Elizabeth Hampsten

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  1. This Is Christmas Eve and I Am in Tintah
    Abstract

    Preview this article: This Is Christmas Eve and I Am in Tintah, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/39/6/collegeenglish16176-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce197816176
  2. Reply to Roberts W. French
    doi:10.2307/375589
  3. Lesbia and Love: Comment on "A Woman's Map of Lyric Poetry" by Elizabeth Hampsten
    doi:10.2307/375587
  4. A Woman's Map of Lyric Poetry
    Abstract

    When timely death my life and fortune ends, Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends, But let all lovers, rich in triumph, come And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb; And Lesbia, close up thou my little light, And crown with love my ever-during night. AND LESBIA, WHAT IS IN IT FOR HER? If she helps this lover turn into a monument to love, will she share the lover's immortality? Does she want to? We'll never know. In these eighteen lines, there are seven pronouns in the first-person singular, five in the plural, four mentions of them, and one of thou. The center of the poem is the who comes back to himself twelve times. Lesbia's imagination is not part of the poem; her person is in the same category as the sun, moon,.stars, swords, armor, drums and trumpets, death, hearse, and lovers, all the equal ingredients of the universalized experience of the poem: the fear of death, the longing of love, the imagined bravado that immortality is to be won through a really grand sexual encounter. Campion is probably right, psychologically as well as poetically, to leave Lesbia out of it. (Anyway, maybe she does not worry about a tomb and ever-during night.) There is no room in the poem for her, and none for me, and so I will begin my confession about how much there is of English poetry which I do not know how to read.

    doi:10.2307/374897