http://www.towernotes.co.uk/ English literature teaching aids and study notes http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-48_Shakespeare_Macbeth-Part-1_1.php Introduction Macbeth and the Imagination Shakespeares Macbeth is a dramatic exploration of why an apparently good man commits terrible crimes. In the course of the plays five acts Macbeth kills his king and kinsman Duncan he then has his friend Banquo murdered and finally he becomes a tyrant overseeing the slaughter of anyone in Scotland he considers untrustworthy neither woman nor child is spared. At first Lady Macbeth and the witches tempt him to do what he does they are in the first two acts external agents in the internal drama that takes place inside Macbeths mind. It is clear ho ... Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:33:54 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-47_Shakespeare_Macbeth-Part-2_1.php Act Two Scene Two The way in which the murder takes place offstage is dramatically effective but also strongly reminiscent of classical tragedy in which such events the murder of Agamemnon for example are always unseen by the audience. 1 That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold Yet another antithesis and a further example follows in the next line. There is a theme of inebriation running through these scenes which is possibly intended to reflect upon the actions of the central characters. Drink frequently emboldens those who partake of it here ironically it is Lady Macbeth who ... Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:50:35 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-46_Shakespeare_Macbeth-Complete_1.php Ninetysix pages of notes on Shakespeare039s Macbeth fully illustrated and annotated. For free samples see Macbeth Part One and Macbeth Part Two . ... Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:06:33 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-45_Pound_Cantos-LXXIILXXXIV_1.php The Lute Of Gassire Cantos LXXIVLXXXIV I From first line to last line The Pisan Cantos sing of pain and endurance The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasants bent shoulders Canto LXXIV 838425 If the hoar frost grip thy tent Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent. Canto LXXXIV 1054540 ... Sun, 11 Sep 2011 22:25:33 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-44_Eliot_Waste-Land-and-Other-Poems-Complete-Version_1.php Complete notes on T.S. Eliot039s 039The Waste Land and Other Poems039 at a reduced price. For samples click on the separate parts. The poems covered are as follows The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night The Waste Land The Hollow Men Journey of the Magi A Song for Simeon Animula Marina ... Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:18:12 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-43_Blake_Songs-of-Innocence-and-Experience_1.php Combined notes on all of William Blake039s Songs of Innocence and Experience at a reduced price. For samples click on the separate parts. ... Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:51:46 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-42_Tennyson_Selected-Poems-Complete-Version_1.php The complete version of 039Notes on Tennyson039s Selected Poems039 available at a reduced price. For samples please click on the separate parts. The poems covered are as follows Mariana The Lady of Shalott The LotosEaters Ulysses Tithonus St Agnes039 Eve 039Break break break039 Locksley Hall To Virgil The Brook Godiva Crossing the Bar ... Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:24:09 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-41_Donne_Selected-Poems-Complete-Version_1.php Parts One and Two of the notes on John Donne039s Selected Poems combined and available at a special reduced price. For samples please click on the separate parts. The poems covered are as follows The GoodMorrow Song Goe and catche a falling starre The Sunne Rising The Canonization Song Sweetest love I do not goe Twicknam garden Loves growth A Valediction of weeping Loves Alchymie The Flea The Apparition A Valediction forbidding mourning The Exstasie ELEGIE XVI On his Mistris ELEGIE XIX Going to Bed ... Sat, 03 Sep 2011 09:53:50 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-40_Hopkins_Selected-Poems-Complete-Version_1.php The complete notes on Gerald Manley Hopkins039 Selected Poems at a reduced price. For samples click on Parts One and Two. Poems covered Gods Grandeur The Starlight Night As kingfishers catch fire dragonflies draw flame Spring The Windhover Pied Beauty Hurrahing in Harvest The May Magnificat Binsey Poplars Felix Randall Spring and Fall I wake and feel the fell of dark not day No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief Carrion Comfort Patience hard thing the hard thing but to pray My own heart let me have more pity on Harry Ploughman Toms Garland That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire an ... Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:48:27 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-39_Bronte_Jane-Eyre-Complete-Version_1.php Notes on the complete text at a reduced price. See separate parts for free samples. ... Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:13:28 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-38_Fitzgerald_Great-Gatsby-Part-3_1.php Page references are to the Penguin Popular Classics edition 103 I looked once more at them and they looked back at me remotely possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain Nick can see the illusory nature of the fulfilment of Gatsbys dream his false nostos as it were but he still envies those who live on such a plane he has no girl whose disembodied face floats among the dark cornices 87 and he returns home alone in the rain. CHAPTER SIX 104 he fell just short of being news The reader is coming close to the time of Gatsbys death. In ... Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:17:37 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-37_Fitzgerald_Great-Gatsby-Part-2_1.php Page references are to the Penguin Popular Classics edition 41 then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon. Myrtles idea of being a gentleman is essentially financial. This anecdote is a telling example of the shame of poverty. 42 Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets and I saw him too looking up and wondering. I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. The whole theme of observation is one that pervades G ... Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:50:59 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-36_Fitzgerald_Great-Gatsby-Part-1_1.php INTRODUCTION THE GLAMOUR OF AMBIGUITY All page references are to the Penguin Popular Classics edition . A famous study of 1947 by the poet and critic William Empson discusses Seven Types of Ambiguity but the total with regard to The Great Gatsby might well be a significantly higher number than this. Empson doesnt consider for instance the more general ambiguities of character theme and narration that are obviously features of Fitzgeralds novel however the sort of textual details that Empson does write about metaphors oxymorons and the like are a good place to begin a discussion of the w ... Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:28:47 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-35_Fitzgerald_Great-Gatsby-Complete-Version_1.php The complete set of notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald039s The Great Gatsby in one pdf file comprising 106 pages fully illustrated and annotated and available for the special price of pound5.95 a saving of pound5.90. For 38 pages of free extracts from The Great Gatsby notes excluding illustrations and annotations click on The Great Gatsby Parts One Two and Three. ... Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:03:55 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-34_Pound_Cantos-XXXI--LXXI_1.php Cantos XXXI LI Purgatory and Usury In addition to the internal symmetries of A Draft of XXX Cantos and the various analogical structures present to varying degrees in the text there are also several indications that numbers in themselves had a structural importance for Pound. This in fact was a feature of The Cantos from their inception. In an early letter he described his poem as an endless affair which will probably run to 100. This is likely to be an early reference in itself to the hundred cantos of Dantes Divine Comedy which provides the most important structural analogue ... Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:05:42 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-33_Bronte_Jane-Eyre-Part-3_1.php Chapter 27 325 I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me Janes ordeal is immediately seen in terms of a journey through a place of suffering perhaps analogous to Christians passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death in The Pilgrims Progress . 325 Conscience turned tyrant held Passion by the throat told her tauntingly she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony The Pilgrims Progress is again an obvious inspiration here both ... Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:45:39 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-32_Bronte_Jane-Eyre-Part-2_1.php Chapter 12 140 solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children Whereas Evangelicalism tended to emphasise the impact of original sin on the child the Romantic movement had tendencies to go to the opposite extreme regarding children as paragons of nature unsullied by the vices of adulthood. Janes par parentheacutese at the beginning of this paragraph is meant to signal that she is writing is an ironically elaborate style as a contrast to her blunt I am merely telling the truth which follows. The use of French however is perhaps not particularly elegant in stylistic terms. 140 I cli ... Sat, 27 Nov 2010 16:00:36 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-31_Pound_Cantos-I--XXX_1.php INTRODUCTION THE MANYMINDED HERO The first decades of the twentieth century were a new age to Ezra Pound and to many of the writers artists and thinkers he admired. To give just one example the antiquarian Ernest Fenollosa began his essay on the Chinese Written Character with words that could be paralleled in many other and varied texts from this period This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man of worldembracing cultures half weaned from Europe of hitherto undreamed respons ... Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:07:27 +0000 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-30_Bronte_Jane-Eyre-Part-1_1.php Introduction Narrative Structures in Jane Eyre Jane Eyre stands alongside Wuthering Heights as one of the most significant moments in the development of English fiction. Specifically it brought about a widening of the structural and symbolic possibilities open to the novel as well as to an extent redefining its subject matter. Whereas Emily Bronteumls novel however is a complex weave of different narratives drawn from differing perspectives and points of view Charlottes novel has an apparently simple autobiographical structure. In fact this disguises an equally complex narrative base ... Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:49:08 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-29_Chaucer_Wife-of-Bath039s-Prologue-and-Tale_1.php THE WIFE OF BATH039S PROLOGUE AND TALE by Geoffrey Chaucer Introduction Experience and Auctoritee. That there is plenty of auctoritee in the Wife of Baths Prologue as promised in the first line is not a feature likely to enthuse most modern readers. Chaucer in fact makes sure that her opening discussions as to the value of marriage itself rarely rise to the level of serious argument indeed there are numerous examples of humour in the way in which the Wife deploys her references and comments on them but also many long passages which are essentially a patchwork of scriptural allusions. M ... Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:19:06 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-28_Larkin_Whitsun-Weddings_1.php THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS by Philip Larkin Introduction Nothing To Be Said. Philip Larkin is a major poet. He would probably not have agreed with this assessment and many people would question this judgement even now for a variety of reasons. For a start he can be criticised for his alltooobvious reaction against modernism and his preference for traditional verse forms. This isnt very fair particularly when it is recalled that the greatest modernist poet of all William Butler Yeats never wrote a free verse poem. Furthermore the whole history of literature is one of renewal and reaction to ... Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:43:30 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-27_Hemingway_Old-Man-and-the-Sea_1.php THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway INTRODUCTION THE BOUNDARIES OF MASCULINITY Aside from the tourists of the final page there are no women or girls in The Old Man and the Sea . Omission for Hemingway however is almost a guarantee of importance If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader if the writer is writing truly enough will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only oneeighth of it being above water. Death in the ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:22:29 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-26_Coleridge_Ancient-Mariner_1.php THE ANCIENT MARINER By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Please note only the introduction is available as a free sample for this text INTRODUCTION CROSSING THE LINE Voyages are an occasional feature of the border ballads Coleridge imitated in The Ancient Mariner cf. Sir Patrick Spens which is alluded to in Dejection An Ode but there is nothing comparable to the remarkable travels of the Mariner. Important to the ballad mentality however is the idea of crossing a line which is given an extra significance in The Ancient Mariner by the nautical use of Line to mean the equator. Once the l ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:19:51 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-25_Tennyson_Selected-Poems-Part-2_1.php SELECTED POEMS PART TWO by Alfred Lord Tennyson TITHONUS In the original story Tithonus and Aurora or Eos the Goddess of Dawn fell in love and wished to marry. To effect this Aurora asked Zeus King of the Gods to grant Tithonus who was mortal eternal life. He did so but withheld the gift of eternal youth so that Tithonus aged while his beloved remained young. The woods decay the woods decay and fall There is a strange trickery in the sound here when repeating the woods decay the second decay inevitably falls lower in tone a cadence completed by the lower ausound in fall. The vapours ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:36:55 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-24_Tennyson_Selected-Poems-Part-1_1.php SELECTED POEMS PART ONE by Alfred Lord Tennyson INTRODUCTION TENNYSON AND PURITY The first volume of Tennysons poetry that was deemed worthy of notice by the influential Quarterly Review was his Poems of 1832. His efforts including early versions of The Lady of Shalott and The LotosEaters were famously butchered by the same critic John Wilson Croker who was reputed to have sent Keats to an early death with his review of Endymion . The common ground between the two poets was not lost on Croker who immediately makes the comparison in his most sarcastic terms calling the young Te ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:58:40 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-23_Eliot_Waste-Land-and-Other-Poems-Part-2_1.php THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS PART TWO by T. S. Eliot Death by Water It is worth just recapping the tiny but significant details that prepare us for Phlebas unhappy voyage Frisch weht der Wind Der heimat zu Oed und leer das Meer . Here said she Is your card the drowned Phoenician Sailor Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look Here is Belladonna the Lady of the Rocks I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. You who were with me in the ships at Mylae I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. At the violet hour the evening hour that strives Homeward and brings ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:35:57 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-22_Eliot_Waste-Land-and-Other-Poems-Part-1_1.php THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS by T. S. Eliot The Poems The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night The Waste Land The Hollow Men Journey of the Magi A Song for Simeon Animula Marina Introduction The Invisible Poet In his critical essay Tradition and the Individual Talent published 1917 T. S. Eliot describes the poet as engaged in a continual surrender of himself a continual selfsacrifice a continual extinction of personality. He goes on to explain this more fully in terms rather bizarrely of a chemical reaction between oxygen and sul ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:00:10 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-21_Blake_Songs-of-Experience_1.php SONGS OF EXPERIENCE by William Blake Introduction William Blakes Vision of Experience The Marriage of Heaven and Hell completed by Blake in 1793 while he was composing the Songs of Experience includes the following lines If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro039 narrow chinks of his cavern. ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:37:28 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-20_Blake_Songs-of-Innocence_1.php SONGS OF INNOCENCE by William Blake Introduction William Blakes Vision of Innocence Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience is a fully integrated and finished work of great complexity and beauty. As it stands published in 1794 its two sections comprising what Blake called the contraries of innocence and experience form a creative symbiosis so that it has become almost impossible to think of The Lamb without The Tyger difficult in fact to interpret one poem without the other. There is also a complex symbiosis at work in these poems between illustration and text. Sometimes B ... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:29:43 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-18_Keats_Odes_1.php THE ODES by John Keats Introduction of the Hearts affections and the truth of Imagination All of Keats Odes are closely related and are best seen as a group. Their fundamental theme is the authenticity and supremacy of the imagination. Keats wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Hearts affections and the truth of Imagination What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime creative of essential Beauty ... Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:31:22 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-16_Sherriff_Journey039s-End_1.php JOURNEY039S END by R. C. Sherriff Introduction A Lesson in Dying . Journeys End is a powerful and accurate document detailing the lives of soldiers in 1918 at a particularly crucial moment in the history of the First World War. Its value as a historical and cultural object is obvious. Sherriffs play however is also a significant work of literature that transcends its particular context and deserves to be played on stage as an important work of drama not just as a memorial to the soldiers of the 191418 conflict. Its theme is after all a universal one it is like Hamlet a play about d ... Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:33:43 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-15_Donne_Selected-Poems-Part-2_1.php SELECTED POEMS by John Donne Part Two Loves Alchymie The alchemists were early chemists who believed in the spiritual and cosmic nature of matter. They would perform experiments like modern scientists but often when astrological signs were in a special conjunction and they believed that natural spirits emerged from chemical reactions rather than new compounds. Their aims were quasispiritual but easily corruptible by hopes of untold riches and immortality. Most famously they sought for the Elixir Philosophers Stone or panacea universal medicine that would preserve life for ever and tra ... Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:55:57 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-14_Donne_Selected-Poems-Part-1_1.php SELECTED POEMS by John Donne Introduction Love Revealed. In The Ecstasy the speaker explains to his beloved that they must turn to their bodies so that Weak men on love revealed may look. In Donnes Elegy XIX Going to Bed he writes in a similar vein of the way in which women are mystic books denied to the laity but who may be revealed to those to whom they choose to impute that grace. Such a sense of revelation also lies behind the reference in The GoodMorrow to our waking souls. Love for Donne is a wonder a mystery an extraordinary secret known only to the few but something his ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:19:39 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-13_Hopkins_Selected-Poems-Part-2_1.php SELECTED POEMS PART TWO Spring and Fall GLOSSARY Goldengrove a name evocative of a wood in autumn but there are numerous Goldengroves around the country so this could be a real place. unleaving a coinage referring to the fall of leaves in autumn. wanwood wan is pale and colourless so the coinage suggests a dead empty colourless forest. leafmeal Another coinage. Rather than the white meal of the clouds in Hurrahing in Harvest Hopkins is probably thinking of brownish oatmeal. From a distance a forest floor of leaves would resemble oatmeal. ghost spirit or soul. THOUGHTS The re ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:54:08 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-12_Hopkins_Selected-Poems-Part-1_1.php Introduction The Poetry of Sound Hopkins wrote in his Journals that the language of poetry should be enjoyed for its sound rather than its meaning. The first thing to remember here is that Hopkins statement reads that poetry should be enjoyed for its sound italics added not that sound is necessarily more important than meaning. This is an important distinction. It is frequently through sound that Hopkins communicates meaning and an overlyrigorous pursuit of exact meaning can mistake the essence of his poetry. Sound therefore is often the gateway to a deeper appreciation and unders ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:20:20 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-11_Shakespeare_King-Lear_1.php KING LEAR by William Shakespeare INTRODUCTION THE CHARACTER OF KING LEAR Shakespeares King Lear is a work richly laden with themes and symbols which touches upon many profound questions such as our relationship as human beings with the divine world and related questions as to the fundamental justice or injustice of the universe. The play is also one about families and what can happen when relationships between parents and children go wrong. But it can be forgotten that King Lear is also a play about a man. Considering that there are so many studies of Shakespeares characterisation ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:25:59 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-10_Shakespeare_Hamlet_1.php HAMLET By William Shakespeare Introduction Hamlet and Death The visual image that is most associated with the play Hamlet is of a young man holding a skull before his face and contemplating steadily the grisly reality of death and bodily decay that it represents Alas poor Yorick I knew him Horatio a fellow of infinite jest of most excellent fancynow how abhorrd in my imagination it is my gorge rises at it. V.i.1838 ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:48:25 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-9_Shakespeare_Antony-and-Cleopatra_1.php ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by William Shakespeare INTRODUCTION I AM FIRE AND AIR Frank Kermode observes in his introduction to this play in the Riverside Shakespeare that Antony and Cleopatra shares many of the characteristics of one of Shakespeare039s history plays. The histories are not without their tragic circumstances but there is a different sense or colour to them compared to the tragedies they certainly lack the intense focus on individual or collective disaster that is found for example in King Lear Macbeth or Othello . In some ways the Roman plays of Shakespeares maturity ... Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:31:39 +0100 GMT http://www.towernotes.co.uk/literature-notes-1_Shakespeare_Midsummer-Night039s-Dream_1.php A MIDSUMMER NIGHT039S DREAM William Shakespeare Introduction the silliest stuff that ever I heard. ... Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:01:44 +0100 GMT