Songs and stories of the world - Kaleidoscope - Part - 3 - Module - III - Plays - Module - IV - Prose & Speech

 

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Module – III – Plays

The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 1 (The log, Scene) William Shakespeare

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the band of Avon, is hailed as the Universal dramatist.  He wrote 154 sonnets, 39 plays and three narrative poems.  He continues to be the most widely read studied and critically analyzed writer of all ages.  His plays are translated to all ‘living languages’ of the world.  His play ‘The Tempest’ is regarded as his swansong.  Prospero, the Duke of Milan was usurped by his brother Antonio, lives in a Mediterranean Island with his only daughter Miranda Prospero using his magical powers creates storms and torments the survivors of the shipwreck.  Among them, Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples, is one who falls in love with Miranda.  It is beautifully visualized in the 1^st scene of the third act of ‘The Tempest’ that is called as the log scene here.

Ferdinand is given the work of piling up the logs by Prospero. Though he is not used to such hard labour of removing thousands of logs, the sweet thoughts of Miranda refresh his labour.  Miranda enters then and says as her father Prospero is at study, he will come only after three hours.  So, she asks him to take rest while she does the work for him.  But Ferdinand refuses and their further talk makes them fall in love with each other.  Ferdinand says as she is so perfect and peerless, at the very moment he saw her, he fell in love with her.  On hearing these words, Miranda weeps and says that she is a fool to weep then. Though she hasn’t seen any men other than her father, she wants only Ferdinand. The couple touches and takes each other’s hands and pledges their love.

Prospero, who is watching all these without their knowing it, prays Heaven to rain grace on the two lovers and leaves. Actually, Prospero is the architect of the love story of Ferdinand and Miranda who has already preplanned all these.  Miranda is a living representation of female virtue blessed with beauty and kindness.  Moreover Prospero believes that he can reverse all that happened twelve years ago by their marriage.  Thus the log scene of ‘The Tempest’ becomes the scene of love and reconciliation.

 

 Module – IV – Prose and Speech

Getting Up on Cold Mornings – Leigh Hunt

 

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the contemporary of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt was a great poet, journalist, critic and essayist. He wrote on a diverse range of topics with epistolary style. His humourous and delightful essays were published in ‘the Indicator, ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Examiner’. In ‘Getting Up on a Cold Morning’, Hunt describes one’s reluctance to get up on cold mornings as a ‘hellish torture’, in a mock serious way.  As there were no snowy winters before the sinning, Hunt accuses the sinning of Adam and Eve was the reason for this.

Hunt begins his essay ‘Getting up on a Cold Mornings’ with Giulio Cordara, an Italian writer and a Jesuit, who wrote a poem about insects, the troublesome creatures that were created to annoy the humans after the Sinning.  Everyone knows that it is pleasant to life in bed on cold mornings and no one wants to get up early until and otherwise there is a compulsion.  Actually the sudden transition is a hellish torture like the dragging out of the lost soul is by harpy-footed furies from fire and thrusting them into ice.  The reason behind all these is the sin of Adam and Eve.

When Hunt is asked to get up in a cold morning to shave by his servant, he asks him to bring hot water and waits for the hot water to cool down.  Thus he postpones his getting up.  Only slaves and business men who are mad after money would get up in the cold morning.  He remarks the poet Thomson, who used to get up at noon.  He also says as there are no proofs that early rising is good for health and longevity of life, we need not follow it. Really, a sudden change in temperature on our getting up in a cold morning brings shock to the body and thereby affects good health.  Moreover, on talking about the longevity of life, he says that Holborn, the longest street in London is not beautiful.  So, all long things are not beautiful.  In this way he concludes that a short life with joys of late rising is better than a long life with the suffering of early rising of cold mornings.  However, at the end of his essay he says it is up to the readers whether his suggestion is to be accepted or to be rejected. Thus, in an amusing way he concludes his essay ‘Getting up on a Cold Morning’.

 

 Crediting Poetry – Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) who won Nobel Prize in 1995 for literature is a major modernist poet of the 20^th century.  He was born in Northern Ireland in a family of farmers and cattle sellers.  He was a prolific writer and critic and authored over twenty volumes of poetry, including ‘North’(1975) and ‘Seeing Things’(1991), where he reflected the violent political struggles between the catholic republicans and the protestant unionists between 1968 to 1988. ‘Crediting Poetry’ is the lecture he delivered at the Swedish Academy on his getting the Nobel Prize, where he credits poetry that helped him realize the voice of truth and to see the rightness of the world.

Heaney began his speech talking about his three-roomed traditional thatched farmstead in rural Londonderry in 1940s. In their childhood days they used to hear the sounds of the horse in the stable and the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen.  The aerial wire that came from the chestnut tree to the room brought the news through the voice of the news reader of the Radio Eireann (Irish Radio).  Then he loved Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn’ for its language. In his adulthood he loved Hopkins’s poems for the intensity of exclamation and Robert Frost’s poems for his accuracy and his down-to-earthiness.  Then he began t o love the poems of Wilfred Owen and Patrick Kavanagh. Thus he realized the poetry’s ability and responsibility to say what happens and how they affect the society.

Heaney also mentioned the killing of the Protestant workers who were returning home in a mini bus in 1976 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).  Similar attacks were done to Catholics by Protestant paramilitaries.  Here, Heaney referred to Homer who compared the tears of a wife on the battle field for the death of her husband to the tears of Odysseus for his men.  As Homer’s image brings the people to their senses, Yeats’s poetry too reveal the contemporary savagery in his words, ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare’.  So, the poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It helps us to choose the rightness from the wrongness all around. Thus Heaney credits poetry for its poetic form and poetic power.

----Thulasidharan V