This poem is just a popular representative of the poems in which Yeats has achieved suggestive patterns of meaning by a careful counterpointing of contrasting ideas or images like human and fairy, natura1 and artificial, domestic and wild, and ephemeral and permanent. Around a "fairyland" background, the poem is c1osely woven, easy, subtle and musical; the c1arity and control of the imagery give the poem a haunting quality.

2. Down by the Salley Gardens
Originally entitled "An Old Song Resung," with Yeats's footnote: "This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself."
The theme of the poem is very simple: a boy has fallen in love with a beautiful girl who is carefree and advises the boy not to be so serious about love and life. But he does not agree with her and suffers a lot.

 

　　　　　　　Ⅳ.T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
　一．一般识记：
His life and writing: Thomas Steams Eliot was born at St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. Eliot was first educated at Smith Academy and then at Harvard where he concentrated his energies on studying philosophy and logic. He took interest in Elizabethan literature, the Italian Renaissance and Indian mystical philosophy of Buddhism. He was also attracted by the French symbolist poetry. He worked as the editor of The Egoist and The Criterion, the two most influential literary reviews of 20th century. He won various awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948.
　二．识记与领会：
1． Eliot had a long poetic career, which was generally divided into two periods: the early one from 1915 to 1925, and the later one from 1927 onward.
(1) The main features of T.S.Eliot's early poems: In his early period, Eliot produced a fairly large number of poems, which were mainly collected in Poems 1909-25 (1925). His first important poem was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). He also published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and his most famous poem The Waste Land (1922). As a young man with bitter disillusionment and with boldness in the handling of language, Eliot had explored in his early poetry various aspects of decay of culture in the modem Western world, expressing a sense of the disintegration of life. Most of his early poems are about a state of mind. There is little "action" in a physical sense; the action is totally psychological. The poems are dominated by the dark horror of an earthly hell. The more important poems of this period are: "Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men.
(2) In his later period, Eliot produced only two major volumes of poetic works: Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1944). The quest for stability, for order, and for the maintaining of the bourgeois status quo became his primary concern in his later works. The Four Quartets, based on the Christian dogmas of incarnation and resurrection, is concerned with the quest for the immortal element, the stillness within time or history. Man, disillusioned and hopeless in his early poetry, now finds reconciliation in God. Thus, the Four Quartets is characterized by a philosophical and emotional calm quite in contrast to the despair and suffering of the early works. The stream-of-consciousness technique has been largely employed in Eliot's poems.
2．T. S. Eliot's major achievement in drama writing:
He was one of the important verse dramatists in the first half of the 20th century. Besides some fragmentary pieces, Eliot had written in his lifetime five full-length plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The-Elder Statesman (1959). All the plays have something to do with Christian themes. His three later plays are also concerned with the subject of spiritual self-discovery but in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy. Eliot's major achievement in play writing has been the creation of a verse drama in the 20th century to express the ideas and actions of modern society with new accents of the contemporary speech.
3．T. S. Eliot was also an important prose writer. During his literary career, he wrote a large number of essays, articles and book reviews. His essays are mainly concerned with cultural, social, religious, as well as literary issues. It is not inappropriate to say that Eliot, as a critic, may have occupied today a position of distinction and influence equal in importance to his position as a poet.
In his famous essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent," Eliot put great emphasis on the importance of tradition both in creative writing and in criticism. And in presenting his doctrine of impersonality, Eliot argued that a poet's mind should remain "inert" and "neutral" towards his subject matter, keeping a gulf between the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

　三．应用Selected Reading:
1．The literary significance of The Waste Land:
(1) The theme: The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation.
(2) The main ideas of each section: The poem is 433 lines long and is divided into five sections, which are not logically constructed or connected. Section I, "The Burial of the Dead," deals chiefly with the theme of death in life. The inhabitants in the modern Waste Land, who have lost the knowledge of good and evil, live a sterile, meaningless life. In the last passage of the section, Eliot connects the "unreal city" with the city of the dead, and modern London with Dante's Hell, claiming that those who have no faith of religion are actually living dead. To bury the dead is to bury a memory, which brings no hope of growth or renewal. Section II, "A Game of Chess," gives a rather concrete illustration of the sterile situation. A picture of spiritual emptiness is presented with the reproduction of a contemporary pub conversation between two cockney women. The discussion is constantly interrupted by the pub keeper's "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Section III, "The Fire Sermon," expresses a painfully elegiac feeling by juxtaposing the vulgarity and shallowness of the modern with the beauty and simplicity of the past. What was once ritualistic and meaningful is now despairing and empty. In section IV, "Death by Water," the drowned Phoenician Sailor is an emblem of futile worries over profit and loss, youth and age. With the curative and baptismal power of the water images, the drowned Phoenician Sailor also recalls the rebirth of the drowned god of the fertility cults, thus giving an instance of the conquest of death. The title of Section V, "What the Thunder Said," appears to be derived from an Indian myth, in which the supreme Lord of the Creation speaks through the thunder. As the drought breaks and the thunder speaks, various elusive suggestions of hopes are given; but despite the thunder's advice "to give, to sympathize, and to control," which projects the possibility of regeneration, the issue is left uncertain at the end.
(3) The poem's social significance: The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society. The horror and menace, the anguish and dereliction, and the futility and sterility expressed in his poetry had been afflicting all sensitive members of the postwar generation.
2．The characteristics of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is Eliot's most striking early achievement. It presents the meditation of an aging young man over the business of proposing marriage. The poem is in a form of dramatic monologue, suggesting an ironic contrast between a pretended "love song" and a confession of the speaker's incapability of facing up to love and to life in a sterile upper-class world. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, is neurotic, self-important, illogical and incapable of action. He is a kind of tragic figure caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desires. The setting of the poem resembles the "polite society" of Pope's " The Rape of the Lock," in which a tea party is a significant event and a game of cards is the only way to stave off boredom. The poem is intensely anti-romantic with visual images of hard, gritty objects and evasive hellish atmosphere.

V. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
　一．一般识记
His life and writing: David Herbert Lawrence was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire. His father was a coal-miner with little education; but his mother, once a school teacher, was from a somewhat higher class, who came to think that she had married beneath her and desired to have her sons well educated so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913).
　二．识记
1．Lawrence's major works: During his life-long literary career, he had written more than ten novels, several volumes of short stories and a large number of poems. Lawrence began his novel writing in his early twenties. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), is a remarkable work of a talented young man, acutely observant of nature and delighting in story. His second novel is The Trespasser (1912), which is about the failure of human contact and the lack of warmth between people, which are to be further explored in his later novels. Lawrence was recognized as a prominent novelist only after Sons and Lovers was published. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) are generally regarded as his masterpieces in which symbolism and complex narrative are employed more richly.
2．The Rainbow
(1) The story: The Rainbow is a story about the three generations of the Brangwen family on the Marsh farm. The first part is about the marriage and life of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow. They have a deep and loving understanding of each other in spite of the utter foreignness between them. They can also communicate with the mysterious natural world. Their relationship is presented as the model one in the novel. The second part of the novel is about Anna Lensky, Lydia's daughter by her first husband, and Will, Tom's nephew. They have physical passion for each other; but, in Lawrence's words, "their souls remain separate." Their relationship is fraught with conflicts, and their marriage fails to achieve the final fulfillment of the older generation. The last part of the novel deals with Ursula, the eldest daughter of Will and Anna, who carries the story on into the third generation. This part of the novel traces Ursula's life from childhood through adolescence up to adulthood. At the end of the novel; Ursula is left with much experience behind her, but still "uncreated" in face of the unknown future.
(2) The social significance of The Rainbow: In this novel, Lawrence illustrates a terrible social corruption that accompanies the progress of human civilization. In Lawrence's opinion, the mechanical civilization is responsible for the unhealthy development of human personalities, the perversion of love and the failure of human fulfillment in marital relationships. In reading the novel, the reader often feels the threatening shadows of the disintegration and destructiveness of the whole civilized world which loom behind the emotional conflicts and psychological tensions of the characters. As a matter of fact, it is the first time for Lawrence to make a conscious attempt to combine social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.
3．Women in Love:
(1) The story: As its title implies, Women in Love is a novel about two pairs of lovers, around whom a series of episodes are dramatically presented. The two heroines are Ursula Brangwen and her younger sister Gudrun; and the two chief male characters are Gerald Crich, a young coalmine owner, and Rupert Birkin, a school inspector. At the opening of the story, Ursula and Birkin strike an immediate kin ship with each other, while Gudrun is attracted by Gerald's physical energy. The rest of the novel is a working out of the relationships of these four through interrelating events and conflicts of personalities. After a series of ups and downs, Birkin and Ursula have reached a fruitful relationship by maintaining their integrity and independence as individuals and decided to get married in the end. But the passionate love between Gudrun and Gerald experiences a process of tension and deterioration. As both of them have let their "will-power" and "ideals" interfere with their proper relations, their love turns out to be a disastrous tragedy.
(2) The symbolic meanings in this novel: Women in Love is rich in its symbolic meanings. Gerald Crich, an efficient but ruthless coalmine owner, who makes the machine his god and establishes the inhuman mechanical system in his mining kingdom, is a symbolic figure of spiritual death, representing the whole set of bourgeois ethics. Whereas Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, who fights against the cramping pressures of mechanized industrialism and the domination of any kind of dead formulas, is presented as a symbolic figure of human warmth, standing for the spontaneous Life Force. Women in Love is a remarkable novel in which the individual consciousness is subtly revealed and strands of themes are intricately wound up. The structural pattern of the book derives from the contrast between the destinies of the two pairs of lovers and the subordinate masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. The two sisters, the two male friends, and the two couples are closely paralleled in ideas, actions and relations so that each is corresponding to and contrasting with the other. Thus, Women in Love is regarded to be a more profoundly ordered novel than any other written by Lawrence.
4．His later novels, which deal more extensively with themes of power, dominance, and leadership; the relationships that men form with one another, are also under exploration. These works include Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence has returned to his early subjects and background of Nottinghamshire. By presenting an old romantic story about a dissatisfied aristocratic lady who deserts her half-man, half-machine husband to find love with a man of nature, Lawrence not only condemns the civilized world of mechanism that distorts all natural relationships between men and women, but also advocates a return to nature.
5．The theme of his short stories: Lawrence also uses them to expose the bankruptcy of the mechanical civilization and to find an answer to it. Irony, humour and wit are the characteristic features of many of the stories. St. Mawr, The Daughter of the Vicar, The Horse Dealer's Daughter, The Captain's Doll, The Prussian Officer, and The Virgin and the Gypsy are generally considered to be Lawrence's best known stories.
6．Lawrence is also a proficient poet. He began his poetry writing very early and wrote quite a large number of poems in his whole career. His poems fall roughly into three categories - satirical and comic poems, poems about human relationships and emotions, and poems about nature. Lawrence does not care much about the conventional metrical rules; what he tries to do in poetry is to catch the instant life of the immediate present.
7．Lawrence's three influential plays are known as "the Lawrence trilogy": A Collier's Friday Night (1909), The Daughter-in-Law (1912) and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyed (1914), have in common the typical working-class environments set in Nottinghamshire. The main conflict is between the ignorant, drunken and brutish father or husband and the weary, frustrated mother or wife who tries to find emotional fulfillment in her children. What the plays focus on is the direct and violent emotions of the main characters in times of crisis in their married life. The plays are presented with a higher degree of objectivity and detachment than the novels by Lawrence.

　三．领会
The creative features and the social significance of Lawrence's writing: Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century. The major characteristics of his novel is that he combined social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing. He was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lays in the tracing of psychological development of his character and in his enegetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature.
(1) The theme: In his writings, Lawrence has expressed a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. In his opinion, the bourgeois industrialization or civilization, which made its realization at the cost of ravishing the land, started the catastrophic uprooting of man from nature and caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of man. Under the mechanical control, human beings were turned into inanimated matter, while the inanimated matter should be animated to destroy both man and earth. It is this agonized concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence's writing.
(2) Lawrence's influence to modern and contemporary English literature: