Sad Steps 2571 Homage to a Government 2571 The Explosion 2572 This Be The Verse 2572 Aubade 2573
NADINE GORDIMER (b. 1923) 2574 The Moment before the Gun Went Off 2575
A. K. RAMANUJAN (1929-1993) 2578 Self-Portrait 2579 Elements of Composition 2579 Foundlings in the Yukon 2581
THOM GUNN (1929-2004) 2582 Black Jackets 2583 My Sad Captains 2583 From the Wave 2584 Still Life 2585 The Missing 2585
DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930) 2586 A Far Cry from Africa 2587 The Schooner Flight 2588 1 Adios, Carenage 2588 The Season of Phastasmal Peace 2590
OMEROS 2591
1.3.3 [" 'Mais qui qa qui rivait-'ous, Philoctete?' "] 2591 6.49.1�2 ["She bathed him in the brew of the root. The basin"] 2592
TED HUGHES (1930-1998) 2594 Wind 2594 Relic 2595 Pike 2595 Out 2597 Theology 2598 Crow's Last Stand 2599 Daffodils 2599
HAROLD PINTER (b. 1930) 2601 The Dumb Waiter 2601
CHINUAACHEBE (b. 1930) 2622 Things Fall Apart 2624 From An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness 2709
ALICE MUNRO (b. 1931) 2714 Walker Brothers Cowboy 2715
GEOFFREY HILL (b. 1932) 2725 In Memory of Jane Fraser 2725 Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings 2726
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September Song 2726 Mercian Hymns 2727 6 ("The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall") 2727 7 ("Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools") 2727 28 ("Processes of generation; deeds of settlement. The") 2728 30 ("And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-") 2728 An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England 2728
9. The Laurel Axe 2728
V. S. NAIPAUL (b. 1932) 2729 One Out of Many 2730
TOM STOPPARD (b. 1937) 2752 Arcadia 2753
LES MURRAY (b. 1938) 2820 Morse 2821 On Removing Spiderweb 2821 Corniche 2822
SEAMUS HEANEY(b. 1939) 2822 Digging 2824 The Forge 2825 The Grauballe Man 2825 Punishment 2826 Casualty 2828 The Skunk 2830 Station Island 2831 12 ("Like a convalescent, I took the hand") 2831 Clearances 2833 The Sharping Stone 2836
J. M. COETZEE (b. 1940) 2838 From Waiting for the Barbarians 2839
EAVAN BOLAND (b. 1944) 2848 Fond Memory 2848 That the Science of Cartography Is Limited 2849 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 2850 The Lost Land 2851
SALMAN RUSHDIE (b. 1947) 2852 The Prophet's Hair 2854
ANNE CARSON (b. 1950) 2863 The Glass Essay 2864 Hero 2864 Epitaph: Zion 2868
PAUL MULDOON (b. 1951) 2868 Meeting the British 2869 Gathering Mushrooms 2870 Milkweed and Monarch 2871 The Grand Conversation 2872
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CAROL ANN DUFFY (b. 1955) 2873 Warming Her Pearls 2874 Medusa 2875 Mrs Lazarus 2876
POEMS IN PROCESS A1 William Blake A2 The Tyger A2 William Wordsworth A4 She dwelt among the untrodden ways A4 Lord Byron A5
Don Juan A5 Canto 3, Stanza 9 A5 Canto 14, Stanza 95 A6
Percy Bysshe Shelley A7 O World, O Life, O Time A7
John Keats A9 The Eve of St. Agnes A9 To Autumn A10
Alfred, Lord Tennyson A11 The Lady of Shalott A11 Tithonus A14
Elizabeth Barrett Browning A15 The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point A15 Gerard Manley Hopkins A18 Thou art indeed just, Lord A18
William Butler Yeats A19 The Sorrow of Love A19 Leda and the Swan A21
D. H. Lawrence A23 The Piano A23 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES A25 Suggested General Readings A25 The Romantic Period A28 The Victorian Age A36 The Twentieth Century and After A45
APPENDIXES A74 Literary Terminology A74 Geographic Nomenclature A96 Map: London in the 19th and 20th Centuries A98 British Money A99 The British Baronage A104
The Royal Lines of England and Great Britain A106 Religions in England A109
Permissions Acknowledgments A113
Index A119
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Preface to the Eighth Edition
The outpouring of English literature overflows all boundaries, including the capacious boundaries of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. But these pages manage to contain many of the most remarkable works written in English during centuries of restless creative effort. We have included epic poems and short lyrics; love songs and satires; tragedies and comedies written for performance on the commercial stage, and private meditations meant to be perused in silence; prayers, popular ballads, prophecies, ecstatic visions, erotic fantasies, sermons, short stories, letters in verse and prose, critical essays, polemical tracts, several entire novels, and a great deal more. Such works generally form the core of courses that are designed to introduce students to English literature, with its history not only of gradual development, continuity, and dense internal echoes, but also of sudden change and startling innovation.
One of the joys of literature in English is its spectacular abundance. Even within the geographical confines of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where the majority of texts brought together in this collection originated, one can find more than enough distinguished and exciting works to fill the pages of this anthology many times over. The abundance is all the greater if one takes, as the editors of these volumes do, a broad understanding of the term literature. In the course of several centuries, the meaning of the term has shifted from the whole body of writing produced in a particular language to a subset of that writing consisting of works that claim special attention because of their unusual formal beauty or expressive power. Certain literary works, arousing enduring admiration, have achieved sufficient prominence to serve as widespread models for other writers and thus to constitute something approximating a canon. But just as in English-speaking countries there have never been academies empowered to regulate the use of language, so too there have never been firmly settled guidelines for canonizing particular texts. Any individual text's claim to attention is subject to constant debate and revision; established texts are jostled both by new arrivals and by previously neglected claimants; and the boundaries between the literary and whatever is thought to be "nonliterary" are constantly challenged and redrawn. The heart of this collection consists of poems, plays, and prose fiction, but, like the language in which they are written, these categories are themselves products of ongoing historical transformations, and we have included many texts that call into question any conception of literature as only a limited set of particular kinds of writing. English literature as a field arouses not a sense of order but what Yeats calls "the emotion of multitude."
Following the lead of most college courses, we have separated off, on pragmatic grounds, English literature from American literature, but, in keeping
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with the multinational, multicultural, and hugely expansive character of the language, we have incorporated, particularly for the modern period, a substantial number of texts by authors from other countries. This border-crossing is not a phenomenon of modernity only. It is fitting that among the first works here is Beowulf, a powerful epic written in the Germanic language known as Old English about a singularly restless Scandinavian hero. Beowulf's remarkable translator in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seamus Heaney, is one -of the great contemporary masters of English literature he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995�but it would be potentially misleading to call him an "English poet" for he was born in Northern Ireland and is not in fact English. It would be still more misleading to call him a "British poet," as if the British Empire were the most salient fact about the language he speaks and writes in or the culture by which he was shaped. What matters is that the language in which Heaney writes is English, and this fact links him powerfully with the authors assembled in these volumes, a linguistic community that stubbornly refuses to fit comfortably within any firm geographical or ethnic or national boundaries. So too, to glance at other authors and writings in the anthology, in the sixteenth century William Tyndale, in exile in the Low Countries and inspired by German religious reformers, translated the New Testament from Greek and thereby changed the course of the English language; in the seventeenth century Aphra Behn deeply touched her readers with a story that moves from Africa, where its hero is born, to South America, where Behn herself may have witnessed some of the tragic events she describes; and early in the twentieth century Joseph Conrad, born in Ukraine of Polish parents, wrote in eloquent English a celebrated novella whose vision of European empire was trenchantly challenged at the century's