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Sir philip sidney an apology for poetry
Sir philip sidney an apology for poetry
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Monks would renounce the world to spend their time in contemplation of and service to God, putting their own desires aside, knowing that they could lead them down a path unwanted. Sir Philip Sidney, famous for his direct and forceful simplicity, is able to put so much emotional depth and truth in all of his poetry (Spencer). In “Thou Blind Man’s Mark,” he gives a twist to the understandings of desire. Sidney does this by showing the dark side of desire and the effect on people’s lives. The speaker’s disgust and bitterness of desire led him to the feeling of isolation and sacrificing his own sanity made him eager to throw away desire itself through Sidney’s specific diction, the bitter tone towards desire and poetic device such as irony and personification.
Sidney choice of diction emphasizes the revulsion the speaker feels for the truth of desire. Right off, Sidney uses the words “blind man” (1). It is not that the speaker is blind, but that men are not able to truly see the truth of desire, they are blinded by it. Using the word “mark,” it evokes how the speaker sees that desire is more like a hideous stain in peoples live, it has a negative connotation (1 Sidney). This stain has engulf him, stinking into his mind. In the first quatrain, Sidney describes the speaker the he was overwhelmed by his own desires, throwing himself into a trap of quarantine. This is shown in Sidney’s choice of using the words “snare” and “web” (1-4). The speaker foolishly trapped himself through the entanglement with desires with no end and will never be achieved. Much like a “labyrinth of desire,” trapped and searching for a way out (Brennan). Calling desire themselves “band of all evils” and that they are worthless “scum.” Just useless thoughts that h...
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...ed mind” (6 Sidney). They all add to the bitterness to desire that the speaker feels. In the end the sense of irony is left. The speaker had spoken for his loathing of desire, and then he decided to look “within [himself] to seek]” his virtues (13 Sidney). With this new understanding, the speaker only desire is to “kill desire.” This paradox became the solution of the speaker’s problem of his unwanted desires and with that, ending his pain of his imprisoned and tortured mind (14 Sidney).
The speaker now only wants to leave his desire, since he had sacrificed his sanity, a price that was far too high for desires. With Sidney’s end of irony as the solution to the madness that desire had brought upon the speaker, it establish that the want of material things should be tossed out and internal rewards should be kept. One should only desire to “kill desire” (14 Sidney).
The speaker states that those who desire could be “raised high” or even “dragged…down.” It is desire that can ruin your life or help it in many different ways. Even in “A&P” when Sammy quit his job to get the attention of the three young girls. Sammy was living in the moment because he was blinded by the girls and ended making a bad decision. In the poem it describes “The desire of thought-power” could dragged a person down and kill “his inner silence.” When Lengel tries to tell the girls to leave that causes Sammy “inner silence” to die and him to speak out loud and tell him it was not okay to embarrass them like that. However, to Lengel Sammy’s action seemed foolish. The speaker in the poem knows what desire can do to a person, and how it can affect their
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Myra, who is dying of illness, escapes the confinement of her stuffy, dark apartment. She refuses to succumb to death in an insubordinate manner. By leaving the apartment and embracing open space, Myra rejects the societal pressure to be a kept woman. Myra did not want to die “like this, alone with [her] mortal enemy” (Cather, 85). Myra wanted to recapture the independence she sacrificed when eloping with Oswald. In leaving the apartment, Myra simultaneously conveys her disapproval for the meager lifestyle that her husband provides for her and the impetus that a woman needs a man to provide for her at all. Myra chose to die alone in an open space – away from the confinement of the hotel walls that served as reminders of her poverty and the marriage that stripped her of wealth and status. She wished to be “cremated and her ashes buried ‘in some lonely unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea” (Cather, 83). She wished to be alone once she died, she wanted freedom from quarantining walls and the institution of marriage that had deprived her of affluence and happiness. Myra died “wrapped in her blankets, leaning against the cedar trunk, facing the sea…the ebony crucifix in her hands” (Cather, 82). She died on her own terms, unconstrained by a male, and unbounded by space that symbolized her socioeconomic standing. The setting she died in was the complete opposite of the space she had lived in with Oswald: It was free space amid open air. She reverted back to the religious views of her youth, symbolizing her desire to recant her ‘sin’ of leaving her uncle for Oswald, and thus abandoning her wealth. “In religion , desire was fulfillment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded”( Cather, 77), it was not the “object of the quest that brought satisfaction” (Cather, 77). Therefore, Myra ends back where she began; she dies holding onto
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