“Poetry focusing on villainy and wrongdoing or even on foolish characters with dark minds, often produces engaging material for the reader or the listener”. Consider in what ways foolishness and villainy appears in your six selected poems and in what ways, if any, it may be of interest. I do agree with the title that poetry, villainy and wrong doing do produce more engaging pieces for the reader because everybody likes to see the villain’s attempts at success but as we see in Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias’ “nothing beside remains”.
We the audience like seeing their efforts at success even though really we know that good will prevail. In ‘Ozymandias’ we get a strong example that villainy produces interesting content because of the way that Shelley uses his diction and imagery in his crisp sonnet of delicious irony. The first example of engaging material is when we hear of: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” that colossal wreck” Shelley uses adjectives of scale and irony to show how Ozymandias’ (Ramesses ii) was an egomaniac and a megalomaniac because he had such a huge statue of himself created to broadcast his glory, however he uses irony because of the fact that in Ozymandias’ time his statue would have been colossal but now many centuries later it is just a colossal wreck. Another example of twist in Ozymandias is when he boasts in a stone inscription “My name is Ozymaindias, King of Kings; Look on my works ye mighty and despair! ”
A sure sign of maniac is when the inscription on the pedestal is read out the tone becomes loud and boastful because of the fact that he says he is the “King of Kings” This is so ironic because “Nothing beside remains” of his kingdom just the remains of his “colossal wreck” statue which is toppled and broken with his head just emerging from the sand , his vast city has vanished from a thousand years of sand , From history we know that villainy and wrong doing does not last, all that is to be seen is the melaneluly “lone and level sands” that “stretches far away” now it is a vast emptiness: modern examples would be Hitler and Stalin.
The saying “Sic transit Gloria mundi” meaning so passes away all the glories of the world , saying that eventually all powers of the world will have their expiry date like so the “King of Kings” Ozymandias time came to an end like all hateful tyrants, a panielom poet instead has the last laugh and we smile with him too. Ozymandias himself is obviously a complete villain. Percy Shelley makes this quite clear in this Italian style 14 line sonnet, comprising an Octave and a Sestet. Shelley uses a clever image of vainglorious colossal statue to reveal the egomania of its original creator, someone who was obviously a power adoring megalomaniac. La Belle Dame sans Merci’ a medieval ballad written by John Keats in 1819 presents a knight who is “Alone and palely loitering”. He looked dead; this presents mystery because of the sense of something awful that has happened. Our curiosity is aroused. This is completely opposite to Ozymandias where you know for certain that evil has been done and the details that come with it as well. La belle dame is a “femme fatale” a woman full of trickery and dishonesty who tricked the knight into falling in love with her “Full beauty – a faerys child” the beautiful lady la belle dame.
In this ballad we see that in the first three stanzas the pace is very slow and negative but in the last five stanzas the pace changes and the mood turns positive until the end where we see the curse put on the knight by la belle dame and the mood turns from loving and joyful to full of upset and confusion. “La belle dame sans merci Thee hath in thrall” the beautiful lady has enslaved you as well says the pale warriors that the dame has trapped into this evil curse like the kings and princes that lay with the poor knight another death scene has occurred. A Case of murder’ by Vernon Scannel is a macabre style poem. The poem focuses on the wrongdoing and dark mind of the boy, Vernon Scannel takes us through the changes of the young boy throughout the lines and emphasises how it was not all his fault which does produce interesting and engaging material. The poem starts by stressing the word “alone” and we can infer that the boy was neglected by his parents and leads us to decide whose fault was it really? Was it the parents or was it both? In the first five lines the word “alone” is repeated four times however he was not he was “alone, that is, except for that cat”.
Vernon Scannell here introduces the dark mind of the boy bringing us to the boys point of view and he achieves this by using various language techniques, for instance he uses commas to slow down the pace of the story so that it is read with more emphasis and brings a greater effect to the story when he says “alone, that is, except for that cat” this makes us emphasise and really understand his hatred for that cat. The writer uses emotional language to portray the feelings of the boy by saying “He hated that cat “.
This makes us feel that it is not all his fault because he was “alone” “in a basement flat” , Which introduces an interesting point of who is to blame for the death of the cat. The hatred of the boy is really proven in the next point when Scannell objectifies the cat by using a variety language techniques like similes and metaphors for instance he says “Plump as a cushion” Which uses both a simile and a metaphor in just one line which is very powerful and we know that the phrase has a double meaning because it means that the cat is very comfortable but it also means that the cat is much more comfortable than the boy and we know that this
Il lead to a macabre scene because of the dark mind of the boy already introduced by Scannell only a few lines before. Emotional language is used in the poem to really express how the boy is feeling for example he says “He hated that cat” which really emphasises the boy’s feelings because “hate” is a very strong and powerful word and really puts us as the reader into the mind of the boy and throughout the poem because of words included like “Alone”, “loathed”, “cried”, “fear” and Scannell employs words and phrases throughout the poem to really create a comic macabre tone.
The Middle section describes the cat and objectifies “it” so that you lose feelings for “it” and then Scannel very effectively takes away its real identity so that the reader can really easily conjoin with Scannell in his efforts to convince us of the dark mind of the boy when he says that the parents would have been better leaving the boy with a dog that has “slashing jaws” which then in my opinion really develops how apparent the strange tone of ‘A Case of Murder’ is in the final section of the piece as we read on into the darkest segments and details of Scannell’s writing we can
The ‘Pardoner’ by Geoffrey Chaucer Dark mind commas In the first poem we see the story of Ozymandias a megalomaniac and considered to be a complete villain and to be worse than all the others, however the Duke of Ferrara in my final poem “my last duchess” completely exceeds Ozymandias’ spiteful nature. The content in ‘my last duchess’ really does produce engaging material because of the comparison between the dark mind of the duke of Ferrara and his innocent wife. The first sign we clearly get is by reading only the first 10 lines here we see the large amount of personal pronouns such as “l”. and “my” used by the author Robert Browning to clearly show us that the Duke’s first priority is himself over his wife and this is a common trait amongst villains, such as Ozymandias when he said “look on my works ye mighty and despair” because all he cared about was how big and great he and his works were compared to anyone else in the world. The duke has an incredible passion for art and so it seems that the art is more important to him than his wife as his constant mention of Fra
Pandolf, an expensive celibate artist reveals his true controlling identity. “My last duchess’ is an intriguing piece because we are given small hints throughout the poem as to what the end result will be and what the Duke is really like, such as when Browning writes in the first two lines “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive” which delivers us as the reader with many questions such as; is the duchess still alive? And how many duchesses has the duke had? This really does produce
