AmyMorgan
05-15-2010, 08:19 AM
We have to analyze these stanzas of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage for the final test of English Literature, find the themes which appear here, how do they correspond with the ethics of Romanticism and tell what is the general mood of the extract..... :eek2: I am almost desperate with it.. :brickwall
PLEASE can SOMEONE HELP ME?
It is from Canto IV:
CXXIV.
We wither from our youth, we gasp away -
Sick--sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first -
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same -
Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst -
For all are meteors with a different name,
And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
CXXV.
Few--none--find what they love or could have loved:
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.
CXXVI.
Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew -
Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see--
And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.
CXXXVII:
"But I have lived, and have not lived in vain;
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire;
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their soften'd spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love"
PLEASE can SOMEONE HELP ME?
It is from Canto IV:
CXXIV.
We wither from our youth, we gasp away -
Sick--sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay,
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first -
But all too late,--so are we doubly curst.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same -
Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst -
For all are meteors with a different name,
And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.
CXXV.
Few--none--find what they love or could have loved:
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.
CXXVI.
Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew -
Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see--
And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.
CXXXVII:
"But I have lived, and have not lived in vain;
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire;
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their soften'd spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love"