2. The poem is a love story about a man and a woman. How are the small narratives of love stories in the poem completely different from the main one? How are they similar? Do the differences astonish you?

3. C. S. Lewis, in The Oxford History of English Lit, says the following about Marlowe's poem. For each quality find specific lines or images in the poem that would support or negate what Lewis says.
A. Marlowe is the great master of material imagination.

B. In Hero and Leander, all beauty is sensuous and all sensuality is beautiful.

C. The poem is continuously sweet, yet never cloying. He does this by hardness. (Where is the love in the poem "hard" rather than sentimental?)
Marlowe excludes all tenderness.
Leander woos with sophistry (clever rather than weighty arguments).
Leander is almost raped and then almost murdered by a male lover.

D. We don't think of Hero and Leander as boy and girl but as lovers. They don't exist apart from their desires. We are "at the centre [of their world] and see the rest of the universe transfigured by the hard, brittle of erotic vision" (487).

E. Marlowe's hyperboles are preposterous, yet wholly successful.

F. We don't witness passion but a world as passion sees it. In Marlowe's poem there is no pretense that appetite is anything other than appetite.

4. In Mary Herbert's poem, how is the neoplatonic Thenot a humanist?

5. What aspects of puritanism does Piers display?