...Robert R. Meyers Copyright © 1972 by Duke University Press 1972 WAS THERE A TOAD IN THE BOWER? By ROBERTR. MEYERS It is curious that Satan should pause in Book 9 of Paradise Lost to curse so bitterly his imbrutement as serpent-who...

... of “Toads,” in The Less Deceived, are picked up in the later volume’s “Toads Revisited Both are finely wrought poems, yet their treatment of particulars is completely different and representative. The earlier poem begins by setting out a problem through its deservedly famous allegorical fig- ure...

... as image of God. Eve’s first important occasion of choice occurs at the pool, her second when Satan is interrupted by Ithuriel and Zephon as he whispers a dream in her ear: . . . him there they found Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve...

... :' In the reign of Caesar there lived a noble knight who, on riding one day through a forest, beheld a serpent struggling with a toad. The latter was about to get the better of his opponent when* the knight put the toad to flight after wounding it. In the struggle he had however been wounded...

... of mine on “The Out- growths of Toynbee Hall.” [A woman] said that when she was a little girl playing in her mother’s garden, she one day discovered a small toad who seemed to her very forlorn and lonely, although as she did...

...- cule, and Othello’s toad in “the vapor of a dungeon” (III.iii.271) and Leontes’ spider in a cup (II.i.39-40), for example, may be seen as details meant to define feelings precisely rather than as symbols of debasement. The relation of the human self to that which is small implies an ability...

...), “a savage wild” (D), “a lion so fierce” (WW). Regularly he is transformed into a shape (or shapes) associated with water: “An adder and a snake” (B and others), “An adder and an eel” (J “A toad and an eel” (Ca snake so large” (BJ), “the laidliest worm [ugliest serpent] of Ind” (E). All...

..., and the Historicization of Form Nicholas Halmi n a letter of 1818 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956 – 71, 3: 94 – 95) mem- Iorably compared his thoughts to Surinam toads: “As they crawl on, little Toads vegetate out from back & side, grow quickly, and draw off attention from the mother Toad.” Insofar as he...

... of a gift to follow him through his garden of Eden. With a naivet6 equal to his, she must imagine the usual trinkets exchanged by lovers, such as silk scarves and sweets. Libereso gives none of these. He offers her ifi turn a toad, a handful of beetles, a lizard, snakes, earthworms, a goldfish...

.... It fills the apprehension of reader or auditora with thermal, echoic, kinetic, and tactile images in abundance. It presents not so much “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as imaginary gardens with fully realized toads. The verisimilitude of GGK has, it would appear, made Markman read...

... was inevitable,’then “Ifyou want to eat a toad you should Look for a fat and juicy one” (p. 6). (1) f chbq iri bwd rik nkk 6hzi di 6md. [If] you want to eat toad eat the one [whose] body is good [fat]. (2) I ch#Q iri Ciwd gbdd mbd rik nnkkwzitt? 6wd. try hard...

....” But yet he asks his readers “to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside these vol- umes.” It is a real garden with imaginary toads in it. Throughout the prefaces (most of them written for the Wessex Edi- tion), Hardy urges the shaping role...

..., in the morning paper, in the train, that sixteen men had been shot, others prisoned, just over there, across the gulf, in the fl at land which divided them from the continent?” (46). Giles’s response to this news is to kill a “monstrous” snake that is choking on a toad (99). Since “the snake was unable...

..., No. V, 342 .(toad swal- lows wafer) , and R. Christiansen, Folklore Fellows Communicatsons, XXIV, 83, where a toad which has swallowed a wafer must be burned. The occur- rence of a rat in one variant is cited. 84 Op. cit. (Note 40), p. 131. See also note 50. ...

..., physically ugly-red nose enormous, round patch in middle of scalp which I forget less than 1 did and which is brown when I don’t wash my head and pink when I do. Face in the dis- tance . . . is toad-like and pallid. . . . My stoop must be appalling yet I don’t think much...

.... the wren. 43 1. an owl, the owls; 2. the cry of the hawk; 3. a nest, the nests ; 4. the frog( s) ; 5. a toad, the toads ; 6. mosquitoes, a mosquito. 44 1. the bee (s), the hornet ; 2. the bumblebee ; 3. the gnat (s) ; 4. the firefly; 5. a bat, the bats; 6. grasshoppers, a grasshopper; 7...

... Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage-1 It is doubtful whether anywhere else in his work Browning so successfully harnesses both his humor and his wit in the prosecution of a serious artistic intention. (“The Bishop Orders His Tomb...

..., in artistic exhibition, pleasurable and harmonious because we know it to be contained within an over-all imaginative form. Poems, like games, are made by the artificial control oE real energy, imaginary gardens with real toads. Coleridge says that the artificiality of the meter is important...

..., But you, loose toe from the old life, The cold slime come into being, Creepingslowly over the wet grass. . . .lo In “The Lost Son,” he uses words such as sleek, slime, slither, slept, slip- pery, and images suggesting unpleasant dampness and moisture: “Toads...

... at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbon- adoed” (263-66). The perversion of natural appetites is both the subject and the effect of this ballad, which is a parodic example of the art that competes with “great creating nature.” ? Pafford, ed., pp. 105-106. 348...