American_Literature_Book_unit3
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PAUL REVERE’S RIDE from Tales of a Wayside Inn
Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere [...]
He said to his friend, “If the British march By land or sea from the town tonight, Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light — One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm For the country folk to be up and to arm.“
Then he said, “Good night!“ and with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore
Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay The Somerset, British man-of-war,
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk that was magnified By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears The muster of men at the barrack door, The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet, And the measured tread of the grenadiers Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church, By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch [...]
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns!
A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
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And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light The fate of a nation was riding that night,
And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight Kindled the land into flame with its heat […]
You know the rest. In the books you have read How the British regulars fired and fled;
How the farmers gave them ball for ball From behind each fence and farmyard wall, Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere,
And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm —
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo forevermore! For, borne on the night wind of the past, Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoofbeats of that steed
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
1863 (27)
Expanding Your Knowledge
PERSONAL RESPONSE
LONGFELLOW’S LIFE
1.Why did Longfellow travel to Europe? What was he particularly talented in?
2.Who did he come in touch with while teaching at Harvard?
3.Draw a chronological chart and retell Longfellow’s biography according to it.
PAUL REVERE’S RIDE
1.Which way were the British soldiers coming as Paul Revere’s urgent message warned people? What place names help us see that the events were at the heart of the American Revolution?
2.Find examples of alliteration. Read them out loud, carefully pronouncing the first sounds of the words. How instrumental is it in the general design of the poem? How does the author create a turbulent atmosphere?
3.Find examples of hyperbole. How important is it?
4.Longfellow masterfully imitates the gallop of the horse by auditory means. Starting from the line And lo! as he looks on the belfry’s height find examples of onomatopoeia. What role does it fulfil here?
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5.Paul Revere’s Ride is an example of narrative poetry. What features is this genre characterized by?
WRITING WORKSHOP
zLongfellow is a master of creating a well-organized rhythm. There are many natural rhythms in the world around, e. g. the sunrise and sunset, the changing of the seasons, etc. Choose some rhythm and try to express it through a short poem.
zBy removing stylistic ornamentation, reduce Paul Revere’s Ride to a prose story. Which words from the original would you keep? Can poetry roughly be defined by what was left out?
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined.
Edgar Allan Poe
zWhat works by Poe are you familiar with?
zBring to memory any dark episodes from either his life or works.
The forerunner of psychological writing, detective stories and science fiction, Poe’s heritage appears astonishingly modern to the contemporary reader. Misunderstood by popular American writers of his time, Poe was a major influence in Europe, particularly among the French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarm
. He also added to the dark tradition in American literature maintained by Hawthorne, Bierce, and Faulkner.
When his actor-parents died, Edgar Allan Poe (Jan. 19, 1809, Boston —
Oct. 7, 1849, Baltimore, Maryland) was taken without formal adoption into the household of John Allan, a prosperous but childless tobacco merchant.
As he grew older, Poe must have felt his uncertain position in a wealthy aristocratic family. Allan quarreled with Poe after the latter was dismissed from the University of Virginia, where he had done well academically, but had got into debts which Mr. Allan refused to pay. Shortly afterwards, Allan secured for him an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he was expelled in 1831. Allan now turned his back on Poe.
Poe had already published Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827 and a better volume called simply Poems in 1831. He was living in Baltimore with his father’s widowed and poverty-stricken sister, Mrs. Maria Clemm, when he won a prize of $50 for his MS Found in a Bottle in a Baltimore Saturday Visitor short-story contest. In due course, Poe spent most of his remaining years as a staff member of various magazines from which he usually either soon retired or was discharged as the result of unruly behavior. He was becoming increasingly known as the writer of sharp critical essays, now recognized as the most original that had appeared in the United States; of poems, marked by an unforgettable rhythm; and of stories, of which the best were mostly fantastic, mysterious, and morbid.
Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836. Her pale beauty, weak health, and childlike character seemed to embody the ideal which almost from the beginning had been celebrated in his poems and stories. Her death in 1847 of a wasting disease seems to have caused Poe’s total collapse. He was found ill in a Baltimore tavern in October 1849, and died in a hospital.
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Poe’s deep understanding of human psychology was most vital in his establishing one of the popular literary genres — the detective story. C. Auguste Dupin, the predecessor of a long line of literary sleuths developed by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie, embodies the idealized version of Poe that life had never granted him. Masterful in his ingenious inductive and deductive powers, Poe’s protagonist is a faultless thinking machine able to resolve the most complex mysteries such as in the trilogy The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter.
Poe’s imagination knew no limits. He foreshadows Jules Verne and the space explorations of the 20th century in tales such as The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, where he describes a balloon voyage to the moon. In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, he digs into the still undefined field of mesmerism. Poe transcends yet another barrier — that of time — in the humorous Some Words with a Mummy. Poe is particularly unique as the acknowledged discoverer of those dark corners of the human mind where unearthly beauty is merged with the subconscious dreadful nightmares.
Morella
“Itself, by itself, solely, one everlasting, and single.”
— Plato. Sympos With a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to
me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream. Morella’s erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no common
order — her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German literature.
In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my
deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies. And then
— then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me — would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory. And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. […]
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But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the mystery of my wife’s manner oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid; she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it fate. Yet was she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent; and one instant my nature melted into pity, but, in next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul sickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss.
Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella’s decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of the day.
But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen.
“It is a day of days,” she said, as I approached; “a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life — ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!”
I kissed her forehead, and she continued: “I am dying, yet shall I live.” “Morella!”
“The days have never been when thou couldst love me — but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.”
“Morella!” I cried, “Morella! how knowest thou this?” But she turned away her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.
Yet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had given birth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth. [...]
And as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing form, day after day did I discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother, the melancholy and the dead. And, hourly, grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was like her mother’s I could bear; but then I shuddered at its too perfect identity — that her eyes were like Morella’s I could endure; but then they too often looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella’s own intense and bewildering meaning.
Thus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughter remained nameless upon the earth. “My child,” and “my love,” were the designations usually prompted by a
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father’s affection, and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella’s name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to the daughter;
—it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her existence, the latter had received no impressions from the outward world, save such as might have been afforded by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal font I hesitated for a name. What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables — Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded — “I am here!”
Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years — years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch — never. Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine — but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only
—Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore — Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second — Morella.
1840 (29)
THE BELLS
I
Hear the sledges with the bells- Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II
Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night
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How they ring out their delight! From the molten-golden notes, And an in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells-
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III
Hear the loud alarum bells- Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor, Now–now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar! What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging, And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows: Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
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And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bellsOf the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells, Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV
Hear the tolling of the bellsIron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats Is a groan.
And the people–ah, the peopleThey that dwell up in the steeple, All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor womanThey are neither brute nor humanThey are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls
A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bellsOf the bells:
Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bellsOf the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells; Keeping time, time, time,
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As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bellsOf the bells, bells, bells: To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bellsBells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
1849 (XX)
Expanding Your Knowledge
PERSONAL RESPONSE
POE’S LIFE
1.What singles Poe out of the other literati? What could Virginia Clemm symbolize to him?
2.How does Poe’s idea of “pure imagination” agree with your views about art?
3.Find expressions that add to the “dark” image of Poe. Using a thesaurus try to substitute
them with more neutral equivalents. What is the overall impact of such changes? MORELLA
1.Poe used to say that in the story texture there should be no single word but only those which add to the overall effect. Find proofs in this story.
2.Characterize Morella. Do you see any vicious intent in her doings?
3.In what state of mind could Poe have written the story? What could lead to the darkness in Poe’s subconsciousness?
4.Why do you think Poe gives no place or time in the story? Define the plot phases in the story.
5.What atmosphere is created here? What constitutes such mood?
6.Find antithesis in the dialogue with Morella and comment on its hidden meaning and importance for the story.
THE BELLS
1.Find examples of assonance in the poem. What is their function?
2.Perform scansion of the poem and identify its meter. How does it differ from the previously covered poems? What tone does it set up?
3.Try to pick out examples of inversion in the poem. What does it help to emphasize?
4.If you were to render it in prose, all the attractiveness of the poem would be lost. What factors, then, add up to the beauty of this poem?
5.How does mood differ in each stanza. What could be the reason for metrical irregularity?
6.Find examples of alliteration. What do they help to emphasize?
WRITING WORKSHOP
zYou apply for a job at a film studio. One of the tasks is to write a screen version. Scriptwrite Morella, or any other of Poe’s story into a screenplay, with more fictional dialogues and other inventions.
zMake your own poetic translation of The Bells or any other of Poe’s verses. Try to make it sound like the original, i.e. bring in as many auditory images as you can.
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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
My soul an’t yours, Mas’r! You haven’t |
z What was woman’s role in the |
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family and society in the 19th |
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bought it, — ye can’t buy it! It’s been bought |
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century? |
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and paid for, by one that is able to keep it. |
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z How was woman educated? |
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Harriet Beecher Stowe |
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811, Litchfield, Connecticut — July 1, 1896, Hartford, Connecticut) was initially involved in teaching under her authoritarian sister. Though this occupation took up a lot of time and effort, she managed to turn her lifelong interest in writing into stories and
publish them.
In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a leading professor at Lane Theological Seminary, which was founded by Harriet’s father. After living eighteen years next to slaveholding communities across the Ohio River, the Stowes returned to New England in 1850 when Stowe’s husband was offered a professorship at Bowdoin College, Maine. Outraged at the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which allowed
owners to capture runaway slaves in free Northern States, she started her major work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Later in life, she claimed that she was under the spell of a Godsent image of sufferings of a beaten slave, who, nonetheless, was forgiving his tormentors.
Owing to her overwhelming success, she traveled widely, met Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria, and lived among the rich and famous. Her seventieth birthday was an event of the national importance.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN;
OR LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY
Chapter VII.
The Mother’s Struggle
It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom’s cabin.
Her husband’s sufferings and dangers, the danger of her child, all blended in her mind with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object, — the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband, — everything, as it lay in the clear frosty moonlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that?
But stronger than all was maternal love, wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy by the near approach of a fearful danger. Her boy was old enough to have walked by her side, and in an indifferent case she would only have led him by the hand; but now the bare thought of putting him out of her arms made her shudder, and she strained him to her bosom with a convulsive grasp as she went rapidly forward.
The frosty ground creaked beneath her feet, and she trembled at the sound; every
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