Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the greatest and most challenging poems in English
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (Chapter VII)
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
This emphasizes two conflicting points of view between the characters in Gatsby–and the people of the boom-and-bust 1920s more generally. Some, like Gatsby and Daisy, have grandiose master plans and are always looking ahead toward something greater. But the more realistic characters, like Jordan and Nick, take everything day by day, season by season. This is an excellent example of the literary device called “foil”: the two sets of characters are foils, or contrasting types.
Traditionally in literature spring is symbolic of rebirth. Ironically Jordan refers to fall as the start of life, though in nature and literature fall is edging toward death, the “beginning of the end.”
Jordan is associated with autumn elsewhere in the novel as well; compare this phrase from Chapter IX, which takes place, not coincidentally, at the end of summer:
…her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
A kiki is a party for calming all your nerves
We're spilling tea and dishing just desserts one may deserve Scissor Sisters – Let’s Have a Kiki
We're spilling tea and dishing just desserts one may deserve Scissor Sisters – Let’s Have a Kiki
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
Sonnet 135 in the 1609 Quarto.
Sonnet 135 continues the sequence of sonnets dedicated by Shakespeare to his “"Dark Lady”. The Fair Youth is no longer the subject and the woman is now central. Her identity is unknown and, as with the boy, it is a matter of academic debate as to whether she is fictional or a woman he loved in real life. The story behind this change remains a mystery. There is an interesting alteration of tone in that the Fair Youth sonnets were more spiritual and concerned with the pain of love, whereas the “Dark Lady” sonnets deal more with sexual passion.
In Shakespeare’s time many sonneteers wrote as an intellectual exercise intended for friends and other writers who were also producing sonnets, though it is believed by many not to be the case with Shakespeare’s sonnets and that they reflect the true events of his life. Others, though, dispute this.
Sonnet 135 deals with the subject of lust, and the speaker’s desire for the Dark Lady. The repetition of the word “will” in this sonnet is almost certainly an extended play on “Will” Shakespeare’s own name. The primary meanings of “will” here include “determination” and “power of decision-making.” It is also a pun on the male sexual organ.
An interesting, though less obviously self-referential, echo of this pattern–along with a similar theme of romantic union–occurs in the last scene of Much Ado About Nothing, in which Benedick declares his intention to marry Beatrice:
But, for my will, my will is your good will
May stand with ours, this day to be conjoin’d
In the state of honourable marriage…
ABOUT SONNETS
A sonnet is a poem which expresses a thought or idea and develops it, often cleverly and wittily.
The sonnet genre is often, although not always, about ideals or hypothetical situations. It reaches back to the Medieval Romances, where a woman is loved and idealised by a worshipping admirer. For example, Sir Philip Sydney in the Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence wrote in this mode. Poems were circulated within groups of educated intellectuals and they did not necessarily reflect the poet’s true emotions, but were a form of intellectual showing-off. This may not have been true of all; it is a matter of academic debate today as to whether Shakespeare’s sonnets were autobiographical
BBC Podcast, Melvyn Bragg, “In Our Time” Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Sonnets are made up of fourteen lines, each being ten syllables long. Its rhymes are arranged according to one of the following schemes:
• Italian, where eight lines consisting of two quatrains make up the first section of the sonnet, called an octave. This section will explore a problem or an idea. It is followed by the next section of six lines called a sestet, that forms the ‘answer’ or a counter-view. This style of sonnet is also sometimes called a Petrarchan sonnet.
• English, which comprises three quatrains, making twelve lines in total, followed by a rhyming couplet. They too explore an idea. The ‘answer’ or resolution comes in the final couplet. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow this pattern. Edmund Spenser’s sonnets are a variant.
At the break in the sonnet — in Italian after the first eight lines, in English after twelve lines — there is a ‘turn’ or volta, after which there will be a change or new perspective on the preceding idea.
Language
The metre is iambic pentameter, that is five pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables to the line. The effect is elegant and rhythmic, and conveys an impression of dignity and seriousness. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow this pattern.
Rhyme Scheme
The rhyming pattern comprises three sets of four lines, forming quatrains, followed by a closed rhyming couplet.
In Sonnet 135 it forms ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. This is typical of Shakespeare’s compositions.
See Don Paterson – Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Faber & Faber, 2012
Helen Vendler The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Harvard University Press
Shakespeare’s Sonnets with Three Hundred Years of Commentary, Associated University Press 2007
BBC Podcast, Melvyn Bragg, “In Our Time” Shakespeare’s Sonnets
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
“Absolutely real — have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and — Here! Lemme show you.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (Chapter III)
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
One of the major separations between Old Wealth and New Wealth is how New Wealth buys things to be seen, but never actually uses them.
What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too- didn’t cut the pages.
–Owl Eyes
Gatsby built a fantastic, Gothic library and filled it with real books. Most members of the New Wealth class fill the shelves with pieces of wood painted to look like books, because they will never use them. However Gatsby tries to appear like a member of the highest class by buying real books, replicating their behavior. However, Gatsby has never read any of the books, as he hasn’t yet “cut the pages.” In older forms of bookbinding, the pages were printed on pages four times the size of the book to make production faster. The book then would have multiple pages attached together at the bottom of the page, which the reader would have to tear or “cut.”
An old book with uncut pages
By cutting these pages, Gatsby is exemplifying his attempt to copy Old Wealth and present himself as a man of culture.
During the ‘20s some people kept shelves full of fake books just to show off their high level of education or just to furnish a room on the cheap. Gatsby’s library isn’t just a constructed stage. And while it is disingenuous in its own way (we, like Owl Eyes, come to assume that Gatsby hasn’t read most of them), perhaps it represents a kind of reality in a society that hid Gatsby’s corrupted values behind a facade of money and luxury.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun? Langston Hughes – Harlem ("What happens to a dream deferred?")
like a raisin in the sun? Langston Hughes – Harlem ("What happens to a dream deferred?")
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
The juice and life of the dream vanish, sucked away, dried up, and crumpled. Perhaps, so does the life of the dreamer. A raisin came from a grape, but doesn’t really look like it anymore; a dream waited on is completely unrecognizable after a while.
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry used this line as the title for her acclaimed 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.
221