of by grace; Evangelist turns him back. At the Gate, Good-Will receives him. In the Interpreter’s House he sees emblem-rooms of the spiritual life. At the Place of Deliverance, beside the Cross, the burden falls from his back. That physical drop is conversion told as story. The Puritan mark is already clear: grace, not the law; a felt burden; a plain English road instead of a court masque. This is the Commonwealth moral weather of Unit 1, written by a tinker-preacher, not by Bacon the councillor.

Then the road tests him, and each test is a second meaning. Hill Difficulty must be climbed, not avoided. Palace Beautiful is rest and instruction among the faithful. In the Valley of Humiliation he fights Apollyon, a devil. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is fear of dying without hope. Vanity Fair is the world’s market: everything is for sale, including faith; Faithful is killed there; Hopeful joins Christian. Giant Despair locks them in Doubting Castle; the key called Promise opens the door — despair is undone by remembering God’s promise, not by a new sword. They see the Delectable Mountains, cross the Enchanted Ground (the danger of spiritual sleep), rest in Beulah, and enter the River of Death. Christian almost drowns in fear; Hopeful holds him. The Celestial City receives them. You do not need every side-character for twenty marks. You do need this chain, and that each name is a meaning.

Style is part of the allegory. Bunyan writes plain English, close to speech, far from Marlowe’s mighty line and from Bacon’s packed aphorism. The names preach because a Puritan reader was trained to hear sermon in story. The book is not a Metaphysical lyric: there is no conceit of a pulley or a falling star; there is a road. It is not Montaigne’s elegy for one friend; Faithful and Hopeful are virtues walking. It is not the whole of Macbeth, though both works know damnation: Bunyan’s hell is a city to leave, Shakespeare’s hell is a castle that becomes hell-gate in the Porter’s joke. Keep those contrasts so the genre stays clear: Puritan allegory, Part I only.

Social and historical placement belongs in a long answer. Theatres were shut in the Commonwealth; this narrative does the public work of teaching last things without a playhouse. Unit 1’s Puritanism is not “hatred of all verse”; it is inward Protestant severity, scriptural, suspicious of idle ornament. Bunyan’s personifications are ornament that preaches, which Puritanism allows. Renaissance tools — personification, journey, named places — are still in use; the end is salvation, not civic ability as in Bacon, and not one irreplaceable friend as in Montaigne. A full essay therefore (1) defines allegory, (2) walks Christian’s chain from Destruction to the City, (3) explains four or five names (burden, Slough, Worldly Wiseman, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, River), (4) names Part I and Penguin, and (5) refuses Part II and extra saints. That is the set book on this paper.

Two mistakes close the door on marks. The first is to retell the entire crowd of episodes until the argument disappears. The second is to write a history of the Civil War and never quote the road. Twenty marks want the journey as theology told as travel. Keep Christian, the burden, the Fair, the key Promise, and the River, and the long answer will stand inside the syllabus.

The witches open Macbeth with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Alliteration binds the opposites; the play will mix fair looks and foul acts from this first sound. Macbeth’s first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” echoes them in blank verse before he has heard their full prophecy.

The day is foul with weather and battle, fair with victory. The echo is the start of hamartia: his tongue already lives in their mix of fair and foul. Quote the witches and Macbeth; do not reverse the words to “fair and foul.”

Hamartia, in Abrams’s account of tragedy, is the tragic error or flaw through which a high person falls. In the set play it is ambition woken by the witches’ “king hereafter,” fed by Lady Macbeth, but completed by Macbeth’s own choice to kill Duncan.

He sees the horror as he does it; that inner sight is why he is a tragic hero, not a flat villain. Banquo hears the same witches and does not kill. The hamartia is therefore not prophecy alone; it is the deed that follows the leap of the mind.

The lines are from Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy after the cry of women, when the queen is dead. They are metaphor, not simile. Life is a walking shadow; life is a poor player. There is no joining word like or as.

Similes in this play include Lady Macbeth’s “look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t” and pity “like a naked new-born babe.” Do not label the poor player a simile. The figure empties time: the player’s hour ends, the tale signifies nothing.

Reference. These are the opening lines of Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy in Act II, before the murder of Duncan, in the Norton text edited by Greenblatt (2016), the edition named for this paper. The play is Jacobean tragedy, about 1606, almost wholly in blank verse. A soliloquy, as Unit 1 defines it, is a speech by a character alone on the stage, or who believes himself alone, so that the audience hears the mind working. Macbeth is about to go to Duncan’s chamber in Inverness. Lady Macbeth has already driven him past the hesitation of “If it were done when ’tis done.”

Context. He sees a dagger in the air, the handle toward his hand, and asks whether it is a true dagger or a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain. He tries to clutch it and cannot. On the blade and dudgeon he sees drops of blood which were not there before. The vision leads him toward Duncan even as it shows the crime. The murder itself is offstage; this speech is the mind visible. After the deed he cannot say amen. Lady Macbeth smears the grooms. A knocking begins, and the Porter imagines he is porter of hell-gate — comic relief that still names the house as hell.

Explanation. The extract therefore holds hamartia at the moment of choice. Ambition has leapt; the hand has not yet struck; the airy dagger is the will made visible and also the horror of the will. It is not a simile (“like a dagger”); the question is whether the dagger is there. Personification of the weapon, the supernatural weather of the witches, and blank verse that can run on (enjambment) all sit in the speech. An RTC that only says “Macbeth is imagining things” has not placed poet, play, act, soliloquy, or the murder that follows. Keep Duncan, Inverness, Lady Macbeth’s goad, and the Porter’s hell; do not import the tomorrow speech into this night. The dagger is before the blood; “Tomorrow” is after the queen’s death. They are two soliloquies, two hours of the soul.

Lady Macbeth, in the Norton Macbeth set for Unit 4, is the stronger will at the start of the tragedy and the mind that breaks before the end. After she reads her husband’s letter about the witches, she fears he is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. She calls on spirits to “unsex” her: to take pity out of her so that the killing can be done in will. The figure is not a joke about gender only; it is a prayer to be emptied of the milk she has just named in him. She tells him to look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it — a simile, with like, unlike the later metaphors of shadow and player. When he hesitates (“If it were done when ’tis done”), she drives him on. After the murder she smears the grooms with blood and says a little water will clear them. He is the one who cannot say amen; she is the one who manages the scene.

The play then reverses the two minds. Macbeth, once king, hires murderers, sees Banquo’s ghost, and returns to the witches; he grows used to blood. She, who said water would wash them, walks in her sleep rubbing her hands: “Out, damned spot.” The doctor cannot cure a mind diseased. The little water of Act II is proved a lie by Act V. Her death is reported, not shown; Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” speech follows the cry of women. She does not fight Macduff; she is destroyed from inside, which is the Jacobean interest in conscience as well as in crime.

An eight-mark sketch should therefore hold three stages: the letter and the unsexing; the night of Duncan and the flower/serpent counsel; the sleepwalking and the spot. She is not the witches, though she speaks to spirits; she is not Macbeth’s hamartia itself, though she feeds it. Banquo does not kill though he hears the same prophecy; the choice remains the man’s, and her will is the goad. Do not import Lady Macbeth from another play, or a Freudian essay this paper does not ask. Keep Greenblatt’s text, the milk, the flower, the spot, and the contrast with Macbeth’s later emptiness.

The witches open Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the whole play set in Unit 4, with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Alliteration ties the opposites; the rest of the tragedy lives in that mix. They hail Macbeth Glamis, Cawdor, and “king hereafter,” and tell Banquo he will beget kings though he will not be king. The second title comes true by Duncan’s gift, without a crime, which is why Macbeth’s mind leaps to the third title and to murder. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama and the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare treat such figures as the English stage’s supernatural: visible to the audience, tempting to the hero, never a full excuse for the deed. Banquo hears the same hail and does not kill. The hamartia remains a human choice.

After the rise, Macbeth returns to them. Three apparitions speak riddles that sound like safety. An armed head: beware Macduff. A bloody child: none of woman born shall harm Macbeth — so he thinks he cannot be killed by any man. A crowned child with a tree: he shall not be vanquished until Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane — so he thinks a forest cannot walk. Then a show of kings, Banquo’s line, stretching out. The apparitions are true as word-tricks. Malcolm’s army cuts branches from Birnam wood; Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” That is equivocation: language that keeps a technical truth and hides the death inside it. The witches never lie in the letter; they murder in the sense.

Other supernatural facts belong in the same note: the airy dagger before Duncan’s death; Banquo’s ghost at the feast, visible to Macbeth, not to the lords; Lady Macbeth’s spirits invoked to unsex her, which is prayer to darkness, not a fourth witch on the heath. Comic relief in the Porter still talks of hell-gate. An eight-mark answer that says only “the witches cause everything” has dropped tragedy into puppet-play. The right sentence is: they wake ambition and later hide death in riddles; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do the blood. Keep the Norton text; do not import the witches of another play or a lecture on Jacobean witch-trials beyond what the stage shows.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the whole play of Unit 4, in the Norton edition edited by Greenblatt (2016). It is Jacobean tragedy, about 1606, inside this paper’s span Elizabethan to Jacobean, 1558–1625. Abrams’s glossary treats tragedy as a serious dramatic action in which a high or strongly placed person falls through hamartia into suffering and usually death. Pity and fear are the old effects; the English stage, as the Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama describes it, also allows comic relief without turning the play into comedy. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Dobson and Wells) places this play among the tragedies of ambition and the supernatural. A twenty-mark essay that retells every scene without naming hamartia, soliloquy, and the witches has the story and not the term. A essay that imports Julius Caesar or a Shakespeare sonnet has left this syllabus.

Macbeth is Thane of Glamis, then Cawdor by Duncan’s gift, then king by murder, then an isolated butcher. His hamartia is ambition, woken by the witches’ “king hereafter” and fed by Lady Macbeth, but the choice to kill Duncan is his. A bleeding captain has already shown him as a loyal soldier; the leap of the mind after the hail is the start of the flaw. He draws back (“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly”); she drives him on. He sees the horror as he does it — cannot say amen, sees a dagger, later sees Banquo’s ghost — and that inner sight is why he is a tragic hero, not a flat villain. Banquo hears the same witches and does not kill. Lady Macbeth is the stronger will at first, then the mind that breaks in sleep. Duncan’s gracious kingship measures what is destroyed; Malcolm’s return at Scone is the land’s cure. The fall is from thane to king to head on a pole, and the flaw is a deed, not a prophecy alone.

Soliloquy is the form that makes that inner sight audible. Unit 1 defines it as a speech spoken by a character alone, or who believes himself alone. The dagger speech — “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” — is the mind before the blood: a false creation of the heat-oppressed brain, yet it leads him to Duncan’s door. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” after the cry of women, empties time: life is a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Those figures are metaphors: life is the shadow and the player; there is no like. Similes in the play belong elsewhere: look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it; pity like a naked new-born babe. Blank verse carries both soliloquies; witches’ chant and Porter’s prose sound like another world. Enjambment lets thought run past the line-end as a guilty mind runs past rest.

The supernatural is the third pillar. The witches open with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” which Macbeth echoes, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” They give three titles and later three apparitions: beware Macduff; none of woman born; Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. The apparitions are equivocation — technical truth that hides death. Macduff was untimely ripped; the army carries the wood. Banquo’s ghost and the airy dagger belong to the same English-stage supernatural: visible temptation, not a full excuse. The Porter’s hell-gate is comic relief that still names the house. Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” is a prayer to spirits, not a fourth witch. Keep these facts from the Norton play; do not write a history of Jacobean witch-trials instead of the tragedy.

Kingship, guilt, and appearance-and-reality complete the long answer. Duncan’s rule is measured; Macbeth’s is sleepless and bloody; Malcolm’s is restoration. After the murder Macbeth asks whether Neptune’s ocean will wash his hand, then says that hand would redden the seas — hyperbole of guilt. She says a little water will clear them; her “Out, damned spot” proves her wrong. Fair looks and foul acts, moving wood, “not of woman born,” borrowed clothes that do not fit a title — the play lives in Unit 1’s mix of metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and alliteration. Comic relief is one scene, not a second plot. The professional playhouse makes blank verse audible to a mixed audience; that is Renaissance drama in a Jacobean key, darker than Spenser’s strand, closer to Donne’s prosecution of Death in seriousness, yet still a play, not a holy sonnet.

Close by refusing two extras. Do not retell Hamlet or King Lear to define tragedy; this paper has given you Macbeth. Do not pad with Freudian readings or with Shakespeare’s sonnets, which Unit 1 names only as a rhyme-pattern, not as a set text. Twenty marks want the high man’s fall, the flaw named as choice, two soliloquies tied to dagger and tomorrow, the witches’ equivocation, and Lady Macbeth’s reverse from will to spot. Keep Greenblatt, keep “So foul and fair,” keep walking shadow as metaphor, and the essay stands on ENGL4.5 DCCT12.

Sagun bhakti loves God with attributes and form: Krishna, Rama, the beloved, the king who lifts the mountain. Meera’s Giridhar in Subramanian’s songs 2 and 6 is sagun: a named Lord who can be bought in love and who can steal away the folk’s pain.

Nirgun bhakti loves God without form: no temple, no mosque, no caste mark. Kabir’s four Tagore poems (I.13, I.16, I.101, II.56) are nirgun: God beside the servant, inside the ghat, beyond Hindu–Muslim labels. Do not call Meera nirgun because she scorns the world’s talk; her Lord still has a name. Do not call Kabir sagun because he says “beloved”; these four poems are not Krishna-lila.

In V. K. Subramanian, Mystic Songs of Meera (Abhinav, 2005), song 2, Meera has taken Govind at a price. People talk: some say cheap, some say too high. She does not argue with the market. The cost she names is herself — eyes, body, mind, wealth — laid down so that Giridhar Nagar is hers.

This is sagun bridal speech: the devotee is the buyer-bride, Krishna the goods that are really the Lord. The shock is social. A Rajput woman singing that she has purchased God offends family honour; the pad keeps the bargain anyway. Keep this song; do not replace it with another famous Meera pad.

Unit 5 sets two songs of Meera from V. K. Subramanian, Mystic Songs of Meera (Abhinav, 2005), songs 2 and 6 only. Other famous pads are not this paper. Both songs are sagun Krishna-bhakti: the Lord has a name, Giridhar, and a story. They share inwardness and the vernacular with Kabir’s nirgun poems, but they fill the song with a person of God, not with the formless One. An eight-mark note that mixes in Kabir’s temple-and-mosque refusal as if it were Meera’s has crossed the two paths Unit 5 asks you to distinguish.

Song 2 is the pad of the mol. Meera has taken Govind at a price. People talk. Some say she bought him cheap, some say the price was too high. She does not argue with the market. The cost she names is herself: eyes, body, mind, wealth — whatever the world counts — laid down so that Giridhar Nagar is hers. The meeting is sahaj, easy once the price is love, not once the priests approve. This is sagun bridal speech: the devotee is the buyer-bride, Krishna the goods that are really the Lord. The shock is social. A Rajput woman singing that she has purchased God offends family honour; the pad keeps the bargain anyway. Bhakti’s social impact is inside the song: the world’s mouth is loud; Meera’s mol is paid.

Song 6 is a prayer-pad: Hari, take away the suffering of your people — Hari tum harau jan ke peer. The song recalls the sagun Lord’s old rescues: Draupadi’s honour when the cloth was pulled, the man-lion form for the devotee, the elephant drawn from the water, the chains of the servant Meera. The pattern is the same each time: the devotee cries; the named God acts in a body and a story. Beside song 2, this pad shows the other face of Meera’s sagun love. Song 2 is the bargain of the bride. Song 6 is the cry of the dasi for the whole jan, the folk. Giridhar is not only her private beloved; he is the one who harau — who steals away — pain. Keep both songs, both faces, Subramanian’s numbering, and the word sagun. That is the set Meera on this paper.

Unit 5 sets four Kabir lyrics from Rabindranath Tagore, One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915): I.13, I.16, I.101, and II.56. This eight-mark note treats the first pair. Both are nirgun: God without form, without temple-mark, without caste-mark. Tagore’s English is the prescribed text; do not replace it with a random Hindi pad the examiner has not set, even if the Hindi is famous. An answer that calls these poems sagun Krishna-bhakti has misread Unit 5’s distinction. Meera’s Giridhar has a name and a story; Kabir’s One in these two lyrics refuses holy geography and holy birth.

I.13 opens: “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee.” God is neither in temple nor mosque, neither in Kaaba nor Kailash, neither in rites nor in yoga and renunciation. If the seeker is true, he meets God in a moment. Kabir says God is the breath of all breath. This is nirgun teaching in one page: stop hunting holy geography; the One is already beside the bande, the servant. The social impact of bhakti is already here: priest and pilgrim lose their monopoly. The seeker is a servant, not a caste title.

I.16: it is needless to ask a saint’s caste. Priest, warrior, tradesman, and all thirty-six castes alike seek God. The barber, the washerwoman, the carpenter have sought; Raidas was a seeker; the rishi Swapacha was a tanner. Hindus and Moslems alike have reached the End where no mark of distinction remains. Nirgun here is social: the saint’s jat is not a question. That is bhakti’s impact in a single lyric — caste and communal labels drop at the point where God is found. Read I.13 and I.16 as a pair: first, stop looking in buildings; second, stop asking the saint’s birth. Keep Tagore’s numbers. I.101 and II.56, the ghat-garden and the river-wave, are the inward metaphysics of the same voice; they belong in another answer unless the question names all four.

Tagore’s I.101 and II.56 complete the four Kabir lyrics set in Unit 5 from One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915). Beside I.13 (God beside the servant) and I.16 (do not ask the saint’s caste), these two are inward metaphysics in homely pictures. They remain nirgun. Gardens, oceans, jewels, river and wave are maps of the inside, not temple images to worship outside, and not Meera’s Giridhar-lila. An eight-mark answer should keep Tagore’s numbering and refuse to turn the ghat into a Krishna shrine.

I.101: within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, and within it the Creator; within it the seven oceans and the unnumbered stars; the touchstone and the jeweller; the Eternal sounding, the spring welling up. Kabir says the beloved Lord is within. Ghat is the clay pot of the body. The garden is not a pilgrimage site. Nirgun inwardness here uses sagun-looking pictures as maps of the inside. The social claim of I.16 (caste is not a question) meets the spiritual claim of I.101 (the One is in this clay). Bhakti’s impact is that a weaver can say this in the vernacular and not leave the saying to a priest.

II.56: the river and its waves are one surf; where is the difference? When the wave rises it is water; when it falls it is the same water. Because it was named “wave,” shall it no longer be water? Within the Supreme Brahma the worlds are told like beads; look on that rosary with the eyes of wisdom. The lyric teaches non-duality: many names, one water. It is nirgun metaphysics in a homely image, not a Krishna narrative. Read with I.101: the garden in the pot and the wave in the river both refuse a God locked in one building or one caste. Keep Macmillan 1915, keep the four numbers if the question allows, and keep the word nirgun. Do not pad with other Kabir pads from a different book.

Unit 5 names Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural, Chapter 11 On Gratitude and Chapter 36 On True Knowledge, in V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar’s translation (the Sri Ramakrishna Math / Project Madurai text named in the syllabus). These are ten-plus-ten kurals, 101–110 and 351–360. The rest of the Kural is not set. The chapters are Tamil ethical verse, not a bhakti pad. They sit under Voices from India beside Meera and Kabir, but they are not sagun Krishna-song and not nirgun Kabir-song. An eight-mark note that turns Valluvar into a north-Indian sant has mixed the paper’s three voices.

Chapter 11, knowing the good that was done: help given with no return in mind cannot be repaid by earth or heaven (101). A small help in time is greater than the world (102). Help done without weighing profit is vaster than the sea (103). The wise treat a millet-small kindness as a palmyra fruit (104). The worth of help is measured by the receiver’s quality, not by a bill of return (105). Do not forget the companionship of the pure, nor drop those who stood by you in sorrow (106). The good remember, through seven births, those who wiped their suffering (107). It is not good to forget a benefit; it is good to forget an injury at once (108). Remembrance of one good act takes the sting from a deadly injury (109). There is a way up for other sins; there is no redemption for ingratitude (110). The chapter is conduct, not temple ritual.

Chapter 36, true knowledge: taking the unreal for the real breeds the wretched cycle of births (351). Pure vision leads from darkness to light (352). To unclouded wisdom, heaven is nearer than earth (353). Perfect senses profit nothing without true knowledge (354). To track all things to their subtlest retreats is true knowledge (355). Those who have learnt the truth do not enter this world again (356). If the mind seeks and finds what is, rebirth need not be feared (357). Wisdom is to see the real so that the folly called birth ends (358). Know the ground on which all rests, and the ills that assail life lose their hold (359). Wipe out even the names of lust, anger and delusion, and the disease of rebirth is wiped out (360). Beside Kabir’s inward One and Meera’s Giridhar, this chapter is Tamil clarity: knowledge is seeing what is, and that seeing ends the wheel. Name Dikshitar, the two chapter titles, and two or three kurals with numbers; stay inside 11 and 36.

Bhakti means devotion: a personal bond with the divine, sung in the language people actually speak, rather than locked in temple ritual or in Sanskrit learning alone. The idea is older in India, but the north Indian flowering that this Unit 5 needs is strong in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the same centuries this English paper studies in England as Renaissance and Reformation. Saints teach that God is reached by love, by the Name, and by a true guru, not by caste pride or by empty ceremony. The singer may be a weaver (Kabir), a princess who leaves the palace in song (Meera), a cobbler, a housewife. That is the first historical fact: who is allowed to speak of God. A twenty-mark essay that writes a full census of every sant from Tamil Nadu to Bengal has left the paper. This course has already chosen three voices: Meera (sagun), Kabir (nirgun), and Tiruvalluvar (Tamil ethical verse named beside them under Voices from India, not as a bhakti pad).

Social impact follows from that fact. Scripture-sounding verse appears in Hindi, Rajasthani, and other vernaculars, so devotion is not only a priest’s job. Community gathers around kirtan and sat-sangh. Women can be saints in public song. Hindu and Muslim seekers sometimes use the same hunger for one God — Kabir’s set poems refuse temple and mosque alike, refuse to ask a saint’s caste, and still speak of the beloved Lord within the clay ghat. Meera’s mol offends family honour and is sung anyway. Tirukkural’s gratitude and true knowledge, in Dikshitar, are not bhakti songs, yet they belong to the same Indian insistence that conduct and seeing what is matter more than empty show. The impact, on this paper, is not a modern party programme. It is that the set lyrics already contain a social claim: the world’s mouth is loud; the servant, the bride, and the ethical couplet still speak.

Sagun and nirgun must be distinguished with the set texts, not with a memorized table only. Sagun bhakti loves God with attributes and form: Krishna, Rama, the child, the beloved, the king who lifts the mountain. The poet speaks as friend, child, or bride. Meera’s Giridhar in Subramanian’s Mystic Songs of Meera (Abhinav, 2005), songs 2 and 6, is sagun. Song 2: she has taken Govind at a mol; people talk cheap or dear; the price is herself, eyes, body, mind, wealth, so that Giridhar Nagar is hers; the meeting is sahaj once the price is love. Song 6: Hari, take away the suffering of your people; Draupadi’s honour, the man-lion, the elephant, Meera’s chains — the devotee cries, the named God acts in a body and a story. Do not call Meera nirgun because she scorns the world’s talk; her Lord still has a name and a story. Song 2 is the bargain of the bride; song 6 is the dasi’s cry for the jan.

Nirgun bhakti loves God without form: no temple, no mosque, no caste mark, the One as breath or as the river that is also the wave. Kabir’s four poems in Tagore’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915) are the set nirgun: I.13, I.16, I.101, II.56. I.13: “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee” — not in temple or mosque, Kaaba or Kailash, rites or yoga; God is the breath of all breath. I.16: needless to ask a saint’s caste; barber, washerwoman, carpenter, Raidas, the tanner-rishi; Hindus and Moslems reach an End with no mark of distinction. I.101: within this earthen ghat are gardens, oceans, stars, the Creator, the beloved Lord. II.56: river and wave are one water; worlds are beads on Brahma’s rosary; look with the eyes of wisdom. Do not call Kabir sagun because he uses “beloved”; the beloved in these four is not Krishna-lila. Gardens and waves are maps of the inside.

Tiruvalluvar’s two chapters complete the unit without being forced into a north-Indian bhakti school. Dikshitar’s Chapter 11 (101–110) on gratitude: help without thought of return cannot be repaid by earth or heaven; a small help in time is greater than the world; forget injury, do not forget benefit; no redemption for ingratitude. Chapter 36 (351–360) on true knowledge: taking the unreal for the real breeds rebirth; pure vision leads from darkness to light; those who have learnt the truth do not enter this world again; wipe out lust, anger, delusion, and the disease of rebirth is wiped out. Beside Meera’s Giridhar and Kabir’s One, this is Tamil clarity: knowledge is seeing what is. Stay with these two chapters; the rest of the Kural is not set.

A full essay therefore does five jobs: history of bhakti as vernacular devotion and open singers; social impact inside the set songs (mol, caste, temple/mosque); sagun Meera songs 2 and 6; nirgun Kabir’s four Tagore numbers; Tirukkural 11 and 36 as ethical verse, not as a third bhakti party. Refuse extra pads, extra sants, and a lecture on English Metaphysical poetry dragged into Unit 5. Donne’s conceit is not Kabir’s ghat. Spenser’s strand is not Meera’s mol. Keep Subramanian, Tagore 1915, Dikshitar, and the unit title Voices from India. Twenty marks on this paper are won by those names and those distinctions, not by a longer list.