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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Tzu Yu Allison Lin
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.05.003
Gaziantep University, Gaziantep, Turkey
In this article, I read different poems of London through the perspectives of time and the self. The city of London, as a physical space, a world in the globe, is changing through both inner time and outer time. Firstly, in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Cleopatra’s Needle, the flow of tide symbolises the passing time, through the long Egyptian history to Tennyson’s Victorian London. The Needle has been through different seas and places. The sense of history, a fusion of inner time and outer time, is claimed by the Needle’s subjective self, seeing London as a “monster town”. Secondly, Ahren Warner’s Greek titled poem is trying to locate the one in London, which cannot be localized, in the trend of globalization, as the gazer observed on the bus. Struggling between the self and the other, inner and outer existences, happiness and being unhappy, W. B. Yeats’ from Vacillation comes to show the reader that through reflection and memory, the sense of one’s own self can be reinforced and affirmed, while creating one’s own personal history. Last but not the least, I read a part from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. As the dialectic of light and shadow plays a sense of Beauty, the soul is aware of all fancy things, but only without any meanings. The question of the self and tradition, the poet and the world, somehow, is a timeless one.
London, self, time, history, tradition
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