Chapter 9
Love (p. 453)
TRUE LOVE: POEMS (p. 455)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Let me not to the marriage
of true minds (p. 455)
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 seems at first to celebrate the enduring qualities of
love between husband and wife. It is, in fact, often recited at wedding ceremonies, an
appropriate setting for a poem whose first lines echo the marriage vows in the Book of
Common Prayer. It is written in one of the most structured of forms, in what has come
to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet, though Shakespeare was not the first to use
it. Although this poem was published—probably without his permission—as part of a
sequence of 154 sonnets in 1609, it may have been written earlier. In 1598, a writer
mentioned Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends”; imitating and
transforming the conventions of the Italian sonnets of Petrarch had become a popular
pastime in literary and court circles of the late 1500s. Petrarchan sonnets held strictly
to conceits describing unrequited love for an idealized woman leading ultimately to
religious transcendence. English writers often toyed with these conventions, however,
and Shakespeare inverted conventions and used the poems for wordplay and argumen-
tation about the nature of love and change—and about rhetoric and writing as well.
The form of the Shakespearean sonnet keeps the fourteen lines of the Italian
sonnet, but its three quatrains followed by a final couplet allow the poet to form an
argument that reaches its conclusion in the last two lines. Predominantly iambic
actually don’t exist? Is this a traditional marriage ceremony, a platonic marriage of
minds, or—because this sonnet is in the part of the sequence in which most poems
are addressed to a man—an argument about a homoerotic relationship? What sort of
logic is implied in the second line: “Love is not love”? Even though the enjambment
leads to a qualification, a sense of paradox remains. Furthermore, each sentence
contains a negative or an absence: not, not, remove, no, never, unknown, not, not, never,
and no continue to pile up oppositions. Contrasted with this emptiness of not-love, the
word impediment seems unusually solid, and the conventional enemy time is
personified as an inexorable automaton that mows down everything within his
compass, recalling the circling hands of a clock that signal human aging. Love, in
contrast, receives a negative personification—is defined as a not-fool—and seems
peculiarly distant and impersonal. The only positive metaphors for love in the poem
are linked closely to their opposites: the solitary channel marker, while not shaken,
merely “looks on,” and the guiding star cannot really be known.
Having conceded the poem’s rhetorical ambiguity, most readers would still
undoubtedly be pleased to have such enduring love proclaimed to them. The last lines
seem to indicate, however, that the speaker may be defining true love rather than
declaring it because he makes it explicit that he is offering a scientific or rhetorical
JOHN KEATS
Bright Star (p. 456)
William Shakespeare, in the preceding sonnet in this cluster, famously calls love “an
ever-fixèd mark” and “the star to every wandering bark.” The metaphor is apt if one
wishes to romanticize love as central to existence and, to use John Keats’s words, “sted-
fast [sic]” and “unchangeable.” As seen from the Northern Hemisphere, the polestar,
Polaris, lies nearly in a direct line with the axis of the earth’s rotation, “above” the
North Pole, and stands almost motionless in the sky, with all the other stars of the
northern sky appearing to rotate around it. Because of its place in the sky, Polaris is
thus a “fixèd mark” from which to draw measurements for navigation and astronomy,
important in the voyages of discovery taking place during the lives of both poets. In
this poem by Keats, itself a Shakespearean sonnet, Keats extends the metaphor to con-
trol all fourteen lines, much as the polestar controls the sky. As many critics have
pointed out, Keats thus pays homage to Shakespeare, a favorite poet of his, but makes
The Romantic poets, a group in which literary historians place Keats, are usually
disliked by students, who find their diction and syntax foreign and their ideas too
idealistic. Ironically, however, the Romantics were poetic rule-breakers, and many of
them—certainly Keats, who died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the young age of twenty-
five—lived intensely, much like young readers in our college classes. The Romantics
sought out new ways of thinking; and, in a letter to his brother, Keats coined the
influential term “negative capability” to describe “what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously . .
. that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Presumably, we want to encourage critical
reading and writing that keeps just such an open mind to complexities rather than the
safely vague or reductive arguments students often feel they must submit to get a good
grade on a school paper. To readers more comfortable with prose or free verse, poems
like this one may be incomprehensible and inaccessible unless it is read aloud and
read well, several times. Fortunately, the 2009 movie Bright Star (named for this
poem; both the poem and the film reflect the love story between John Keats and
Fanny Brawne) contains eloquent readings, one read by the actor Abbie Cornish near
the end of the film in the voice of Fanny as she grieves John’s death. Take the
back to Old English, adding no-nonsense strength to its meaning. Biblically oriented
students might recall psalms that repeat the refrain that God’s “steadfast love endureth
forever”—a translation of the Hebrew word hesed, related to the Greek word agape,
connotations undoubtedly familiar to Keats. The star thus symbolizes the sort of
unchanging love Keats wants to exemplify. It is interesting, therefore, when the poem’s
speaker shifts from the isolation of a star stuck up in the sky, like an “Eremite” (a
hermit who lives alone and contemplates God in purity), all the way down to the
sensual world of relationships, using the soft, warm, swelling breast of his beloved as a
pillow, bringing steadfast love back into a very earthly paradise. Rather than standing
high in the sky of cool, unmoving Platonic ideals, he is very much a part of the earth,
Readers will differ in their opinions about romantic love. Scientists have analyzed
love, writing it off to evolutionary survival value, chemical compounds, or
psychological “love maps” wired into the brain through childhood experiences. Some
historians have maintained that our cultural ideas about romantic love spring from
courtly love inventions of European medievalism, themselves perhaps influenced by
Arabic cultures, while others look back to the biblical Song of Solomon and other love
songs of ancient literature. Much popular wisdom of our day foregrounds gender
differences in how we define love and sexuality, and queer theory questions
heterosexual assumptions. It is realistic to acknowledge that human beings change
over time and that lasting love must change along with the lovers. Perhaps the
steadfastness of love includes the commitment to apply “negative capability” to the
relationship, not expecting it to remain the same but letting the “sweet unrest” take
lover and beloved into unknown places together. When Keats’s short life and his
awareness that he was seriously ill are taken into account, the final lines become filled
with pathos. Recalling Shakespeare’s imagery that love does not change but “bears it
out even to the edge of doom”—implying that love lasts right up until the end of life,
perhaps even until the end of the universe—the two poets seem to have similar ideas
about love. However, the speaker of Keats’s poem does not speak of love in abstract
terms throughout the poem, as Shakespeare does. Shakespeare’s poem is rhetorical,
providing a philosophical definition of love and personifying the abstract concept. His
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
How Do I Love Thee? (p. 457)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” is inarguably her best
known poem. Published in Sonnets from the Portuguese, the poem is a meditation on a
form of love that goes beyond even the corporeal. Throughout, Browning uses spiritu-
al or religious references to demonstrate the pure and unadulterated nature of the
speaker’s love. For example, the speaker not only loves through her soul but with a
reach beyond “being.” The lines, “when feeling out of sight / For the ends of being
and ideal grace” (3–4) suggest that, in searching for the ends of existence or the limits
of her soul, she finds that love extends outward as well. Love here seems to be almost
outside the senses, like “sight,” moving beyond the limits of an earthly plain. Along
with these spiritual musings, Browning’s speaker loves also “to the level of every day’s /
E. E. CUMMINGS
somewhere i have never travelled (p. 459)
An unusually structured and grammatical poem for e. e. cummings, “somewhere i
have never travelled” nevertheless uses vocabulary in the poet’s idiosyncratic way. As
always, reading cummings involves breaking a code, which we can only touch on in a
short introduction. The experiments with syntax and typography that characterize
cummings’s poems reflect cubism, futurism, and other modern visual art movements.
He is also keenly aware of sound, and much of his diction depends on the musical
rhythms of American speech, the punning qualities of the language, and the often
highly personal and carefully crafted connotations that he attaches to words. Words for
him carry inherent positive or negative qualities, and the connotations of pathos and
poetry are opposed to the denotations of logos and common sense. The specific and
concrete tends to be privileged, whereas generalities and agreed-upon conclusions are
considered deadly. He especially likes words like alive, Spring, suddenly, young, new,
yes, touch, small, frail, guess, dare, open, dream, and others that symbolize positive
movement and energy. He knows the meaning of is, contrasting its immediacy with
the negative knows or reasons. Who is individual and thus good, but the rhetorical
which, how, and because move into reductive explanations that he abhors. Although
cummings was strongly grounded in literary theory and was influenced by Ezra Pound
to choose his words carefully, he deliberately traveled the path of extreme individuali-
ty. Thematically, his poetry sets the courageous, joyfully spontaneous “anyone,” the
protagonist of another popular cummings poem, against the oppressive conformity of
what he calls “mostpeople.” Only this sort of human being is capable of an authentic
PASSIONATE LOVE: POEMS (p. 461)
MICHAEL S. HARPER
Discovery (p. 461)
We have seen in poems about true love that each new pair of lovers redefines and re-
discovers the experience for themselves. These poems, in fact, exemplify the important
premise of poetry itself that seemingly universal truths are expressed most clearly in
the particular, specific details of an individual human life. While Shakespeare’s meta-
phors specify in a way that hides the individual lovers, teasing us into guessing about
their identities and real-life experiences, later poems like Michael S. Harper’s “Dis-
covery” allow us to see lovers in a photographic flash, a moment in time, and to build
our abstract definitions of love from the concrete details of their experience. Like the
other poets in this cluster who challenge conventions or stereotypes, Harper surprises
the reader by having his speaker, presumably male, experience the heat of a female
lover’s desire in the middle of the night. While the surprise is pleasant for both reader
breathing as they go to sleep in the dark, then share his confused awakening. The
subtle use of the pronoun we to open the poem pulls the reader in, even though we
soon realize that the poet refers to himself and another person—her—rather than to
the poet and the reader. The ellipsis of line 5 is an effective way to communicate
the experience of waking from a sound sleep without knowing why. As he is
questioning, his vision interrupts him with the answer that this woman has been
watching him, her staring eyes and taut readiness for sex willing him awake. The
immediacy of his reaction would have been lost if he had broken the spell by
explaining. When another person feels strong desire for us, we do tend to be “a little
shaken”—perhaps rightly so. There is an aggressive aspect to the experience, a threat
of invasion. If the roles had been reversed—if the man’s lust had awakened the
woman—we might be less surprised and less pleased by the image. The use of the
word cared is interesting in this context, however, neatly revealing the conflicting
emotions of the situation. Such intense caring makes erotic love transcend mere sex,
SUSAN MINOT
My Husband’s Back (p. 462)
College students are often hopeless romantics. Brought up on Disney versions of fairy-
tale princes and princesses, young women tend to talk about independence but long
for love to buffer them against the world. The Cinderella syndrome can sap one’s en-
ergy, leading girls to passively wait for the magical kiss that they believe will complete
them. Men, too, have their fantasies about the perfect woman who will recognize their
nobility and become their compass in a world of chaos. When all is not perfect, some
couples may give up rather than help each other through rough spots. Others unrealis-
tically hang on to fantasy, even in the face of abuse. The ability to see beauty and
faithfulness in small things, like a husband’s back as he leans in to build a fire, may
indeed signify true love. The speaker of Susan Minot’s poem is weary, perhaps sick
herself, overwhelmed, because the baby has the flu, never an easy time. Sometimes
weekends seem longer than any workweek, and the opening line “Sunday evening”
communicates the draining awareness that the weekend is over and rest has not come.
We get the feeling that everything has gone wrong this weekend, the “pot of burnt
rice” metonymically standing in for a series of botched efforts typical of a bad spell. It
is cold, and apparently the family depends on a woodstove for heat. Noticing her hus-
band’s back, the speaker suddenly moves into a moment of peace.
The moment is one of infinite simplicity. The speaker refers to a sort of chaos that
until this point has caused her to be confused and overwhelmed: “the giant world
which swirls . . . suddenly ceases to spin” as she gazes at her husband’s back while he
bends to a simple task. His back is “animal and gamine”—an odd image. The word
animal implies the sheer physicality of what he does; he carries out the primitive,
DEREK WALCOTT
Love After Love (p. 464)
Painter, playwright, and poet Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” is a testament to that
which eludes so many in today’s world, love and acceptance of yourself. Readers
might consider some of the ways in which our consumer-driven society insists that we
are insufficient or even not worth loving without particular products or even certain
physical traits. In some sense, we are more focused on making ourselves appealing to
others than learning about and loving ourselves.
MELANCHOLY LOVES: POEMS (p. 466)
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and
Where, and Why (p. 466)
In 1923, the year this poem was first published, Edna St. Vincent Millay became the
first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was suffering from the
debilitating illness that would plague her for the remainder of her life, contributing to
alcoholism and drug addiction. One biographer states bluntly that in 1923 Millay was
dying. She also married that year, on the same day she underwent major abdominal
surgery. Although hers was an open marriage from the beginning, with each partner
free to have sexual affairs with others, sometimes even engaging in group sex, perhaps
these milestones explain why the poem’s “unremembered lads” may not be coming to
her bed with such frequency and why she feels that her summer is over, like “a lonely
tree in winter.” She was only thirty-one, but she had already lived intensely, with many
lovers, both male and female, and perhaps she was at a watershed year in her life.
iambic tetrameter rhythm, “Renascence” both made the writer’s reputation and ran
counter to a modernism that would soon replace such emotional, structurally formal
poetry and judge it as trivial and subjective, filled with invitations to affective and
pathetic fallacies. Like the later movie genre tagged “chick flick,” her poetry came to
be thought of as feminine and thus inferior. Millay told an interviewer that she wanted
to write in a way that would help readers see that “[l]ife can be exciting and free and
The cliché of being “in love with love” seems apt when considering Millay’s
poetry and her lifestyle choices. In the sonnet by Millay in this cluster, the speaker
remembers the experiences of love—the lips, the arms, the midnight cry—but not the
individual human beings who have been her lovers. Unlike John Keats’s “Bright Star”
(p. 456)—in which the speaker evokes the image of a real woman’s breast rising and
falling underneath her lover’s head forever—the objects of Millay’s passion are plural
“unremembered lads”—anonymous, faceless, and temporary. The poet, if the poem is
autobiographical, misses the pantheistic sensuality and oneness with all nature and
humanity that she had earlier described in “Renascence,” but her experience of love is
The last two lines of the poem echo the barrenness and loss implied in words like
ghosts, sigh, unremembered, winter, lonely, vanished, silent, and gone. It is not so much
that she is no longer in love but that she feels a life of love is over for her. For a poet
who began with unrestrained emotion and the image of renaissance, this poem is
strikingly pessimistic. The final words—no more—offer no hope of resurrection. We
might look up the words posed in question 5 of “Thinking about the Text” in a
scholarly source like the Oxford English Dictionary to consider their connotations.
The word wistful implies longing and expectancy, whereas nostalgic looks back to the
W. H. AUDEN
Funeral Blues (p. 467)
Ironically, the poem by W. H. Auden that begins with the agonized plea “Stop all the
clocks” is best known to current readers from a dramatic reading in a movie, while its
first publication (in part) also can be found in a dramatic setting, Auden’s 1936–1937
play, written with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6. Only the first two stanzas
of the poem appear in the original play, an absurdist critique of empire, with a warped
sort of motherhood and sibling rivalry setting the tone. Unexpectedly, a sensitive
mountain climber seems to cause his manipulative, exploitative brother to die, and it
is this representative of empire who is mourned by the first lines of the elegy, causing
the mother to finally give her introverted son—the mountain climber—the mother’s
love he desires. Exploration of the North and South Poles and expeditions to climb
Mount Everest and other Himalayan mountains (including one famously called K2)
So, beginning with the blunt, understated, highly ironic images from his satirical
modernist play, Auden moves in the last two stanzas of “Funeral Blues” to the eloquent
passion later readers recognize from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. In the
film, actor John Hannah, playing a gay man whose longtime lover has died suddenly,
begins with the words, “Perhaps you will forgive me if I turn from my own feelings to the
words of another splendid bugger, W. H. Auden.” Many viewers have found Hannah’s
reading profoundly moving, so much so that subsequent readers tend to mimic his
intonations and accent when they recite the poem. Viewing Hannah’s performance
(available on YouTube) could add much to readers’ experience of the poem’s depth.
Perhaps the poem is universally popular because it captures both the agony and
the ordinariness of losing a loved one, whether that person is a spouse, a relative, or a
close friend or classmate. The images in the opening lines are startling in their
banality. To think of a dog gnawing on a “juicy bone” would seem disrespectful to
many, even conjuring up images of corpses. But death does come just this way, in the
middle of an ordinary day, and the speaker asks for actions that might possibly be done
on the day of a funeral. Nevertheless, hyperbole rules—even from the opening phrase,
in which not just the clocks in the room but all the clocks are to be stopped. As the
ROBIN BECKER
Morning Poem (p. 468)
Robin Becker’s “Morning Poem” offers a different take on love from that of the other
poets. Rather than taking place by the sea or located on a spiritual plane, the site of
Becker’s love story is an everyday bed—more specifically, in a bed on a morning when
other responsibilities await. Readers of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet might
recall that morning is often figured in literature as a time when love, or at least love’s
magic, must end. Morning is something to be feared or avoided. Like the lark herald-
ing the dawn, the “real world” is always waiting to disrupt and intrude on the lovers.
This outside world, in the case of Becker’s speaker, consists of “traffic,” a ringing
phone, a morning crankiness, and the depression that “wakes with [them]”—all of
which she expects, but nevertheless hopes to forestall, in favor of dreams.
SEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS: POEMS (p. 471)
JOHN DONNE
The Flea (p. 471)
“The Flea,” a well-known love poem by John Donne, rehearses a man’s specious ar-
gument in favor of a liaison with a woman he desires. His argument rests on the rea-
soning that, because a flea has bitten both of them, their mingled blood makes them
“more than married.” Being at such an advanced stage in their relationship, he argues,
they should go ahead and consummate. In response, she moves to kill the flea, which
hints at her resistance to his proposition; but he implores her to spare its life, for in
doing so, she would also spare both of theirs: “Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,”
Donne’s speaker proclaims. The flea, he explains further, houses their love and, in
holding both of their blood, also serves as their “marriage bed.” She kills the flea any-
way and replies that neither of them is weaker for the act. He agrees, and his rejoinder
ANDREW MARVELL
To His Coy Mistress (p. 473)
As involved in his way with the political issues of the middle years of the seventeenth
century as Sir Walter Raleigh was with those around its beginning, Andrew Marvell
wrote prose satires and metaphysical verse much admired and ultimately recovered for
a twentieth-century audience by T. S. Eliot. Up until that time, Marvell was best
known for having served as secretary to the blind poet John Milton. In a poem about
Milton’s composition of the epic poem Paradise Lost, Marvell reacts to Milton’s writ-
ing process, describing his amazement as he watched the complex structure and lines
of the epic take shape before his eyes. Therefore, as a reader in his own time, and later
as an influence on early-twentieth-century writers, Andrew Marvell is a poet’s poet.
Some readers of Marvell’s lyric poems have speculated that his deceptively light
touch, applied to what they see as his profound insight and skilled technique, came as
a result of his years as a tutor. Even the most devoted readers of Andrew Marvell there-
fore concede that to skim the surface of his poetry is to miss an undercurrent that may
run counter to the poem as it first appears. Some critics who have examined “To His
Coy Mistress” in close detail maintain that the poem sends ambivalent, even con-
fused, messages about love and that its ideas do not bear up under logical scrutiny.
The speaker’s purpose in “To His Coy Mistress” is to persuade his reluctant
audience to give up her virginity to him without further delay. His logic seems to be
that if more time existed, then waiting would make sense, but since there is little time,
Even the title may confuse students who have never heard the word coy or who
assume that the word mistress implies that she is already his illicit lover, a reading that
throws her reluctance to make love into a different light. The woman addressed is
assumed by the speaker to be a virgin, and her remaining so until marriage is the
expectation of Puritan English society in the 1600s, though birth and marriage records
call into question any universal adherence to prohibitions against premarital sex. If
Marvell’s speaker is meant to be the poet himself, an issue in itself, he is calling for a
woman to sin or at best to marry. He assumes that she will be persuaded to do so by
hyperbole, flattery, fear of death and decay, and violently erotic images rather than by
logic.
The poem has three major sections, though the rhythm and sense often provide a
sense of closure at the end of four lines and the rhyming couplets at the end of two.
The first major section elaborates on the first premise of Marvell’s argument, what he
would do if there were world enough and time, and the final couplet (lines 19–20)
sums up his warrant for this action, that she deserves it and he desires it. The second
premise, that time prevents such a love, is described in the next section, again ending
with a couplet that sums up and gives a warrant for his assertions by citing the finality
of the grave (lines 31–32). The final section deals with the third part of the syllogism,
with the word therefore appropriately used in its first line. He goes on to explain to her,
Although some readers may see a threat toward his coy mistress in the last section,
others may note that he does not propose that he should direct his violent energy toward
her but that they do these things together, pooling their “strength and . . . sweetness”
(lines 41–42). And she seems ready to participate, if we are to believe his description of
her body in lines 35 and 36. Students who have read Plato’s Symposium may wonder
from lines 41 and 42 if Marvell’s reading of classical literature has included
Aristophanes’ description of divided human beings seeking their other halves because he
LOVE AS A HAVEN: CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR A POEM (p. 492)
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach (p. 493)
The son of a famed headmaster of the English preparatory school Rugby, Matthew
Arnold found himself in the midst of debates about social, political, and intellectual
issues from the beginning of his life. In his prose, he tackled educational and literary
issues directly. He felt that education would change society by changing the middle
and lower classes, bringing culture to “the little ploughboy” who would eventually
hold the reins of political power. In his thirty-five-year tenure as an inspector of
schools, Arnold was in a position to put his philosophies into action.
As a literary theorist, Arnold favored the accessible diction and “high seriousness”
that he thought would uplift the reader. Religion was losing its power to transform,
and he believed literature should possess qualities that would allow it to fill the gap.
He wanted to bring “culture” to the class he called the “Philistines,” people like those
described by William Wordsworth as dulled by “getting and spending.” For Arnold,
culture could be defined as an awareness of the art, literature, philosophy, and so forth
of Western civilization coupled with a mind unwilling to blindly defer to authority.
These issues are reflected in his best-known poem, “Dover Beach,” in which a speaker
In the second stanza, the poet takes us back to ancient Greek drama for an
allusion to Sophocles’ same reaction to the sound of the sea. He refers to lines 656 to
778 of Antigone. Because the play appears on page 1240, students could turn back to it
and read the passage for themselves. Sophocles specifically refers to tragedy’s
reverberating consequences through the generations of a family like that of Oedipus.
In Christian theology, the equivalent is the proverb that the sins of the fathers are
visited on the children. The sea in Antigone is “a great mounting tide / driven on by
We discover at this late point that the speaker addresses someone he loves,
probably a woman. The sounds of the ocean echo like the sounds of warfare as the
speaker thinks of vulnerable humans alone “on a darkling plain” without the sure
expectations faith once provided. Although the speaker calls someone to the window
in the first stanza, revealing that the poem is a dramatic monologue overheard by us as
he addresses another character whose voice we do not hear, we know little about the
relationship. Anthony Hecht’s parody “The Dover Bitch” assumes that this is a good
way to get someone into bed, especially if the speaker is a soldier going off to war.
Knowing something of Arnold’s philosophy, we assume that he has higher motives. He
is suggesting obliquely to his readers that we need to rely on our own critical thinking
and goodwill toward our fellow human beings rather than on authority. His vision of
the world intensifies the value of love. The speaker wants to be in a relationship in
which lovers are true to each other. Issues of definition may come up in class
discussion about exactly what Arnold means by this. Students might enjoy writing
their own scenarios for a soap opera about this couple.
The poem begins in the present tense, and the imperative sentences that invite the
speaker’s companion to the window and urge her to listen increase the sense of
immediacy. But by the end of the first stanza, he raises the issue of eternity. At this
CULTURAL CONTEXTS
CHARLES DICKENS, from Hard Times (p. 495)
FRIEDRICH ENGELS, from The Condition of the Working Class in England
(p. 500)
JAMES ELI ADAMS, from Narrating Nature: Darwin (p. 504)
In this selection from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, we see children’s schooling fig-
ured merely as the transmission and recitation of bare facts—a purely utilitarian mod-
el of education strongly opposed by both Dickens and Matthew Arnold. Students in
the college classroom will likely have experienced a range of educational settings, in-
cluding regular standardized testing, and this story might provoke interesting discus-
sion on familiar or valued teaching and learning models. Dickens’s parody is led by
two extremely educated educators, Thomas Gradgrind and Mr. M’Choakumchild,
whose chief faults appear to be an inability to teach. At one point in the story, Sissy
(otherwise known as girl number twenty), whose father works with horses, is called on
to define what a horse is. Any reader would recognize the difficulty of such a question,
and Sissy struggles to come up with a satisfactory explanation. When she hesitates, Mr.
The selection from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in
England focuses specifically on slums in Manchester near the tanneries and other
factories on the Irk River. Such areas, once hidden from passersby, are made slightly
more visible by the railway and, despite their dense population, feature completely
inhospitable conditions. Engels includes rich descriptions of the deplorable conditions
there, often stringing together lists of adjectives and verbs to show the wretchedness of
the area. The water, into which various sewers and refuse from the factories empty, is
particularly disgusting. Of the Irk, he writes, “At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates,
the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it
deposits on the shallower right bank.” Engels’s description stands in stark contrast to
the calm sea and fair moon of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The “long line of
spray” (7) Arnold observes in the English Channel is not, readers might imagine, an
experience we would have had viewing the Irk.
Engels’s focus on the area’s living conditions anticipates his later work with Marx,
in that he is concerned with the permanence of such poverty. There seems to be little
opportunity for any positive change, and the dwellings themselves are managed by
people in positions of power and mostly hidden away from outsiders. He sees a stark
contrast here between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” questioning later in the piece,
“How can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps
and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone?” Although Engels’s