Studying for comps has taken over my life for the past couple weeks, and it's all going to be over tomorrow (thank God). I've studied everything from Chaucer to modern British poetry, and about ten thousand terms and names and whatever else for the ID section. I think my favorite moment so far has been when Jessica and I were studying Victorian poetry and got to Tennyson's "In Memoriam." Here's what we concluded about Tennyson himself (as quoted from a Facebook wall post):
Tennyson was 6'4" tall and had red hair, and he stooped because he was ashamed of how tall he was. His father was emotionally fragile, and didn't get the inheritance he should have because his younger brother got it instead, which violated the laws of primogeniture. When Tennyson went to Cambridge, he stayed in his room a lot and only ate when he was starved. He lived on that random island and then became Lord. In 1842, he received a £200 pension from the government for literary distinction. He was apparently a "rock star" (so says Reishman). Emily says that "he was like the Robert Pattinson of the Victorian age." Also, he "really liked Hallam" (quoted from Jessica's notes).
My reasoning for why he wrote "In Memoriam" (which is a ridiculously long elegy for his late friend Arthur Henry Hallam)?
"The second half of his bromance had just passed away, what did you expect to happen?"
Yeah. And then Jessica began singing Lady Gaga's "Bad (B)romance" in the Reishman Room in Gailor. It was kind of great.
Anyway, tomorrow I'm taking the comp, and then I'm going to celebrate, and it's going to be freaking awesome.
The picture is from a pizza box I was drawing on at dinner tonight... I can't seem to get away from Tennyson.
Also, I had my first comp nightmare the other night. I fell asleep reading Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," which is really wonderful, by the way, and dreamed that I was swimming across the Atlantic Ocean and Neptune was trying to drown me, and Dr. Macfie and her Renaissance Lit class were all standing in a boat watching, and Dr. Macfie was saying, "See, everyone, this is exactly what happened to Leander. See how Neptune is trying to get revenge on Becca for scorning his advances?" Yeah... it was a bit strange.
