Hemingway

Nineteenth Century Romanticism
Romantic period in English literature is usually said to have begun in 1798 (the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads), and to have ended in 1832 when Scott died and the passage of the Reform Bill signaled the political preoccupations of the Victorian Era. It was mainly a period of poetry. Romanticism favored innovation in the materials, form, and style of literature. English romantic poetry began with a kind of “manifesto”, or statement of revolutionary aims, in the preface to the second edition (1800) of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. By the way they entitled it “ballad” implying denial of the classicalism in the poetical form as ballad chiefly found in the populace and “lyrical” suggesting the voice of heart instead of head. This Preface, written by Wordsworth denounced the poetic diction of the preceding century and proposed to deal with materials from “common life” in “a selection of common language really used by men”. In the Preface Wordsworth repeatedly described good poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” According to this point of view poetry is not a mirror of men in action; its essential element, on the contrary, is the poet’s own feelings, while the process of composition, being “spontaneous” in emotion “recollected in tranquility”. So according to Wordsworth the act of composition of genuine poems must be free of “artificial” rules and conventions of Neoclassicism. External nature became a persistent subject of poetry, nature was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers. But nature was not described for its own sake, instead, served as a stimulus for the poet to engage in the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking. The important poems of the time are poems of feelingful meditation of central human problems. Wordsworth said that it is “the Mind of Man” which is “my haunt, and the main region of my song”. However it was not people in general that Romantic poetry are really concerned about, instead, the poets themselves directly or indirectly in altered but recognizable form are the center of their poems. They themselves were no longer part of an organized society, but, typically, solitary figures engaged in a quest; often they were solitary, nonconformists or outcasts. Coleridge and Keats sought the realm of the supernatural and of “the far away and the long ago”, while Blake and Shelley transcended the physical qualities of objects for symbolic significance. Byron was essentially a free democratic spirit who was more embraced by the masses.
7.William Blake (1757—1827):
William Blake never went to school. At 14 he was apprenticed to a well-known engraver and in the same time tried his hand at poetry. His early works were modeled after the Elizabethan writers. Later he followed his own mystic soul and became the most talented and original poet and a fine painter of his time. He claimed that he had “Divine Vision”, or had a visual mind; whatever he imagined, he also saw. His works: Poetical Sketches (1783); Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and so on.
The Chimney Sweeper
(from Songs of Innocence)
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “ ‘weep(1)! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!
So your chimney I sweep, & in soot I sleep.
There’s little Tom Dacre who cried when his head
That curl’d like a lamb’s back, was shav’d, so I said,
Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black;
And by came an angel who had a bright key
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun;
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind,
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work
Tho’(2) the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Notes：
(1)‘weep’ means “sweep”, it’s the child’s lisping attempt at the chimney sweeper’s
street
(2)though
The Chimney Sweeper
(from Songs of Experience)
A little black thing among the snow
Crying “‘weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father & mother? Say?”
“They are both gone up to the church to pray.
“Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King,
Who make up a Heaven of our misery.’
Understanding:
There are two vastly different versions of “The Chimney Sweeper”, appearing in the two different volumes of Blake’s lyrics, The Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Songs of Experience. They respond to the same matter from the different points of view, one on the part of children, the other on adult. Child labor is cruel, however the children seem happy and joy since children have dream at heart and they fancy that God will bless them from any harm and misery and they soon forget what day labor means to them because they are children. In the second poem the same matter is viewed from the vision of adult by the mouth of children to tell the true adult world: parents go to church to thank God, for I am happy and they think God has done me no injury. Here parents really wish for children a life without misery and hard chimney sweeping. But it is just a fancy idea. The last line of the poem accuses religion and politics.
Technique: (1).Satire: When your head is bare, the soot cannot spoil your white hair. To praise the God and His Priest and King, / Who make up a Heaven of our misery. (2). Humor :That curl’d like a lamb’s back, (3).Irony: He’d have god for his father and never want joy. (4).Contrast: A little black thing among the snow. Children’s world and vision versus those of adult.
In the first poem “do our duty and we’ll have no harm”: child labor and God protection forms a tension. In the second poem while children do chimney sweeping, parents beg in vain bless from God, but they still go there, which forms a tension too.
The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
It the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry(1)?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire(2)?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder & what art,
Could twist the sinews(3) of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil(4)? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears(5),
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb(6) make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Notes:
(1)referring to the well-proportioned body of the tiger
(2)have ambition for something
(3)muscles
(4)iron block on which a smith shapes heated metal by smiting it
(5)When the smith is hammering the heated metal, the fire sparkles like shooting
stars which are often called as angels’ tears by children.
(6)symbol of peace and purity, Blake wrote a lyric “Lamb” in Songs Of Innocence.
Understanding:
“The forest of the night”: it symbolizes the world of experience. C.f. innocence takes place in day. “Fearful symmetry”: he sees a symmetry / beauty about it. An awesome beauty. In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes? What’s your origin? What the hand, dare seize the fire? With so many what-questions the tiger is being created in the anvil / fiery furnace. The tiger takes shape, and then it comes to life. And we hear it being smitten out. Who could seize the fire and create this animal? Blake wonders not only at the tiger, but at the creator, who could have created such a creature? So he is wondering both at the creature and the creator. And what shoulder, and what art… What dread grasp / Dare its deadly… Having created this, who could control this tiger? There is a shift in the last two stanzas. When the stars threw down their spears: why do they throw them down? In defeat? Do the stars capitulate? Does heaven claim by pity? It’s rather ambiguous? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? The poet’s amazement now is turned towards God. Could the forces of meekness and energy and wrath be parted from the same creator? Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? The idea of will involves in the creation. The audacity and risks are involved in creating two such contrary forces as the lamb and the tiger. This force of wrath eventually will be the force that would destroy / burn up the error of the false ideas of experience. The force of wrath is needed to destroy error. Through the poem the poet’s mind worked in achieving one of the finest and most profound poems in the English language. The poem is deliberately composed of a series of questions, none of which is answered. It contains the riddle of the universe, how to reconcile good with evil, careful dissection will only spoil its impact. Notice the spelling. Even using tyger instead of tiger strengthens the name of the tiger. Somehow more attention gets into it than into “tiger”.
The tiger represents energy. Blake felt that energy was good. Energy / wrath can overthrow error. So revolutionary energy can overthrow error. The tiger represents this force of energy and wrath that is to consume error. Tiger could symbolize the French Revolution in 1789, the explosive force destroying the old foundations and tiger can be a kind of force encircled by evil, gloom and superstition and so on, but “tiger” more here, carries a philosophical meaning, it refers to contrast or contradiction everywhere. Whenever and wherever there is tiger, there is lamb, whenever there is a problem there is solution to the problem. Tiger and lamb are both created by God. Because of imbalance tiger is a force over lamb and tiger is the ferocious enemy to lamb. Literally and physically tiger and lamb are two opposite forces, but philosophically and symbolically they are interchangeable. Tiger / wrath / energy / problem can be dead and consumed and then lamb turns into tiger. Anyway there must be tiger and lamb in the universe. That is the law of nature.
Blake is a symbolist as well as visionary poet whose poems are highly simple in language yet speculative in idea. And here his poems are full of musical rhythm with strong anvil iron-smiting sound. It’s very masculine in wording and sonorous in rhythm suggesting the overwhelming power and will of the tiger and its creator.
To See the World in a Grain of Sand
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
Understanding:
This is another philosophical poem by William Blake. Each line contains a philosophical metaphor, infinite world is seen in the finite world, eternity held in transience.
8.Robert Burns (1759—1796):
Robert Burns was born in Scotland, of a peasant’s family. His father was a peasant, who worked very hard but remained poor all his life. Burns received only two and a half years of regular schooling. At 16 he was chief laborer in his family and a master-hand at the plough. He developed, however, an early inclination for literature, and got acquainted with old Scottish folk songs, ballads and legends. He liked Scottish folk songs. He managed to read a little every day at his meals and to write a little on Sundays. He sang his songs to the old popular Scottish tunes and in this way he wrote poems that were circulated in manuscripts among the peasants. Burns is the national poet of Scotland. His works: Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) among his poems there are well known “Auld Lang Syne” and “A Red Red Rose”.
My Heart’s in the Highlands
My heart’s in the Highlands(1), my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the highlands, a-chasing(2) the deer;
A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe(3),
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.
Farewell to the highlands, farewell to the North(4),
The birthplace of valour(5), the country of worth(6);
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Notes:
(1)highlands in Scotland
(2)in chasing
(3)little deer
(4)highlands is in the North of Britain.
(5)bravery
(6)noble quality
Understanding:
The poem is read and sung with refrains in the whole poem. It carries a regular rhyme aabbccdd as well as assonance through out the poem, giving the impact of strong musical rhythm.
My heart and highlands form a tension here: highlands represent more than the actual place, as well as the noble, elevated and supreme realm of artistic attainment that the poet’s heart is longing for and chasing for.
9.George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788—1824):
George Gordon Lord Byron came from an old aristocratic but impoverished family. At the age of ten upon the death of his uncle he inherited the baronial title and a large estate. Byron was educated at Harrow, then Cambridge University. He made no profession of serious study but was greatly interested in Oriental history. After graduation Byron entered the House of Lords and soon started on a tour of Europe and the Orient. On his return he published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), which made him famous overnight. Of his works the better known are Don Juan, his masterpiece, Hebrew Melodies, Oriental Tales, The Prisoner of Chillon, etc.
When We Two Parted
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever(1) for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow—
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me
Why wert(2) thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well—
Long, long shall I rue(3) thee,
To deeply to tell.
In secret we met –
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.
Notes:
(1)cut
(2)were
(3)hate
Understanding:
In 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a pious Christian and an heiress who married Byron explicitly to reform him. After they had two years of intermittent correspondence and one rejected proposal by Byron they blundered into marriage. But soon the marriage broke up after an affair with Augusta (Byron’s half-sister). Byron had many lover affairs. Annabella raised a scandal in England over the whole affair with Augusta and England turned against Byron. Byron felt like a social martyr and left England in anger in 1816, never to return. This is the poem he wrote to tell something about his idea on the divorce with Annabella when he had affair with other lady, he didn’t think he was wrong. He thought it was his wife to blame for divorce with him.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
From Canto IV (Ocean)
177
Oh! That the Desert(1) were my dwelling place,
With one fair Spirit(2) for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements(3)!—in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted –Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err(4)
In deeming such inhabit(5) many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot(6).
178
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but nature more,
From these our interview, in which I steal(7)
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet can not all conceal.
179
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain(8);
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
180
His steps are not upon thy paths—thy fields
Are not a spoil for him(9)—thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength the wields(10)
For earth’s destruction thou dose all despise,
Spurning(11) him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply(12) lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth—there let him lay(13).
181
The armaments(14) which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding(15) nations quake
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans(16), whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator(17) the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war—
These are thy toys, and, as the snow flake,
They melt into thy yeast(18) of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar(19).
182
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free(20),
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger(21), slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts—not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play;
Such as creation’s dawn behold, thou rollest now.
183
Thou glorious mirror, where they Almighty’s form
Glasses(22) itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime(23)
Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime—
The image of Eternity-the throne
Of the Invisible(24); even from out thy slime(25)
The monsters of the deep(26) are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread(27), fathomless, alone.
184
And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned(28) with thy breakers –they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—’twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near(29),
And laid my hand upon thy mane(30)—as I do here.
Notes:
(1)England
(2)some girl in his mind
(3)natural forces (wind, water, earth and air)
(4)make mistake in inhabiting the country--desert
(5)inhabitation
(6)our capacity
(7)keep away from my former social being
(8)without trace
(9)not controlled by him (man)
(10)the evil strength he has
(11)rejecting or throwing
(12)perhaps
(13)lie
(14)the power of the ocean
(15)cauing
(16)warship
(17)man
(18)brewing or rolling, formation
(19)The Spanish Armada, defeated by the English in 1588, lost many ships in a
storm; another storm was responsible for the loss of a number of French ships
that Nelson had captured at Trafalgar (1805).
(20)Waters offer sea traffic for trade and business.
(21)foreigner
(22)mirror
(23)extremely hot climate
(24)God
(25)soft mud in the bottom of the sea
(26)dragons
(27)frightening
(28)played
(29)whenever I am far and near.
(30)He takes the ocean as a horse here. He is on the ocean.
Understanding:
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was written in the Spenserian stanza, i.e. a 9-line stanza rhymed ababbcbcc, in which the first eight lines are in iambic pentameter while the ninth line in iambic hexameter. The poem contains four cantos. It tells of Childe (a youth of noble birth) Harold’s travels in Europe and praises the grandeur of nature. From the long poem emerges the image of the Byronic hero Childe Harold—strong willed, friendless, always at war with the conventional world, always at one with the people’s aspirations for freedom. Disgusted with the society as it was, he turns to nature in solitude. Byron himself was identical with Byronic hero. In character Byron defied man, defied institution of society, defied God, defied anything human. He was free in spirit and against any government. He liked to identify with the storms in the sea and mountains——the large aspects of nature. He had a great sense of isolation——the sense of himself alone against the world. So we have the Byronic hero here.
10.William Wordsworth (1770—1850):
William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, West Cumberland, in the lake district of Northwestern England, where he developed a strong love of nature. He graduated from Cambridge and went to France. The French Revolution exercised a strong influence upon him but that enthusiasm finally gave way to his passion with nature. In 1795 he received a legacy and settled down with his sister Dorothy in his native Lake District. At the same time he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they developed between them a close and long standing friendship. Together they published in 1798 Lyrical Ballads, which marked the break with the eighteenth century classicism and the beginning of Romanticism in English poetry.
On the one hand Wordsworth is the closest to nature. To him nature is the dominant influence in changing people’s sensibilities: nature to him is a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual revelation; it is a teacher, it is the stepping-stone between Man and God. On the other hand he maintained that scenes and events of everyday life and language of ordinary people should be what the poets hunt for. Of Wordsworth’s group poems, the best known is the “Lucy Poems” in which he described with a rare beauty of lyricism and well used metaphors a simple, natural and pure country girl who lived in a remote mountainous area far from the spoiled artificial city life.
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
The difference to me!
Understanding:
“The untrodden ways”: paradoxical language. The way must be trodden, otherwise there is not a way. If there is a path, it’s been trodden. A violet is a very tiny wild purple flower that is very like the image of a country girl. “Fair as a star when only one / Is shining in the sky”: she is hidden by a mossy stone, but as the only star in the sky. When there is only one star in the sky, the star is undoubtedly brightest. Here is a psychological state of true mind and that can only happen in the situation when there is love grown in the poet’s heart that made him not able to see the other stars no matter how brighter they are. She is unique and there is love or harmony between them. “The difference to me”! The poet can’t put his grief into words “loss that was so deeply”. It is a means of understatement. You hold back what you want to say and leave room for readers to fill up, the resultant effect is better than you have exaggerated. Understatement is opposite to overstatement or hyperbole. Keats called the last line “the most perfect pathos”.
Did the girl actually live? Was she a friend of the poet? Or who is the speaker? Lucy here could be a pure girl, a country girl, or beautiful scenery of the country, but all are unnecessary to identify distinctly.
The Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee-.
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude-,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Understanding:
This is one of the most anthologized poems in English literature. It bespeaks the poet’s inward affinity with nature. In the first stanza: the poet was wandering alone, a host of dancing daffodils suddenly came into his eyes. They are so numerous and alive and bright and rocking in the breeze that he seemed to enjoy them so much. Pay attention to contrast used here, the poet is alone but the daffodils are a host. Then the poet conveyed his impression of the vast host. There are light images in “twinkle on the milky way” and in “the sparkling waves”. Besides there are sound and motion images in “twinkle on the milky way,” “Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” “Continuous as the stars that shine” and “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”
“A poet could not but be gay,” he has been taken in to the company. The last stanza tells here on the one hand he is “recollecting emotion in tranquility”, and on the other hand he became sublime and elevated no matter what difficulties and hardship he met in the world he could meet them with a composed mind. The last line tells he had a renewed and fresh heart experience of daffodils.
William Wordsworth is the best natural poet among the Romantic poets.
11.Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792—1822):
Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the leading Romantic poets, was born of a wealthy family so was sent to Eton where he was called “Mad Shelley” because of his sensitive and rebellious character. At Oxford he published The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled. The influence of William Godwin, the revolutionary philosopher and novelist led him to write Queen Mab, a poem against dogmatic religion, government, tyranny and war. In 1818 he went to Italy and Rome where he wrote the wonderful “Ode to the West Wind” and the best lyric “To A Skylark”. In 1822 Shelley was drowned off Leghorn in one of those swift storms which sweep the Mediterranean during the summer heats. His works: The Revolt Of Islam (1818), The Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1819) and others.
Ode to the West Wind
1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes(1): O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring(2) shall blow
Her clarion(3) o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
2
Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning(4): there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad(5), even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge
Of the dying year(6), to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline stream(7),
Beside a pumice isle(8) in Baize bay(9),
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the waves intenser day
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!(10) Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers(11)
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!(12)
4
If I were a dead leaf thou rnightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness—Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous One!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
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?
Notes:
(1)Fallen leaves are driven by the west wind as if they escape a pest.
(2)The wind that will blow in the spring, the begetting or preserving side of the
west wind.
(3)shrill and high trumpet
(4)Rain and lightning come from among heavy dark clouds
(5)a frenetic woman in Greek mythology
(6)West wind in winter sends away the dying year.
(7)currents that flow with difference in light and color
(8)an isle near Naples, Italy, formed by deposits of lava from Vesuuius, a volcano
(9)a favorite resort of ancient Romans, near Naples
(10)The beautiful sights make the eye dizzy.
(11)water power
(12)The two stanzas describe the power of the wind that makes the vegetation at
the bottom of the sea grow gray with fear when it comes. That’s natural
phenomenon in winter.
Understanding:
The poem was written in 1819. In Latin the word wind means breath or spirit, so the west wind is more than the personification of the natural wind and symbol, it’s a prayer for a holy spirit, a power and an energy. It’s written in terza rima (rhymed in aba bcb…) with the rhythm of great speed. The stanzas run on without pause or punctuation, but flowing on in the way the wind does.
As the poem begins, the poet is at the point of despair, and he is calling on the autumn wind to give him its wild energy. He is de-spirited, and he is asking to have the breath of life blown into him. And by invoking / summoning he is trying to identify the spirit with the wind. So here he is asking to be inspirited with this spirit behind the universe.
In each of the first section he is calling forth the spirit and each begins with an address / invocation, “Thou” and ends with “Oh, hear!” and in the middle we have “Oh, thou,” each of the first 3 stanzas follows a similar pattern—Thou…Oh, thou…Oh, hear!” It is almost a magic repetition—sort of the idea of magic incantation behind the poem.
“Destroyer and preserver”: paradox, the magic wind has two roles ridding of old and dying things and begetting new and fresh things.
In the fourth section: he feels hopeless. He is making a prayer. “I would never have striven / As thus with thee in prayer…” “I fall…! I bleed!”: a kind of cringe at that statement. “impetuous one”: there is a thought that the wind needs the poet as its mouthpiece to express it, too. They need each other. “Scatter…hearth”: the wind blows on the dying coal, the fire comes to life again. “My words among mankind!”: May I inspire the world when I am inspirited by the wind.
In his Defence of Poetry Shelley made this statement: “it (the wind) produces not only melody alone but harmony by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.” Man is not just a passive lyre that the spirit plays over, but the imagination / the spirit of man blends with this spirit. They work together. The spirit of man is excited to respond to the very impressions that excite his spirit.
Device: 1.the rhythmical structure—typical example of Shelley’s power to make the movement of verse embody its mood. In this mode the impetuous sweep and tireless overflow of the terza rima, ending after each twelfth line in a couplet, suggest with wonderful truth the streaming and volleying of the wind, interrupted now and then by a sudden lull. 2.myth-making: his poetry is full of personification such as the west wind, the spirit. 3. His poetry seems to reflect a dream world yet, despite the ethereal qualities, his poetry lies solid learning and knowledge of science and philosophy of his time. So it’s both universal and speculative, philosophical and paradoxical, natural and scientific as well as artificial, intrinsic and extrinsic.
To A Sky-Lark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest(1) thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep(2) thou wingest,
And singing still dose soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken Sun—
O’er which clouds are brightning,
Thou dose float and run;
Like and unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even-
Melts around thy flight,
Like a star of Heaven
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen,— but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see — we feel that it is there
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when Night is bare(3)
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams —and Heaven is overflowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought(4)
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour,
With music sweet as love — which overflows her bower:
Like a glowworm golden
In a dell(5) of dew,
Scattering unbeholden(6)
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves -
By warm winds deflowered -
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves(7):
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine:
Chorus Hymeneal(8)
Or triumphal chant
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields or waves or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?
What thy clear keen joyance
Languor(9) cannot be—
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee;
Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety(10).
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
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.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures(11)
Of delightful sound—
Better than all treasures
That in books are found—
Thy skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then—as I am listening now.
Notes:
(1)seocnd person singular after “thou”
(2)blue sky
(3)deep and late
(4)excited to
(5)small valley
(6)unseen
(7)bees
(8)marital (from hymen, Greek god of marriage)
(9)fatigue
(10)Loving too much goes to the opposite.
(11)musical rhythm
Understanding:
Skylark is a small bird that sings only in flight, usually when it is too high to be visible. The bird freed from the bonds of earth and soaring beyond the reach of all the physical senses but her singing is the emblem of a nonmaterial spirit and pure joy, beyond the possibility of empirical knowledge; see lines 15, 31.
Shelley invented his own stanza here. The first 4 lines in trochaic trimeter and the fifth line in iambic hexameter is also an Alexandrine (6 feet). He is gaining gradual speed in this way. The last line catches a bird poising and circling in the sky singing. These first 4 lines are quick and the last one is slower.
Stanza1: show the poet’s aesthetic view that poems come from direct soul without sophisticated hand. the poet made greeting to the blissful bird. That is not ordinary bird that (you) pour out your full heart in singing rich music of natural art. Here the bird is the image of poet, ideal poet in his mind.
Stanza 2: moving image: from earth to sky, singing while flying.
Stanza 3: your race is begun in the evening.
Stanza 4: Evening time falls, your songs are still echoing in the air. “Melt around thy flight”: melts here is an example of ambiguity, is it the bird’s flight melt? the surrounding atmosphere? Or do they melt together? the song and the sky? Ambiguity in poetry makes sense and meaning blurred with much room of possibility for the reader to fill by themselves.
Stanzas 5,6,7: Some beautiful visual sights—moon beam, rainbow, starlight are all compared to the audible strains of the skylark by the means of synesthesia. “Keen as are the arrows / Of that silver sphere”: He is thinking of the moon. The moon has come out now. He is thinking of the moon as Diana, the goddess of the moon and hunting, hence the arrow, i.e. the moon beams.
“Whose intense lamp narrows / In the white dawn clear…”: As dawn approaches, the moon becomes less visible, but we still feel that it is there.
Stanza 8: emphasize again; “good poetry comes from direct soul.”
Stanzas 9,10,11: the bird is like a poet hidden, like a high-born maiden, a glowworm, and a rose embowered——all hidden sometimes, his poems are wildly spread, fascinating.
Stanza 12: To compare further some other features of the skylark’s
strain: joyous, clean and fresh——justify further the skylark’s clean and pure song.
Stanzas 13,14: Search for cause of beauty, to Shelley art of beauty
comes from sincere thought and holy ideal. All the conventional idea of marriage, war and violence are root of evil.
Stanza 15: object, fountain, refers to the sources: “What is your life
fountain that produces your refined art?”
Stanza 16: Shelley was always seeking the ideal / perfect love,
which ironically had caused him som trouble. Reality is imperfect
and finite in love, the actual love is not living up to one’s ideal of love. So there is dualism on the earth.
Stanza 17: The bird cannot be thrown into despair by the idea of
death. To Shelley moral souls are immortal. Mortals are afraid of death. Only moral beings are transparent penetrating everything. Skylark is the ideal poet to Shelley.
Stanza 18: A kind of truth for human beings. Contrast with the bird.
Stanza 19: If we are not human, we cannot appreciate your quality.
Here is the play of aesthetic distance.
Stanza 20: full of metaphors. “Scorner of the ground”: meaning
poets to get rid of dirty thought and feelings.
Stanza 21:The world should listen to me then if I had your inspiring skill. “Harmonious madness”: paradox. “The world should listen then”: He feels that the world is not listening to him, but he longs to achieve his poetic ideal and to move the world. Shelley took the poet as a legislator, someone who could reform the world through poetry. He believed that it is through the power of the creative imagination and through the enhanced perception of beauty that the world and society will be reformed. It is here in the point Shelley is above his contemporary in taking the poet as a person with a mission, an actual legal leader in society.
Skylark here is the idealized poet in Shelley’s mind and heart. It’s a keynote to understand Shelley and the poem here.
The rhyme scheme of the poem ababb, i.e. the first 4 short lines and the last longer lines imitates the rhythmical utterance of the skylark.
12.John Keats (1795—1821):
John Keats, the most talented poet of Romanticism, was born in London, the son of a livery-stable keeper. At 15 he was apprenticed to learn surgery, but he abandoned surgery and gave up the profession for poetry. He underwent a tormenting and hurtful love affair, and finally died as a result of tuberculosis, an illness that had already killed his mother and brother. Anyway he has emerged as one of the Romantic poets about whose greatness there is little doubt. Some of his poems: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1817), three great odes: “On a Grecian Urn”, “To a Nightingale”, “To Autumn”, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “Eve of St. Mark” and others.
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspring with him(1) how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bee,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor
Thy hair sort-lifting by the winnowing(2) wind;
Or on a half –reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook(3)
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden lead across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hour
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows(4), borne aloft to
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs bleat from hilly bourn(5);
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with trebles soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft(6);
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies
Notes:
(1)the sun
(2)to fan the chaff from the grain
(3)sickle
(4)willow
(5)land
(6)place
Understanding:
It is in iambic pentamenter rhymed in ababcdecdde. First stanza: Autumn is personified as woman first—a fruitful female who conspires with the male sun, producing abundant offspring. Images here are maturing and ripeness and verbs reiterate the idea of impending fruition—“load” “bend” “fill” “swell” “plump” “set budding” “o’er-brimm’d”. Autumn here is tactile. The second stanza: Autumn harvest is personified as a peasant who is seen everywhere in the country scenery. That the process of change is natural and effortless which is conveyed by the image of repose in this stanza, where Autumn is personified as one whose power and confidence admit the seeming carelessness of his stewardship: as the various hands on the estate reclining on a “half-reaped furrow”; carrying grain or watching the cider press. Autumn here is visual. The third stanza: The sense of naturalness continues here with the images of birds, animals and insects oblivious of the “songs of spring” and the song of mortality. Here autumn is no longer pictured as acting, it is occupied in being, as a general and pervading spirit. The music of autumn—the mourning, funeral choir of the small gnats, the bleating of the “full-grown lambs”, the chorus of hedge crickets and birds—signify both death and serene culminating fulfillment of the year. Autumn is here auditory.
Keats’ vision of autumn is akin to the song of nightingale in that it is one of natural process captured by art at the heightened point of near completion. The fact of impermanence is nowhere overtly mentioned, yet it is omnipresent through the ode’s emphasis on process and change.
Ode to a Nightingale
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock(1) I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiates to the drains(2)
One minute past, and Lethe-wards(3) had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad(4) of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
2
O, for a draught of vintage(5)! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved(6) earth,
Tasting of Flora(7) and the country green,
Dance, and Proven?al(8) song and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South ,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene(9) ,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth,
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies(10);
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow(11).
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards(12),
But on the viewless wings of Poesy
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply, the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays(13);
But here is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense(14) hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith(15) the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covr’d up in leaves;
And mid-Mays eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6
Darkling(16) I listen: and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused(17) rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod(18).
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown(19):
Perhaps the self-same(20) song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth(21) when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands(22) forlorn(23).
8
Forlorn’ the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy(24) cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf .
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem(25) fades
Past the near meadow, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now’ tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades(26):
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep
Notes:
(1)a poisonous herb
(2)drank up to the bottom some sleep-inducing opium drug
(3)the river of forgetfulness according to Greek Mythology
(4)a nymph inhabiting a tree, here referring to the nightingale
(5)a drink of wine
(6)deeply dug
(7)the goddess of flowers in Roman mythology, here referring to flowers
(8)The part of south-eastern France is famous for chivalry and poetry in the Middle
Ages.
(9)the fountain of the Muses, its water was believed to impart poetical inspiration
(10)Keats’ brother, Tom wasted by tuberculosis, had died the previous winter.
(11)New love fades away in a short time.
(12)the god of wine and his team of leopards
(13)fairies
(14)fragrant blossoms
(15)with which
(16)in the dark
(17)well thought poems
(18)I couldn’t hear your hymn sung for the soul if I die.
(19)by all people high and low
(20)exactly the same
(21)According to “The Book of Ruth” in the Old Testament, Ruth’s husband died
in a famine, she then went to live with her mother-in-law in a foreign country.
But she is sad at heart when she gleaned the ears of corn in a strange land.
(22)airy lands
(23)sorrowful
(24)i.e., “the viewless wings of Poesy”
(25)song
(26)valley place
Understanding:
Charles Brown, with whom Keats was then living in Hampstead, wrote: “In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.”
It’s a poem with 8 stanzas, each consisting of ten lines of iambic verse and a rhyme scheme of ababcdecde. All are pentameter, with the exception of the eighth line which has only 3 feet. The poem is perhaps one of the best examples of empathy—his actually joining the nightingale. He projects his mind towards an object / a thing until he becomes one with it. Here he projects himself towards the nightingale. And yet at the same time he does retain his own individuality. Here he is thinking, trying to reconcile joy with melancholy, pleasure with pain, and the aesthetic feelings are intense. “light-winged Dryad of the tree”: the bird is a contrast to him, there is a sense of heaviness in the poet when he describes his own lot.
Stanza 1: the word “happy” is repeated three times in the stanza.
Keats gains intensity through his repetition. The bird had its full spontaneous, joyous song, no striving. The poet, in a sense, is striving. The meter is light and soaring as he describes the bird. But when he describes himself, the first quatrain is rather heavy: dull, numbness, drowsy, hemlock, drunk, drains… with so many “u” [Λ]vowels and “d” and “k” sounds. “had sunk” [Λ, k] in downwards and there is a finality about them.
Stanza 2: Instead of the dull opiate that he refers to in Stanza 1, he would take “a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene”(contrast). “O, for a …”, irregular, perhaps that irregular foot suggests his own striving as he is seeking to gain spontaneity, perhaps his effort to identify with the bird. “With beaded bubbles…/ And purple-stained mouth”: sight imagery. “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen…” His gradual identification with the bird. (He has been working up to the identification). “And with thee fade away into the forest dim”: this does represent escape. In other words, to unite with that bird represents escape from the pain / suffering and reality of the earth.
Stanza 3: The contrast between the bird’s ideal world and his world of reality. Emphasize “here” even caesura (pause) after it. So the bird’s song is joyous; the poet’s song is melancholy. He goes on to develop the immortality of the bird’s song.
Stanza 4: “Away! Away!” shows the poet’s determination to fly away with the bird. “But on the viewless wings of Poesy”: I’ll fly with the inspiration of poets, not with power of wine.
Stanza 5: “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”: here so many “m” and “n” sounds suggest the poet’s drunk and dizzy state of mind among flowers in summer night.
Stanza 7: The bird’s song attracted the strange castle, and made the lady open the window and look out in the land of solitude.
Stanza 8: “plaintive anthem”: back to the reality, so plaintive, sad.
The poem shows how an awareness of suffering and an awareness of beauty are inextricably linked, so that one cannot be shed without the other. The price for our realization of beauty is that it must pass, and perhaps this knowledge adds to its piquancy. To perpetuate a feeling is to remove from it the finer edge of its power; only in its transitory nature can it be fully experienced. True beauty is beautiful because it is transient and lacks permanence. The result is a pure and unalloyed vision of beauty, realized in Keats’ most sensuous and richly descriptive language.
“Where palsy shakes a few, sad last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies,” the lines show the poet unable to exclude the real world, where “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”
All around the poet is a miserable world, but the nightingale’s song stand for a new and different world, a beautiful realm which had been heard through all the history of the world and therefore had a touch of eternity in it. The poet wishes to immerse himself totally in the song and the vision of beauty it suggests, and just as he seems about to achieve this total empathy he and the reader are hauled back into the real world by the word “forlorn”, which is “like a bell / to toll me back from thee to my sole self!” The poet is imprisoned by his humanity. He is able to perceive the beauty of the bird’s song by virtue of his life, but that same life brings about misery and pain. The mind that appreciates the beauty cannot fail to be as much as sensitive to the “fever” and the “fret”. Death is no solution. It stops the pain, but also the beauty, and puts the poet in a situation where he has become (“To Thy high requiem…) a sod.” The fact that the nightingale will be unaware even of the poet’s death is a very effective device for bringing out forcibly the unbridgeable distance between the two worlds. The poet’s mortality dooms him to a world, “where but to think is to be full of sorrow / And leaden-eyed despair!” but does allow him to partake partially of eternal beauty. He is like the meanest stage hand in a great theatre; he can comprehend and yearn after the power and beauty he sees on the stage, but knows he had neither the power nor the ability to take part himself. To rid himself of the pain he must also rid himself of the joy.
The three Romantic poets, Byron died at 36, Shelley at 30, Keats at 26. Keats is the best of them in talent. All his short life he suffered from tuberculosis, his brother too. In that time TB was fatal. So the actual life cast a long dark shadow upon his sensitive heart. Poetry was his natural element and the only pursuit of life. And he had his own understanding of art and life. Of his views there are some important to understand him such as: “Beauty is true, true beauty”: To Keats life is changeable, and the beauty of life is temporary. True beauty can only exist in imagination, which is more important in poem writing. To him imagination is bright venus for poem writing. So his “true” means “beautiful things in imagination are true things.” They had nothing to do with reality. To Keats his imagination wings get flying in description, which make some things beautiful and then he added philosophy into it. That whole represents the characteristics of Keats poems. Keats senses and pursues beauty, the true beauty (metrical form and images) for which he is called aestheticist. On the other hand there is another famous terms by him “Negative capability”, that is completely opposite to Byron and Shelley and their expression of rebellious spirit. Unlike them Keats experienced pains, debts, illness, loneliness and loss of love, so he defined negative capability as the ability to remain content with half knowledge and rest, the ability not to be disturbed, but to take the object as it is given to him. This contentment makes him able to think, and in the same time renders him capable of accepting the fact and resting, rather than always irritably resisting / fighting back, etc.
13.Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—1892):
Alfred Tennyson, the most important poet of the Victorian age. When he was at Cambridge, he published his first signed work Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). In 1831 and 1841 he published two volumes of Poems, he met harsh criticism for the first one, and he was finally recognized with the second one, among which there are the dramatic monologue “Ulysses”, the epic narrative “Morte d’Arthur”, the exquisite idylls “Dora”, etc. In 1850 he was appointed the Poet Laureate and he saw the publication of his greatest work In Memoriam. Tennyson’s poetic career is also marked by Idylls of The King (1842—1885), which took him over 30 years to complete. It is made up of 12 books of narrative poems.
Break, Break, Break
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would(1)that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad(2),
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand(3),
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day(4)that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Notes:
(1)wish
(2)young sailor
(3)refers to the hand of the poet’s dead friend Arthur Hallam
(4)the memory of the past
Understanding:
The poem war written in memory of the poet’s dear friend Arthur Hallam whose death (1834) was keenly felt by Tennyson throughout his life. The short poem contains four quatrains with combined iambic and anapaestic feet.
“Break, break, break,” both refers to the breaker hit upon the rock and my heart breaks as well. The second stanza and the third stanza talks about life and death compared or 3 stages of life: childhood to youth and adulthood (stately ship).
In the poem we have more anapaestic than iambic feet, so we see slower movement mixed up with the fast ones. We have so many round vowel sounds [ou] [u:] [au ] in the beginning of the lines, but at the end of the line we turn to have more [ i:] or sound or sounds of closing mouth, which suggest the mouth shape of crying and weeping.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands(1);
Close to the sun(2) in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world(3), he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls(4);
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt(5) he falls.
Notes:
(1)claws
(2)head up towards the sun
(3)against the blue sky
(4)waves move under him
(5)rapidly and violently
Understanding:
The poem was written in 1851, the second year after Tennyson was awarded with Laureate Poet since Wordsworth. Therefore we can see he was at the culmination of his poetic career, so was the glory of Britain in the world in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tennyson here presents a picture of proud and ambitious images both of himself and Britain as well. On the other hand he used many [ou], [ ], [ao] sounds without long [i:], the formers few vowels are loud and sonorous to show deliberately the ambitious and proud image of the eagle.
14.Edgar Allen Poe (1809—1849):
Born in Boston. Both of his parents died within two years of his birth. He was then adopted by a merchant, the Allans, whom he later broke up. He was an editor to various magazines.In his country Poe lived unacknowledged and misunderstood as a poet in his lifetime and remained the most controversial in the history of American history after death. All his life he lived in dire poverty and frustration in writing and so remained drunk to keep out the scene of the actual world which he hated. Ironically Poe was hailed as a pioneer in the poetic and fictional technique of symbolism in Europe, chiefly France but he still remained living in obscurity in the States. His odd talent is found in his poems and short stories. Among them The Raven (1845), a poem and the Fall of the House of Usher, a story.
To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those nicéan barks (1)of yore(2),
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth(3) hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad(4) airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome
Lo(5)! In yon brilliant window-niche(6)
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, psyche, from the regions which
Are holy-Land!
Notes:
(1)Nicean (in Mediterranean area) boats are known for their musicality.
(2)ancient time
(3)name for a flower,风信子, here refers to purple color
(4)nymphlike,fairylike
(5)Look!
(6)shelf recess in the wall for holding statue or ornament
Understanding:
“To Helen”, one of the most famous of poe’s lyric, was written, as poe recalls, “ in my passionate boyhood of 16 years old, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul.” It was inspired by the beauty of the mother of a schoolmate of Poe. The poem is well noticed for a number of things, for example, its rhyme scheme, its varied line lengths, its metaphor of a travel on the sea and its oft-quoted lines: “To the glory that was greece / and the grandeur that was Rome”.
First stanza: Helen’s beauty renders a peaceful and sweet and cozy note.
Second stanza: your beauty suggests a classical flavor.
Third stanza: your beauty is the ideal and holy dream of my love.
Idea: Ode to an ideal and beautiful love in a boy’s heart and eyes.
“Weary, way-worn wanderer”: five [w] sounds imply exhausted and dull journey at the sea of life. Thus forms a tension with the goal and wine of life—love.
15.Walt Whitman (1819—1892):
Walt Whitman was a great democratic singer of the nineteenth century America as well as a radical innovator of English poetry, the pioneer of free verse. He came from a poor family. He left school at the age of eleven. He was an office-boy, typesetter, occasional author. Later he became an itinerant country school teacher and learned printing business and in 1841 he definitely cast his lot with journalism in New York. He published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. He continued to add new poems to the collection and to rearrange and revise them until 1892 the ninth edition came out before his death.
O Captain! My Captain!
O captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip(1) is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack(2), the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel(3), the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! Heart! Heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! My Captain! Rise up(4) and hear the bells;
Rise up –for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! Dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain, does not answer, his lips are pale and still.
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread(5),
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Notes:
(1)American Civil War (1861—1865)
(2)has gone through every difficulty
(3)Eyes follow the return of the safe ship
(4)He wished Lincoln could come to life
(5)footstep
Understanding:
The poem is one of the best found in Leaves of Grass, President Lincoln led the North Union against South slavery in the Civil War and proclaimed emancipation of slaves. Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents American people loved but he was assassinated in the time when the factory of Civil War was celebrated throughout the country. The poem was written in the fonder memory of the president
Symbol is employed here. Captain is magnificently referred to President Lincoln who led the warship through the torrents of difficulties and battles, but when the hard journey was done and the ship was acclaimed in by swaying masses and eager faces with bouquets, bugles and bells but the captain were down, never to rise up. Overjoyed and triumphant atmosphere is cast into sharp contrast with the tragedy of the American people. The tension is found here. The balance between the two moods can only be offset when the tragedy is fully comprehended and turned to hate against the violator of democracy.
With the last three lines of each stanza indented the poem mimics the shape of ship. A solemn and stirring rhythm is strongly felt throughout the poem. “Fallen cold and dead” is repeated three times at the end of each stanza to form a refrain swirling in the air and in the heart of the reader. The poet used in many places long vowels and diphthongs but few [i:]to give a sonorous effect in accord with Lincoln, the paternal image to his people and with the masculine bosom of the poet, unlike Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” where long i: is used a lot to suggest sort of miserable and feminine weeping of the poet at the loss of close friend.
Song of Myself
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume(1) you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe(2) and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of(3) summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same.
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death(4).
Creeds and schools in abeyance(5),
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy(6).
Notes:
(1)admit
(2)wander
(3)a blade of
(4)hoping not to cease till death.
(5)put aside dogmas and isms.
(6)I permit Nature to speak boldly, without obstructing it.
Understanding:
The interpretation of the poem is usually based on knowledge of the poet’s innovation of poetry and his democratic idea of everything.
Whitman’s ideas and attitudes were chiefly those of the Romantic Movement. He was akin to such predecessors as Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley and Emerson. To Emerson, in fact, he was deeply indebted, saying, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” The above writers and thinkers’ influence on him was chiefly lying in his response to nature, his mystical desire for immediacy of experience, his cultivation of senses, feelings, and imagination, his subjective individualism, his celebration of common man.
His ideas found in Leaves of Grass: (1)Individual in his poem, i.e. “I” or “self” means everybody, grass, individual soul, Emerson’s self. In his poems common people are well received and acclaimed, being “cruel, beastly, hoggish qualities” but also admirable and spiritual.(2)Everything, noble or ignoble has a place in his poem. He was so magnanimous and all embracing. He extended his sympathy to particularly the lowest of society: the felon, the slave, the prostitute, the diseased, as well as the healthy and the beautiful. (3)He took pride in being a poet of the body and of the soul. Against the Victorian reticence concerning physical relations, he urged recognition of sensuality without shame, all in the name of glory of the individual and senses. It was this attitude which caused many of his contemporaries to condemn him. Though he wanted his poetry to be for the common people, but ironically it was ignored by the general public.
His innovation in poetry: he rejected the time-hallowed marks of the English verse: rhymes, regular meters, stanza patterns, elaborate similes, frequent allusions to the Bible, the Classics, the Middle Ages, etc. Instead, he aimed at a freer verse form based on the organic principle, a form not imposed upon but growing out of content: free verse—poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. Whitman’s poetry is virtually non-poetic, anti-poetic. He broke off from the traditional rhyme and rhythm completely, his short lines mix up with long lines, a natural tone, mood, natural and organic structures move on themselves to the climax. In short there are natural images, natural flow, natural rhythms and democratic atmosphere pervading his poems. He pursued naturalness in form and democracy in idea, democratic in the idea of tradition, America, people, politics, salve emancipation, morality, language and everything. In addition he liked to use inversions and repetition for emphasis.
Fifty years before the birth of Whitman America was freed of European states, to be an independent country, yet it was freed physically, not spiritually. Therefore Whitman meant to make a new America in its place. To Whitman democracy was hidden in each individual democratic being, he himself was such a being. So his task was to explore the individual being, only on which you can discover American soul. Under his pen a new American is to found in every new individual being.
The reputation of Whitman grew after his death and it reached a high point during the 1920s. For example Lewis Munford in The Golden Days (1926) said: “he is more than a single writer; he is almost a literature.” At his best he wrote “poetry of the first rank;” his poems “belong to sacred literature”. He especially influenced on the twentieth century poets, such as Carl Sandburg. The influence of Whitman arose from his poetic technique more than from his vision of life.
16.Emily Dickinson (1830—1886):
Emily Dickinson: One of the rare greatest and profound poets in the world. She was claimed as the founder of Imagism after death. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful yet conservative man who stopped her from schooling when she was freshman at Holyoke Seminary. Nevertheless Dickinson continued self-study at home. Her mother was invalid and bed-ridden and took no concern of her intellectual growth. So Dickinson was rebellious against tradition from girlhood and cultivated a strong personality against any custom and constraints. Dickinson never married and lived in total isolation from society and was a complete professional failure in her lifetime. She wrote and left behind her a total 1775 poems, which she dedicated all her life to, but which suffered the same silent fate as herself, only seven of 1775 were published, all anonymously and “tinkered with”（modified）.Five years after her death the first book of her poems went through six editions within six months. Until now Dickinson’s poems have been translated into 19 languages and Dickinson has been widely studied over the 50 years since the Johnson version appeared in 1955. Dickinson was crowned as “the greatest woman poet since Sappho”.
A Word Is Dead
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Understanding:
Dickinson was anti-traditional in idea. Common sense goes that a word is stale when used twice. The first user is a creator, the second an imitator, the third a dull scribbler. Dickinson just takes here the other way round.
I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
I taste a liquor never brewed—
From Tankards scooped in Pearl(1)—
Not all the Frankfort berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate(2) of air—am I –
And Debauchee(3) of Dew—
Reeling –thro(4) endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue(5)—
When “Landlords”(6) turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxgloves’s(7) door—
When Butterflies –- renounce their ‘drams”(8)
I shall but drink the more!
Till Serphs(9) swing their snowy Hats—
And Saints—to windows run—
To see the little Tippler(10)
Leaning against the—Sun—
Notes:
(1)from the cup carved in pearl
(2)drunk
(3)suck
(4)staggering because of drunk
(5)here refers to Great Nature with blue sky
(6)time or season
(7)毛地黄，一种花名
(8)give up sipping
(9)angel
(10)drunkard
Understanding:
Dickinson was chiefly a subjective poet relying on her imagination and inspiration drawn from the nature. That is what Emerson proclaimed in his transcendental philosophy: go to the nature to perceive fresh nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God and in doing so one can transcend the empirical world. Nature is spiritual and implicative and an endless source and inspiration for poets. Dickinson thus immersed herself in nature and became “Inebriate of air—am I – / And Debauchee of Dew—” and got drunk in the inn of nature, staggering through the numerous summer days. Further she imagined herself as one of the natural beings like bees and butterflies who leave when season is off but she could not part herself away with the alcohol until she got too drunk to move, which drew angels and saints out to have a look at her a drunkard in the sunshine!
The unique feature of the poem is found in the poet’s fancy and daring imagination. The relation of poets to nature is commonsense and iterated by poets over and over again but few poets can write such a rarely unique poem as Dickinson. First of all, the concrete images used to replace the abstract words; secondly, analogy is drawn between the poet and the drunk, both are dependent on alcohol, but different alcohols, one spiritual and the other physical. “I taste a liquor never brewed—” the liquor I “taste” forms a tension not merely with the actual liquor, but also with I, the taster. The former tension plays an inebriating effect upon the Great Nature, and the latter one brings “I” into the poetic realm, poetic sip from the poetic alcohol, hence from which an ethereal spirit pervades throughout the poem and in the air, in our illusion and then intoxicates us by degrees to be wholly dissolved by a poetical power. When the other dependent creatures “give up” and “renounce’ their sip, “I shall but drink the more” though fully drunk.
Dickinson was an outstanding poet shown chiefly in her unusual sensitive and anti-conventional way of observing the world. In mechanical form Dickinson has her odd way of capitalization and special dash—deviation of capitalization and dash can only tells her way of emphasis and possible extension of idea. These two idiosyncrasies plus her images bearing later modernist features credited herself with the title of the forerunner of Modernist poet or founder of Imagist poetry.
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
The Space—began to toll,
As all the heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—
And then a plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And finished knowing—then—
Understanding:
Here Dickinson has nearly all the Modernist features found in the poem: unusual and rare images, deviation of capitalization and dash as well as odd imagination, intermittent flow of idea and too radical way of presenting paradox.
First stanza: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro”: funeral, literally unpleasant word and meaning, and because of the funeral, “mourners to and fro”, it means that the real world is so repressing as to rid of my imaginative power. “Sense” refers to the imaginative sense, that’s regular sense to her.
The second stanza: That confusion and repression go on further and push my sense to the verge of collapse and so “My Mind was going numb—” I stopped thinking
The third stanza: The repression goes on and makes me mad and I am going to die.
The fourth stanza: “Heavens” means the social world, “Being” human beings, so the whole world is repressing and makes man suffered and twisted in nature. “And I, Silence, some strange Race /
Wrecked, solitary, here—” means I can only keep in silence. (She took silence or solitude as her lifelong company), destroyed and solitary.
The fifth stanza: “And then a plank in Reason, broke,” I am overcome by the real world and fall out of balance. When I confront with the world (“hit a World”) as fate would have it (“at every plunge”), my way of reasoning (imagination) is “finished” or dying.
Literary device: paradox used: the real world is quite a blow to her imaginative world. She cannot live without the latter but she can live without the former. The real world forms a tension with her imaginative world.
17.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807—1882):
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine. He taught at Harvard European literatures. His book The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) brought home to the ordinary reader the rich variety of European literatures. His own poetry was widely read. He was the first American poet memorialized by a bust in Westminster Abbey.
The Arrow and the Song
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its fight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterwards, in an oak,
I found the arrow, still unbroke:
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
Understanding:
You harvest whatever you sow. Device: strong musical rhythm for the use of assonance and consonance and the internal rhymes.