Monday, 18 October 2021

The tragedy of ambition in Macbeth

Hello,I am Emisha Ravani , writing this blog as a part of the task which is given by sir for the play Macbeth written by The great William Shakespeare.

Macbeth: The Tragedy of ambition, how do you view ambition in today's time?

In the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, we discover that Macbeth is a tragic hero. Macbeth is very ambitious, courageous, and a moral coward: all these things lead to his tragic death at the end of the play.

At the beginning of the play, Shakespeare defines Macbeth as a hero very clearly. From the courages in defense of Scotland is significant in the opening scene. However, he is very ambitious to be king. At the beginning of the play, he was loyal to the king. While he did imagine of murder his mind rejects it and said, “Why, if fate will have me king, why, chance may crown me,” – Act I, Sc 3, .

Yet increasingly his ambition defeated his good nature. When Duncan named Malcolm the Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth decided on the murder of Duncan. When Duncan arrived at Inverness, Macbeth controled his ambition for the time being and did not kill Duncan. The failing of his decision was soon reflected by Lady Macbeth who called him a coward. From then on, after the murder of Duncan, Macbeth entered into a life of evil.

Since he overcomed his good nature, he no longer needed to be with his friend Banquo. He wanted to protect his ambition, by killing the king, and now he killed Banquo, due to the prediction of what the witches said about Banquo’s son becoming the king. Macbeth wanted to ensure that he would reach his ambition without problems.

Above the picture is showing how his own ambition made him restless.

Macbeth, who now no longer needed any encouragement from Lady Macbeth, started to leave her in ignorance of his plans.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

The witches pronounce these lines at the very beginning of the play Macbeth and introduce its central themes: the complexity of interpreting conflicting statements; evil and its impact upon the lives of humans. Macbeth is a story of a Scottish general and the misadventures that he undergoes mostly due to his unrestrained ambition aided by the influence of evil that he inherits from prophecies of the witches and the counsel of his own wife Lady Macbeth. Although rewarded by King Duncan for his bravery, he kills the King with some persuasion from his wife, to become the King of Scotland and there begins the misery of his life. Evil breeds evil, as the story unfolds and we come across multiple acts of violence.

Macbeth as a tragedy is appreciated by the critics for its unparalleled insight into human nature and its aesthetic achievement. The character of Macbeth presents before us a complexity of its own kind. Among the whole range of Shakespearean plays perhaps Macbeth emerges as the one that blends both good and evil at the same time. The goodness is his inherent quality, but so is the dark desire of becoming King. He further inherits more evil through external sources and internalizes it to apparently fulfill the prophecy but more to realize the ambition of becoming the King. However, the play as it progresses leads us to the world that Macbeth conceives and creates for himself based on what he comes across. He assumes himself to be safe forever, as it is prophesied that he cannot be killed by ‘any man born of woman’ but destiny has an answer in the form of Macduff. The display of great courage by Macbeth has been closely examined by the critics; considering it as his personal attribute and as something induced by the circumstances occupies a central place in discussing the persona of this great Shakespearean anti-hero.

Macbeth presents us a society where the codes of honour and loyalty are supreme. King is the representative of God on Earth; he must be absolute in all terms. The social order depends upon such attributes or virtues which are marked by absolute loyalty and integrity towards the king and the king has the responsibility of assuring the prevalence of same virtues in the kingdom. Based upon such virtues the other relationships of familial and social life get their acceptance and value. Macbeth contemplates the implications of his action if he commits a regicide. He also at the same time thinks about the double trust that exists between him and King Duncan. It is his ability to think rationally and think beyond oneself that compels him to contemplate the political and social imbalance that he would initiate by his act of crime.

At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is a good and brave soldier who gives his loyal service to Scotland. He wins the battle as well as the respect of the King. As a reward the king honours him with the title, the Thane of Cawdor. Ironically, it is precisely this honour that triggers Macbeth’s corrupt thoughts of wrongfully seizing the kingship. The witches’ prophecy that accurately predicted his new title makes him believe that he is indeed destined to be the king as predicted by their second prophecy. He thus sees the promise of much greater rewards. The prophecies and the realization of one of them tempt Macbeth into achieving his ambition at any cost. Many critics consider Macbeth’s unusually high concentration of ambition as a classic example of a tragic flaw. Ambition is not so much a fatal flaw because it is part of the social fabric and possessed in more or less quantity by every human being. However, ambition that is unchecked by morality is most certainly a fatal flaw which is the case with Macbeth.

Macbeth starts out as a good person; but his ambition gets the better of him when he finally kills Duncan despite his hesitations and better judgements. After he commits his first act of treachery, he becomes practically unstoppable as he continues with more and more murders in order to cover up his previous ones. He becomes the play’s primary source of evil as the audience begin to see him as the villain. After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth becomes paranoid about his newly gained throne. He feels compelled to keep killing all possible threats and maintain his grip on power. Each of his crimes results in Macbeth’s growing estrangement from reality as well as from himself. He becomes detached from everything as the kingdom of Scotland descends into total chaos. It is believed by those who were wronged by Macbeth that restoring order in Scotland would require Macbeth’s death. The throne needs to be in the hands of its rightful heir. Macbeth willingly embraces evil despite knowing that he will be haunted by guilt for the rest of his life.

The ambition or pride of Macbeth results in his fall and is seen as the fall of a great man. It refers to the ancient Greek notion of tragedy involving hubris where the hero falls due to his ignorance shrouded by his pride and ambition. The hero may not be pitied for his fall here and the story of Macbeth is a typical case where we do not see any scope for catharsis as his fall is a result of his personal motives. He who is devoid of all the virtues of becoming a king and is not upright all through doesn’t deserve to be a king. And if he attains it by some means, it may not last for long. The tragedy of King Duncan gets translated into a tragedy only for King Macbeth although he becomes the agent of change. Macbeth’s awareness about his crime makes it increasingly difficult for him to live with himself.

The play has been seen to be very close to the Aristotelian model of a classic tragedy. In Aristotelian norms of tragedy, the tragic hero should be a figure high up in the social ladder and his downfall must be because of his tragic flaw (hamartia) and also by the working of fate. In Macbeth, the protagonist is a figure of eminence in Scotland and it is because of his ambition (his tragic flaw) and the role of fate (the three witches) that he becomes the King of Scotland by murdering King Duncan. He goes down a dark path of treachery and violence. His evil act eventually leads to his downfall which makes us take pity on him and also be fearful of fate. Thus, the purgation of feelings of emotions of pity and fear (Catharsis) happens in the play leading it to be a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense of the term, though the norms of Unities of Time, Place and Action are not being followed strictly by Shakespeare. In spite of taking liberties with these norms, Shakespeare could create a masterpiece, something which is unique as is Macbeth.

Macbeth is a highly notable and unique play because it is the only tragedy that Shakespeare wrote where the protagonist hero is also the villain.end of the play, Lady Macbeth sleepwalked and had a dream about the killing of Duncan and Banquo. She died because of all this pressure and her guilt about the murder. Soul of Macbeth have been destroyed since Macbeth love Lady Macbeth very much, as shown in Act I, Sc. 5, p.58, “My Dearest Love.”

The power of nemesis is shown clearly at the end of the play when Macduff came back to murder Macbeth. Macbeth would never have guessed that Macduff would come back for revenge for the killing in Macduff’s household. This nemesis shows an additional force beyond Macbeth’s control. Because of Macbeth’s strong beliefs in ambition and the witches, when he found out Macduff was not born of woman, and also found out the Birnam Wood had been seen moving, he realized that the third apparition hadeceived him and he understood he was no longer safe.

Through the development of this tragedy, Macbeth has turned from a fine natured person to an evil person. His ambition, strong belief in the witches, has brought him to a tragic end of his life, and caused many people to lose their lives.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

This picture stretching us towards catharsis.

Macbeth is a highly notable and unique play because it is the only tragedy that Shakespeare wrote where the protagonist hero is also the villain.In the present time we can see how people are influencing by their own ambitions. And how they are becoming their own down fall in their own lives as well as so many other lives too.

In the other side nowadays having ambitions to get progressive way in the lives it is necessary too. Sometimes it makes us too much greedy and can be harmful for our downfall. and when it gets outerflows it became more dangerous.

Words: 3014

Reference: Essaysouse, freshread

William Blake and his work The Tyger

William Blake and his work ' The Tyger'

Hello, I'm Emisha Ravani. I'm writing this blog for the class activity of the age of neoclassical age. For that I'm going to do briefly about William Blake's life and then his ten famous poems and one of favorite poem that is ' The Tyger' along with much explanation.

William Blake is famous today as an imaginative and original poet, painter, engraver and mystic. But his work, especially his poetry, was largely ignored during his own lifetime, and took many years to gain widespread appreciation.

The third of six children of a Soho hosier, William Blake lived and worked in London all his life. As a boy, he claimed to have seen ‘bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’ in a tree on Peckham Rye, one of the earliest of many visions. In 1772, he was apprenticed to the distinguished printmaker James Basire, who extended his intellectual and artistic education. Three years of drawing murals and monuments in Westminster Abbey fed a fascination with history and medieval art.

In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, the steadfast companion and manager of his affairs for the whole of his chequered, childless life. Much in demand as an engraver, he experimented with combining poetry and image in a printing process he invented himself in 1789. Among the spectacular works of art this produced were ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, ‘Jerusalem’, and ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’.

Although always in demand as an artist, Blake’s intensely felt personal mythology, derived from radical ardour and the philosophy of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, led to wild mental highs and lows, and later in life he was sidelined as being close to insanity. On his deathbed, he saw one last glorious vision, and ‘burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven'.

The greatest poems by William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key figures of English Romanticism, and a handful of his poems are universally known thanks to their memorable phrases and opening lines. Blake frequently spoke out against injustice in his own lifetime: slavery, racism, poverty, and the corruption of those in power. The ten famous poems of him.

1. ‘Jerusalem’.

The hymn called ‘Jerusalem’ is surrounded by misconceptions, legend, and half-truths. Blake wrote the words which the composer Hubert Parry later set to music, but Blake didn’t call his poem ‘Jerusalem’, and instead the famous words that form the lyrics of the hymn are merely one part of a longer poem, a poem which Blake called Milton. The poem has been read as a satire of the rampant jingoism and Christian feeling running through England during the Napoleonic Wars, and has even been described as anti-patriotic, despite the patriotic nature of the hymn it inspired. It features the famous, rousing lines:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

2. ‘London’.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

This is one of Blake’s finest poems. In ‘London’, Blake describes the things he sees when he wanders through the streets of London: signs of misery and weakness can be discerned on everyone’s face. Every man’s voice – even the cry of every infant, a child who hasn’t even learnt to talk yet – conveys this sense of oppression. It’s as if everyone is being kept in slavery, but the manacles they wear are not literal ones, but mental – ‘mind-forg’d’ – ones.

The poem has been interpreted as a response to the French Revolution, and Blake’s wish that Englanders would follow suit and rise up against the authorities and power structures which tyrannised over them.

3. ‘The Sick Rose’.

This little poem seems to be very straightforward, but its meaning remains elusive. Is the worm that destroys the rose a symbol of death? By contrast, roses are often associated with love, beauty, and the erotic. In Blake’s poem we get several hints that such a reading is tenable: the rose is in a ‘bed’, suggesting not just its flowerbed but also the marriage bed; not only this, but it is a bed of ‘crimson joy’, which is not quite as strong a suggestion of sex and eroticism as ‘scarlet joy’ would have been, but nevertheless bristles with more than simple colour-description.

4. ‘A Poison Tree’.

Blake originally gave ‘A Poison Tree’ the title ‘Christian Forbearance’. It begins:

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

The speaker of the poem tells us that when he was angry with his friend he simply told his friend that he was annoyed, and that put an end to his bad feeling. But when he was angry with his enemy, he didn’t air his grievance to this foe, and so the anger grew. The implication of this ‘poison tree’ is that anger and hatred start to eat away at oneself: hatred always turns inward, corrupting into self-hatred.

This powerful and curious little poem is about the power of anger to become corrupted into something far more deadly and devious if it is not aired honestly. The enemy may have stolen the apple (and trespassed on the speaker’s property – he ‘stole’ into his garden, after all), but he was deceived into thinking that something deadly and poisonous (the speaker’s anger) was something nice and tasty (the apple).

5. ‘The Clod and the Pebble’.

‘Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet …

This poem is about two contrasting ideas of love – the ‘clod’ of clay representing a selfless and innocent kind of love and the ‘pebble’ in a brook symbolising love’s more pragmatic, selfish side.

6. ‘The Little Black Boy’.

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child:

But I am black as if bereav’d of light …

Blake published ‘The Little Black Boy’ in 1789 and the poem can be seen in part as an indictment of slavery. Blake’s poem gives a voice to a black boy born into slavery, whose skin is black but, he maintains, his soul is white. ‘White’ here suggests purity and innocence, that central theme in Blake’s poems of 1789.

7.The Lamb’.

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

So begins the counterpoint poem to ‘The Tyger’, or rather, ‘The Tyger’ is the ‘experience’ version of this ‘innocence’ poem. The lamb is a well-known symbol for Jesus Christ, and Blake draws on this association in this poem, telling the lamb that it was its namesake, the Lamb (i.e. the Lamb of God) who made the lamb, along with all living things.

8. ‘The Garden of Love’.

In this poem, Blake’s speaker goes into the Garden of Love and finds a chapel built on the spot where he used to play as a child. The gates of the chapel are shut, and commandments and prohibitions are written over the door. The garden has become a graveyard, its flowers replaced by tombstones. This idea of love starting out as a land of liberty and promise but ending up a world of death and restriction is expressed very powerfully through the image of the garden:

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green …

9.‘Never seek to tell thy love’.

Never seek to tell thy love

Love that never told can be

For the gentle wind does move

Silently invisibly …mmmm.

This untitled poem, written in around 1793, would have to wait 70 years to see publication, when the Pre-Raphaelite poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti included it in his edition of Blake’s poems in 1863. The poem suggests that sometimes it’s best not to confess one’s love but to keep it secret. In one manuscript version of the poem, the first line actually reads ‘Never pain to tell thy love’, but many subsequent editors have altered ‘pain’ to ‘seek’.

10. ' The Tyger'.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The opening line of this poem, ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, is among the most famous lines in all of William Blake’s poetry. Accompanied by a painting of an altogether cuddlier tiger than the ‘Tyger’ depicted by the poem itself, ‘The Tyger’ first appeared in the 1794 collection Songs of Experience, which contains many of Blake’s most celebrated poems. The Songs of Experience was designed to complement Blake’s earlier collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), and ‘The Tyger’ should be seen as the later volume’s answer to ‘The Lamb’ (see below).

Framed as a series of questions, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ (as the poem is also often known) sees Blake’s speaker wondering about the creator responsible for such a fearsome creature as the tiger. The fiery imagery used throughout the poem conjures the tiger’s aura of danger: fire equates to fear. Don’t get too close to the tiger, Blake’s poem seems to say, otherwise you’ll get burnt.

Monday, 11 October 2021

John Milton

Hello I am Emisha Ravani.today I am dealing with the very important figure of the puritan age who is 'John Milton'. Milton has same consideration as Shakespeare has in the English literature because Shakespeare and Milton are the two figures who has made English literature famous. Each is representative of age that and together they form a suggestive commentary upon the two forces that rule our humanity- the force of impulse and force of a fixed purpose. Shakespeare is the poet of impulse, the loves, fears, Jealousies, and ambitions that swayed man of his age. Milton is the poet of steadfast will and purpose ,who moves like a God amid the fears and the hopes and Changing impulses of the world ,regarding them as trivial and momentary things that can never swerve a great soul from it course.

JOHN MILTON

Time Line: 1608- 1674

Milton's Life :

Milton is like an ideal in the soul ,like a lofty after mountain on the Horizon . We never attained ideal , we never climb the mountain but life would be expressibly poorer were either to be taken away. In character the elder Milton was a rare combination of scholar and businessman, medical puritan in politics and religion, great musician, whose tunes are Steel song, a lover of art and literature. Poet mother was a woman of refinement and social grass deep interest in religion and in a local charities. So the boy grew up in a home which combine the culture of the Renaissance with the piety and moral strength of early puritanism.Two things of personal interest deserve mention in this period of milton's life, his marriage and his blindness.

Notable Works: “A Treatise on Christian Doctrine” “Areopagitica” “Artis Logicae” “Comus” “Defense of the English People Against Salmasius” “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The” “Eikonoklastes” “History of Britain” “Il Penseroso” “L’Allegro” “Lycidas” “Of Education” “Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England” “On Shakespeare” “On the Fifth of November” “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” “Paradise Lost” “Paradise Regained” “Samson Agonistes” “The Second Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman, in Reply to an Infamous Book Entitled “Cry of the King’s Blood”” “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”

Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion. His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions. In his works on theology, he valued liberty of conscience, the paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from abroad.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

Abandoning his earlier plan to compose an epic on Arthur, Milton instead turned to biblical subject matter and to a Christian idea of heroism. In Paradise Lost—first published in 10 books in 1667 and then in 12 books in 1674, at a length of almost 11,000 lines—Milton observed but adapted a number of the Classical epic conventions that distinguish works such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid.

Milton's Paradise Lost

Among these conventions is a focus on the elevated subjects of war, love, and heroism. In Book 6 Milton describes the battle between the good and evil angels; the defeat of the latter results in their expulsion from heaven. In the battle, the Son (Jesus Christ) is invincible in his onslaught against Satan and his cohorts. But Milton’s emphasis is less on the Son as a warrior and more on his love for humankind; the Father, in his celestial dialogue with the Son, foresees the sinfulness of Adam and Eve, and the Son chooses to become incarnate and to suffer humbly to redeem them. Though his role as saviour of fallen humankind is not enacted in the epic, Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden learn of the future redemptive ministry of Jesus, the exemplary gesture of self-sacrificing love. The Son’s selfless love contrasts strikingly with the selfish love of the heroes of Classical epics, who are distinguished by their valour on the battlefield, which is usually incited by pride and vainglory. Their strength and skills on the battlefield and their acquisition of the spoils of war also issue from hate, anger, revenge, greed, and covetousness. If Classical epics deem their protagonists heroic for their extreme passions, even vices, the Son in Paradise Lost exemplifies Christian heroism both through his meekness and magnanimity and through his patience and fortitude.

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Horeb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,

In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth

Rose out of chaos; or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God: I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

This muse is the Judaeo-Christian Godhead. Citing manifestations of the Godhead atop Horeb and Sinai, Milton seeks inspiration comparable to that visited upon Moses, to whom is ascribed the composition of the book of Genesis. Much as Moses was inspired to recount what he did not witness, so also Milton seeks inspiration to write about biblical events. Recalling Classical epics, in which the haunts of the muses are not only mountaintops but also waterways, Milton cites Siloa’s brook, where in the New Testament a blind man acquired sight after going there to wash off the clay and spittle placed over his eyes by Jesus. Likewise, Milton seeks inspiration to enable him to envision and narrate events to which he and all human beings are blind unless chosen for enlightenment by the Godhead. With his reference to “the Aonian mount,” or Mount Helicon in Greece, Milton deliberately invites comparison with Classical antecedents. He avers that his work will supersede these predecessors and will accomplish what has not yet been achieved: a biblical epic in English.

Paradise Lost also directly invokes Classical epics by beginning its action in medias res. Book 1 recounts the aftermath of the war in heaven, which is described only later, in Book 6. At the outset of the epic, the consequences of the loss of the war include the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven and their descent into hell, a place of infernal torment. With the punishment of the fallen angels having been described early in the epic, Milton in later books recounts how and why their disobedience occurred. Disobedience and its consequences, therefore, come to the fore in Raphael’s instruction of Adam and Eve, who (especially in Books 6 and 8) are admonished to remain obedient. By examining the sinfulness of Satan in thought and in deed, Milton positions this part of his narrative close to the temptation of Eve. This arrangement enables Milton to highlight how and why Satan, who inhabits a serpent to seduce Eve in Book 9, induces in her the inordinate pride that brought about his own downfall. Satan arouses in Eve a comparable state of mind, which is enacted in her partaking of the forbidden fruit, an act of disobedience.

Paradise Lost is ultimately not only about the downfall of Adam and Eve but also about the clash between Satan and the Son. Many readers have admired Satan’s splendid recklessness, if not heroism, in confronting the Godhead. Satan’s defiance, anger, willfulness, and resourcefulness define a character who strives never to yield. In many ways Satan is heroic when compared to such Classical prototypes as Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas and to similar protagonists in medieval and Renaissance epics. In sum, his traits reflect theirs.

But Milton composed a biblical epic in order to debunk Classical heroism and to extol Christian heroism, exemplified by the Son. Notwithstanding his victory in the battle against the fallen angels, the Son is more heroic because he is willing to undergo voluntary humiliation, a sign of his consummate love for humankind. He foreknows that he will become incarnate in order to suffer death, a selfless act whereby humankind will be redeemed. By such an act, moreover, the Son fulfills what Milton calls the “great argument” of his poem: to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton writes in Book 1. Despite Satan’s success against Adam and Eve, the hope of regeneration after sinfulness is provided by the Son’s self-sacrifice. Such hope and opportunity enable humankind to cooperate with the Godhead so as to defeat Satan, avoid damnation, overcome death, and ascend heavenward. Satan’s wiles, therefore, are thwarted by members of a regenerate humankind who choose to participate in the redemptive act that the Son has undertaken on their behalf.

Emisha ravani

mkbu, dept of English

Saturday, 9 October 2021

' Lockdown' by Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage

An English poet, playwright and novelist He was appointed poet laureate on 10 May 2019.He is also professor of poetry at the University of Leeds and succeeded Geoffrey Hill as Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Lockdown by Simon Armitage

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.
Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.
But slept again,
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.

Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the UK, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”.The poet laureate’s new poem, Lockdown, moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in Eyam in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village, to the epic poem Meghaduta by the Sanskrit poet Kalidas.

Armitage, who is at home with his family in West Yorkshire, said that “as the lockdown became more apparent and it felt like the restrictions were closing in, the plague in Eyam became more and more resonant” to him.

His poem references Eyam’s boundary stone, which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. It also touches on the doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming.

A man touches the boundary stone in Eyam from which no resident could pass during the village’s isolation in 1666.

The poem was also influenced by a scene in Meghadata in which an exile sends reassuring words to his wife in the Himalayas via a passing cloud.

“The cloud is convinced to take the message because the yaksha, which I think is sort of an attendant spirit to a god of wealth, tells him what amazing landscapes and scenery he’s going to pass across. I thought it was a kind of hopeful, romantic gesture,” said Armitage.