Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 20152016.

Unit 1 Answers

GRADO

GUA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE

TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA
INGLESA
UNIT 1 | ANSWERS

2015-2016
Comentario de Textos
Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Literarios

en

Isabel Castelao (Coodinadora), Jess Cora y Ddac Llorens

GRADO
EN
ESTUDIOS
LITERATURA Y CULTURA

INGLESES

LENGUA,
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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 20152016. Unit 1 Answers

Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas

1. In the poem, the speaker says he is not going to lament
the death of a child in a London fire and then does
precisely that. His lament draws on Christian, Jewish and
pagan traditions, i.e. Biblical references. However, this
poetic "I" conceives human life from an atheist or at
least clearly non-religious point of view that denies the
survival of individual consciousness after death and
contemplates death as the mere natural process of
decomposition and the body's components returning to the
eternal cycle of the elements in nature, that will
nurture new life until the end of the universe.
2. The first punctuation mark comes at the end of line
thirteen. There is nothing before that. His voice drops
as it is the end of a complete sentence.
3. This is the text written according to standard punctuation
and undivided in lines (or verses) or stanzas, written as
if were prose (remember that you must discuss the text in
its original form, spelling, and punctuation and pay
attention to the unorthodox use that authors may resort
to):
Never until the mankind-making, bird-, beast-, and
flower-fathering and all- humbling darkness tells with
silence the last light breaking, and the still hour is
come of the sea, tumbling in harness, and I must enter
again the round Zion of the water bead and the
synagogue of the ear of corn, shall I let pray the
shadow of a sound or sow my salt seed in the least
valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning of
the child's death.
As to the syntax, here is some help:
[Never until the mankind making bird, beast and flower,
fathering and all humbling darkness tells with silence
the last light breaking] [and the still hour is come of
the sea, tumbling in harness] [and I must enter again
the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of
the ear of corn], shall I let pray the shadow of a
sound or sow my salt seed in the least valley of
sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning of the
childs death.
The three coordinate sentences forming the time adverbial
and the two disjunctive verbs and their respective objects
have been colour-coded, and there are suggested commas to
standardise the punctuation. "Never until" modifies the
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three sentences beginning with "and" to indicate the time

when the actions expressed by the disjunctive main verbs
(modified by "shall I let") "pray or sow" will take place.
4. You may find this opening section extremely difficult to
follow. The difficulty lies less in the vocabulary (which
you can look up in a dictionary!) than the syntax and
punctuation, which are non-standard. The main verbs, for
example "let pray [] or sow" (modified by Shall I in l.
10, come almost at the very end of the sequence. You may
need to read these lines several times before you can
begin to understand them. Even though the title helps,
all in all, understanding is frustrated and delayed (=
aplazada) by the poems complex and unusual syntax and
punctuation. Actually, the lack of the usual, standard
punctuation and the intentional breaking of the first
sentence into three stanzas have a function. They match
the breaking down of the language of the poem in
correspondence with the subject matter of the poem, the
idea of decomposition and the final end of the world the
poem expresses as the mark. This unconventional attitude
to and use of language also parallels the unconventional,
unorthodox attitude to the mainstream ideas and customs
related to death that the readers expect. Language, then,
calls the reader's attention to itself. The reader is to
notice this and realize and overcome such apparent
problem. The language of the poem challenges the
expectations and assumptions of the average British
reader of the 1940s both in form and content.
In Understanding Poetry (1976, 4th edition), poets Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren suggest their own prose
paraphrase of the opening sentence:
Never until the darkness that begets and humbles all
tells me that hour of my own death will I utter any
prayer or weep any tear to mourn the majesty of this
childs death. (Note: the verb to beget is a Biblical
term which means to engender, to create, to give life
to).
5. mourn infinitive (to mourn); grieve, lament, express
sorrow.
fathering present participle of verb to father, it
functions like an adjective: engendering, creating.
humbling present participle of verb to humble
functions like an adjective: debasing, humiliating.

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still adjective; tranquil, calm, silent, hushed (it is

not an adverb of time in this context).
tumbling gerund of the verb to tumble: falling,
tottering; it indicates how the "still hour / Is come out
of the sea".
harness noun; equipment used to control or restrain a
horse, or a person.
sackcloth noun; rough fabric, mentioned in the Bible as
a sign of mourning together with casting ashes on the
mourner's head and gnashing of teeth.
grave adjective; serious, important, solemn, somber,
but also suggesting grave as a noun, meaning place for
burial of a corpse, modifying "truth".
elegy noun; a song or poem of lament (especially for
someone who has died).
robed past participle of verb to robe functioning as
an adjective: clothed, clad, covered.
6. my salt seed combines the two processes or events central
to the poem: death (and mourning) and rebirth (and
engendering). Salt connotes tears shed in grief (tears
taste like salt), seed suggests the creation of life
and also the voice's (even the poet's) poem as creation
as 'seed' in the reader's consciousness that may 'bear
the fruit' of making the reader think , reflect on life,
death, her/his own personal beliefs, etc.
valley of sackcloth suggests the valley of tears (or
life) one leaves when one dies and the cloth or garment
worn by mourners or penitents.
a grave truth takes an adjective, "grave", usually
associated with certain collocations or dead metaphors
(a
grave
responsibility,
a
grave
mistake)
and
literalises the adjective:, a word like grave inevitably
evokes a tomb, burial, coffin thus, literally, death,
but in the context of this poem, "grave truth" is used
ironically: it suggests epitaphs and panegyrics, that the
good things that are engraved on stone or said in
funerals to praise the dead person and to appease the
mind of the attendants by offering comfort by stating
that the dead person is in a better place and in the care
of God, angels, the Saints, his/her ancestors departed
before her, etc. are not true. This is also connected
with the idea that he will not "murder the mankind of her
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going", i.e. he will not hide the fact that she died
because of mankind, in war (significantly, Dylan Thomas
does not use the word 'humanity' for that might suggest a
'humane' death).
7. Poetry is a particular form of language tending, among
other things, to repeat patterns of sound, phrases, and
words. Some sounds are repeated at the beginning of
words. This repetition is connected with the meaning of
the verse by the effect that the basic sound has in
connection with feelings, natural phenomena, etc. The
repetition of nasal sounds in the first lines emphasises
the solemnity of the occasion and also suggests the moans
of mourning (it is no chance that these words begin with
/m/, they relate and reproduce the basic human emotions
and
their
physiological
manifestation).
Also
the
repetitive -ing suffix in this poem is just another such
example. One of the effects of threading -ing words
throughout the poem (there are nine in 24 lines) is to
give it internal cohesion. Another effect is to create a
sense of unbroken movement and continuity, of unending
process. This would in turn support the theme of the
eternal life-death cycle.
8. Here are some thoughts:
-

the appearance of the text on the page: it looks like a

poem, it is arranged in stanzas, line-breaks, and so
on. This is form understood in its most basic sense. A
prose paragraph or chapters in a novel look entirely
different;

repetition of sounds or alliteration (initial sounds of

words, -ing endings), themes (life and death);

the regular stanzaic form: four stanzas of six lines

each;

the rhyme scheme is (more or less) a regular abcabc

(the rhyme of "friends" and "Thames" can be accepted as
a dialectal one);

the metre (=mtrica) or rhythm is not that of ordinary

spoken language, but it is related with traditional
English rhythms, thus the long verses have four beats
or stressed syllables while the shorter verses (the
second and fifth verses in each stanza) have three. The
traditional rhythm in Old English poetry and ballads
from the Middle Ages to the 19th-century as well as
many songs in 20th-century pop-music is the four-beat
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verse (characterized by an indeterminate number of

syllables per line where four of them are stressed,
they are the beats of the verse, and the rest are
unstressed). 1
-

there is enjambement (the syntactical continuation of

the verse into the next one or following verses in
order to form a sentence; be aware that, of course,
lines are not to be considered, having a complete
meaning in isolation);

the syntax is profoundly non-standard: no-one speaks or

writes
or
communicates
like
that
in
normal
circumstances. As indicated above, this is language
drawing attention to itself. Its saying: look at me,
Im different, pay attention to me, think about my
particular form and interpret me;

the poem is rich in metaphors, some easy to grasp, some

others not;

the poem is also rich in paradoxes and contradictions

(the speaker refuses to mourn, and then spends 24
lines doing just that!).

9. As noted in the first point of the above question, a poem

has nearly always a different shape from that of a piece
of prose. It does not have paragraphs, it has (or tends
to have) stanzas; the line endings are very important
(these will contain the end rhyme) and the words placed
here will carry greater emphasis than others. The rest of
the points also identify A refusal to mourn as a poem
rather than prose.
10.
Again we come back to the question of form. It would
seem that meaning and the way we receive a text are
directly impacted by the form in which they are
delivered. The singularity or peculiarity of the shape
Dylan Thomas gives to his meditation on the death of a
child, at the very least intensifies its meaning in ways
in which simply declaring, a child has burnt to death,
would not.

As to the Old English verse, you will find more details about the AngloSaxon alliterative verse in the first unit in the subject Literatura
Inglesa I: ejes de la literatura medieval y renacentista in first year.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARRY

1.
a) Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a text
which may contradict the surface or apparent meaning.
b) They foreground superficial similarities in words (sound,
common etymologies, etc.) and make them central to the
texts meaning.
c) They look for the fissures and inconsistencies in a text,
rather than its supposed cohesion.
d) They practice rigorous close reading of an excerpt
(=extracto) to the point where multiple meanings emerge
and a single, stable meaning is no longer possible.
e) They see the fissures and fault-lines (=fallas, this is a
geology term used as a metaphor) in a text as evidence of
repressed or silenced meanings which the surface
meaning of the text ignores. In geology, fault-lines are
evidence of previous rock activity.
2. Barrys post-structuralist interpretation:
the verbal stage: this can involve a traditional form of
close reading. Barry suggests looking for paradoxes and
contradictions, such as in the last line: After the first
death, there is no other. A first death implies a second,
third, fourth, etc., in other words, there will indeed be
others.
Poststructuralists
argue
that
apparent
contradictions like this point to the unreliability and
instability of language.
Barry reminds us that poststructuralists tend to question
and overturn binary oppositions or what Derrida terms
violent hierarchies (suggestion: look this up in the
Glossary), such as male/female, day/night, light/dark,
etc. Poststructuralists thus will privilege the second
term and Barry notes that in the poem it is darkness (and
not light) which appears to create life. The poem gives
us a reality we can recognize, even if it inverts the
terms by which we normally recognize reality. Again,
deconstructionists
(a
common
alternative
term
for
poststructuralists) say that language creates its own
reality and is not a reflection of that reality. Another
way of explaining how a poststructuralist reading inverts
or overturns familiar binary oppositions, is to say that
it reads a text against itself, revealing how the
signifiers dont match up with expected signifieds.

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the textual stage: here the reader takes in the text as a

whole and tries to identify interruptions or changes in
the flow of the poem. At the very least, these breaks and
slippages suggest an unstable rather than a fixed
position. Barry points to potential inconsistencies of
focus, time, tone or point of view, among others. They
can be found in grammar (shift from first to third
person, changes in verb tenses). The Thomas poem presents
significant shifts in time and viewpoint, moving from a
geological time scale to the present, then on to a
historical vista of the unmourning and riding Thames.
Such
discontinuities,
Barry
notes,
make
the
poem
extremely unstable and present major difficulties in
uncovering meaning. Lastly, he reminds us that what a
text does not say its omissions is often as important
as what it should say or has led us to expect it to say.
the linguistic stage: here the poststructuralist critic
will look for moments where language fails to communicate
or when the unreliability of language is emphasized, as
in actually saying that something is unsayable. The
Thomas poem is a good example, in that it says it is not
going to do something (mourn) and then proceeds to do
just that. Barry gives examples in the poem which
illustrate how language can profess one thing and express
the opposite. The poems speaker expresses a certain
intention (I shall not murder/The mankind of her
going/[]with any further/Elegy ll. 14-18) only to find
himself betraying that intention: a trap is identified
and promptly fallen into.
Thus a poststructuralist (or deconstructive) reading will
expose disunity within the text, however unified or
stable it may appear at first sight.
3.

The title already expresses a desire not to do something,

which is immediately betrayed by the poem itself. In other
words, A refusal to mourn announces its opposition to
verbalizing a particular event (the death of a child) and
the accompanying emotion and ritual (mourning, elegy). The
speaker thus gives us a poem (that is, an object
constructed of words and groups of words) about not
wanting to give us a poem at all.
This contradiction is continued in the tension between the
two opening words, Never until
a virtual binary
opposition, since it juxtaposes a word which means at no
time, on no occasion with a word meaning up to the time
of.

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Other examples: Tells with silence (l. 4); I shall not

murder/[] her going/[]/with any further/Elegy (ll. 1418), a refusal to mark the childs death with elegiac
statements, followed by the solemn, quasi-liturgical
pronouncements of the final stanza [], which sounds very
like traditional panegyrical oratory, with the dead person
is transformed into some larger than life heroic figure
(Barry 73).
Part of the effect of the poems strategy is to set up
expectations in the reader (we expect the speaker not to
mourn, we anticipate perhaps a rejoicing or a celebration
instead of an elegy or lament) and systematically to
frustrate them. This gives the poem a kind up/down,
push/pull movement, paralleling the waves of the sea
tumbling in harness swelling first, then tumbling or
crashing down and the riding Thames.
For one critic, the entire shape of the poem mimics the
movement
of
water,
with
the
up/down
(or
expectation/frustration) movement in consonance with the
death that is in life:
"Extraordinary too is the stanzaic form of A
Refusal to Mourn []: four rhyming stanzas,
abcabc, that is, eight identical abc triples,
each of them consisting of a long line, a short
line, and a long line. In this metre, it seems
to me at least, Thomas imitates the sea
tumbling in harness, the unmourning water,
and the riding Thames. These three-line abc
units are two waves and a trough the crest of
a wave, its trough or valley, and then another
crest. The poem moves like the sea in its round
(Earth-like) bead, rising and falling with
the tides, every day the same, every month the
same. The music of Refusal to Mourn moves
counterpoint to the heart-felt consolation that
Dylan Thomas speaks. Death is to life what a
trough is to the crest of every wave in the
tumbling sea".
http://dylant.talkspot.com/aspx/m/603659
4. Possibly the most striking (and difficult!) metaphor comes
in the second stanza: And I must enter again the round /
Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of
corn (ll. 7-9). The speaker continues the water imagery
and introduces two others Zion and synagogue both
associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Critics
interpret this admittedly very opaque metaphor as an
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allusion to the speakers own death (see the Cleanth

Brooks and Robert Penn Warren interpretation in answer
4), but also to the universality of death and, by
extension, to the circularity of existence (the round
water bead), its constant renewal. Both "Zion" and
"synagogue" refer to places or spaces into which the
speaker "must enter", and they draw on their traditional
Biblical meanings. "Zion" stands for the return to the
Promised Land, especially during the Jews' exiles and
slavery in Egypt and Babylon as well as during their
diaspora. Hence, "Zionism" is the political movement that
strove to establish the State of Israel. Here these two
words are not used in their religious sense, but only
metaphorically. "Zion" is identified with "water bead",
and the idea that the speaker must "enter" this "water
bead" means that the speaker, some part of him, an
infinitesimal part of the water that he contains, must
return to being water in nature. The word "bead" in turn
adds the Catholic connotations of the beads of the
Rosary, connotations that would be lost if the text read
the more literal expression "water drop". The word
"synagogue" is used very much like the word Church, used
allegorically to signify the whole Jewish community; its
identification with the "ear of corn" is based on the
literal meaning of the word "shibboleth", which is a
Hebrew word that in the Bible is used in Judges 12:6 to
distinguish and persecute a specific Jewish group because
of their incapacity to pronounce the word ("sibboleth").
It also means "stream of water" and connects with the
previous image in the poem and it has come to mean quite
a number of things in modern English: http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/shibboleth.
However,
in
the
context of Dylan Thomas's poem, it is used in its literal
meaning in Hebrew: the speaker is to return to the
community of the elements in the earth that will
eventually nurture the ears of corn. The idea is that he
must die and decompose and return to the earth. It is an
image of the cycle of life, but it is devoid of any idea
of
individual
spiritual
transcendence
and
it
is
circumscribed to the mere physical aspect of life.
The mother metaphor is introduced in the last stanza in
which the speaker evokes the resting place (the earth) of
the child in anthropomorphic terms (i.e. by using
personification or allegory): the child is among long
friends, those other corpses that were buried there in
the past and are now intermingled with the earth and have
been 'close' like people who have been 'friends' for 'a
long time'; they have also joined and are now the "grains
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beyond the ages" of the earth, the ground where she is

now buried, which is also the dark veins of her
mother. The image of the child "robed" in the "veins" of
the (mother) earth is a striking one and reiterates the
theme of life going back to her origins, it recalls
pregnancy, it also has a pagan pre-Christian sound to it.
But
just
like
the
Judeo-Christian
images,
these
allegories are used paradoxically for the tenor or
meaning of the images, emphasizing the child's death and
return to nature and denying the survival of her spirit,
soul or individual consciousness in the afterlife. It
denies the existence of such an afterlife. The images
express an atheist, naturalistic attitude to life (the
belief in naturalism, that human life and consciousness
is just part of nature and the physical world and there
is nothing else, no soul, no spiritual plane or reality).

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARTHES

1.

*Capitalist ideology: system of ideas which refers to an

economic system, dominant in the Western world since the
breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of
production are privately owned and production is guided
and income distributed largely through the operation of
markets.
("capitalism."
Encyclopdia
Britannica.
Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopdia
Britannica,
2008).
Capitalist
ideology emphasizes private initiative and individual
effort and enterprise. Barthes selects individualism as a
defining feature of capitalism.
*Allegory: a story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which
the meaning or message is represented symbolically
(Concise Oxford Dictionary 1990). It must be also said
that
in
a
narrower
sense,
"allegory"
involves
personification, i.e. the representation of human ideas,
feelings,
virtues,
vices,
experiences,
etc.
with
symbolical human figures dressed or carrying symbolical
objects that allow to identify and 'decode' their meaning.
*Signified: the Glossary in the curso virtual gives
explanations for sign, signified and signifier. Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that every sign (= a
basic unit of communication, e.g. a word) has two
elements: the signifier (what you can physically perceive
through sound or a graphic mark) and the signified (what
the sound or graphic mark conceptually refers to).
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2.

Barthes links the capitalist notion of the individual (the

source from which all effort and production spring) to the
notion of the individual or person who writes, that is,
the author. He says capitalism attaches great importance
to the figure of the author.

3.

Ordinary culture reads and interprets literature through

its author (his life, his tastes, his passions), while
Mallarm and Valry emphasized writing, linguistic
activity and the essentially verbal condition of
literature over the person of the author.

4.

Author is the term which ordinary culture uses when

referring to the person who produces a literary work;
ordinary culture considers the author to be solely
responsible for the meaning of that literary work and
likens the Author to the father of the book, his child,
over whom he holds authority. (See the Glossary in the
curso virtual). "Modern scriptor" is Barthes term and it
differs from the Author in that he (the modern scriptor)
is not held to be responsible for a book in the same way.
The modern scriptor does not have a comparable authority
over what he writes; for Barthes he is just the person who
wrote the text, but we must not give him authority over
the text by trying to ascertain what the Author meant with
his text or try to read his life, ideas and experiences in
his text. More importantly, according to Barthes, the
modern scriptor is constituted through the act of reading
itself: the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
the text. In this respect, since the text is 'played' (in
the sense of interpretation as in playing a musical
Instrument) every time a reader reads and interprets the
text,
the
modern
scriptor
is
also
the
reader
herself/himself, his/her act of reading. Thus, the modern
scriptor is half-way between the text itself and each
individual reader's particular reading of the text.
Thus, these two terms Author and modern scriptor have
important consequences for how we read. Author is
distinguished from reader in that the former must die in
order for the latter to be born. This is Barthes
provocative way of saying that the reader must not look
for authority in the Author, must somehow eliminate the
Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of
reading. For Barthes, the reader interprets the text
creatively and this creative reading is far more important
than the Author's intentions and ideas, which are no
longer relevant or important.
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5.

For Barthes, to seek meaning in a text through the person

who wrote it (the person of the author) is comparable
to the search for a transcendent being God who can
confer ultimate, fixed meaning on everything. That is why
he uses religious terms such as God, theological, etc.
Barthes criticizes the search to interpret a text through
the Author because this is to close the writing. Meaning
is liberated only if writing is linked to an antitheological practice; writing must refuse to fix meaning
[] and refuse God.
The reader must collaborate in
this anti-theological practice, indeed, can only be born
if the Author dies.

6.

Each summary will be slightly different as to its

wording, but it must stick to the indication on page 6 in
the questions: it must indicate the main points of the
text briefly and most importantly, it must be faithful to
the ideas expressed in the paragraph. If the summary
distorts the information contained in the original, the
summary is at fault.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: DERRIDA

1.

Reading means understanding the text, so you had to make

an effort involving reading comprehension. If you feel
that you missed something or still find the text
confusing, then you need to read it again.

2.

*Signified,
*referent,
*transcendental
signifier,
*signifier see answer to Q. 2 above and the Glossary in
the curso virtual. Derrida is using these terms in a
classic poststructuralist way. We can understand them more
or less thus: signifier/signified = word/meaning, referent
is
roughly
interchangeable
with
signified,
and
transcendental signified denotes an ultimate, fixed
meaning (Barthes might call this a theological meaning or
message of the Author-God). Derrida is critical of the
search for a transcendental signified or supreme meaning.

3.

Derrida
is
skeptical
of
the
writers
supposed
authorial/authoritative command over what he produces. He
says that only the reader is able to perceive the tension
(relationship) between what a writer thinks he can
control and what he cant (what he commands and what he
does not command). Thus Derrida questions the validity of
a reading which accepts the writers authority over his
text and its meaning, and encourages a critical reading
instead which perceives the texts discrepancies and
contradictions and from which meanings will emerge.

4.

Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it

look for meaning (a referent, a signified) which may be
historical, biographical, psychological, etc., outside the
text. Reading can only seek meaning inside a text or
writing: Our reading must remain within the text.
Ultimate meaning or meaning which lies beyond the text
(transcendental signified) does not exist according to
Derrida and his followers.

5.

See the answer above.

6.

Your summary must include the main ideas of the text

briefly and in simple English and it must not distort the
main information of the text. If you find that your
summary is not faithful to the text, then rewrite it.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

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The information contained in this key to the self-assessment

work is not supposed to be memorised. You are supposed to
develop your capacity to integrate this information into your
reading and understanding of the poem and use it in a flexible
way to answer the PEC or exam questions using your own writing
skills instead of sterile copying in the case of the PEC or
word-for-word memorisation in the case of the exam. This key
does not constitute a final reading or an exhaustive
commentary of the text. You will of course find further
nuances and possibilities in the text and you are expected to
produce your own ideas when discussing texts as long as they
are cogently expressed and based on the text itself and a
cogent critical reading.

15/15