ENGLISH 331.301

FINAL EXAM

This is a take-home exam for English 331.301 Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Donne to Milton. It consists of three questions. I'm allowing for no choices among them: answer all three. You should answer them in three short (and separate) essays. Length? Use your own good judgments, but I should think each might reasonably be dealt with in between five and seven pages of about 250 words per page. Keep the three papers together. Put your name somewhere brutally obvious on them. They are due by the end of business -- 5 P.M. -- on December 20th. Please deliver them to my office. A format that is PRINTED OUT or TYPED is better than one that is (yuck!) handwritten. It's also better than e-mailing your answers to me as an attachment, although in extremis I will cope if you feel absolutely compelled to so. (But I might lower your grade two or three letters.)

If you are behind with a paper, see the bottom of this page.

1. QUESTION 1:
   In her play, Wit, Margaret Edson writes about a number of things. These include the attitudes towards Donne's poetry of an English literature professor, her own professor, and one of her students, now an oncology research professor. Why is Donne important in this play? What (if anything) does Edson get right -- and what (if anything) does she get wrong -- about the ways in which Donne is read, taught, and responded to in this play?

2. QUESTION 2:
   Here follows (immediately below) a seventeenth-century poem. Its date is its only claim on us: it is not supposed to be "representative" or "typical" of anything at all. Its author is none of the five people we have concentrated on this semester. I should add that, for your purposes here, there is, I assure you, no reason to waste a lot of time trying to dope out who s/he is: there's not going to be a whale of a lot of critical help out there for you to find that will assist you in completing the assigned topic.

   Which is: in your essay, analyze -- read -- the poem. How does this "little machine" work? Write your analysis -- your reading -- self-consciously. What elements do you choose to concentrate on in your discussion: imagery? theme? logic? setting or dramatic situation? prosody? diction? all of these? some of them? other matters entirely? Why do you make this or that choice/these or those choices? How do these choices seem to help you to read this poem?

   If you wish, your concluding paragraph might also attempt to judge (in other words, to "criticize") the poem. Is it "a success"? Is it "a good poem"? What do such judgements mean?

   Elegy over a Tomb

   
   

   Must I then see, alas! eternal night

   Sitting upon those fairest eyes,

   And closing all those beams, which once did rise

   So radiant and bright,

   That light and heat in them to us did prove

   Knowledge and Love?

   Oh, if you did delight no more to stay

   Upon this low and earthly stage,

   But rather chose an endless heritage,

   Tell us at least, we pray,

   Where all the beauties that those ashes ow'd

   Are now bestow'd?

   Doth the Sun now his light with yours renew?

   Have Waves the curling of your hair?

   Did you restore unto the Sky and Air,

   The red, and white, and blew?

   Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death

   That sweetest breath?

   Had not Heav'ns Lights else in their houses slept,

   Or to some private life retir'd?

   Must not the Sky and Air have else conspir'd,

   And in their Regions wept?

   Must not each flower else the earth could breed

   Have been a weed?

   But thus enrich'd may we not yield some cause

   Why they themselves lament no more?

   That must have changed the course they held before,

   And broke their proper Laws,

   Had not your beauties giv'n this second birth

   To Heaven and Earth?

   Tell us, for Oracles must still ascend,

   For those that crave them at your tomb:

   Tell us, where are those beauties now become,

   And what they now intend:

   Tell us, alas, that cannot tell our grief,

   Or hope relief.

   
   

3. QUESTION 3:
   Compare and contrast the representation of Christ in Herbert's The Temple and in Milton's Paradise Regained (Regained, not Lost!). Whether you see similarities or differences, discuss what they might signify about the kind of poetry both writers produce -- and, if you are feeling especially adventurous, not to say "foolhardy," what might they signify about the intentions for their poetry both writers seem to have?

Some of you, for one reason or another, owe me a short paper. Here is its topic. Let me know that you're going to be doing it! If you say nothing, I will submit a final grade that assumes that you have not completed the work for this class. If you say that this essay is coming, then I will submit a grade of INCOMPLETE for you and will NOT expect this paper before your return at the start of the spring semester.

I WILL EXPECT IT THEN, HOWEVER! But I do NOT want work on this make-up paper to interfere with your on-time completion of the final exam, due before the holiday.

Discuss the function of the alchemical imagery in Donne's "Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day." This poem, apparently based on images associated with seasonal change, tells its reader that it was written on (or about) the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. Its ostensible focus is on themes cosmological, astronomical, geophysical, meteorological. Examine the alchemical imagery carefully. Where is it? What is it? And what is it doing here?