Page 250 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes plumes, was very cold: the hare felt stiff in legs and so could not run easily on the stiff grass, and the
flock of sheep in its fold made no bleating sound. Inside a beadsman was counting his prayers on a
rosary, but his fingers were numb with cold, and his condensed breath, like vapour, was rising
before the picture of Virgin Mary, as if it was smoke coming out of the burning incense in a censer, or
like the soul of man rising to heaven, though nodoby died. That day was sacred to St. Agnes.
It was night time and there was darkness inside the chapel where the beadsman had just finished his
prayers. This stanza makes the inside of the chapel vivid to our eyes and at the same time creates the
spirit of medieval life and faith in the Roman Catholic church. After finishing his prayer the beadsman
stood up from his kneeling posture and taking a lamp in his hand, he left the spot. He looked weak
and thin, and was barefoot and pale. Slowly he passed that part of the chapel where there were
statues and effigies of knights and ladies of the tombs in which they were buried. These tombs were
marked off by an iron railing, as if the place was their purgatory for the purification of their souls,
which were biding their time by praying to escape from that gloomy cold place were. The beadsman
shuddered to think what these knights and ladies in marble should be feeling, encased in cold stone
as they. To the beadsman’s imagination they were like living beings. And hence his sympathy for
them in the purgatory of cold.
2. Read the following passages carefully and explain them:
My Life has stood—a Loaded Gun
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified —
And carried Me away —
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods —
And now We hunt the Doe —
And every time I speak for Him —
The Mountains straight reply —
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow —
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through —
And when at Night—Our good Day done —
I guard My Master’s Head —
‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s
Deep pillow—to have shared —
To foe of His–I’m deadly foe —
None stir the second time —
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye —
Or an emphatic Thumb —
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I —
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die —
Explanations: These lines have been taken from the poem “My Life had Stood— A Loaded Gun”
composed by Emily Dickinson.
The poem begins with a brilliant conceit. Fused from the ambiguous abstraction “life” and the explicit
concretion “loaded gun”, it expresses the charged potential of the human being who remains dormant
until “identified” into conscious vitality. The paradox of finding oneself through losing oneself in
love is rendered in the poem by one word: she achieves south, and a hurricane rages overhead in the

244 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY