o
Romantic
era – 19th century poetry
o
William
Wordsworth and Coleridge are considered the founders of Romanticism in England
o
Some of
the Romantic poets are
o
William
Wordsworth
o
Samuel t
Taylor Coleridge
o
John Keats
o
P B Shelley
o
George
Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)
Common Features of Romantic Poetry
·
Personal experience – not
didactic
·
Nature as a benevolent force
with regenerative force
·
Variety of forms – odes,
lyrics, sonnets
·
Simple language
Early Romantic Poetry of William Blake
·
William Blake is an early
Romantic poet
·
His work comes in two books:
“Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”
·
Most of the poems in “Songs of
Innocence” have a counterpart in “Songs of Experience”
·
“Songs of Innocence” is
composed by a person who has faith in his religion and his society
·
“Songs of Experience” is
composed by a poet who has experienced life and as a result lost faith in the
church and society
The Tyger
1.
Dramatic exclamations: “Tyger!
Tyger! Burning bright/ In the forest of the night”
2.
If “The Lamb” is about Jesus
and faith in God, “The Tyger” is about Satan and doubt
3.
The narrator in “The Lamb” has
absolute faith in his religion and his God
4.
In “The Tyger”, Blake raises a
fundamental question: If God is good and merciful, could he be the creator of
both the Lamb and the Tyger?
5.
The tiger’s eyes have a
supernatural brightness
6.
They could only have come from
“distant deeps or skies” - either hell or from the heaven
7.
The mighty heart of the tiger
could have been forged only by an immortal
8.
But who would have dared to
give such a creature life and endanger the lives of both the Lamb and the
Child?
9.
Non of the questions raised are
answered, for Christianity does not explain how both goodness and evil could be
created by the same creator
Themes
·
The question of good and bad
existing side by side in the world created by God
Techniques
1.
Dramatic opening: exclamations
– heightens emotions “Tyger! Tyger!”
2.
Rhetorical questions
a.
What immortal hand or eye/
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
b.
In what distant deeps or skies/
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
c.
Did he who made the Lamb make
thee?
3.
The poet is both fascinated and
terrified by the tiger
4.
Visual images – Burning bright/
In the forest of the night
5.
Auditory images – “Tyger!
Tyger! Burning Bright” – sound of
hammering in a smithy
6.
Classical references
a.
Reference to the smithy of
Hephaestus in the island
of Lemnos
b.
Reference to the myth of
Prometheus stealing Gods’ fire: What hand, dare seize the fire?
7.
Biblical references – Lamb =
Jesus; Burning bright = Lucifer, the brightest of all angels who later becomes
Satan
8.
References from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
– Seeing Lucifer and his army of angels ready to fight God:
9.
When the stars threw down their
spears
10. And water’d the heaven with their tears
11. Repetition of the first stanza as the last stanza
Biographical sketch of John
Keats
o
Keats
belonged to the 2nd generation of Romantic poets made of Keats,
Shelley and Byron; the 1st was made of Wordsworth and Coleridge
o
He was
born in Moorgate, London in 1795 and died in Italy in1821 at
the age of 25 from tuberculosis
o
Keats was
the son of a stable worker.
o
His
private life was full of sadness for two main reasons
o
Death of
his brother Tom from TB
o
His
unsuccessful love affair with Fanny Browne
o
Most of
his family members too died young, i.e., his brother Tom
o
Transience
of life was an issue that worried him from the very beginning
o
After
meeting Leigh Hunt, an editor and a close friend of Shelley and Byron, Keats
was encouraged to write poetry at the age of 21 he produced his first great
poem.
o
In 1819,
from January to September Keats produced a set of dazzling odes
1.
Ode to
Autumn
2.
Ode to a
Nightingale
3.
Ode on a
Grecian Urn
4.
Ode to
Psyche
5.
Ode to
Melancholy
6.
Ode to
Indolence
Ode on a Nightingale – John Keats
Form
o
Ten-line
verse of varying meter
o
Rhyming
scheme – ABABCDCDE
Background
o
The poem
was written in 1819 when Keats was ill. At that time he was living with a
friend in Hampton.
In April, a nightingale had built a nest and Keats hears the nightingale as he
sits in the garden one evening. So, it is believed that the poem was composed
while he was sitting there. Hence, this is an autobiographical poem. The
speaker on the poem and the poet are one and the same.
o
The poem
contains the following ‘Romantic’ qualities
o
The power
of imagination
o
Intense
feelings
o
Delight in
natural beauty
o
Imagery
from a range of human senses – auditory, tactile, visual
o
Natural
imagery
o
The close
association between natural beauty and poetic inspiration
o
Human
conflicts
o
Journey of
self-discovery
o
An attempt
to find meaning and salvation in poetry
o
The effect
of dreams on the dreamer
Themes
o
Yearning
for happiness and meaning through poetry
o
Awareness
of pain and suffering Vs. joy brought by the bird’s song – the idea that human
joy and pain are inextricably linked
o
The
contrast between the ideal and the real world
o
Awareness
of the poet’s own sickness and mortality vs. beauty and immortality of the
bird’s song
o
The
conflict between the need to experience passionate feelings and the yearning to
escape
Analysis
o The
speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though
he had taken a drug only a moment ago.
o He
is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says
that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but
rather from sharing it too completely
o He
is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some
unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
o In
the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing
his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country
and like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear
into the dim forest with the nightingale.
o In
the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to
forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever,
and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal
and nothing lasts.
o Youth
“grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous
eyes.”
o In
the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will
follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but
through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.”
o He
says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where
even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through
when the breezes blow the branches.
o In
the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade,
but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the
musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”
o In
the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying
that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death
soft names in many rhymes.
o Surrounded
by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems
richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while
the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth.
o If
he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would
“have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.
o In
the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that
it was not “born for death.”
o He
says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors
and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open
magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn.”
o In
the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker
from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself.
o As
the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination
has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s
music was “a vision, or a waking dream.”
o Now
that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake
or asleep.
o With
“Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest
exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human
life.
o In
this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy
shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin,
and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music
(“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”).
o in
“Nightingale” numbness is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in
thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale.
o Hearing
the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join
the bird.
o His
first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza,
he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself.
o But
after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects
the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman
god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by
leopards) and chooses instead to embrace “the viewless wings of Poesy.”
o The
rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the
nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven,
imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest.
o The
ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of
painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and
never experiencing any further pain or disappointment.
o But
when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to
himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the
inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do,
deceiving elf”).
o As
the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left
him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.
o In
the nightingale’s song, Keats finds a form of outward expression that
translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the
discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last.
o The
“art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music
without record, existing only in a perpetual present.
o As
befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though
it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses.
o He
can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”; he knows he is
surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet.
Language
o
Formal and
decorous with the ode
o
It does
not have the simplicity of expression
of Wordsworth’s poetry
o
Synthesia
– a poetic device used by Keats to combine different senses in one phrase –
sunburnt mirth, blissful Hippcrene
Techniques
o
Allusion –
to classical mythology – Hippocrene, Baccus and his pards; reference to the
Bible – Ruth
o
The
nightingale is a symbol of joy and desire to escape the world of suffering
o
Onomatopoeia
– murmurous haunt
o
Tone – a
melancholic tone filled with changing moods and poetic imagination
o
Personification
– happy the queen Moon
o
Alliteration
– deep –delved, fever and the fret
o
Assonance
– beechen green
o
Borrows
images from nature, summer, the woods, the night sky, the country side
o
The
association of wine and music is an image for poetic inspiration
Biographical sketch - P B Shelley
o
Born in
1792 as the 7rth child to a well-to-do family in Horsham,
Sussex in England
o
Shelley
led an extremely colourful but a short life like the other two 2nd
generation Romantic poets
o
He entered
Oxford in 1804.
o
He eloped
with his friend’s wife Harriet and married her in 1811. they had two children
but the marriage broke down due to differences in their views
o
Later he
eloped with Mary Godwin.
o
During
this time he became friends with Lord Byron and Keats
o
Shelley
died on a sailing trip in 1822. he was 29 at that time
To a Skylark – P B Shelley
o
Genre – a
lyrical ode
Form
o Ode
is eccentric, songlike, and has 21 five-line stanzas
o The
rhyme scheme of each stanza is extremely simple: ABABB.
o The
fifth line of each stanza is usually long and sometimes clinches the main idea
of the verse
Analysis
1. Both
Shelley’s skylark and Keats’s Nightingale represent immortality
2. Their
songs issues from a state of joy unmixed with any hint of sadness
3. But
while the nightingale is a bird of darkness, the skylark is a bird of daylight
4. The
nightingale makes Keats to feel “a drowsy numbness” that makes him think of
death
5. The
skylark inspires Shelley to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of
pain
6. Even if we do not see it, or even hear it,
“we feel it is there.”
7. The poet hopes to learn how it possesses
“rapture so divine”
8. Finally, the speaker comes to terms with
the idea that in some ways, ignorance can be bliss.
o
According
to Mary Shelley, in 1820, in a beautiful evening, she and Shelley hear the
singing of a skylark and that had inspired the poet to compose the poem
o
The poem of long and consist of 21 stanzas
o
The poem
can be divided into 3 headings
o
1-3 –
introduction of the skylark
o
4-12 –
description of the skylark
o
13-21 –
request for inspiration from the skylark
o
The poet
opens with an address to the skylark. The poet identifies the bird as a divine
spirit
o The
speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a “blithe Spirit” rather than a
bird, for its song comes from Heaven
o From
its full heart the skylark pours “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
o The
skylark flies higher and higher, “like a cloud of fire” in the blue sky, singing
as it flies.
o In
the “golden lightning” of the sun, it floats and runs, like “an unbodied joy.”
o As
the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is
still able to hear its “shrill delight,” which comes down as keenly as moonbeams
in the “white dawn,” which can be felt even when they are not seen.
o The
earth and air ring with the skylark’s voice, just as Heaven overflows with
moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind “a lonely cloud.”
o The
speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is, for it is unique: even
“rainbow clouds” do not rain as brightly as the shower of melody that pours
from the skylark.
o The
bird is “like a poet hidden / In the light of thought,” able to make the world
experience “sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
o It
is like a lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her song to soothe her
lovelorn soul.
o It
is like a golden glow-worm, scattering light among the flowers and grass in
which it is hidden.
o It
is like a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is blown by the
wind until the bees are faint with “too much sweet.”
o The
skylark’s song surpasses “all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh,”
whether the rain falling on the “twinkling grass” or the flowers the rain
awakens.
o Calling
the skylark “Sprite or Bird,” the speaker asks it to tell him its “sweet
thoughts,” for he has never heard anyone or anything call up “a flood of
rapture so divine.”
o Compared
to the skylark’s, any music would seem lacking.
o What
objects, the speaker asks, are “the fountains of thy happy strain?” Is it
fields, waves, mountains, the sky, the plain, or “love of thine own kind” or
“ignorance or pain”?
o Pain
and languor, the speaker says, “never came near” the skylark: it loves, but has
never known “love’s sad satiety.”
o Of
death, the skylark must know “things more true and deep” than mortals could
dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, “how could thy notes flow in such a crystal
stream?”
o For
mortals, the experience of happiness is bound inextricably with the experience
of sadness
o Dwelling
upon memories and hopes for the future, mortal men “pine for what is not”;
their laughter is “fraught” with “some pain”
o Their
“sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
o But,
the speaker says, even if men could “scorn / Hate and pride and fear,” and were
born without the capacity to weep, he still does not know how they could ever
approximate the joy expressed by the skylark.
o Calling
the bird a “scorner of the ground,” he says that its music is better than all
music and all poetry.
o He
asks the bird to teach him “half the gladness / That thy brain must know,” for
then he would overflow with “harmonious madness,” and his song would be so
beautiful that the world would listen to him, even as he is now listening to
the skylark.
Commentary
o The
skylark is Shelley’s greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the
“harmonious madness” of pure inspiration.
o The
skylark’s song issues from a state of purified existence
o Its
song is motivated by the joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is
unmixed with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy so
often is.
o The
skylark’s unimpeded song rains down upon the world, surpassing every other
beauty, inspiring metaphor and making the speaker believe that the bird is not
a mortal bird at all, but a “Spirit,” a “sprite,” a “poet hidden / In the light
of thought.”
o In
that sense, the skylark is almost an exact twin of the bird in Keats’s “Ode to
a Nightingale”; both represent pure expression through their songs, and like
the skylark, the nightingale “wast not born for death.”
o But
while the nightingale is a bird of darkness, invisible in the shadowy forest
glades, the skylark is a bird of daylight, invisible in the deep bright blue of
the sky.
o The
nightingale inspires Keats to feel “a drowsy numbness” of happiness that is
also like pain, and that makes him think of death; the skylark inspires Shelley
to feel a frantic, rapturous joy that has no part of pain.
o To
Keats, human joy and sadness are inextricably linked
o But
the skylark sings free of all human error and complexity, and while listening
to his song, the poet feels free of those things, too.
Themes:
o The
ability of the creatures of nature to experience pure joy, unlike humans
o The
poet’s yearning for pure joy in the skylark’s song as well as his yearning for
the ability to express pure joy like a skylark through his poetry
o The
unity and the correspondence between heaven and nature
o The
correspondence between nature and joy
o The
poet’s role according to Shelley is to inspire joy and rapture in the reader
o A
poet’s yearning for an audience
Techniques
o There
is much emphasis on sound and imagery in this poem – the imagery is borrowed
from nature
o The
images are visual and easy to grasp – pale, purple, evening, melting
o Comparison
is a technique used widely in the poem as seen in the repetition of phrase
“like a”. the poet compares the skylark and its song to
o A
cloud of fire
o A
star in heaven – which is extended to how the ‘arrows’ – the light of the silver
sphere (stars) seem to disappear as the dawn comes
o The
moon raining down its beams
o A
rainbow cloud shedding raindrops
o A
poet hidden behind his thoughts
o A
princess singing to sooth her sorrows
o A
glow-worm shedding light
o A
rose spreading its petals and perfume in the wind
o The
skylark is a metaphor for poetic expression for an ideal state of existence and
pure joy untouched by sorrow
o It
is said that Shelley’s imagery is not very original or varied
o He
used a limited range of poetic images repeatedly in his poetry – D W Harding
o There
is also the use of exaggeration
o –
From the earth thou springest like a cloud of fire – to describe a small bird
o –
All that ever was joyous, and clear and fresh thy music doth suppress – to
describe its singing which is not considered
beautiful, unlike the nightingale’s song
Language
o Conventional
poetic diction in its choice of words – hail to thee – and poetic inversions
o His
expression is not very compact as each verse contain a single idea often
clinched in the last line – 9, 10, 11
o This
does not have the compression of ideas of poems like Ozymandias
o The
language is musical and extremely rhythmic. There is assonance - lines ending in verse 17 – asleep, dream
o Alliteration
o –
singing dost soar and soaring ever since – verse 2
o –
sunken sun – verse 3
o Pale
purple – verse 4
o Silver
sphere – verse 5
Remembrance – Emily Bronte
1.
A Victorian poetess who belongs
to the Romantic tradition
2.
Expresses a “fiery stoicism,
fervent pantheism, and independent spirituality”
3.
Fifteen years has passed since
the woman’s lover had died
4.
He is buried on a far away
mountain
5.
The woman swears undying love
for the dead man
No later light
has lighted up my heaven
No second morn
has ever shown for me
6.
Death of her lover had made the
woman realize how precious life was
7.
So she had “sternly denied” he
souls “burning wish to hasten/ Down to that tomb already more than mine”
8.
She dares not let her soul
“indulge in memory’s rapturous pain” for “once drinking deep of that divinest
anguish” she was sure she would not want to continue living
Themes
·
Undying love – reminds one of
the love between Katherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
·
Death
Techniques
·
Conversational tone
·
Use of monosyllabic words –
language is more straight forward and natural
·
Images
o Time as a destroyer: Severed at last by Time ’s all severing wave
o Light and morning for love and happiness: No later light has
lightened up my heaven/ No second morn has ever shone for me
·
Passion and despair are
personified as formidable forces
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