Purposes
Such poems may simply have been recorded or read for entertainment, or to convey a moral or religious lesson. The Owl and the Nightingale includes extended dialogues on rhetorical skills and has been seen as an instruction in (or possibly a parody of) the teaching of rhetorical technique. For example, both employ the medieval rhetorical tools of appealing to authority (by quoting Alfred the Great) and by attempting to goad the opponent into anger and then a mistake (stultiloquiem). During the eighth and ninth centuries, it was customary for students to debate their masters in schools and universities, and debates in litigation were likewise becoming more popular. These situations – which increased the relevance of the genre – were sometimes alluded to or parodied in debate poems.
The fiery debate in The Owl and the Nightingale is ended with a wren intervening, but critics have variously argued that either the owl or the nightingale is better at employing rhetorical strategy. One critic, Kathryn Hume (in Cartlidge, XIX), suggests that the poem is itself a moralistic warning against pointless quarreling.
Read more about this topic: Medieval Debate Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
chorus: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding ev’ry hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow’r.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)