The Mystic Drum
The Mystic Drum Explanation A slumber did my spirit seal And stately ships go on She is all States, and all Princes, I, O sages standing In God’s holy fire. The Mystic Drum is a Poem that is Composed by An African Poet. Here we explain all of the Chapters from the mystic Drum.
She is all States, and all Princes, I,
She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor’s mimlque; All wealth alchimie.
This bed thy center is these walls, thy sphere.
Explanation: These lines occur in the poem The Sunne Rising by John Donne one of the greatest poets in the English language. Donne is a poet with a unified sensibility in which both thought and feeling are simultaneously expressed through the use of fantastic conceits, farfetched images, unbelievable hyperboles, scholarly allusions, and colloquial speech rhythms.
He is intensely personal, highly witty, sensuous, and dramatic. He is at his best in his love poems, whether profane or divine. The Mystic Drum
The poem presents an uncommon unconventional picture of the sun rising in a metaphysical style. The theme of the poem is unusual. The sun is normal life-giving and therefore welcome. But the poet says exactly the opposite. The poet condemns the sun because it disturbs the lovers. The argument is persuasive, though fantastic.
Let the sun disturb all others, not the lovers because love neither knows any seasons nor any units of time like hours, days, or months which are mere rags of time. Using an unusual conceit the speaker says that the lovers could overshadow the sink with a wink so that the sun blinded (by the beauty of the beloved) would rise late the next day to find all the wealth of India lying in love’s bedroom.
As the whole world has contracted into it, the sun would do well to shine on it to the entire globe eight suns are here made powerless and love is made the center of the world.
Here in these lines, Donne presents an artistic sum up. The beloved of the poet represents all states and the poet himself symbolizes all princes. According to the poet, all the princes of the world play the same game of love.
And compared to his basic act of love, all honor is merely a mimicry and all wealth is only alchemy. The sun is only half as elated as the poet and his beloved are, and the entire world has been squeezed into that bed-chamber.
The sun has grown old and needs rest. Since the function -of the sun is to give warmth to the world, that duty is fulfilled by his warming the poet and his beloved. The stanza ends with the poet commanding.
The sun to shine for the poet and his beloved: The bed is the center of the sun and the walls of the bed-chamber make up its sphere of orbit. Here Donne seems to be using the old belief of Ptolemaic cosmology that the sun moved around the earth.
The Mystic Drum Explanation
O sages standing In God’s holy fire
O sages standing In God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul
Explanation: These lines occur in Yeats’s poem’; “Sailing to Byzantium.” His poetry is deeply symbolic and is generally characterized by spiritualism and mysticism. The poem was written in 1926 and marks the final phase of his poetry. The Mystic Drum
In this phase of his creative career, Yeats was torn between passionate regret for the warning of physical strength and the desire to enrich his soul with things on the mind and spirit.
Here in these lines the poet refers to the sages in the Firenze at St. Appolinaire at Ravenna and invokes them to spiral down the cone to him. He implores them to purify his soul in their holy fire.
He bewails the fact that his heart is “sick with desire’ and is ‘fastened to a dying animal,’ his aging body. Only the sages can redeem it and the highest redemption for him is to be gathered into the artifice of eternity,’ or to be made a part of the divine pattern of beauty.
“Perne’ also means a kind of hawk and the image of a bird is like the descent by the sages. It is convincingly linked with the golden bird in the last stanza.
The world of art and image is as holy as a sage. God, is the supreme artist and is the artificer. eternity and the holy fire, like the poet with his imagination which makes all artifices.
Weave a circle around him thrice
Weave a circle around him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Explanation: These lines occur in S.T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, the recreation of a dream that Coleridge saw when he had fallen asleep. The poem is often described as the most perfect of all records of dream experiences, with the coherent incoherence of a dream.
The poem creates a wonderful picture of a dream-like vision that the poet had as a psychological curiosity tries to penetrate the process of creation. It considers the role of the conscious. The subconscious and unconscious are in the process of creation.
It also speaks of the role of inspired imagination in the process of poetic creation. In the poem, there are echoes of several books that Coleridge had read. The immediate source of inspiration, however, were books like His pilgrimage and travels to Discover the source of the Nile.
In the poem, the poet conjures up visions of two kinds of paradise, one of the stately dome and pleasure garden of Kubla Khan and the other the paradise of Mount Abora, a reference to a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book IV.
Here These lines present a picture of an inspired poet who is nearly divine in his inspiration as he feeds on the milk of paradise.’ They take us to the beauty of this song of the Abyssinian maid reminding us of Wordsworth’s reaction to the songs of the solitary reaper.
Coleridge here says that if he could bring back within him the symphony and song of that maid, he would get indeed such a deep pleasure that he would build the pleasure dome that Kubla Khan wanted to construct.
He would become a person who has fed on the dew of honey and has drunk the milk of paradise. In short, the song of the Abyssinian maid is so powerful that it can give. eternal happiness to people and make them do great things.
Explanation of Mystic Drum
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavyweight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift; and proud,
EXPLANATION: These lines have been taken from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind‘. It is one of the finest lyrics in English Poetry. It epitomizes Shelley’s revolutionary ideals in life and art. The poem was composed in October 1819, in a forest by the Arno river near Florence, in Italy.
The theme of the poem is the spiritual regeneration of mankind. Here in these lines, Shelley gives vent to a passionate desire to be lifted from the torpor of life. He says that the west wind should lift him as it lifts and drives the leaves, the clouds, and the waves.
He is in extreme dejection and melancholy. The circumstances of Shelley’s life at this time were singularly unhappy. He had lost his children recently and had been attacked by critics for his recently published poetry. He feels miserable.
He has bled on the thorns of life. He has been weighed and bowed with a heavyweight of hours, though in his early life he was endowed with fiery energy. He was tameless, swift, and proud like the west wind.
Shelley wants to suggest that though his spirit is under dejection, he is capable of the same wild and tameless energy and rebellious spirit which he once possessed and which is manifest in the west wind. In this poem, Shelley addresses the spirit of the west wind and implores it to spread his fiery message of revolution.
In a most passionate invocation of the west wind, he has been able to establish a complete identification between man and nature, or between the poet and the west wind. Shelley represents the voice of a new age rising in revolt against a decadent order.
A slumber did my spirit seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
EXPLANATION: “A slumber did my spirit seal” is one of the four Lucy poems written by Wordsworth. In 1799, when Wordsworth lived at Goslar. near the Harz forest, in Germany, with his sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge, he wrote these Lucy poems.
In all these poems the poet speaks of an imaginary girl, perhaps modeled on his sister Dorothy, whom he called Lucy. According to Coleridge, perhaps Wordsworth imagined the death of his sister in this poem.
In this line, s the soul of the poet was under a blissful sleep. It was as if sleep had sealed the soul of the poet.
So much so that it was happily unaware of all human fears or anxieties. To the poet, his beloved seemed beyond ouch of age or death. It seemed to the poet as if she would never grow old and die. The Mystic Drum
Break, break, break,
Break, break, break,
On the cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
EXPLANATION: These lines have been taken from “Break, Break, Break‘, an elegiac poem by Lord Tennyson, perhaps the greatest and most representative poet of the Victorian age.
In this brief lyric Tennyson mourns the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, who died at an early age in 1833. In a note to the lyric Tennyson said: “This poem saw the light along with the dawn in a Lincolnshire lane at 5 a.m.”.
Here in this stanza, the poet says that even as the sea breaks its wavęs on the cold grey stones he is not able to give vent his feelings. The poet suggests in these lines that the sea can at least find a release (for its support grief) in the breaking of the waves on the cold grey stones.
But his feelings can find no release. Here the poet presents a contrast between the vast sea and his sorrow leaden heart.
And stately ships go on
And stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that it still!
EXPLANATION: These lines have been taken from “Break, Break, Break’, an elegiac poem by Lord Tennyson, perhaps the greatest and most representative poet of the Victorian age. In this brief lyric Tennyson mourns the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, who died at an early age in 1833.
In a note to the lyric Tennyson said: “This poem saw the light along with the dawn in a Lincolnshire lane at 5 a.m.”. Here in this stanza, the poet says that though the “stately ships’ go on to their “haven’ or harbor under the hill, his own heart is restless with grief over Arthur Hallam’s loss.
He misses the warm touch of the hand that is now vanished, and the sweet sound of the voice that is now still. Though the ships sail towards home and rest, his own heart is restless with deep grief.
In these lines, Tennyson presents a contrast between the stately ships heading homeward and his own heart that can find no peace and rest.
Ah ! as the heart grows older
Ah ! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of Fanwood leafmeal lie:
And yet you will weep and know why.
sorrow’s springs are the same.
EXPLANATION: These lines have been taken from the brief lyric “Spring and Fall” by G. M. Hopkins, a modern poet who lived and wroté during the Victorian era. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and his poetry is deeply religious.
His poems were made with an entirely original and synthetic poetic style and he invented “sprung rhythm” in poetry. His poems were published for the first time about thirty years after his death (1889), by his friend Robert Bridges.
Hopkins is considered a modern poet, Here in these lines the poet, addressing Margaret, says that there is a close similarity between the falling autumn leaves and transitory human life, though the child is not able to realize it.
As the heart grows older it becomes colder and less sensitive. But the sorrow for the falling leaves originates from the same source as that for the transience of human existence. The child would, perhaps, realize it when she grows up.
An aged man is but a paltry thing
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul claps its hands and sings, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
Explanations: These lines have been taken from Yeats’s poem” Sailing to Byzantium‘. His poetry is deeply symbolic and is generally characterized by spiritualism and mysticism. The poem was written in 1926 and marks the final phase of his poetry. In this phase of his creative career.
Yeats was torn between passionate regret for the waning of physical strength and the desire to enrich his’ soul with things on the mind and spirit.
Here in this line,s the poet delineates the problem of old age. He says that an aged man:’ is like a tattered coat upon a stick or a ridiculously insignificant being. He can be best compared to Eliot’s hollow men.
He does not have the spiritual virility suggested by the clapping of hands and singing by his soul. His self’s marked by vanity (monuments of its magnificence) He has become meaningless. His only redemption lies in sailing, to the holy city of Byzantium, which for Yeats symbolizes spiritual regeneration.
Here Yeats justifies his escape to Byzantium, which represents eternity, a paradise free from the cause of growth and decay. The artist finds permanence in this place through his art and can remain free from the distortions caused by age and hard work.
Byzantium also symbolizes European civilization and spiritual philosophy, and the journey to Byzantium, a search for spiritual life.
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