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 4.1 Introduction Let us turn now to the problem of consciousness. What exactly is the issue here that so divides philosophers and is the focus of such vigorous debate? In broad terms, it is the question of the place of consciousness in the world – the question of how it arises and how it is related to processes in the brain. It is hard to deny that consciousness is closely dependent on the brain. Changes in the brain can affect consciousness (think of the effects of anaesthetics and psychedelic drugs), and References 2.9.2 Searle's objection In ‘What is a speech act?’, John Searle introduces a memorable example of an utterance in which Grice's conditions are all met for it to mean one thing, but where the words used suggest that the utterance means something quite different, if it means anything at all. The conclusion Searle invites us to draw is that what our utterances mean is not exhausted by the speaker's intentions alone. An additional consideration is the meaning of the expressions used. If they don't match the intentio
Kinloch Ainort
Activity 1
The house that Jack or Jill might build
There's no one here at the moment
Author(s):
