Of Man's First Disobedience

OF MAN’S FIRST DISOBEDIENCE            

John Milton

     John Milton is one of the greatest poets in English.  He has written many well-known poems like Lycidas, L’Allegro and Ilpenseroso. But he is remembered even today for his great epic Paradise Lost.

      ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience’ is the first twenty six lines of Paradise Lost Book I. In these lines, Milton states the theme of his epic.  He also invokes the heavenly muses to help him in accomplishing the task of writing the epic.

       Milton begins his poem by declaring the theme of his epic- man’s first act of disobedience to God and the sorrowful consequences that followed from it.  This has a biblical reference.  God instructs Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  But disobeying God, Adam anad Eve eat the fruit and earn the displeasure of God.  Milton says that this sin of disobedience brought death to human beings and the loss of Paradise.

      Milton then invokes the Heavenly Muse, the goddess of poetry to sing about the subject through him. He makes it very clear that this muse is greater than the classical muse.  He associates his muse with the Holy Spirit which is a part in the creation of the Universe.  Hence, the poet hopes that his poem will be a pioneering one. Eventually, he requests the muses to inspire him to tell the human kind the greatness of God and his ways.

      The beginning lines from Paradise Lost is the befitting one for the great epic. It exhibits Milton’s use of grand style and his wide scholarship in biblical knowledge.

Mending Wall Essay

MENDING WALL

                                                                                                                        Robert Frost

            Robert Frost is the national poet of America.  Like Wordsworth, he is a poet of nature.  He is known as the poet of New England (North Eastern region on America) since many of his poems deal with the New England farmers.

            Mending Wall is one of the most widely quoted poems of Frost. It is a dramatic lyric or monologue. The speaker is the poet himself. The poem expresses the poet’s views and attitudes towards boundaries. The other character is the poet’s neighbour. He does not speak even a single word, but we come to know of his conservative views and orthodoxy, from what the poet says about him.

            The poet and his neighbour get together every spring to repair the stone wall between their respective properties. The neighbour, an old England farmer, seems to have a deep-seated faith in the value of walls and fences. He declines to explain his belief and only reiterates his father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

            The poet remains unconvinced and asks the neighbour to look beyond the old-fashioned ideas.  His neighbour will not be moved.  The poet sees his neighbour as a person from an old era, a living example of a dark age mentality.  But the neighbour simply repeats the proverb again.

            Thus, the poem represents two opposing attitudes towards life – one is the surrender to the natural forces and the other battling with them. The poem also explores the role of boundaries in human society as the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbours..