Week Three
So i was away for the tute this week cos my mouth was being ripped apart so i thought i'd focus on some of the extra readings, particularly the works of Sir Walter Ralegh. I think the poem 'What is our life?' is really beautiful and offers obvious parallels to Shakespeare's assertion that "All the world's a stage and we are merely players". In the poems opening lines, Ralegh suggests that life is 'a play of passion' and a ‘comedy’. He likens our mother’s wombs to dressing rooms where we prepare to take the stage. It is interesting that the poem is quite short, this seems to structurally represent Ralegh’s point of view that life is really a ‘short comedy’. The poem focuses on the major stages of life- that is, birth and death, featuring ‘passion’ and ‘mirth’ in the space and time between these two events and as life continues, we are watched from heaven, where the ‘judicious and sharp spectator is, that sits and marks still who doth act amiss’, both a metaphorical and realistic portrayal of religious belief intertwined with the theme of the poem. The word ‘act’ here seems to work as a double entendre, signifying the physical actions that we carry out through life and representing the Ralegh’s theory that life is but a play made up of different acts. This suggests that if we ‘act amiss’ or if our actions don’t correspond with Christian ‘rules’, we become ‘marked’, if our lines and our actions don’t adhere to God’s intended script (fate?) we are condemned to our death and the curtains are drawn as our ‘play is done’. Ralegh completes the poem in a couplet that summarises his own opinion and alters the mood and tone of the poem, he concludes that, we are acting in a play until the very moment of our death, but this is a time that is ‘no jest’, it is no comedy because we die ‘in earnest'.
mood :
annoyed by aching, angry teeth (or lack thereof)