In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
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In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28
Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work.
Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English.
Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you’re not even a good actor, you’re clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street’, or ‘girl third from right in crowd’. You don’t even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You’re trapped in a trivial story, written by an idiot, and it means nothing.
It's not only nihilistic, it’s also startlingly unchristian,
And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He’s lying to himself.
Very clever that Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.
The Poetry Voice
In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps.
At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.
