English Cosmos by Dr Mukesh Pareek

The Hollow Men Mistah Kurtz-he dead             A penny for the Old Guy                         I     We are the hollow men     We are the stuffed men     Leaning together     Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!     Our dried voices, when     We whisper together     Are quiet and meaningless     As wind in dry grass     Or rats' feet over broken glass     In our dry cellar         Shape without form, shade without colour,     Paralysed force, gesture without motion;         Those who have crossed     With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom     Remember us-if at all-not as lost     Violent souls, but only     As the hollow men     The stuffed men.               ...

Gerontion BY  T. S. ELIOT Thou hast nor youth nor age                          But as it were an after dinner sleep                          Dreaming of both. Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.                    ...

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  Launch Audio in a New Window BY  T. S. ELIOT S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the...

Literary Impressionism  is influenced by the European  Impressionist  art movement, many writers adopted a style that relied on associations. The  Dutch   Tachtigers  explicitly tried to incorporate impressionism into their prose, poems, and other literary works. Much of what has been called "impressionist" literature is subsumed into several other categories, especially  Symbolism , its chief exponents being  Baudelaire ,  Mallarmé ,  Rimbaud ,  Verlaine  and  Laforgue . It focuses on a particular character's perception of events. The edges of reality are blurred by choosing points of view that lie outside the norm. Impressionistic literature can basically be defined as when an author centers his story/attention on the character's mental life such as the character's impressions, feelings, sensations and emotions, rather than trying to interpret them. Authors such as  Virginia Woolf  ( Mrs Dalloway ) and  Jo...

Preludes BY  T. S. ELIOT I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. II The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms. III You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the s...

The Second Coming  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of  Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    T...

Pope wrote “An Essay on Criticism” when he was 23; he was influenced by Quintillian, Aristotle, Horace’s  Ars Poetica , and Nicolas Boileau’s  L’Art Poëtique . Written in heroic couplets, the tone is straight-forward and conversational. It is a discussion of what good critics should do; however, in reading it one gleans much wisdom on the qualities poets should strive for in their own work. In Part I of “An Essay on Criticism,” Pope notes the lack of “true taste” in critics, stating: “’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.” Pope advocates knowing one’s own artistic limits: “Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, / And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.” He stresses the order in nature and the value of the work of the “Ancients” of Greece, but also states that not all good work can be explained by rules: “Some beauties yet, no precepts can declare, / For there’s a happiness as well as care.”   In Part II...