TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS

In 1968 I found myself having lunch in the Roma Restaurant in São Paulo Brazil. It's still there and if you want one of the best Italian meals of your life they'll be happy to serve you. At the time I was a bachelor earning a decent salary and had just had a wonderful lunch on a beautiful sunny day. Just as I was thinking that life could not be better a rather unprepossessing chap came to sit at the next table, flanked by two beautiful women who were clearly not his daughters.

Moral of the story: however good you think you have it, there's always someone who's got more. This came back to me recently on the wonderful holiday Rejane and I have just had touring in England and Scotland. Last year I bought a second-hand camper van which has turned out to be the ideal vehicle for two people to travel around and live in.

We visited Winston Churchill's home at Chartwell in Kent on a beautiful summer's day and enjoyed the magnificent view over the Weald of Kent (a geographical term I had read in books but never actually seen) and drifted back to Wales through the Cotswolds, pausing to enjoy some of the impossibly beautiful small towns in that region. Then we set off to the North.

On the way of course we had to visit Stratford-upon-Avon and for the first time I did the tourist thing I have always avoided: visiting Anne Hathaway's cottage. I liked the way they have kept the garden in something like the way it would have been in the 16th and 17th centuries. And so onward to the Lake District, where again we did the tourist thing and visited Wordsworth's home at Grasmere. Once again, you can see why the place is popular with tourists: the house and gardens seem to be almost exactly as Wordsworth left them.

Then on up the road to Scotland, drawing a veil over Carlisle, a drab and windy place where they have built a castle out of the most unattractive red stone. Nevertheless, we were having a marvellous time, either eating in the van or finding good food in restaurants while still, after 16 years of companionship, finding new things to talk and to laugh about on the way, including competing to see who could spot the greatest number of Eddie Stobart lorries rather like a couple of pre-adolescents told by their parents to amuse themselves for long trip.

Finally we arrived at the Scottish border. The weather was beautiful. The camper was running well and providing for our needs. Rejane was her beautiful, brilliant and witty self and all was well with my world. Then came that Roma moment.

It growled quietly into place alongside us. It remained there, long slim and totally beautiful. Voted by one British newspaper as the most beautiful sports car of all time (a comment repeated by Enzo Ferrari no less) and celebrating its 50th anniversary, yes it was a perfectly restored and maintained E-type Jaguar. The owner was about my age but with a bit more weight around his middle. His wife was a pleasant-looking lady but hardly as beautiful as Rejane. The vehicle could not be slept in or cooked in as we can do in our camper and in comparison to the most modest domestic saloon today, its mechanics are rather primitive. Nevertheless I found myself standing next to one of the most perfect pieces of design that has ever been produced.

One of the criteria of good design is that the object should do precisely what it is intended to do and the E-type does exactly that: it transports a man and his female companion (created in pre-politically correct times, it can only be driven by heterosexual males) from A to B with the maximum possible style. That style was its secondary purpose, one so typical of the 1960s and for those who were not around at the time, it is difficult to realise what a unique vehicle this was. The revolutionary motoring icon we usually associate with the 1960s is the Mini and with its transverse engine and front-wheel drive it is technically more advanced than the Jaguar, but its boxy body was not too far removed from other boxy cars of the time. The E-type looked like nothing else on the road and unlike most vehicles on the racetrack. Looming silkily out of that drab era that was only a teenager's lifespan away from World War II, rationing and bombsites, this beast blew your socks off – and still does.

At the time of its appearance a lot of nonsense was talked and written about its so-called Freudian significance – the phallic symbol of that elongated bonnet. Piffle.  The bonnet was long and low and curved because it had to perform two functions: contain a bloody great engine with its attendant pipes and wires and ancillary structures, and also because its designer Malcolm Sayer sought the best aerodynamic shape for it.

And we do have to give credit to the boss of Jaguar, Sir William Lyons, who approved the project. This is one of the few advantages of the limited size of most British motor car companies at the time – that one individual could come up with a design and another give his approval – the disadvantage was that these firms were too small to invest in research and were swallowed up by larger conglomerates. It is difficult to see the ranks of bean counters in a large company like Ford, for example, giving the go-ahead to this futuristic vehicle. Paradoxically, of course, it did turn out to be an exceptionally good business venture for Jaguar as its combination of appearance, performance and reasonable price found a market among young men who were beginning to make money in the false dawn the British economy enjoyed at that time.

And so there I stood in the sun and wind at a parking place on the border between England and Scotland being given a choice of values: the homely, practical camper with its abundance of domestic happiness, or the seductive charms of the most beautiful car of all time. Well, reader, I married my choice and I'm happy with it (but there was a moment there).

Violence in London

Everyone and his brother has contributed to the debate on the recent riots in London and various other parts of Britain, so what can I add?  Perhaps after spending three weeks in London, I might have some objective observations to make, as a stranger to the town.

The first thing is to register the fact that 99% of my interactions with people dealing with the public (shop assistants, restaurant staff and receptionists of various kinds) involve people whose accents indicate they were not born in Britain.  Before the Guardianistas and Independentes give their knee-jerk accusation of racism on reading that remark, let me point out that it is simply a fact.  Is it also going to be considered racist to examine the implications of this fact?

The obvious first implication is that any of the rioters and looters who are unemployed and living on benefits could be doing the jobs of these people, and in my innocence I cannot understand why the situation has arisen where they are not doing them. 

The two conventional arguments brought out on these occasions are (a) foreign workers are prepared to accept lower wages and for many British-born people it is more advantageous to live on benefits than to work, and (b) the native population is not educationally qualified for work.

Both of these arguments are nonsense.  The virtually uncontrolled immigration Britain has experienced since the 1950s is the result of an alliance between employers (who wanted low-paid labour to compensate for the inefficiency of their manufacturing processes) and successive labour governments who saw potential voters in the immigrant population.  The result has been to create a kind of 'sandwich' society consisting of the well-off sitting on top of a large layer of the unemployed/unemployable who are in turn sitting on top of a low-paid temporary or permanent workforce from overseas.

If we paid decent wages for a decent day's work and controlled access to unemployment benefit we would diminish the numbers of the lower two levels and this would have two results: those in work would begin to feel they are participating in society and not that they have a justification for looting it, and those who are bringing their skills from overseas would find that they have to stay home and dedicate their skills to improving the countries they feel the need to move out of.

The educational argument makes me, as an educator, actually angry and not many things do that these days.  In a long career of teaching and teacher-training I have watched standards being eroded and intellectual rigour being corrupted by political correctness.  All of this has been accompanied by ‘grade inflation’ in our school and university examination systems, and the more the educational authorities deny this, the truer it becomes.  If our young people were given an honest education and thorough training they would have no problem in holding down jobs.

All of this brings me to the question that has been of obsessing me during these days of incredible and vicious violence in London and other British cities – why?  We might be able to understand mass robbery from shops if, perhaps, a large section of society were suffering poverty but that is not the case, despite the wailing of NGOs who owe their jobs to creating an image of poverty that only they are capable of alleviating.  What has accompanied the present violence is the deliberate destruction of property, the invasion of private houses and attacks on individuals in the streets.  This is unprecedented; in previous disturbances there has been a racial element but the faces of those being brought to justice after these events show the one area in British society in which multiculturalism seems to have worked.  Also included in this rabble are people who cannot possibly, under any floppy-minded liberal thinking, be considered to be poor.

It will take a long time to find an answer to this question but the automatic responses from the press, following their predictable political lines, are inadequate.  The political right says the situation is the result of the castration of the police force after the report of the Holy Fool Lord Scarman, and the left blames ‘the cuts’ imposed by the new government, conveniently forgetting that these cuts were made necessary by a long period of left-wing government that led the country into extreme levels of debt.

Both are right in their ways, but perhaps not for the reasons they think.  The recent revelations concerning News International have lifted a blanket on various areas of inefficiency and corruption in the Metropolitan Police and anyone who has reported a property theft in Britain during the last 30 years or so will recognise that even outside London conventional policing has disappeared.  Obviously, if a section of society begins to feel the need to disrupt social order the perceived ineffectiveness of the police will only encourage it.  During the recent disturbances they were proved right as we read in the press many reports of groups of police standing watching buildings being burned and doing nothing because of orders they had received.

Right-wing protests against cutting the police force are therefore irrelevant: reducing the numbers of an ineffective organisation will actually be advantageous because it will save money.  Policing in Britain will only become effective after a root-and-branch reform aimed at transforming the police from its present role as an extension of social services to becoming an effective body the main aim of which is enforcing the law and maintaining order.  One step in this direction might be to reform the absurd situation of 52 separate police forces on a tiny island.  If we are looking for savings to be made, the administrative economies resulting from merging the majority of these institutions would be a good place to start.

Left-wing whining about the recent riots (initially called ‘protests’ by the BBC - protests against what?) being a legitimate protest by the underprivileged against a greed-based society is equally ridiculous.  The last Labour government had over a decade to work on the situation of the underprivileged and threw immense amounts of money at social problems and education, to little effect.  One of the reasons that government was ejected from power was that voters realised that this policy was ineffectual, that the greed of bankers was being tolerated as the blackmail price paid for having them stay in London and providing the mainstay of an economy from which industrial production has been largely removed, and that ineffectiveness of border controls meant that large numbers of recent arrivals were putting unsupportable pressure on various social services.

And yet none of this can tell me why, having robbed a shop, young thugs should feel the need to burn it down.  Why they should feel the need to smash down the doors of people in much the same situation as themselves to steal their belongings, nor why they should wish to beat almost to death someone who is arguing against their actions. 

And this really is serious.  If we read the history of civil unrest in Britain, it always has a political or social reason behind it - the events of this weekend do not.

Do I dare to offer an answer?  It may be that the laudable spread of equality of opportunity and of democracy in Britain since World War II has become confused with feelings of equality of possession.  In other words, advertising campaigns tell us that the new Audi sports car is on sale and, by implication, is available to us whoever we are.  If, however, we are an incompetent numbskull working in a low-paid job, or have no job at all, the inconvenient fact of not having the money to pay for the Audi sports car is interpreted as an affront to our equality of possession.  In the often drink-muddled reasoning of our friendly neighbourhood numbskull this is seen as unfair treatment by ‘the system’, a situation which can only be put right by breaking the system’s laws.

Films and television have also created what we might call an ‘equality of violence’ and we are now so saturated with violent images from childhood that violence is seen as a justifiable means of resolving any problem.  Whenever this question arises, the masters of media dismiss it as unprovable, a restriction on the holy right of free speech, etc, etc.  Well, if messages brought to us on the television and cinema screen do not have an effect on the public, why is so much money spent on advertising in those media?  The same executives who say that the hundreds and thousands of violent actions a child will observe on-screen have no effect on his or her attitudes in real life give a very different pitch when they are talking to those they wish to persuade to advertise on those same screens.

As a footnote, I must say that last Friday my Brazilian wife and I were having dinner with friends and she was having to listen to my usual diatribe against violence in Brazil.  By Saturday night I was being sweetly asked about my views on violence in my own country.  Answer have I none.

CHURCHILL AND HITLER: A Tale of Two Bunkers

 

My Brazilian wife Rejane has become interested in Winston Churchill after reading his autobiography and I am encouraging this in order to wean her away from the traditional Brazilian admiration for Napoleon and his nefarious works, so we recently went to see the War Rooms and Churchill Museum in London.  (We also visited Churchill's home at Chartwell in the Kent countryside on a beautiful summer's day and I thoroughly recommend this excursion.)

The Cabinet War Rooms are a classic example of the way Britain went into World War II, with their inadequate space, inadequate protection, improvised facilities and evidence of the dedication of the staff who worked there.  When the bombing of London started, it was decided that the rooms were not sufficiently protected from bombs, so extra cement was inserted above these vital nerve centres of the global war effort.  Except that this protection was only above the rooms and as a recorded statement from one of the structural engineers states, if a bomb had fallen in the nearby park and travelled diagonally it would have destroyed the rooms from the side.

Another point that strikes the visitor is the small size of the rooms compared to the scope of the operations run from them.  In a room about the size of my kitchen a map of the Atlantic Ocean covers one complete wall and has thousands of pinholes in it, showing where once convoys were tracked.  And as we look at those pinholes, we recognise that a good proportion represent points where ships were sunk and people died.

The sound recordings and video interviews in later life of those involved bring alive the precarious and rather sordid conditions in which they lived.  As the rooms had been improvised, there were no proper toilet facilities other than the notorious Elsan chemical toilets.  The well brought-up female secretaries had to traverse the corridor system in their nightdresses, confronting on their way marine guards, government officials and the most senior officers of the armed forces.  In another room, not much bigger than a suburban dining room, up to 11 typists would have to work.  At a time when probably the majority of the adult population (including Churchill with his cigars) smoked, the air-conditioning system must have had a difficult task.

One small detail stood out for me as giving a special insight into the conditions: a small, slotted noticeboard showing a removable sheet of card that said "Warm and Sunny" to inform the underground workers what the weather was like in the outside world.  There was not, however, a notice to tell them if their houses and families had been destroyed by the bombing and this was a constant source of worry to them.

We spent longer in this complex than I have spent in a museum for a long time because it is extremely interesting, at a time when Britain seems to have thrown away any advantage that might have accrued from supposedly ‘winning’ World War II, to get a sense of the conditions and the people that made the world safe for economic decline, the destruction of industry, overpopulation, politicians' expenses scandals, MRSA, a culture of incompetence in the Civil Service, the collapse of public education and reality shows and Top Gear on television.  As we left, however, my thoughts also spread to remembering the German film reconstructing the last days of Hitler in his bunker.  Although that particular bunker no longer exists, historical records imply that it was purpose-built from the start, with no chance of bombs accidentally penetrating and was far bigger than its equivalent in London.

Despite this impressive display of German architecture and technology, however, the difference of course lies in the people occupying the respective buildings.  Churchill's generals complained that he goaded them and came up with impractical suggestions, but he never overrode their final opinions.  Corporal Hitler's initial successes in the war led him to believe that he was a competent strategist and the terror-based regime he created, together with traditional German respect for authority (even illegitimate authority in this case) meant that his decision to commit military suicide by invading Russia was not seriously questioned.  Neither were his increasingly irrational decisions following the Russian disaster and the D-Day invasion.

The Churchill Museum has an example of the Enigma encoding machine developed by German technology but British intellectuals had cracked its codes so that every ‘secure’ order coming out of Hitler's physically secure bunker came to be read in Churchill's improvised equivalent.  One of the major figures involved in breaking the codes was Alan Turing who allegedly felt pressurised into committing suicide after the war by British society's intolerance of his homosexuality.  Be that as it may, in Nazi Germany those proclivities would have put him into a concentration camp before he had had time to contribute to the war effort in either coding or decoding.

Someone once said that World War II had one winner, America, one villain, Germany, and one hero, Britain.  Examining this exhibition and walking around Churchill's home at Chartwell is both uplifting and depressing.  Uplifting because you are brought close to the personality of this incredible human being Winston Churchill as well as the heroic spirit of the millions of ordinary, unremarkable people who were forced to become extraordinary and remarkable during his period of war leadership, and depressing as we pick our way through the litter-strewn detritus of the world we have made from their sacrifice. 

Two stories, one old, one new, summarise this situation for me: in 1946 a British Royal Engineers officer was running the factory that produced Hitler's Volkswagen ‘people’s car’ and production had reached 1,000 cars a month.  When the factory was offered to the British, American and French automobile industries they scornfully turned it down, claiming that this vehicle would never sell to a wider public.  Today the Volkswagen Company builds Rolls-Royces.  More recently, a British naval veteran travelling on one of the ghastly low-cost airlines was refused permission to carry his unit’s military standard as hand baggage because it did not meet some petty health and safety regulation.  As the veteran pointed out with some asperity: "If it wasn't for people like me, you would be telling me this in German".

LEARNING LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE

I have recently put on the Internet a website that summarises my efforts over the years to marry together teaching literature with teaching language.  Materials on the site are sold (very cheaply) but you might be interested in seeing this sample.  The material is aimed at more advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language, but I think many native speakers might enjoy it as well.  The site is at: www.litandlang.co.uk

How do I love thee?

and

Yet, love, mere love (1850)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

5 10 5 10

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; and equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: And love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee ... mark! ... I love thee -in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

a b b a a b b a c d c d c d a b b a a b b a c d c d c d

Writer’s background

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born the eldest of twelve children at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, in the North of England. For many years, the Barrett family had run sugar plantations in Jamaica, using slave labour. Elizabeth’s father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, brought his family to England while keeping his Jamaican plantations. Elizabeth was educated at home and was something of a prodigy, reading Milton and Shakespeare before she was ten. By the age of twelve she had started writing poetry.

In adolescence, Elizabeth fell ill with lung problems for which the treatment prescribed, common at that time, was opium. She also suffered an injury to her spine as a teenager. Despite these problems, she spent her adolescent years learning Hebrew to read the Old Testament, later reading Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno all in the original languages. In contrast to the free-thinking tendencies of other Romantics, and while reading the modern ideas of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (which appeared in her later, socially aware writing) Elizabeth was nevertheless a committed Christian who worked for Bible and Missionary Societies. She underwent a religious experience similar to that of William Blake, which she described as ‘not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast’.

In 1826 she published anonymously An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. In 1828 her mother died, the family fortunes declined and her father sold his English estate, eventually moving the family to London, where he ruled his children harshly, sending some of them to Jamaica to run the plantations, despite Elizabeth’s opposition to slavery (an opposition that did not prevent her living off its profits). Again, surprisingly perhaps for a Romantic writer, she translated classical Greek literature and wrote in the form of classical Greek tragedy. In 1838, she published The Seraphim and Other Poems.

Her health continued to cause problems and she spent a recuperative year at the seaside resort (a fashionable new idea) of Torquay in the Southwest of England, with her brother, who drowned there in a sailing accident. Elizabeth returned to her father’s house, spending the next five years as an ‘invalid’ (another fashion among wealthy persons of the time), while still writing.

The poems she published in 1844 brought her widespread fame, causing Robert Browning to write to tell her of his admiration for her work. Browning visited her in May 1845, and they began the celebrated courtship later portrayed in a play and a film. She expressed her love for Browning, six years younger than her, in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Their union was opposed by Elizabeth’s father so the pair eloped to Florence, where Elizabeth’s health improved sufficiently for her to bear a son, although her father remained estranged from her until his death. Elizabeth’s Sonnets from the Portuguese were published in 1850, are typically Romantic and many critics feel they are her best work. The sonnet How Do I Love Thee discussed here was voted ‘the nation’s favourite love poem’ in one British survey.

Elizabeth’s later work is also typically Romantic in its social and political content. She supported the campaign for the unification of Italy, opposed male domination of women, the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, child labour in British mines and factories, and slavery, among other social injustices. She died in Florence.

Language and Content Study

How do I love thee?

1(a). The poet uses the word ‘thee’ where we would use ‘you’ today. When would she have used the form ‘thou’?

1(b) What word would a writer using these forms have used to mean ‘your’?

2.In l.3 is the word ‘feeling’ a verb or a noun?

3(a). In l.6, the grammar checker on our word processor would probably correct the phrase ‘most quiet’ to what?

3(b) What is the rule that operates here?

4. In l.7 the verb ‘strive’ means to ‘struggle’. What form does this verb take in the simple past and past participle?

5(a). In l.13 we find the phrase ‘of all my life’; what would be a grammatically acceptable equivalent of this phrase today?

5(b) In l.13, we see the phrase ‘if God choose’.  We would expect this phrase to be ‘if God chooses’, so what is the explanation for the present form?

6. In the last line, what would be an acceptable alternative to the word ‘but’?

Yet, love, mere love,

1. What form of ‘acceptation’ would we use today?

2. In ll.2-3 ‘Fire is bright,/ Let temple burn, or flax’, the word ‘let’ is crucial; what to make the phrase more easily understood?

3. The verb ‘burn’ follows the noun ‘temple’ so it should really take form ‘burns’; why is it not do so?

4. What is ‘flax’, and what is it used for?

5. The phrase ‘at need’ in l.5 is difficult; it is found today in the description of requests being ‘at need or on demand’, which gives us an indication of what the poet meant; can you suggest an alternative phrase?

6. The word ‘mark’ (l.6) is usually used today in the physical sense of making a mark (e.g. on a piece of paper) or in the non-material sense of making an impression (‘The Romans left their mark on Europe with their legal system’), but here is has a different meaning which is no longer used; what is it?

7. Is there a difference between ‘aright’ as used here in l.7, and the word ‘right’ that we would use today?

8. What is the modern equivalent of ‘thine’ (l.9)?

9. How could you change the order of the underlined words in the lines: ‘There’s nothing low in love, when love the lowest (ll.9-10)?

10. What is the meaning of ‘mean’ in the sense in which it is used here ‘meanest creatures’ (l.10) and what is its most common meaning as an adjective today?

11. In l.13 we find ‘doth flash itself’ , an interesting phrase that has two elements we would probably not find in modern English; what are they and what would the modern form be?

Literary analysis

How do I love thee

As noted above, this poem was recently chosen the greatest love poem of all time in a large readers’ poll in Britain. It is one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese Elizabeth addressed to her husband, who used to call her ‘My little Portuguese’ because of her dark complexion. The conventional sonnet is said to have the ability to convey intense expressions of emotion (see Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? on this site). Queen Victoria had come to the throne in 1837 so Elizabeth’s poems are firmly within what we call the ‘Victorian’ era, famed for its public Puritanism and insistence on rules. Nevertheless, this poem is an outspoken expression of passionate love and indeed, privately Victoria herself (1819-1901) was deeply in love with her husband Prince Albert and had eleven children with him. When he died relatively young she disappeared from public life for a long period and apparently slept with his folded nightshirt in her bed for the rest of her life. The dull cloud of what we know as ‘Victorian Puritanism’ actually begins to close over Britain later in Victoria’s reign – there was naked bathing on Britain’s beaches until the 1840s, for example – and was probably a reaction to the social problems caused by urban overcrowding in the later Industrial Revolution, as well as a rejection of the decadence of the Regency era that preceded Victoria’s reign. The period of Elizabeth’s creativity reflects the development of new ideas originating from the thinkers associated with the time of William Blake (also on this site).

There is a tradition in love poetry of ‘listing’ and ‘measuring’ the extent of one’s love for the other or the qualities of that other. This sonnet begins with the writer ‘counting’ the ways she loves her man and measuring the depth and breadth and height her soul can reach when it looks for the limits of being and of ideal grace. Notice how these statements are contained in the first four lines (quatrain) while the second quatrain introduces the repeated phrase ‘I love thee’, which again ‘lists’ different aspects of love. We can see that the passionate personal love the writer feels is compared to wider forms of love such as the way men ‘strive for right’ and ‘turn from praise’. Notice also that, despite Elizabeth’s independence of spirit, she is happy to use ‘men’ to include women. Today she would have to use the politically correct ‘As persons strive for right’, which doesn’t carry quite the same effect.

It is interesting to speculate on the religious nature of this poem, with its reference to the Christian concept of ‘ideal grace’ contrasting with ‘childhood’s faith’ and ‘lost saints’. In fact, there is no contradiction here: Elizabeth had been brought up within the strictly conventional traditions, beliefs and rituals of the Church of England, but seems to have felt that she could apply the Christian way of life to her dealings with the adult world without depending too much on orthodox religious structure.

Studying this poem shows how useful it is to have some knowledge of the writer’s life. Knowing how difficult her younger life was, with a tyrannical father (who never gave his permission for any of his children to marry, and disowned all those who did), losing her mother at a relatively young age and her favourite brother even younger, together with her own health problems, gives a deeper meaning to ‘my old griefs’. This awareness of early death in the family, together with her own ill-health, also gives extra resonance to the final phrase ‘and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death’. (Compare this sentiment to that expressed by John Donne in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, on this site.)

Yet, love, mere love

This is a rather more difficult poem than the previous one, although it shares the same form of the sonnet, and so I have included a modern ‘translation’ after the Answers to the Language and Content Study questions. It is a passionate statement of love from a person who is putting herself in a lower position than the object of her devotion. The work sits comfortably within the tradition of Christian European love poetry, seeing human love as a reflection of God's love.

The main idea of the sonnet is to say that all love, however ‘mean’ (in this sense, humble or of low value), is still a reflection of God's love. The writer claims that people can be made physically more beautiful as a result feeling love: ‘How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s [work]’.

Internet Research questions (for both sonnets)

1. Is the language of the poem the same as the informal language of the letters Elizabeth exchanged with Robert Browning?

2. Given the rhyme scheme of these sonnets, are they Petrarchan, Spenserian or Shakespearian?

Answers

How Do I Love Thee?

1(a). When the ‘you’ was the subject of the sentence; here ‘thee’ is the object of the verb ‘love’.

The system is:

Subject	Object	Possessive adjective	Possessive pronoun
I	me	my	mine
you (singular)	thee	thy	thine
he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/its	his/hers/ø
we	us	our	ours
ye	ye	your	yours
they	them	their	theirs

1(b) thy

2. It is the present participle of the verb ‘feel’; the writer is describing how she is trying to find the limits of being and grace which she cannot see.

3(a). Quietest

3(b) (i) Regular adjectives of one syllable usually add -er and -est.

(ii) Adjectives of two syllables and end in -y (pretty), -ow (narrow), and -le (subtle in the), may also add -er and -est.

(iii) Usually, adjectives of two or more syllables use the words ‘more’ and ‘most’ to create comparative and superlative forms.

Examples: (i) sad, sadder, saddest (ii) pretty, prettier, prettiest (iii) beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful.

4. ‘strove’, ‘striven’

5. ‘my whole life’.

5(a) It is a rare example of the English subjunctive, which could also be written as ‘if God should choose’.

6.‘only’

Yet, love, mere love,

1. ‘acceptance’

2. ‘whether’, so the phrase would be: ‘whether a temple burns, or flax’

3. It is in fact the English equivalent of the subjunctive that is not often found today, although you will find it in certain phrases (Whether he be man or beast).

4. Flax is grown both for its seeds, which are used in cooking and to make linseed oil, a solvent used by artists. Its fibre is used to make textiles, paper and soap, among many other uses. It is also one of the earliest plants to have been ‘domesticated’ by man.

5. I would suggest: ‘as I have to’.

6. ‘take note’ or ‘notice’.

7. Not really -they both mean ‘correctly’, as in ‘did I hear you aright?’ and ‘did I hear you right?’. The only point here is that ‘glorified right’ is very clumsy, so we would probably say ‘properly glorified’. This is an example of how we actually use English, as opposed to how English can be used. If you are a learner, you may have heard a teacher say: ‘Yes, you could say that, but a native speaker would not say it’. And that is the point of these exercises: by making you look at the changes in English over time, we introduce you to examples of how the language is used today.

8. ‘yours’ (see the table above).

9. ‘when the lowest love’

10. ‘low in the order of things’. Today it is most commonly used to describe someone who is ‘tight-fisted’ and does not like giving things to others.

11. The literal modernisation of the phrase would be ‘flashes’. The ‘doth’ is an older form of ‘does’, which is found with the verb today in three cases: the question form (‘Does he live in Manchester?’), the negative form (‘No, he doesn’t.) and the emphatic form (‘I tell you, he does live in Manchester!’). None of these cases applies here, but the ‘do’ auxiliary in normal sentences is often found, as in the Queen Gertrude’s famous line in Hamlet: ‘The lady doth protest too much’.

So English has eliminated ‘do’ as an auxiliary verb in ordinary statements but keeps it for questions and negatives, which is the cause of many mistakes for learners. We find people producing questions like *‘What you do?’ or *‘What you are doing?’ and negatives like *‘I not like this book’.

A modernised version of the sonnet Yet, love, mere love

Still, love, simple love, is really beautiful and worth accepting. A

fire is just as bright whether it is burning a temple or flax, and the

same light jumps in the flame coming from a plank of cedar wood

or from a weed; and love is fire. And when I say, as I have to, that

I love you – take note! – I am changed in your eyes and appear in

my real glory, aware of the new rays of light that shine from my

face into yours. There is nothing low in love because even the

lowest creatures can love; God accepts the lowest creatures who

love Him and loves them in return. And my feelings flash across

the poor features of my face and show how the great work done by

love improves the looks Nature gave me.

Internet Research questions

1. It is not easy to find the text of the letters written by Elizabeth and Robert, but the following address may be useful -
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16182/16182-8.txt. The most noticeable difference is that she no longer uses the ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ forms. It seems as if these forms are already antiquated at the time of writing, but have a certain formality which she feels gives perhaps more depth to the poem. The truth is ... since we really are talking truths in this world ... that I never have doubted you – ah, you know! – I felt from the beginning so sure of the nobility and integrity in you that I would have trusted you to make a path for my soul – that, you know…. If you could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book, you would see nothing there offensive to the least of your feelings ... not even to the outside fringes of your man’s vanity ... should you have any vanity like a man; which I do doubt.

2. Look at http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm where you will find that it is Petrarchan.