Poetry in the Completion of Sanditon by Another Lady
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In Ch. 16, Another Lady has Sir Edward quote:
We understood
Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
He attributes this to Cowper, but Sidney Parker corrects him, saying that
it is by [John] Donne, and that he doubts the quotation has anything to
do with fatigue, as Sir Edward implies. In fact, the poem is a funeral
elegy On
the Death of Mistress Drury(exerpt), and refers to how the lady
looks in death, not fatigue.
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Then, Sir Edward makes reference to "Having climbed the steep-up heavenly
hill". Sidney correctly guesses this to be Shakespeare. It is Sonnet
7.It is not refering to a literal hill at all, but the sun climbing
in the sky as a metaphor for the passage of time through one's life.
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At the end of the completion, Sir Edward quotes to Charlotte:
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her guilt away?
He attributes this to John Dryden, but Charlotte is right when she corrects
him and says it is [Oliver] Goldsmith. It is Ch. 24 Fresh Calamities of
The
Vicar of Wakefield . In the context of what is happening in Goldsmith's
book when the heroine Olivia sings these lines, it is an incredibly inappropriate
quotation for him to give.
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