BXBX NOVEL Chapter 171 - Allowed Herself
[This chapter is dedicated to BedheadBookworm as a birthday dedication for her since this July is also her birth month! Advanced/belated happy birthday! I hope you enjoy/enjoyed your day! I'm blessed to have such a supportive reader such as you! ^^]
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To Shu Xian, she finalized her notes on her analysis about the two poems, the reference she found on the net helping her greatly on her research.
"The Passionate Shepherd" is a poem of seduction. In it, the speaker tries to convince his listener to come to the country and be his lover.
The speaker makes his case on the basis of the luxuries they will enjoy together in the countryside, describing it as a place of pleasure that is at once sensual and innocent.
He wants his "love" to simply sit on the rocks for a while and appreciate the scene, without worrying about their responsibilities.
Although the joys the speaker describes may be fleeting, they are still rich and seductive. Listing them, the speaker makes a case for embracing the pure pleasure of love and rejects the idea that doing so might have negative consequences.
As its title suggests, "The Passionate Shepherd" is thus a passionate poem, full of sexual tension. But, diverging from traditions that associate sexuality with sin and death, the poem portrays this sexuality as an innocent.
There seem to be no costs associated with the pleasures the speaker describes in his seduction. Instead, the countryside is presented as a place of play and sheer joy, song, and dance.
The speaker refuses to admit any problems, troubles, or downsides into the world he imagines occupying with his "love."
Instead, he urges his love to just live in the moment, enjoying the sensual pleasures he lists for their own sake, without worrying about the consequences. Indeed, the speaker offers these delights as an escape from responsibilities and consequences.
With Shu Xian copy-pasting this in her notes using her phone as she decided to print this in the morning before she goes to class, she already gave up on rephrasing her paper as she is now sleepy and want to rest already.
'Only this once that you are cramming, Shu Xian.'
She complained to herself, further copy-pasting the other information that she needed on the paper.
'Next time, don't you do this ever again. Next time, remember your homework and don't give in to your distractions. Stupid Professor Pan An.'
Putting her complaint aside, she instead continued copying and pasting an analysis from the link: https://owlcation.com/humanities/An-Analysis-of-The-Nymphs-Reply-to-the-Shepherd-by-Sir-Walter-Raleigh because she really is lazy to make her own analysis right now.
The poem, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," was written by Sir Walter Raleigh, and is a response from a nymph rejecting a shepherd's proposal of love. The poem is in iambic tetrameter.
It is made up of six four-lined stanzas or quatrains, where each iamb regularly alternates between stressed and unstressed syllables.
The emphatic rhythms focus on creating pauses in order to make the poem more rhetorically expressive. Additionally, Drummond notes that Raleigh "end-stops his lines very sharply and also provides strong caesuras, sometimes two in a line.
Shu Xian didn't understand what she just copied. However, she just went on and on, already copying the other important information that she needs for her printout homework later.
By expressing in imaginative detail the reasoning behind her rejections, stanza-by-stanza, the speaker within the poem, a young female nymph, responds to the shepherd's vision of their "happily-ever-after."
The nymph, having superior rationality, coolly objects the shepherd's offerings and explains to him that all he proposes is of the limited timeframe of a mortal being; his offerings will not last.
When she read the analysis that she found on the net, she also agreed to the fact that the nymph seemed to be mocking the shepherd in her reply.
Thus, this led her to copy and paste another part of the article, planning to mention her resources at the end, too, since she felt guilty of not doing the homework and decided to answer this task sloppily.
The poem begins and ends her explanation in the subjunctive mood; this helps set up the rhetorical style of the poem as she contrasts the hypothetical vision of the shepherd to her own morally reflective understanding. The diction of the poem is alluring.
In the initial lines of each stanza, the nymph initially seems to adhere to the shepherd's pastoral diction of a happy ending, but just as quickly as the beautiful imagery is laid out, she mockingly undermines his vision with a more literal view of how life is short and will soon be forgotten.
This sense of mockery is found in the end-rhyme of each line. In each instance, the words help portray what is to be considered within the context of the shepherd's humanistic vision of their life together.
The words forgotten and rotten, which are taken from the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth lines, help focus the imagery in the poem.
The nymph explains to the shepherd that any gift he may give, to win her heart, will soon grow old, break, and be forgotten.
She alludes that a timeless creature such as herself sees things as they will someday become, "Had joys no date nor age no need, / Then these delights my mind might move" (22-23), and that any gift she receives is already rotten in her eyes because of her foreknowledge of the change it will eventually go through.
As she was now satisfied with her newly formed one-paged homework found in her phone, she sighed in relief, shaking her head as she read it carefully.
With her now putting the two links where she got her answers from, she rolled her eyes at herself, seeing that the time on her phone is now 1:30 AM.
'This is what you get for not doing your homework and forgetting about it, Shu Xian,' she thought, now keeping her notebook in her bag. 'Later, you will get your karma on your paper for relying on the internet and not even bothering to revise the paper. This will be the last time you'll do this!'
With that said in her thoughts, she now decided to sleep, now feeling her drowsiness when she was alive a while ago because of the kiss from the professor.
Now that she's thinking of this, she then started to curse herself for being so attracted to him that she allowed herself to be distracted…