Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Which of the following quotations contains an allusion?"His foray had failed;/the harm-wrecker rued his raid on Heoret." "Where had the horse...

Only one of the four quotations, I suspect, is from Beowulf: the first (because of the reference to Heoret). The second is from The Wanderer. The third is from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The fourth is from the Cantebury Tales.


At first, I didn't think any of them contained an obvious allusion, because I was thinking of an allusion as "an indirect reference." A common (and probably more accurate) definition of allusion is "a quick or passing reference." Using this second definition, the two previous posters are absolutely right: the fourth quotation, with the passing reference to a book of the Bible, is the one with the allusion.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Discuss at least two characteristics of Romanticism in John Keat's poem "Ode toa Nightingale".

The poet in Ode To A Nightingale  is an escapist .He escapes through imagination .On his way the bower of the bliss wher the nightingale is ...