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"The term triumvirate (from Latin, "of three men") is commonly used to describe a political regime dominated by three powerful individuals" (Wiki).
I needed help with question # 12 and finding powerful imagery in this poem. I noticed the cow and the liquor imagery, but nothing about them really strikes me and I can't find anything else.
Hey Diya (and everyone else!)-- Yeah, I was looking for some metaphors too. I’m pretty sure the whole last stanza, the one alluding to the legend of Mithridates, is a metaphor for something… I found some info on him that I think will help us figure it out:
Apparently, Mithridates was the King of Turkey and was favored by the Romans. During his lifetime he became extremely worried that he was going to be poisoned. In his paranoia, he began taking small, non-lethal amounts of poison to build up an immunity so no future “attack” could ever harm him.
They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up: … THEM it was THEIR poison hurt.
This practice of self-administering poisons over a period of time to build immunity became known as mithridatism. Then, later in his life, he allegedly tried to commit suicide by poison; however, this attempt failed because of his unique toleration to poisons. Ironic, huh?
This last stanza alludes to Mithridates’ “antidote.”
As for the metaphor… It might help if we figure out who the audience is first. Did Ms. Minor say he wrote this to his critics? I can't remember, I might have imagined it.
I don’t know if this helps at all, but it helped me understand the last stanza at least.
Houseman was criticized a lot for his depressing poetry and this poem was written in response to the criticism. Ms. Minor explained that Houseman only wrote poems when he was in a bitter moods. Just goes to show how poets can express themselves and the reader picks up on the mood.
I researched the cow part and got this:""The cow, the old cow, it is dead" pokes fun at poets and their tendency to repetition. "It sleeps well, the horned head" ridicules the way poets can take a single syllable word like "horned" and of metrical necessity make it a two-syllable word ("hor-ned"). Synecdoche or the use of a part to suggest the whole is also satirized. (The entire cow is "sleeping"; not just its head.) The delayed apposition of "it" and "the horned head" is another poetic manipulation as is the euphemistic substitution of "sleeps" for being no longer alive."
11 comments:
Hi guys,
I needed help with question # 12 and finding powerful imagery in this poem. I noticed the cow and the liquor imagery, but nothing about them really strikes me and I can't find anything else.
Any thoughts/ideas?? Thanks in advance!
Hey Diya (and everyone else!)--
Yeah, I was looking for some metaphors too. I’m pretty sure the whole last stanza, the one alluding to the legend of Mithridates, is a metaphor for something…
I found some info on him that I think will help us figure it out:
Apparently, Mithridates was the King of Turkey and was favored by the Romans. During his lifetime he became extremely worried that he was going to be poisoned. In his paranoia, he began taking small, non-lethal amounts of poison to build up an immunity so no future “attack” could ever harm him.
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
…
THEM it was THEIR poison hurt.
This practice of self-administering poisons over a period of time to build immunity became known as mithridatism.
Then, later in his life, he allegedly tried to commit suicide by poison; however, this attempt failed because of his unique toleration to poisons. Ironic, huh?
This last stanza alludes to Mithridates’ “antidote.”
As for the metaphor… It might help if we figure out who the audience is first. Did Ms. Minor say he wrote this to his critics? I can't remember, I might have imagined it.
I don’t know if this helps at all, but it helped me understand the last stanza at least.
Houseman was criticized a lot for his depressing poetry and this poem was written in response to the criticism. Ms. Minor explained that Houseman only wrote poems when he was in a bitter moods. Just goes to show how poets can express themselves and the reader picks up on the mood.
Ignore the misspellings of Housman. Oh, and Nick, thank-you for posting about Mithridates.
Yeah, thanks Nick! Wiki didn't help me at all.
"Paraphrase" the poem? What purpose does that serve?
I don't get the cow part.
I researched the cow part and got this:""The cow, the old cow, it is dead" pokes fun at poets and their tendency to repetition. "It sleeps well, the horned head" ridicules the way poets can take a single syllable word like "horned" and of metrical necessity make it a two-syllable word ("hor-ned"). Synecdoche or the use of a part to suggest the whole is also satirized. (The entire cow is "sleeping"; not just its head.) The delayed apposition of "it" and "the horned head" is another poetic manipulation as is the euphemistic substitution of "sleeps" for being no longer alive."
http://www.helium.com/items/1206813-a-e-housmans-terence-this-is-stupid-stuff-a-vehicle-for-teaching-poetic-devices
You probably won't see this since I posted it so late, but Thanks for the help Nick and Sara!
The Mithridates allusion/metaphor makes more sense now.
i love how "so late" is 11:35 PM.
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