Quotation and paraphrase
The number three and four things
I’m asking you to do in your final paper are to use quotation and
paraphrase in the way that literary critics do. Here are some
examples, which I’ve written on Donne’s Holy Sonnet #7
(“At the round earth’s imagined corners”; Broadview
Anthology page 123).
We make a quotation only if we’re going to add an observation and explanation:
The
speaker asks for divine instruction “here on this lowly
ground” (12)—emphasizing, through the spatial image, that
his thoughts are no longer in the cosmic realm of the resurrection
where the poem began, and contrasting the exalted state of the angels
with his own felt worthlessness.
If we’re not interested in giving an explanation, we simply paraphrase (i.e., summarize):
In
line 9, the speaker turns away from imagining the resurrection, a shift
that surprises the reader somewhat, in the first place because the
speaker evidently enjoyed thinking up the details of the scene.
In other words, we don’t use a quotation simply as evidence, as this sentence does:
But
then, perhaps surprisingly, the speaker turns away from the scene of
the resurrection that has so clearly fascinated him: “But
let them sleep, Lord” (9).
In the following paragraph, which of the sentences with quotations
would you turn into paraphrases? Which ones would you fix by
adding an explanation?
For this speaker, the end of the world is imagined not
only as a scene of intense action, but also, importantly, as a
pullulating crowd scene with a literally infinite population. In
the first place, the human souls to be resurrected since the beginning
of time are uncountably many—in the speaker’s words,
“numberless infinities” (3). The speaker’s
enthusiastic call to them—“arise, arise”
(2)—repeats not only his excitement, but also the command itself,
as if in many directions or to distant listeners. Again, he
emphasizes the souls’ sheer quantity by repeating the word
“all”: “All whom the flood” (5),
“All whom war” (6). Even the means of their deaths
turn into a long list, “War, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies”
(6), and so on, impressing us further with their multiplicity.
But after the speaker has left this imagined scene, it echoes in his
thoughts of self-reproach: his abundant sins are greater than the
sins of any of the dead (10), and he must ask here on this earth for
the divine abundance of grace and forgiveness (11). The idea here
is, of course, of humility, although we cannot help noticing that the
boundless magnitude of the speaker’s problem and the boundless
magnitude of the remedy he asks for have replaced the entire rest of
the human race as the objects of his fascination.