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"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" is an 18th-century ode by Thomas Gray. It is composed of ten 10-line stanzas, rhyming ABABCCDEED, with the B lines and final D line in iambic trimeter and the others in iambic tetrameter.
The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the General Prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where he meets a group of 'sundry folk' who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, a martyr reputed to have the power of healing the sinful.
Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post-Restoration and Augustan periods in Great Britain.The earliest example of the form is the Batrachomyomachia ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great.
It appeared in Chapter 10 of Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and was sung by a character in the book, the Mock Turtle. The poem is very similar to "The Spider and the Fly" in its rhyme scheme, meter, and tone. The first lines of the two songs are as follows: Will you walk a little faster said a whiting to a snail...
Written about 1678, but not published until 1682 (see 1682 in poetry), "Mac Flecknoe" is the outcome of a series of disagreements between Thomas Shadwell and Dryden.Their quarrel blossomed from the following disagreements: "1) their different estimates of the genius of Ben Jonson, 2) the preference of Dryden for comedy of wit and repartee and of Shadwell, the chief disciple of Jonson, for ...
For the mock-heroic structure of the Dunciad itself, however, the idea seems to have come most clearly from MacFlecknoe. MacFlecknoe is a poem celebrating the apotheosis of Thomas Shadwell, whom Dryden nominates as the dullest poet of the age. Shadwell is the spiritual son of Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poet of low fame, and he takes his place ...
With an ambiguous ending, the poem does not just end with a death, but instead, it just begins. [20] The monody clearly ends with a death and an absolute end but also moves forward and comes full circle because it takes a look back at the pastoral world left behind making the ambivalence of the end a mixture of creation and destruction. [21]
The poem, on the literal level, celebrates the simple life exemplified in the new America by hasty pudding (or cornmeal mush). In three cantos (the principal division known from epic and heroic poetry) he celebrates the mythical origin of corn , its production, and its consumption within the homely setting of the American farmer.