Artistic Structures Define Worldviews

Artistic Structures Define Worldviews

  • Submitted By: nlc129
  • Date Submitted: 06/05/2010 8:11 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 940
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 292

The artistry in poems by Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller present a particular worldview of the aristocratic culture. This view is very different Herrick, who was a 17th century poet that focused on laborers in his poem “The Hock Cart.” The contrasts between the poems not only lay in the actual text, but also in the art of the poem. This includes rhyme schemes, indentation, vocabulary, punctuation, division of the poems into parts, etc.
Carew’s “To Saxham,” Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper” and “To Penshurst,” and Waller’s “At Penshurst” and “On St. James’s Park,” present the aristocrats in a particular way. The aristocrats lived “above” everyone else and did it excessively. The food in “Inviting a Friend to Supper” begins with a salad. There is then a “short-legged hen” followed by partridge, pheasant and woodcock. Finally, there is canary wine, which only the best drink. The meal gradually gets better and then there is mention that no one lesser will be invited to this dinner.
The poem is written in couplets and is split up into sections. The sections are determined by the presence of periods. There are only three periods in the entire poem and there are many colons and semicolons. The typical use of a colon in a sentence is to create a list. Semicolons are used to separate long sentences. The fact that there are only three periods in the entire poem while there are several colons and semicolons indicates that there is an excess of words, or rather, there is an excess of food. Each section builds upon each other. The first section’s vocabulary includes the words “worth,” “acceptance,” “desire” and “dignify.” This section sets up who is “worthy” of this food. It then builds up to the second section, which indicates what food is at the table. The last section determines who will be excluded from this food. It is as though as the poem builds up and the food increases, there is a hierarchy. Only certain people can be at the top, and only some...

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