00511--Agincourt/poem/Michael Drayton



     Agincourt/poem/Michael Drayton
The title under which Drayton wrote this was The Ballad of Agincourt.  This poem and to the Virginian Voyage are, according to Hardin Craig, two of the best ballads in English.  Both of them are classified as odes.  They are Horatian rather than Pindaric odes, though they lack the detached meditation and streak of scepticism associated with the former.  It doesnot strictly measure up a standard ballad which is a narrative song, dramatic and impersonal, characterised by the absence of sentimentality and a tragic conception of life.  It does not follow the ballad stanza which is a quatrain in alternate iambic trimester and tetrameter, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.  The devices of refrain and incremental repetition are also absent.  It tells the story with action and dialogue.  It exhibits the personal emotion of the poet, that is, his patriotism.  However, it can be considered a variant form invented by Drayton to suit his need.   It is, as John Buxton remarks, metrical tour de force with the verse beating a tattoo for King Harry and his men with supreme gallantry.  Drayton kept on revising and polishing this poem from 1606 to 1619, till he could make clear, to use the words of Harold Child, the ringing tramp of the marching army.  With its stanzas of eight short, crisp lines, rhyming aaabcccb, it is the model for a war poem.

Agincourt refers to the Battle of Agincourt (Agincourt was a 

village in France, where the battle took place) fought in 1415, in which the English King, Henry V won a victory over the French.  Drayton in the poem, pays a glowing tribute to Henry V whose heroism according to him, sweeps away everything before him.  

Labels

Addison (4) ADJECTIVES (1) ADVERBS (1) Agatha Christie (1) American Literature (6) APJ KALAM (1) Aristotle (9) Bacon (1) Bakhtin Mikhail (3) Barthes (8) Ben Jonson (7) Bernard Shaw (1) BERTRAND RUSSEL (1) Blake (1) Blogger's Corner (2) BOOK REVIEW (2) Books (2) Brahman (1) Charles Lamb (2) Chaucer (1) Coleridge (12) COMMUNICATION SKILLS (5) Confucius (1) Critical Thinking (3) Cultural Materialism (1) Daffodils (1) Deconstruction (3) Derrida (2) Doctor Faustus (5) Dr.Johnson (5) Drama (4) Dryden (14) Ecofeminism (1) Edmund Burke (1) EDWARD SAID (1) elegy (1) English Lit. Drama (7) English Lit. Essays (3) English Lit.Poetry (210) Ethics (5) F.R Lewis (4) Fanny Burney (1) Feminist criticism (9) Frantz Fanon (2) FREDRIC JAMESON (1) Freud (3) GADAMER (1) GAYATRI SPIVAK (1) General (4) GENETTE (1) GEORG LUKÁCS (1) GILLES DELEUZE (1) Gosson (1) GRAMMAR (8) gramsci (1) GREENBLATT (1) HAROLD BLOOM (1) Hemmingway (2) Henry James (1) Hillis Miller (2) HOMI K. BHABHA (1) Horace (3) I.A.Richards (6) Indian Philosophy (8) Indian Writing in English (2) John Rawls (1) Judaism (25) Kant (1) Keats (1) Knut Hamsun (1) Kristeva (2) Lacan (3) LINDA HUTCHEON (1) linguistics (4) LIONEL TRILLING (1) Literary criticism (191) literary terms (200) LOGIC (7) Longinus (4) LUCE IRIGARAY (1) lyric (1) Marlowe (4) Martin Luther King Jr. (1) Marxist criticism (3) Matthew Arnold (12) METAPHORS (1) MH Abram (2) Michael Drayton (1) MICHEL FOUCAULT (1) Milton (3) Modernism (1) Monroe C.Beardsley (2) Mulla Nasrudin Stories (190) MY POEMS (17) Narratology (1) New Criticism (2) NORTHROP FRYE (1) Norwegian Literature (1) Novel (1) Objective Types (8) OSHO TALES (3) PAUL DE MAN (1) PAUL RICOEUR (1) Petrarch (1) PHILOSOPHY (4) PHOTOS (9) PIERRE FÉLIX GUATTARI (1) Plato (5) Poetry (13) Pope (5) Post-Colonial Reading (2) Postcolonialism (3) Postmodernism (5) poststructuralism (8) Prepositions (4) Psychoanalytic criticism (4) PYTHAGORAS (1) QUEER THEORY (1) Quotes-Quotes (8) Robert Frost (7) ROMAN OSIPOVISCH JAKOBSON (1) Romantic criticism (20) Ruskin (1) SAKI (1) Samuel Daniel (1) Samuel Pepys (1) SANDRA GILBERT (1) Saussure (12) SCAM (1) Shakespeare (157) Shelley (2) SHORT STORY (1) Showalter (8) Sidney (5) SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1) SLAVOJ ZIZEK (1) SONNETS (159) spenser (3) STANLEY FISH (1) structuralism (14) Sunitha Krishnan (1) Surrealism (2) SUSAN GUBAR (1) Sydney (3) T.S.Eliot (10) TED TALK (1) Tennesse Williams (1) Tennyson (1) TERRY EAGLETON (1) The Big Bang Theory (3) Thomas Gray (1) tragedy (1) UGC-NET (10) Upanisads (1) Vedas (1) Vocabulary test (7) W.K.Wimsatt (2) WALTER BENJAMIN (1) Walter Pater (2) Willam Caxton (1) William Empson (2) WOLFGANG ISER (1) Wordsworth (14) എന്‍റെ കഥകള്‍ (2) തത്വചിന്ത (14) ബ്ലോഗ്ഗര്‍ എഴുതുന്നു (6) ഭഗവത്‌ഗീതാ ധ്യാനം (1)