Literary terms, age and movements notes

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Break the name. Verse means a metrical line, not “a holy verse.” Blank means the line-ends do not rhyme. An iamb is one weak beat plus one strong beat (da-DUM), like the word to-DAY. Five iambs make pentameter (penta = five), so the usual line has ten syllables: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. English tragedy uses this because it is close to speech, yet still has a pulse.

Macbeth’s first line is a clear sample: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” Count five lifts: so FOUL / and FAIR / a DAY / I HAVE / not SEEN. Seen does not rhyme with the next line; the beat is enough. Almost the whole of Macbeth is in this metre. The witches’ chants and the Porter’s prose are exceptions, so they sound like another world. Marlowe made the same unrhymed five-beat line the voice of English tragedy; the Helen speech in Unit 2 is that “mighty line” swelling around one face.

Because there is no rhyme-chain, a sentence can run on into the next line (enjambment). Thought then sounds unfinished at the line-end, as a mind sounds unfinished. A sonnet, by contrast, is built on rhyme. Dryden’s St Cecilia ode is stanza and rhyme; it is lyric, not blank verse. Later free verse has neither this regular iambic beat nor a fixed rhyme; do not use that word for Shakespeare.

A sonnet is a poem of exactly fourteen lines. In English it is usually iambic pentameter, and the end-words follow a fixed rhyme pattern. Abrams’s glossary (the book named for literary terms) does not treat “sonnet” as “any short love poem.” It treats it as this locked form. That is why a definition must name the line-count, the metre, and the type.

How to read the letters a, b, c: they are not maths. They mark which lines rhyme with which. If two lines share the letter a, their last words rhyme. A new letter means a new rhyme-sound. So abab means: line 1 rhymes with line 3; line 2 rhymes with line 4. The numbers 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 only count lines in groups: three quatrains (four lines each) plus a couplet (two lines). 4+4+4+2 = 14. This is not a formula for Macbeth. It is the skeleton of one kind of sonnet.

English practice has three skeletons, all in Abrams. They are not mistakes, and they are not three extra poems. They are three ways a fourteen-line poem can be built.

Petrarchan (Italian). Named after Petrarch. Shape 8 + 6: an octave, then a sestet. A common rhyme is abbaabba for the eight, and cdecde (or cdcdcd) for the six. Near line 9 the thought turns; that turn is the volta. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 works like this in spirit: eight lines argue that Death is not mighty; then the poem turns and calls Death a slave.

Shakespearean (English). Named after Shakespeare because he wrote this pattern often. This paper does not set any Shakespeare sonnet. The name still matters, because the glossary’s main English type is this one. Shape 4 + 4 + 4 + 2. Rhyme abab cdcd efef gg: three quatrains with fresh rhyme-pairs, then a closing couplet that snaps the argument shut. “Shakespearean” here means the pattern, not “a speech from Macbeth.”

Spenserian. Spenser’s own twist on the English sonnet. Shape still 4 + 4 + 4 + 2, but the quatrains are chained: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The last rhyme of one group becomes the first rhyme of the next, so the thought is stitched, not cut into three separate boxes. The set poem of this paper, Amoretti 75, is this type. End-words of that sonnet run: strand / away / hand / prey / assay / immortalize / decay / likewise / devise / fame / eternize / name / subdue / renew. That is abab bcbc cdcd ee on the page, not in theory only.

What the set sonnet says: the lover writes her name on the sand; waves wipe it; she says mortal things cannot be made immortal; he answers that his verse will write her name in the heavens, so love outlasts death. The problem lives in the quatrains; the claim for poetry lives in the last two lines. Unit 2 walks the same poem line by line. Here, in Unit 1, you only need: fourteen lines, locked rhyme, volta or couplet-turn, and which type you are looking at.

A lyric is a short poem that presents one speaker’s feeling, thought, or song-like mood. Abrams: a fairly short, non-narrative poem of an inner state. Three tests. Is it short? Does it stay with a mood or argument rather than a long plot? Could it once have been sung, or does it still sound like song? If yes, it is lyric. An epic would tell a nation’s long war. A play needs bodies on a stage. A lyric needs a voice.

The name comes from the Greek lyre. On this paper the lyrics are Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star,” Herbert’s “The Pulley,” Spenser’s sonnet, and Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.” Dryden’s poem is also called an ode: a lyric of public praise (here, of music). It is still not a play and not an epic. A sonnet is one tight kind of lyric — fourteen locked lines. Herbert’s “Pulley” is lyric but not a sonnet: four stanzas of five lines. Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” speech is emotional, yet it is dramatic verse inside a tragedy, so do not call it a lyric poem.

Rule to keep: every sonnet is a lyric; not every lyric is a sonnet. Donne’s falling-star poem is lyric without being a sonnet. That distinction is the whole point of listing both words in Unit 1.

Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration. The speaker stretches size, time, or power so that a feeling becomes visible. It is not meant as a laboratory fact. Abrams: a bold overstatement, used for serious or comic effect.

Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star” piles impossible tasks: catch a star, get a child from a mandrake root, find a woman who is both true and fair. The overstatement carries a bitter point about constancy. Marlowe’s set line, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,” makes Helen’s beauty large enough to start a war. In Macbeth, after the murder, Macbeth asks whether Neptune’s ocean can wash the blood from his hand, then says that hand would rather redden the seas. Guilt is shown by making one stain as large as the sea.

Hyperbole is a matter of scale. Conceit is a matter of a surprising comparison. They can meet in one poem, but they are not the same figure.

A conceit is a striking, often ingenious parallel between two things that seem far apart. Abrams splits two kinds so that “conceit” is not a vague word for “clever image.”

A Petrarchan conceit uses the stock comparisons of love poetry: the beloved as sun, rose, ice, a siege, a storm. The likeness is conventional; a reader has met it before. A metaphysical conceit surprises. It takes an object from crafts, science, or daily work and argues the spiritual or amorous point through that object, step by step. Dr Johnson later said such poets yoked heterogeneous ideas by violence. That yoking — forcing unlike things into one thought — is the conceit. In literary English the word does not mean pride (हिन्दी अहंकार).

The set example is Herbert’s “The Pulley,” walked fully in Unit 2. Here the machine is enough to see the figure. God pours strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure into man, then withholds rest. A pulley lifts a weight because a rope is pulled downward. Weariness is that downward pull; it tosses man to God’s breast. The soul is not iron and rope. The poem keeps both pictures in play until the doctrine is exact: if man had rest, he would stop at the gift and forget the giver. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 works another conceit: Death is a short sleep, so waking into eternity “kills” Death. A simple metaphor would say “Death is sleep” and stop. The conceit stays and proves it.

Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of nearby words. Abrams: a speech sound repeated in a close sequence, usually an initial consonant. It is a sound figure, not a thought figure.

The witches in Macbeth say, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The repeated f binds the opposites and makes the charm easy to remember. Spenser’s love sonnet also plays on repeated sounds, but the exam example students can quote in one breath is this witches’ line.

Conceit compares ideas. Alliteration repeats sounds. Do not count every repeated letter inside a word; the usual sense is the opening sound of stressed words.

A simile compares two different things using like or as (sometimes than). The comparison stays visible: A is like B. Abrams: an explicit comparison between two distinctly different things. If you can take the like out and the sentence still names A as B, you have probably moved into metaphor.

Lady Macbeth tells her husband to “look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t.” Look like is the simile (face resembling a flower). Be the serpent is already metaphor (the will is a snake). In Act I Macbeth also says pity may come “like a naked new-born babe.” Pity is not a baby; like holds the picture beside the feeling so we see helplessness and holiness together. “Life’s but a walking shadow” has no like. That line is metaphor, not simile. The exam mix-up is almost always this pair. Train the eye on the little words like and as.

A metaphor says A is B. It does not use like or as. The two things fuse in the wording. Abrams: a word that denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind, without stating a comparison.

Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow.” Life is named as shadow, then as a poor player, then as a tale told by an idiot. Each renaming is a metaphor. Donne tells Death “Thou art slave to fate…” — Death is a slave, not “like a slave.”

A conceit is a metaphor that is stretched and argued. All conceits are metaphors; not all metaphors are conceits. “Life’s but a walking shadow” is a metaphor. Herbert’s pulley, carried through a whole lyric, is a conceit.

Allegory is a narrative in which persons, places and events systematically stand for ideas. Abrams: the story makes sense on the literal level and, at the same time, points to a second, correlated meaning. It is metaphor stretched into a plot.

The prescribed allegory is Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (Penguin Classics text named in the syllabus). Christian leaves the City of Destruction, sinks in the Slough of Despond, passes Vanity Fair, and seeks the Celestial City. The names teach as they narrate: despair is a bog; the world’s show is a fair; heaven is a city. A reader can follow the journey and, together with it, a map of salvation.

A symbol can flash once (a cross, a dove). Allegory keeps the double story going from start to end.

Tragedy is a serious drama, not a sad lyric. Abrams still starts from Aristotle’s Poetics. A complete action of high importance; a protagonist of standing; a fall into suffering and usually death; hamartia (error or tragic flaw — in Macbeth, ambition that chooses murder); reversal (the witches’ comfort turns into the moving wood); recognition (Macbeth sees, too late, that life has become a tale told by an idiot); catharsis (the audience’s pity and fear are worked through, not left as raw shock). English Renaissance tragedy, as the Cambridge Companion describes the public stage, adds five acts, blank verse mixed with some prose, comic relief, and often the supernatural.

The set tragedy is the whole of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Norton). Macbeth is thane, then king, then isolated. He hears prophecy, he is pushed by Lady Macbeth, but the dagger is his choice. The witches and the air-drawn dagger are supernatural. The Porter scene is comic relief: a drunk man imagines hell’s gate while real hell is upstairs — so the laugh still names damnation. Unit 4 tells the plot in order. Unit 1 only needs the genre: high man, flaw, fall, death, pity and fear.

Do not call Donne’s “Death, be not proud” a tragedy. It is a sonnet. Do not call Macbeth a simple villain: he sees the horror as he does it; that inner sight is the tragic hero.

A soliloquy is a speech spoken by a character who is alone on the stage, or who believes he is alone. Abrams: talking to oneself, in drama used to reveal the inner mind. The audience hears plan, fear, guilt, or desire; the other characters do not.

In Macbeth the dagger speech (“Is this a dagger which I see before me…”) and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” are soliloquies. Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking is related inner speech, but it is not a chosen, waking soliloquy: the body speaks when the will is asleep.

Keep three words apart. An aside is a short remark to the audience while others are still on stage. A monologue is a long speech; other people may be present. A soliloquy needs privacy of the mind. Blank verse suits it, because the unrhymed line can follow a thought as it twists.

The syllabus treats 1558–1625 as one span, then you split it by monarch. Elizabethan England is the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603. The Church of England is settled as Protestant. Spain is the great Catholic rival; the defeat of the Armada in 1588 feeds patriotic writing. Public theatres rise in London. Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare belong to this flowering. Spenser’s Amoretti sonnet is courtly love poetry of the age. Marlowe’s Helen line comes from Doctor Faustus: a scholar who sells his soul for knowledge and pleasure looks at Helen of Troy. That hunger to climb is the Elizabethan note, already close to tragedy.

Jacobean England is the reign of James I, 1603–1625 (Jacobus is Latin for James). The stage grows darker: power, guilt, witches, blood. Macbeth (about 1606) is Jacobean: a Scottish king, prophecy, and illegitimate rule. Donne’s lyrics and Holy Sonnets belong to this restless, witty climate, not to Spenser’s smooth music. Shared ground of the whole span: Renaissance learning and the professional playhouse. Difference inside the span: Elizabethan gold and national myth; Jacobean shadow and inward fear.

Caroline means the reign of Charles I (from Latin Carolus), 1625–1649. The court is refined; tension with Parliament grows over tax, church and army. In 1642 civil war begins and the public theatres are closed. Charles is tried and executed in 1649. George Herbert, an Anglican priest, publishes The Temple in 1633; “The Pulley” is devotion from this Caroline world, before the war breaks the court.

Commonwealth names the years without a king, 1649–1660, under Oliver Cromwell. Puritan power is real: Bible-centred culture, strict morals, no playhouse. John Bunyan is a Puritan preacher. The Pilgrim’s Progress is printed later (1678), after 1660, yet its soul is this godly, plain English — allegory a common reader can follow. In 1660 the king returns; that next phase is Restoration, which Unit 1 does not name as a set age. Dryden’s St Cecilia ode (Unit 2) belongs after 1660; do not force it into 1625–1660.

Contrast to hold: Caroline court and Anglican lyric (Herbert) versus Commonwealth Puritan plainness (Bunyan’s religious world).

Renaissance means rebirth: the revival of classical Greek and Roman learning. In Italy it begins in the fourteenth century; in England the literary flowering is later, under the Tudors and early Stuarts — the same years as this paper’s first age. Humanism studies the human being as a centre of value, without throwing God away. Printing multiplies books. The Reformation splits the Western Church; England’s Protestant settlement shapes what poets may praise.

English results you can name from this paper: the sonnet (Spenser, Donne), blank-verse tragedy (Marlowe, Macbeth), and the essay. Bacon’s “Of Studies” and “Of Travel” treat reading and travel as tools of the civil life. Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” is the French essay from which English prose learns the form. Both essayists are prescribed in Unit 3; both belong to Renaissance prose.

The meaning is larger than “rebirth of art.” It includes humanism, the classics, print, the Reformation, and English fruits such as the theatre, the sonnet, and the essay — each of which has a set text on this paper.

Puritanism was a movement inside English Protestantism. Puritans wanted the Church of England purified of ceremonies they judged too Catholic: vestments, bishops’ pomp, set liturgy. They stressed the Bible, preaching, a strict moral life, and the individual’s standing before God. In politics they often backed Parliament against Charles I. In culture they distrusted the playhouse. The 1642 closure of theatres is the sharp fact. The Commonwealth years are the high tide of Puritan power.

On this paper the Puritan literary voice is Bunyan. The sentence is plain; the names in The Pilgrim’s Progress preach. Do not call Donne or Herbert Puritans. Donne died Dean of St Paul’s, an Anglican. Herbert is an Anglican country priest. Metaphysical devotion and Puritan dissent are neighbours, not the same church party. Puritanism is a force in 1625–1660; it is not the whole of seventeenth-century literature.

The Metaphysical school is a later label for a group of seventeenth-century poets whose method is led, in practice, by John Donne. George Herbert is the other name prescribed here. Dryden first used “metaphysics” as a slight on Donne’s over-subtlety. Dr Johnson, in the life of Cowley, fixed the school in criticism: wit, learning, and conceits that yoke unlike things. Abrams’s glossary entry follows that history. The poems argue. The voice is colloquial, not Spenser’s honeyed line. Images come from crafts, the body, and theology as readily as from roses.

Donne’s “Go and catch a falling star” is sceptical wit and hyperbole. Holy Sonnet 10 uses the same direct address in faith: “Death, be not proud.” Herbert’s “The Pulley” is quieter, but the conceit is as exact. Contrast: Spenser’s sonnet trusts beauty and fame written in verse; Donne’s lyric trusts argument. The school sits mainly in Jacobean and Caroline decades. It is not “poetry about ghosts.” In this paper it means this witty, argumentative lyric method.

Renaissance is the wide European weather around the first two rows and still colours the third. Puritanism thickens in the Caroline crisis and the Commonwealth. The Metaphysical school sits in the Jacobean and Caroline decades (Donne, Herbert). Unit 1’s named span stops at 1660.