Allusions/references To Other Works
The novel makes references to many works of classical literature. John Donne is alluded to twice, first is in Chapter 10 when Howl refers to the first line of John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising", saying "Busy old fool, unruly Sophie." Howl makes a reference to Donne again in Chapter 11, when Miss Angorian reads from his poem "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star". The poem also serves as the inspiration for the terms of Howl's curse. In the same chapter there is a sign on Megan's house labeled "Rivendell", which is the name of an Elf city in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In Chapter 12 there is a reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when Howl tells Sophie "We can't all be Mad Hatters." Howl refers to Hamlet in Chapter 17 when he quotes "Alas, poor Yorick!" and "She heard mermaids, so it follows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I have an everlasting cold, but luckily I’m terribly dishonest. I cling to that."; another Hamlet reference occurs at the beginning of Chapter 11 referring to the nothingness in the doorway to Wales as being "only an inch-thick after all." The names of Suliman's alias Percival, and Howl's brother-in-law Gareth are two of The Knights of the Round Table, while Howl's own alias, Pendragon, is derived from King Arthur's surname. Finally, the Witch of the Waste's name is a possible pun on the Witch of the West from the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its subsequent film.
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“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
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