Ambition

Ambition

1. A Grammarian's Funeral

   • unattainable goal
     • rhyme scheme tries to achieve dactylic metre but fails
     • 'aiming at a million,/Misses an unit'
   • sacrifice
     • 'Learned, we found him/ Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead'
     • 'Calculus racked him'
     • 'Dead from the waist down'
   • spiritual ambition
     • 'actual life comes next?'
     • 'patience a moment!'
   • mountain imagery
     • 'on a tall mountain, citied to the top'
   • light imagery
     • 'sparkle'
     • 'he's for the morning'
   • comparative language
     • 'rarer'
     • 'intenser'
     • 'loftier'
     • 'loftiest'

2. Love in a Life/Life in a Love

   • unattainable goal
     • 'though I do my best I shall scarce succeed'
     • cyclic form
       • 'Escape me?/Never-/Beloved!'
         • 'I shape me-/Ever/Removed!'
   • sacrifice
     • 'So the chase takes up one's life/that's all'
     • 'Spend my whole day in the quest,-/ who cares?'
   • failure to achieve romantic ambition
     • assonance 'room after room' and 'door succeeds door' emphases loneliness
     • 'She goes out as I enter'

3. Porphyria's Lover

   • romantic ambition only achieved through death
     • 'That moment she was mine,mine,'

4. My Last Duchess

   • materialism
     • 'Notice Neptune.../Which Claus Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!'

5. Two in Campagna

   • romantic ambition
     • 'i would that you were all to me'
     • 'see with your eyes, and set my heart/ Beating by yours'
   • unattainable goal
     • 'then the good minute goes'
     • 'the pain/ Of finite hearts that yearn'

6. The Lost Leader

   • materialistic ambition
     • 'Just for a handful of silver he left us'
   • ambition at all costs
     • 'He alone sinks to the rear'
     • 'one more insult to God!'

7. Bishop Orders His Tomb

   • materialstic
     • 'peach-blossom marble'
     • 'with those nine columns around me'
   • lack of sacrifice
     • 'sons mine'
     • Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!'
   • lack of spiritual goals
     • sensory language
       • 'hear/..see/..feel'
     • 'then I shall lie through centuries'
     • 'Vanity saith the preacher, vanity!'

8. Up at a Villa - Down in the City

   • desire for life
     • 'a house in the city-square/Ah such a life. such a life'
     • 'one's life is a perfect feast'
   • unattainable
     • 'wine, at double the rate'
     • 'Oh a day in the city-square'

9. Toccata of Galuppi

   • desire for life
     • 'As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop'
   • importance of academia
     • 'mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree'

10. Pictor Ignotus

    • ambition for fame
      • 'Nor will I say I have not dreamed.../Of going forth.../To Pope or Kaiser'
    • sacrifice
      • will not sacrifice his integrity for fame
        • 'these buy and sell our pictures, take and tie/Count them for garniture'
        • 'so die my pictures! surely, gently die!'
        • 'O youth, men praise so, - holds their praise its worth?'

11. Apparent Failure

    • 'No, for I'll save it!'

12. Prospice

    • romantic ambition achieved through death
      • 'thou soul of my souL! i shall clasp thee again'