Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 5.1
Unit 5 Language and time
Section 2 Language variation

This activity uses two poems (Lord Byron’s ’If that high world’ (1814), and Philip Larkin’s ’High windows’ (1974)) in order to make some provisional observations about differences in language and poetic conventions between 1814 and 1974.

1 On the evidence of Byron’s poem (below), list the language-related conventions that appear to have held for poetry in around 1814 (e.g. use of archaism, choice of words, order of words, metre, rhyme, visual layout of the lines).

2 On the evidence of Larkin’s poem (below), list language-related conventions that appear to have held for poetry in 1974.

3 Using the evidence you have gathered, make a list of the changes in poetic language between the two poems and a list of what does not seem to have changed.

4 Prevailing conventions constrain what we say, but they also enable us to say things in particular ways. Compare the two sets of conventions, and try to classify them for each poet into limiting and enabling conventions; in each case justify your decision (e.g. if you think Byron’s use of rhyme is enabling while Larkin’s use of rhyme is limiting, explain why).

If that high world

I

If that high world, which lies beyond

Our own, surviving Love endears;

If there the cherished heart be fond,

The eye the same, except in tears -

How welcome those untrodden spheres!

How sweet this very hour to die!

To soar from earth and find all fears

Lost in thy light - Eternity!

II

It must be so: ’tis not for self

That we so tremble on the brink;

And striving to o’erleap the gulf,

Yet cling to Being’s severing link.

Oh! in that future let us think

To hold, each heart, the heart that shares;

With them the immortal waters to drink,

And soul in soul, grow deathless theirs!

       (Lord Byron, 1814)

High windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives -

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God anymore, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

       (Philip Larkin, 1974)

Reading

Barber, C. (1976) Early Modern English, London: Andre Deutsch.

Cameron, D. (1985) Feminism and Linguistic Theory, London: Macmillan, pp. 79-90.

Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change, London: Polity Press.

Leith, D. (1983) A Social History of English, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 32-57.

Pauwels, A. (1998) Women Changing Language, London: Longman.