Talk:BM1 - Introduction to Literature - Assignment 1
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Question One
The speaker (male) addresses an unspecified audience. The last line offers a change with his report of the words the Muse finally offered him as advice. The reported problem and the interaction with the Muse lie in the past (the problem is – obviously – overcome).
- Commentary: the question was rather simple, we gave 10 points for the speaker/audience part and five each for the muse and the past.
- Several people gave us more complex (and as it turned out: misleading) answers. The speaker is not identified as Sir Philip Sidney (we do not read “I, Sir P.S. had a bad time…”), nor is the speaker identified as “Astrophel”. Several participants saw the title of the whole collection (Astrophel and Stella) as the full clue and concluded that the poem addresses a “she”, Stella, or, in “reality”, Penelope Rich. The Wikipedia article offered this information [1]. The attributions were in any case problematic. We did not ask “who is behind Stella”. The problematic aspect was the risk to continue with the “truth”. Penelope Rich was another man’s wife, so the poem is about unfulfilled love. Those who went that way were likely to give a number of wrong answers on question 2.
- Why should one ask for the communicative situation? Most of all: to get a notion of the problems presented in the poem, a notion of the tensions and the suspense it offers. The question was designed to lead you into the content.
- Another marginal problem might be mentioned: Some began to muse about the Muse. Do Muses exist? Several people were sure that they are completely fictional – and concluded that in reality Sidney must have been talking to himself. Others noted that many poets speak of their beloved ones as Muses – in which case they were ready to see Penelope Rich suddenly answering (or Stella) (or the “dear she”). You can just as well conclude that Robinson Crusoe was fictional and that the whole novel Defoe wrote was hence invention, and that we rather had to consider why Defoe wrote such a novel than read it.
