English Literature / Unit 19 ENL 1826 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Which Period? Ten Openings
The idea
Practise on ten openings the course has taught. "When that Aprilis, with his showers swoot" is Middle English, Chaucer, unit four. "Death be not proud" is Donne's metaphysical sonnet, unit eight. "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may" is Cavalier, Herrick, unit eight. "Of Man's first disobedience" is Milton's blank-verse epic, unit nine. "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs" is Augustan mock epic, Pope, unit eleven. "Tyger Tyger, burning bright" is Romantic, Blake, unit twelve. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" is Romantic, Wordsworth, unit twelve. "It is a truth universally acknowledged" is Austen, Romantic-period prose, unit thirteen. "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall" is Victorian, Browning, unit fourteen. "April is the cruellest month" is Modernist, Eliot, unit sixteen. For each, name the clue: spelling, conceit, carpe diem, Latinate syntax, mock-epic machinery, a symbolic animal, nature recollected, irony, a monologue's listener, fragment.
In practice
Ten openings, ten periods.
Where people slip
Austen is Romantic-period prose, not Victorian. Date by publication, not by manner alone.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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