Michael Ondaatje’s “Elizabeth” shows the life in the English California king Elizabeth I actually. Ondaatje combines prose and poetry, truth and fictional works, realism and surrealism. The result of this fusion creates a high degree of dramatic realism. That illustrates the progression and transition from childhood to adulthood.
The Poem unwraps with a youthful Elizabeth harvesting apples with her father (King Henry VIII) and Uncle Jack port (fictional character); preceded with a trip to the zoo. The atmosphere suddenly shifts via going to the tiergarten, to ice fishing with Philip (King of Spain) on a cold winter day.
Easily, the ambiance and period shifts again to conveying Mary’s (Elizabeth’s stepsister) teeth. Then jumps to a moving scene with Elizabeth’s confidant, Tom (Lord Thomas Seymour), which is and then the performance of Jeff. Finally, the poem ends with a alternatively short information of At the writing poems with one more confidant, the Earl of Essex.
The narrative lines and detailed passages employed in “Elizabeth” will not flow realistically and coherently from stage A to point M.
The names do not look like in traditional and chronological order; yet , they fit right into a generalized picture of the political mayhem, betrayal, and punishments of that time. Elizabeth’s stepsister “˜Bloody’ Mary Tudor, Mary’s husband Philip II of Spain, the unfortunate Master Tom Seymour, and her late preferred, the Earl of Kent, were most executed.
Ondaatje’s “Elizabeth” alters from child-voice through adolescent-voice to adult-voice, catching the tone of each and every stage of maturity. Ondaatje’s imitation in the tones reveals how Elizabeth must, through debilitating maturity and sophisticated situations, sacrifice passion to power, while how a young ruler would need to. For example in stanza 3, Philip “broke the ice”(19) and “then he [Philip] kissed me personally [Elizabeth]”(22), shows that love is definitely deceitful, and it is to be prevented. Furthermore in stanza five, “I retained the love inside my palm right up until it blistered”(34) connotes that love is usually painful rather than time-worthy. Fatality is present and apparent in last stanzas as both threat and momento mori (remembrance to get the dead), even for the young mischievous girl whom “hid the apple in my room/ till it shrunk like a face/ growing eyes and teeth ribs”(7-9).
The emblematic references to “apple”(2) and “snake”(12) bring in the relationship among Elizabeth’s life to that of Adam’s and Eve’s. The evil, deceptive snake in Adam and Eve assures Eve to consume the apple, which in the finish leads to her downfall. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII of England, compliments and sides with snake inside the zoo, simply by describing this as “Smart”(16). This exterior of the snake might illustrate to the readers with the residing nasty within him. In stanza three, the image of glaciers fishing and eating organic, uncooked seafood implies a primitive and uncivilized lifestyle. A ancient life is an unhealthy one.
The correlation between your snake, the father, and the primitiveness can lead to a sense of danger in Elizabeth’s lifestyle. Elizabeth feelings the danger and evades that by becoming sly and controlling. This is indicated by tonal changeover in since she photo slides from thoughts of “Tom, soft laughing”(28) and “turning / with all the rhythm of the sun in warped limbs, / who’d hold my breast watching it approach like a snail / giving his quick urgent appreciate in my palm”(30-34), to his beheading, and then to her after “cool”(44) flirtations “with white young Kent (45). Even so, Elizabeth’s control of voice captures the readers’ attention.
“Elizabeth” is an example of Ondaatje’s attempts to defy traditional poetry publishing. And he achieves that in the incoherency of events, the un-rhythmic lines as well as the irregular stanzas.
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