By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’: this oft-quoted line from Oscar Wilde was not spoken by Wilde during conversation, as so many of his witty lines were. Instead, ‘we are all in the gutter’ is uttered by one of Wilde’s characters in his play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. But what is the meaning of this pithy and strangely beautiful line?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘He was my North, my South, my East and West’ is a line from what is probably W. H. Auden’s best-known poem, ‘Funeral Blues’ (as it’s commonly known) or ‘Stop all the clocks’ (as it’s also known, after its opening words). But what is the meaning of this line, and Auden’s poem as a whole?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ These lines appear in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in one of Prospero’s most famous speeches (‘Our revels now are ended’).
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting and enchanted plays: a fantasy or ‘romance’ featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, fairies, a lavish masque, drunken conspirators, young lovers, and much else.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ is a famous line from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, but since Hamlet is positively brimming with famous lines, it doesn’t get as much attention as other famous quotations from the play.
Many of us know, and some may use, phrases such as ‘to the manner born’, ‘cruel to be kind’, ‘neither a borrower not a lender be’, ‘hoist with one’s own petard’, ‘in my mind’s eye’, ‘primrose path’, ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’, ‘method in one’s madness’, and many more.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the origins of a famous line from The Waste Land
Among many haunting lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ stands out for its sinister suggestions of death, mortality, and the ultimate futility of all human endeavour. If the poem as a whole seems to offer a vision of civilisation as a pile of textual rubble or ruins, with all of human achievement in literature, religion, and myth reduced to those ‘fragments’ which the speaker has ‘shored’, then ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ does the same for the human species. But is this a correct analysis of the line’s meaning? What else might it mean?