Lecture notes
Reading Myth, Poetry
- Institution
- Bangor University (BU)
Summaries and analysis of poetry based on or surrounding myths.
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PoetryOvid
● Penelope is married to Ulysses, King of Ithaca (also known as Odysseus). Son called
Telemachus. Penelope is the daughter of Icarius of Sparta and Periboea.
● Emphasis on the relationship between Penelope and Ulysses as she demonstrates
wifely devotion and loyalty. There is also an emphasis on Ulysses’s fighting in the Trojan
war.
● Poetic effects include hyperboles to show Penelope’s fear that Ulysses hasn’t returned.
● A metaphor to describe the way she is feeling.
● Imagery demonstrates her love and devotion.
● Penelope is defined by her chastity which creates the idea of innocence.
● Penelope’s suitors are all associated with death.
● Apotropaic - to keep death at bay. For example, her ‘hanging web’ - the idea of her
weaving and unweaving her own prison. Her power is ambiguous. She has no
independent identity.
Tennyson - The Lotos-Eaters.
● Mariners imagine spending the rest of their lives in the peaceful land of the lotos-eaters.
● Both narrative and song - the form of the narrative are reminiscent of Spenser’s ‘The
Faerie Queene.’
● Based on the story of Odysseus’s mariners who go off course and find the land of the
lotos-eaters, Odysseus must find them and bring them back.
● Spenserian form = ABABBCBCC - ends in a rhyming couplet.
● The imagery evokes the yearning of the mariners to settle on the land.
● Each stanza of the song represents a different argument for the mariners wanting to stay
on the line.
● The personification of landscape objects creates the backdrop for the foreboding
atmosphere of the Trojan War.
The Sea-Fairies.
● Prelude to ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ but the mariners encounter fairies.
● Written in iambic pentameter but broken occasionally for emphasis.
Ulysses.
● Written before Ulysses’s final voyage.
● Retrospective of the War, Ulysses says it shapes the man he is now. He ‘cannot rest
from travel.’ He yearns for more experiences.
● Tennyson draws on the Ulysses of ‘The Odyssey’ and Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ The poem is
also an elergy for Tennyson’s deceased friend who is symbolised by Ulysses.
● Written in blank verse and constant use of enjambment shows fluid and flowing
thoughts.
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