William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son's artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At 14, William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Blake's political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the Revolution, in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalized religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he was married himself). His unorthodox religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whose influence is particularly evident in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic mode, and wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem. Linked together by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake's own creation, these books propound a revolutionary new social, intellectual, and ethical order.
Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake's poetry during his life. It has also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake's work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians. Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety about the public's apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly found himself. When his self-curated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric--as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.
Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such poems as "The Lamb" represent a meek virtue, poems like "The Tyger" exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramatic--that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human beings.
The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes--over the heads, as it were, of the innocent--Christianity's capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty.
The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective ("The Tyger," for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness.
The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others, like "The Sick Rose" and "The Divine Image," make their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake's favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blake's perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior.
The Lamb"


Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.



Summary
The poem begins with the question, "Little Lamb, who made thee?" The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its "clothing" of wool, its "tender voice." In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who "calls himself a Lamb," one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.

Form
"The Lamb" has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l's and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping character of a child's chant.

Commentary
The poem is a child's song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters and contains explanation and analogy. The child's question is both naive and profound. The question ("who made thee?") is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The poem's apostrophic form contributes to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one, and not simply a literary contrivance. Yet by answering his own question, the child converts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is presented as a puzzle or riddle, and even though it is an easy one--child's play--this also contributes to an underlying sense of ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The child's answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.
The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible's depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is "The Tyger"; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.

The Tyger"


Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?



Summary
The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: "What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?" Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger's fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to "twist the sinews" of the tiger's heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart "began to beat," its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? "Did he smile his work to see?" Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?

Form
The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem's central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.

Commentary
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem's series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The "forging" of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of "shoulder" and "art," as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the "heart" of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the "dare" to replace the "could" of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of "experience" and "innocence" represented here and in the poem "The Lamb." "The Tyger" consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of "The Tyger" contrasts with the easy confidence, in "The Lamb," of a child's innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

London"

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every black'ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse




Summary
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the monarch's residence. The nighttime holds nothing more promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the "Marriage hearse."

Form
The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.

Commentary
The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of stains in this poem's first lines recall the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a twist; we are now quite far from the piping, pastoral bard of the earlier poem: we are in the city. The poem's title denotes a specific geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other Songs are set. Everything in this urban space--even the natural River Thames--submits to being "charter'd," a term which combines mapping and legalism. Blake's repetition of this word (which he then tops with two repetitions of "mark" in the next two lines) reinforces the sense of stricture the speaker feels upon entering the city. It is as if language itself, the poet's medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction of resources. Blake's repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the city. But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus "mark," between the third and fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of nouns--from an act of observation which leaves some room for imaginative elaboration, to an indelible imprint, branding the people's bodies regardless of the speaker's actions.
Ironically, the speaker's "meeting" with these marks represents the experience closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker. All the speaker's subjects--men, infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlot--are known only through the traces they leave behind: the ubiquitous cries, the blood on the palace walls. Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human form--the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to personify and render natural phenomena--is lacking. In the third stanza the cry of the chimney-sweep and the sigh of the soldier metamorphose (almost mystically) into soot on church walls and blood on palace walls--but we never see the chimney-sweep or the soldier themselves. Likewise, institutions of power--the clergy, the government--are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they reside. Indeed, it is crucial to Blake's commentary that neither the city's victims nor their oppressors ever appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system of enslavement for the city's woes; rather, the victims help to make their own "mind-forg'd manacles," more powerful than material chains could ever be.
The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery recommences, in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a cursing, prostitute mother. Sexual and marital union--the place of possible regeneration and rebirth--are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus Blake's final image is the "Marriage hearse," a vehicle in which love and desire combine with death and destruction.

Holy Thursday"


'Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walk'd before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow

O what a multitude they seem'd these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door



Summary
On Holy Thursday (Ascension Day), the clean-scrubbed charity-school children of London flow like a river toward St. Paul's Cathedral. Dressed in bright colors they march double-file, supervised by "gray headed beadles." Seated in the cathedral, the children form a vast and radiant multitude. They remind the speaker of a company of lambs sitting by the thousands and "raising their innocent hands" in prayer. Then they begin to sing, sounding like "a mighty wind" or "harmonious thunderings," while their guardians, "the aged men," stand by. The speaker, moved by the pathos of the vision of the children in church, urges the reader to remember that such urchins as these are actually angels of God.

Form
The poem has three stanzas, each containing two rhymed couplets. The lines are longer than is typical for Blake's Songs, and their extension suggests the train of children processing toward the cathedral, or the flowing river to which they are explicitly compared.

Commentary
The poem's dramatic setting refers to a traditional Charity School service at St. Paul's Cathedral on Ascension Day, celebrating the fortieth day after the resurrection of Christ. These Charity Schools were publicly funded institutions established to care for and educate the thousands of orphaned and abandoned children in London. The first stanza captures the movement of the children from the schools to the church, likening the lines of children to the Thames River, which flows through the heart of London: the children are carried along by the current of their innocent faith. In the second stanza, the metaphor for the children changes. First they become "flowers of London town." This comparison emphasizes their beauty and fragility; it undercuts the assumption that these destitute children are the city's refuse and burden, rendering them instead as London's fairest and finest. Next the children are described as resembling lambs in their innocence and meekness, as well as in the sound of their little voices. The image transforms the character of humming "multitudes," which might first have suggested a swarm or hoard of unsavory creatures, into something heavenly and sublime. The lamb metaphor links the children to Christ (whose symbol is the lamb) and reminds the reader of Jesus's special tenderness and care for children. As the children begin to sing in the third stanza, they are no longer just weak and mild; the strength of their combined voices raised toward God evokes something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with heaven. The simile for their song is first given as "a mighty wind" and then as "harmonious thunderings." The beadles, under whose authority the children live, are eclipsed in their aged pallor by the internal radiance of the children. In this heavenly moment the guardians, who are authority figures only in an earthly sense, sit "beneath" the children.
The final line advises compassion for the poor. The voice of the poem is neither Blake's nor a child's, but rather that of a sentimental observer whose sympathy enhances an already emotionally affecting scene. But the poem calls upon the reader to be more critical than the speaker is: we are asked to contemplate the true meaning of Christian pity, and to contrast the institutionalized charity of the schools with the love of which God--and innocent children--are capable. Moreover, the visual picture given in the first two stanzas contains a number of unsettling aspects: the mention of the children's clean faces suggests that they have been tidied up for this public occasion; that their usual state is quite different. The public display of love and charity conceals the cruelty to which impoverished children were often subjected. Moreover, the orderliness of the children's march and the ominous "wands" (or rods) of the beadles suggest rigidity, regimentation, and violent authority rather than charity and love. Lastly, the tempestuousness of the children's song, as the poem transitions from visual to aural imagery, carries a suggestion of divine wrath and vengeance.

The Nurse's Song"


When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies

No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep

Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd
And all the hills ecchoed



Summary
The scene of the poem features a group of children playing outside in the hills, while their nurse listens to them in contentment. As twilight begins to fall, she gently urges them to "leave off play" and retire to the house for the night. They ask to play on till bedtime, for as long as the light lasts. The nurse yields to their pleas, and the children shout and laugh with joy while the hills echo their gladness.

Form
The poem has four quatrains, rhymed ABCB and containing an internal rhyme in the third line of each verse.

Commentary
This is a poem of affinities and correspondences. There is no suggestion of alienation, either between children and adults or between man and nature, and even the dark certainty of nightfall is tempered by the promise of resuming play in the morning. The theme of the poem is the children's innocent and simple joy. Their happiness persists unabashed and uninhibited, and without shame the children plead for permission to continue in it. The sounds and games of the children harmonize with a busy world of sheep and birds. They think of themselves as part of nature, and cannot bear the thought of abandoning their play while birds and sheep still frolic in the sky and on the hills, for the children share the innocence and unselfconscious spontaneity of these natural creatures. They also approach the world with a cheerful optimism, focusing not on the impending nightfall but on the last drops of daylight that surely can be eked out of the evening.
A similar innocence characterizes the pleasure the adult nurse takes in watching her charges play. Their happiness inspires in her a feeling of peace, and their desire to prolong their own delight is one she readily indulges. She is a kind of angelic, guardian presence who, while standing apart from the children, supports rather than overshadows their innocence. As an adult, she is identified with "everything else" in nature; but while her inner repose does contrast with the children's exuberant delight, the difference does not constitute an antagonism. Rather, her tranquility resonates with the evening's natural stillness, and both seem to envelop the carefree children in a tender protection.

Holy Thursday"


Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill'd with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.



Summary
The poem begins with a series of questions: how holy is the sight of children living in misery in a prosperous country? Might the children's "cry," as they sit assembled in St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, really be a song? "Can it be a song of joy?" The speaker's own answer is that the destitute existence of so many children impoverishes the country no matter how prosperous it may be in other ways: for these children the sun does not shine, the fields do not bear, all paths are thorny, and it is always winter.

Form
The four quatrains of this poem, which have four beats each and rhyme ABAB, are a variation on the ballad stanza.

Commentary
In the poem "Holy Thursday" from Songs of Innocence, Blake described the public appearance of charity school children in St. Paul's Cathedral on Ascension Day. In this "experienced" version, however, he critiques rather than praises the charity of the institutions responsible for hapless children. The speaker entertains questions about the children as victims of cruelty and injustice, some of which the earlier poem implied. The rhetorical technique of the poem is to pose a number of suspicious questions that receive indirect, yet quite censoriously toned answers. This is one of the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience that best show Blake's incisiveness as a social critic.
In the first stanza, we learn that whatever care these children receive is minimal and grudgingly bestowed. The "cold and usurous hand" that feeds them is motivated more by self-interest than by love and pity. Moreover, this "hand" metonymically represents not just the daily guardians of the orphans, but the city of London as a whole: the entire city has a civic responsibility to these most helpless members of their society, yet it delegates or denies this obligation. Here the children must participate in a public display of joy that poorly reflects their actual circumstances, but serves rather to reinforce the self-righteous complacency of those who are supposed to care for them.
The song that had sounded so majestic in the Songs of Innocence shrivels, here, to a "trembling cry." In the first poem, the parade of children found natural symbolization in London's mighty river. Here, however, the children and the natural world conceptually connect via a strikingly different set of images: the failing crops and sunless fields symbolize the wasting of a nation's resources and the public's neglect of the future. The thorns, which line their paths, link their suffering to that of Christ. They live in an eternal winter, where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love. In the last stanza, prosperity is defined in its most rudimentary form: sun and rain and food are enough to sustain life, and social intervention into natural processes, which ought to improve on these basic necessities, in fact reduce people to poverty while others enjoy plenitude.

FORM

The passive of an active tense is formed by putting the verb to be into the same tense as the active verb and adding the past participle of the active verb. Only transitive verbs can have a passive form. The subject of the active verb becomes the 'agent' of the passive verb. The agent is very often not mentioned. When it is mentioned it is preceded by by and placed at the end of the clause.
However,when with is used and not by, it means that we are dealing with the material, tool or instrument used, not with the agent. In this case the two sentences have different meaning:

He was killed by a (falling) brick. = A (falling) brick killed him. (it was an accident)
He was killed with a brick. = The man who killed him used a brick. (it was no accident)

USES OF PASSIVE

The passive is used:
1. When it is not necessary to mention the doer of the action as it is obvious who he is/was/will be.

2. When we do not know, or do not know exactly, or have forgotten who did the action.

3. When the subject of the active verb would be 'people'.

4. When the subject of the active sentence would be the indefinite pronoun one.

5. When we are more interested in the action than the person who does it.

6. The passive may be used to avoid an awkward or ungrammatical sentence. This is usually done by avoiding a change of subject.

7. The passive is sometimes preferred for psychological reasons. A speaker may use it to disclaim responsibility for disagreeable announcements.

EXAMPLES

Simple present
"I find that, howsoever men speak against adversity, yet some sweet uses are to be extracted from it; like the jewel, precious for medicine, which is taken from the head of the venomous and despised toad."
"Én úgy látom, bárhogyan is beszélnek az emberek a balsors ellen, de valami előnyt mégis lehet nyerni belőle, akárcsak a mérges, utálatos varangyos béka fejéből a gyógyereje miatt értékes gyöngyöt." (Lamb,p86)

Simple past "From this loving conference she was called away by her nurse, who slept with her, and thought it is time for her to be in bed, for it was near to day-break; " "E szerelmes beszélgetésből Júliát elszólította dajkája, aki az ő szobájában szokott aludni, és úgy gondolta, ideje már, hogy Júlia lefeküdjék, hiszen nemsokára hajnalodik." (Lamb,p6)

Present perfect
"Helena, as has been before related, endeavoured to keep pace with Demetrius when he ran away so rudely from her;but she could not continue this unequal race long..."
"Helena, mint ahogy elbeszéltük, igyekezett lépést tartani Demetriusszal, aki olyan durván elrohant tőle, de nem bírta sokáig ezt az egyenlőtlen versenyfutást..." (Lamb,p66)

Past perfect
"They found that it was likely to prove a very tragical sight; for a large and powerful man, who had long been practised in the art of wrestling..." "Úgy látták, hogy valószínű tragikus látványban lesz részük, mert egy izmos, hatalmas férfi, aki régóta űzte a birkózás művészetét..." (Lamb, p196)

Future
"See! The vessel will be dashed to pieces."
"Nézd csak! A vitorlás rögtön darabokra törik." (Lamb, p198)

Conditional
"...was just going to wrestle with a very young man, who, from his extreme youth and inexperience in the art, the beholders all thought would certainly be killed."
"...éppen egy nagyon fiatal emberrel készül megmérkőzni, akiről valamennyi néző azt gondolta, hogy megölik, olyan fiatal volt, és olyan tapasztalatlan a birkózásban." (Lamb, p88)


Present infinitive
"...but for poor Lysander to be forced by a fairy love-charm to forget his own true Hermia, and to run after another lady..."
"De így szegény Lysandernek igazán szomorú véletlen volt, hogy e tündéries szerelmi varázs arra kényszerítette, hogy elfeledje hű Hermináját, és egy másik hölgy után szaladjon..." (Lamb, p66)

Present participle/gerund
"The dance being done, Romeo watched the place where the lady stood;"
"Amikor a tánc véget ért, Rómeó megfigyelte, hol áll meg a hölgy" (Lamb, p10)
Perfect participle
"...and having been for some time displeased with her niece, because the people praised her for her virtues, and pitied her for her good father's sake..."
"Már egy idő óta sehogy sem volt ínyére az unokahúga sem, mert a nép dícsérte erényeit, és sajnálta jó apja miatt." (Lamb, p92)

Auxiliary + infinitive combinations are made passive by using a passive infinitive(tempest)
"You must be brought, I find, for the lady Mirinda to have a sight of your pretty person."
"El kell, hogy vigyelek az úrnőm, Mirinda elé, azt hiszem, azért, hogy meglássa csinos személyedet." (Lamb, p206)


EXAMPLES from Newsweek:

Simple present:
“...our new Ultimo seats from Italy are electrically controlled...” (p1)
“A mi új, olasz Ultimo nevű üléseink elektromosan vezéreltek.”

Simple past:
“Last weekend Betancourt was housed in a U. S. diplomatic residence in Santo Domingo...” (p5)
“Múlt hétvégén Betancourtot egy amerikai diplomáciai rezidencián szállásolták el Santo Domingoban.”

“Glass everywhere was shattered, and cafeteria tables were upturned and littered with food.”
(p78)
“Az üveg mindenütt össze volt törve, és az étterem asztalai fel voltak fordítva és tele voltak szórva étellel.”

Present perfect:
“While in the rest of Europe many people have been freed from domination and have achieved democratic rights, the Serbs in Yugoslavia still believe they can dominate the Albanian Kosovars by force.” (p12)
“Míg Európa nagy részén sok ember szabadult fel az uralom alól és nyerte el a demokratikus jogokat, addig a szerbek Jugoszláviában még mindig azt hiszik, hogy erőszakkal uralkodhatnak az koszovói albánok felett.”


Present perfect:

“Throughout its 100-year history of making cars, Opel has been known as a vital ingredient of progress.” (p19)
“Az autogyártás 100 éves története során az Opelt úgy ismerik, mint a fejlődés egyik alapvető tartozéka.”

Past perfect:
“Lisa Kreutz, 18, had been shot at least six times.” (p79)
“A 18 éves Lisa Kreutzot legalább hatszor meglőtték.”

Conditional:
“If Russia supported Belgrade, great powers would be aligned on competing sides of a Balkan conflict.” (p21)
“Ha Oroszország támogatná Belgrádot, hatalmas erőket sorakoztatnának fel egy balkáni ellentét versengő oldalain.”

Present infinitive:
“...they are likely to be joined by U. N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.” (p22)
“Valószínű, hogy az ENSZ főtitkár Kofi Annan csatlakoztatni fogja őket.”

“We’re certainly not going to be stopped by forces like Slobodan Milosevic’s.” (p24)
“Biztosan nem fognak minket olyan erők megállítani, mint Slobodan Milosevicé.”

Auxiliary+infinitive:
“The war in Kosovo should be viewed no differently.” (p16)
“A koszovói háborút is pontosan így kellene szemlélni.”


INFINITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS AFTER PASSIVE VERBS


A .Expressions of the type they/people+say/believe, etc., Are frequently used in the passive in formal speaking and writing. Other verbs which are used in this pattern are: assume, feel, find, presume, repute, understand, claim, report, think, know, etc. Sentences of this type have two possible passive forms: It is known that he is.../He is known to be...

B. After suppose

1. In the passive can be followed by the present infinitive of any verb but this construction usually conveys an idea of duty and is not therefore the normal equivalent of suppose in the active:
You are supposed to know how to do it = {



Sources:
Thomson, A.J.& Martinet, A.V. - A Practical English Grammar, Oxford University Press Lamb, Mary & Charles - Tales from Shakespeare - Shakespeare-mesék, Noran könyvkiadó
Allsop, Jake – Cassell’s Students’ English Grammar, Cassell Publishers Limited
Newsweek (May 3,1999.)

The development of today's conventional loudspeaker started back in 1898 when the basic structure of the dynamic loudspeaker was invented by an English physicist Oliver Lodge[1]. Since then much of the past 40-plus years of loudspeaker development has revolved around identifying and understanding its limitations, such as diaphragm and enclosure resonances, the effect of crossover networks and so on. Yet, in the past few years many new loudspeaker paradigms emerged. When we see how much academic and design effort has been expended on perfecting current technology a question might arise. Are not the conventional speakers good enough, do we need to research new types of sound reproduction systems and if so, what are the current developments?
In order to answer the first question we need to review the basic principles of how conventional loudspeakers operate and identify the fundamental restrictions on performance that they impose.

In Figure 1 we can see the structural outline of a conventional speaker. The aim of such speakers is to create a pistonic motion of the diaphragm for sound reproduction. By pistonic we mean that the diaphragm moves back and forth as a rigid whole.
To achieve this the moving voice coil of the loudspeaker is placed in the air gap of a strong permanent magnet. The moving coil is attached to a conical diaphragm which is supported by flexible suspension to keep the motion axial. The basket attached to the magnet supports the rim of the diaphragm. As electrical current flows through the coil an axial force is generated according to the law of inductance. This force brings the diaphragm into motion thus producing sound waves.[2]
Even though later other methods of transduction were invented - using electromagnetic, electrostatic or piezoelectric forces to set the diaphragm into motion - the basic principle of the operation, pistonic motion, has remained the same.
As we are now more or less familiar with the operation of the conventional loudspeaker let us try to identify the physical limitations of such a system.
Variation in directivity with frequency is one of the great bugbears of loudspeaker design. If we listened to reproduced sound in anechoic environments it would not be a problem: we would hear the diaphragm's on-axis output and nothing else. But the usual listening environment is far from anechoic, so a loudspeaker's output off the listening axis has a significant effect on what we hear. Because of frequency dependent directivity the direct, reflected and reverberant sounds in a room all have different tonal balances. Even if a conventional loudspeaker had an absolutely flat on-axis response and was entirely free of resonance - a high expectation - it would still sound colored and introduce imaging aberrations.
The reason for this phenomenon is the following. At low frequencies, where the wavelength in air is large compared with the diaphragm dimensions the acoustic power output is constant. As frequency continues to rise, though, and the wavelength in air reduces to the point where it becomes comparable with the diaphragm dimensions, a major change occurs. (Figure 2)

Because of various reasons the diaphragm's acoustic power output now begins to fall at a rate of 12dB per octave. This does not mean that the on-axis (in front of the speaker) pressure response falls away: what generally happens is that the diaphragm's acoustic output becomes restricted to progressively narrower solid angles. In other words, it becomes directional; it begins to beam. This is the main reasons why we need to use more than one speaker and a crossover network in better quality speakers. This will reduce the problems related to directivity but at the same time the crossover networks will introduce new disturbances in the signal chain. The crossover networks and their effect will be described later in a little bit more detail.
The second group of problems is resonances. Resonances stem from the fact that we live in a real world and we do not have ideal, completely rigid materials. Resonances appear at certain frequencies, depending on the inherent qualities of the materials. If the source signal contains these frequencies, the resonances of the different parts of a loudspeaker system will distort the sound at those given frequencies.
For starters we have the resonances of the diaphragm itself. An ideal diaphragm would move as a rigid whole. In reality we can never achieve such a pistonic motion. A real diaphragm is never completely rigid, therefore it resonates which results in further colorations in the reproduced sound since the speaker emits such sound components which were not in the original source. In the following table some of the fundamental bending modes of the diaphragm are illustrated.

Furthermore there is the resonance of the enclosure. We need an enclosure because the front and the rear of the diaphragm must be separated in order to avoid acoustical shortcircuit. (The distance between the rear and the front side must be larger than the largest wavelength we would like to reproduce) This is achieved by building the speaker either into the wall or an enclosure. Here we have another source of distortion in sound: the resonance of the enclosure. Similarly to the diaphragm, the sides of the enclosure will also have their own bending modes at different frequencies.
Now let us go back a bit. As it was mentioned earlier when the problem of directivity was discussed, we need to apply multiple loudspeaker systems and crossover networks.
The point of having multiple loudspeakers is that each of them covers just a part of the entire audible range, the part where it can operate without becoming too directional. For this we need an electric network which splits up the incoming signal according to the necessary frequency ranges. This is what a crossover network is. (Usually the signal is split into three parts: low, mid and high range)
A crossover consists of resistive, capacitive and inductive elements. Anyone who has learned a bit of electronics knows that the last two elements are reactive, that is they shift the phase of the signal which passes through them. The result of this will be for example, that the sound coming from the mid range speaker will have a different phase than the sound coming from the low range speaker. This would not be a problem if it were not for a special quality of our hearing. Namely, that we are able to hear phase differences. Therefore a crossover network will introduce phase distortions in the reproduced sound.
In monophonic listening situations this would not be such a significant problem, but in stereophonic situations these phase differences will greatly reduce the stereo image of the sound.
So far we have seen that there are physical limitations on the sound quality that can be achieved by conventional speakers.
Thus we can conclude that because of its physical limitations not even an ideal conventional speaker will reproduce the original signal perfectly, therefore the answer for our first question is that new loudspeaker paradigms are necessary to improve the overall quality of sound reproduction.
Now, we can move on to discuss our second question: what are the current developments in the field of loudspeaker design?
Presently, there are two new designs currently being developed which are worth looking at. The first one is the so called NXT, or Flat speaker, the second is the HSS, HyperSonicSpeaker.
The NXT is based on what we term distributed-mode (DM) operation. Essentially this involves encouraging the diaphragm, in this case a special panel, to produce the maximum number of bending resonances, evenly distributed in frequency. The resulting vibration is so complex that it approximates random motion. This means that each small area of the panel vibrates, in effect, independently of its neighbors, rather than in the fixed, coordinated fashion of a pistonic diaphragm. Think of it as an array of very small drive units, each radiating a different, uncorrelated signal but summing to produce the desired output[3]. (see Fig. 3)

Fig.3
Snapshot of panel motion
Because of this quasi random vibration of the panel there is no need for an enclosure and since we are actually using the resonances of the panel to reproduce sound we have no resonance problems as with the conventional loudspeaker.
Also, the problems related to directivity disappear since, because of the nearly random vibration of the panel, power is transferred into sound through the mechanical resistance of the panel, which is constant with frequency. The radiation resistance is now insignificant because the air close to the panel also moves in a random fashion, reducing the effective air load. This means that diaphragm dimensions no longer control directivity: you can make the radiating area as large as you want without high frequency output becoming confined to a narrow solid angle about the forward axis.
The HSS technology uses ultrasonic (frequency range above 200 kHz) emitters. The process of sound reproduction is based on the non-linear characteristics of air that give way to Tartini Tones, or the frequency differences between two original sounds. Firstly the source signal (e.g. music) is added to an ultrasonic signal, then this is amplified and sent to the emitters. One emitter will radiate this signal, the other one only the ultrasonic signal. Here come the characteristics of air in the game because these two signals will interfere in a special way, such that their sum and their difference (the Tartini Tones) will be present. Because of our limited hearing range we will only hear their difference, which is the original source signal.
We do not have problems with resonances since there is no diaphragm and even if the emitter has resonances, they are way above our hearing range.
As for the problem of directivity, we noted in the earlier discussion of the conventional loudspeaker that if we listened to the reproduced sound in an anechoic environment - this means that we are not disturbed by sound reflected back from the environment - the variation with directivity would not be a problem: we would hear the diaphragm's on-axis output and nothing else. In case of the HSS system its high directivity solves the problem. Even if we are not in a anechoic enviroment we only hear the on axis output.
In summary, it is true to say that the design goals for a conventional loudspeaker have to be a compromise. You are trying to deliver acoustical output across a wide bandwidth, yet when the radiated wavelength becomes smaller than the diaphragm circumference the loudspeaker's power output begins to fall. Because of this, and the need to provide sufficient diaphragm displacement to reproduce frequencies at the lower extreme of its passband, a conventional drive unit's power bandwidth is typically limited to four to five octaves. This is a physical fact that remains a limitation with pistonic speakers even if we could design and make a perfect pistonic radiator. Consequently conventional drive unit design always embodies trade-offs between bandwidth, directivity and smoothness of frequency response. In the finest conventional loudspeakers these engineering compromises are skilfully struck, but they remain compromises. Looking at the new designs the future appears promising. sincethe NXT or the HSS speakers oprerate on a completely different basis, they lack all the physical limitations of the conventional dynamic loudspeakers. Although these systems are still in the development stage, we hope that we will see their implementations and the improvements that they will bring to sound reproduction, in the next couple years.
Bibliography/Web-o-graphy:
- http://www.flatspeaker.com NXT speaker official website
- http://www.atcsd.com/ HSS official website
- Matthias Carstens: Zenei Elektronika, Cser kiado, Bp. 1996.
- Klinger: Hangdoboz építés, Franzis Kiado, München 1989., Marktech kft. Bp. 1991.
- Chronik der Technik, ,Chronic-Verlag, Dortmund 1988.
- Géher Károly: Híradástechnika, Műszaki Könyvkiadó Bp. 2000.
NXT™ is a trademark of New Transducers Ltd 2000
HSS™ is a trademark of the American Technology Corporation


________________________________________
[1]Chronik der Technik, p.364
[2] Géher Károly: Híradástechnika, p. 53
[3] http://www.flatspeaker.com/techology/technology.htm

Window-shopping
I love window-shopping. I like walking up and down in front of shop-windows. I love especially in the new shopping centre, where there are a lot of boutiques.

Every-day shopping
I do my every-day shopping in the nearest shop. I am a regular customer there. The assistants know me, and they are very politely with me. I often do the shopping on my way home from work. Every day I buy bred, milk, some cold cuts and basic food for supper and breakfast.

Weekend shopping
To do my weekend shopping I go to the nearest supermarket because it sells almost everything that a family needs. The customers walk about filling their baskets from the selves. The shops are full of customers. On Saturdays you always have to queue up in front of the counters as well as at the pay desks. In a supermarket you can get almost everything under one roof. Almost all supermarkets are self-service shops. They are very popular.
Some people don’t like it. These people have to walk from shop to shop a long time.
But the supermarkets have lower prices than small shops. I suppose this is because bulk sale is cheaper.

Supermarket
The largest supermarket in our town is a self-service store.
The first counter to your right is the FRUIT AND VEGETABLE COUNTER with its fresh fruits, for example oranges, bananas, pineapples, apples, plumbs, peaches, pears, grape, cherry and lots of different kinds of vegetables, for example: onion, potato, paprika, carrot.
Next we come to the CONFECTIONERY shelves with all sorts of sweets, chocolate bars, cakes, biscuits and other sweets.
Then comes the BAKERY COUNTER, which is always stocked with fresh breads, rolls, croissant, buns etc.
Further down are the DRY GROCERIES shelves, where you buy flour, cereals, tea, spices, salt and sugar.
There is also a big DAIRY counter with a large variety of dairy products: milk, cheese, butter, margarine, cream and yoghurt.
Next to this is the DELICATESSEN. This counter sells sausages, ham, bacon, and salami.
A special counter handles PACKED MEATS. There is a wide choice of chicken, pork, beef, veal, duck and turkey.

Shopping
When I do my shopping there I walk from shelf to shelf. I fill my basket with the things I need. After I finishing shopping I go to the cash desk. There is often a long queue. When it is my turn, the cashier adds up the bill on the cash register and gives me the receipt. I pay. I pack the things and leave the shop.

window-shopping kirakatnézegetés
especially különösen
politely udvariasan
cold cuts felvágott
fill tölt, telerak
basket kosár
queue up sorban áll
counter pénztár
pay desk pénztár, kassza
under one roof egy helyen
almost majdnem, csaknem
self-service önkiszolgáló
lower alacsonyabb
bulk nagy mennyiség
counter pult
pineapple ananász
plumb szilva
confectionery cukrászda
sweet édesség
bakery counter pákáru
stocked felszerel, áruval ellát
croissant kifli
bun molnárka
dry groceries fűszeráru
flour liszt
cereal gabonanemű
spice fűszer
dairy tejtermékek
delicatessen csemegeáru
packed meats húsáru
veal borjúhús
cash desk pénztár(asztal)
it is my turn sorra kerülök
cash register pénztárgép
receipt nyugta

1. Non-identifying (Bővítő)
Az előtte álló főnévről többlet információt ad, a főmondat önmagában is értelmes.
Az ilyen típusú vonatkozó mellékmondat mindig vesszők között áll.

who, which (aki, amely) alanyra vonatkoztatva
My sister, who works at the cafe, is Martin’s girlfriend.
My car, which is a Nissan, works correctly.

Whom/who, which (akit, amelyet) alanyra vonatkoztatva
Peter, whom we saw yesterday, is my friend.

Whose, … of which (akinek a…, amelynek a …)
Peter, whose brother is John, is my friend.
My car, the engine of which is excellent, is a Nissan.

For/about/etc. whom, for/about/etc. which or who…for/about/etc., which…for/about/etc. (akinek/akiről, amelynek/amelyről)
Mr Black, for whom my son works, is a generous man.
Mr Black, who my son works for, is a generous man.
My car, about which I told you, is a Nissan.
My car, which I told you about, is a Nissan.


2. Identifying (Szűkítő )
Vessző nélkül épül a főmondatba, azonosítja, hogy pontosan mire/kire/melyikre gondolunk. A főmondat értelmetlen, érthetetlen lenne nélküle.

Who - (that), that – (which) (aki, amely)
That (amely, ami) felsőfokú melléknevek után valamint névmások után, ha a névmás a mellékmondat alanya: everything, all, something, anything, nothing, none, little, few, much, only.
The girl who (that) has got blond hair is my sister.
The car that (which) is mine works correctly.
I’m afraid this is all that is left.


A „THAT” CSAK SZŰKÍTŐ (identifying) ÉRTELMŰ MELLÉKMONDATOKBAN HASZNÁLHATÓ!

Who, which (kivéve fokozott mellékneveknél és névmásoknál), that (akit, amelyet) ha a névmás a mellékmondat tárgya, kihagyhatóak!
This is the most exciting film (that) I have ever seen.
The girl (who) you saw yesterday is my sister.
The car (which, that) you have bought was stolen.

Whose (akinek a…, amelynek a…) emberekre és tágyakra egyaránt vonatkozhat.
I don’t like people whose cars are bigger than mine.
The big white house whose owner is an old man is very nice.

For/about/etc whom, for/about/etc which, or which, who, that…for/about/etc.(akinek, akiről, amelyről, amelynek)
Kihagyhatóak és az előljárószót a mellékmondat végére kell tenni.
This is the book about which I told you.
This is the book that/which I told you about.
This is the book I told you about.

Where, why (ahol, amiért)
The town where we live…., That’s why I went on to university.

3. What
E vonatkozó névmás pótolja a „főnév + which/that” szerkezetet, ezért a „What” előtt főnév sosem áll! Vesszőt nem lehet elé tenni.
I didn’t know what to do.
What I really want is a cup of tea.

4. Which (ami, amit)
Amikor a „which” az egész mondatra vonatkozik nem csak a főnévre, vesszővel választjuk el, ez is mutatja, hogy „BŐVÍTŐ” (non-identifying) mondatot vezet be. Ez a fajta mondat, egyfajta véleménynyilvánítás az előző mondatra vonatkoztatva.
He is always blowing smoke into my face, which is rather annoying.


Összefoglalva:
- Sosem használjuk „what”-ot főnévre
- A „which”-et véleménynyílvánításra használjuk, az egész mondatra vonatkoztatva
- A hagyományos vonatkozó névmásokat vesszővel, „bővítő” értelmű mondatok esetén használjuk, többlet információ adására. Nem hagyhatjuk ki a névmásokat, és nem használhatjuk a „that”-et!
- „that” mindig használható főnév esetén, „szűkítő” értelmű mondatokban
- vonatkozó névmást csak akkor hagyhatunk ki, ha „szűkítő” értelmű mondatban szerepel, ill. ha e névmás a vonatkozó mellékmondat vagy az elöljárószó tárgya.

Nowadays the society has to face up to a lot of problems. Among them the pollution is one of the most popular topics. People generally don't think of it that they injure their environment with almost every action and this carries consequences. With few exceptions they can be solved.
There are several ways of the environmental pollution. The most frequent question is the air pollution because the different gases appear everywhere: in the most beautiful countries, in villages, but to the highest degree in cities. The biggest danger is caused by cars and factories which can be found on the outskirts of cities. These factories many times don't use filters that can reduce the quantity of the poison-gases, which get into the air, besides often they are responsible for the water pollution. They have the dirty water run into the oceans, seas and rivers. The other factor is the oil. It gets into the water by crashes of oil-tankers or sometimes if a submarine pipeline become damaged. It can cause gigantic damage, because removing the oil is often impossible. Unfortunately, these problems are less avoidable, but at least we should pay attention to those which might be fended off considerably. One of them is the pollution of soil. It would be prevented somehow or other if the waste was carried to the suitable rubbish dump. But there are troubles with some things which don't decay but their components make the soil acid. For example the refrigerator, batteries and the plastic which remains in the soil in good condition 500 hundred years later, too. Frequently the agriculture is also responsible because they use too much chemicals. The different artificial fertilizers (nitrogenous, phosphates,
ammoniums) dissolve in water and nitrates and so on arise from them. Although, these seem to be far-away from us, nevertheless they are close because we pollute our direct environment, too. You can make sure if you are walking in the streets or travelling somewhere by car, because you can find chocolate papers and bottles near the roads and pavements. There are numeral harmful things in a household, too. If you use the gas cooker or the different kinds of aerosols, dioxides get into the air, but the smoking isn't either negligible. And the most waste materials derive from the houses and flats.
These factors make an impression on each other. The result of the smoke and gases is that the rain becomes acid through the soil it gets into the subsoil, and after that into the drinking-water. But beside the rain, chemicals and poisonous liquids take part in the previous process as well. And there are some plants which can preserve the nitrates which are from the wet soil. For example potato and medic. So in essence the animals eat the poisoned plant and then we eat them. In this way through the chain of nourishment the most damaging things made by the society, get back into the human organism.
As we see, the circulation affects the living world and it also results in geographical changes, too. The changes of the atmospheric conditions are influenced especially by the chlorine, the sulfur dioxide, and the carbon dioxide. In experts opinion it will increase the temperature with 2-5 C in 80-100 years which will lead to the melt of the icebergs. If it ensues, the extension of waters will be larger and it will overflow big areas, so agricultural lands and habitable areas will be destroyed and people will have to count on big flood dangers, too. The most concerned are these countries which lies near the oceans or under the sea-level (for example the Netherlands). In this manner, millions of people will lose their home. And we should think of our health! The smog in the streets and the cigarette smoke cause lung cancer and diminish the thickness of the ozone layer. In some countries there are many people who hide their mouth and nose in order not to breathe in the polluted air. Nowadays there are more and more people who suffer from skin cancer because of the increased ultraviolet radiation. The most concerned continent is Australia but this problem is found everywhere in the world. Mainly the dioxide can be call to account because of the formation of other malignant tumors. And among them there are only some which are curable. Fortunately, the dirty water means immediate danger only in some underdeveloped countries. For example in India, where there aren't enough drains, the streets are dirty and so the risk of infectious diseases is much bigger. The pollution of natural waters influence the balance of the water living world. In a number of cases we can hear about destructions of fish because they eat the poisoned plants, drink the oiled water, or they can eat other ill animals. These harmful things are absorbed and remain in their organism. It is true for every animals overland, too. Most of all, domestic animals are affected because there is medic among the fodders that they are given to eat, and the nitrates in it result in changes in hemoglobin. In plant kingdom there are less glaring effects unless the ruin of plants. The acid rain causes metabolism troubles, in this way the average crop decrease. We often can see trees near the busiest roads which drop their leaves because they don't get enough nutrient and the concentration of gases is very high, or dust is deposited on the leaves, so they can't get oxygen and perish for it.






Some of these problems can be solved. Chiefly young people join to environmentalist organizations which fight for a good cause. They give lectures and organize exhibitions where we can see terrible films and photos about the dying Earth. We can view and try the new things which have been developed. These are very good because their use is economical, and we take care of our environment. But if we can hear news of a car which is operated by water, everybody will be happy. If we travelled by public transports which operates by electricity, instead of cars, we could save up and do something for our health. There should be more developments but they mean problems because of the money. Factories should replace the old machines and they should develop new technologies which don't increase the sulfur dioxide in the air. It would be another sollution if they put into practice alternative source of energy (wind, water, etc.). The agriculture should use chemicals that are wiped out in some days without side-effects or should use these kinds that are made from natural things. Older people used to make spray insecticide from nettle and it was very effective. There can be used manure or compost instead of artificial fertilizers. The most possibilities are for the recycling of waste but it is still in its infancy, because it usually needs special procedures. If we take back the empty bottles to the shops the factories can refill or melt them down. The rubble of glass is used for road construction and in the building industry. The paper industry makes paper from textile-waste and waste-paper. The wastes coming from the food industry can be given to animals as feed. Beside them there are a lot of unexploited opportunities.
If you don't throw away anything in the streets, you can say, you have done something for your environment. But it isn't everything! You must pay attention for the other things, too. But if you don't care of yourself, think of your descendants, because they will suffer because of your irresponsibility. The choices are given, you have only to make the best of them.

(Original Article by Bryan Bergstein)

Summary:
Logitech the one of the world’s greatest computer accessories maker came out with a new product “iFeel MouseMan.” At the first look it looks like than other regular computer mice, but the difference is inside of the mouse: it contains a motor, which helps us to “feel” things what we point on the monitor. The company also designed the needed software for it. The company says that with the mouse we can recognize even the materials what we point on…
The “iFeel” mouse is not a new invention, because there are some other computer accessories used nowadays with the same technology. Even it is not new for Logitech, because last year the company came out with a similar mouse, but this product was not successful, because users found it impractical.
Logitech plans to put the new product on the market this fall. The company’s biggest competitor – Microsoft – decided to not sell this kind of mice, because “People find them distracting, and not advanced enough…” as said spokeswoman for Microsoft.
In spite of pessimism of Microsoft, Logitech is optimistic about its new product.
________________________________________________________________________

Reaction:
“There is nothing new under the Sun” – Logitech wants to make a big seller from an old technology. The company has already tried out to use it in its mice, but they were not successful with it, probably because of the fact that the product was practically useless. There is no program that really uses its “advantages”, and people know this…
The technology of “force-feedback” was first used in military flight simulators, which enabled to the pilot of the virtual jet to feel the turbulences, take-offs, airwaves etc. Later it was used in joysticks but not very successfully, because these controllers needed also special software and there was no standardization - every controller needed different software. Nowadays force feedback in our everyday life is most common used with the play console “Playstation” known as “Dual Shock” controller.
Logitech believes that the mouse will be used especially on the Web to “feel the material of the icons.” I do not think that this is so important, and I do not believe that the technology is advanced enough to feel the difference between the materials, it cannot be made so precise. The other big problem is the software: It seems, that it is not enough to buy the mouse, you need special software for it, and I don’t think that the software which comes in the package with the mouse is enough to play tennis or anything else using the force feedback features of “iFeel”. It would probably need some kind of standardization in the games and other applications, which enabled to use it with every program.
In my opinion Logitech’s new product will not bring a “big-boom” in the market of computer peripherals, as Microsoft did with his IntelliMouse in the recent years. The difference between the two products that IntelliMouse and the similar products really make surfing on the Net easier, iFeel is quite useless – I think that even Logitech’s engineers does not really know where to use it.
I think this won’t be the “product of the year”…

-By the age of 4 we have the basic vocab., syntax & pronunciaion of our language.

Language learning must be separated into 2 psychological processes : speech production & speech understanding.

-Speech production :

-Vocalization: at 1st babies cry, blow, gurgle, make undescribeable noises. This gets them practice articulation, control of breathing w/ the making of sounds. The next stage is “babbling” a type of vocalization where the child uses speech sounds (vowels & consonant-vowel syllables) eg. papa, mama, gigi… Also, the babies 1st acquire intonation patterns, even b4 producing any words.

-The 1-word utterance : There’s no precise determination of when children start to say the 1st words (may start as early as 4 months, up to 18 months), because there’re great individual differences. However around 3 ys of age the differences disappear. Also its not easy to determine whether a word has been learned or not. There has to be a meaningful use of sounds.

-The uses of a single word : eg. the same word “banana” can be used to name an object, or for request. Or to emphasize actions like “bye-bye” accompanied by a wave of the hand when leave taking. Single words can be used to express complex situations (peach, Daddy, spoon -> dad put a piece of peach onto the spoon).

-2 & 3 word utterances : At around 18 months children start to produce them. Tend to express ideas of quantity, possession, negation, attribute. (eg. “More milk”). The purposes may be: request, warning, answer, question refusal, inform, or even bragging. At this stage the child understands much more than (s)he can produce. The utterances mainly consist of Ns, Vs, adjectives (the content classes), lacking function words such as articles, prepositions, auxiliaries & modals. Also, there’s a lack of inflections (plurals, verb endings, tense markings etc.). ->telegraphic stage

-Function words & inflections : now the child has something on which to elaborate, acquisition of these “grammatical morphemes” -> a theory of order of acquisition by Roger Brown : present progressive; prepositions in, on; plural; past irregular; possessive; articles; past regular; 3rd person regular / irregular; aux. “be” (regular); aux. “be” (contracted). -> on the basis of this theory some important questions arise :

-1. Why might the plural & possessive learnt b4 the 3rd person ? -> its because of the actual physical situations & objects readily observed in the environment. 3rd person simply serves less vital communicational needs.

-2. Why might be present learnt b4 past? -> a great deal of analysis is required to learn the past. The child must 1st acquire the morpheme struct. 4 the present. (At first he needs to have something in the immediate environment to relate others’ speech to.

-3. Why might be past irregular learnt b4 past regular? -> The irregular sound changes are more noticable. Irregular verbs tend to be especially important in everyday life.

-4. Why might be the regular aux. “be” learnt b4 the contracted version? ->the uncontracted version constitutes a complete syllable while the contracted forms dont. A syllable is easier to hear.

So we can conclude the factors that determine the order of acqusition of language : meaningfulness, ease of observability, noticeability of sound change difference.

-Developing complex sentences: w/ longer utterances children start to make negatives, questions, rel. clauses … eg. the acquisistion of negation has 3 main periods : #1: “No the sun shining” the neg. marker is placed at the front of an affirmative utterance (in English). Japanese children place it after the utterance according to their structure of language. ; #2: “He no bite you”, “We cant talk” the neg. marker tends to appear internally & contractions begin to appear. The neg. imperative is sstill poory formed (“No play that”) ; #3: The child still makes errors but has a good idea when “do” is not inserted (“I am not a doctor”) : when there’s a modal or when “be” is the verb.

-Speech understanding : Chlild will only discover the meaning of speech sounds if some relevant environmental experience or clue is provided at the same time so that (s)he can relate to it. Even abstract words are learnt in such way. The child must 1st learn to understand speec b4 (s)he is able to produce it meaningfully. So comprehension develops in advance of speech production (empirical evidences show that small children are able to respond to comands well beyond their speech level). Its also observed tthat some children completely skip over some stages of development (eg Einstein was slow to start to speak but when he started he spoke sentences.).

-Learnng abstract words : the child must observe speech along w/ situations in which abstract words are involved. Eg. “hunger” -> Are you hungry? Do u want a banana? (offering the child a banana). (on the same analogy w/ “pain”).

-Memory : memory is a cruicially important psychological factor in language acquisition. A child must remember a multitude of words, phrases … along w/ the contexts in which they occured.

-Parentese & baby talk

-Parentese (motherese) is the speech that children receive when they’re young. -> usually about whats happening in the immediate environment, w/ a simple vocab. & structure (though regular!). Also : more pauses inserted than normal, & the more words are given stress & emphasis. ->highlight child’s attention to important constituents. This all serves to make the acquisition of the learer easier.

-Baby Talk: this involves overly simplified & reduced vocab. & syntax. Parents believe it serves to foster communication. It has modifications in vocab. : eg. pee-pee (urine). Also it can be a construction principle w/ these words that they represent the sounds which various things make (bow-wow - dog). Another characteristic is the adding of an “iy” sound to words’ endings (birdy, kitty). This provides a vowel 4 the competion of the consonant+vowel syllable. Besides it has a diminutive & affectionate tone. ; Syntax’s role is not prominent, parents occassionally use baby talk syntax (telegraphic) eg. “Mommy give Tony banana”.

-Imitation & correction :

-The role of imitation : children imitate intonation patterns & sounds of their language & tend to approximate the proper order of words in a sentence. However imitation cannot account for the acquisition of rules, grammatical morphemes. -> English children commonly make mistakes like : mouses, goed, comed … ->that cant be imitation but can only mean that children formulate rules in their minds & construct words on their basis. -> rules cannot be imitated , they’re abstract constructions of the mind.

-The role of correction : its is NOT an important factor in the process of language acquisition. Anyway usually parents are more concerned in the truth valuse or the cleverness of what the child said. Children naturally their own mistakes over time w/out the intervention of others.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 to devout Anglican parents who fostered from an early age their eldest son's commitment to religion and to the creative arts. His mother, quite well educated for a woman of her day, was an avid reader. His father wrote and reviewed poetry and even authored a novel, though it was never published. Hopkins also had a number of relatives who were interested in literature, music, and the visual arts, some as dabblers and some professionals; he and his siblings showed similarly creative dispositions from an early age, and Hopkins enjoyed a great deal of support and encouragement for his creative endeavors. He studied drawing and music and at one point hoped to become a painter--as, indeed, two of his brothers did. Even his earliest verses displayed a vast verbal talent.
Hopkins was born in Essex, England, in an area that was then being transformed by industrial development. His family moved to the relatively undefiled neighborhood of Hampstead, north of the city, in 1852, out of a conviction that proximity to nature was important to a healthy, wholesome, and religious upbringing. From 1854 to 1863 Hopkins attended Highgate Grammar School, where he studied under Canon Dixon, who became a lifelong friend and who encouraged his interest in Keats. At Oxford, Hopkins pursued Latin and Greek. He was a student of Walter Pater and befriended the poet Robert Bridges and Coleridge's grandson. In the 1860s Hopkins was profoundly influenced by Christina Rossetti and was interested in medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and developments in Victorian religious poetry. He also became preoccupied with the major religious controversies that were fermenting within the Anglican Church. Centered at Oxford, the main debate took place between two reform groups: the Tractarians, whose critics accused them of being too close to Catholicism in their emphasis on ritual and church traditions (it was in this culture that Hopkins was reared), and the Broad Church Movement, whose followers believed that all religious faith should be scrutinized on a basis of empirical evidence and logic. Immersed in intense debate over such issues, Hopkins entered into a process of soul-searching, and after much deliberation abandoned the religion of his family and converted to Catholicism. He threw his whole heart and life behind his conversion, deciding to become a Jesuit priest.
Hopkins undertook a lengthy course of training for the priesthood; for seven years he wrote almost no verse, having decided that one who had pledged his life to God should not pursue poetry. Only at the urging of church officials did Hopkins resume his poetry, while studying theology in North Wales, in 1875. He wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland in 1876 and, during the course of the next year, composed many of his most famous sonnets. Hopkins's subject matter in these mature poems is wholly religious--he believed that by making his work religious-themed he might make poetry a part of his religious vocation. These post-1875 poems follow a style quite different from that of Hopkins's earlier verse. After his ordination in 1877, Hopkins did parish work in a number of locales. He spent the last years of his short life quite unhappily in Dublin, where he wrote a group of melancholy poems often referred to as the "Terrible Sonnets" or "Sonnets of Desolation"; they exquisitely render the spiritual anguish for which Hopkins is famous. The great poet died of typhoid fever in 1877 in Dublin in 1877.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the greatest 19th-century poets of religion, of nature, and of inner anguish. In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God. In this book God expresses himself completely, and it is by "reading" the world that humans can approach God and learn about Him. Hopkins therefore sees the environmental crisis of the Victorian period as vitally linked to that era's spiritual crisis, and many of his poems bemoan man's indifference to the destruction of sacred natural and religious order. The poet harbored an acute interest in the scientific and technological advances of his day; he saw new discoveries (such as the new explanations for phenomena in electricity or astronomy} as further evidence of God's deliberate hand, rather than as refutations of God's existence.
One of Hopkins's most famous (and most debated) theories centers on the concept of "inscape." He coined this word to refer to the essential individuality of a thing, but with a focus not on its particularity or uniqueness, but rather on the unifying design that gives a thing its distinctive characteristics and relates it to its context. Hopkins was interested in the exquisite interrelation of the individual thing and the recurring pattern. He saw the world as a kind of network integrated by divine law and design.
Hopkins wrote most frequently in the sonnet form. He generally preferred the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, which consists of an octave followed by a sestet, with a turn in argument or change in tone occurring in the second part. Hopkins typically uses the octave to present some account of personal or sensory experience and then employs the sestet for philosophical reflection. While Hopkins enjoyed the structure the sonnet form imposes, with its fixed length and rhyme scheme, he nevertheless constantly stretched and tested its limitations. One of his major innovations was a new metrical form, called "sprung rhythm." In sprung rhythm, the poet counts the number of accented syllables in the line, but places no limit on the total number of syllables. As opposed to syllabic meters (such as the iambic), which count both stresses and syllables, this form allows for greater freedom in the position and proportion of stresses. Whereas English verse has traditionally alternated stressed and unstressed syllables with occasional variation, Hopkins was free to place multiple stressed syllables one after another (as in the line "All felled, felled, are all felled" from "Binsey Poplars"), or to run a large number of unstressed syllables together (as in "Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy" from Wreck of the Deutschland). This gives Hopkins great control over the speed of his lines and their dramatic effects.
Another unusual poetic resource Hopkins favored is "consonant chiming," a technique he learned from Welsh poetry. The technique involves elaborate use of alliteration and internal rhyme; in Hopkins's hands this creates an unusual thickness and resonance. This close linking of words through sound and rhythm complements Hopkins's themes of finding pattern and design everywhere. Hopkins's form is also characterized by a stretching of the conventions of grammar and sentence structure, so that newcomers to his poetry must often strain to parse his sentences. Deciding which word in a given sentence is the verb, for example, can often involve significant interpretive work. In addition, Hopkins often invents words, and pulls his vocabulary freely from a number of different registers of diction. This leads to a surprising mix of neologisms and archaisms throughout his lines. Yet for all his innovation and disregard of convention, Hopkins' goal was always to bring poetry closer to the character of natural, living speech.

God's Grandeur" (1877)
Complete Text


The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.




Summary
The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe a natural world through which God's presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God's presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up "to a greatness" when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of God's presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed ("reck") His divine authority ("his rod").
The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life--the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of "toil" and "trade." The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.
The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins's contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep "freshness" that testifies to the continual renewing power of God's creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who "broods" over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation ("ah! bright wings") Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God's grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God's loving incubation.

Form
This poem is an Italian sonnet--it contains fourteen lines divided into an octave and a sestet, which are separated by a shift in the argumentative direction of the poem. The meter here is not the "sprung rhythm" for which Hopkins is so famous, but it does vary somewhat from the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet. For example, Hopkins follows stressed syllable with stressed syllable in the fourth line of the poem, bolstering the urgency of his question: "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" Similarly, in the next line, the heavy, falling rhythm of "have trod, have trod, have trod," coming after the quick lilt of "generations," recreates the sound of plodding footsteps in striking onomatopoeia.

Commentary
The poem begins with the surprising metaphor of God's grandeur as an electric force. The figure suggests an undercurrent that is not always seen, but which builds up a tension or pressure that occasionally flashes out in ways that can be both brilliant and dangerous. The optical effect of "shook foil" is one example of this brilliancy. The image of the oil being pressed out of an olive represents another kind of richness, where saturation and built-up pressure eventually culminate in a salubrious overflow. The image of electricity makes a subtle return in the fourth line, where the "rod" of God's punishing power calls to mind the lightning rod in which excess electricity in the atmosphere will occasionally "flame out." Hopkins carefully chooses this complex of images to link the secular and scientific to mystery, divinity, and religious tradition. Electricity was an area of much scientific interest during Hopkins's day, and is an example of a phenomenon that had long been taken as an indication of divine power but which was now explained in naturalistic, rational terms. Hopkins is defiantly affirmative in his assertion that God's work is still to be seen in nature, if men will only concern themselves to look. Refusing to ignore the discoveries of modern science, he takes them as further evidence of God's grandeur rather than a challenge to it. Hopkins's awe at the optical effects of a piece of foil attributes revelatory power to a man-made object; gold-leaf foil had also been used in recent influential scientific experiments. The olive oil, on the other hand, is an ancient sacramental substance, used for centuries for food, medicine, lamplight, and religious purposes. This oil thus traditionally appears in all aspects of life, much as God suffuses all branches of the created universe. Moreover, the slowness of its oozing contrasts with the quick electric flash; the method of its extraction implies such spiritual qualities as patience and faith. (By including this description Hopkins may have been implicitly criticizing the violence and rapaciousness with which his contemporaries drilled petroleum oil to fuel industry.) Thus both the images of the foil and the olive oil bespeak an all-permeating divine presence that reveals itself in intermittent flashes or droplets of brilliance.
Hopkins's question in the fourth line focuses his readers on the present historical moment; in considering why men are no longer God-fearing, the emphasis is on "now." The answer is a complex one. The second quatrain contains an indictment of the way a culture's neglect of God translates into a neglect of the environment. But it also suggests that the abuses of previous generations are partly to blame; they have soiled and "seared" our world, further hindering our ability to access the holy. Yet the sestet affirms that, in spite of the interdependent deterioration of human beings and the earth, God has not withdrawn from either. He possesses an infinite power of renewal, to which the regenerative natural cycles testify. The poem reflects Hopkins's conviction that the physical world is like a book written by God, in which the attentive person can always detect signs of a benevolent authorship, and which can help mediate human beings' contemplation of this Author.

The Windhover"

Complete Text



To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-
dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.




Summary
The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or "caught") one of these birds in the midst of its hovering. The bird strikes the poet as the darling ("minion") of the morning, the crown prince ("dauphin") of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled colors of dawn. It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with steady control like a rider whose hold on the rein is sure and firm. In the poet's imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly reined in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and suspended in an ecstatic moment of concentrated energy. Then, in the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater balancing forces as he makes a turn. The bird, first matching the wind's force in order to stay still, now "rebuff[s] the big wind" with its forward propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his own heart stir, or lurch forward out of "hiding," as it were--moved by "the achieve of, the mastery of" the bird's performance.
The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird's movement and an injunction to the poet's own heart. The "beauty," "valour," and "act" (like "air," "pride," and "plume") "here buckle." "Buckle" is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature's being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the "buckling" of the knees), in which all parts subordinate themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a unification takes place. At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order as the glory of Christ's life and crucifixion, though not as grand.

Form
The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging: the bird's perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are inseparable. Note, too, how important the "-ing" ending is to the poem's rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives, and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird's motion.
"The Windhover" is written in "sprung rhythm," a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird's pausing and racing. Listen to the hovering rhythm of "the rolling level underneath him steady air," and the arched brightness of "and striding high there." The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on Christ.

Commentary
This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins's sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections. Part of the beauty of the poem lies in the way Hopkins integrates his masterful description of a bird's physical feat with an account of his own heart's response at the end of the first stanza. However, the sestet has puzzled many readers because it seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced in the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover's motion now give way to the phrase "my chevalier"--a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback, to which the poem's subtitle (or dedication) gives the reader a clue. The transition between octave and sestet comes with the statement in lines 9-11 that the natural ("brute") beauty of the bird in flight is but a spark in comparison with the glory of Christ, whose grandeur and spiritual power are "a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous."
The first sentence of the sestet can read as either descriptive or imperative, or both. The idea is that something glorious happens when a being's physical body, will, and action are all brought into accordance with God's will, culminating in the perfect self-expression. Hopkins, realizing that his own heart was "in hiding," or not fully committed to its own purpose, draws inspiration from the bird's perfectly self-contained, self-reflecting action. Just as the hovering is the action most distinctive and self-defining for the windhover, so spiritual striving is man's most essential aspect. At moments when humans arrive at the fullness of their moral nature, they achieve something great. But that greatness necessarily pales in comparison with the ultimate act of self-sacrifice performed by Christ, which nevertheless serves as our model and standard for our own behavior.
The final tercet within the sestet declares that this phenomenon is not a "wonder," but rather an everyday occurrence--part of what it means to be human. This striving, far from exhausting the individual, serves to bring out his or her inner glow--much as the daily use of a metal plow, instead of wearing it down, actually polishes it--causing it to sparkle and shine. The suggestion is that there is a glittering, luminous core to every individual, which a concerted religious life can expose. The subsequent image is of embers breaking open to reveal a smoldering interior. Hopkins words this image so as to relate the concept back to the Crucifixion: The verb "gash" (which doubles for "gush") suggests the wounding of Christ's body and the shedding of his "gold-vermilion" blood.

Pied Beauty" (1877)

Complete Text



Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.




Summary
The poem opens with an offering: "Glory be to God for dappled things." In the next five lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric of "dappled." He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the "brinded" (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting color on a trout. The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell; they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within. The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the "trades" and activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment.
In the final five lines, Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the characteristics of these examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now to the concept of variety and diversity that he has elaborated thus far mostly in terms of physical characteristics. The poem becomes an apology for these unconventional or "strange" things, things that might not normally be valued or thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God, which, in their multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and inspire us to "Praise Him."

Form
This is one of Hopkins's "curtal" (or curtailed) sonnets, in which he miniaturizes the traditional sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and shortening the six lines of the sestet to four and a half. This alteration of the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating originality and contrariness. The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem ("dappled," "stipple," "tackle," "fickle," "freckled," "adazzle," for example) enacts the creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a pleasing and coherent whole.

Commentary
This poem is a miniature or set-piece, and a kind of ritual observance. It begins and ends with variations on the mottoes of the Jesuit order ("to the greater glory of God" and "praise to God always"), which give it a traditional flavor, tempering the unorthodoxy of its appreciations. The parallelism of the beginning and end correspond to a larger symmetry within the poem: the first part (the shortened octave) begins with God and then moves to praise his creations. The last four-and-a-half lines reverse this movement, beginning with the characteristics of things in the world and then tracing them back to a final affirmation of God. The delay of the verb in this extended sentence makes this return all the more satisfying when it comes; the long and list-like predicate, which captures the multiplicity of the created world, at last yields in the penultimate line to a striking verb of creation (fathers-forth) and then leads us to acknowledge an absolute subject, God the Creator. The poem is thus a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. It expresses the theological position that the great variety in the natural world is a testimony to the perfect unity of God and the infinitude of His creative power. In the context of a Victorian age that valued uniformity, efficiency, and standardization, this theological notion takes on a tone of protest.
Why does Hopkins choose to commend "dappled things" in particular? The first stanza would lead the reader to believe that their significance is an aesthetic one: In showing how contrasts and juxtapositions increase the richness of our surroundings, Hopkins describes variations in color and texture--of the sensory. The mention of the "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" in the fourth line, however, introduces a moral tenor to the list. Though the description is still physical, the idea of a nugget of goodness imprisoned within a hard exterior invites a consideration of essential value in a way that the speckles on a cow, for example, do not. The image transcends the physical, implying how the physical links to the spiritual and meditating on the relationship between body and soul. Lines five and six then serve to connect these musings to human life and activity. Hopkins first introduces a landscape whose characteristics derive from man's alteration (the fields), and then includes "trades," "gear," "tackle," and "trim" as diverse items that are man-made. But he then goes on to include these things, along with the preceding list, as part of God's work.
Hopkins does not refer explicitly to human beings themselves, or to the variations that exist among them, in his catalogue of the dappled and diverse. But the next section opens with a list of qualities ("counter, original, spare, strange") which, though they doggedly refer to "things" rather than people, cannot but be considered in moral terms as well; Hopkins's own life, and particularly his poetry, had at the time been described in those very terms. With "fickle" and "freckled" in the eighth line, Hopkins introduces a moral and an aesthetic quality, each of which would conventionally convey a negative judgment, in order to fold even the base and the ugly back into his worshipful inventory of God's gloriously "pied" creation.

Spring and Fall" (1880)

Complete Text



To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.




Summary
The poem opens with a question to a child: "Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?" "Goldengrove," a place whose name suggests an idyllic play-world, is "unleaving," or losing its leaves as winter approaches. And the child, with her "fresh thoughts," cares about the leaves as much as about "the things of man." The speaker reflects that age will alter this innocent response, and that later whole "worlds" of forest will lie in leafless disarray ("leafmeal," like "piecemeal") without arousing Margaret's sympathy. The child will weep then, too, but for a more conscious reason. However, the source of this knowing sadness will be the same as that of her childish grief--for "sorrow's springs are the same." That is, though neither her mouth nor her mind can yet articulate the fact as clearly as her adult self will, Margaret is already mourning over her own mortality.

Form
This poem has a lyrical rhythm appropriate for an address to a child. In fact, it appears that Hopkins began composing a musical accompaniment to the verse, though no copy of it remains extant. The lines form couplets and each line has four beats, like the characteristic ballad line, though they contain an irregular number of syllables. The sing-song effect this creates in the first eight lines is complicated into something more uneasy in the last seven; the rhymed triplet at the center of the poem creates a pivot for this change. Hopkins' "sprung rhythm" meter (see the Analysis section of this SparkNote for more on "sprung rhythm") lets him orchestrate the juxtapositions of stresses in unusual ways. He sometimes incorporates pauses, like musical rests, in places where we would expect a syllable to separate two stresses (for example, after "Margaret" in the first line and "Leaves" in the third). At other times he lets the stresses stand together for emphasis, as in "will weep" and "ghost guessed"; the alliteration here contributes to the emphatic slowing of the rhythm at these most earnest and dramatic points in the poem.

Commentary
The title of the poem invites us to associate the young girl, Margaret, in her freshness, innocence, and directness of emotion, with the springtime. Hopkins's choice of the American word "fall" rather than the British "autumn" is deliberate; it links the idea of autumnal decline or decay with the biblical Fall of man from grace. That primordial episode of loss initiated human mortality and suffering; in contrast, the life of a young child, as Hopkins suggests (and as so many poets have before him--particularly the Romantics), approximates the Edenic state of man before the Fall. Margaret lives in a state of harmony with nature that allows her to relate to her paradisal "Goldengrove" with the same sympathy she bears for human beings or, put more cynically, for "the things of man."
Margaret experiences an emotional crisis when confronted with the fact of death and decay that the falling leaves represent. What interests the speaker about her grief is that it represents such a singular (and precious) phase in the development of a human being's understanding about death and loss; only because Margaret has already reached a certain level of maturity can she feel sorrow at the onset of autumn. The speaker knows what she does not, namely, that as she grows older she will continue to experience this same grief, but with more self-consciousness about its real meaning ("you will weep, and know why"), and without the same mediating (and admittedly endearing) sympathy for inanimate objects ("nor spare a sigh, / Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie"). This eighth line is perhaps one of the most beautiful in all of Hopkins's work: The word "worlds" suggests a devastation and decline that spreads without end, well beyond the bounds of the little "Goldengrove" that seems so vast and significant to a child's perception. Loss is basic to the human experience, and it is absolute and all-consuming. "Wanwood" carries the suggestion of pallor and sickness in the word "wan," and also provides a nice description of the fading colors of the earth as winter dormancy approaches. The word "leafmeal," which Hopkins coined by analogy with "piecemeal," expresses with poignancy the sense of wholesale havoc with which the sight of strewn fallen leaves might strike a naive and sensitive mind.
In the final, and heaviest, movement of the poem, Hopkins goes on to identify what this sorrow is that Margaret feels and will, he assures us, continue to feel, although in different ways. The statement in line 11 that "Sorrow's springs are the same" suggests not only that all sorrows have the same source, but also that Margaret, who is associated with springtime, represents a stage all people go through in coming to understand mortality and loss. What is so remarkable about this stage is that while the "mouth" cannot say what the grief is for, nor the mind even articulate it silently, a kind of understanding nevertheless materializes. It is a whisper to the heart, something "guessed" at by the "ghost" or spirit--a purely intuitive notion of the fact that all grieving points back to the self: to one's own suffering of losses, and ultimately to one's own mortality.
Though the narrator's tone toward the child is tender and sympathetic, he does not try to comfort her. Nor are his reflections really addressed to her because they are beyond her level of understanding. We suspect that the poet has at some point gone through the same ruminations that he now observes in Margaret; and that his once-intuitive grief then led to these more conscious reflections. Her way of confronting loss is emotional and vague; his is philosophical, poetical, and generalizing, and we see that this is his more mature--and "colder"--way of likewise mourning for his own mortality.