Overt references to the climax of the Exodus appear in the first and last books of Paradise Lost. The war in heaven, appearing in the exact center of the poem and overlaid with elements of the Exodus account, radiates meaning to the beginning and end. When Milton uses the Exodus story to heighten our apprehension of his poem as a wholly unified structure, he is accommodating to the esthetic demands of his poem a tradition deriving from the Old Testament which found temporal concordance in the event. The Prophets bind together the primordial battle with the Dragon, the Exodus, and the Messianic Age, thus providing an eschatological interpretation of the overwhelming of Pharaoh's forces and the redemption of the Children of Israel. The New Testament—believing that the New Exodus is already at hand—enjoins the Christian reader to see Israel's escape through the waters of the Red Sea as a foreshadowing of baptism in Christ's saving blood. Throughout his life, Milton maintains an essentially Old Testament conception of the Exodus. Indeed, the appearance in Book vi of details from Exodus as well as from Rashi's Commentary suggests that even when Milton invokes the typological dimension, he takes pains to preserve the literal meaning of the Old Testament episode.

The language of Ford's The Broken Heart, unlike that of his other plays, mainly explains the inevitable operation of the processes that the play dramatizes, delineating cause and effect in feelings and actions. The indicative names signify what their bearers have become within the chain of causality. The beginning of the play is heavily explanatory and characters continue throughout to explain what they and others do and have become. Many of these speeches are imprecise: groping, periphrastic, ambiguous syntactically, and metaphorically unstable. The words, furthermore, describe experience rather than become a part of it. Short, direct statements bring the longer passages to rest, the two styles forming a rhythmical unit yet balancing each other and providing a sense of things unsaid. Especially distinctive are verb forms that concretize interaction among abstract nouns to explain how and why things happen. Some are reiterated as key words indicative of the pattern of the whole. The language of ceremonies, violated and reshaped into antithetical ceremonies, particularly those of propitiation and sacrifice, gives form and significance to the pattern of causation and intensifies as the play moves to its conclusion. Through his language, Ford controls any tendency to melodrama and harmonizes surprise with inevitability, narrowness with range, and explicitness with implication.

The image of the Hermaphrodite with which Spenser presents the union of Amoret and Scudamour in his original conclusion to Book IIIof The Faerie Queene draws on two distinct iconographic traditions: the Ovidian scene of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis which had become a symbol of marriage in Renaissance emblem books, and the single androgynous figure found in antique Roman statues which bear an uncertain relationship to Platonic notions of perfection. Such a conflation enables Spenser to emphasize and complete patterns of imagery which he has been developing throughout Book III: Britomart as patroness of Chastity has assumed an Amazonian role which stresses her androgynous self-sufficiency, but she has been repeatedly shown as tormented by visions of love. Like Guyon in Hook II, she fulfills her immediate quest when she liberates a victim of enchantment; but although she differs from Guyon in her destined participation in British history, she remains aware that within the context of the Book of Chastity she can be wholly chaste only at the price of her continuing incompleteness as a woman. Spenser's poem in its three-book form shares with other Elizabethan works a preoccupation with the paradoxical identification of love and death, a recognition that the self can triumph over change only by accepting its own destruction in marriage.

Dryden's poem, though praised for its style, remains generally unappreciated because it is regarded as public and theological in its theme and argumentative in method. What is overlooked is the vivid personal confession of faith, the poem's most vital and appealing element. The neoclassical strategy of providing a literary treatment through the beast fable has obscured the personal drama. Both the Panther and the Hind are at times personae for Dryden: they dramatize the poet's struggle to achieve faith and charity. Their debate over church authority recapitulates in the present moment the doctrinal doubts of Dryden before his conversion. The more spiritual struggle, between charity and humility (represented by the Hind) and pride and revenge (represented by the Panther), is also crucial in the poem since pride is innate in the poet and prompts him still to revenge against enemies like Stillingfleet and Burnet. The poem not only provides a vivid, dramatic testimony to the poet's unending struggle to achieve practical piety, but as a neoclassical work, it transforms the personal drama into the pattern of the universal Christian drama to achieve faith and charity.

Coleridge maintains a lifelong ambivalence toward nature. As early as the 1795 version of “The Eolian Harp,” he toys with incompatible speculations upon nature and, for the moment, retreats from the pantheistic implications of a bold metaphor. After long worrying about the problem of nature, he arrives at a more stable resolution of his dilemma : in The Stateman's Manual (1816) and in his “Essays on Method” (1817), he employs a traditional distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. Regarded in this latter aspect, nature becomes a source of sacramental symbols: Coleridge holds that the imagination is peculiarly fitted to create symbols and, hence, to apprehend natura naturans. In 1817, twenty-one years after its original publication, he adds to “The Eolian Harp” a key phrase, “the one Life within us and abroad.” This addition, Coleridge's poetic equivalent of natura naturans, reconciles the poem to his Christian Platonism. Despite a growing dualistic aversion to nature in later life, Coleridge, as witnessed by dated footnotes added to his works in the 1820's, continues sporadically to reassert his sacramental faith in nature. Coleridge's adaptation of natura naturans, though it does not resolve all ambiguities, binds through common assumption a considerable body of his mature writings.

The poet's struggle for communication is a common theme in five of René Char's early poems, “Cesoir” (1923), “Jouvence” (1923–25), “Sillage” (ca. 1925), “Prêt au dépouillement” (ca. 1925), and “Sur le volet d'une fenêtre” (1923–25). Char passes from “mutisme” to meaningful dialogue; he learns first to see, then to listen, and, finally, to hear. Many of his mature poems will repeat this triple apprenticeship, and they are quoted to show Char's continuous concern with the necessity for dialogue. By implication this article tries to disprove Barthes's definition of modern poetry, and hopes to lead into wider considerations of the object of contemporary poetry.

The sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare's boy Cleopatra embodies the clash between two poetic theories the theory that poetry imitates Nature and is therefore subject to rules of decorum and verisimilitude and the theory that poetry creates a new, “golden” world to which the truth-criteria for extrapoetic experience do not apply. Both theories were prevalent in Shakespeare's time, as we see in Sidney's Apology for Poetry; and both persist today, as we see in modern controversies about the play. Shakespeare's dramatic strategy in Antony and Cleopatra involves the interplay between these two notions of poetry and poetic truth: the first is associated with the Roman viewpoint and the kinds of dramatic evidence that support it, the second with the Egyptian viewpoint and the kinds of poetic and dramatic evidence that support it. Only by studying the play with both theories in mind can we approach its structural and thematic center and see that its problematic features Cleopatra's enigmatic character and motivation. Antony's ambiguous stature as a tragic hero, and the eccentric structure are – like the boy Cleopatra, necessary components of its dramatic strategy, functional embodiments of its themes.

Recent interpretations of The Mill on the Floss distort the novel's emphasis in two principal ways. According to one, it is a tragedy of repression and regression; Maggie is responsible for her downfall because she is flawed by her acceptance of Kempis' philosophy of renunciation and by a fixation upon her father and brother, both of which fatally pull against her legitimate desire for wider fulfillment. According to the other interpretation, however, this desire is itself Maggie's flaw, whereas her acceptance of Kempis and her family devotion are good; thus, the main subject of the novel is not her downfall, but her spiritual development, which is climaxed by her two rejections of Stephen and her attempt to rescue Tom from the flood. Although both contain valid insights, neither of these readings is satisfactory, for each oversimplifies George Eliot's complex outlook, which presents Maggie's frustrations and her ultimate defeat as springing from both the fact that she has intense and legitimate desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver cannot comprehend, and the fact that she is, at the same time, bound to them by an equally legitimate, indeed noble, love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary.

Much of the detail in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is derived from historical sources, but the focus of the book is on the internal conflicts of the narrator. This focus is achieved by several means: (1) H.F. structures his account around! s repentance of the decision to remain in London; (2) he frequently comments on his not entirely successful attempts to comprehend the nature of morality in a time of plague; (3) he uses many biblical references to suggest spiritual interpretations of physical reality. Instead of directing the spiritual meanings of his narrative primarily outward toward the reader for a didactic purpose, Defoe used these meanings to create a psychologically complex and interesting central character. The morally disorienting forces of the plague expose the tensions within the narrator, and we see his conflicts and mounting anxiety. This focus on the narrator makes A Journal of the Plague Year something more like a novel than like either history or the seventeenth-century pious writings that lie in its background.

This article incorporates the text of nearly 800 lines of verse written in 1729 and 1733 by Henry Fielding, printed from his holograph. The MS is itself a rarity, being the only extant literary writing in Fielding's hand. The verse has never been published or identified. Textual footnotes record Fielding's corrections and explanatory notes identify the people and events to which he refers. The article discusses the verses as mock-epic and polemical epistle. and as material illuminating Fielding's literary and political relationships: with Pope and the Scriblerus writers, with Robert Walpole, and with his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding imitates Pope's Dunciad, yet rebukes its savagery. He appears as a vivid reporter of the topical scene, a supporter of Whig rule as a bastion against Roman Catholicism and Jacobitism, and an upholder of the ancients against the moderns. The new verse provides the earliest glimpse of Fielding working in burlesque and in comic epic, and an early example of the moral value he placed on benevolence. The various implications of this new knowledge are considered here.

The presence of syncopation in certain words in the Libro de Alexandre (lazrar, menestral, ofrecer, sabroso, sombra, etc.) and its absence in other words (avellana, eredad, eredar, etc.) support the Castilian origin of the poem and discredit the theory of western or Leonese authorship. The preservation of the etymological medial -d- in such words as porfidia, piedes, and vidieron is also dialectically significant, since the trait is particularly evident in other documents of the area of La Rioja. Similarities between the alterations introduced into Berceo's MSS and those found in the Alex are constantly stressed, since only through a clear understanding of the problems of transcription of medieval codices can we hope to clarify the question of regular meter in mester de clerecía of the thirteenth century. Scribes were capable of completely eradicating such forms as piedes (in O), udió, udién, and meydía (in both P and O). This type of obliteration has tended to confuse many critics, who are prone to base their ideas concerning the language and versification of the Alex on the MSS as they observe them, without attempting any critical analysis or reconstruction.

Blake's attitude toward sexual love changed in significant ways during the late 1790's. Before that time, Blake thought of sex as potentially liberating—as a prime method of achieving the fourfold vision of Eternity. After that time he connected sexual love with pity and compassion, not with liberation. He came to think of sexual love as a force which tied individuals to the endless cycles of the fallen world; a force which at best might lead to the delightful, but limited, threefold vision of Beulah. Details of this important shift of attitude are suggested on the basis of close examination and discussion of three poems: “William Bond,” “My Spectre Around Me…,” and “The Crystal Cabinet.”

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.

Though the development of novelistic prose in medieval Castilian literature has been traditionally associated with the encyclopedic works of Alfonso el Sabio and those of his nephew, Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor, the stylistic differences between these two writers are sufficiently important to indicate the existence of a transitional period characterized by the absorption of classical rhetoric into the mainstream of religiously oriented didactic literature. An analysis of the critically neglected works of Sancho IV, second son of Alfonso and guardian to the young Juan Manuel, reveals the intermediate stages in the transformation of impersonal Alfonsine historical narrative to the highly anecdotal mode of Juan Manuel and subsequently affirms Sancho's role in Castilian letters while stressing Juan Manuel's clear genius for synthesizing the major literary currents of his age. (In Spanish)