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[ruletamulet]

“La Divina Comedia”

by Dante

Fragment:

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more; But of the good to treat, which there I found, Speak will I of the other things I saw there. I cannot well repeat how there I entered, So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way. But after I had reached a mountain’s foot, At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart, Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders

About The Author: 

Dante was an italian poet. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and his depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art. He is cited as an influence on John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer and Alfred Tennyson, among many others.

Analysis

Dante finds himself in "... a dark jungle after giving my way for loss." He is in the middle of his life in a world of sin. He considers that the life in which he is trapped is a dark and gloomy place, that forest represents "the good abandoned road." Lost as it is, it is beset by a panther (symbolizing lust), a lion (symbolizing pride ) and a wolf (which symbolizes greed). In this despair, a shadow appears and is none other than Virgil, the poet who so admires Dante (and how he must do so that he is appointed by his guide in Hell and Purgatory) to get him out of that trance and take him to Paradise.

Reviews

I believe that in this story you can feel the darkness as it guides you through hell and back but you can also sense the poetry and the beauty in desastre that the author expresses by the view of the main character.

Reflections:

Dante’s view of God is expanded through his relationship with Beatrice speaks directly to me in light of past experiences. Not only does Dante cause me to reflect on previous romantic relationships, but it all of the relationships in my life past, present, and future. The importance or even necessity of having community in a person’s life has become very evident to me in this past few years. The more intimate a community becomes the easier it is to identify and fight sin. This process brings people closer together, glorifies God, strengthens community, and allows people to serve one another with a deeper and more heartfelt understanding. It’s always funny to see how a system like this works when carried out correctly and then to realize that this is the way God designed it to work.

Fun Fact: The greatest poetic composition of the Christian Middle Ages and the first masterpiece of world literature written in a modern European vernacular.

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Golden age:

“name unknown” by Francisco de Quevedo

·         Fragment

Ah life!

Ah life!

No one aswers?

Here are the years

I have lived; my times

Gnawed by fortune

The hours my madness conceals

I cannot know how where health time

Have fled.

Lacking life, life lived attends me

And there is no calamity

That does not surround me

Yesterday was;

Tomorrow has not come;

today is going on without stopping.;

I am a was, a will be,

An am exhausted

In today, tomorrow, yesterday

Diapers and shroud are joined.

And I have remained present

In this succession to decay.

·         About the author

Francisco de Quevedo (1580 - 1645) had every chance in the world to make something respectable of himself. Born of a good Madrid family, he was sent to university at a time when perhaps 1% of Europeans could so much as sign their own name.

Primarily known as a satirist in life, he certainly had satiric skill, and wrote a great deal of satire that was not to be equaled in Europe until the coming of Voltaire, but he was much more than a mere wisecracker.

Quevedo wrote his first important collection of poems in 1613, as a consequence of a profound spiritual crisis. Fun fact: he was extremely ugly.

·         Analysis

this poem talks about life, about how life is messy and sometimes gone, how sometimes can be stuck and feels only the bad things surround you. It tells how its just today, not tomorrow and not yesterday, but just today, it just helps the author express the loneliness, the sadness and all of his feelings.

·         Reflections

I think this poem is really deep and reflects what its meant to be the feeling of being trap in a moment or a day surrounded by a bad feeling, there’s just today and you have to go through every day.

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The Renaissance.

“Macbeth“ By Shakespeare.

Fragment

Lady Macbeth : Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely? From this time

Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valour

As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that

Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,

And live a coward in thine own esteem,

Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'

Like the poor cat i' the adage?

About The Author.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564. His father William was a successful local businessman, and his mother Mary was the daughter of a landowner. In 1582 William, aged only 18, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Juliet. It is thought that during the 1590s he wrote the majority of his sonnets. His early plays were mainly comedies By the early Seventeenth Century, Shakespeare had begun to write plays in the genre of tragedy. Shakespeare died in 1616; it is not clear how he died.

Fun fact:  Shakespeare is known as England’s national poet – as well as the “Bard of Avon”

Analysis.

Macbeth is a tragedy that tells the story of a soldier whose overriding ambition and thirst for power cause him to abandon his morals and bring about the near destruction of the kingdom he seeks to rule. At first the conflict is between Macbeth and himself, as he debates whether or not he will violently seize power, and between Macbeth and his wife, as Lady Macbeth urges her husband toward a course of action he is hesitant to take. Ultimately, Macbeth’s overreliance on his belief he is fated to be king leads to his downfall, since he arrogantly misinterprets the witches’ prophecies, believing that they promise him glory while in fact the prophecies predict how he will be defeated. While the audience has long understood that, the witches are untrustworthy and up to no good, Macbeth only realizes this fact when facing his own death. His death resolves the political and social conflict, since the legitimate king can now return to power and restore order to Scotland. The play’s brief falling action allows for the promise of a brighter future under Malcolm’s new reign.

Reflections.

Macbeth is a book filled with betrayal, prophecies, revenge and many other themes. After reading this book I feel that Macbeth is indeed tragic because of his one fatal flaw, or harmatia. As one could see, throughout this book, Macbeth seeks guidance from the wrong people like the witches, his wife, whose ambition is as great, if not greater than his.

Firstly, the three witches, similar to the three Fates in the Greek legends, influenced him greatly with their prophecies. But without these prophecies of fame and power, would Macbeth actually have killed King Duncan? Macbeth ends up getting killed because he placed all his faith in the prophecies and never even bothered with a back-up plan, and even though he is killed by Banquo at the end of the book, none of the prophesies proved false.

"Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." (act 5 scene 5) -Essey forum.

Reviews.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's darkest play not only because of the restricted palette of its images--shades of black varied with bright red blood--but also because, in the play's world of warfare and witchcraft, its hero is half-damned from the start.

Inured to violence, prone to superstition, Macbeth struggles with the hags' predictions in the depth of his soul. But his wife, fiercely ambitious, never struggles. When he is haunted by his imagination, she is steadfast: preparing everything, looking after the details, urging him on. It is only afterward, when he is thoroughly damned, coldly vicious, that she finds she cannot wash Duncan's blood off from her hands.

Among other things, this play is the portrait of a good marriage. If, that is, a good marriage can be made in hell. –Bill Kerwin.

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Middle Ages:

“The Book of Duchess” By Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Fragment.

“There is nothing dear nor despised for me–it’s all alike to me–joy or sorrow, it doesn’t matter. For I feel nothing about anything, as if I am some sort of dazed thing, always on the brink of falling over; for sorrowful visions and images are always and everywhere fully in my mind.

 And well you should know, it is against nature to live this way, for nature would not allow any earthly creature to endure for such a long time to be without sleep and in sorrow. And as I can not sleep, neither by night nor morning, I am melancholy and afraid that I shall die. Lack of sleep and heaviness have slain my spirit of liveliness, so that I have lost all joy and vigor. My head is so full of fantasies that I don’t know what’s best to do. (...).”

About The Autor.

Geoffrey Chaucer was the first published medieval poet, and remains one of the most respected poets in English literature. Chaucer was born around 1340, most likely in London. His father was a wealthy wine merchant. He spent most of his career in service as a statesman, working his way up from page, to soldier, to customs comptroller, to parliament member, and finally to diplomat.

Chaucer's career in later life was lucrative. His wife, Philippa, also made a good salary working as a lady in waiting for the queen. Chaucer's various responsibilities for the Court required him to travel a great deal. Through his travels he became acquainted with the great literature of Italy and France. Chaucer died around 1400. 

Fun Fact: he was the first poet to be buried in Westminster Abbey, in a spot which is still called, 'The Poet's Corner.'

Reflections and Analysis.

This books speaks about the fear of losing someone and how it can affect someone´s perception of reality.  

The poem reflects’ Chaucer’s knowledge of classical literature, in various details, he brought the experiences of the Dreamer, with admirable art, near to the actual phenomena of the dream-life.   The Book of the Duchess, with all its defects, is a very beautiful poem.  A haunting charm about it eludes analysis, but subdues our mood to a gentle and vaguely troubled pensiveness. The mind is purged, not by the tragedy of life, with its pity and terror, but by a sense of the  sadness which pervades  its beauty and its joy.

Reviews.

"The Book of the Duchess" is a decently lengthy poem which has a really, really intriguing structure. While to me it seems like kind of a given that the medieval folk were quite fixated on dreams and their significance, Chaucer takes a really interesting stance here that makes for not one, but two good stories. At the opening of the poem, the sleep-deprived speaker (referred to as a poet, possibly Chaucer himself) reads the story of Alcyone and Seys, in which a wife loses her husband at sea. The speaker then proceeds to fall asleep and have a dream about a similar but more time-appropriate situation, in which he finds himself in the same setting as the "Romaunt of the Rose". There, he speaks to a knight who reveals that he has lost his wife. When the speaker awakens, he decides he's going to write a poem about what just happened, thus the reason "Duchess" even exists!    -Good reads, by Sarah.