Biblical influence on English Language

Biblical influence on English Language

“The greatest of all translations is the English Bible. It is even more than that: It is the greatest English book, the first of the English classics, the source of the greatest influences upon English Character and speech………. It is in a singular degree, the voice of a people.” ---- George Sampson. It is needless to say that the influence of the Bible on English literature has been immensely great and most valuable. Ever since the publication of the first translation of the Bible by Wycliffe to the publication of the Authorized Version in 1611, its influence on English literature and language has been constant and steady. These productions exerted great influence in the development of standard prose relinquishing the crude style of the liturgical treatises. The influence of the Bible was immensely felt in other branches of literature especially in poetry.

The Authorized Version of the Bible was published in 1611. It was the work of forty-seven scholars nominated by James I, over whom Bishop Lancelot Andrews presided. It is very difficult to distinguish the influence of Authorized Bible from that of the earlier forms yet it found a righteous conclusion of religions controversies started in 1523 in England.

Humanism, the product of the Renaissance and the religions Reformation came into conflict during the mid 16th century England. The greatest advantage of this was that they largely contributed to the development of English prose. The controversialists wanted to reach the public and win over their sympathies. For that purpose they had to write their pamphlets and treatise in simple English so that it could easily be understood by the common people. That is how the translation of the Bible into English raised the controversies and how these controversies helped in the development of English prose. Let us now study the Biblical influence upon the modern English as it stands now.

Proverbs & phrases: Many proverbs and phrases, which are in common use in modern English, are the gifts of the Bible. Quotations from the Bible are given profusely. English language has been enriched by the Bible so much that a proper assessment is practically impossible. Some illustrations of Biblical phrases are given below: ‘arose as one man’, ‘broken reed’, ‘a law unto themselves’, ‘the man of sin’, ‘moth and rust’, ‘clear as crystal’, ‘the eleventh hour’, ‘city of refuse’, ‘whited sepulcher’, ‘wash one’s hands off’ and many other familiar scriptural phrases and allusions. From Tyndale we owe ‘long-suffering’, ‘peacemaker’, ‘stumbling block’, ‘the fatted calf’, ‘filthy lucre’, ‘mercy seat’, ‘day spring’ and ‘scapegoat’. From Coverdale we have ‘tender mercy’, ‘loving-kindness’, ‘valley of the shadow of death’, ‘avenges of blood’ etc. Many such Biblical phrases and idioms are current in modern English without even knowing its source.

Poetry: Right from Chaucer to the present day the influence of the Bible is clearly discernible in poetry. Even Chaucer drew the material for some of his tales from the Bible. Spenser’s Fairy Queen is also “steeped in the humanism of the classics and Italian literature and it everywhere testifies to the strenuous idealism and moral earnestness of Protestantism”. Milton’s Paradise Lost is Biblical while the metaphysical poets were interested in Biblical allusion. In the twentieth century the poetry of T.S.Eliot, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas is full of the Biblical references. Technically the Biblical influence can be seen in the use of ‘th’ such as in hath, ‘loveth’, ‘hateth’, ‘giveth’ etc in place of ‘has’, ‘haves’, ‘gives’ etc as a poetical style. Again, we find old past tenses in ‘gat’, ‘clave’, ‘brake’ instead of got, clove, broke in poetry mastered by Tennyson, Morris, Coleridge etc. Instead of using ‘s’ ending in verbs we have: “He prayeth best who loveth best/All things both great and small”- Ancient Mariners.

Superlatives, Scriptural Proper Names: On the analogy of the scriptural ‘holy of holies’ which contains a Hebrew manner of expressing the superlatives, we get in modern English similar phrases such as: In my heart of hearts, the place of all places, a friend of friends, the pearl of pearls, a prince of princes etc.

Further scriptural proper names are often used as appellatives to designate types of character. As for example, ‘to raise Cain’ meaning to make a determined angry fuss; ‘David and Jonathan’ means ‘any pair of devoted friends’.

Revival of Some Archaic Words: Biblical usage has revived some of the lost words into full life. Such words are like ‘damsel’ for young women, ‘raiment and apparel’ for dress, ‘firmament’, a poetical synonym for sky’.

The modern world has seen many changes; but it has, so far, seen no movement that has shaken the supremacy of the greatest of English books ‘The Bible’. If ever the Bible falls from its high sovereignty, we may be sure that the English character has fallen with it.

Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell's famous lyric "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem.  Metaphysical poems are brief, intense meditations employing wit, irony and elaborate "conceits" or comparisons. Underlying the formal structures of rhyme, meter, and stanza is the poem's logic-based argument. In "To His Coy Mistress" the explicit argument (the speaker's request that the coy lady yield to his passion) is a whimsical statement bristling with humorous hyperbole but leading to a deadly serious argument about the shortness of life and the quick passage of libidinal pleasure.

The theme expressed in it is carpe diem or seize the day. Marvell's poem is usually excluded from secondary level textbooks because of its explicit sexuality, despite its author being a Puritan and the son of a Calvinist Anglican preacher.

This seduction poem is presented in the unromantic form of a logical syllogism. The opening "if" segment lacks that subordinating conjunction that is more elegantly presupposed by the subjunctive mood of "Had we but world enough and time." The mediate inference is presented in the second verse paragraph beginning with "But," and the deduction in the concluding stanza commencing with "Now therefore." Such strict adherence to logical argument befits the author who was an important political figure in the Cromwell protectorate in England.

Current readers of Marvell's poem are often upset to learn that the adjective "coy" at the time of writing had none of its modern suggestions of playful teasing or coquetry. In Marvell's day the word was a synonym for reluctant, modest, even disdainful. [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]  In  "the mother tongue: English and how it got that way" [page 73], Bill Bryson points out that "'coy' and 'quiet' both have the same grandparent in the Latin 'quietus'."The lady addressed in the poem remains silent - reluctant to accede to the speaker's pleas because she wishes to maintain her "quaint Honour" or virginity. There is none of the dalliance or playing-hard-to-get that we usually assume with coyness.

Bryson also mentions how Marvell's term "quaint" was in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale spelled "quainte" but also appears as "kent" and three other spelling variations. The variable spellings of today's unspeakable crudity "lie with  Chaucer or his copyists of both." [page 62].

In stanza one, the speaker/seducer makes concrete the abstractions of "Had we but world enough and time." Geographically, she might search for rubies on the shores of the Indian Ganges while he voices his unrequited desires by England's Humber River half way around the world from the object of his amorous desire. Temporally, he would sue for her affections beginning ten years before the Flood of Noah until the unanticipated "Conversion of the Jews." Read forever.

Moderns tend to read "My vegetable love" as a slow-growing carrot, turnip or the like. In the poet's day, "vegetable" would have signified the lowest of man's three souls. The uppermost was the rational, possessed only by humanity; then came the sensitive, shared by animals and involving motion and perception; then the vegetative, which, as with plant life, concerned itself with generation, augmentation, corruption, and decay. Were Marvell to hear vegetable love construed as a swelling cabbage or rutabaga, he would probably smile rather than protest.

Next comes an anti-Petrarchan segue. Petrarch and other writers of the courtly love tradition expounded in hyperbolic blazons  every physical feature of the love object: hair, brow, eyes, nose, teeth, voice, bosom, in descending order. Marvell's speaker says that he would happily follow in that tradition were it not for time and encroaching age, decrepitude, and accompanying sexual dysfunction. The lady is deserving of nothing less. We hear the unromantic terminology of investment and finance in

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

Section two of the syllogism is enlivened by arresting imagery of sound and sight. "At my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity." The tone switches from earlier whimsicality to seriousness. There is nothing comical about

Thy Beauty shall no more be found

Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound

My echoing Song; then Worms shall try

That long preserv'd Virginity;

And your quaint Honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my Lust.

"Do it now. You're going to be dead a long time. Why bring a maidenhead to a coffin?" One need not comment on the phallicism of worms. It is interesting that churchman Marvell did not shun what today is considered at least an impropriety, but capitalized on the witty sexual double entendres.

This segment of the syllogism is memorably summarized by its ironic concluding couplet. It describes a location that offers seclusion, darkness, privacy, and security from observation or interruption by third parties. There is, however, one serious drawback.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Part three of the syllogism, stripped to its essentials, argues, "Now therefore, . . . let us sport us while we may."  The poet dresses that imperative with figurative language. Not just while we're young, but "While the youthful hew/ Sits on thy skin like morning dew." Let's have none of this "vegetable love"; let us rather couple fiercely like amorous hawks or eagles. Let us not be devoured by the slowly grinding molars of time and age, but do the devouring ourselves. Rather than the vast separation of the Ganges from the Humber, let us not merely unite but

. . .  roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough* the iron gates of life.                *through

More simply, let us love actively and passionately. Though we can't stop time's passage ("make our Sun/ Stand still"), we can make it fly by enjoying sexual fulfilment (we will make him run).

Although this analysis makes the poem sound like seduction motivated by sexual appetite, the copulatory activity is actually a symbol or metaphysical conceit for living life intensely and letting no opportunities slip by. Marvell, who never married, is not trying to emulate John Donne of the early "Jack the rake period." Presumably, this poet had no flesh and blood woman in mind for the coy mistress of the title. As stated earlier, the theme is carpe diem. All humanity, not just one woman, are adjured not to let opportunities slip past nor allow time, age, and creeping decrepitude to do their work on bored minds and inactive bodies.

SSC Question & Answers for Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ulysses --- Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809–1892]

"Ulysses" was written by Tennyson in 1833 and it was published with his Poems in 1842.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees; all times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy, I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
    This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
    There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Summary
Form
Commentary

Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with his old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses who live in his kingdom.

Still speaking to himself he proclaims that he “cannot rest from travel” but feels compelled to live to the fullest and swallow every last drop of life. He has enjoyed all his experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a symbol for everyone who wanders and roams the earth. His travels have exposed him to many different types of people and ways of living. They have also exposed him to the “delight of battle” while fighting the Trojan War with his men. Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: “I am a part of all that I have met,” he asserts. And it is only when he is travelling that the “margin” of the globe that he has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.

Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.

Ulysses now speaks to an unidentified audience concerning his son Telemachus, who will act as his successor while the great hero resumes his travels: he says, “This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle.” He speaks highly but also patronizingly of his son’s capabilities as a ruler, praising his prudence, dedication, and devotion to the gods. Telemachus will do his work of governing the island while Ulysses will do his work of travelling the seas: “He works his work, I mine.”

In the final stanza, Ulysses addresses the mariners with whom he has worked, travelled, and weathered life’s storms over many years. He declares that although he and they are old, they still have the potential to do something noble and honourable before “the long day wanes.” He encourages them to make use of their old age because “ ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He declares that his goal is to sail onward “beyond the sunset” until his death. Perhaps, he suggests, they may even reach the “Happy Isles,” or the paradise of perpetual summer described in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been taken after their deaths. Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in youth, they are “strong in will” and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem is spoken by a single character, whose identity is revealed by his own words. The lines are in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, which serves to impart a fluid and natural quality to Ulysses’s speech. Many of the lines are enjambed, which means that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines. The use of enjambment is appropriate in a poem about pushing forward “beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” Finally, the poem is divided into four paragraph-like sections, each of which comprises a distinct thematic unit of the poem.

In this poem, written in 1833 and revised for publication in 1842, Tennyson reworks the figure of Ulysses by drawing on the ancient hero of Homer’s Odyssey (“Ulysses” is the Roman form of the Greek “Odysseus”) and the medieval hero of Dante’s Inferno. Homer’s Ulysses, as described in Scroll XI of the Odyssey, learns from a prophecy that he will take a final sea voyage after killing the suitors of his wife Penelope. The details of this sea voyage are described by Dante in Canto XXVI of the Inferno: Ulysses finds himself restless in Ithaca and driven by “the longing I had to gain experience of the world.” Dante’s Ulysses is a tragic figure who dies while sailing too far in an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Tennyson combines these two accounts by having Ulysses make his speech shortly after returning to Ithaca and resuming his administrative responsibilities, and shortly before embarking on his final voyage.

However, this poem also concerns the poet’s own personal journey, for it was composed in the first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his dear college friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. Like In Memoriam, then, this poem is also an elegy for a deeply cherished friend. Ulysses, who symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push onward in spite of the awareness that “death closes all” (line 51). As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” after the loss of his beloved Hallam.

The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” came to serve as a motto for the poet’s Victorian contemporaries: the poem’s hero longs to flee the tedium of daily life “among these barren crags” (line 2) and to enter a mythical dimension “beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars” (lines 60–61); as such, he was a model of individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity. Thus for Tennyson’s immediate audience, the figure of Ulysses held not only mythological meaning, but stood as an important contemporary cultural icon as well.

“Ulysses,” like many of Tennyson’s other poems, deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits of one’s field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life. Ulysses is the antithesis of the mariners in “The Lotos-Eaters,” who proclaim “we will no longer roam” and desire only to relax amidst the Lotos fields. In contrast, Ulysses “cannot rest from travel” and longs to roam the globe (line 6). Like the Lady of Shallot, who longs for the worldly experiences she has been denied, Ulysses hungers to explore the untraveled world.

As in all dramatic monologues, here the character of the speaker emerges almost unintentionally from his own words. Ulysses’ incompetence as a ruler is evidenced by his preference for potential quests rather than his present responsibilities. He devotes a full 26 lines to his own egotistical proclamation of his zeal for the wandering life, and another 26 lines to the exhortation of his mariners to roam the seas with him. However, he offers only 11 lines of lukewarm praise to his son concerning the governance of the kingdom in his absence, and a mere two words about his “aged wife” Penelope. Thus, the speaker’s own words betray his abdication of responsibility and his specificity of purpose.

1.     Who was Ulysses?

Ulysses is the Roman name of the legendary Greek hero Odysseus. We get to read of him in bits and parts in Iliad by Homer and he is the main protagonist of the Odyssey. He was the ruler of Ithaca, an island in the Ionian Sea.

2.     It little profits that an idle king,/By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole/Unequal laws unto a savage race,/That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” – Explain.

Ulysses, the Greek hero and the king of Ithaca has returned from the battle of Troy to find that he cannot reconcile himself to dull and domestic life, matched as is with his aged wife Penelope and forced to live among primitive people to whom he meets out unequal laws to govern. These men perform life’s functions perfunctorily and do not share his idealism or aspiration.

3.     “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/Life to the lees;” – Who is the speaker? Annotations of the sentence.

The speaker is Ulysses (Roman name), known as Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses inspired by wander-lust which is adventure and experience that leads to knowledge, feels claustrophobic at Ithaca, matched with an aged wife and ruling a primitive race. He proposes to travel further and experience life to the maximum by drinking it to the dregs, by activity and enterprise that would lead to greater knowledge and save him from death.

4.     “I have enjoy'd/Greatly, have suffer'd greatly” – What is Ulysses referring to?

Ulysses is referring to the adventures he has had during his extensive sojourn when he both enjoyed and suffered alone and in the company of his fellow mariners on shores and seas, even when the haydes meaning ‘Rainers’, a group of seven stars in the head of the constellation of Taurus whose rising and setting are believed to be attended by rains – raised tempests on oceans.

5.     “Much have I seen and known; cities of men/And manners, climates, councils, governments,/Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;” – Explain.

Ulysses is expounding on his rich and varied experiences of travels in course of which his knowledge has been widen as he has encountered new races, manners, climates, councils and governments. He has been there object of honour and reverence.

6.     “And drunk delight of battle with my peers,/Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy” – Explain.

Ulysses is referring to the great Trojan War which they had fought and won. Ulysses had partaken of the delight of the great victory with his peers and the bells were ringing to commemorate their victory over the Trojans.

7.     “I am a part of all that I have met;” – Explain.

His rich and varied experience is an inseparable part of his own being.

8.     “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'/Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades” – Explain.

Ulysses is referring to the elusive world of knowledge that can be seen beyond the arch of experience, but its margin recedes the more one pushes forward to reach it. Ulysses’ immense experience makes him thirst for the world of knowledge and impels him to walk towards it to explore its unexplored regions, despite the inevitability of his failure to attain to his ideals.

9.     “Life piled on life/Were all too little, and of one to me/Little remains: but every hour is saved/From that eternal silence” – What does it reveal about the speaker and his intentions?

Ulysses feels that ‘Life piles on life’ are all too little to pursue the elusive world of knowledge. He wishes to have a life of activity and dictates inactivity at Ithaca. He regrets that he is old. Yet, he feels that every moment devoted to the pursuit of knowledge is saved from the eternal silence of death.

10.“And this gray spirit yearning in desire/To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” – Explain.

Ulysses is referring that his spirit has become gray with experience and age beyond any inconceivable limit set by human thought.

11.“This is my son, mine own Telemachus” – Explain.

These lines contain a concealed irony for Telemachus, though well loved and appreciated by Ulysses, does not share his view of life. Telemachus is a capable ruler who amiably and prudently governs a primitive race trying by soft degrees to civilize the people. He is blameless, does his household course, and performs duties of tenderness and governance and duties to household Gods. Ulysses, however, proposes to live a life of activity in pursuit of knowledge to defeat death albeit temporarily.

12.“—you and I are old;/Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;/Death closes all” – Explain.

Ulysses is voicing a clariant call to his mariners to embark upon a relentless pursuit of knowledge despite the fact that they are old. Old age is not for him a time to retrieve into dignified leisure, but surmounting the limitations of old age he proposes, to take up a life of intense activity since possibilities of newer attainments are enormous that close only with death.

13.“For my purpose holds/To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars, until I die.” – Explain.

Ulysses proposes to undertake a relentless journey in quest for knowledge would soil beyond the western horizon where the sun vanishes out of sight. The baths of the western stars also refers to the western horizon. Both expressions figuratively refers to man’s insatiable thirst for adventure and relentless quest for knowledge.

14.“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:/It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,/And see the great Achilles, whom we knew./Tho' much is taken, much abides;” – Explain.

Ulysses proposes to live a life of activity in pursuit of knowledge, perhaps even in the shores of death, where they might meet Achilles, the greatest of Greek warriors, residing at the Happy Isles, a fortunate island situated in the Atlantic ocean, at the west of Africa, popularly known as the Greek Paradise. Thus, to pursue knowledge and the life of activity Ulysses is ready to embrace death. Ulysses’ determination and the Victorian spirit of enterprise and adventure is voiced through these lines.

15.“One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” – Explain.

‘Heroic hearts’ refer to Ulysses and his followers, who bravely encounter numerous adventures and who are now equally resolved to embark upon a relentless pursuit of knowledge though made weak by time and misfortunes. Their resolution is adamant, that of pursuing knowledge inexorably and assiduously without yielding to time and fate.