00517--The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

                              

   The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

Plays	Summary
A Street Car Named Desire	Is concerned with the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and abnormality.  Blanche the protagonist of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America.  Sex takes the form of perversion.
The Summer and Smoke	Deals with unsuccessful love affair.  Alma is the central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form, John on the other hand is a sex profligate.  The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken.  The play stresses that love and sex are inseparable.
The Rose Tattoo	Is concerned with a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her husband.  The play points out that false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of sexual passion.  Sexuality suppressed reawakens with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak.  Here force of sexual passion gains domination.
Kingdom of Earth	Presents a true picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than anything else.  Spiritual satisfaction alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.  Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment.  To him sex  is the possible path, it is everything.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Dramatizes the feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception.  It portrays the deterioration of a young aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the oblivion that will bring peace.  The characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
Sweet Bird of Youth	Is concerned with the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life.  Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the central characters of the play.  Boss Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their happiness.  But the only way through which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making.  Love making is the only “dependable distraction”.
The Milk Train Does not Stop Here	Depicts the pain and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections.
Period of Adjustment	Williams pursues his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money.  Williams sincerely desires to help people rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so much in his own tormented history.

00516--The Little Girl in the Rain

The Little Girl in the Rain

It was a rainy morning.  For me there is nothing better than to hope for a rain.  In Ahmedabad anything that hides the sun is always welcome.  It was a relief from the heat.  I was on my way to the highway where the university bus would stop for the employees and the students.

There were a few huts on one side of the road.  The first one in the line almost touched the road.  The rain was not harsh, but still it was doing justice to the monsoon season.  The street was almost empty though it was 8 a.m.

Each house seemed like an introvert.

They held back their thoughts.

It was peaceful.

The road was full of gutters and I had to be cautious at each my step.  I also had to be careful about the vehicles that occasionally passed by.  They could shower you with muddy water.

It was then I saw a little girl squatting on the tar road.  She was facing opposite to me.  I could see utensils around her.  The door of her house was closed. No one was around.

 I passed her by, and I looked back. 

She was just seven or eight years old.  I suddenly had an urge to capture that image.  I had recently bought a camera.  But it was at home.  If I went back I could miss both my bus and the girl in the rain.  My mobile had an inbuilt camera.  I was about to take out my mobile but then I couldn't.

I stood there still.

She didn’t even look at me.

She was lost in some thoughts, and was mechanically doing the dishes.  The rain drops that fell on her head were rolling down her face.

She wasn’t crying.  But indeed the childhood in her was crying.

Was she imagining the utensils as toys? Was she enjoying the rain?

I couldn’t see any spark of joy in her eyes.  Her bending figure was a silent request to let her back to the warmth of home. 

It would be possible to capture a seven year old girl who was washing the utensils, but it was impossible to capture the stillness I saw on her face.  The cloudy sky above, the muddy earth below, the sad music of the rain and the little girl and myself couldn’t be caught in a still frame.

I captured her image in my mind, and turned and walked away so that I wouldn’t miss the bus.

As long as that little girl was in the rain, I knew, my country would be fine and prosperous.  Things should remain the same.  Humanity, I thought, at least in my country is subjected to vasectomy; thus no possibility of the girl entering back home; no possibility of a revolution that would right the wrong.

 

I was to take a class on Ethics and Values for engineering students that very morning.  In the class I asked them to come up with an ethical issue that bothered them.  When they were searching for one I narrowed down the range and asked them specifically about an ethical issue that they came across in the very campus they study.  One student came up with the issue: ‘prohibition of the use of mobile phones in the class room’.

I couldn't wait.  I asked them about a girl of 12 or 13 who works as a sweeper in the university canteen.  All of them must have seen her there.   Is her being there an ethical issue?

Where is she supposed to be? I asked.

In school.

The soft answer came from a student who was sitting in the front row.  I could see a change of expression on everyone’s face.  Obviously they have never thought of that girl being in the canteen sweeping and cleaning as an ethical issue.

Yes, it is an ethical issue.  Their silence agreed with me.

Before moving to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant I wondered what that little girl in the rain might be doing at that moment.

                                                            ********

00515--MY CANON PHOTOS

00514--The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw

          The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a very well-constructed play.  It has:

 exposition,

complication, and,

conclusion. 

Act-1 works as exposition.  Main characters are introduced.  Prof.Higgins, the hero of the play claims that he can train ignorant and ill-educated flower girl, Eliza Doolitle in such a way that after six months people will accept her as a Duchess. 

 In Act-II and Act-III, the complication takes place.  Eliza’s training has started.  She begins to change in her speaking, dressing and manners after the training.  Now she is presented at the Ambassador’s party.  This event works as the climax.  It comes between Act-III and Act-IV, the complication sets in Higgins behaves in callous manners and Eliza did not have soft feelings of love for him.  She resents her treatment as an experiment.  Act-IV and Act-V function with spirited discussion of the consequences of Eliza’s education.  Higgins becomes totally dependent upon Eliza.  There takes place a verbal sword play between them.  Finally, Eliza accepts Freddy as husband and leaves Higgins, and Prof.Higgins laughs out the whole affairs. 

Thus the play progresses from ignorance to knowledge, the myth fades into the reality the didacticism turns from Phonetics to life and Eliza’s spirit evolves from darkness to light.  Thus the construction of the play is logical, artistic and elegant. 

00513-- VOLPONE (1606) /PLAY/by BEN JONSON

1.      VOLPONE (1606) /PLAY/by BEN JONSON

Ben Jonson did not possess Marlowe’s poetic power, but his career on the whole was more productive and better rounded.  One of the best of his plays is Volpone.  It is a harsh and scathing exposure of human greed in terms which are at the same time horrifying for their baseness and yet mockingly humorous.  The rich and avaricious Volpone, aided by his wily servant, Mosca (The Fly), pretends that he is dying.   He tricks his equally greedy friends into giving him costly gifts of gold and jewels, leading each one to believe that he has a chance of becoming heir to Volpone’s great wealth. 

When the friends have been bled, one of them having disinherited his son in Volpone’s favour, another having offered him his wife, Volpone spreads the rumour that he has died, and confounds the hopefuls/candidates by a will making Mosca his heir.  Mosca, seizing the upper hand, tries to keep Volpone legally dead, but succeeds only in bringing the house of cards down upon the heads of the whole unsavoury crew. 

Volpone is an impressive play, similar in quality and texture to the almost forgotten plays of Machiavelli.  In 1928 the Theatre Guild produced it in an adaption for the modern stage by Stefan Zweig, and it has since been made into a French film. 

00512--What is the dramatic function of the Good and Bad Angels in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?

What is the dramatic function of the Good and Bad Angels in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in its use of the personified Good and Bad Angels reveals the influence of the older morality play tradition.  Morality drama was allegorical and didactic, and usually dealt with the struggle of an everyman-type figure against the forces of evil represented frequently by the Seven Deadly Sins.    Man’s victory emphasized the positive forces of grace and a life following religious and ethical teachings.  The negative aspect, or man’s defeat, was the reverse of this movement, and dramatists found this appealing because it offered the moral lesson that retributive justice punished sin.  Obviously there is a close relationship between tragedy and this latter process, and Doctor Faustus is a type of reverse morality play because it is concerned with spiritual defeat and not victory. 

In Doctor Faustus the Good and Bad Angel, as in the morality play, contend for Faustus’s soul.  They represent in an exterior way the interior conflict of Faustus between good and evil.  The Good and Bad Angel appear repeatedly throughout the play to show the recurring torment within Faustus’s soul.  The Good Angel signifies the presence of grace, and repeatedly urges Faustus to repent.  The Bad Angel represents evil and the forces leading Faustus to damnation.  Dramatically, these personified figures offered Marlowe a way, other than the soliloquy, to present Faustus’s spiritual struggle.    

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.  

00510--Song to Celia/lyric/Ben Jonson

S           Song to Celia/lyric/Ben Jonson

  Song to Celia is from Ben Jonson’s The Forest.  John F.M.Dovaston was the first to point out in 1815 that song to Celia was constructed from passages in the prose epistles of Philostratus.  Ben Jonson is indebted to him for the bantering tone and the ingenious conceit.  But he has so skilfully transformed the borrowing that the poem appear original and, to use the words of George Parfit, thoroughly English in Diction, syntax and rhythm.  W.M.Evans observes that the happy marriage of words and music is responsible for its excellence.

The first eight lines express how the poet esteems the kiss of Celia superior to wine and Jove’s nectar.  The next eight lines suggest that she can influence and improve upon Nature; for she makes the garland fresh and lends her fragrance to it, which is more pleasant and lasting than its own sweet smell.  This conceit smacks of the metaphysical concept of unified sensibility.  The poem, thus extols the unique and and almost divine trait of Celia.

The poem may be divided into two eight-lined stanzas with the rhyme scheme abcb abcb, each line consisting of eight syllables.  It is marked by classical poise, elegance, subdued emotion and an urban tone.

00509-- Care-charmer Sleep/sonnet/by Samuel Daniel

         

     
 Care-charmer Sleep/sonnet/by Samuel Daniel

Care-charmer Sleep is a sonnet in Delia.  Like Sidney, Daniel addresses sleep.  In the first quatrain, he describes sleep as a care-charmer, the brother of death and son of dark night.  He requests sleep to relieve him of the agony caused by his unfulfilled love.  I the second quatrain he says that the waking hours of the day will make him mourn his misfortune.  In the third quatrain he asks dream not to visit him during the night, unfolding the painful desires of the day.  In the couplet he expresses his wish not to wake up from his sleep lest he be tormented by the disdain of the mistress.

 Lever praises Daniel for the formal perfection achieved by him in his sonnet structure—a perfection unmatched in the work of any of his contemporaries except Shakespeare—and for the subtle variations of metre in consonance with the implication of these traits.  Daniel achieves his effect with monosyllabic words.  Long vowel and diphthongs are used to produce a slow movement in consonance with the heaviness of his heart.  The sonnet consists of three quatrains with a final couplet, having the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

00508-- SUMMARY/ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD by THOMAS GRAY

ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD by  THOMAS GRAY

Thomas Gray was born in London in 1716.Gray occupies a distinctive place among the transitional poets of England during the 18 century.He stands like a giant between 'the ages of classicism and romanticism'. His thin volumes of poems forge a link between the two ages.

     

      Gray's elegy differs from the elegies written by other poets.He does not mourn the death of a friend but the death of poor people in general.The elegy has 'anonymity'as its main appeal.It is not artificial but sincere in its expression.

   

      Elegy written in a country churchyard is the most popular work of Gray.Dr.Johnson said the poem "abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind,and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo".William Hazlitt considers the elegy as one of the most classical productions that has never been penned "by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralizing on human life".

      In the opening stanzas Gray builds up the suitable atmosphere for the poem.The poet is all alone in the churchyard.It is late evening.Darkness engulfs the whole place.The poet gives us a visual picture of the churchyard as he sees it.There are elm and yew trees in the churchyard and the 'rude forefathers of the hamlet'lie buried under the shade of the trees.The description of the late evening and the loneliness of the poet prepare us for the melancholy reflections that follow.

           

The poet describes the joys of the poor villagers in visual images,the domestic scene with the busy housewife and clustering children and the farm scene with the sickle and the furrow.The villagers have put over the graves simple tombstones to honour the dead in their own way.The "frail monuments"of the poor can in no way compare with the costly monuments of the rich.The costly monuments are of no use over the dead.Once the life is gone,nothing in the world can bring it back.See the poet's lines:

           Can storied urn or animated bust

           Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

           Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust

           Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

      Then the poet proceeds to reflect on the emptiness of earthly life.Nobody can escape death.Death lays his icy arms on everybody.Birth,power,beauty and wealth will have to submit to death.

      The poet is saddened at the thought that the talents gifted rustics did not flower owing to their poverty and lack of education.Many of them would have become poets,patriots and administrators had they been given opportunities.But he feels in a way consoled.The poor have not performed great achevements but they have committed no crimes.

      Gray appends to his "Elegy" an epitaph. Prof.Bateson and Prof.Odell Shepherd consider the epitaph as a serious flaw in this great poem.They believe that the epitaph should have been written as a separate poem.

00507-- Muiopotmos or The Fate of the Butterfly /Edmund Spenser

 

Muiopotmos or The Fate of the Butterfly /Edmund Spenser/poetry

   

The Fate of the Butterflie is a mock-heroic poem or epyllion of 440 lines.  Spenser used allegory, mythology, fable,and symbol as an indirect means of expressing his thoughts and feelings in order to avoid a brush with authorities and aristocrats.  His Mother Hubberd’s Tale embodies a political satire in the guise of the fable of The Fox and the Ape. 

Muiopotmos narrates the fable of the fight between the Butterfly Clarion and the Spider Archanol.  It is supposed to allude to the animosity between Essex and Raliegh or between Sidney and Oxford. The first stanza of the prescribed piece portrays the butterfly as being endowed with a delicate aesthetic sensitivity.  He tastes every flower and every herb in the garden without upsetting their order or disfiguring them. 

The second stanza shows the butterfly as an Epicurean with a refined sensibility.  He seems to believe in the dictum that variety is the spice of life.  Spenser’s humour comes out in the aphoristic utterance; for all change is sweete.

00506--An Evening of Respect

An Evening of Respect

I couldn’t recognize K when he stood there and greeted me good evening.  

It is natural to forget the faces and names.  Now busy days are felt busier because the very being busy is for a shallow cause – often to make profit.  Profit making is not a sin but pretending that one is doing a holy act while working just for money is nothing but being a fraud.  When doctor shows concern for the patient’s health one might wonder that if the patient had no money to pay the consulting fee he woudn’t  be able sit in front of the doctor.  The problem comes when the doctor pretends that his primary concern is the health of people. 

So when K stood there I didn’t recognize him.  Obviously I was doing a job where my primary concern was the salary I drew every month.  Human relations were only secondary.  I would rather remember things that could other ways cause me an increment than remember a face that might not practically be of any use to me.

I offered him a seat. 

He said he didn’t expect me there because last time I had told him that I would resign and leave the place for something better.    

There was no chair on the other side of the table.  It was kept beside my chair.

He sat down.

Then he introduced me to a children’s magazine.  But that didn’t last as I didn’t have any kids, and as I asked him about his job.  He  is paid well.  Then the talk gradually shifted to education.  He was not happy about the way some well educated people treated him.

Formal education has nothing to do with manners.  We concluded.

Whenever I went to a new class I would have to send the students back to the door so that they ask permission before entering the class. 

Money is the new master.  All are but servants to that master.  This generation students realise it in a pretty early stage. 

When money becomes the means and end everything else becomes secondary.

K told me he was not happy with his job.  That he would resign and join for PhD.  I wished him all the best.

K then started to talk about his life.  His mom was duff and dumb.  His father lost his life in 1985 Gujarat riot when K was just 6 months old.  His school (where his mother worked as a peon) threw him out because they thought he was too dull to study.  His mother got him admission in the Municipality school.  It was better.  Government gave grant to poor students there.  That helped K’s family’s financial condition. 

 

His mother couldn’t teach him in a traditional way as she couldn't speak or hear, instead she gave him exercises on Maths and English. He was to simply copy them as many times as he could.  She had passed her SSC examination and was qualified to teach her son.  K filled in hundreds of papers with excercises on various subjects. 

 

K did well in school.

K would ride his bicycle for 15 kilometers to Satellite to learn Spoken English.  He spends one hour before the mirror practicing English speaking. 

  

His journey has been wonderful.

I didn’t tell him my story.

 

Everyone has a story to tell.

While he was leaving I stood up and shook his hand.

It was not because his story was great but because he lit my soul with positive energy.

He forgot to sell me books.

But he did give me a leaf from the book of life. For free.

                                                  END

00505-- Two Monks and a Woman

Two Monks and a Woman

[by Osho]

Two monks were coming back to the monastery; they had gone into the village to preach. It was evening, the sun was setting; soon it would be night. They came across a river. A young woman, a beautiful woman, was standing there on the bank hesitating whether to enter the river or not: it may be too deep, it appears very deep.

The first monk -- the older one -- followed the Buddhist rule not to look at a woman. But that is a very strange rule: first you have to look, then only will you be able to see whether she is a woman or not. You can follow the rule only by breaking it! So he must have looked -- of course a stolen look -- and then he must have looked down. The Buddhist rule is: Don't look more than four feet ahead. Such fear... and he must have been trembling inside. And he crossed the river.

When he was crossing the river and was reaching the other shore, suddenly he remembered his younger fellow monk, who was also coming behind. What has happened to him? He looked back. The younger monk was carrying the woman on his shoulders! The older one was really enraged; in his rage there must have been jealousy also; otherwise why be angry?

The younger one brought the girl to the other shore, left her there, and both the monks moved towards the monastery. For one mile the old man didn't say a single word. Then, when they reached to the gate of the monastery, the old man turned to the younger monk and said, "Listen, I will have to report it to the abbot.

This is against the rules. Buddha has said: Don't touch a woman, don't look at a woman. You have not only seen her, you have not only touched her, you have carried her on your shoulders. This is too much! This is going against the law."

I don't think that Buddha has said that. A man like Buddha cannot say such nonsense things. But twenty-five centuries of stupid interpreters have done as much harm as they can do.

The young monk said, "But I have left the woman on the bank, far behind. Are you still carrying her on your shoulders?"

00506--photos gujarat all