All Questions

In Chapter VII of My Boyhood Days, Tagore describes how the narrator as a child became interested in music and singing. The "family friend Srikantha Babu was absorbed in music day and night":...

The standard edition of Rabindranath Tagore's song lyrics, গীতবিতান / giitabitaan, "A Canopy of Songs", classifies the lyrics under six headings: পূজা / puujaa, "Worship" স্বদেশ / ...

In Watership Down, one of the rabbits is named Dandelion. The explanation given for the name in the Fandom wiki is this: He is a yellow-furred rabbit, hence his name [Dandelion]. But while that ...

Camus's novel The Stranger begins with the news of the death and the funeral of Meursault's mother. Meursault smokes cigarettes during the wake, doesn't weep before, during or after the funeral, and ...

There's a short poem by Ko Un that, when translated, goes like this: In the very middle of the road two dogs are coupling I take another route (source; translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé) Why ...

Birds generally are symbols of high power, e.g. the sun. Excluding mythical birds, which real species are most strongly associated with power, magic, and specifically fire in particular?

In Mary Norton's Borrowers series, the Borrowers are tiny people who live secretly among humans. There are or were several families of Borrowers living in one large house, with family surnames ...

In Macbeth, when the eponymous hero is hesitating to kill Duncan, Lady Macbeth urges him forward to the murder. She memorably says:      I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe ...

In poem 52 of Tagore's English version of Gitanjali, a female persona speaks of a gift that a man or lover left her: What token left of thy love? It is no flower, no spices, no vase of perfumed water....

When I was in elementary school (from 2013-2018), I read a picture book I saw on the classroom shelves. It was a short picture book where a black cat would walk through an abandoned castle/manor of ...

could you please recommend me some poems in English (from 18th-20th centuries) where Shakespearean characters (Hamlet, Ophelia, etc.) are mentioned in the text?

This questions is not quite about learning the language, but could you recommend me some poems in English (from 18th-20th centuries) where Shakespearean characters (Hamlet, Ophelia, etc.) are ...

I'm looking for any insight on the poem "Walking to Work" (1952) by Frank O'Hara. I feel like the meanings are just escaping me, and I can't find any analysis on the Internet to support/...

If I have to find one "flaw" about The Lord of the Rings, it may be the fact that Sam is more or less the slave of Frodo, albeit a willing servant. This fundamentally bothers me, for some ...

In chapter 17 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing a captured man who had been led to a building: The sight he saw was a remarkable one. He was in a chapel; he ...

In book III of Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator, who has published some popular poems, reads her fan-mail, which includes: … rarer tokens from young bachelors, Who ...

In chapter 17 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing a conversation between an old uncle and his nephew, who was an assistant-commissioner of police. In a ...

In The Hero of Ages, Vin and Slowswift have this conversation: "Cett is one of the finest poets I know, child," said Slowswift, waving her toward a chair. "We shared our work with one ...

An excerpt from essay by Marita Golden in the book "three minutes or less: life lessons from America's greatest writers " Like their creator, my fictional characters reject the notion of ...

An excerpt from essay by Marita Golden in the book "three minutes or less: life lessons from America's greatest writers " Writers are always headed or looking for home. Home is the first ...

When I was a student, many years ago, in the mid 1990s, I remember reading a fascinating piece about traditional African poetry. If I remember correctly, it was a scholarly article reprinted an ...

An excerpt from "My Glove" by Katherine A. Powers: I walked around (out of sight of the house) with the glove tucked under my arm, wishing I could shove it in my back pocket like boys did ...

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronounciation of English vowel sounds, marking the dividing line between Middle English and Modern English. A wholesale shift of sounds took place ...

Petrarch's celebrated sequence of 366 poems to Laura goes by three different titles. As far as I can tell, they're used interchangeably: Il Canzoniere, The Songbook Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, ...

"The Wanderer" is an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poem from the Exeter Book. What best describes the overall tone/mood of this poem? Is it deeply philosophical, highly emotional, or carefree? ...

Ok I think this was a short story I read, but it may have been a novel or even a tv show or movie. There is a man in jail for murder and a lady is there asking him to write in a journal or something ...

In book I of Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eponymous narrator describes the process of forming her values and beliefs out of a throng of idées reçus:                          ...

What exactly is the message that George Orwell tried to communicate through Animal Farm? What exactly did he mean by The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to ...

In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe's husband Halle never came back to Baby Suggs' house after planning to run away from Sweet Home. After Paul D arrives, he later blurts out to Sethe of what he ...

So far, we have had at least two questions about the early history of the English sonnet: Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare? Why are Shakespearean sonnets called ...

The Little Stranger is a gothic-style novel by Sarah Waters in which a fading aristocratic family appears to be haunted by a presence in their crumbling estate. Minor spoilers for the book follow. The ...

Is there a book that contains English translations of all the prose and poetry in the Fenian Cycle?

1- Why does Defoe not use phrases like “ social distancing”, and “flattening the curve”? The Spanish flu of 1918 reshaped the world, leading to the loss of 50 million people, on the heels of 10 ...

Rabindranath Tagore's 1886 collection of verse কড়ি ও কোমল / ka.Di o komal, "Sharps and Flats", includes a set of 15 or so poems under the general heading বিদেশী ফূলের গুচ্ছ / videshii ...

In The Story of Doctor Dolittle, the author writes, But the Cat’s-meat-Man wasn’t very rich and he only got sick once a year—at Christmas-time, when he used to give the Doctor sixpence for a bottle ...

Towards the very end of her novel, Avni portrays a scene where the protagonist Antara is together with all the characters introduced in the novel (except Kali Mata). They are having a family get ...

The large majority of poems in the English version of Tagore's Gitanjali address a supreme being. Tagore uses the pronouns "thou", "thee" and "thy" in almost all of these ...

The term Shakespearean sonnet is frequently used for sonnets with a particular verse pattern and rhyme scheme, namely ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. But from what I can find with a little reading online, this ...

I have an assignment where I have to write a Shakespearean sonnet for my professor (who is very strict about the formatting of the assignment). Are there any ways/tricks in which I can figure out if ...

What quotes tell us about Simon's submission, that he is a peacemaker, and that he knows how to get off of the island? I'm doing a body biography on him, and I need quotes for each part.

I’m looking to find some books I read as a child: a collection of stories about a young boy involved with motocross or dirt biking. This was in the UK in the 90s. One of the stories featured a rival ...

In book I of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), the eponymous narrator describes the experience of reading poetry:                                 But the sun was high When first I ...

Rabindranath Tagore's novel Chokher Bali makes a few references to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Vishabriksha or The Poison Tree, which was first published in 1873. (The passages below are quoted ...

A quote from Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand: The horseless carriage was just arriving in San Francisco, and its debut was turning into one of those colorfully unmitigated ...

Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) and Rabindranath Tagore's Gora (1910) have several parallels. Each is about an Irish orphan who passes for Indian. Each is also a Bildungsroman, portraying their ...

Michael Crichton’s 1996 novel “Airframe” opens with two quotations, one of which reads: The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion. This is ...

I continue to read "Great Expectations" and there is another question about some words that I'd like to put. A fearful man, in a coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. I emphasized the ...

The key thing I remember about this story: In-universe, the folklore goes something like: if you go to the woods, and find the house, and press your face against the glass, there's a sudden horrifying ...

I have just started reading Great Expectations. I want to improve my English, and since I'm not a native speaker, I have difficulty understanding what "raw" means in the following piece of ...

I am looking for a book whose title roughly translates to "Way to Oregon". The author was a person of color. The story is about a group who were involved in trade when Europeans first ...