Starry Starry Night

Stars are one of the most beautiful things in nature. Simply magical.

John Keats’s “Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast As Thou Art” reminded me immediately of the saying that love is “the star of every wandering bark” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. The shining, sparkling feature of stars is usually the first thing that comes up in people’s minds when they think about them. In the poem, however, Keats emphasizes mainly on the bright star’s “steadfast” and “unchangeable” (9) nature which allows it to overlook everything that happens on Earth. The imagery of “moving waters” and “soft-fallen mask / Of snow” not only adds to the underlying theme of nature’s beauty, but also shows that only by staying still on the sky can the star observe them, suggesting that one can attain so much more in a relationship with faithful and undying love.

Nonetheless, the bright star is not all that perfect.  Its loneliness of hanging on the sky eternally with no companion cannot be compared with the speaker’s joy of spending his life with his “fair love” (10). He is not fond of being a “sleepless Eremite” (4) like the star. Or perhaps we can say that, unless we can find someone that has the same persistent view towards love, we might as well be just like the star, shining alone in the dark.

King of Kings

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away". 

1.     What Kind of a person was Ozymandias?

He was a very arrogant, powerful, and cold man who thought that he was the “king of kings” (10). The huge pieces of his statue’s remains suggest that the original statue must have been gigantic, showing the sense of superiority he saw in himself.

2.     Underline words and phrases in the poem that illustrate his character.

3.     Why did Ozymandias have the inscription (lines 10-11) put on his statue?

To boast to everyone who sees his statue, if they haven’t already figured it out just by looking at it, that he is the “Mighty” (11) king and people should feel “despair” (11) knowing that they can never be compared with his greatness.

4.     Restate the meaning of this inscription in your own words.

My name is Ozymandias, king of all kings. Look at my mighty and grand work, and feel sorry for yourself

5.     What is the theme of the poem?

Even the greatest, most powerful people cannot escape the diminishing of significance through the passage of time. Ozymandias’s civilization and kingdom are gone, his statue is now merely broken pieces “half sunk” in the desert, and all has been turned to dust by the impersonal and destructive power of history.

6.     List some historical characters from the past and present who were or are like the character of Ozymandias.

Hitler, Louis XVI, basically all the kings in the past.

Mountain High Ocean Deep

Byron’s “Apostrophe to the Ocean” conveys his admiration and love for the ocean. The exclamation “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!” (10) is where this is first established in the poem. In the second stanza, he shows the insignificance of man compared to the vastness of the ocean. Although men are the destroyer of nature – “man marks the earth with ruin” (12), their “control / Stops with the shore” (12-13), and becomes only as trivial as “a drop of rain” (16) when they sink into the ocean. The last line of the stanza further stresses the insignificance of humanity.

In the fifth stanza, Byron compares the ocean’s power with that of great empires in history. He suggests that empires like “Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage” (38) received power from the ocean, but then they brought tyrants to rule. Now that their “decay / Has dried up realms to desert” (41-42), the power of the ocean remains unchangeable regardless of the passage of time – “Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow” (44).

The last stanza is a bit different from others because Byron expresses his personal relationship with the ocean – “I have loved thee, Ocean!” (55) Being an excellent swimmer, he has trust in the waves and tides of the ocean that he compares swimming in it to riding a horse. I agree with Byron about the power of the ocean, but I dread it more than I admire it. So many accidents can happen in the ocean and as the poem itself suggests, people can die in the ocean “Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknonwn” (18) and never be found again.

It isn't a spelling mistake

Like horoscopes, Chinese zodiacs also have twelve signs, each represented by an animal. A few years ago when it entered the year of Tiger, I saw my dad’s email for his former literature students saying “Tyger Tyger, burning bright. Happy New Year!” and I thought: you are the dean of the faculty of arts and you misspelled tiger?

Little did I know that William Blake’s “The Tyger” is such a renowned piece of literary work. It has six rhyming quatrains, consisting unanswered questions only. Right at the first stanza, the tiger’s “immortal hand or eye” (4) and its “fearful symmetry” (4) shows that the tiger is a symbol of power and evilness. Blake suggests that all creation must in some way reflect the nature of its creator. The reference to the lamb – “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (20) – reminds the readers that both the tiger and the lamb were created by the same God. The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a kind and loving world. Blake leaves us readers to figure out by ourselves that that if even God has both good and evil in Him, then isn’t it just obviously true that there is an undeniable existence of evilness in all of human, and people just need to accept this?

Tim'rous Beastie

It is said that Robert Burns wrote “To a Mouse” after finding a mouse and its nest in ruins. In the first seven stanzas, the speaker apologizes to the mouse for ruining its life with his plough and for the way human treats other creatures. He sees not with the view of “man’s dominion” (7) but treats the mouse as a “fellow mortal” (12). He also confesses for smashing the mouse’s shelter with his “cruel coulter” and feels terrible that it now has to “thole the winter’s sleety dribble / An’ cranreuch cauld!” (35-36) because he accidentally made it homeless.

In the last stanza, the speaker sighs that even with all the problems a mouse could have that he has just addressed and apologized for, it is still better off than the speaker himself. He envies that with “The present only toucheth thee” (20), the mouse doesn’t have to be restrained by the past or to be afraid of the future like he does. However the fact that he thinks the mouse only has the present to worry about reflects his underlying opinion of mouse being an inferior species of animal instead of an “earthborn companion” (11) of human. If the mouse could hear Burns or actually answer him, it must have not been very pleased that he automatically assumes that his own problems and fears are more important and of a greater scale than that of the mouse’s.

Rest in Peace

My homeroom teacher in grade 4 loved to dive, she used to tell us exciting experience of seeing sharks or almost running out of oxygen all the time. October 1st 2002, I remember that it was a public holiday. That night her name was on the news: she was said to be missing after an accident happened while she was deep down in the ocean. The next day back in school, when the news about her unfortunate death was announced, everyone in my class started sobbing, some crying out loud. That was my first time dealing with death.

Last summer, I learned that my Mandarin tutor passed away after a long fight with cancer. Although we hadn't been in touch for almost six years, my sister and I still went to her funeral to show our respect. I was surprised how emotional I got when I was there because we were quite distanced by then.

I guess this is the thing about death. We dread it, we avoid it, we wonder, and we fight. It is the one thing that is inevitable to absolutely everyone, even the proud and the mighty must one day lie beneath the earth like everybody else. A sad but true line in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” points out that “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” (36) and we’ve been walking that path since the day we were born. Even though we are all well aware that death will approach us and our loved ones sooner or later, losing someone we know (they don't even need to be really close to us) is still heart wrenching because there is too many uncertainties about what happens after death. Even if there really is an afterworld where everything is perfect and worry-free, it doesn’t change the fact that there is one less of us in the world we know.

忽必烈

Yes, these are Chinese characters.

My eyes opened wider as we read the introduction of the poem “Kubla Khan” not only because it has something to do with ancient China, but also because I had no idea who Kubla Khan was. So I googled it right after class, and it turned out that I did know him (phew!) only by a different name. (Because he was a Mongol king; Mongol people and Han people, who are the majority of Chinese, have totally different languages and cultures. But that's a story for another time)

I find the little in-class activity “Imagination and Connotation” quite interesting. I put bath tub for lifeless ocean; cream for milk of Paradise; red riding hood for ancient forest; and dead body in the sea for flashing eyes and floating hair. To further show that I didn’t link up my knowledge of Chinese history with their names in English, I actually wrote mythical God as the connotation for Xanadu. It’s funny how they mean so differently in the poem from what I first thought of.