4.2.2 Pronouns Pronouns are used to avoid repeating nouns and to supply the subjects for verbs. I, me, we and us are known as the first person pronouns, you is the second person pronoun, and he, him, she, her, it, they and them are third person pronouns in English. In Latin, pronouns are used only when really necessary for the sense of a sentence, or sometimes for emphasis. Often, a pronoun subject, such as I, you or she, can be understoo
4.2.1 Nouns Nouns are used to name people, places, things or concepts, for example Cicero, Italy, tree, happiness. Most nouns can be singular or plural, for example tree, trees. They each belong to a certain gender, masculine, feminine or neuter (from Latin neuter, neither). In English, nouns have natural gender; for example, boatsman is masculine, woman is feminine, student is of common gender (either masculine or feminine), and university and b
4.2 Parts of speech In describing the grammar of written Latin, the best method is to use the traditional classical grammar, as worked out by the Greeks and Romans themselves. As a preliminary, it may be useful to learn the ‘parts of speech’ in English. A very brief explanation follows, and then a much fuller discussion. Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an awareness of the links between English and Latin; an understanding of basic English grammar in order to recognise and describe the way languages work; an awareness of the fundamentals of pronunciation in Latin. Conclusion You have now had an opportunity to examine the poetry of Sorley Maclean. This should have helped you gain an increased sense of the power of Maclean's poetry both in the English and in its original Gaelic. The provision of the English translations and the discussion by the poet himself during the interview with Ian Critchton-Smith should have increased your understanding of the English texts. 2.3 After the recording It follows that sorting MacLean's poems out by ‘themes’ entails the risk of disguising the tight interlocking of ‘Politics’, ‘Love’, ‘Landscape’, ‘War’ and ‘History’ in all his poetry down to 1945. Nevertheless, for convenience's sake, I will do this. 2.1.2 The poems Your reading in this unit has already prepared you to some extent, but please read the following poems (both the English and Gaelic versions are given) which are discussed in the recordings, and then listen to the recordings.  A company of mountains, an upthrust of mountains a great garth of growing mountains a concourse of summits, of knolls, of hills 1.3 MacLean's Celtic roots MacLean was born in 1911 in Osgaig, a small township on the Isle of Raasay, adjacent to Skye, the larger island where he went to school. His childhood was dominated by a majestic landscape. The woods of Raasay and the peaks of the Cuillin Hills on Skye are as central to his poetic universe as the hills of Cumbria to Wordsworth's. His father and mother combined work on a small croft with a tailoring business. The latter was severely hit by the great depression of the 1930s, and the family's re 1.2 Grasping Gaelic Please read the following poems by Sorley MacLean (linked below): ‘The Turmoil’, ‘Kinloch Ainort’, ‘Heroes’, ‘Death Valley’, ‘A Spring’, and ‘She to Whom I Gave…’. Some of the poems have both Gaelic References 2.3 The pervasive influence of Enlightenment You will find in this unit in one form or another the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment. Sometimes this influence is buried in deeply ambiguous texts such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (1756–91) opera Don Giovanni (1787), which includes a famous toast to ‘liberty’. The opera is seen by some as an attempt to subject to critical scrutiny the behaviour of at least one member of a corrupt eighteenth-century aristocracy and the social or class structure that facilitated h 10 Hold that space! The caesura is the stress which falls at a moment of silence. It's the equivalent of a musical rest and is usually delineated by punctuation. Composers and poets recognise the importance of the space between notes. We know that poems are made of lines and lines need line- breaks, which we've already discussed. These 7 Other rhyming techniques
Near- or half rhymes are words or combinations of words that achieve only a partial rhyme. Half rhymes can be between words with just one syllable, or between parts of words, for example where the accented syllables rhyme with each other, but other syllables in the word don't rhyme. For instance: cover–shovel; wily–piling, calling–fallen; wildebeest–building.
Assonant rhyme refers to echoing vowel sounds, eith 5.4 Tercets The following poem is written in tercets.
It happens once, in his absence. The bright hall rings, rings and, mid-ring, clicks back over into silence. It leaves two isolated sighs, hers, momentarily frozen before an ocean of blank space that by nightfall he'll come across and save against the backdrop of 5.3 Stanzas and verse The poem ‘The literal and the metaphor’, which you read in Section 5.1, was divided into two sections. We call these verses or stanzas, and they are the poetic equivalent of paragraphs, but with more shape, weight and focus than the prose equivalent. Stanzas are like islands encircled by shores. Or, 3 What is poetry? We can possibly best define what poetry is by saying what it isn't. For one thing, poetry, unlike prose, cannot be paraphrased. If you could sum it up succinctly in any other fashion you wouldn't write the poem. One can talk about the theme of a poem, for instance, but it's the poem itself which conveys the ultimate effect. A poem is the best possible expression of what the poet wants to say. Some might say that the form and content of art, in this case poetry, is untranslatable. Let's Introduction This unit introduces common techniques underlying free verse and traditional forms of poetry, and how it is necessary to use these techniques in order to harness what T.S. Eliot called the ‘logic of the imagination’ (Eliot, 1975, p. 77). We discuss the possibility of using your own experience, but also the power of imagination, and of utilising different personae in your poems. You are also introduced to the basic terminology and practical elements of poetry – the line, line-breaks, sta Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions)
This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Glossary 4.2 Naturalism and reductive explanation There is a widespread commitment among contemporary philosophers and scientists to a naturalistic view of the world. In broad terms, naturalism is the view that everything is scientifically explicable – to put it crudely, that there are no miracles. (Note that I am using ‘naturalism’ here for a metaphysical position – a view about the nature of the world. It is also used for a methodological position – a view about how the world, or some aspect of it, should be
Part of speech
Explanation
Kinloch Ainort
Activity 1
The house that Jack or Jill might build
There's no one here at the moment
Author(s):
