Page 84 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 83
Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.
Cry the man mercy, love him, take his offer.
(III. v. 60–1, Arden edn, London, 1975)
This is eminently sensible advice.

The reader will want to know more about the detailed
expression of these lines. What is it about the text’s selection
and ordering of terms here that makes the ‘advice’ sound so
‘sensible’? Is it the commercial metaphor in the first line? Does
that usefully drag the audience’s mind back from the fantasy
world of literary pastoral to the more familiar and practical one
of the market-place? Or is the effect achieved more by syntax?
Are the four, firmly imperative verbs (‘Sell’, ‘Cry’, ‘love’, ‘take’)
almost bullying in their claim that they recommend no more
than common sense must concede?
What too of the bluntly unqualified negative in which
Phoebe is defined (‘you are not’)? Alternatively, could rhythm
be the main manipulator here? Does the quickening pace of
those three, short clauses in the second line, each beginning
with a stressed monosyllable, suggest an almost exasperated
tone of urgency? Essay-writers could quite legitimately hold
various views as to how each of these factors should be
weighted relative to the others. Indeed an entirely different set
of specifics might be picked out as more relevant. What is
essential is that some detailed analysis is offered to put
intellectual flesh on emptily assertive bones.
Where the quotation is in prose, it is no less important to
think carefully about how it defines its statement as well as
about what it is saying. Consider this example of inadequate
commentary on a passage from Johnson’s novella, Rasselas:
Johnson shows that the Princess’s dream of a pastoral life is
just a fantasy:
She hoped that the time would come when with a few
virtuous and elegant companions, she should gather
flowers planted by her own hand, fondle the lambs of her
own ewe, and listen, without care, among brooks and
breezes, to one of her maidens reading in the shade,
(chapter 19)