word information
● attend church / school / class
● shire
A shire is a traditional term for a division of land, found in the United Kingdom and Australia. Although in modern British usage counties are referred to as "shires" mainly in poetic contexts, terms such as Shire Hall remain common. Shire also remains a common part of many county names.
a. New Hampshire:
✔ a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States
✔ In January 1776, it became the first of the British North American colonies to establish a government independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain's authority and it was the first to establish its own state constitution.
✔ Its license plates carry the state motto, "Live Free or Die". The motto comes from a statement written by the Revolutionary War general John Stark, hero of the Battle of Bennington.
✔ The state's nickname, "The Granite State", refers to its extensive granite formations and quarries.
b. Yorkshire:
a historic county of Northern England
● ford
→ a shallow place with good footing where a river or stream may be crossed by wading or inside a vehicle
Oxford (a ford where oxen crossed the river)
✔ The city is known worldwide as the home of the University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world.
✔ Buildings in Oxford demonstrate notable examples of every English architectural period since the late Saxon period.
✔ Oxford is known as the "city of dreaming spires", a term coined by poet Matthew Arnold.
The coat of arms of the University of Oxford depicts an open book with the inscription Dominus illuminatio mea ("The Lord is my light"), surrounded by three golden crowns.
● bury
The word derives from the Old English word burh, meaning a fortified settlement.
Salisbury:
✔ a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England, and the only city within the county.
✔ Stonehenge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is about 8 miles (13 km) northwest of Salisbury and greatly aids the local economy.
Stonehenge
✭ The ruins of Stonehenge play a large role at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (⇠click). It is the symbolic ending of Tess’s trBluestones of Stonehengeagic story – her final place of symbolic sacrifice for her love for Angel Clare. Hardy’s decision to end the novel at Stonehenge not only gives the novel a dramatic and un-forgetful ending, but it also supports the thesis that Bonica provides in her essay concerning Hardy’s modern characters’ desires to see paganism as an alternative for a wholly Christian belief system.
✔ The city itself, Old Sarum, the present cathedral and the ruins of the former one also attract visitors.
● The Canterbury Tales (⇠click)
→ a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer
→ The Decameron (⇠click) by Giovanni Boccaccio contains more parallels to The Canterbury Tales than any other work. Like the Tales, it features a number of narrators who tell stories along a journey they have undertaken (to flee from the Black Death).
Graduate Record Examination (GRE)
✔ a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for most graduate schools in the United States.
✔ The exam aims to measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, and critical thinking skills that have been acquired over a long period of time and that are not entirely based on any specific field of study outside of the GRE itself.
Musée des Beaux Arts (1940) -W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
✐ The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel, which the poem is basically about.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
❖ background info:
Icarus (⇠click) was a Greek mythological figure, also known as the son of Daedalus (famous for the Labyrinth of Crete). Now Icarus and his dad were stuck in Crete, because the King of Crete wouldn't let them leave. Daedalus made some wings for the both of them and gave his son instruction on how to fly (not too close to the sea, the water will soak the wings, and not too close to the sky, the sun will melt them). Icarus, however, appeared to be obstinate and did fly to close to the sun. This caused the wax that held his wings to his body to melt. Icarus crashed into the sea and died.
The Other Boleyn Girl
Storyline:
A sumptuous and sensual tale of intrigue, romance and betrayal set against the backdrop of a defining moment in European history: two beautiful sisters, Anne and Mary Boleyn, driven by their family's blind ambition, compete for the love of the handsome and passionate King Henry VIII.
☀ In 1517, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church, which in turn, influenced Henry VIII's bold move to claim that he, not the pope, was the head of the church in England. In 1533, when Henry marries Anne Boleyn, he is excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
The Waste Land (⇠click)
The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central text in Modernist poetry.
“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.”
Danaë and the Shower of Gold
↑ Danaë was the daughter, and only child of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice.
⇒ Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, King Acrisius asked the oracle of Delphi if this would change. The oracle announced to him that he would never have a son, but his daughter would, and that he would be killed by his daughter's son.
⇒ Danaë was imprisoned in a tall brass tower with a single richly adorned chamber, but with no doors or windows, just a sky-light as the source of light and air.
⇣ Similarly, when Rapunzel reaches her twelfth year, Dame Gothel shuts her away in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window.
⇒ However, Zeus, the king of the gods, desired her, and came to her in the form of golden rain which streamed in through the roof of the subterranean chamber and down into her womb. Soon after, their child Perseus was born.
Perseus(⇠click)
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats(⇠click)
✐ a collection of whimsical poems by T. S. Eliot about feline psychology and sociology
✐ It is the basis for the musical Cats.
Cats (musical)
The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as "the Jellicle choice" and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Cats introduced the song standard "Memory". The first performance of "Cats" was in 1981.
↓ Memory
William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech (⇠click)
William Faulkner delivered his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, 10 December 1950. In this audio recording, you can hear paragraph 1-4.
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