Concomitantly, the Romantic poets developed an acute consciousness
of the conflicting forces that existed between Christian and antique subjects. They solved the contradiction by investing ancient myths with modern significance and by turning the beautiful forms of Greek myths into symbols of permanence and progress . The heroes of mythological stories, in whose existence the Greeks believed, became for the Romantic poets a great abstract idea that transcends personal experience and destiny. Some of the poets, William Blake being the most noteworthy example, created a mythology of their own. He felt that poetry cannot be created outside a mythological frame: “ I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s” ( Jerusalem, I, 10).
William Wordsworth turned the pagan myths into vital symbols of nature, endowing natural scenes with a characteristic power.
He established mythology as the language of poetic idealism “ a treasure of symbols rich enough to embody not only the finest sensuous experience but the highest aspirations of man” ( D. Bush, 1969, p. 70).
Percy Bysshe Shelley aspired to create a new myth of the redemption of the earth. In Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, and Adonais, he used classical materials very freely, interfering creatively with the world of the Greek heroes . In the story of Prometheus he kept many details that were necessary for establishing the right background, but he repudiated the religious and philosophic solution of Aeschylus as inadequate to modern ideas.
John Keats’s interest in ancient mythology is evident in the majority of his great poems. Sleep and Poetry, Hyperion, Endymion are but a few examples of some mythological recreations in a sensuous, imaginative, and fanciful way. In a contemporary essay, On the Poetical Use of the Heathen Mythology (1822), Hartley Coleridge the son of the poet, noted the revitalisation of myth in Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. He attributed its genesis to “an instinct” which induced nations “to weave a fabric of fables, accommodated to the wants and yearnings of their own minds”.
He predicted its continued use in poetry because of “the pregnancy of its symbols, and the plastic facility with witch it accommodates itself to the fancy and feelings of mankind” ( in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1958, p. 294).
George Gordon Byron stands apart from this group of poets. His classical mythology is very remote from the idealistic symbolism of his contemporaries. As far as the symbol is concerned, for the English Romantics it represents a synthesis ,a fusion of polarities. The distinction between symbol and allegory is, for Coleridge, related to that between imagination and fancy, genius and talent, reason and understanding. His poem The Ancient Mariner is organised on the symbols of moonlight and sunlight, wind and rain. Through Shelley’s poetry runs a consistent system of symbols such as the eagle and the serpent, the beat and the stream, the cave and the veil, whereas in Keats’s work the symbols of moon and sleep, temple and nightingale become recurrent.
Strictly connected with the cult of the symbol is the new attitude of the Romantic poets towards metaphor and irony. The metaphor becomes more daring and vigorous, while irony turns into an important manifestation of the poet’s freedom to build and destroy worlds.
The language is used in a dreamier way, with vague overtones and associations that create the impression of “writ in water”.
The writers were dependent on various features peculiar to their time: a reaction against previous literary styles, arguments with eighteenth century and earlier philosophers, the decline in formal Anglican worship and the rise of dissenting religious sects, and the rapid and unprecedented industrialisation of Britain and consequent changes in its countryside.
G. Romanticism and Form
Two contradictory clichés are current about Romanticism and form. The one derived from L. A. Reid’s Study in Aesthetics (1931), maintains that the art of the period is formless. The other, derived from F. P. Chamber’s History of Taste (1932), considers that Romantic art is nothing but the discovery of pure form.
On the level of craftsmanship both extreme positions are untrue because the Romantic theory of form was at once expressive and functional. It proscribed everything that was ornamental and superfluous and rejected the mechanical conventions of poetic diction dear to classical poets. It advocated a great flexibility of metre and rhythm, not devoid of a certain regularity, because the original emotion issued forth from an intuition of order, harmony, and unity.
Chapter II
The First Generation of Romantic
Poets - The Image of Nature
With the pre-romantic poets, nature became a subject in itself and was attributed a much larger place in poetry. The first work devoted to natural description was J. Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-30). It deliberately introduced the English people into the solitary world of nature with its enchanting mysteries. His description of nature are vast, opening unbounded prospects, minutely particularised by accurate, seasons details and meditation on man. His Preface to Winter expresses a view of his subject which was to become increasingly popular:
“ I know of no subject more elevating, more amusing, more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm,
the philosophical reflection and the moral sentiment,
than the works of Nature. Where can we meet with
such variety, such beauty, such magnificence ? In
every dress Nature is greatly charming – whether
she puts on the crimson robes of the morning, the
strong effulgence of noon, the sober suit of the
evening or the deep sables of blackness and tempest.
How gay looks the spring! How glorious the summer!
how pleasing the autumn! And how venerable the
winter! …
For this reason the best, both ancient and
modern, poets have been passionately fond of retirement
and solitude. The wild romantic country was
their delight! And they seem never to have been
more happy than when, lost in unfrequented fields,
far from the little busy world, they were at
leisure to meditate and sing the works of Nature.”
The people left towns to visit the country, encouraged also by the opening of new roads and the increased safety of travel.
The works of J. Dyer, Grongar Hill (1726), a new description of a journey in South Wales, and Fleece (1757) were also full of journey in South Wales, and Fleece (1757)were also full of country sights and scenes. The letters of Th. Gray described the landscape of Yorkshire and Westmorland with a minuteness quite new in English literature. Th. Worton’s poems did no longer speak of nature and human life in general, but of nature and himself. He saw the reflection of his own passions in the woods and the streams of the surrounding nature and this self-conscious pleasure with lonely nature grew slowly into a main subject of his poetry. (S. A. Brooke,1911, p. 146).
Certain diaries also sustained the love for the nature of England or of exotic, distant lands, and travel books published by eighteenth and nineteenth centuries writers. They developed the public’s taste for the remote and the mysterious, for the foreign and the savage, which were cultivated in parallel with the commonplace settings of Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was born on April 7 th. 1770, at Cockermouth, Cumberland. During 1776-1777 he attended Anne Birkett’s infant school at Penrith. In 1787 he entered at St. John’s College Cambridge, graduating in 1791, Wordsworth left for Paris and Orléans for nearly one year. There, he fell in love with Marie Anne Vallon (Annette) and began the Description Sketches and Guilt and Sorrow.
In 1797, Wordsworth started his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and moved to Alfoxden, a house in Somersetshire, in order to live near his friend. They planned and wrote the Lyrical Ballads that were to be published in 1798. In 1798-99 he made a visit to Germany where he composed such typical poems as Lucy Gray, Ruth, and Nutting and planned The Prelude. Returning from Germany, Wordsworth settled in the Lake District.
In 1843 he wad appointed Poet Laureate until 1850 when he died. The poetic creation of Wordsworth has been approached in two critical directions established by M. Arnold and A.C. Bradley.
The first tendency generated by M. Arnold’s Introduction to “Poems of Wordsworth” (1879), considers that Wordsworth is primarily a simple, affirmative poet, describing elementary feelings and essential human passions. Wordsworth was preoccupied with the universal and the permanent features of man and life. The great subjects of this poetry, as he claimed in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, where “the essential passions of the heart”, “the great and simple affection”, “the great and universal affections of man”.
The second tendency, generated by A. C. Bradley’s Oxford lectures on Wordsworth, published at the beginning of the century presents Wordsworth as primarily a complex poet of strangeness, paradox and ambiguity. This impression was derived from his Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, added to the 1815 edition of the Lyrical Ballads.
It is true that Wordsworth has sometimes visionary moments like those mentioned in The Prelude:
I forgot,
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appear’d like some thing in myself a dream,
A prospect in my mind.
It is also true that the subjective element in his poems is very important. His verses are either the direct or symbolic expression of his personal feelings, mood and intuition. Almost all of them are directly or indirectly autobiographical, full of confessions.
However, as the majority of critics agree, the poet’s normally remains conscious over unsounded depths and mysteries. His sanity has strong root in the poetry of the eighteenth century and that is why Wordsworth avoids the instinctive and the primitive in favour of the rationalised and civilised.
The complete originality of Wordsworth’s poetry lies in its being a complete and satisfactory man to nature. It defines convincingly the sense of belonging to a certain world, the consciousness of integration in nature that becomes especially acute in modern civilised societies.
For Wordsworth nature is a spiritual power, “the visible quality and shape and image of right reason”, governed by steadfast laws which nature its processes. The educational function of nature is remarkable. If in civilised societies man is governed by ambition, folly, and madness, nature:
“… gives birth
To no impatient of fallacious hopes,
No heat of passion or excessive zeal,
No vain conceits; provokes no quick turns
Of self-applauding intellect but trains,
To meekness, and exalts by humble faith.
(The Prelude, Book XIII)
In fact Wordsworth’s worship of nature is the result of his strong dislike of science and his deep sense of solitude. He scorns those who peep and botanize on their mother’s grave and his characteristic thought can be summed up in the phrase “We murder to dissect”. His repugnance for the coldness of science makes him repeatedly insist on the idea that the important facts of nature elude the scientific method. He tries to grasp the whole of nature as involved in the specificity of the particular instance. That is why he laughs with the daffodils and finds in the primrose “thoughts too deep for tears”.
Partly because he is the poet of mountains, Wordsworth is even more pre-eminently the poet of solitude (A. C. Bradley, Wordsworth; 1950). He feels fascinated by the thoughts that come to his mind, “the visionary power” that overpowers him when alone.
“The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.”
(A Poet’s Epitaph)
A thing that is lonely or solitary opens for Wordsworth a bright or solemn view into infinity.
At the same time, no poet is more emphatically the poet of community as Wordsworth. Many verses of his are dedicated to the description and praise of home, neighbourhood, and country, to the love, which links together all nature’s children, and “steals from earth to man, from man to earth”.
The poet’s doctrine on nature is also concerned with the notions of change and eternality. It seems that the enormous permanence of nature haunted the poet’s mind and, therefore, his trees and hills show the minimum of change with the seasons. His rocks and stones, rivers and stars, are curiously uncreative and dead. The glory of nature in his opinion consists in the moods of calmness and static contemplation that it generates. The poet, “born to thrive by interchange of peace and excitation”, finds in nature his best and purest friend.
The beauty, power, and mystery of nature are the same cardinal qualities that characterise the feelings and passions of man. Once this vital relationship discovered, Wordsworth can explore in all his verses what is human and divine in man and nature.
Wordsworth’s love of humanity is passionate and intense. He notices the divine vitality of the elements of nature in humble representatives of making: the poor wanderers of the countryside roads, the bankrupt farmers, the cottage girls, the idiot boys, the betrayed and deserted women. Their independence, love of nature, habit of solitude, and capacity for long and deep sorrow impressed Wordsworth and occasioned him to write poems like The Idiot Boy, The Thorn, The Forsaken Indian Woman. The intense inner life and pure force of human vitality he discovered in children, women, and old people turned into the favourite subjects for his human tales and studies.
Wordsworth was also bold experimenter in language and metre. His first works, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, show the influence of the eighteenth century diction which he strongly imitated. After 1798, however, Wordsworth rebelled against the traditional rhyming methods and adapted the ballad metre to a variety of simple stanza forms, which allowed him to attain the truth and simplicity of expression has desired.
Wordsworth’s early poetry has commonly been looked upon as “The misdirected adaptations of enervated eighteenth century form” (J. Ramsey, “Seeing and Perceiving in Wordsworth’s ‘ An Evening Walk’).
The first noticeable works, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (both 17930, have been declared as failures because they derive from the picturesque mode of the 18 th. century and show the influence of English topographical poets and of French minor writers like Rosset, Roucher, Dellile, and Saint Lambert (D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, 1969, p. 876).
An Evening Walk is a poem of natural description which depicts the Lakes and their surroundings. Revisited after many years, the familiar places fill the poet’s heart with melancholy and make him regret the youth he passed among them and the delights he can never have again:
While thic “Then, while I wanted where the huddling rill
Brightens with water-breaks the hollow ghyll
As by enchantment, an obscure retreat
Opened at once, and stayed my devious feet
While thick above the rill the branches close,
In rocky basin its wild waves repose,
Inverted slimes, and moss of gloomy green,
Cling from the rocks, with pale wood weeds between;
And its own twilight softens the whole scene,
Save when aloft the subtle sunbeams shine
On withered briars that o’er the crags recline;
Save where, with sparkling foam, a small cascade
Illumines, from within, the leafy shade.”
Except the verbal precision of his description, remarkable are also the pictorial and sonorous qualities of the lines that conclude the poem.
The still air, the sleeping water and hill form the background for the tolling of the clock, the sounds of the closed gate, the rustle of the corn, and the tremulous sob of the owl.
The poem is important for an idea which Wordsworth will later on develop as fundamental for his theory of poetry: the conviction that the writer’s power of emotional response vitalises observation and that his selective vision is very important in the transcription of the experience of nature. (J.Hefferman, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry: The Transforming of Imagination, 1969, p. 28).
In the 18 Th. century poetry, nature was only a setting, which stimulated the meditative predisposition of the poets.
Wordsworth adapts the picturesque heritage to express an entirely new conception of reality, a reality “whose form is continuously emerging through a complex of relationships discovered within consciousness among the objects of perception and most crucially between inner and other” (J. Ramsey, 1975, p.386).
Wordsworth seeks the emotional continuities that survive over years in spite of changes.
He tries to “find / Strength in what remains behind”, but also in the present moment. Thus happiness recollected form the past, as well as the joys of the present, illustrate the poet’s complex interaction with nature and help him discover the self in creative efforts.
Descriptive Sketches was published in the same year. The work is also dependent on the poetry of the day, especially on William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Switzerland (1779).
Written during a tour among Alps, it describes the scenery of Switzerland with the beauty of the rives, the grandeur of the mountains and the freedom of the peasants’ life.
“Even so, by faithful Nature guarded, here
The traces of primeval Man appear;
The simple dignity no forms debase;
The eye sublime, and surly lion-grace:
The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord,
His book he prizes, nor neglects his sword;
- Well taught by that to feel his rights, prepared
With this ‘the blessings he enjoys to guard’ .
Although it does not show any originality of conception or of treatment, the poem already reveals the Wordsworthian eye form nature.
“The Borderers” (1975-1797) was Wordsworth’s only play, a closet drama never acted.
In1798, Wordsworth published together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge the volume of Lyrical Ballads represents one of the most famous revolutionary documents in the history of English poetry. The title of the book draws the attention of the contemporary public on the possibility of establishing a new literary genre. The story was reduced to pure emotionality and its pathetic appeal was generated by new kind of subjectivity.
The preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” represents one of the most famous revolutionary documents in the history of English poetry. Wordsworth protested against the poetic practices of his predecessors and brought about totally new attitude towards the writing of English poetry.
The poet, in his opinion, should described “the essential passion of the heart”, “the great and simple affection”, “the beautiful and forms of nature”, in order to interest mankind permanently.
Wordsworth’s theory set out in the preface can divided into two parts, concerning the subject and the style of poetry.
Regarding the subject, Wordsworth declares his preference for “incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a section of language really used by men, and at the time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination.
For Wordsworth, the feeling developed in poetry should give importance to the action and situation to the feeling. However, the importance of the subject is permanently stressed, justifying the use of peasant, children idiots, and criminals that represents for the poet a new and rich source of poetic inspiration.
With regard to style, Wordsworth declares that the language of poetry ought to be “the language really used by men”, especially by rustics because they “speak a plainer and more emphatic language”.
Wordsworth statements about the subject and style of his poem have opened up wide possibilities for the development of romantic poetry. The poet in his opinion, should describe “the essential passion of the heart”, “the great and simple affection”, “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”, in order to interest mankind permanently. He is a “man speaking to man”: a man, it is true, endowed with more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul.
From the poems published in Lyrical Ballads, The Idiot Boy was a favourite of Wordsworth’s. The subject seems simple and unworthy of poetical treatment. Susan Gale is sick and nobody is next to her for help. Her neighbour sends her idiot boy to fetch the doctor. As neither of them comes, she goes herself to find him. She discovers the idiot boy lost in the beautiful landscape of the March night:
“ Now Johnny all night long had heard
The owls in tuneful concert strive;
No doubt too he the moon had seen;
For in the moonlight he had been
From eight o’clock till five.”
For Wordsworth, The Idiot Boy was “a great and not a foolish poem”, a kind of cosmic assertion of the actuality of being in a person who is outside the range of anything but mere mechanical understanding. He also insisted on the beauty of nature that could impress even the simplest mind.
The poem The Thorn was inspired for Wordsworth by the sight of a thorn tree in a hailstorm. The first stanza begins with the description of the tree and of its location. Stanza 6 mentions a woman in a scarlet cloak crying by the tree. She was left pregnant and abandoned by her lover some twenty years ago. What happened to her baby remained a mystery. Some say:
“She hanged her baby on the tree;
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond:
But all and each agree,
The little Babe was buried there,
Beneath that hill of moss so fair.”
When they brought the woman to public justice the hill of moos before their eyes and the grass shook upon the ground.
S. M. Parish (The Thorn: Wordsworth’s Dramatic Monologue, 1972, p.77) suggested that the point of the poem might be very well that its central event had no existence outside the narrator’s imagination, that there was no woman sitting in a scarlet cloak behind a crag on a mountain top, that the narrator had neither seen nor heard her, that what he had seen was village superstitions about a woman wronged years ago. This reading The Thorn, S. M. Parish says, “differing sharply from any traditional reading alters the poem radically. It become not a poem about a woman but a poem about a man (and a tree); not a tale of horror, not a ballad, but a dramatic monologue.”
Lines Composed a Few Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour (shortly known as Tintern Abbey) represents a miniature of the long poem Wordsworth never quite wrote, the philosophical and autobiographical epic of which The Prelude, The Recluse fragment and The Excursion would have been only parts.
Tea “beauteous forms” of nature awaken in the poet’s heart sweet sensations and especially:
“… that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
In body, and become a living soul:
Almost suspended, we quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”
It was “all in all” for him in childhood when nature offered only coarser pleasures. He was haunted by sounds and colours in youth when nature in youth when nature turned into a passionate love.
The time of “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” had passed and the poet entered a new stage in which he had learned to look on nature and listen to its “still, sad music of humanity”.
Thus the poem offers a clear distinction of the three stages that man passes through in the appreciation of nature:
-
childhood, when man approaches nature from a sensual point of view
only;
-
adolescence, when man is consciously and passionately rapture by
nature, and finally;
-
maturity, when man discovers in the transitoriness of natural
phenomena permanence and an eternal principle of rightness. It is this stage that man feels the deep communion that binds him to nature, the unity which makes the boundaries between man and nature be dissolved.
The Old Cumberland Beggar, included in second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) as well as the other poems discussed below, illustrates a related idea of the poet who believed that man was almost totally absorbed in nature in childhood and extreme old age. The old beggar is so integrated in nature that he moves on incessantly, like a natural process:
“He travels on, a solitary Man;
His age has no companion. On the ground
His eyes are turned, and as he moves along,
They move along the ground;
……………………………………………..
Poor Traveller:
His staff trails with him; scarcely do his feet
Disturb the summer dust; he is so still
It look and motion, that the cottage curs,
Eve he has passed the door, will turn away,
Weary of barking at him.”
The Beggar exemplifies one fundamental law of nature:
“That none, the meanest of created things,
Of forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good – a spirit and pulse of good,
A life and soul, too every mode of being
Inseparably liked.”
The Lucy poems, written while Wordsworth was in Germany, consist of five short lyrics. Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Zays, Three Years She Gra I Travelled Among Unknown Men, and A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. They represent the only love poetry Wordsworth wrote. Lucy may refer to Margaret Hutchinson, sister of this future wife, who died in 1796. But Lucy may be an unknown love of the poet or else wholly imaginary.
The poems are full of simple, passionate melancholy determined by Lucy’s death. Nature / “both law and impulse” decided to make Lucy a child of hers.
The shorter poems of the middle period
The two volumes of Poems that followed in 1807 contains some of the finest lyrics in Wordsworth’s poetry as greatest English sonneteer after Shakespeare and Milton. He is concerned with the problem of nation independence and liberty in Composed by the Sea-side near Calais (August 1802), Great Men Have Been Us (1802), and It Is Not to Be Thought of (1803) and he shows great displays of Switzerland and London, 1802.
His function is to stir memories of good impulses in all around him. Wherever he goes,
“The mild necessity of use compels
To acts of love.”
Pity for him is inappropriate. He is pathetic only if shut up in one of those workhouses that were the results of the industrialisation.
In Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802, he describes the image of London, majestic and touching in the morning light, as a part of nature.
The images of the river flowing natural and elastic, of the houses that seem asleep, and of the might heart suggest that the city has to be viewed organically:
“Earth has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships , towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun move beautifully steep
In his fist splendour, valley, rocks, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!”
My Heart Leaps up When I Behold expound the great responsiveness of the romantic poet to elements of nature that impress him and stir him to meditation.
“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each by natural piety.”
Wordsworth’s doctrine of continuity form childhood to old age is exemplified by the rainbow which generates the natural piety that the days of life and leads man from love of nature to love mankind.
The last three lines of the poem reappear as an epigraph to his famous Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood which records the poet’s development toward an ever greater consciousness of the feelings the natural scenes aroused in him. It was placed at the volume as the crown of Wordsworth’s poetical work .
The plan of the poem is simple, but majestic. It has three distinct parts:
-
the first four stanzas speak of a spiritual crises, of a glory passing away from the
earth.
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen now I can see no more.”
The time when the perceived the surrounding nature with the eager awareness of the child had passed away.
b. the middle stanzas (V-VIII) examine the nature of the glory stated in the first lines and explain it by a theory of reminiscence from a pre-natal existence. According to Wordsworth, a child has memories, which he gradually loses of a blessed state in another world before death.
c. the last three stanzas have perished, life has infant joys, the poet, however, does not try to recapture them. He fights for a more in the concluding lines, that is not sorrow but is deeper than joy:
“Thanks to human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
I. A. Richards (in Cl. Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, 1962, p. 145) analysed the relation poet-nature in this poem and derived from it two doctrines which Wordsworth developed as to a life in or behind nature:
1. The mind of the poet at moments, penetrating “the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”, gains an insight into reality, reads Nature as a symbol of something behind or within Nature not ordinarily perceived. (In the Ode, the child, untarnished by “the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”, sees nature clad in a celestial light.)
2. The mind of the poet creates a Nature into which his own feelings, his aspirations and apprehensions are projected.(In the Ode, the child projects his own joy over nature as the moon projects its light over the bare heavens.)
In the first doctrine, man through Nature, is linked with something other than himself whom he perceives through her. In second, he makes of her, as with a mirror, a transformed image of his own being.
The usual form of the ode seems strange in a period when the form of this poetic genre was well established. It also astonishes for its stately vocabulary which in outside Wordsworth’s usual range of common, prosaic words. Even Coleridge noticed it when he claimed that the “seventh stanza is an instance of “mental bombast’ or “thoughts and images too great the subject” (Biographia Literaria, II, 109).
Resolution and Independence was written on a sunny morning when, after a heavy spring rain, the poet took a walk upon the moors. Invaded by thoughts, he muses upon the fate of Chatterton and Burns:
“We Poets in our Youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the despondency and madness.”
Suddenly, he sees an old leech-gather who fires his imagination as once old Cumberland beggar did.
“His body was bent double, feet and heard
Coming together in life’s pilgrimage;
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.”
In Ode of Duty, Wordsworth abandons the pensive mode of the Trintern Abbey and Intimations Ode and replaces it with an abstract, eighteenth century tone, dedicating the poem to a personified abstraction. Nature, as a moral and ethical power, gives place to Duty, “Stern Daughter of the Voice of God”.
The Longer Poems
WILIAM WORDSWORTH planned a great work, The Recluse, whose high argument was meant to be the capacity of man’s mind to transform the world into paradise by its union with nature. In the Prospectus to The Recluse and its associated poems, the poet also announced his intention “to weigh\The good and evil of our mortal stade”. Both aims could be full-filled in a simple language, be worlds “which speak of nothing more than what we are”.
The Recluse was supposed to have an autobiographical preliminary. The Prelude (begun in 1799 and completed in 1905), which become the essential document for the interpretation of Wordsworth’s life an poetry. The Prelude is a fully poetic equivalent of two remarkable innovations in prose faction: the Bildungsroman (Wordsworth called The Prelude a poem on “the growth own mind”) the Kunstlerroman (Wordsworth also spoke of it as “a poem on my own poetical education).
As it stands, the epic structure of a diary offers this long autobiographical poem a tight unity of designs. The fourteen books are centred around the intellectual development of the poet and the spiritual crises he underwent after French Revolution.
The Prelude, correspondingly is ordered in three stages. The firs stage follow the steady process of mental development, which takes place in early life of childhood and school/time. The process in interrupted by crisis of despair following the destruction of the hopes in the French Revolution. In the end, there is reconciliation, recovery from despair and rebuilding of the hopes for man upon sounder bases. Discovering the prophetic value of a poet, Wordsworth s determined to write a knew kind of poetry about the dignity and grandeur of lowly, suffering men.
Two great climaxes punctuate the narrative. The firs one is illustrated in Book IV by the illumination the poet had during a summer dawn that he should be a “dedicated spirit”. The second one follows in Book IX when Wordsworth feels the awakening of his deep interest in mankind.
Nature is always present as “a never-failing principle of joy” and “purest passions”. Its feeds the poet’s “lofty speculations” and gives him hope in a period of shattered confidences.
The second part of The Recluse was entitled The Excursion and it was to be followed by a third one, which remained immaterialized. The Excursion contains nine books of long debates on political, moral, and religious problems between the poet and a peddler, a wanderer, a solitary, and a pastor. A Wordsworth confessed the preface to the 1814 edition, its structure intentionally opposed that of the firs and the third parts which consisted of meditation in the poet’s own person. It adopted something of a dramatic form established by the intervention of characters speaking.
The leech-gatherer represents symbolically man’s liberty and happiness when wholly integrated in nature. His apparent physical decrepitness hides a firm mind that understands the strong immemorial bonds between humanity and nature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was born at Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, on October 21, 1772, as the youngest of a family of fourteen children of the clergyman John Coleridge. From his father he inherited the dreamy nature and the love for “verbal niceties”. The Wordsworthian influence is obvious in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison both in its stylistic freedom from the classic idiom and the sensitiveness to the beauties of nature.
Coleridge provided the philosophic basis of Romanticism and proved to be probably the most penetrating analyst of the Romantic accomplishment. Coleridge is than the key figure in the Romantic poetry.
Coleridge early experimental work merely shows us a young man of versatile intellect and highly sensitive imagination with great power of expression. He was fascinated by the theoretical conception Boehme and Plotinus; and such philosophers like Spinoza, Hartley and Barkeley appealed to his speculative imagination.
His spiritual interpretation of the universe, coupled with a rich appreciation of the beauties of the physical world, may be traced in the verse of the period 1793-1796. This period ends with the rupture oh his early intimacy with Southey and his memorable meeting with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy bears its first result in the odes To the Departing Year and To France, followed by his Poems on Various Subjects. But the full flowering of his genius came with The Ancient Marnier, Chirstabel, and Kubla-Khan.
His work as poet is the result of the blending of keen intellectuality with the receptive emotionality of lyric poetic. His work as a philosopher reveals a general parallelism with the intuitive, idealistic and historical movement of ideas, which gives German Romanticism its essential character. But he himself declared that he was just as much the disciple is the most lasting. He revolutionised the English view of literature and he set in on a new and sound base.
The volume Poems on Various Subjects (1975) contains thirty-six poems. These are his Poems of Friendship. They composed as the expression of feelings which were occasioned by definite events in the poet life, poems in which reference is made to certain places and people who formed the inner circle of this friends: Charles and Mary Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Sarah Hutchinson. They may all be termed, as Coleridge named it of them, Conversation Poems because, even when they are soliloquies, they suppose to have a listener and require a considerable knowledge of the poet’s life. The Poems of Friendship are the supreme example of a peculiar kind of poetry. It is in the first instance a Romantic lyrics, which represents a solitary speaker confronting a particularised landscape; it moves through a sustained mediation that is stimulated by the visual details.
The Eolian Harp is the best example in the volume, being at the same time, the most characteristic poem. In the Preface to the poem the author was perfectly conscious that this kind of poetry would not satisfy those readers who had been bred in the traditional taste for objectivity and impersonality which characterised the poetry of the eighteenth century.
The poem is addressed to Coleridge’s wife, Sara Tricker. It begins with a description of the two sitting in their garden at dusk. The garden itself is described, the sky (“clouds and star”), the earth (“bean-field”) and the distant sea, so that by end of the first part the stage is the whole “world”. Coleridge was using the image of widening perspective leading to a sort of cosmic view.
“My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on my arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our cot, our cot o’ergrown
With white flowered jasmin, and the broad-leaved myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of innocence and love!)
And water the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
Snatched from you bean-field! And the world so hushed!
The stilly murmur of the distant sea
Tells us of silence.”
In the second part, he reverts to a single definite object, within his immediate experience: the lute. Now the poet does not explore the perceptual world, but leaves the concrete object to dream of Fairy-land, the harc’s notes evoking both the “witchery of sound” and the melodies that float round the flowers of the Fairy-land. The general impression of a fanciful dream built up in Part II is summed up in the word “slumbering” and the day-dreaming image bides over to Part III, in the picture of the poet stretched on the hill-side and locking at the world through “half-closed eye-lids”,
Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and pensive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swells and flutter on this subject Lute!
The poem is characterised by a widening and ascending movement, which carries the poet from nature to God.
The poet expresses here what he considers to be a deeper and more accurate knowledge of the universe and of his place in it. It results that the ego was to Coleridge but the starting-point of his poetic meditation, that he was concerned with the ego not in and for itself, but as an element in the complex network of relationship which comprised the fundamentals of human thought and experience: nature, man, and universe. The following lines from the Eolian Harp epitomize the Romantic constellation of joy, love and the shared life:
O! the one life within us and abroad…
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d.
The poem is written in a fluent blank verse, the cadences are long and beautiful, bending line to line and sentence to sentence.
In the other poem, Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement, Coleridge is concerned personal happiness and humanitarian action. The poem begins with a quite description and the writer’s personal happiness.
Then goes on to the panoramic presentation of nature, and then to the depiction of those who suffer on die in war. He asks himself:
“Was it right
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled,
That I should dream away the entrusted hours
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use?”
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797) offers the first real touches of the “authentic” Coleridge. It is a perfect blending of feeling and thought, imagery and structure. It starts with Coleridge’s complaining that he is obliged to stay at home as a result of Sara’s “accidentally emptying a skillet of boiling milk” on his foot. His three guests, Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Charles Lamb (to whom this poem is addressed), have gone upon a walk leaving him beneath the lime.
“Well, they are gone and here I must remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison I have lost
Beauties and feelings such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness!”
In imagination the poet follows his friends along the hill-top edge and up the hill from which they can rejoice “in gladness” the beauties of familiar, panoramic nature. Then Coleridge focuses his attention on Charles Lamb:
“ thou hast pined
And hungered after Nature, many a year,
In the great city pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity.”
(I, 28-32)
After that the panoramic nature is transmuted into a cosmic vision of the landscape as a living thing. The poem closes with the description of the lime-tree bower, which appears as a microcosm where the presence of nature can be felt:
“Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure.”
The Nightingale (1798), another “conversation poem”, is a statement about the poetic imagination in the presence of Nature.
Frost at Midnight (1789) is Coleridge’s masterpiece among the “conversation poems”. The scheme of the poem is worked out in the concrete images: could, silence, moonlight outside the cottage, the fire in the room witch supplies an association to lead the poet back to his childhood, then to his hopes for the baby at his side( his son Hartley ):
……………………………
My babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shall learn far other lore
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
This poem is another example of the “circuitous form” which he inaugurated in the Eolian Harp and repeated in several other “conversation poem”. The interchange between mind and nature constitutes the entire poem; it poses and resolves a spiritual crisis in the poet’s inner life. This meditation constitutes a brief crisis-autobiography, from which the poet foresees no possibility of recovery from the personal crisis of isolation, apathy and creative sterility.
Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode expresses the port’s personal failure, under the emotional stresses and physical afflictions of his life. This meditation constitutes a brief crisis-autobiography, from which the poet foresees no possibility of recovery from the personal crisis of isolation, apathy and creative sterility.
In the opening description, the poet reveals himself to be static, for he lacks any “natural outlet” and has no emotional interchange with the natural world of the sky, cloud, stars, and the unmoving moon.
“A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.
…………………………………………
All thing long ere, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gaping on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gape-and with how blank an eye!…
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see not feel, how beautiful they are!”
In reviewing his life, he ascribes this condition to the recurrent afflictions, which have forced him to cut off “from my own nature all the natural man”. Having separated the mind from its objects, the poet is isolated, his inner fountains of “the passion and the life” dried up and his “ shaping spirit of Imagination suspended” in a nature, which has become alien and deed, since:
“We receive but what we give
And in our life alone does nature live.”
The necessary condition for overcoming this division within himself and from the other world is the state witch he calls “joy”.
Joy, virtuous lady! Joy that ne’er was give,
Save to the pure, and their purest hour;
Life and Life’s affluence…
Joy is a central and recurrent term in Romanticism, which often has peculiar meaning. Coleridge’s joy signifies the conscious accompaniment of the activity of a fully living and integrative mind. He defines it in his Philosophical Lectures as a state of abounding vitality, necessary to the working of the creative power of genius.
Joy is described in his poem as the inner power, which unites living self to an outer world. Coleridge represents this union by the figure of the marriage between mind and nature:
Joy, lady is the spirit and the power;
Which wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth, and a new Heaven,
………………………….
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud
We in ourselves rejoice!
Dejection concludes with a passage in which the poet expresses his hope that the absent friend, to whom the poem is addressed, may forever retain joy, which thee speaker has forever lost, and so sustain her interchange with an outer world.
The Lyrical Ballades (1798) was a collection of poems written by W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge. Coleridge’s contributions were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the most famous “ art ballad” in English, is a tale of crime and punishment . It falls into seven sections and each section tells of a new stage in the process : the Mariner’s account of the voyage, the suffered punishment for what he has done, the guilty Mariner becomes conscious of what he has done, the sense of solitude is elaborated, the process of the soul’s revival, the process of healing seems to be impeded, the Ancient Mariner is saved by the pilot’s boat .The clue of the significance of the poem may lie in the subtitle Coleridge affixed to it in 1800 : A Poet’s Reverie. Reverie meant for him a waking dream in which the mind, though remaining aware, allowed the imagination to roam freely in a steamy process of association.
The Ancient Mariner is his greatest poem because he put most of himself into it and in it spoke most fully from his inner being. The Sun and the Moon have alternatively benevolent and malevolent associations and they contribute to an effect of visionary intensity; their beneficent power is always transitory and their final association is malevolent.
The ship is driven by a storm to the South Pole, the land of ice, of fearful sounds, where no living things were to be seen. Then the Albatross comes through the snow-fog, begin received by the crew with great-joy, the Albatross proving to be a “bird of good omen”.
The Mariner kills the Albatross. The shooting of the Albatross comes quite suddenly and unexplained. Yet, Coleridge knew that, by the ordinary standards of the world, the act was not terrible.
The killing of the bird that loved the man is an act, which expresses the Mariner’s prideful self-sufficiency, his readiness to cut himself off from the universal community of life and love. His punishment is to experience the full measure of this elected isolation in a world in which all his companions have died and nature has become alien an inimical to him.
The appearance of the Albatross is associated with the Moon. The bird itself is never described as seen in sunlight:
Through the fog it came
In mist or cloud, on most or shroud
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine,
The crew hangs the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck.
In the second section, the Mariner begins to suffer punishment for what he has done. The world, which faces the Mariner after his deed, is dead. The ship has ceased to move and sailors are tortured by thirst, while the only moving things are the limy creatures on the sea and the death-fires, which dance at night. The becalming and the drought all occur under the influence of the sun. It has been remarked that the evil and disaster in the poem acquire under the light of the sun, while the different phases of redemption occur under the light of the moon.
The fair breeze blew; the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.
Suddenly, what is favourable reverses itself: the breeze droop and
All in a hot and copper sky;
The bloody Sun, at noon
Right up above the most did stand
No bigger than the Moon.
The third section shows hot the guilty Mariner becomes conscious of what he has done. The Mariner begins to realise the consequences of his action when he sees the skeleton ship which approaches across a windless sea, disclosing the figures of Death and Life-in-Death. In a dice game, Death wins the crew Life-in-Death wins Ancient Mariner.
The night in which the Mariner’s shipmates die symbolises the darkness in the soul when it suddenly finds itself alone.
In the fourth section, this sense of solitude is elaborated. Part IV begins with the crisis of extreme isolation, with the desire for death.
The Mariner’s loneliness is thrown into relief by contrast with multiplicity.
Nevertheless, some degree of unpredictable recovery occurs. In an unpremeditated burst of fraternal love, he blesses the slimy creatures of the deep, the water-snakes, and the Mariner begins to re-establish relations with the world of the world of the affections, bringing him back to life.
The blessing under the moon-light is critical turning-point of the poem. Just as the Albatross was not a mere bird, so these are not mere water-snake. They stand for “happy-living things”. There is a parallel between the Mariner’s blessing the snakes and his shooting the bird. Both acts are unpremeditated. In both cases, unconscious impulse – one for spontaneous cruelty and one for “sacramental love” – succeeded in displacing opposite state of consciousness. The firs phase of redemption, the recovery of love and of the power of prayer, depends on the Mariner’s recognition of the kinship with other natural creatures.
The fifth section continues the process of the soul’s revival. The ship begins to move and celestial sprits stand by the bodies of the dead men. The Mariner hears heavenly music in the air and is comforted by it. The sudden bound of the ship renders the Mariner unconscious and through the two voices the Mariner learns that the Polar Spirit requires vengeance for the death of the Albatross.
The other voice tells him that he has more penance to do.
In this sixth section, the process of healing seems to be impeded. The Voices say the ocean is under the power of the Moon. The ship is trance. The Mariner is haunted by the presence of his dead comrades.
Then that spell is snapped and he feels a sweet breeze on himself alone. The ship is miraculously brought to the very harbour from which it had first sailed. The three objects he had last seen at his departure – the kirk, the hill, and the lighthouse – now reappear, but in a reversed order.
In the seventh section, the suddenly sinks, but the Ancient Mariner is saved by the pilot’s boat wherein the is shrived by Hermit of the wood.
At times, the memory of what he has done is so insistent that he must speak of it.
The Wedding-Guest departs “a sadder and a wiser man”. Thus, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a myth of guilt and redemption, At the same times, its symbolical purpose is but one element in a complex design.
The Mariner’s experience presents his moral error, the discipline of suffering and consequent change of heat. The Mariner’s literal voyage, then, is also a spiritual journey: it is a circular journey in which, amid cheerful communal ceremony, he departs from his native land to come back, at the close, “to his own country”. Coleridge makes appeal to our experience of dreams, he uses the atmosphere of dreams to accustom us to his special world and, then, he proceeds freely within his chosen limits. Coleridge expects us to suppose that the situations are real and to have some kind of human feelings about them.
We may also say that Coleridge felt the attraction of the supernatural and sued it for his myth The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. What touched his genius was his sense of mystery at unknown forces at work in life. In order to snow what he really saw in them, he needed characters and circumstances in themselves strange. He was both fascinated by the unknown and, in some sense, afraid of it. This helped him to make The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In creating the imaginary world, “Coleridge offers an alternative to familiar existence which is at the same time an illuminating commentary on it”. Both in the main plan of the Mariner’s crime and in the spiritual forces that battle over him, Coleridge emphasises the state of man between persecuting horrors and enchanting beauties…
The poem is lively and colourful. The movement and appearance of the sun and moon are described in stanza after stanza.
In this poem, Moon and stars have become humanised, as Coleridge himself expressed the idea in Biographia Literaria, ant the description of the Mariner’s voyage shows that the Mariner has learnt what it means to belong to a place, a native land, a family, and a home.
Thus, for Coleridge art signifies “the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts and passion of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought and though nature, - this is the mystery of genius in fine arts” (Coleridge, “On Poetry or Art”, in Biographia Literaria, II, p. 253-258).
The poem is written in the general belief that the truth is implicit in the poetic act, that the moral concern and the aesthetic concern are aspects of the creative activity is expressive of the hole mind.
Chapter III
The Second Generation of Romantic Poets - Views on Nature
Percy Bysshe Shelly
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822), belongs to an ancient family. His father, Timothy Shelley, was a country gentleman, heir to a baronetcy.
Even as a child he had lived in two worlds. One was the world as he perceived it – the world of suffering, cruelty, and injustice – and he found it most intolerable. The other world, the one he conceived or imagined, was a world of beauty, goodness, love, and justice.
“I will be wise
And just and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise
Without reproach or check.”
Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819) is Shelley’s most characteristic work, is not a prophecy but a challenge. It is not concerned with events in time but with the eternal situation of man and the universe. Shelley was always seeking for a single abiding reality behind the multiplicity of the transient things and his mind turned to the universal and the permanent whose fait reflections he saw in the phenomenal world. For him poetry was the only way in which to grasp the ultimate reality because it must be understood not though the intellect but through the imagination. Shelley means by the ‘imagination’ the inspired insight into “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’ and ‘those forms which are common to universal nature and existence” (P. B. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, vol. III, p. 108, quoted in C. M. Bowra, 1969, p.25).
Shelley’s poems contain many fine perception of natural beauty. He emphasises the beauty of seasonal order and change as a symbol of the naturalness and inevitability in man’s minds.
The Ode to the West Wind (1819), considered to be “the greatest of all those lyrics of Shelley, which do not, in brief compass, covey a single and simple emotions, is a Prometheus Unbound in miniature, the Ode being composed simultaneously with the third act” (O. Klton, A Survey of English Literature: 1780-1830, 1912, p. 213).
The poem embodies the conflicting themes of the poet’s personal despair and his hopes for social renewal, in images drawn from the seasonal cycle.
In the Preface to the poem Shelley mentions the fact that “the poem was conceived and briefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains.
They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lighting peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.” (P. L. Lieder, ed., Eminent British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, 1938, p. 440).
The first stanza invokes the West Wind, which marks the end of summer and the beginning of the rainy autumn. Another westerly wind, Favorious, favourable to life, will bring in the spring to the western coast of Italy.
It was to this “azure sister” of Shelley’s wind that the classical poets Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Catullus addressed their praises.
From the beginning then Shelley is invoking a destroyer and not a creator as poets did before him. (H. C. Pancoast, “Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind”, quoted in H. Bloom, 1969, p.69):
“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deed
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
(11. 1-3)
In the first stanza the wind is both a “Destroyer” and a “Preserver” because in autumn it drives the dead leaves:
“Yellow, and black, and pale, and heretic red,”
- 4)
and scatters the seeds for the next spring’s growth. The seeds are “charioted” to the bed where they will sleep until the spring wind is “azure”, not only because it will bring azure sky, but because throughout Shelley’s poetry azure or blue is the colour of redemption, of happiness. The action of the wind is described with exactitude, in all its spheres of operation: earth, sky and water, the music growing fuller and more majestic as the poem goes on: “O life no as a wave, a leaf, a could! (1. 53)” The fourth stanza suggests the idea of rebirth:
“If I were a dead left thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift could to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power …”
(11. 43-45)
and summarises the preceding stanzas by associating them wit the poet’s desires. The last stanza defines the nature of the prayer the poet makes to the wind:
“Make me thy lyre,
……………………
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!”
(11. 57-64)
Then, from the individual, the poem passes to the universal. The connection is not altogether clear, but there is no doubt that a socio-political implication is intended. Shelley wants his reader to see the West Wind as a symbol of the forces of progress. The old world must go and a new world must come with the spring, laden with fresh sweet promises for the suffering humanity.
“And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind:
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
(11. 65-70)
The Cloud (1820) presents a mythopoetic autobiography of the cloud, the poet using accurate scientific observation upon the essential unity amidst the seeming variety of the cloud.
The Sensitive Plant (1820) is a mythoposic poem, its archetypal analogues being Spenser’s poem The Fate of a Butterflie and Blake’s The Book of Thel. The image of the garden is central in these poems – it embodies a starts of innocence, a first imaginative world through which poets and readers must pass.
Shelley’s poem has three parts and a conclusion. Part I present, in ecstatic detail, the garden in summer, dwelling with particular weight upon the “sensitive plant” in the garden described as “an undefiled Paradise of numerous beautiful flowers.
The Sensitive Plant trembles more than the other flowers; it is devoid of bloom and scent:
“For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not the Beautiful!”
(11. 74-77)
After a description of all the flowers in the garden, the fist part closes with a song of innocence reminiscent of Plato’s philosophy in so far as it seeks to express the love it feels and the beauty it aspires to. The idea is continued in the vision of the Lady of the Garden, in Part 2.
“There was a power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden, a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was a God to the starry scheme.”
(11. 115-118)
She maintains the garden undefiled, she bears away from the garden insects and “gnawing worms” or any other intrusive ugliness. When the Lady dies, decay and death characterise the garden.
The conclusion of the poem expresses Shelley’s conception that beauty cannot be destroyed for beauty is an eternal idea unaffected by change and mutability. Part 3 is a dark vision of the passing of Innocence into Experience.
The poet is writing about different states of being, each existing independently of the other. Shelley sees sensitive people doomed in a loveless world, the world of experience, where only the objects of experience can survive, “mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels”.
The Lady is a “ruling Grace” in the garden and she represents Love, being another of the poet’s idealisations of Intellectual Beauty, which appears in so many forms throughout his work.
The subject of To a Skylark (1820) is at once the bird and Shelley’s personal desires and ambitions. The bird is:
“Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought
Singing hymn unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
(11. 36-40)
He compares the bird in turn with high-born maiden, glow-worm, raze and showers, he moves from human life through lower animal and vegetable creation. The bird knows what love is but does not know the disillusionment of love:
“Thou lovest -but ne’ar knew
Love’s sad satiety.”
(11. 79-80)
The bird is exempt from the human yearning, for the absent and the unattainable:
“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those
That tell of saddest thought.”
(11. 85-90)
Though the poet is contemplating the bird, he is able to express his own feelings with objectivity and to remain in the world of reality, being, therefore, able to communicate with his readers:
“The world should listen
then – as I listening now.”
(11. 105-106)
The poet seeks inspiration from this vision to reveal the ideal truth to mankind.
Adonais (1821) is one of the greatest pastoral elegies in English. The occasion was Keats’s death in 1821. We may assume from the poem that two poets were friends, but such an assumption would not be exact.
Since Keats had been treated with injustice during his lifetime, Shelley was anxious to do him honour after his death.
The subject of the poem is neither the individual Keats, nor the individual Shelley, but rather the poetic and creative impulse itself. The poem starts from the pastoral motive of the contrast between the renewal of life in nature and the eternal sleep of the dead. In the end of the poem, the soul of Adonais is an intense spiritual essence merged into the world-soul to be the guiding star for all mankind to come.
The poem is written in Spenserian stanza, which was a favourite with Keats. As Shelley wrote Adonais, he followed the advice Keats had sent him in a letter: “Be more of an this is why Shelley described the poem as a “highly-wrought piece of art” and perhaps better in print of composition than anything else he had written.
Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate meditation, which is stimulated by an aspect of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a private problem or a general human one (Wordsworth’s Imitations of Immortality, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind).
George Gordon Byron
George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) in the history of Romanticism, had a peculiar place.
From the European point of view, he is the exponent and the most renowned figure of the whole movement, the man who summed in himself its essential qualities, and, by his inspiring example.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is the greatest confessional poem of the Romantic period in English literature. It has been supposed, from Byron’s day to our own, that Childe Harold is Byron himself, or at lest his conception of himself, and this, in spite of Byron’s protestations to the contrary both in his letters and in the Prefaces to Cantos I and II, in which he refers to Harold as “a fictitious character” and “a child of the imagination”.
Childe Harold of the first cantos is indeed an imaginary figure although he may have acquired many details from Byron’s personal life. In personality he is a compound of many distinct and even disparate elements of the literary heroes. “In age and in some of his attitudes he is a Child of Nature, in his appearance and with his burnt-out-passion and secret sins he bears a resemblance to the Gothic Villain, and in his meditations and in his personal reactions toward man and nature he resembles most closely those eighteenth-century types, the Gloomy Egoist and the Man of Feeling.” (Thorslev, 1962, p.132).
He is a Child of Nature in his attitude toward the natural world he loves:
“To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell.”
( II, 25 )
Harold himself calls nature his mother and himself his child. He identifies himself with “high mountains, desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam”. The following stanza (72-75) confirms that Child Harold mingles with some universal spirit embodied in nature.
He clams to become “a portion” of all around him, to receive “a feeling” from the mountains, to be tortured by “the hum of human cities”. He can see “nothing to loathe in Nature” except to be “a link reluctant in a fleshly chain”, to be a creature of flesh possessed by an aspiring soul which would flea:
“And with the sky – the peak – the heaving plain
Of Ocean, or the stars, mingle – and not in vain.”
(III, 72 )
Declaring his own “absorption” into such natural phenomena he tries to assimilate to himself the charm of the environment, to fit himself into the order and harmony of nature.
The theme of the ‘lonely-soul’ appears again in the third canto and it is generally associated with that of nature. The Rhine journey offered subjects for meditation to the lonely soul. Among the solitude of the Alps, Byron becomes for a while a true disciple of Wordsworth. He also enters that communion with nature, wherein mountains, sky and sea are felt to be a part of himself and he of them.
But in the end he returns to the proud defiance of the Promethean rebel, which is the dominant motif of the canto.
“I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee …”
(III, 113)
The canto ends with an address to his daughter. The love for the daughter is Harold’s only remaining human tie to mankind and it is the one thing that keeps him alive.
John Keats
The main noticeable difference between John Keats and the other Romantic poets consists in fact that while the other Romantic poets believe in the powers of imagination, Keats believes in the values of sensations.
John Little (1975) considers Keats an impressive narrative poet. Under the influence of the pseudo-Chaucerian The Flower and the Leaf, Keats developed a two-fold structural pattern, observable in Sleep and Poetry upon which he steadily improved throughout his career. John Keats’s first successful works were published in the 1817 volume of Poems. According to F. Matthey (1974 p. 27), the common and general characteristic of these poems is the static and general characteristic of these poems is the static imagery, which cannot generate an evolutionary process.
Representative is the poem I Stood Tip-Toe, ranked by critics as one of the best of the volume. It opens the typical world of Keats, the luxurious nature with crystal air, white and pure clouds, fresh brooks. The atmosphere is paradisiacal, full of calm grandeur, losing the soul in “pleasant smothering” and stimulating sensations. The mind is startled:
“… by the leap
Of buds into ripe flowers; or by the flitting
Of diverse moths, that aye their rest are quitting;
Or by the moon lifting her silver rim
Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim
Coming into the blue with all light.”
This “fair world” is a “maker of sweet poets”, inspiring the creators and helping them to transcend the real world into the world of myths. Pan, Narcissus, and Echo are mentioned, to be immediately followed by Endymion, whose love for Cynthia finds complete fulfilment.
Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), comments the relation between dreams and the creative operations of the mind. The poem indeed has four books. The introduction to the first book shows Keats haunted by the story of Endymion. In a moment of loneliness, far away from the “city’s din”, he starts to put on paper the pleasant scenes of the story that are growing fresh before his eyes.
The background to the action is Latmos, a land of beauty and richness, with a specifically Romantic nature.
The “mighty forests”, the “weed-hidden roots”, the “o’erchanging boughs” and “precious fruits” are pulsing tenfold to feel the beauty of the sunrise. Garlanded children, dancing young damsels and a venerable priest surround a white marble altar in the sounds of a faint air of the morning. Endymion appears in a crowd ofshepherds, in the full beauty of early manhood, but “wan, pale, and with an awed face”.
The solemnity of the procession dedicated to Pan is enhanced by the words of the priest that finish with:
“Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinking; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven,
That spreading with in his dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal – a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown – but no more: we humbly screen
With uplift foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a short most heaven-rending,
Conjure the to receive our humble Pean,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!”
Ode on a Grecian Urn is based on the idea of the eternity of art. Present, past, and future meet in this object of beauty which traverses the centuries with it’s silent magic.
Hyperion is an epic poem in which Keats tried to follow Milton’s example to relate the story of Hyperion. Remarkable is the cosmography established by the elements of nature described. Saturn is seated in a vale of a voiceless stream, with his right hand upon the sodden ground and with his head apparently listening to the Earth. Darkness dominates the beginning of the poem. Combined with silence and immobility it suggests downfall and death.
When he died, Keats gave promise of becoming the greatest poet of his generation. In spite of his early death, the poet’s influence in the century grew with the years. It became especially strong on emotionally oriented poets like the Pre-Raphaelites and the symbolists and prepared the way for the supreme enrichment of modern literature.
CONCLUSION
The transition to the nineteenth century was by a change in attitude. If in the works of the pre-romantics the treatment of nature was principally the simple chronicle and sympathetic observation of natural features, in the new generation of poets the observation became more matured and intimate, turning the feeling for nature into a passionate veneration that was love and religion at same time
However, it is essential to establish that the Romantic poets had an individual attitude towards nature, generally deter John Keats mined by their specific philosophic outlook. It reflected “the heterogeneity of its philosophic components: the specific blend of deistic theology, Newtonian physics, and pantheistic naturalism which pervades the Wordsworthian landscapes in the period of Tintern Abbey, the theism which sounds in the Eolian Harp of Coleridge, the conflict between French atheism and Platonic idealism which even in Prometheus Unbound Shelley was not able to resolve” (W. K. Wimsatt. The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery, 1949, p. 219).
Yet, the following common features can be determined:
-
nature is considered a creature alive, with its objective and personal qualities, existing outside the mind of the poet. It can be admired and loved as a human being with its own life, passion, and expressiveness. Such descriptions represent the poetic equivalent of the current metaphysical concept of nature developed in deliberate revolt against the mechanical views of Descartes and other scientific philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
-
nature has living soul, which enters into flowers, streams or mountains and gives them a soul of their own. The spirit that animates the landscape can be found in the West Wind:
“Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!”
(P. B. Shelley, Ode to the West Wind)
or in a skylark:
“Hail to the, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven or near it,
Pours thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
(P. B. Shelley, To a Skylark)
It indicates a transcendental order, which connects the elements of nature and the mind of man in the same motion:
“ … a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfaced,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
(W. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)
-
nature is in a continuous movement: the flight of night is swift (P. B. Shelley, To Night), the daffodils are “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (W. Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Could), the ocean is covered by dark clouds that “roll o’er the blackened waters” (P. B. Shelley, Queen Mab). Moments of calm – “So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! (W. Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas) or “…not the faintest breath / Steals o’er the unruffled deep” (P. B. Shelley, Queen Mab) – are used to bring out by contrast the permanent dynamism of nature;
- W. Wordsworth and John Keats prefer minute elements of nature (a skylark, daffodils, a green linnet) because they either represent the commonplace in nature or are elements of sensual beauty. Cosmic, grandiose elements (the sky, the stars, the ocean) are preferred by S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley,, and G. G Byron in order to underline the sinister and cruel side of nature vs. man’s helplessness;
- G. G. Byron who gives truthful and accurate description of the Greek islands offers the only realistic appeal to nature.
Byron took nature as he found it and appreciated much that other poets missed: “His poetry of nature is instinctive and immediate, free from theory or ulterior intention.” (C. M. Bowra, 1969, p. 160)
- the idea of the soul that penetrates all things, of the spirit and mystical essence , of the divine knowledge that lies behind all nature, turns it into a deity and its worship into a religion. This Pantheistic conception is evident especially in the poetry of W. Wordsworth and P. B. Shelley;
-
nature is born of the meeting of tow opposite forces: the unity and organising power of the spirit and the diversity and chaos of matter. It is in this sense that, according to S. T. Coleridge, “Nature… would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part.”(On Poesy or Art);
- there is a deep harmony between the spirit of nature and the mind of the poet. This harmony allows the former to communicate its own thoughts to man and man to reflect upon them until an absolute union between them is established.
- the poet’s personal dealings with nature produce a sense of joy, a plenteousness of delight which, however, are not reduced to mere rejoicement. He tries to see more deeply and to find the secret spring of this joy by a complete penetration into the mysteries and beauties of nature.
The writers were dependent on various features peculiar to their time : a reaction against previous literary styles, arguments with eighteenth century and earlier philosophers, the decline in formal Anglican worship and the rise of dissenting religious sects, and the rapid and unprecedented industrialisation of Britain and consequent changes in its countryside. Above all, however, it was the impact of the French Revolution which gave the period its most distinctive and urgent concerns. Following the Revolution itself, which began in1789, Britain was at war with France on continental Europe for nearly twenty years while massive repression of political dissent was implemented at home. Against this background much of the major writing of the period, including its Gothic fiction, can be seen as a response to changing political and social conditions in one respect or another. Given the political repression, for example, much of the fiction can be understood as an indirect exploration of issues of gender and power whose direct expression was either unthinkable or censored.
It was a revolutionary time for poetics: arguably it was during this time that the foundation of modern poetry were laid. The poets debated the new significance they wished to see in poetry: they wrote accounts of their theoretical beliefs, and wrote too with a remarkable openness in letters, diaries, and notebooks about the process of writing, their friendship, their travels, and their metaphysical inquires.
The influence of the English poetic tradition on the works of the Romantic writers could be possible because they laid “the knowledge and experience of all ages under a heavy tool”, because they based their poetry on the knowledge and experience of the previous ages. If the Classical writers were explored anew by the genius of Shelley and Keats, the Middle Ages inspired the novels of Scott and the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Except the great range of subject, the abundant output of literary productions made the Romantic period is one of the most fertile periods in English literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
-
Leviţchi, Leon; Trifu, Sever; Focşeanu, Veronica-Istoria literaturii engleze şi americane, Ed. All Educational, Bucureşti, 1998
-
Preminger, Alex; Warnke, Frank J.; Hardison,O.B.-Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974
-
Goodman, Lizabeth -Literature and Gender, London: Open University
Press; New York: Routledge, 1996
-
Barnet, Sylvan; Berman, Morton; Burto, William; Stubbs, Marcia-Literature for Composition: Essays, Fiction, Poetry and Drama, New York: Harper Collins, 1999
-
Kirwan, James-Literature, Rhetoric, Metaphysics: Literary Theory and Literary Aesthetics, New York: Routledge, London, 1990
-
Day, Aidan-Romanticism, New York: Routledge, London, 1996
-
O’ Flinn, Paul-How to Study Romantic Poetry, Houndmills: MacMillan, 1988
-
Wordsworth, William; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor-Baladas Liricas Y Biographia Literaria, Caracas: Monte Avila, 1985
-
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor-Poems/S.T. Coleridge, Ed. and Introd. By John Beer, London: Everyman’s Library, 1999
-
Cambridge Editions-The Poetical Works of Keats, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975
-
Barnard, John-Selected Poems/John Keats, London, New York: Ringwood, Penguin Books, 1988
-
Keats, John-The Poems/ John Keats; with an introd. by David Bromwich and notes by Nicholas Roe, London: Everyman’s Library, 1999
C.M. BOWRA – The Romantic Imagination, 1969
D. Daiches – A Critical History of the English Literature, 1969
Fr. Schlegel – Fragments
R.Wellek – The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History, 1949
Thomas Percy – Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
R. Williams – The Romantic Artists
N. Frye – A Study of English Romanticism, 1968
W.K. Wimsatt – The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery, 1949
A.C. Baugh – A Literary History of England, 1967
M. Arnold – Introduction to Poems of Wordsworth, 1879
A.C. Bradley – Oxford Lectures on Wordsworth
A.C. Bradley – Wordsworth, 1950
M.S. Day – A History of English Literature
J. Hefferman – Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry, 1969
F.W. Baterson – Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation, 1963
S.M. Parish – The Thorn: Wordsworth’s Dramatic Monologue
Gerard – The Systolic Rhythm: The Structure of Coleridge’s
Conversation poems, 1960
M.H. Abrams – Natural Supernaturalism, 1973
G.W. Knight – Coleridge’s Divine Comedy
