The four poems I am going to use are; 'Porphyria's Lover', by Robert Browning, 1812-1889; 'The Highwayman', by Alfred Noyes, 1880-1958; 'The Eve of St. Agnes', by John Keats, 1795-1821; and 'The Lady of Shalott', by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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Pre-1914 Poetry Coursework

Comparison Essay on Four Studied Poems.

        The four poems I am going to use are; ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, by Robert Browning, 1812-1889; ‘The Highwayman’, by Alfred Noyes, 1880-1958; ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, by John Keats, 1795-1821; and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. I chose these four poems as they all deal with love which ultimately leads to death, except in The Eve of St. Agnes.

        ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ was first published in ‘Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other poems’ in 1820. The theme had been suggested to Keats by his friend Isabella Jones in January 1819. She reminded him that the 20th was St. Angel’s Eve, when maidens were supposed to dream of their husbands; and Keats, who was already in a romantic medieval mood, took up the idea. But although the inspiration was Isabella’s, the physical background for the poem and the fat that the lover was no vision but a flesh-and-blood young man came (as Robert Gittings point out) from a book Keats had recently been reading, the ninth volume of the ‘Bibliotheque Universelle des Dames’, and especially the third of the three stories, ‘Pierre de Provence et La Belle Maguelone’.

            ‘The Lady of Shalott’, published in 1832, was the first of Tennyson’s excursions into the realm of King Arthur, although he admitted he had the story from an Italian novella, ‘Donna di Scalotta’. ‘Shalott and Astolat are the same words. The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of the Morte d’Arthe, but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former. Shalott was a softer than “Scalott”. Stalott would have been nearer Astolat’. It is to be noted that in this Italian story Camelot is by the sea. Tennyson, who was only twenty-three when ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was published, returned to the theme in ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ (Idylls of the King, 1859).

        ‘The Highwayman’, which is wholly imaginary, was written on the edge of a desolate stretch of land in West Surrey known as Bagshot Heath, where Noyes, then aged twenty-four, had taken rooms in a cottage. ‘“The Highwayman” suggested itself to me one blustery night when the sound of the wind in the pines gave me the first line.’ The poem was published in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, August 1906, and soon found a place in anthologies and reciters, both in England and America, possibly due to its reputation as ‘the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery’. Noyes included ‘The Highwayman’ in his ‘Forty Singing Seamen, and Other Poems’, 1907.

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The four poems are similar as they contain stories of love between a male and female. For different reasons during their relationship death is featured in all four cases. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the male seems to be in love with the chase whilst Porphyria is in love with the male, but when she finally tells him he kills her. In ‘The Highwayman’, both the male and female are in love with each other, but because he is a highwayman their relationship is difficult and she ends up killing herself because of the difficulties. In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ she falls ...

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