BS English

ROMANTIC POETRY
Course Code: 9063
Study Guide

Department of English
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY
 ROMANTIC POETRY
(BS ENGLISH)

Course Code: 9063 Units: 1–9

Department of English
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Allama Iqbal Open University
Islamabad
 (All Rights Reserved with the Publisher)

First Edition ...................................... 2023

Quantity ............................................ 1000

Price .................................................. Rs.

Typeset by ......................................... M. Hameed Zahid

Printing Incharge ............................... Dr. Sarmad Iqbal

Printer ............................................... AIOU-Printing Press, Sector H-8, Islamabad

Publisher ........................................... Allama Iqbal Open University, H-8, Islamabad

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 COURSE TEAM

Chairman of the Course Team: Dr. Malik Ajmal Gulzar

Course Development Coordinator: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Writer: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewers: 1. Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

2. Sajid Iqbal

Editor: Fazal Karim

Formatted / Layout by: M. Hameed Zahid

iii
 CONTENTS

Page #

Foreword ................................................................................................................... v

Introduction of the Course ...................................................................................... vi

Objectives of the Course .......................................................................................... vii

Unit 1: Introduction to Romantic Age ........................................................... 1

Unit–2: Salient Features of Romanticism ....................................................... 9

Unit–3: Introduction to Romantic Poets ......................................................... 25

Unit–4: William Blake .................................................................................... 35

Unit–5: William Wordsworth ......................................................................... 45

Unit–6: Samuel Taylor Coleridge ................................................................... 71

Unit–7: Percy Bysshe Shelley ......................................................................... 89

Unit–8: John Keats .......................................................................................... 121

Unit–9: Lord Byron ......................................................................................... 155

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 FOREWORD

The BS English programme is being offered by the Department of English of

Allama Iqbal Open University for the students who are interested in the fields of
linguistics and literature. This programme is exclusive in the sense that it will
provide study guides for all the courses written, especially for the students of AIOU
to introduce the concepts in an effective and simple manner. Furthermore, it will be
effective from the viewpoint of students and researchers in implementing their
knowledge in the classroom setting and/or research setting. The BS English study
guides aim to include all possible queries that students may have and gently
stimulate their intellect to probe into further questions. The courses intend at
professional development of the students in various disciplines of linguistics and
literature using versatile methods adopted by course writers, while writing the units.
The topics and ideas presented in each unit are clear and relevant. Owing to the
same reason, the text is comprehensive and accessible to students having no prior
knowledge of linguistics and literature. The BS English study guides are a powerful
tool even for BS English tutors teaching in various regions, focusing upon a
uniform scheme of studies for all the courses. Also, these courses will help tutors
by providing adequate teaching material for independent teaching. All study guides
strictly follow the standardized nine-unit sub-division of the course content for
optimum understanding. The short introduction at the beginning provides an
overview of the units followed by achievable learning objectives. The study guides
also define difficult terms in the text and guide the students for accessible learning.
The units are finally summed up in summary points and the assessment questions
not only guide students, but also help to revise the content developed upon
previously formed concepts. Moreover, they provide links and a list of the
suggested readings for further inquiry. In the end, I am happy to extend my gratitude
to the course team chairman, course development coordinator, unit-writer, reviewer
and editor for the development of the course. Any suggestions for the improvement
in the programme/courses will be fondly welcomed by the Department of English.

Prof. Dr. Nasir Mahmood

Vice-Chancellor

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 INTRODUCTION OF THE COURSE

Romantic poetry is a literary movement that emerged in the late 18th century and
lasted till the mid-19th century. The Romantic poets rejected the norms and
conventions of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment and instead, they celebrated
individualism, imagination, emotion and nature. They believed in the power of
poetry to express the innermost feelings of the poet and to connect the individual
to the universe. This course is an exploration of the major poets of the Romantic
Era, including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron.

The course is divided into nine units that cover a range of topics related to Romantic
poetry. The first unit is an introduction to the Romantic Age and it provides an
overview of the literary movement, different writers of Romantic literature and
poetry in Romantic literature. The second unit examines the salient features of
Romanticism, including the concept of the poet and the poem, spontaneity and the
impulses of feeling, romantic “nature poetry”, the glorification of the ordinary, the
supernatural, the romance and psychological extremes, individualism and
alienation.

The third unit focuses on an introduction to Romantic poets, including the early
Romantic poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, other poets of the early
Romantic period and the later Romantics like Shelley, Keats and Byron and some
other poets of the later period. The following units delve into the works of each of
these poets in detail. Unit four examines the works of William Blake, including
poems like The Sick Rose, London and A Poison Tree. Unit five covers William
Wordsworth's major works, including The Solitary Reaper, Tintern Abbey and
London.

Unit six focuses on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his works, including The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Youth and Age. Unit seven covers Percy
Bysshe Shelley and his writing style, themes generally employed in his poems and
his treatment of nature in works such as To the Sky Lark, Ode to the West Wind
and Ozymandias. Unit eight examines John Keats, his works, themes in his major
poems and poetic theory, and analyzes poems like Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a
Nightingale and Ode on Melancholy.

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Finally, the last unit focuses on Lord Byron and analyzes his works, including She
Walks in Beauty, major themes in She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Part, and
critical appreciation of When We Two Part. Each unit includes a summary and
assessment questions to test the understanding and knowledge of the students.
Overall, this course is an exploration of the major poets and themes of the Romantic
Era, providing insights into their lives, works and their contribution to English
literature.

OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE

 After going through this course, you will be able to:

 Understand the historical and cultural context of the Romantic Age and its
influence on literature.

 Identify the salient features of Romanticism as a literary movement.

 Analyze the ways in which Romantic poets challenged traditional literary

conventions and experimented with new forms and themes.

 Examine the key themes in Romantic poetry, such as nature, individualism,

and the imagination.

 Evaluate the ways in which Romantic poets addressed social and political
issues in their work.

 Understand the different styles and techniques used by Romantic poets, and
the ways in which they contributed to the development of poetry as a form of
art.

 Analyze the works of major Romantic poets, including William Blake,

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John
Keats, and Lord Byron.

 Identify the unique characteristics and contributions of each of these poets to

the Romantic tradition.

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 Develop skills in close reading and literary analysis, and apply these skills to
the study of Romantic poetry.

 Enhance critical thinking skills and engage in discussions and debates about
the literary and cultural significance of Romantic poetry.

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Unit–1

INTRODUCTION
TO ROMANTIC AGE

Written by Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

1
 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 3

1.1 Introduction to Romantic Age ................................................................. 4

1.2 Different Writers of Romantic Literature ................................................ 5

1.3 Poetry in Romantic Literature .................................................................. 6

1.4 Summary .................................................................................................. 7

1.5 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 8

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 INTRODUCTION

This unit aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the

historical context, characteristics, and themes of Romanticism. By exploring the
works of prominent writers, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, students will gain insight into the changing conventions of the age.
Students will analyze the major themes of Romantic poetry, including the
importance of nature, imagination, individualism, and emotion. They will also
examine the stylistic features of Romantic poetry, such as the use of symbolism,
imagery, and the sublime.
Comparing and contrasting Romantic poetry with other literary movements that
preceded it, such as the Enlightenment and the Neoclassical era, will help students gain
a deeper understanding of the significance of Romanticism in literature and culture.
Through close reading and analysis of selected texts, students will be encouraged
to engage in critical thinking and interpretation of Romantic poetry. Ultimately, this
unit seeks to foster an appreciation for the enduring influence of Romantic poetry
on literature and culture.

OBJECTIVES

To provide you with an understanding of the historical context of the romantic era.
 to enlighten the students with the characteristics of the age.
 to introduce students to some of the writers of romanticism and their thoughts
on the changing conventions.
 to analyze the major themes of romantic poetry, including nature,
imagination, individualism, and emotion.
 to examine the stylistic features of romantic poetry, such as symbolism,
imagery, and the use of the sublime.
 to compare and contrast romantic poetry with other literary movements that
preceded it, such as the enlightenment and the neoclassical era.
 to encourage critical thinking and interpretation of romantic poetry through
close reading and analysis of selected texts.
 to foster an appreciation for the enduring influence of romantic poetry on
literature and culture.

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1.1 Introduction to Romantic Age
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, musical,
and philosophical movement that began in Europe at the end of the 18th century
and culminated between 1800 and 1850. Romanticism was defined by its stress on
emotions, individualism, idealization of nature, distrust of science and
industrialization, and exaltation of the past. This movement favored the medieval
over the classical traditions. It was partly a reaction to modernity and the rapidly
growing urbanization, caused by the Industrial Revolution. It also challenged the
conventions of the Age of Enlightenment.

It was most strongly represented in the visual arts, music, and literature, but it also
influenced historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Romantic intellectuals influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and
nationalism, and had a significant and complex impact on politics.

The movement stressed extreme emotion as an actual source of aesthetic

experience, placing a new emphasis on feelings like fear, horror, and terror, as well
as wonder — particularly when addressing romantic notions of sublime and natural
beauty. It elevated folk art and historical customs to a noble status and also made
‘spontaneity’ a desirable trait (as in the musical impromptu). In opposition to the
Enlightenment's Rationalism and Classicism, Romanticism reintroduced
medievalism with its authentic medieval elements of art and narrative. This was
done as an attempt to escape population increase, early urban development, and
industrialism.

This movement was originally based on the German Sturm und Drang movement.
The German movement stressed upon extreme emotions, exalted nature and high
individualism. It was also against the ideals of Rationalism, of the Enlightenment
era. Although Romanticism was centered around the German moment, it was also
motivated by many other factors. The primary factor being that many Romantics
were influenced by the French Revolution. Since many early romantics were
cultural revolutionaries and sympathizers, romanticism placed great importance on
the achievements of “heroic” individualists and artists, claiming that their example
would improve society.

Romanticism also emphasized that human imagination allowed artists to break free
from traditional concepts of form. In the portrayal of the movement’s ideas, there
was a significant reliance on the historical and the natural elements.

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Realism was proposed as the polar opposite of Romanticism in the second part of
the nineteenth century. During this time, the decline of Romanticism was linked to
several factors, including social and political changes.

1.2 Different Writers of Romantic Literature

Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his brother Thomas
Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, were among the forerunners of
Romanticism in English poetry in the mid-eighteenth century. A poet's key
qualities, according to Joseph, are invention and imagination. With the international
success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, Work of Scottish poet
James Macpherson had significant impact on the early development of
Romanticism, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Thomas
Chatterton is often regarded as England's earliest Romantic poet. Both Chatterton
and Macpherson's work contained aspects of deception, as what they purported to
be previously discovered or gathered literature was, in fact, entirely their work.

With a relish in terror and threat and exotic attractive locales, the Gothic fiction,
which began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important
predecessor of one strain of Romanticism, mirrored in Walpole's case by his role in
the early resurgence of Gothic architecture. Laurence Sterne (1759–67) presented
a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental fiction to the English literary
public with Tristram Shandy.

Isabella di Morra, a 16th-century poet, is regarded by some scholars as a

predecessor of Romantic literature. In contrast to the Patriarchist tendency of the
time, which was centered on the philosophy of love, her songs were about
loneliness and solitude, which depicted the horrible circumstances of her existence,
and are regarded as “an extraordinary prefigurement of Romanticism”.

The evocation or criticism of the past, the worship of “sensibility” with its emphasis
on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator, and love for nature
were all common themes in Romanticism's literature. Several romantic writers,
including Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their works on the
supernatural/occult and human psychology. Satire was often dismissed by
Romanticism as undeserving of serious consideration, a bias that persists today.

“Romantics” is a representative term for describing those writers who became

famous in the late nineties and early twentieth century. There was no self-styled
“Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not refer
to themselves as Romantics. A strong difference between the “organic,” “plastic”

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qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism was not
established until August Wilhelm von Schlegel's Vienna lectures of September
1808.

Nonetheless, many of the era's leading writers believed that something new was
unfolding in the world's affairs. “A new heaven has begun,” wrote William Blake
in 1793, was followed by Percy Bysshe Shelley's “The world's grand age begins
afresh” a generation later. John Keats said about Leigh Hunt and William
Wordsworth, “These, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses.”
New ideas arose; in particular, the long-cherished English concept of liberty was
being expanded to all aspects of human endeavor. As that concept spread over
Europe, it was easy to imagine that the period of dictators was drawing to a close.
The new role of individual thought and personal experience is the most remarkable
element of the poetry of the time.

1.3 Poetry in Romantic Literature

The main trend in 18th-century poetics was to glorify the general. The poet was
considered a spokesman of society, who preached to a cultivated and homogeneous
audience with the conveyance of “truth” as his goal. However, the Romantics found
poetry's basis to be in the personal, and unique experiences of an individual. “To
generalize is to be an Idiot,” Blake writes (in a marginal note on Sir Joshua
Reynolds' Discourses) “The only Distinction of Merit is to Particularize.” The
Romantics considered the poet to be a unique individual, different from others in
his perceptions and intellect. Poetry was thought to transmit its truth, and sincerity
was the standard by which it was judged.

In some ways, the emphasis on feeling—perhaps best exemplified in Robert Burns'

poems—was a continuation of the previous “cult of sensibility,” and Alexander
Pope commended his father for knowing no language except the language of the
heart. However, sentiments had begun to receive special attention, and they can be
found in most of the Romantic poetry. In 1833, John Stuart Mill defined poetry as
“feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.”
Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and
John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the
medium of its utterance.” As a result, the best poetry was that, which portrayed the
greatest intensity of feeling, and the lyric was given a new level of importance.

Another distinguishing feature of Romantic writing was its shift away from the
Neoclassical era's mimetic, or imitative norms to a fresh emphasis on imagination.
Imagination, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is the greatest poetic quality,

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quasi-divine creative energy that elevates the poet to godlike status. “Invention,
imagination, and judgment” were the components of poetry according to Samuel
Johnson, while Blake said, “One Power alone produces a Poet: Imagination, the
Divine Vision.” As a result, poets of the time placed a strong focus on the
unconscious mind, dreams and reveries. The supernatural and the infantile or
primeval vision of the world also gained special attention. The latter was valued for
its clarity and intensity, which had not been constrained by civilized “reason.”

The Romantic attitude towards form is another indicator of the reduced emphasis
on judgment: if poetry is to be spontaneous, sincere, and intense, it should be
fashioned according to the rules of creative imagination. “You feel deeply; trust
those sensations, and your poem will acquire its shape and proportions as a tree
does from the vital element that actuates it,” Wordsworth instructed a young poet.
In other words, poetry is free and spontaneous. Its biological conception contrasts
with the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own grammatical rules and
regulations. This gives the impression that poetic sublimity could only be achieved
in brief passages.

Demand for new techniques of writing went hand in hand with the new
understanding of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter. Wordsworth
and his followers, particularly Keats, felt that the late-eighteenth-century poetic
diction was old and stiff, or “gaudy and inane,” and completely inappropriate to the
expression of their feelings. It couldn't possibly be the language of feelings for
them; therefore, Wordsworth set out to reintroduce poetry to the realm of everyday
speech. Wordsworth's diction, on the other hand, frequently contradicts his idea.
Nonetheless, the time was ripe for a change when he wrote his prologue to Lyrical
Ballads in 1800: the agile diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had fossilized into
a purely conventional language.

1.4 Summary
Romanticism (1800 – 1850) was an intellectual movement that influenced all fields
of study. Resulting as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution and the
Enlightenment era’s logic and rationality, romanticism sought for the pure and
sublime. The Romantic Movement focused on the individual and his place in
nature. It emphasized emotion, imagination and beauty. It also favored the medieval
in place of the classical. Moving from the general to the specific, romanticism
placed value in subjectivity and found healing in nature. And with Wordsworth’s
effort poetry was made enjoyable for everyone, being written in the common
tongue.

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1.5 Self-Assessment Questions
1. What do you know about the Romantic Age?

2. What are the distinguishing features of romantic writing and how does
Wordsworth contribute to that?

3. How did the Romantic poets view nature, and what themes and motifs were
commonly found in their work?

4. In what ways did the Romantic poets challenge traditional forms and themes
in poetry?

5. What role did emotion and personal experience play in Romantic poetry, and
how did this differ from previous literary movements?

6. How did the political and social changes of the Romantic era influence the
poetry of the time?

7. Discuss the influence of other art forms, such as painting and music, on
Romantic poetry?

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Unit–2

SALIENT FEATURES
OF ROMANTICISM

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

9
 CONTENTS
Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 11

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 11

2.1 Salient Features of Romanticism ............................................................ 12

2.2 The Concept of the Poet and the Poem .................................................... 13

2.3 Spontaneity and the Impulses of Feeling ................................................ 16

2.4 Romantic “Nature Poetry” ....................................................................... 16

2.5 The Glorification of the Ordinary ............................................................ 18

2.6 The Supernatural, the Romance, and Psychological Extremes ............... 19

2.7 Individualism and Alienation................................................................... 21

2.8 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 22

2.9 Summary .................................................................................................. 24

2.10 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 24

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 INTRODUCTION
The study of Romantic poetry is a fascinating and insightful journey into the realm
of literature, where emotions, imagination, and nature are expressed in a profound
and unique way. In this unit, we will delve into the salient features of Romantic
poetry, with a focus on the works of major Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Through a detailed analysis of their poetry, we will
explore the themes of individualism, imagination, and emotion, which were used
to challenge traditional literary conventions. Furthermore, we will examine the role
of nature in Romantic poetry and how it was used to convey the poets' emotions
and ideas. In addition, we will analyze the use of symbolism in Romantic poetry
and its significance in conveying the poets' ideas and emotions. By the end of this
unit, students will be able to discern these characteristics in the poetry of the
Romantic poets and compare and contrast their works to understand their
contribution to the development of Romantic poetry as a literary movement.
Moreover, this unit aims to encourage critical thinking and analysis of Romantic
poetry and its relevance to contemporary literature and culture.

OBJECTIVES
To enlighten you with the features of romantic poetry.

 to offer insight to students by explaining said features with mentions of

relevant poets.

 to enable students to be able to discern these characteristics in the poetry of

the romantic poets

 to examine the role of nature in romantic poetry and how it was used to convey
the poets' emotions and ideas.

 to explore the themes of individualism, imagination, and emotion in romantic

poetry and how they were used to challenge traditional literary conventions.

 to analyze the use of symbolism in romantic poetry and its significance in

conveying the poets' ideas and emotions.

 to compare and contrast the works of major romantic poets, such as

wordsworth, coleridge, keats, and shelley, and how they contributed to the
development of romantic poetry as a literary movement.

 to encourage critical thinking and analysis of romantic poetry and its

relevance to contemporary literature and culture.

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2.1 Salient Features of Romanticism
Romanticism is a doctrine that holds the belief that art and literature should be free
from classical and neo-classical rules and constraints. There are many salient
characteristics or features of Romanticism. Such as high imagination, love for
nature, spontaneity, interest in the remote or love for the past, simplicity in
expression and revolutionary zeal. Among others, there is also Individualism,
supernaturalism, subjectivity, medievalism, love for freedom and liberty, and the
predominance of lyricism. Romantic poetry is fanciful and introspective. It is often
marked by extravagance.

Romantics are highly imaginative. They prefer writers to be free and creative rather
than realistic and factual. They seek an ideal condition for human beings in their
unlimited imagination. The poetry of Wordsworth and Keats is full of imagination.
In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth imagines that a hermit alone in the forest is
cooking something. Keats flies to the fanciful world of the nightingale in his most
beautiful poem, “Ode to a Nightingale”. Moreover, both the poets are great lovers
of nature. Wordsworth is the greatest priest and worshipper of nature. He is a mystic
and a pantheist in his treatment of nature. Nature is the nurse, guide and guardian
of the heart and soul.

While Keats is very sensuous in treating nature, Romantic poetry is a spontaneous

overflow of powerful passions. The romantic poet is gifted with a strong “organic
sensibility”. He feels more than there is to feel. He sees more than there is to see.
Even ordinary objects and incidents excite his imagination and set up in him
powerful passions. So, he does not care for the perfection of form or clarity of
expression. The result is much vagueness and obscurity. The substance is more
important for him than the form. The philosophical tone of Wordsworth seems to
be beyond understanding. His pantheism and mysticism are almost inscrutable.

All romantic literature is subjective. It is an expression of the inner urges of the artist.
The poet does not care for rules and regulations. But he gives free expression to his
emotion. Emphasis is laid on inspiration and institution rather than on the observance
of set rules. The poet writes according to his fancy. He is often guilty of wild
excesses. Hence it has been criticized as irregular and wild. Wordsworth's poetry is
entirely subjective. He expresses his philosophy of nature and childhood in “Tintern
Abbey”, “Immortality Ode” and “Michael”. In “Immortality Ode”, he has said that a
child is a mighty prophet and philosopher. But Keats is objective in his famous odes,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Autumn” or “Ode to a Nightingale”.

The tone of Romantic poetry is frequently pessimistic. A romantic might rebel

against the status quo. He might be particularly infatuated with the medieval world

12
or the middle Ages. In his poetry, his concern with the remote and distant is
obvious. He wishes to be enchanted by the past's color, pomp, and charm. He
wishes to be free of the present's dreadful reality. He can try to elude reality by
immersing himself in a fantasy world of his own making. He frequently retreats
into the past. It is exemplified by John Keats. He is frequently reproached for his
escapism. He wishes to escape from the harsh truths of the real world by flying to
the enchanted world of the nightingale. Wordsworth is irritated by the loudness and
bustle of towns and cities. As a result, he wishes to seek refuge in nature.

The protest of Romanticism is against any artificiality. It represents simplicity in

both subject and execution. The common man and language are treated as props by
the romantics. They reject the poetic style of poets such as Dryden, Pope, and others
from the eighteenth century. They refuse to use the Heroic Couplet as a poetic
weapon. Instead, they employ Spenserian stanza, ballad meter, and blank verse.
Poems are written as lyrics, odes, and sonnets.

The Romantics competed with Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. In turn, Wordsworth
also raised his voice against the 18th-century classic's inane and unnatural diction.
He argued that poetry should be written in common people's language. In his
“preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” which is considered the Romantic manifesto, he
presented his poetic idea.

Finally, it can be concluded that Romanticism had become a new sensation in

English poetry. The heroes of this movement are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord
Byron, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats. Their poetry embodies practically all of
Romanticism's key characteristics. Natural objects become supernatural in
Wordsworth's hands, whereas supernatural objects become natural in Coleridge's.
Two famous revolutionaries of the period are Byron and Shelley. The Romantic
Movement's final romantic poet is John Keats. His poetry begins with sensuality
and concludes with reflection. He is a successful ode writer. He doesn't try to make
the improbable probable or the unbelievable believable. Wordsworth, on the other
hand, has made believable objects seem unbelievable.

2.2 The Concept of the Poet and the Poem

To build a stable foundation on which social institutions could be built, eighteenth-
century British philosophers spent a lot of time demonstrating that human nature
must be the same everywhere because it stemmed from individuals' shared sensory
experience of an objectively represented external world. However, as the century
progressed, philosophers began to emphasize — and poets began to establish a new

13
language for — individual differences in perception and the receptive awareness'
potential to filter and re-create reality.

This was the shift Wordsworth noticed in the Preface when he stated that the
important ingredients of a poem were not the external persons and events it
described, but the author's inner sentiments, or external objects only after they had
been altered by the author's feelings. In 1802 Wordsworth described all good poetry
as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” at the time of composition. In
simpler words, the world moved from combined objectivity to individual
subjectivity. It was the individuals’ sole feelings that became the subject matter.

Other Romantics agreed, citing the poet's mind, emotions, and imagination as the
source, content, and defining characteristics of a poem. Mary Robinson and
Coleridge defined several of their significant poems of the 1790s as “effusions,” or
intense outpourings of feeling, using a metaphor that was similar to Wordsworth's
“overflow,” and that Wordsworth would resurrect in later work.

Following this, Coleridge drew on German precedents to introduce an account of

the organic form of literary works into English criticism; in this account, the work
is conceptualized as a self-originating and self-organizing process, similar to plant
growth, that begins with a seed-like idea in the poet's imagination, grows by
assimilating both the poet's feelings and the materials of sensory experience and
evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are entwined.

Following the belief that poetry communicates the poet's thoughts, the lyric poem
written in the first person, which had been considered a minor sort for much of
literary history became a significant Romantic form and was frequently described
as the most poetic of all the genres. In most Romantic songs, the word “I” is no
longer a conventionally typical lyric speaker, such as in the Petrarchan lover or the
Cavalier gallant of Elizabethan and in the seventeenth-century love poems, but
rather a character who shares familiar characteristics with the poet. The lyric
speaker's experiences and states of mind frequently correspond to known facts
about the poet's life and personal confessions in the poet's letters and journals.

This reinterpretation of the lyric threw accepted notions of authorship gender into
disarray.

Some commentators argue that Wordsworth's definition of poetry as “the actual

language of men” and the Poet as a “man speaking to men” in the Preface is not
coincidental: Wordsworth, who began publishing at a time when women like
Robinson and Charlotte Smith were at the forefront of the new personal poetry

14
movement, may have felt that to distinguish his enterprise, he needed to balance his
emphasis on his sentiments with an emphasis on their “manly” dignity. This isn't to
argue that women poets had an easy time adjusting to new poetic notions. Smith
anticipates being chastised for “putting up 'with querulous egotism,' the mention of
myself” in one of her prefaces.

The other challenge that those ideas about poetry posed for many female poets may
have been their potential to reinforce the old, prejudicial notion that their sex—
traditionally seen as creatures of feeling rather than intellect—wrote about their
own experiences because they were incapable of anything else.

Male poets faced different risks of artistic self-revelation, which were grabbed in
part by those who, like Coleridge and Shelley, implied darkly that the introspective
propensity and emotional sensitivity that made someone a poet could also lead to
melancholy and lunacy. These new accounts of the poet were not simply recorded
in the lyric. By inviting his audience to equate the heroes of Childe Harold,
Manfred, and Don Juan with their author, and to see these fictional protagonists'
experiences as disclosing the deep truths of his secret self, Byron confounded his
contemporaries' expectations about which poetic genre was best suited to self-
revelation.

The Prelude by Wordsworth is an extreme example of this proclivity to self-

reference. Despite its epic length and severity, the poem's theme is not, as is
common in epics, world-changing history, but rather the poet's mental maturation.
Two other major tendencies are highlighted in the Prelude. Wordsworth, like
Blake, Coleridge in early works, and later Shelley, describes himself as “a chosen
son” or “Bard.” That is, he takes on the persona of a poet-prophet, a composite
figure based on Milton, biblical prophets, and figures of national music, Celtic or
Anglo-Saxon harp-playing patriots, whom eighteenth-century poets and
antiquarians had located in a fictitious Dark Ages Britain. Taking on this bardic
persona, Wordsworth positions himself as a spokesman for civilization in a period
of crisis— a time of “melancholy waste of hopes overthrown,” as he expressed it
in The Prelude. (The term spokesman is appropriate here because the bardic poet-
prophet was nearly usually a male persona.)

The Prelude is also an example of a major literary form of English, as well as

European, Romanticism— long work about the self's crisis and rebirth, told as the
story of an inward journey undertaken in search of one's true identity and destined
spiritual home and mission. This form is also exemplified by Blake's Milton, Keats'
Endymion and Fall of Hyperion, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh in
Victorian poetry.

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2.3 Spontaneity and the Impulses of Feeling
In traditional poetics, poetry was regarded as the highest form of art—one that was
practiced by poets who had studied classical precedents, and were aware of the
“rules” governing the type of poem they were writing, and (except for the happy
touches that, as Pope put it, are “beyond the reach of art”) purposefully employed
to achieve premeditated effects on an audience. Although the composition of a
poem is inspired by “thoughts recollected in tranquility” and may be preceded and
followed by meditation, Wordsworth believes that the initial act of composition
must be spontaneous, born of impulse, and free of rules. “If poetry does not come
as easily as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all,” Keats stated as an
“axiom.”

Other Romantics made similar assertions of artistic freedom from established

principles, sometimes by turning away from the here-and-now and toward a remote,
preliterate, and primeval past. Many Romantics found the old bard to be a
compelling character in part because envisioning the songs he would have sung
made it easier to consider an alternative to modernity's humdrum language.

When poets like Byron, Hunt, and the Shelley went to Italy after Waterloo, they
were enchanted by the talents of the men and women whose thrilling oral poetry
performances contained no texts other than those of instant inspiration. Percy
Shelley, one of the poets who admired and aspired to that rhapsodic spontaneity,
said it was “a fallacy to declare that the finest passages of poetry are generated by
labor and study.” “A great monument or picture grows under the influence of the
artist as a child in the mother's womb,” he said, implying that these were the results
of unconscious creativity.

The Romantics' emphasis on the spontaneous activity of the imagination is linked

to a belief in the essential role of passion, whether in the realms of art, philosophy,
or morality. The judgments of the merely rational faculty, “the brain,” were to be
supplemented with the intuitive impulses of “the heart.” “Profound thought can
only be attained by a man of deep emotion,” Coleridge remarked, adding that “a
metaphysical answer that does not tell you anything in the heart is grievous to be
doubted as apocryphal.”

2.4 Romantic “Nature Poetry”

Nature poetry is considered as one of the chief characteristics of Romantic poetry
and with good reason. Lyrical Ballads was Wordsworth's response to the decline in
taste caused by “the increasing accumulation of men in cities”: the style he
envisaged in the Preface was intended in part to undo the negative consequences of

16
urbanization. However, because he and many of his contemporaries avoided city
life and wrote about outdoor surroundings so frequently, “nature poetry” has
become nearly synonymous with Romantic poetry in the eyes of the readers.

Wordsworth portrays himself as correcting the failings of predecessors who, he

claims, were unable to accurately depict natural phenomena such as a moonlit sky.
From Dryden to Pope, he claims, there are almost no images of external nature
“from which it can be inferred that the Poet's eye had been steadily fixed upon his
object.” Neither Romantic theory nor practice, on the other hand, supports the
notion that Romantic poets valued description for its own sake, despite the fact that
many of the period's poems are almost unrivaled in their ability to capture the
sensuous nuances of the natural scene, and the writers enthusiastically participated
in the new leisure activity of the time, touring picturesque scenery.

However, Wordsworth's criticism of eighteenth-century poetic imagery continues

in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface: “Take an image from an early-
eighteenth-century poem, and it will show no signs either,” he says, that the Poet's
“feelings had urged him to work on it in the spirit of genuine imagination.” “As its
exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state
of submission to external things,” Wordsworth writes, “the ability to notice objects
accurately is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poetry.”

While many of the great Romantic lyrics— Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,”

Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight,” Keats' “Nightingale,” Smith's Beachy Head—
remark on an aspect or change of aspect in the natural environment, this just acts as
a stimulus to the most typical human activity, thinking. The longer Romantic
“nature poems” are frequently introspective, employing the given scene to
symbolize a personal crisis, with the growth and resolution of that crisis serving as
the poem's organizing principle.

Furthermore, Romantic poems frequently imbue the landscape with human life,
emotion, and expression. Many poets consider the outside world to be a vital entity
that shares the observer's feelings (an idea of a sympathetic exchange between
nature and humanity that Mary Shelley, however, would probe fiercely in her novel
“The Last Man”. The created universe was described by James Thomson and other
descriptive poets of the eighteenth century as providing direct contact to the deity.
Wordsworth not only demonstrates the landscape attitudes and sentiments that
human beings had previously had for God in “Tintern Abbey” and other poems; he
also loves it in the way that human beings love a father, a mother, or a beloved in
“Tintern Abbey” and other poems.

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Still, there existed a counter-intuitive belief, expressed particularly in the poetry of
Blake and Percy Shelley, that natural objects were important primarily because of
the correspondences that linked them to an inner or spiritual world. A rose, a
sunflower, a cloud, or a mountain is depicted in their poetry as an item endowed
with a significance beyond itself, not as something to be observed and pictured. “I
always seek the likeness of something beyond the immediate and concrete object
in what I observe,” Shelley stated. Blake scorned nature as seen through the
physical eye, calling it “like the dust upon my feet, no part of me.” Blake wrote on
a copy of Wordsworth's 1815 Poems, criticizing the poet's commitment to
unspiritual observation: “Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden,
and obliterate imagination in men.”

2.5 The Glorification of the Ordinary

Romantic poetry glorifies the ordinary. Wordsworth stated in Lyrical Ballads that
the goal was to “select episodes and situations from common life” and to adopt a
“language truly spoken by men”: for Wordsworth's polemical goals, this language
is found in “humble and rural life.” Because of Wordsworth’s revolutionary
changes to poetry, Hazlitt deemed his school of poetry to be the literary equal of
the French Revolution, in which political change was transformed into poetical
experimentation.

“In legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, kings and queens were dethroned from their rank
and station, as they were elsewhere... The paradox [these poets] set out with was that
all things are by nature, equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference
to give, those that are the most humble and most unpromising are the best.”

Later eighteenth-century writers had previously dabbled with the presentation of

simple subjects in their works. Burns had successfully conveyed “the rustic vistas
and rural delights of [his] native Soil,” in a language striving to be loyal to the
rhythms of his regional Scots accent, much like the youthful Wordsworth, a
sympathizer with the Revolution.

Women poets in particular—Barbauld, Robinson, and Baillie—incorporated the

subject matter of ordinary life into their poems. Wordsworth's poetic practice was
underpinned by a theory that inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres,
subjects, and styles: it elevated humble life and the plain style, which were
previously thought to be only appropriate for the pastoral, the genre at the bottom
of the traditional hierarchy, to the primary subject and medium for poetry in
general. And, as Hazlitt pointed out, Wordsworth went much further in his practice,
turning to the disgraced, outcast, and delinquent for the subjects of serious poems—

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“convicts, female vagrants, gypsies... stupid boys and mad mothers.” As a result,
Lord Byron scorned Wordsworth, who jokingly called eighteenth-century spirits to
assist him in demonstrating that Wordsworth's innovations were leading literature
in the wrong direction:

“Peddlers,” and “Boats,” and “Wagons”! Oh! ye shades

Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?

Yet, as he stated in his Preface, Wordsworth's goal was not just to depict the world
as it is, but to “cast over” “situations from everyday life... a certain coloring of
imagination, wherein ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unexpected aspect.” No one can read his poetry without seeing the care with which
he treats words that were once considered negative by other writers—words like
“common,” “ordinary,” “daily,” and “humble.” Wordsworth's goal was to break the
monotony of routine in order to reawaken our sense of awe in the mundane,
insignificant, and lowly. “Wonder is a halt of reason”— “the effect of novelty upon
ignorance,” as Samuel Johnson put it in the seventeenth century.

However, a significant role of poetry for many Romantics was to arouse in the
sophisticated mind that sensation of amazement supposed to be felt by the ignorant
and innocent—to regenerate the world, as Percy Shelley put it, “when it has been
sharpened by reiteration.” “To mix the child's feeling of wonder and novelty with
the appearances, which every day for maybe forty years had become familiar... this
is the character and privilege of genius,” Coleridge said of Wordsworth's early
verse. Baillie and Barbauld contributed to this poetry of the child's-eye view by
writing poems about an observer's attempt to imagine the unknowable perspective
of beings for whom thought and sensation are new or have not begun—in Baillie's
case, a “waking infant,” in Barbauld's, a “little invisible being who is expected soon
to become visible” but is still in its mother's womb.

2.6 The Supernatural, the Romance, and Psychological Extremes

The supernatural is another very important feature of Romantic poetry. Although it
is not present in all Romantic poems, it was used as a device to introduce the
elements of wonder and mystery. It also helped relay the extreme emotions in
romantic situations creating an outwardly and highly imaginative atmosphere.
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, dealt with commonplace things in most of his poems,
but, in “Frost at Midnight,” he demonstrated how well he could generate the
sensation of awe in the mundane. According to the division of labor that organized
Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s collaboration on Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge was
tasked to present wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary

19
course of events. Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria. “the incidents and agents
were to be, in part at least, supernatural”. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Christabel, and “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge introduced a realm of mystery and
enchantment to modern poetry. Stories of bewitching, haunting, and possession,
influenced by ancient treatises on demonology, folklore, and Gothic novels,
provided him with a means of conveying a sense of occult powers and undiscovered
forms of being to his readers.

These types of materials were frequently lumped together under the category
“romance,” a concept that would later give the “Romantic” period its name. On the
one hand, romances were works that, in search of settings suitable to supernatural
occurrences, turned to “strange fits of passion” and weird experiences, to distant
pasts, remote places, or both— Keats' “perilous seas, in faery regions lonely” or
“Kubla Khan's” China.

On the other hand, romance refers to a native, homegrown literary tradition that has
become strange and alien due to the passage of time. Writing under the banner of
romance meant reclaiming their national birthright: literature of untrammeled
imagination—associated, above all, with Spenser and the Shakespeare of fairy
magic and witchcraft—that had been forced underground by the Enlightenment's
emphasis on reason and refinement, starting with Horace Walpole, whose Castle of
Otranto (1764) established the Gothic fiction tradition.

In Childe Harold, Byron maneuvered between romance's two sets of connections

by having his hero journey to far-flung Albania and become enthralled by the locals'
barbarous songs, while simultaneously giving the poem the subtitle “A Romaunt”
(an antique spelling of romance) and penning it in Spenserian stanzas. This was the
same stanzaic form that Keats drew on for The Eve of St. Agnes, the poem in which
he proved himself a master of the Romantic mode that establishes a medieval
setting for events that violate our sense of realism and the natural order, which had
been neglected for much of the eighteenth century.

Women contributed to the Romantic period's “medieval revival,” including

Robinson (author of “Old English,” “Monkish,” and “Gothic” Tales), as well as
Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Joanna Baillie, and others, who frequently
matched the arch-medievalist Sir Walter Scott in the historical knowledge they
brought to their compositions.

The Romantic interest in the mysteries of mental life and determination to investigate
psychological extremes, which Walter Pater identified as a key Romantic tendency
near the end of the nineteenth century, is seen not only in this concern with exotic and
archaic landscapes of romance but also in the Romantic interest in the mysteries of

20
mental life and determination to investigate psychological extremes. Wordsworth
investigated visionary states of consciousness, which are frequent among children yet
defy adult categorization. Coleridge and De Quincey were both fascinated by dreams
and nightmares, as well as the altered states of consciousness they encountered as a
result of their opium addiction. Keats described odd combinations of pleasure and pain
with exceptional sensitivity in his odes, as in the quasi-medieval “ballad” “La Belle
Dame sans Merci,” pondering the destructive sides of sexuality and the passionate
quality of the wish for death. And Byron made frequent use of the forbidden allure, as
well as the scary yet alluring Satanic hero.

Of course, some writers objected to these artistic encounters with fictitious settings
and odd impulses. Women, who were said to be particularly prone to romantic love
delusions due to their sex, had a particular incentive to support the Enlightenment
mission and advocate the logical management of emotion. Barbauld composed a
poem softly warning Coleridge not to linger in the “fairy bower” of romance for
too long and instead interact actively with the world as it is.

Jane Austen's heroine in Persuasion, while conversing with a melancholy, Byron-

reading young man, cautioned him against overindulging in Byron's “impassioned
descriptions of hopeless agony” and “prescribed” to him a “larger allowance of
prose in his daily study,” a satirical assessment of characters who imagine
themselves the pitiable victims of their powerful feelings. Despite being “pressed
into prudence in her childhood,” this heroine has “discovered romanticism as she
got older.” The reversal of the typical order in which female socialization stories
are told implies a susceptibility to romance's charm that connects even Austen to
the spirit of the time.

2.7 Individualism and Alienation

Romantic poetry emphasizes on individualism. Most Romantics were cultural
revolutionaries and thus, strived for individual freedom. Subjective experiences were
asserted upon as they provided a more accurate picture of an individual’s inner self.
Byron's poetry drew attention and, in some quarters, scorn for his hero's insistence
on self-sufficiency. For example, Hazlitt used lines from Shakespeare's Coriolanus
to criticize Byron's propensity of rejecting the human connection, writing, “as if a
man were the author of himself and owned no other kin.” The daring individualism
that Hazlitt questions here (a questioning that he continues in part by enacting his
reliance on others and supplementing his words with Shakespeare's) was, however,
central to many Romantic-period writers' celebrations of creativity. Romantic writers
welcomed this daring individualism because it gave a writer the freedom to portray
his own subjective and highly imaginative worlds. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,

21
Wordsworth had already characterized his poetic experimentation as an exercise in
artistic self-sacrifice (as if anticipating and preempting) The Preface has been
interpreted as a document in which Wordsworth, demonstrating his self-made status,
provides for his disinheritance—as he puts it, “from a substantial portion of the
phrases and forms of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the
common legacy of Poets.” In short, Wordsworth disregards the poetic traditions and
rules of generations for much simpler common ones.

Many of the defining principles of European Romanticism were created by German

thinkers who also devised a theory of how individuals may author and construct
themselves. The human mind was portrayed by Kant and others, as constructing the
universe and hence creating its own experience. Kant's admirer Coleridge said that
the mind is “not passive,” but rather “formed in God's image, and that too in the
sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator.”

In The Prelude, Wordsworth argued that the individual mind “Doth, like an Agent
of the one vast Mind, / Create, both maker and receiver.” The Romantic period,
which was characterized by free enterprise, imperial expansion, and unbounded
revolutionary hope, was also characterized by individualism, with philosophers and
poets alike placing a high value on personal potentialities and capacities.

2.8 Conclusion
Much of the poetry of the time redefined heroism and made a never-ending quest
for the unattainable its central element in expressing this expanded scope for
individual initiative. Longings that can never be satisfied—or, as Percy Shelley put
it, “the desire of the moth for a star”—came to be revalued as the glory of human
nature by previous generations of moralists. “Less than everything cannot satisfy
man,” Blake declared.

Discussions about the nature of art progressed similarly. The German philosopher
Friedrich Schlegel's proposal that poetry “should forever be becoming and never be
perfected” provided a way to see unfinished, “fragment” poems of the time (most
famously, Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”) not as failures, but as confirmations that the
most poetic poetry was defined as much by what was absent as by what was present:
the poem, in this understanding, was a fragmentary trace of an original conception
that was too grand eve.

Many writers became impatient with the literary genre notions they acquired as a
result of their confrontational attitude toward boundaries. The result was an
astonishing variety of hybrid forms built on fresh principles of organization and

22
style: “elegiac sonnets,” “lyrical ballads,” The Prelude's poetic autobiography,
Percy Shelley's “lyric drama” of cosmic reach, Prometheus Unbound, and (in the
field of prose) Scott's “historical novels” and Mary S. Scott's complex interweaving
of letters, reported oral confessions, and interpolated tales. Blake went even further:
for his poems, he created a composite art of word and image, as well as “illuminated
printing,” which daringly reinvented the concept of the book.

Many writers' choice to represent poetry as a result of solitude and poets as loners
could be interpreted in this sense as a way of reinforcing the uniqueness of their
viewpoint. And the popularity of nature poetry during the period can be attributed
to a desire to idealize the natural scene as a place where individuals could find
freedom from social laws, an idealization that was easier to maintain when nature
was depicted as uninhabitable wild wastes, unplugged uplands, caves, and chasms,
as it was frequently in the era. The rural community was a shaky presence in poetry
as well, endangered by the enclosures that were destroying village life.

The abrupt appearance of a single figure, stark and solitary against a natural
background releases Wordsworth's imagination; the terms “solitary,” “by oneself,”
and “alone” recur throughout his poetry. Desolate landscapes are frequently the
haunts of disillusioned visionaries and accursed outlaws in the poetry of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Byron (before Don Juan launched Byron's satire on Byronism), figures
whose thwarted ambitions and torments connect them, variously, to Cain, the
Wandering Jew, Satan, and even Napoleon. Prometheus, the hero of Greek
mythology, is a version of this figure, who, like Satan, sets himself against God,
but, unlike Satan, is the champion rather than the enemy of humanity.

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley ironically rewrote this important figure in her

husband's mythmaking: Victor Frankenstein, a “Modern Prometheus,” is far from
a champion of humanity.

The lady of “genius” is the counterpart of these half charismatic, half-condemnable

figures of alienation for other women writers of the period, and for Shelley in books
after Frankenstein. In a world where, as Wollstonecraft lamented in The Rights of
Woman, “all women are to be flattened by meekness and docility, into one character
of... mild submission,” the woman who asserted a distinct identity in an
“unfeminine” manner faced ostracism rather than power.

In writings by Robinson, Hemans, and Landon, in particular, the lady of genius's

story was often depicted as a modern twist on ancient legends of Sappho, the ill-
fated Greek female poet who succeeded in poetry but died of love. Hemans and
Landon were especially cautious to equate brilliance with self-inflicted grief and

23
pleasure with a woman's embrace of her domestic calling, pressured by the
emerging Victorianism of the 1820s and playing it safe.

2.9 Summary
The Romantic period gave birth to beautiful poetry which broke the constraints of
classical and neo-classical writings. Favoring the Medieval in contrast, romantic
poetry sought to show an individual’s link with nature and its mystical qualities.
According to romantic poets’ (such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, etc.)
Nature holds within it sublime truths and healing. It provides great imaginative
powers that allow the individual to find the extraordinary in the mundane and
ordinary. It is spontaneous, passionate and creative, imbued in simplicity and
therefore, should be described as such. It also, undoubtedly, connects man to God
(as stated by Blake and Shelley). Since Romanticism favors subjectivity, it gives
the individual liberty to freely express their emotions in the wonders of the natural
world around them.

2.10 Self-Assessment Questions

1. What are the major features of Romantic poetry?

2. What is the concept of spontaneity in Romanticism (or Romantic poetry)?

Explain it in the light of Wordsworth’s words “poetry is a spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings”.

3. What is the romantic poets’ view of nature?

4. How did Romantic poets emphasize individualism in their works?

5. How did Romantic poets challenge the traditional literary conventions of their
time?

6. What role did imagination and emotion play in Romantic poetry?

7. How did Romantic poets use symbolism to convey their ideas and emotions
in their works?

8. How did the Romantic poets view the relationship between the individual and
society?

9. How did Romantic poetry reflect the political and social climate of the time?

10. How did the Romantic poets use language and style to convey their ideas and
emotions in their works?

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Unit–3

INTRODUCTION TO
ROMANTIC POETS

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

25
 CONTENTS
Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 27

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 27

3.1 Introduction to Romantic Poets ............................................................... 29

3.2 Early Romantic Poets i.e., Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge ............... 29

3.3 Other Poets of the Early Romantic Period .............................................. 30

3.4 The Later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron .................................... 31

3.5 Some Other Poets of the Later Period...................................................... 33

3.6 Summary .................................................................................................. 33

3.7 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 34

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 INTRODUCTION

Our main objective in this unit is to familiarize students with the different poets of
the Romantic era and introduce them to the work of this literary movement. We
will begin by identifying and understanding the common components of Romantic
poetry, while also recognizing the diversity and lack of consistency among
Romantic poets in their writing. We will explore the role of Romantic poets in
altering the intellectual setting of their time and analyze their impact on society.
Our focus will be on the works of early Romantic poets such as William Blake,
William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We will examine their
contributions to Romantic literature and their responses to the French Revolution,
which had a significant impact on their poetry.

We will also explore the themes of nature, humanity, and memory in the works of
Romantic poets, appreciating the significant contributions of lesser-known
Romantic poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, Thomas Campbell,
Samuel Rogers, and Thomas Moore, and understand their place in the Romantic
literary movement.

By the end of this unit, students will have a deep understanding of Romantic poetry,
its impact on literature, and its significance in shaping the intellectual and cultural
landscape of the era.

OBJECTIVES

After reading the unit, you will be able;

 familiarizing students with different poets of the romantic era.

 introducing students to the work of romantic era.

 to identify and understand the common components of romantic poetry.

 to recognize the diversity and lack of consistency among romantic poets in

their writing.

 to analyze the role of romantic poets in altering the intellectual setting of their
time.

27
 to study the works of early romantic poets such as william blake, william
wordsworth, and samuel taylor coleridge, and understand their contributions
to romantic literature.

 to examine the impact of the french revolution on the poetry of early romantic
poets.

 to explore the themes of nature, humanity, and memory in the works of

romantic poets.

 to appreciate the significant contributions of lesser-known romantic poets

such as charlotte smith, william lisle bowles, thomas campbell, samuel rogers,
and thomas moore, and understand their place in the Romantic literary
movement.

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3.1 Introduction to Romantic Poets
While tracing the common components in Romantic poetry is useful, there was
little consistency among the writers themselves. Reading the first Romantics' poetry
as though it were intended exclusively to express their sentiments is deceptive.
Their primary objective was to alter the intellectual setting of the day.

3.2 Early Romantic Poets i.e., Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge

Since childhood, William Blake was dissatisfied with the state of poetry and what
he saw was the irreligious drabness of contemporary philosophy. In the satirical
“An Island in the Moon” (written c. 1784–85), he shows his early development of
a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science
had become trivial and art insignificant; he then took the bolder step of setting aside
sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal
led him to regard the start of the French Revolution as a turning point. He addressed
the age's hypocrisies and impersonal cruelties stemming from the ideals of the
supremacy of analytic reason in modern philosophy in works like The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794).

As it became clear that the Revolution's ideals would not be realized in his lifetime,
he redoubled his efforts to change his contemporaries' perceptions of the universe
and construct new mythology centered on Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and
law whom he believed to be the deity worshipped by his contemporaries, rather
than the God of the Bible. The First Book of Urizen (1794) and, more ambitiously,
the unfinished work Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from around
1796 to approximately 1807, told the story of Urizen's ascension. Blake expanded
on these concepts in Milton's (1804–08) and Jerusalem's (1804–20) visionary
narratives. He positioned the inventive artist as the hero of society here, still
utilizing his mythological heroes, and emphasized the prospect of redemption from
the fallen (or Urizenic) situation.

Meanwhile, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were debating the
consequences of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who spent 1791–92 in
France, was upset when Britain declared war on the republic shortly after his return,
dividing his loyalty. He was stuck on those events for the remainder of his career,
attempting to build a vision of humanity that satisfied both his combined sense of
the sadness of individual human tragedies and the unmet potentialities in mankind
as a whole. The first factor can be found in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined
Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both of which would later appear in the Excursion); the
second emerged in 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, were living in the west

29
of England and were in close contact with Coleridge. Coleridge wrote the poems
gathered in Lyrical Ballads, inspired by Dorothy's immediacy of feeling, which can
be found throughout her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897). The
collection began with Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued
with poems celebrating nature's powers and ordinary people's humane instincts, and
ended with Wordsworth's meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey,” an attempt to express his mature faith in nature and humanity.

In The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in thirteen books;
reworked constantly and released posthumously, 1850), he resumed his
examination of the relationship between nature and the human mind in a long
autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge. He traced the worth of being a child
“fostered alike by beauty and by dread” by an upbringing in exquisite settings for
a poet in this passage. The Prelude is the most important English statement of the
Romantic exploration of the self in art and literature. Memory plays an important
role in the poem, which is also examined in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Childhood Recollections.” Wordsworth, on the other hand, focused on the tragedy
and potentialities of everyday lives in poems like “Michael” and “The Brothers,”
which were composed for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800).

3.3 Other Poets of the Early Romantic Period

Blake's poetry was little known during his lifetime. Sir Walter Scott, on the other
hand, was regarded as a significant poet for his energetic and vivid verse narratives
such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1805). (1808). Other
verse poets were equally well-respected.

Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and William Lisle Bowles' Fourteen
Sonnets (1789) were both well welcomed by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is best
known for patriotic songs like “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of
Hohenlinden” (1807), as well as the critical preface to his Specimens of the
British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk
(published after his death in 1856 as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel
Rogers), as well as his exquisite but demanding poetry. Thomas Moore, whose
Irish Melodies first appeared in 1808, was another popular poet of the time. His
sarcastic poems and the richly colored story Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance
(1817) was also hugely famous. Charlotte Smith was not the only notable female
poet of the day. Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall's Poetical Sketches (1795),
Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe's Psyche (1805) are
all noteworthy works.

30
Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was
considered a key member of the “Lake School” of poetry with them. His ballads
and nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799
volume of his Poems with a preface noting that these lyric pictures of modern life
showed “no likeness to any poems in our language,” are examples of his creativity.
His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of
Kehama (1810) were popular at the time, but his reputation was built on his prose
work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32),
and his classic version of “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote a different kind of poetry: his sensibility, values, much of his
diction, and heroic couplet verse form are all from the 18th century. However, he
varies from the previous Augustans in that he focuses on factual, unsentimental
depictions of the lives of the low and middle classes. In his collections of poetic
tales (in which he predicts several short-story approaches), he demonstrates strong
storytelling abilities as well as great descriptive abilities.

In 1783, he published his anti-pastoral “The Village”. After a long hiatus, he

returned to poetry with “The Parish Register” (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales
in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), all of which were well-received in
the early 1800s.

3.4 The Later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron

The following generation of poets shared their forefathers' desire for liberty (now
heightened by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to benefit from their
experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley was particularly interested in politics, having
fallen under the spell of William Godwin's anarchist ideals in 1793 with his Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice. Shelley's revolutionary zeal led him to assert in his
critical essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821, 1840) that poetry is “the most unfailing
herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
beneficial change in opinion or institution,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.”

The early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna (renamed The Revolt of
Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound all reflect this fervor
(1820). As the magnificent “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) demonstrates, Shelley
considered himself as both poet and prophet. It is a mistake to look for concreteness
in his poetry since his preoccupation is with subtleties of perception and the
underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic pictures are of sky and weather,
lights and fires, despite his knowledge of real politics. His literary position

31
encourages the reader to respond with an outward goal as well. It is based on
Rousseau's belief in an underlying spirit in individuals that are more true to human
nature than the behavior exhibited and approved by society. In that respect, his
subject matter is transcendental and cosmic, and his presentation is perfectly suited.
He is a poet of energy and power at his finest, with remarkable technical brilliance.

John Keats, on the other hand, was a poet who was so sensual and physically
particular that his early work, such as Endymion (1818), can be considered overly
luxurious and cloying. Keats was resolved to discipline himself, as his early poem
“Sleep and Poetry” shows. He devoted himself to the expression of his vision with
feverish intensity, even before February 1820, when he first began coughing blood.
He may have realized he didn't have long to live. Still, he continued his efforts with
a variety of poems such as “Isabella” (published 1820), an adaptation of a tale by
Giovanni Boccaccio, which is a masterwork of craftsmanship in its attempt to
recreate a medieval atmosphere while also being a poem about current events.

Hyperion (begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; subsequently resumed

and published posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) features a fresh
spareness of imagery, but Keats quickly found the language too Miltonic and
resolved to give himself up to “other sensations.”

“The Eve of St. Agnes” and the epic odes “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,”
and “To Autumn” are among the “other feelings” discovered in Keats' “Annus
mirabilis” of 1819. These poems, together with the Hyperion poems, represent the
pinnacle of Keats' achievement, demonstrating “the taming of feeling into symbolic
meaning,” with complicated themes treated with the tangible richness of detail. His
brilliant letters demonstrate the breadth of intelligence at work in his poems.

In reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” issues, George Gordon, Lord

Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at one with
them. He produced a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero,
after throwing down the gauntlet in his early work “English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers” (1809), in which he focused specific derision at poets of sensibility and
announced his allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his masterpiece,
gave him two distinct personae: one, a bitter and sad exile among Europe's historic
places, and the other, a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of amorous
escapades. The dismal and misanthropic vein was further mined in dramatic poems
like Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which served to establish his name in Europe,
although he is today best recognized for witty, sardonic, and less portentous
writings like Beppo (1818), in which he first employed the ottava rima form. Don

32
Juan and his satire on Southey, The Vision of Judgment, used the easy, careless,
incisive style he acquired there as a devastating technique (1822).

3.5 Some Other Poets of the Later Period

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821),
and The Shepherd's Calendar (1822) were early successes for John Clare, a lowly
Northampton shire man (1827). In the late 1830s, both his reputation and his mental
health began to deteriorate. He spent the last years of his life in a Northampton
asylum, where his poems were rediscovered in the twentieth century.

He is one of the most quietly moving of English poets because of his natural
simplicity and lucidity of diction, his purposeful observation, his almost classical
poise, and the unpretentious dignity of his attitude toward life. Thomas Lovell
Beddoes, whose violent imagery and concern with death and the macabre evoke
Jacobean dramatists, represents an opposing pole of imagination; metrical
virtuosity may be found in the songs and lyrical sections from his over-sensational
tragedy Death's Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously, 1850).

George Darley, a small writer who found inspiration in the 17th century and whose
songs from Nepenthe (1835) are still available in anthologies, was another little
writer who found inspiration in the 17th century. Thomas Hood, a comedic writer,
also wrote social protest songs like “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The Bridge
of Sighs,” as well as the lovely Midsummer Fairies' Plea (1827). “Casabianca,”
Felicia Hemans' best-known poetry, debuted in her collection The Forest Sanctuary
(1825). In 1828, the more comprehensive Records of Woman was published.

3.6 Summary
Writers are a product of their time; the romantic poets were no different. They also
wrote according to their situations and developed ideals. Many wrote to voice their
dissatisfaction and to influence, educate and change presiding things that they did
not approve of. Their works offer insight into both their time and their thoughts.
This chapter offers mentions of the various romantic poets along with their many
different works.

33
3.7 Self-Assessment Questions
1. Who were the Lake poets?

2. Describe in detail feature of late romantic poetry.

34
Unit–4

WILLIAM BLAKE

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqool

Reviewed by: Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

35
 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 37

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 37

4.1 William Blake .......................................................................................... 38

4.2 The Sick Rose .......................................................................................... 38

4.3 The Sick Rose: Analysis .......................................................................... 39

4.4 London ..................................................................................................... 40

4.5 Analysis of the Poem ............................................................................... 41

4.6 A Poison Tree .......................................................................................... 41

4.7 Analysis of A Poison Tree ....................................................................... 42

4.8 Summary .................................................................................................. 43

4.9 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 44

36
 INTRODUCTION

William Blake was a visionary poet, artist, and printmaker who lived in London
during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His work is characterized by a unique
blend of imagination, mysticism, and social criticism, which has made him one of
the most influential figures in English literature. In this unit, we will explore the
life, works, and legacy of William Blake, and develop an understanding of his
artistic and literary vision. We will examine his poetry in detail, focusing on the
themes, messages, and literary devices that are common in his works. We will also
study the historical and cultural context in which Blake lived and worked, and how
this influenced his artistic and literary output. By the end of this unit, you will have
a deep appreciation for the complexity and richness of Blake’s poetry, and
understand his significance as a poet and artist in the English literary tradition.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able to:

 develop an understanding of william blake as a person and poet through

researching his biography and studying his literary works.

 discern the works of blake by identifying his style, themes, and literary
techniques used in his poetry.

 identify common themes, messages, and literary devices in blake’s poetry

through close reading and analysis.

 analyze the historical and cultural context of blake's life and work, and how
this influenced his poetry.

 explore the spiritual and mystical elements in blake’s poetry and examine how
they relate to his views on religion and the divine.

 examine the use of symbolism and imagery in blake’s poetry, and how these
contribute to the overall meaning of his works.

 critically evaluate the reception of blake’s poetry over time.

 apply close reading and critical analysis skills to specific poems by blake, and
develop an appreciation for the complexity and richness of his poetic style.

37
4.1 William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker who lived from
November 28, 1757, to August 12, 1827. Blake, who went mostly unnoticed during
his lifetime, is now regarded as a pivotal figure in the history of Romantic poetry
and visual art.

Northrop Frye, a 20th-century critic, described Blake’s prophetic writings as “the

least read corpus of poetry in the English language in proportion to its strengths”.
According to 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones, Blake’s visual talent earned him
the title of “far and away, the greatest artist Britain has ever produced”. Blake was
ranked number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons in 2002. Except for
the three years spent in Felpham, Blake spent his whole life in London, producing
a wide and symbolically rich body of work that embraced the imagination as “the
body of God” or “human existence itself.”

Although Blake's eccentric ideas caused him to be labeled as insane by his

contemporaries, later reviewers praised him for his expressiveness and ingenuity,
as well as the metaphysical and spiritual undercurrents in his work. His paintings
and poetry have been described as “Pre-Romantic” and as part of the Romantic
Movement. Blake was affected by the ideals and ambitions of the French and
American revolutions. A devout Christian who was hostile to the Church of
England (indeed, to practically all forms of organized religion), Blake was
influenced by the values and ambitions of the French and American revolutions.
He had a friendly relationship with political activist Thomas Paine and was
influenced by ideas such as Emanuel Sweden Borg, however, he ultimately
repudiated many of his political beliefs. Despite these well-known influences,
Blake's work is difficult to categorize due to its individuality. He was described as
a “brilliant light” and “a man neither foreshadowed by predecessors, nor to be
grouped with contemporaries, nor to be supplanted by recognized or easily
surmisable successors” by 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti. He has
written a variety of wonderful poems. The most well-known of which is his
compilation of poems known as Songs of Innocence and Experience.

4.2 The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

38
 Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

The sick rose is seemingly a simple poem with a simple message. Although
published in the Songs of Experience, it can be analyzed with both the outlook of
innocence and experience.

In the poem, the speaker addresses a damaged flower, a rose, which has been
discovered by some external agent, described as an invisible worm. This worm is
destroying the flower's life. The speaker, Blake seems to be warning the rose that
the worm has discovered the rose’s secret, and breaks past all limits, entering the
rose’s space. Its intentions are clear as it destroys the rose’s life. The rose and the
worm both are symbolic. D. G. Gillham, in his study of William Blake, makes a
distinction between metaphorical and symbolic imagery, arguing that in “The Sick
Rose” Blake does not compare one thing neatly with another (metaphorical), but
instead presents an image (or collection of images) without telling us what they are
to be compared to. Hence it depends upon the readers’ outlook what they signify
the rose and the worm with.

Since each element in the poem (the rose, its bed, and the worm etc.) is indicative
of something else, it makes the poem mysterious and fascinating. Just like several
other works of Blake, the imagery in The Sick Rose is rich in symbolism, but it
would be dangerous to reduce such imagery to a simple 'rose = love' equation. As
a result, a few words of analysis may be beneficial.

4.3 The Sick Rose: Analysis

The way we analyze the poet's two major imagery poems, the rose, and the worm,
has a big impact on how we perceive the poem's meaning. Given that worms are
associated with deterioration and are widely stated to feed upon the dead, one way
to look at it, is to consider the worm as a symbol of death. It's worth noting that the
rose's demise is continuing, rather than a one-time event: decay and death are
ongoing processes, not one-time events.

'Thou art sick, Rose'; 'Does thy life ruin.

39
Another way to look at it is to consider the worm as an offender of some sort like a
person with bad intentions. Since worms’ ruin plants, the symbolism indicates to a
predator cornering its prey. But why is the worm flying? Worms wriggle and crawl
rather than fly. This is a symbolic worm, implying some kind of contamination on
a deeper level. The fact that the worm is a night creature suggests that it is similar
to a demon or other night-visitor that feeds on individuals while they sleep (Has
found out thy bed), similar to a succubus or incubus sexually 'feeding on' sleeping
victims.

4.4 London
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackening Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

40
William Blake's poem “London” was first published in Songs of Experience in
1794. It is one of the few Songs of Experience poems that doesn’t have a
counterpart in Songs of Innocence. Blake was a resident of London and wrote about
it as a resident rather than a visitor.

“Two Contrary States of the Human Soul” is referenced in the poetry. Poems on
love, children, and nature can be found in the “Songs of Innocence”. The poems,
according to critics, depict the effects of modernity on people and nature by
discussing harmful industrial conditions, child labor, prostitution, and poverty.

London is one of William Blake’s most renowned poems. It describes a walk

through the street of London. The speaker, who is the poet is saddened and
perplexed by the terrible state of the city which has become misery stricken and
grey. The poet is disappointed in the people for they have failed humanity and
nature alike. The poem was written in light of the industrial revolution.

4.5 Analysis of London

This poem is from the collection “songs of experience. It expresses the poet's
feelings about the society he lived in. Fears of the French Revolution impacted
England's harsh behavior throughout the 1800s. Individual freedoms were
beginning to be constrained by laws. Blake admired London at first, writing about
“golden London and her silver Thames, thronged with shining spires and corded
ships” (Poetical Sketches), but after the French Revolution, the British government
began to suppress civil democratic activities, transforming London into something
entirely different: “everything was covered with darkness, terrors, and miseries.”
(Zhan, 2013). As a result, Blake paints a dismal picture of London and criticizes
the social conditions of 18th-century England. In the third verse, there is an acrostic.
In the first letters of each line, the word “Hear” is spelled out. The last word of the
second stanza foreshadows this acrostic.

4.6 A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

41
 And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

4.7 Analysis of A Poison Tree

William Blake's poem “A Poison Tree” was released in 1794 as part of his Songs
of Experience collection. It portrays the narrator's suppressed feelings of rage at a
certain person, stifled feelings that lead to murder. The poem tackle’s themes of
wrath, vengeance, and, more broadly, humanity's fallen state.

A trochaic beat is used throughout the poem. It is divided into four stanzas and
starts with a focus on the first person. The use of the word “And” after the first
verse shifts the first-person perspective, while the focus on “I” is replaced. A line
is drawn beneath the first stanza in the original form, possibly indicating that Blake
meant the poem to end at the fourth line. The original lines 3 and 4 of the poem
read “At a Friend’s Errors Anger Shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe,” but this was
changed to “At a Friend’s Errors Anger Shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe.”

The poem implies that acting on anger decreases the desire for retribution, which
could be related to the British attitude toward fury once the French Revolution
began. The revolutionary forces were frequently linked to rage, with opposing
factions saying that fury was either a motivating rationale or simply blinded a
person to reason. Blake, like Coleridge, believed that fury had to be communicated,

42
but they were also afraid of the type of emotion that may gain control rather than
guide.

Many of Blake's poems deal with poisoning. In “A Poison Tree,” the poisoner
resembles Blake's Jehovah, Urizen, Satan, and Newton. As an inversion of the
Eucharist, poisoning a person results in the victim ingesting a portion of the
poisoner as food, by reading, or through other activities. The poisoner's poisoned
sense of reason is pushed onto the poisoned by consumption.

As a result, the poisoned's death can be understood as the poisoned's uniqueness

being replaced.

Because of a lack of trust, dominance is paramount in the poem's world, and there
is no reciprocal contact between individuals.

Like the other poems in Songs of Experience, this poem expresses a particularly
Christian sense of estrangement. As a result, “A Poison Tree” appears to play off
the Christian concept of self-denial, and Blake is probably drawing on Emanuel
Swedenborg's notion of piety masking malice, which eventually alienates the
individual from their actual character and causes evil to cease to be evil.

In contrast to Swedenborg's notion, Blake's poem has an uncontrollable chain of

deeds that leads to the conclusion. The narrator has no control over the final murder,
which is reflected in the poem's switch from past to present tense. The poem's
duplicity topic and eventual conclusion are similar to “There was a man of a
twofold deed,” anonymous poetry.

The tree appears in several of Blake's works and appears to be linked to his concept
of the Fall of Man. The narrator could be interpreted as a divine character who uses
the tree to entice people into sin. The poems “The Human Abstract” and “London”
from the Songs of Experience series also make use of the fallen state. In “The
Human Abstract,” the actual tree, labeled as a “Mystery tree,” reappears, and both
trees are cultivated within the mind.

4.8 Summary
William Blake was a visionary who sought for a better world and worked hard for
it. These poems, taken from the songs of experience showcase Blake’s observant
nature about the contradictory state of human beings. In the Sick Rose, Blake offers
a symbolic message about human experiences and destructive forces. In London,
Blake presents the sad state of London and criticizes while also pitying how the city

43
has brought itself to ruin. Blake’s time was filled with hypocrisy and injustice.
Blake incorporates these themes in his works to show that it is due to the cruelties
and wrongdoings (of the people, the higher class and the monarchy) that London
has fallen to such a state. In A Poison Rose, Blake intends to point out both the
narrator and his enemy’s nature. It can also be discerned in Biblical connotations
(For example, the forbidden apple).

4.9 Self-Assessment Questions

1. Who was William Blake and what was his contribution to English literature?

2. In “The Sick Rose”, what is the central theme of the poem and how does
Blake use literary devices to convey it?

3. How does “The Sick Rose” reflect Blake's overall vision of the world and his
critique of society?

4. In “London”, what is the speaker's attitude towards the city and what social
issues does the poem address?

5. How does Blake use language and imagery in “London” to create a powerful
and evocative portrait of urban life?

6. In “A Poison Tree”, what is the significance of the tree as a symbol and how
does the poem develop its themes of anger and revenge?

7. How does the analysis of “A Poison Tree” reveal Blake's use of metaphor and
allegory to explore complex psychological states and moral issues?

44
Unit–5

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Dr. Ubaidullah Khan

45
 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 47

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 47

5.1 William Wordsworth ............................................................................... 49

5.2 Themes Generally Employed in Poems ................................................... 49

5.3 The Beneficial Influence of Nature.......................................................... 50

5.4 The Power of the Human Mind ............................................................... 50

5.5 Individuality and Uniqueness Are Emphasized in a Democratic Viewpoint 50

5.6 The Splendor of Childhood ...................................................................... 51

5.7 Poetic Theory of William Wordsworth.................................................... 51

5.8 Style and Diction of William Wordsworth .............................................. 52

5.9 The Solitary Reaper ................................................................................ 55

5.10 A Reading of the Poem ............................................................................ 56

5.11 Tintern Abbey .......................................................................................... 58

5.12 An Analysis of Tintern Abbey ................................................................. 62

5.13 London .................................................................................................... 65

5.14 An Analysis of London ............................................................................ 65

5.15 Summary .................................................................................................. 69

5.16 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 70

46
 INTRODUCTION

This unit is designed to introduce students to the life and work of William
Wordsworth, one of the most important poets of the Romantic era. The unit will
cover a range of topics, from Wordsworth's major contributions to the language and
themes of poetry, to his use of nature and the natural world as a source of
inspiration. Students will explore how memory and imagination play a central role
in Wordsworth's poetry, and how they relate to his concept of the “spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.”

The historical and cultural context in which Wordsworth lived and worked will be
examined, including the impact of the French Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution on his poetry. Students will compare and contrast Wordsworth's poetry
with other poets of the Romantic era, and understand the distinctive features of his
style and themes.

The reception of Wordsworth's poetry over time will also be evaluated, including
the critical responses to his work in the 19th century and beyond. Throughout the
unit, students will develop close reading and critical analysis skills, and apply them
to specific poems by Wordsworth. By the end of the unit, students will have a
comprehensive understanding of Wordsworth's poetic style and themes, and an
appreciation for the complexity and richness of his work.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able:

 to introduce students to wordsworth

 to familiarize students with the ideals of wordsworth, his major contribution

in terms of language (of poetry) and his themes

 to analyze the use of nature and the natural world in wordsworth's poetry and
how it contributes to his overall themes and messages.

 to explore the role of memory and imagination in wordsworth's poetry and

how it relates to his concept of the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings.”

47
 to examine the historical and cultural context in which wordsworth lived and
worked, and how this influenced his poetry.

 to compare and contrast wordsworth's poetry with other poets of the romantic
era, and understand the distinctive features of his style and themes.

 to evaluate the reception of wordsworth's poetry over time.

 to apply close reading and critical analysis skills to specific poems by

wordsworth, and develop an appreciation for the complexity and richness of
his poetic style.

48
5.1 William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth is widely regarded as one of the most important poets in the
history of English literature. He was born in the picturesque town of Cockermouth,
Cumberland, England, on April 7, 1770. The town was located in the Lake District,
an area of outstanding natural beauty that would later become a central source of
inspiration for Wordsworth's poetry.

Wordsworth was the second child of John Wordsworth and Anne Cookson. His
family was socially and financially well-off, and he enjoyed a privileged
upbringing. His father worked as an attorney and a land steward, and his mother
was a respected businesswoman who ran a successful tea-trading company.

Wordsworth's childhood was marked by tragedy, however. His mother died when
he was just eight years old, and his father passed away when he was thirteen. These
events had a profound impact on Wordsworth, and he later reflected on them in his
poetry.

Despite these setbacks, Wordsworth was a gifted student and received a quality
education. He attended St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied literature
and philosophy. During his time at Cambridge, Wordsworth became interested in
revolutionary politics, and he supported the French Revolution and the cause of
democracy.

After leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth traveled extensively throughout Europe,

spending time in France, Italy, and Switzerland. It was during this period that he
began to develop his own distinctive style of poetry, which would later be
recognized as a major contribution to English literature.

Wordsworth's poetry is characterized by its focus on nature, the natural world, and
the inner life of the individual. His poems often reflect on the relationship between
the individual and the natural world, and explore themes of memory, imagination,
and emotion.

In later life, Wordsworth became known as a prominent public figure and a leading
voice in the Romantic Movement. He served as Poet Laureate of the United
Kingdom from 1843 until his death in 1850. His legacy as a poet and thinker has
endured to the present day, and his work continues to inspire and influence writers
and readers around the world.

5.2 Themes Generally Employed in Poems

49
5.3 The Beneficial Influence of Nature
In Wordsworth’s poetry, nature is a benevolent force. It has a beneficial influence
on the human mind. According to Wordsworth, all manifestations of the natural
world provoke noble, elevated thoughts and intense feelings in those who view
them. From the highest mountain to the tiniest flower, all of the nature contributes
to man’s intellectual and spiritual growth.

Individuals who have a positive relationship with nature are better able to relate to
both the spiritual and social worlds. As Wordsworth writes in The Prelude; A love
of nature can lead to a love of humanity. He is of the opinion that people become
selfish and immoral when they live in cities. He depicts this corrosion of human
empathy and nobility of spirit caused by artificial social conventions, as well as the
dirt of city life in many of his poems such as “The World is Too Much with Us”
(1807) and “London, 1802” (1807), etc. Wordsworth emphasizes that people who
spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, on the other hand, keep
their spirits pure and noble.

5.4 The Power of the Human Mind

Wordsworth appreciated the human mind's capacity. Individuals can overcome
difficulties and discomfort by using memory and imagination. For example, the
Speaker in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) finds
solace in nature, whereas the leech gatherer in “Resolution and Independence”
(1807) perseveres joyfully in the face of privation by using his own willpower.
Regardless of one's social position or upbringing, the mind's transformational
powers are open to all.

5.5 Individuality and Uniqueness Are Emphasized in A

Democratic Viewpoint
Throughout his work, Wordsworth advocated for the individual's political,
religious, and creative rights, as well as the strength of his or her mind. Wordsworth
discussed the relationship between the mind and poetry in the prologue to Lyrical
Ballads in 1802. Poetry is “feeling recollected in tranquility”—that is, the mind
converts raw emotion into poetry that can be enjoyed. Nature is imagined as the
source of the inspiring substance that sustains the active, creative intellect in later
works, such as “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807).

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5.6 The Splendor of Childhood
Childhood is a lovely, magnificent moment of innocence in Wordsworth's poetry.
Children have a strong link with nature, to the point that they appear to be a part of
nature rather than the human and social world. Children have a passionate and
extreme attachment to nature: they are ecstatic when they see a rainbow but terrified
when they witness desolation or deterioration. Wordsworth penned numerous
poems in 1799 about a young girl named Lucy who died. “She resided among the
untrodden ways” (1800) and “Strange bursts of desire have I known” (1800) are
among the poems that extol her beauty while lamenting her early demise. Lucy,
unlike the children who grow up and lose their connection to nature, and end up
leading unfulfilling lives keeps the innocence and magnificence of childhood in
death.

Children enjoy nature, according to the speaker in “Ode: Intimations of

Immortality,” because they have access to a heavenly, immortal world. Children
lose this link as they grow older and mature, but they gain the ability to feel
emotions, both good and terrible. Through the strength of the human mind,
particularly memory, adults can recollect the passionate connection to the nature of
their youth.

5.7 Poetic Theory of William Wordsworth

Wordsworth's notion of poetry is a radical break from the neoclassical poetic
norms. Neoclassical poets felt that poetry should be written about noble, high-born
individuals, among other things. Poems were primarily composed for an elite,
literate audience, hence it was not considered suitable to include regular people in
them. Poems about the most socially prominent individuals of society, according to
the prevailing aesthetic, should be composed. This concept was totally debunked
by Wordsworth. He fought for the representation of regular people in verse in his
own idea of poetry, which he laid out in detail in the 1802 preface to Lyrical
Ballads.

Because poetry is about the spontaneous outpouring of feelings, Wordsworth

believed it was only natural and reasonable that regular people be depicted in
poetry. After all, they had emotions and feelings, and many of them had a strong
connection to nature, which was a major source of lyrical inspiration for
Wordsworth, the Romantic. Wordsworth also thought that poetic language should
shift; sloughing off the ornamental, affected manner of Neoclassical verse in favor
of a language far closer to how people actually spoke. In fact, Wordsworth boldly
declared that the language of prose and that of metrical poetry had no essential
difference. Poetry, like prose, is composed of a man talking to other men.
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5.8 Style and Diction of William Wordsworth
Wordsworth's style is a point of contention. Many commentators believe he has two
distinct approaches. Some contend that he has multiple styles, while others argue
that he has none at all. Wordsworth believed that poetic style should be as basic
and true as daily English and that the more a poet draws on fundamental sentiments
and simplicities, the greater his art will be. In poetry, he pushed for the use of plain
language. Poetry, he added, should be produced in a “language truly spoken by men
in poor and primitive settings.” He dedicated himself to ridding poetry of all its
“conceits” and “inane phraseology.” He experimented with the use of basic
language in a number of ways that were both effective and stunning.

Wordsworth was the first poet, according to Lytton Strachey, to completely

recognize and intentionally practice the virtues of extreme simplicity, and this
achievement is his most evident claim to fame. Almost no one who is interested in
reading misses the beauty of his simplicity.

There are countless examples of Wordsworth's use of plain language that are both
successful and effective. Every one of Lucy's poems contains a startling example.
A poem on flowers, for example, exemplifies the successful simple approach.

The usage of the nobly-plain style by Wordsworth is one-of-a-kind and unrivaled.

Wordsworth has a genuine sincerity for his topics, and his subjects themselves have
a profoundly sincere and natural character. His expression is frequently described
as bald, as in the poem Resolution and Independence; nonetheless, it is bald in the
same way that stark mountain peaks are bald, with baldness that is full of grandeur.

Wordsworth prefers to write in an unobtrusive, austere manner. To appreciate the

strength and comprehensiveness, it requires a mature and thoughtful reader.
However, there are many times when Wordsworth's simplicity devolves into
triviality. While bold simplicity is frequently successful, there is also a type of
simplicity known as the bleat, which sounds like an elderly, half-witted sheep. This
results in an odd disparity in Wordsworth's verse, which has been recognized and
commented on by practically every critic.

His poor sense of humor is to blame for a lot of things, but his poetic idea is the
main reason for his puerility and grandeur. According to this theory, Wordsworth
was supposed to use “a selection of the language truly spoken by folks in low and
rustic existence,” while also coloring his subjects with his imagination.

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Wordsworth's efforts in a basic style were meant to elicit sympathy from the
common man for his fellow man. To maintain the simplicity of diction and the need
for rhyme, he compromises the idiomatic sequence of words. With stunning results,
he subverts his goal. He can upset people simply by using meters like — Poor Susan
moans, poor Susan groans.

Fortunately, Wordsworth's brilliant imagination was frequently too strong for his
theory, and in his best work, he completely disregards it. As Graham Hough shows
out, Wordsworth is significantly more eager to employ the full powers of the
English vocabulary in Tintern Abbey than his ideas would predict. The influence
of Milton may be seen in the loftiest portions of this poem, as well as in most of the
introspective blank verse works. Wordsworth occasionally employs a Latinized and
abstract vocabulary, which is often considered to be unusual in his writing and
directly related to Miltonic influence.

According to one commentator, Wordsworth has “several voices,” and even small
poems like Resolution and Independence, Yew-Trees, and Fidelity demonstrate a
wide range.

It is a dangerous simplification to assert, as Arnold does, that Wordsworth has no

style.

Dorothy Wordsworth's notebooks reveal how difficult it was for her to find the
perfect expression. Few poets spent as much time looking for the appropriate word
as they did rewriting their work. The result of such strenuous effort was often
exhaustion, which resulted in dull prosaic verse; however, the same effort produced
the wonderful poetry of Tintern Abbey, which was written in a few hours and hardly
changed, and great extempore works, such as the 1835 effusion on the death of
James Hogg.

Wordsworth's famous dullness, which measures the grave in “The Thorn” and finds
it three feet long and two feet wide, is all part of his fearless search for a diction
that should bypass literature's pomposity and take a kind of photograph or recording
of experience itself, not just the scene but the emotion associated with it.

Given the grounds on which he began, Wordsworth was correct in his banalities. In
some of the ballad poems, only the meter and inversions used to contain regular
speech in short lines generate a sad impact. Wordsworth frequently used more
visual imagery, particularly in similes from nature. But, in general, he asks the
reader to use more of their imagination than most poets.

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His poems regularly reference Milton, Shakespeare, Burns, the Elizabethan poet
Daniel, Pope, Thomson, and Gray; yet, no single work had a greater impact on him
than Milton's Paradise Lost. Rather than being blinded by words, he had maintained
a steady gaze on his subject. His imagery is based on his own thoughts and
experiences.

Wordsworth's style might be summed up as follows: “Wordsworth's language is

usually worthy of his themes.” It contains restraint, quietness, and integrity at its
best, as well as an unwillingness to be smart or fancy in order to entice the reader.
However, there are situations when it is not as serious. Wordsworth was putting
into practice his thesis that poetry should be written in a “selection of language truly
spoken by men,” but he didn't pay enough attention to the word “selection.” When
his abilities failed, he resorted to bombast as a fallback.

Wordsworth, according to Cazamian, never seriously believed that a poet's means

of expression should be identical to those of everyday speech. He makes no attempt
to equate the vocabulary of poetry with that of low- and middle-class men's
discourse. The artificiality of a language in which the tools of conveying intensity
had been worn out by the deadening influence of usage and had lost all their power
of suggestion was a problem for the poetry of the earlier period. To break free from
these shackles, to dare to speak in pure passion, was to return to the old masters'
practice. When compared to the end-of-the-eighteenth-century style, theirs was
more straightforward, racy, direct, and spontaneous.

The faith that animates the literary change, of which the Lyrical Ballads are the
symbol, includes the cults of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Wordsworth and
Coleridge seek elements for the creation of a “permanent” style on the pages of
these writers.

Wordsworth's shorter poems from the best period, however, mixed they may be,
have an undeniable value, despite their shortcomings, slips into the prosaic, or
tedious correctness of the statement. There are pure masterpieces among them, in
which the style's tension is gloriously relaxed: euphoric or sweetly infantile
spontaneity replaces focused effort. The resurgence that the preceding literary
transition was pointing towards is brought to a decisive realization in these poems.

Wordsworth's work launched the reign of liberty by breaking the spell of an

outdated tradition. England awoke to this fact, not indeed at once, but by degrees,
and in the course of a decade. All of the nineteenth-century English poets are
indirectly his heirs.

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The term diction refers to the words, phrases, sentences, and occasionally figurative
language that make up any piece of literature. When it comes to poetry writing, the
issue of diction is always there. The issue of diction is regarded as crucial since the
poet's feelings must be easily understood by the audience. Poets from all eras have
used their own poetic diction.

Classical authors such as Virgil, Spenser, and Milton influenced Neo-classical

poetic diction heavily. These poets used to write poetry using ornate vocabulary
and a certain demeanor. The frequent use of difficult words, allusions, the
personification of abstracts, and the avoidance of things considered low or base
were also major hallmarks of that age. During the period, poetry was revered as a
sacred art form. It was only open to those with a high level of intelligence and social
standing.

Wordsworth's main aim was to condemn such clumsy and over-elaborate phrasing.
Wordsworth's goal was to compose poetry that reflected life in its most basic and
rustic form. For Wordsworth, poetry must be a part of everyday conversation. It
should be written in such a way that everyone who wishes to read it may readily
understand it. All such ornate poetry, according to Wordsworth, conceals the poets'
actual and ardent feelings. He only justifies the use of embellished poetry language
when it is organically inspired by the poet's feelings or subject matter. For
Wordsworth, poetry is the expression of natural impulses, and these feelings can
only be transmitted through “humble and country living” speech, not a phony
version of the upper-class speech.

He defines poetic diction as a common man's language. It is the language of

mankind, not the language of the poets as a group. It is the straightforward
expression of pure sentiments by men who live in close proximity to nature.
Because poetic language is derived from nature, it must be spontaneous and
instinctual. The true poetic diction, according to Wordsworth, is the natural
outpouring of feelings, and so is immune to the purposeful ornamentation of words.

The natural poetic diction, according to Wordsworth, also has the quality of
bringing pleasure. There must be no obscenity or nasty elements in it. The poet
must, by his language, enhance the natural and human feelings.

5.9 The Solitary Reaper

In November 1805, he wrote 'The Solitary Reaper,' which was published in 1807.
Wordsworth was reading a friend's manuscript on a trip to Scotland when one
passage brought back a two-year-old memory of a lone reaper. The poem is made
up of four stanzas, each consisting of eight lines. The first and fourth stanzas

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contain the rhyme pattern abcbddee, whilst the second and third stanzas have
ababccdd. The fact that Wordsworth begins the poem in the present tense and ends
it in the past tense is also notable.

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings? —

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending; —
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

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5.10 A reading of the Poem
This poem begins with a direct approach written in a conversational tone by
Wordsworth. This suggests a sense of closeness, as we believe we are part of a
continuous conversation. It also provides a sense of urgency since we are placed in
the middle of the action, alongside Wordsworth, as he observes the girl at work in
the fields. He paints a picture of Man and Nature coexisting in peace with a few
well-chosen words: ‘single in the field, “solitary Highland Lass, “reaping and
singing,' 'cuts and binds the grain.' The opening stanza, however, is not only
descriptive. The reaper is introduced to the concept of reacting with the statement
'Stop here or gently pass.' What concerns Wordsworth the most is the nature of this
reaction. His focus on reactions to scenes sets him apart from the merely descriptive
poetry that was fashionable at the time. The sight of the valley full of singing in
Wordsworth's poem determines whether to stop or pass. Only the 'Dull... of soul'
would survive in such a situation.

Two images of birds singing make up the second stanza. The nightingale is
employed to establish an exotic locale, a “shady haunt” on the “Arabian dunes,”
whereas the cuckoo's habitat is the “farthest Hebrides.” Wordsworth transports us
from the heat of the desert to the chill of the North Atlantic in eight lines, not only
to express the Reaper's singing's peculiar nature, but also to describe the emotional
effect it had on him. The nightingale sings 'welcome notes' to 'tired bands,' much
as the cuckoo's proclamation of spring breaks 'the silence of the waters.' Both songs
convey relief, comfort, and optimism in the face of adversity. The suggestion is that
Wordsworth is affected by the Reaper's song in the same way.

Wordsworth returns us to the scenario described in the first stanza in the third
stanza. 'Will no one tell me what she sings?' is a conversational question; we're back
in the significant moment, but only for a moment. By posing this question,
Wordsworth invites us to consider our reactions to the song once more.

Different responses to the song result in various responses to his query. One listener
would hear 'ancient, unhappy, far-away things,' while another might hear a 'humble
lay.' In order to express a number of equally valid reactions, Wordsworth follows
up his initial inquiry with a series of further queries. His focus is on the song's effect
rather than the song itself. The word 'Whate'er the topic' in the final stanza
emphasizes this notion. He concentrates on her singing style because it is this that
worries him. The Reaper sang in an uninhibited fashion.

'Her song had no finish,' Wordsworth observed. This was a pivotal moment for him
since the mundane and familiar process of reaping coexisted with a one-of-a-kind
act of creativity that enthralled the human spirit. Wordsworth's reply of standing

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motionless and still' shows that his bodily self was rendered irrelevant as all of his
resources were directed internally to his spiritual reflex. Once this reflex had taken
place, the meaning of the moment had been absorbed: 'The music in my heart I
bore'; his efforts were redirected once more, and he mounted up the hill.' However,
the Wordsworth who ascended the hill was vastly different from the Wordsworth
who came across 'The Solitary Reaper.'

5.11 Tintern Abbey

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.— Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too

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 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

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 Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, then one
Who sought the thing he loved? For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. — I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. —That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. —And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore, am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, —both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

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 Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore, let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long

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 A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

5.12 An Analysis of Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey is a poem by William Wordsworth, the originator of Romanticism,
written in 1798 and titled Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
Tintern Abbey is one of Wordsworth's greatest achievements. It may be described
as the poet's condensed spiritual autobiography. It explores the poet's subjective
experiences and tracks the development of his intellect throughout the course of his
life. The poem's main theme is nature's influence on the poet at various stages. The
poem is about the impact of nature on a little boy, a developing adolescent, and an
adult. The poet has conveyed his love for the natural world. He had a romantic
memory of Tintern Abbey, where he visited for the first time in 1793. This is his
second time visiting this location. Wordsworth has acknowledged his strong belief
in the natural world.

Wordsworth's knowledge of God in nature is present. It gave him sensual pleasure,

and it was everything to him. When he initially came here, Tintern Abbey had the
greatest impact on him. He has returned to the same location, which features steep
cliffs, cottage ground plots, orchards, groves, and copses. He is pleased to see again
hedgerows, sporty timber, pastoral farms and green doors. This remote location,
with its riverbanks and rolling waters from mountain springs, casts a lovely
panoramic light.

The poet of vagabond dwellers and hermits' cave is remanded in this isolated
region. The poem is divided into five parts. The first portion establishes the
meditation's context. It does, however, emphasize the passage of time: five years,
five summers, five lengthy winters... But it's fundamentally the same when the poet
returns to this spot of natural beauty and peace. The poem begins with a sluggish,
dragging cadence and the word 'five' repeated five times, both of which are intended
to indicate the passage of time that has distanced the author from this scenario. The
lines that follow paint a distinct image of the fragrance. The scene depicted is a mix
of chaos and order. He can see the cliffs and waterfalls that are fully natural; he can
see the hedges that surround the people's farms; and he can see wreaths of smoke

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that are most likely coming from hermits lighting fire in their cave hermitages.
These photographs inspire not only a pure natural world, as one might assume, but
also a normal people's lives in harmony with nature.

The meditation kicks off the second portion. The poet suddenly recognizes that
these 'beautiful' forms have always been with him, deep in his thoughts, no matter
where he went. This vision was “felt in the blood, and felt alone in the heart,” to
put it another way. It has had a profound impact on him. They did not vanish from
his mind as if he had been born blind. In hours of exhaustion, frustration and
tension, these things of nature used to make him feel lovely feelings in his very
blood, and he used to feel it at the level of the impulse (heart) rather than in his
awake consciousness and through reasoning. Wordsworth's mystical perception
becomes clearer when he considers the majesty of nature from this point forward.
Human people are naturally uncorrupted, according to Wordsworth.

With wide eyes and an imaginative mind, the poet observes nature. He has always
been a nature lover, with a pure mentality. In his blood is a feeling of love for
nature. In natural objects, he experiences intense pleasure and a strong sense of
excitement. His heart beats with the ferocity of nature's love. He focuses his
emphasis on the Sylvan Wye, a magnificent and well-worth-seeing river. He recalls
the photos from his previous visit and considers his future plans. He bounded over
the mountains by the banks of deep rivers and exquisite streams on his first visit to
this location. In the past, the soundings had been a source of intense anxiety for
him. The huge rock, the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood were all like an
appetite to him at the time. But that period of time has passed. He hears the
sorrowful symphony of humanity in nature.

The poet is probably mirroring the reader's possible misgivings in the third section
so that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he means. For a brief
moment, he wonders if this reflection on nature's influence is futile, but he can't go
on. “How often, amid the joyless daytime, fretful and fruitless fever of the world
have I turned to thee (nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind, he exclaims. He
thanks the 'Sylvan Wye' for the indelible imprint it has left on his memory; his spirit
has frequently gone to this river for inspiration when he has lost his sense of
direction or purpose in life. The water takes on a spiritual significance here.

Despite the poet's seriousness and perplexity in the fourth section, nature provides
him with the bravery and spirit to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure.
This is so typical of Wordsworth that it appears he can't create poetry without
relating personal events, particularly those from his youth. He starts from the
beginning of his life here as well! It started with the raw pleasures of his 'boyish
days,' which are now all gone. “That period has passed, and all of its agonizing

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delights, as well as all of its heady raptures, are no longer with us.” The poet, on
the other hand, does not lament their passing; he does not even lament their loss.
“Other blessings have come; for such loss... because I have learned to look on
nature, not as in the hour of careless youth; but oftentimes hearing the calm,
melancholy symphony of humanity,” he says. This is a philosophical statement
about maturation, personality development, and the poetic or philosophical mind.

As a result, the poet can now experience a joy of elevated cognition, a sense of the
sublime, and a sensation of being far more thoroughly interfused. In the light of the
setting sun, round waters, and blue sky, he senses a sense of majesty and the
functioning of a superior power. He believes that all thinking things are propelled
by motion and spirit. As a result, Wordsworth declares himself a lover of meadows
and all that we perceive from this beautiful ground. Nature is his heart and soul's
nurse, guide, and protector. Despite all of his formative influences, the poet gets to
one key conclusion: he is now deliberately in love with nature. He's evolved into a
thoughtful admirer of meadows, woodlands, and mountains. Despite the fact that
his ears and eyes appear to be the source of the other half of these sensations, nature
is the true source of these beautiful thoughts.

The poet addresses his younger sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice
about what he has learned, in the fifth and last segment of the meditation. He claims
that when he hears her talk, he can hear the voice of his youth, the language of his
old heart, and that he can “read my former delight in the calming lights of thine
wild eyes.” He is ecstatic to see himself reflected in her. He claims that nature has
never deceived his heart, which is why they have been living in bliss. No wicked
words of human civilization can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact
with nature since it may impress the mind with peace and beauty and feed it noble
concepts.

In his reverie, the poet addresses the moon, requesting that nature shower its
benefits on his sister. Allow the moon to shine on her solitary trek, and the mountain
breezes to caress her. When her current adolescent ecstasies fade away, like they
did for him, let her mind become a palace of exquisite shapes and nature-inspired
thought, so that she might appreciate and comprehend life while overcoming the
difficulties of living in a harsh human society. The poem's climax returns us, almost
cyclically, to a physical perspective of the ‘steep woods, tall cliffs, and lush pastoral
landscape' where the poem's meditation is taking place.

To Nature's Superiority, the poet has revealed his genuine and natural feelings. The
language is so simple and clear that reading it over and over will not bore you. A
reader's heart is touched by the sweetness of style. This poem is written in high
blank verse, which is neither a ballad nor a lyric. It uses a low-toned, familiar blank

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verse that moves with surety, tranquilly, and inevitable ease. It has the gentle pulse
of 'core tranquilly' that pervades all of his great poems. Wordsworth's language is
beautiful in this way.

5.13 London
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

5.14 An Analysis of London

William Wordsworth, one of the most important English Romantic poets, wrote
“London, 1802” as a sonnet. The poem praises John Milton, a famous 17th-century
poet, and proposes that England would be better off if it emulated Milton and his
values. In 1802, shortly after returning to London from France, when he observed
the aftermath of the French Revolution, Wordsworth wrote the poem. Wordsworth
wrote “London, 1802” as both an indictment of his nation and a celebration of its
former greatness, contrasting France's dismal social scene with England's
exuberant, carefree mood.

The sonnet “London, 1802” by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807

(Wordsworth 64), contrasts the speaker's criticism of England's political, religious,
and socioeconomic state at the turn of the nineteenth century with an idealization
of English poet John Milton as a writer and a member of English society in the
seventeenth century. The poem “London 1802” is part of Wordsworth's “Sonnets
on Independence and Liberty,” a collection of poems (Sarker 245). It demonstrates
“Wordsworth's advance from the poet of exuberant impulse to the poet of duty and
fortitude,” and thus his turn towards a reflection on political and social issues of his
time in his poetry, as do the other sonnets in this set. In this sense, Wordsworth

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employs both form and subject in “London, 1802” to emphasize his dissatisfaction
with English society at the time and to appeal for reform.

The poem can be classified as a Petrarchan sonnet in terms of form. As a result, the
structure of “London, 1802” provides an intertextual allusion to John Milton, who
uses the Petrarchan sonnet pattern frequently in his poems, such as in “On his
Blindness.” Sarker claims that Wordsworth's sonnets, in particular, reveal his
creative inspiration from John Milton's writing style (Sarker 244f). Wordsworth's
sonnet is divided between an octave, which consists of two quatrains (l. 1-4; l. 5-8),
and a sestet, which comprises 14 lines (l. 9-14). The poem's rhyme scheme also
corresponds to the Petrarchan sonnet's shape. The sestet rhymes “c d d e c e” and
each of the lines finishes with a male cadenza, whilst the two quatrains have an
encompassing rhyme (a b b a) and corresponding cadenzas (female, male, male,
female; female, male, male, female). The poem's rhymes and cadenzas help to
structure it and highlight its thematic separation into two sense units: a negative
portrayal of modern England in the first (l. 1-8) and an idealization of John Milton
as a fictive potential liberator of England in the second (l. 9-14). In terms of Milton's
idealization in the sestet, it's notable that only masculine cadenzas are employed.
They form very solid line endings, giving John Milton a very manly, forceful, and
authoritative image.

Iambic pentameter is used almost throughout the poem by Wordsworth. He does,

however, break from it at key points in the sonnet. He utilizes trochees instead of
iambs in lines 1, 2, and 7, for example, which makes these lines stand out and marks
them as important because they deviate from the standard pattern. These trochaic
aberrations startle and pique the reader's interest. They highlight the passionate
exclamations “Milton!” and “Oh!” in lines 1 and 7. Apart from that, they create a
link between the words “Milton” and “England,” which appear at the start of two
successive lines (l. 1-2). They imply a deep bond between Milton as an Englishman
and his homeland, as well as introducing the poem's fundamental idea of England
as the problem and Milton as the remedy. While the speaker repeatedly addresses
Milton, it is more of a pedagogical role designed to make the reader, i.e., his present
society, aware of and critical of the precarious predicament England is in at the turn
of the nineteenth century. Another divergence occurs in the midst of lines 6 and 13,
when the words “happiness” and “godliness” end with two unstressed syllables
instead of one, making these words stand out and connecting them in meaning.
While “inward bliss” (l. 6) is no longer present, Milton's “cheerful godliness” (l.
13) is reminiscent of that bygone era. Milton is included in the speaker's nostalgic
vision of the past, which contrasts with the image of a corrupted country in the
present. Wordsworth's departures from the classic sonnet can also be linked to his
admiration for John Milton's literary stylistic originality, which can be seen in
works such as Paradise Lost (Bradford 139). Individuality and independence are
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portrayed through the use of caesuras, which disrupt the reading flow, as seen in
lines 2, 3, and 13.

The poem's content is set in the synecdochical title “London, 1802,” which alludes
to England's city but also represents the entire country, which is the poem's goal.
The title also elicits personal associations for the reader when he or she thinks of
London during the period, drawing the reader in. Since the cry “Milton!” is the first
word in the first line of the poem, the speaker pushes the reader to think of the
writer John Milton and to associate him with the city. The trochaic meter, as
previously mentioned, emphasizes the exclamatory effect of the beginning, which
immediately draws the reader's attention. Furthermore, comparing London and
England to a human being underlines the speaker's distinctive and unique approach
to a representation of London and England. The fact that the next line begins with
the trochaic “England” contributes to the sense that the reader is expected to see the
present-day country against the backdrop of a well-known author from the past.
The speaker emphasizes his desire to see John Milton alive again in these initial
lines in order to keep the country from withering or dying, as stated in the verses
“England hath need of thee; she is a fen / Of stagnant waters” (l.1-2). A number of
stylistic devices are essential at this point. To begin with, England is personified
since “she” requires Milton's assistance. As a result, like a human being, a country
becomes mortal. The metaphor “fen / Of stagnant waters” implies that the city has
become sluggish and immobile, making it a filthy environment that represents death
and decay. As a result, Wordsworth crafts an antithesis of life and death, the desire
for a dead poet's resurrection and the observed degradation of a still-existing land.
The assonance “England requires thee; she is a fen” stresses the country's tight
relationship with one of its former people once more. It's most likely that the
speaker is referring to the emergence of the industrial revolution and the current
war with France when he says “this hour” that Milton is needed (l.1) (Bradford
139). The speaker blames religion, the military, and the government (law,
education, and politics) for the current state of affairs in the country by
accumulating the metonymies “altar, sword, and pen” (l. 3). The “English dower /
Of internal delight” appears to have been replaced by money accumulation and
capitalism ambition for superficial material commodities (l. 4-5). (l. 5-6). When the
speaker criticises society, he also makes himself responsible for the state of England
as a citizen when he declares, “We are selfish men” (l. 6). This statement condemns
society's loss of generosity, which contributes to London's and England's
corruption.

The trochaic line is addressed to Milton again in the next line “Oh, no! “Elevate us
up, come to us again” (l. 7) is frequently understood as intertextual since it could
be referring to the words “what is low in me, raise and sustain, “which asks for
God's help in Milton's Paradise Lost (Burt & Mikics 111). The speaker in
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Wordsworth's poem asks Milton, who is described as epitomizing “godliness,” for
assistance in helping England rise up again. Because the first syllable is
emphasized, the iambic pattern is broken, and this line stands out among the others.
The speaker's emotional involvement in the troublesome circumstance is once again
indicated by the exclamation. He wishes for Milton to save the country and conveys
his desperate hope for development. He is the only one who can restore to England
what it sorely lacks: “manners, virtue, freedom [and] might” (l.8). Since Milton is
already dead and Wordsworth is well aware that he won't be able to physically
resuscitate him, the speaker praises his literary achievement as well. His work
continues on, and through it, the poem's intended audience, the English public, can
reclaim the principles listed above.

The next sestet shifts the point of view and tense from the simple past to the simple
present. It's dedicated to John Milton and gives a portrait of him as a person and a
writer before his death. In the Romantic tradition, the speaker elevates the poet and
distinguishes him from other ordinary people. He conveys his respect for Milton by
comparing his features to natural phenomena1 by employing similes that equate his
soul to a star and his voice to the sea (l. 9-10). Furthermore, Milton's personification
of the heavens and the sea makes him look as the perfect vertical connection between
the universe and the earth. As a result, the poem explores the idea of bringing two
opposites together and transforming them into one, which is a common Romantic
strategy. The vision of a “cosmic setting” (Durrant 149) or a cosmic oneness
characterized by John Milton is created by the interconnectedness of stars and sea.
“Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free” (l. 11) describes Milton, putting him
between the stars and the sea.

The consonance of employing harmonic “s”-sounds frequently in lines 9 and 10

emphasizes the notion of oneness as opposed to the alienating selfishness of people
in contemporary England. The word “voice” (l. 10) indicates this reading since the
reader is required to read the lines aloud and listen closely to the harmony that is
transmitted by the sound that is made by these words, which implicitly references
intertextually to Milton's aestheticism. To create an antagonistic juxtaposition to
the portrayal of England as a “fen / Of stagnant waters,” the simile “pure as the bare
heavens” is employed, as are the words “majestic [and] free.” While England has
lost its mobility, health, and vibrancy, Milton is depicted as a pure and free human
being who stands out by having a spectacular personality.

Despite his perfection as a human being and his “godliness,” Milton is said to go on
“life's ordinary route” (l. 12), which does not make him appear pompous but humble
(l. 13). It serves as a counterpoint to line 3's image of the altar. The poet has a closer
relationship with God and even appears to exhibit “godly” characteristics, but church
preachers appear to have lost touch with God, since they are blamed for the issues

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that plague English society (l. 4-6). Poets are seen to be closer to God than any other
human being except infants, thus this image isn't particularly unique. What's striking,
however, is that by idealizing Milton in this way, the speaker simultaneously idealises
the author of “London, 1802,” specifically William Wordsworth. Because he was
concerned with the “lowest tasks,” Milton is classified as noble (l. 13). These
responsibilities can be interpreted as his vocation as a writer who addresses social
injustices. According to the speaker, by persistently attempting to address and
overcome societal challenges, he put himself in the service of his country. It's
described as a decision made by his heart, which is embodied by the phrase “thy
heart. The lowest obligations on herself did put” (l. 13-14). The inversion at the end
of these lines stresses that it was his patriotic heart, that is, his emotional closeness to
England, that drove him to do so and entrusted him with this responsibility. With his
poem, Wordsworth aligns himself with Milton in that he, too, discusses the issues of
his period. The idealization of Milton as a well-known and respected author appears
to legitimize the use of Milton's form and substance to condemn the status of England
in the nineteenth century.

It is possible to conclude that the sonnet “London, 1802” is a kind of societal

criticism. Wordsworth confronts the negative implications of this development and
urges for change in the socioeconomic environment of the industry, the emergence
of capitalism, and the war with France by reinstalling the ideals that Milton possessed
and that are required to reclaim “inward bliss” (l. 6). As a result, as a member of the
English population, the speaker in the poem feels connected to England and loves his
country as a patriot, but he also feels compelled to address the country's flaws in order
to encourage change for a better future. With exceptions like “Composed upon
Westminster Bridge,” Romantic poetry is known for its condemnation of city life.
After the poem's publication, the fact that Wordsworth freely criticizes certain aspects
of English life and expresses his wrath was bound to be contentious.

5.15 Summary
One of the most significant contributions that Wordsworth made to English
Romantic poetry was his emphasis on the healing and guiding power of nature. He
saw nature as a source of comfort and inspiration, and often wrote about its beauty
and majesty in his poetry. His deep love for the natural world is evident in many of
his works, including his famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” which
celebrates the beauty of a field of daffodils.

In addition to his love of nature, Wordsworth was also deeply concerned about the
effects of urbanization and industrialization on society. He was critical of the
deteriorating state of London, and wrote about the need to return to a simpler, purer
way of life that was more in harmony with the natural world. His poem “London,
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1802” is a famous example of this, in which he calls upon the spirit of the poet John
Milton to help restore the moral and spiritual health of England.

Wordsworth's poetry is characterized by a high level of imagination and deep

feeling, and his use of language is often poetic and evocative. His poetry is infused
with a sense of wonder and awe at the natural world, and his works are celebrated
for their ability to capture the beauty and majesty of the world around us.

Overall, William Wordsworth was an important figure in English Romantic poetry,

whose works continue to be studied and celebrated to this day. His contributions to
the genre, including his emphasis on the healing power of nature and his use of
common language and natural themes, have had a lasting impact on English
literature and the wider cultural landscape.

5.16 Self-Assessment Questions

1. What is Wordsworth’s view of nature? And what’s its (nature’s) effect on
human beings?

2. What is Wordsworth’s opinion of London? (How does Wordsworth see

London?

3. Discuss in detail major themes in Wordsworth’s poetry.

4. Tintern Abbey is an autobiography of Wordsworth’s condenses spiritual life.

Discuss.

5. Discuss poetic style used in Solitary reaper by citing from poem.

6. What is the significance of childhood in Wordsworth's poetry?

7. How does Wordsworth emphasize individuality and uniqueness in his poetry?

8. How does Wordsworth's poetic theory differ from that of other poets of his
time?

9. What is the style and diction used by Wordsworth in his poetry?

10. What is the central message conveyed in “The Solitary Reaper”?

11. How does Wordsworth's portrayal of London differ from other poets of his
time in “London”?

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Unit–6

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Sajid Iqbal

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 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 73

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 73

6.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge ......................................................................... 74

6.2 Features of Coleridge’s Poetry................................................................. 74

6.3 Themes Generally Employed in Poems ................................................... 75

6.4 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ............................................................ 77

6.5 Kubla Khan .............................................................................................. 80

6.6 Youth and Age ......................................................................................... 85

6.7 Summary .................................................................................................. 85

6.8 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 87

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 INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the unit on S.T Coleridge, one of the most renowned poets of the
Romantic era. In this unit, we will explore Coleridge's ideals and how they are
reflected in his works. We will also examine the impact of supernatural elements
on his poetry and analyze the relationship between nature and imagination in his
works. Additionally, we will delve into the historical and cultural context in which
Coleridge lived and worked, and understand how this influenced his poetry. Finally,
we will compare and contrast Coleridge's poetry with that of his contemporaries,
such as Wordsworth and Shelley. By the end of this unit, students will have a deeper
understanding of Coleridge's poetry and develop your own perceptions of his
works.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able to:

 familiarizing students with one of the most renowned romantic poets, s.t
coleridge.

 describing coleridge’s ideals to enrich students’ imaginations so they can get

a better understanding of coleridge’s works and other poetical works with
similar elements.

 helping students develop their own perceptions of colridge’s works.

 examining coleridge’s use of supernatural elements and their impact on his

poetry.

 analyzing the relationship between nature and imagination in coleridge’s

poetry.

 understanding the historical and cultural context in which coleridge lived and
worked, and how this influenced his poetry.

 comparing and contrasting coleridge’s poetry with that of his contemporaries,

such as wordsworth and shelley.

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6.1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher who
lived from October 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England, to July 25,
1834, in Highgate, near London. His Lyrical Ballads, co-written with William
Wordsworth, ushered in the English Romantic Period, and his Biographia Literaria
(1817) is the most important work of general literary critique created during the
period.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known for writing two of the greatest English poems,
“Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He may have done more
than any other writer to popularize the ideas of the English Romantic Movement as
a critic and philosopher.

6.2 Features of Coleridge’s Poetry

6.2.1 Precocious Reader
Coleridge, the youngest of ten children, was harassed by his older brother Frank
and felt forsaken by his distant mother. These early events left Coleridge with
sentiments of uncertainty and loneliness that he would carry with him for the rest
of his life. Coleridge was an outstanding student who dazzled peers with his
eloquence, mastery of classical languages, and aptitude for creating poetry, despite
his self-doubt.

6.2.2 Restless Youth

Coleridge continued to read widely and hone his skill at Cambridge University.
But, burdened by debt, he left Cambridge in 1793 and served in the British army's
15th Dragoons under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Coleridge returned to
Cambridge after being rescued by his brothers, but he departed again in 1794,
without having received a degree. Coleridge met novelist Robert Southey that year,
and the two fantasized about founding a utopian colony in America's Pennsylvania
wilderness. However, Southey dropped out of the project, and their dream never
came true.

6.2.3 Dream Poem

Coleridge had a strong friendship with poet William Wordsworth in 1795.
Coleridge's most creative time began with the encouragement and intellectual
stimulation he received from Wordsworth. Over the next few years, he wrote a
sequence of exceptional poems, four of which were included in Lyrical Ballads
with works by Wordsworth (1798). “It was agreed that my endeavors should be
dedicated to persons and personalities supernatural, or at least romantic,” Coleridge
remarked when they arranged this landmark anthology. “The Rime of the Ancient
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Mariner” opens Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was inspired to write the poem by a
dream he had about a skeletal ship. Coleridge studied the poem extensively with
Wordsworth before writing it, and Wordsworth offered several plot ideas and even
a few lines of verse.

6.3 Themes Generally Employed in Poems

6.3.1 Childhood
Several of Coleridge's poems include references to childhood, whether it's an adult
speaker reflecting on childhood recollections as in “Frost at Midnight” and “Sonnet:
To the River Otter” or Coleridge discussing his son's hopes as in “Frost at
Midnight” and “The Nightingale”.

Coleridge’s focus on children rests around an idealisation of the unfettered nature

and innocence of youth. Coleridge believes that childhood shapes one's mature
destiny. He believes that his own childhood was tainted by city life and that by
raising his own child in the countryside, he will be able to better link his son to the
spirit of nature. Coleridge the adult finds childhood innocence and free-spiritedness
unattainable, thus he strives to extend and deepen this experience for the following
generation.

6.3.2 Innocence
Several of Coleridge's works deal with innocence, which is related to the
aforementioned issue of childhood. Coleridge expresses great joy in the prospect of
providing a nurturing and idyllic upbringing for his son in the poems “Frost at
Midnight” and “The Nightingale,” in which he either speaks to or about his son.
Coleridge addresses the vulnerability of innocence and purity in “Christabel.” In
Coleridge's writings, innocence isn't synonymous with ignorance, nor is it
synonymous with a bland simplicity. His innocence refers to a state of being pure
in one's interactions with nature and others, with no artificial walls or society
conceptions obstructing one's enjoyment of the natural world. Innocence is a deep
state of being in which one's thoughts and feelings are undivided and free of the
conflicts that most “experienced” humanity experiences.

6.3.3 Man's Relationship with Nature

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry is replete with references to nature's
wonders. Coleridge shows his insight that man and nature are independent beings
in poems like “The Nightingale” and “Dejection: An Ode.” He is of the view that
humans should not transfer their own attributes onto their interpretations of nature's
qualities. Coleridge explores how a child's pleasure is influenced by an intimate
interaction with nature in “Frost at Midnight” and “Sonnet: To the River Otter.”
Coleridge's speakers (typically Coleridge himself) frequently lament their own lack

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of connection with nature. Coleridge attributed his inability to just enjoy nature in
all of its aspects to his upbringing in the city, where natural beauty was scarce. He
ties childhood innocence and a healthy relationship with the environment, merging
them into his other major theme of nostalgia for a simpler, and purer past.

6.3.4 Dreams/Sleep
Sleep and dreams provide a gateway to happiness and ecstasy in Coleridge's poems.
In “Christabel,” the titular character had a “beautiful vision” about the knight she
would marry while sleeping. The dream world of Xanadu in “Kubla Khan” includes
exotic natural characteristics such as a “sunny pleasure dome.” When Coleridge
returns to a summer youth in the second verse of “Frost at Midnight,” he weaves a
dream within a daydream. There, the child-speaker longs for the outdoor world
outside his classroom window so much that he is lulled into a hazy reverie of
running around outside even while he sits at his desk, ostensibly learning, inside
the school. This dream permitted the young Coleridge to escape the limitations of
the classroom for a brief while, and it is to this escape that the adult Coleridge
returns in his own somber meditation in the chilly winter midnight.

6.3.5 Imagination
In several of Coleridge's poems, the power of the imagination is a recurring theme.
Coleridge investigates the extraordinary inventions of the imagination in “Kubla
Khan.” Coleridge laments the agony an artist feels when his imagination and creativity
are hampered by despair in “Dejection: An Ode.” Coleridge laments the aimlessness
of his thoughts, as well as his lack of originality and invention on the night of the poem's
setting, in “Frost at Midnight.”In Coleridge's works, the imagination is linked to nature
and infancy. The “stately pleasure dome” of Kubla Khan is a work of fiction, but the
reader is aware of this since it is an unimaginable juxtaposition of natural components
(caves of ice over an underground sunless sea). In “Frost at Midnight,” the speaker
pines for his youthful imagination, when he could sit in a classroom on a bright, hot
summer day and picture himself racing over the countryside.

6.3.6 Happiness
Coleridge's poems investigate the roots of happiness in a number of ways. Coleridge
confesses in “Dejection: An Ode” that he cannot rely on his exterior surroundings in
nature to offer him happiness, and that he must take responsibility for his inner state.
Nonetheless, Coleridge emphasises how having an intimate contact with nature can
have a good effect on one's happiness in “Frost at Midnight,” “Sonnet: To the River
Otter,” and “The Nightingale.” Returning to a level of childish innocence can also
bring happiness. Coleridge is overcome by the child's beauty and rendered dizzyingly
pleased when gazing at him in “Frost at Midnight.” Similarly, in “Sonnet: To the
River Otter,” it is his youth that makes him joyful.

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6.3.7 Evening/Night
“Coleridge's major songs are evening poems that usually chronicle the shifts from
sunset to twilight to darkness or frame themselves as solitary nocturnal vigils,”
Christopher R. Miller writes in his article “Coleridge and the Scene of Lyric
Description”. Miller’s viewpoint is exemplified in the poems “Frost at Midnight,”
“Dejection: An Ode,” and “The Nightingale.” Coleridge studies the aspects of the
evening or night in all three of these poems, while meditating on topics such as
man's relationship with nature and the actual sources of happiness.

6.4 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a seven-part ballad composed by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (Coleridge, Samuel 81-100). It was first published in 1798 as an
anonymous work in Lyrical Ballads, a collection of lyrical poems he co-authored
with William Wordsworth. The poem narrates the account of a sailor's hardships on
a journey when he kills an albatross, and his subsequent redemption through faith
and resignation to nature's forces. While Coleridge's theme, structure, and style have
given the poem its enduring quality, the synthesis of these aspects has been made
possible by the poem's artistic genius and the employment of a vast spectrum of
symbols. This synthesis of the poem's essential elements can be traced to “subtle
mergings” or the poet's “fitting material into the master design,” which is the ballad's
“grand arc or curve of the voyage,” according to James Volant Baker (Baker 122).

The poem is primarily written in balladic metre, with line numbers ranging from 4 to
9, with the larger stanzas designed to “relieve the monotony of this measure” while
also fulfilling a “diversity of functions” such as repetition and emphasis (Lennard 43).

The plot appears to be straightforward at first glance. An elderly sailor or Mariner,

most likely drifting through the streets, encounters an unwitting listener, a young
man on his way to a wedding, and tells him the astonishing narrative of his crime
and ultimate redemption. According to legend, while sailing in the South Seas, the
Mariner kills an albatross for no apparent reason and suffers the wrath of nature in
the form of a becalmed ocean, and while his shipmates perish from thirst, his life is
spared by the spirits, but he must endure the terrifying loneliness and horror of a
ship full of corpses in the middle of the ocean (Coleridge, Samuel 81-100).

The Ancient Mariner was anthologized for the first time in Lyrical Ballads, which
is said to be the epochal book that signaled a shift away from the tightly composed
poetry of the early eighteenth century and towards romanticism. In the collection
Coleridge the Critical Heritage, the anthologist Mr J.R.de J. Jackson believes that
“The Ancient Mariner” presented its contemporaneous audience with a “radical

77
divergence from the sort of verse they were used to”. The work sparked a lot of
discussion among readers and reviewers, especially around the turn of the century,
when Coleridge's career coincided with “this epoch in the birth of the review”.

The poem takes on a conversational tone, which is essentially what a ballad is all
about, by structuring the narrative around a wedding, an event whose nature is in
striking contrast to the narrator's theme. It also heightens the drama and shock factor
by telling a story about the mariner's tragedies rather than merely stating the facts
in iambic pentameter. This is one of the poem's main points of departure from the
mainstream style of the day, which was typically obsessed with urbanity, wit, and
humour, rather than a serious representation of one's own thoughts and emotions.

The poem's theme is a horrifying tale of someone exceeding their moral limit and
accepting the consequences with grace and humility. The reader/listener is brought
closer to the narrator's actual experience by using natural elements such as the
water, breezes, and sun. It may be interpreted as an attempt to break free from the
“formal and organised method of writing” that Augustan poets were accustomed to
at the time (Carter 201), which the Romantics saw as too removed from the poet's
true feelings. Poetic language had to be “closer to daily speech” for them, and
writing had to “capture the ebb and flow of individual experience”, the actual core
of which has been portrayed beautifully in The Ancient Mariner.

The poem also employs otherworldly creatures and dramatic plot twists to underscore
its Romantic vision of an allegory set in a world that only exists in the poet's
imagination. It not only generates new language arrangements, but also creates
imagined environments in which the reader is invited to join the narrator on his journey.

It is commonly known that “Coleridge's most famous poem” was inspired by the
voyages of “Captain Shelvocke and Captain Cook” as well as a dream of a “spectre
ship” related by his neighbour “George Cruikshank” during “a long winter walk
with Wordsworth and Dorothy” (Coleridge, Samuel 311n).

The poem, however, is much more than a basic assemblage of those tales. It's a deft
blend of fact and fiction in which the poet employs his “Imagination,” which he
famously characterised in his Biographia Literaria Vol. I as follows: “The
Imagination, then, I regard either primary, or secondary.” Some believe the primary
imagination to be the living Power and Prime Agent of all human awareness, as
well as a finite mind repeat of the infinite I AM's endless act of creation.

I regard the secondary Imagination to be an echo of the main, coexisting with the
conscious will, but nonetheless identical to the primary in terms of agency,
changing only in degree and mode of activity.

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The depiction of a journey in nature is another component of the poem that gives it
a Romantic character. The ballad conjures a sensation of being in the middle of
nature and involvement in the complete cycle of the Mariner's fate by describing
the account of an occurrence at sea and using animals, birds, and other parts of
nature as symbols.

The entire story can be viewed as a symbolic story, or parable, in Christian mythology,
and can be related to comparable tales on Biblical themes of temptation, suffering, and
redemption. While the Mariner's unending sense of guilt, which drives him to tell his
story over and over again, can be read as a parallel to the Christian belief in original
sin, the albatross and the numerous spirits as angels who guide the Mariner to faith and
redemption can most definitely be read as Christ and the albatross.

The Mariner also serves as a moral metaphor, representing a regular human being
who is prone to making mistakes and learning from them. It also appears to be a
common theme of maturation. Because it's unclear why the Mariner kills the bird,
one can only speculate if it's not because of his youthful impulsiveness. If that's the
case, we could say that the Mariner's entire journey represents his coming of age,
with the physical and psychological horrors he encounters serving as rites of passage.

A more eco-critical reading of the poem would lead to a different conclusion than
the ones reached thus far. A reading like this will bring attention to the poem's
underlying theme of a causal interaction between humans and nature. The poet's
frequent use of terms denoting animals, birds, and other aspects of nature
demonstrates his genuine concern for humans' tight interaction with the
environment. To be sure, the main plot, in which the Mariner is punished for
injuring an endangered bird and then forgiven when he recognises his mistake and
surrenders to the laws of nature, helps to demonstrate the idea in its completeness.
In this regard, the following lines contain the main message:

…He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
(Coleridge, Samuel 100)

As we have seen, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner lends itself to a variety of
interpretations, including: a Christian allegory of fall and redemption; a moral study
of Evil's origins; a symbolic account of the poet's emaudit figure; an
autobiographical vision of opium addiction; a 'Green parable' of man's destruction

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of nature and Nature's retaliation; and a psychological investigation into post-
traumatic stress syndrome (Coleridge, Samuel 311n). Despite the fact that the poem
can be interpreted in a variety of ways, we can derive an intriguing conclusion from
the preceding analysis by considering the work as a whole rather than the sum of
its components.

This synthesis of themes, structures, and styles is what keeps the poem together and
gives it the “synthetic and magical power that reveals itself in the balance or
reconciliation of contradictory or discordant aspects,” as the poet put it (Coleridge,
Biographia 202). The importance of The Ancient Mariner as a representative poem
from the English Romantic era cannot be overstated for this “unity of tone,” or the
synthesis of all of its aesthetic, moral, and psychological qualities into a memorable
work of poetic creation.

6.5 Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

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 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed in the following
entry (1816). “Kubla Khan” (1816), together with “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” (1798) and “Christabel” (1816), is often regarded as one of Coleridge's
most important works. While Coleridge himself referred to “Kubla Khan” as a
fragment, the work's vivid visuals have attracted a great deal of critical attention
over the years, and it has long been seen as a poetic embodiment of Coleridge's
theories of imagination and creation.

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Scholars agree that the work was written between 1797 and 1800, despite the fact
that it was not published until 1816. Coleridge dubbed it “A Vision in a Dream: A
Fragment” when it was first published, and he included a preface describing the
work's unique origins. The poet explained that he became tired while reading a
section from Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimage about Kubla Khan's court after taking
some opium for treatment. Coleridge claimed that while in this dreamy condition,
he created a few hundred lines of poetry and immediately began writing the lyrics
down when he awoke. Unfortunately, a visitor interrupted him, and by the time the
poet returned to his work, the pictures were vanished, leaving him with only vague
memories and the last 54 lines of this fragmented poem. Although many critics
have since questioned Coleridge's story of the poem's development, critical
attention has centered on the work's fragmentary form as well as its role in
Romantic writing as a prominent work of poetic philosophy.

6.5.1 Plot and Major Characters

The poem begins with a description of a magnificent palace built during the
thirteenth century by Mongolian ruler Kubla Khan. Kubla's authority is reflected in
the “pleasure dome” described in the poem's first few lines, and the description of
the palace and its surroundings also helps to express Kubla's character and nature.
In contrast to the palace and its planned gardens, the land outside Kubla's domain
is characterized by old forests and rivers, providing a majestic background to
Kubla's handiwork. The two worlds appear to be in peace at first, but the narrator
then recounts a deep fracture in the soil hidden beneath a dense grove of trees. The
tone of the poem then shifts from the first few lines' sense of serenity and
equilibrium to an unsettling sense of the pagan and supernatural.

The organized world of Kubla Khan's palace is a long way from this wild, untamed
location, the source of the fountain that feeds the river that flows through the rocks,
woodlands, and eventually into Kubla Khan's elegant garden. As the river moves
from the deep, uncontrolled chasm depicted in earlier lines back to Kubla's realm, the
narrative turns from third person to first person; the poet then expresses his own
vision and his own sensation of power that comes from successful poetry production.

6.5.2 Major Themes

Despite the disagreement surrounding “Kubla Khan's” origins, most critics agree that
the work's pictures, motifs, and concepts are emblematic of Romantic poetry. Critics
view “Kubla Khan's” focus on the Oriental setting, as opposed to the portrayal of the
hallowed realm of the river, as a widespread concept of orthodox Christianity at the
turn of the century, when the Orient was seen as the first step toward Western
Christianity. Coleridge's lyrical description of the landscape, which is both the source
and custodian of the poetic imagination, is also typical of other Romantic poetry. In-
depth readings of “Kubla Khan” reveal the work's sophisticated rhythmic and poetic
elements. While any work containing rhyme and rhythm can be called a poem,

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Coleridge argued that for the work to be “legitimate,” each section must mutually
complement and enrich the other, resulting in a harmonious total.

In “Kubla Khan,” he employs this complex rhyming structure to lead the reader
through the poem's themes: the first half's ordered rhymes describe Kubla Khan's
ordered world, while the abrupt change in metre and rhyme that follows describes
the natural world around him—the world that he cannot control. This pattern of
contrasting contrasts continues throughout the poem, and the conflict is represented
in Coleridge's use of rhythm and order. “Kubla Khan” is a complicated work with
purpose and structure, according to critics, and it exemplifies Coleridge's poetic
ideal of a harmonious synthesis of content and form that results in a “graceful and
intellectual whole.”

6.5.3 Critical Reception

It is thought that Coleridge first published “Kubla Khan” in 1816 for financial
reasons and as an addendum to the more substantial “Christabel.” Wordsworth had
earlier rejected the poem from the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, and there
is scant evidence that Coleridge considered it one of his most important works. In
fact, many contemporary reviewers classified the poem as “nonsense” when it was
initially published, owing to its fragmentary form. In the years afterward, critics
have dissected the poem, as well as the story of its production, and considerable
critical scholarship has concentrated on the poem's sources as well as the visuals
incorporated in it. Recent examinations of the poem have looked at the poem's
fragmentary form versus the poem's proposed harmonious vision of poetic
philosophy. Timothy Bahti, for example, proposes that the poet uses the symbol of
the chasm to represent the act of creation and that the struggle between fragment
and division that generates the sacred river is representative of the act of creative
continuity, in an essay analysing the fragmentary nature of “Kubla Khan.”

Other commentators have emphasized “Kubla Khan's” relevance as a work that

defines Coleridge's notions of poetic production as a poem that tells the story of its
own creation. Thematic repetition, intricate rhymes, and carefully juxtaposed images
in “Kubla Khan” are now widely acknowledged as a technically complex poem that
reflects many of its creator's poetic and creative philosophies, and the work's thematic
repetition, intricate rhymes, and carefully juxtaposed images come together as a
harmonious whole that is representative of Coleridge's ideas of poetic creation.

6.5.4 Critical Analysis

Young age and old age are contrasted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem “Youth
and Age.” The poem revolves around the subject of death. The poetry also has
autobiographical components. All of life's positive elements are associated with
youth, and life is living a poetic age, according to the poet. This poem is divided
into three distinct stanzas.

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The first stanza is about youth and how full of promise it is. When things seemed
to be going well, Coleridge expresses his regret. He was young at the time (and still
is), and he looked at life with hope and happiness. He felt the allure of natural items
as a sensitive young man and looked forward with youthful zeal. He refers to youth
as a piece of poetry that develops wanderlust in the same way that a child's play or
air does. He provokes youth as a component of a longing-filled life.

Nature and its objects drew him in with their allure. Life was a pleasure to him, and
youth was like a bee feeding on desires, clinging to hope. However, he is taken
aback to realise that youth has passed him by and that old age has become his
companion. This causes him to reminisce about his younger years. He was
physically stronger and not as frail. He was fit enough to scale aery cliffs and sprint
through glistening dunes. He reminded me of those ancient trim skiffs that float on
twisting lakes, in huge rivers, without a sail or oar, and have no fear of wind or tide.
The use of simile to represent the courage and vigour of youth is remarkable. He
regretfully measures the differences between youth and old age, missing his youth.
He referred to this physique as a breathing dwelling that he did not construct with his
own hands. He bemoans the fact that his body has corrupted his morality and ethics.

The second stanza discusses how friendship protects us and how we require love.
He recognises that he is getting older because hope is no longer the most crucial
factor, but he still feels young. He was endowed with friendship, love, and liberty
throughout this age known as youth. He emphasises his closeness to the delights of
friendship, love, and liberty, which have rained down like rain. But, when he comes
to terms with the truth that he is old, he comforts himself with the adage that life is
nothing more than a notion.

Life is what we make of it. It's just a matter of thinking about it. Now he is
confronted with reality, and he has no choice but to acknowledge that he has aged.
However, even after becoming aware of this fact, he refuses to accept reality. He
consoles himself by saying that youth has not yet died and that the vesper bell of
youth has not yet rung. He's attempting to reassure her that while he may be
physically old, he is not spiritually. He refuses to recognise old age as a hard truth
of life. It appears to have put on a bizarre masker to deceive him into believing it
has vanished. Coleridge is terrified of accepting that he has aged since he will no
longer be autonomous and will lose all joy and liberty. He notices his silver hairs,
sagging gait, and shrinking size, all of which indicate that his youth is fading. In
youth, dewdrops are pearls of the morning; in old age, they will turn into tears of
agony and suffering. As a result, the poet tries to distract himself from the realities
of his advanced age by debating in various ways.

As a result, he declares that he will regard himself as young. It suggests he is not

old and that he and youth are still together; he is still a child. Throughout the poem,
the old protagonist (as he has become old) consoles himself in this way, attempting
to escape from the reality of old age. The third stanza describes how he believes
death is approaching and how he is grieving. He laments the fact that old age
forewarns us of the joys of the world being exchanged for a bleak place.
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6.6 Youth and Age
Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee—
Both were mine! Life went a-maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!

When I was young? —Ah, woful When!

Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flashed along: —
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in't together.

Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;

Friendship is a sheltering tree;
O! the joys, that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,
Ere I was old!
Ere I was old? Ah woful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known, that Thou and I were one,
I'll think it but a fond conceit—
It cannot be that Thou art gone!

Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll’d: —

And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on,
To make believe, that thou are gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size:
But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought: so think I will
That Youth and I are house-mates still.

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 Dew-drops are the gems of morning,
But the tears of mournful eve!
Where no hope is, life's a warning
That only serves to make us grieve,
When we are old:
That only serves to make us grieve
With oft and tedious taking-leave,
Like some poor nigh-related guest,
That may not rudely be dismist;
Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while,
And tells the jest without the smile.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem “Youth and Age” is considered one of the most
romantic poems in which he contrasts youth and old age. The poet has attempted to
illustrate how these two stages of our lives are so dissimilar in this poem. One
resembles a blossoming flower, while the other resembles the sunrise. The poet
employed a variety of wonderful pictures to convey these two stages of existence.

As we read the opening verse of 'Youth and Age,' we realise that the poet has associated
youth with all of life's wonderful aspects. Furthermore, the poet has conveyed to us all
of the joys and liberties that he experienced as a child through the use of vivid imagery.
The poet was full of lofty ambitions and expectations for the future, and everything
appeared to be good and readily achievable. The poet was filled with new power and
life, and the world appeared to be good. Coleridge has succeeded in conveying the
delights of childhood thanks to his remarkable imaginative powers.

In the second verse of 'Youth and Age,' the poet laments the passage of time once
more. He recalls his childhood memories vividly. And he mulls on the changes that
time has brought about in him, changes that have occurred in his physique. As a
result, we can see that Coleridge has captured the helplessness of old age through
his imaginative abilities. In his youth, the poet recalls having all of life's blessings.
He had a lot of energy and was very active.

He compares it to the small, fast yachts that ply the lakes and rivers without
assistance. Nothing used to bother him, and he seemed unconcerned about his
surroundings. Because when we are young, we are full of health and vitality and
never consider becoming ill, whereas as we grow older, everything, including our
mental and physical health, becomes a downward spiral.

The poet states in stanza three of 'Youth and Age' that when you're young,
everything seems nice and you appreciate nature. He sensed the allure of natural
objects as a sensitive young man, and he looked forward with the vigour of youth.
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He was physically stronger in his youth, and he was drawn to nature and its objects.
Love, according to the poet, is like a flower, and friendship is like a tree that protects
you from the elements. The poet considers himself fortunate to be surrounded by
friends. But, when he comes to terms with the fact that he has aged, he comforts
himself with the philosophy that we only age when our way of thinking ages.

So the poet soothes himself by stating that youth has not vanished, but it is how we
perceive the world that has changed. He refuses to recognise old age as a hard truth
of life. When the poet cries, “It cannot be that thou art gone!” we can perceive his
hesitation. Coleridge simply refuses to accept that he has gotten old because he
believes that as he grows older, he will become dependent and lose all joy and liberty.

In the fourth stanza, we can see that, unlike the rest of the stanzas, Coleridge is
sending us a message of hope here. Life is only what we believe it to be, according
to the poet. Even if you get older physically, your mind remains young as long as
your manner of thinking and living remains youthful. Although he has gotten old,
his hair is all grey, and he walks with a stoop, the poet claims that he is still young
at heart because his thoughts are young. Because life is but a thought, we construct
it according to our perceptions of it. The poet soothes himself and the reader with
the belief that we only grow old as our thoughts age. Although your body may be
showing signs of age, no one should label you as old if your mind is still fresh.

In stanza five, the poet contrasts youth and old age again, saying that when you're
in your prime, dew-drops in the morning look like pearls, whereas as you become
older, these same dew-drops turn into tears of agony and suffering. To put it another
way, when we are young, we are full of aspirations and ambitions for a bright future,
everything appears to be lovely, and we give everything a new meaning. However,
as we grow older, we become more mature and take a more realistic outlook on life.
As we become older, the entire canvas of life shifts, and things take on new
meaning. As a result, we see that our thoughts are the only thing that keeps us young
and hopeful.

6.7 Summary
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prominent English poet, philosopher, and literary
critic of the Romantic era. His poetry is characterized by its imaginative power,
vivid descriptions, and philosophical themes. Coleridge's poetry often explores the
relationship between man and nature, the supernatural, and the human condition.

Coleridge's most famous poems include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Kubla Khan. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a narrative poem that tells the

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story of a sailor's supernatural experiences at sea, while Kubla Khan is a dream-
like poem that explores the power of the imagination. Both poems are examples of
Coleridge's ability to create vivid and imaginative worlds.

In addition to his skillful use of language and imagery, Coleridge's poetry is also
known for its exploration of themes such as youth and age, love, nature, and the
supernatural. Coleridge's poetry often reflects his own personal struggles with
addiction and his search for meaning and purpose in life.

Overall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry is a testament to the power of the

imagination and the human spirit. His works continue to inspire and captivate
readers today, and his contributions to the Romantic era have had a lasting impact
on literature and culture.

6.8 Self-Assessment Questions

1. Who was Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

2. What are the features of Coleridge's poetry?

3. What themes are generally employed in Coleridge's poems?

4. What is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner about?

5. What is Kubla Khan about?

6. What is the significance of youth and age in Coleridge's poetry?

7. What is the overall impact of Coleridge's contributions to literature and

culture?

8. What is Coleridge’s view of nature?

9. How does Coleridge deal with the supernatural in his poems? (Give reference
to Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

10. What do you think is Coleridge’s worldview in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner? In your opinion, what message does he want to impart to his reader?

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Unit–7

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Sajid Iqbal

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 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 91

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 91

7.1 Percy Bysshe Shelley .............................................................................. 92

7.2 Themes Generally Employed in the Poems ............................................ 94

7.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley's Writing Style ..................................................... 96

7.4 Idealism is Shelley's Poetry ..................................................................... 98

7.5 Platonism or Hellenism ........................................................................... 98

7.6 Vagueness ................................................................................................ 99

7.7 Melancholy and Optimism in Shelley's Poems........................................ 100

7.8 Nature ....................................................................................................... 100

7.9 Imagination .............................................................................................. 101

7.10 Supernaturalism in Shelley's Works ....................................................... 101

7.11 The Treatment of Nature .......................................................................... 102

7.12 To the Sky Lark ....................................................................................... 106

7.13 Ode to the West Wind .............................................................................. 122

7.14 Ozymandias.............................................................................................. 115

7.15 Summary .................................................................................................. 119

7.16 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 120

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 INTRODUCTION

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a renowned English poet of the Romantic era whose
works continue to be celebrated for their passion, idealism, and lyrical beauty.
Shelley's poetry was often marked by his philosophical and political beliefs, which
he expressed through themes such as nature, imagination, idealism, and the
supernatural.

In this unit, we will explore the major themes and writing style of Percy Bysshe
Shelley's poetry. We will examine how Shelley's poetry reflects his Platonist and
Hellenist beliefs, and how his writing style is characterized by its vagueness and
idealism. We will also discuss how Shelley's works often oscillate between
melancholy and optimism, and how his treatment of nature and the supernatural is
reflected in his poems.

Specifically, we will analyze three of Shelley's most famous poems: “To the Sky
Lark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “Ozymandias.” Through these works, we will
explore Shelley's use of imagery, symbolism, and language to convey his
philosophical ideas and political beliefs.

This unit will provide an in-depth analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry,
exploring the major themes, writing style, and literary techniques that make his
works enduring and influential in the world of English literature.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able to:

 identify the major themes present in percy bysshe shelley's poetry.

 discuss shelley's idealistic writing style and how it contributes to his poetry's
enduring appeal.

 explore shelley's treatment of nature in his poems and how it reflects his
philosophical beliefs.

 analyze shelley's use of the supernatural in his works.

 discuss the impact of shelley's political and social beliefs on his poetry.

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 identify the literary techniques used by shelley to convey his ideas and beliefs
in his poetry.

 analyze the imagery and symbolism in shelley's most famous poems, “to the
sky lark,” “ode to the west wind,” and “ozymandias.”

 discuss the enduring influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry on the world
of English literature.

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7.1 Percy Bysshe Shelley
Bysshe, Percy Shelley was born in Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England, on
August 4, 1792. With one brother and four sisters, he was the eldest son of Timothy
and Elizabeth Shelley, and he stood in line to inherit his grandfather's substantial
fortune and a seat in Parliament. Beginning in 1804, he attended Eton College for six
years before enrolling at Oxford University. While at Eton, he began drafting poems,
but his first publication was the Gothic book Zastrozzi (1810), in which he used the
villain Zastrozzi to express his own heretical and atheistic views. In the same year,
Shelley and another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published “Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson,” a pamphlet of a humorous poem, and Shelley
published Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire with his sister Elizabeth.

Shelley maintained his immense output in 1811 with further publications, including
“The Necessity of Atheism,” a pamphlet he wrote and published with Hogg, which
got him ejected from Oxford after less than a year of enrolment. If his father had
interfered, Shelley might have been restored, but he would have had to disown the
booklet and declare himself Christian. Shelley was rejected, and the relationship
between him and his father was severed. For the next two years, until he reached
the age of majority, he was in grave financial problems.

Shelley eloped to Scotland with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook the same year.
Shelley married and relocated to England's Lake District to study and write. Queen
Mab: A Philosophical Poem, his first long serious effort, was released two years later.
Shelley's connection with British philosopher William Godwin inspired the poem,
which expressed Godwin's freethinking Socialist ideology. Shelley fell in love with
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, and the two eloped to Europe in
1814. They returned to England after six weeks, having run out of money.

Harriet Shelley gave birth to a son in November 1814, and Mary Godwin gave birth
prematurely to a child who died two weeks later in February 1815. In January of
the following year, Mary gave birth to a second son, William, named after her
father. In May, the pair travelled to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent time with
George Gordon and Lord Byron, boating on the lake and talking about poetry and
other matters late, including ghosts and spirits. Byron suggested that everyone
present write a ghost story during one of these ghostly “seances.” The novel
Frankenstein was Mary's contribution to the competition. Shelley published
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, a poetry allegory, in the same year. Harriet
Shelley is thought to have committed suicide in December 1816. Shelley and Mary
Godwin were married three weeks after her body was discovered in a pool in a
London park. Because he believed in free love, Shelley was denied custody of his
two children by Harriet.
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Shelley released Laon and Cythna in 1817, a long narrative poem removed after a
few copies were printed due to references to incest and religious attacks. The Revolt
of Islam was later revised and reprinted (1818). He also penned revolutionary
political tracts under “The Hermit of Marlow.” He and his new bride then departed
England for the last time in early 1818. Shelley completed all his major works,
including Prometheus Unbound, in the final four years of his life (1820). He met
the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family and Byron while traveling and residing
in several Italian locations.

Shelley drowned in a storm on July 8, 1822, just before his thirty-first birthday, while
attempting to sail his schooner, the Don Juan, from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy.

7.2 Themes Generally Employed in the Poems

7.2.1 The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet
In Shelley's poetry, the poet (and, to a lesser extent, Shelley himself) is a
magnificent, tragic, prophetic hero, not just a talented entertainer or even a
discerning moralist. As in the poem “To Wordsworth” (1816), the poet has a deep,
mystic appreciation for nature, and this close connection with the natural world
allows him to reach fundamental cosmic truths, as in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of
Solitude” (1816). He has the ability—and the responsibility—to use his
imagination to transform these facts into poetry, but only poetry that the general
audience can comprehend.

As a result, his poetry takes on the role of prophecy, and a poet's words have the
power to change the world for the better, bringing about political, social, and
spiritual change. Shelley's poet is a near-divine saviour, akin to Prometheus, who
in Greek mythology stole heavenly fire and gave it to mortals, and Christ. Figures
of the poets in Shelley's work, like Prometheus and Christ, are frequently doomed
to suffer because their visionary power isolates them from other men because critics
misunderstand them. After all, they are persecuted by a tyrannical government or
because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values.
However, the poet triumphs in the end because his art is timeless, surviving the
tyranny of government, church, and society and inspiring new generations.

7.2.2 The Power of Nature

Shelley, like many romantic writers, particularly William Wordsworth, has a deep
respect for nature's beauty and feels intimately connected to its power. Shelley's
early poems reflect an enthusiastic interest in pantheism or the concept that God, a
divine, unifying spirit, pervades the universe. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” he
refers to this unifying natural force as the “spirit of beauty,” and in “Mont Blanc,”

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he associates it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River. This energy is responsible for
all human happiness, faith, goodness, pleasure, poetic inspiration, and divine truth.
Shelley claims that this energy can persuade people to change the world for the
better on countless occasions.

On the other hand, Shelley knows that nature's force is not entirely positive. Nature
destroys just as frequently as it inspires or creates, and it does it ruthlessly and
indiscriminately. As a result, Shelley's enjoyment of nature is tempered by his
understanding of its dark side.

7.2.3 The Power of the Human Mind

Shelley's primary source of poetic inspiration is nature. “The Mask of Anarchy” is
a poem on anarchy. Shelley implies that the natural world has a sublime power over
his imagination in “On the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819) and
“Ode to the West Wind.” This power stems from a deeper, more mystical source
than his admiration for nature's beauty or grandeur. Shelley believes that his
imagination has creative power over nature, even though nature has creative power
over him because it offers inspiration. The imagination—our ability to generate
sensory perceptions—allows us to characterise nature in unique ways, influencing
how it appears and exists. As a result, the human mind's strength equals that of
nature, and the perception of beauty in the natural world becomes a form of
partnership between perceiver and perceived. Shelley finds it difficult to attribute
nature's power to God because he cannot be certain that the sublime powers, he
perceives in nature are solely the result of his gifted imagination: the human role in
shaping nature damages Shelley's ability to believe that nature's beauty comes
solely from a divine source.

7.2.4 Poetic Theory

Percy Bysshe Shelley uses “A Defence of Poetry” to (1) define poetry and (2) create
a type of apologetics for the Romantic poets and poetics. The Romantic poets and
their poetry defied poetic tradition in two important aspects. To begin with, poetry
was seen to be a mimetic inspiration from God, intended to instruct on how to live
by divine commandments, from Aristotle's concept of poetics through Sir Philip
Sidney's re-articulation of Aristotelian poetics up to the Romantics. As a result,
poets believed their mission was to demonstrate how to live, love, and be as God
inspired them to realise mimetic realities. According to the Romantics, poetry was
inspired by nature and processed through the poet's imagination, which investigated
the relationships between objects and as a form of self-expression rather than a
mimesis of a divine principle. As a result, rather than lecturing on how to live, they
focused on reflecting on how people did live.

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Second, poetry has required a high subject matter of great importance with highly
placed protagonists of great impact and good poetic diction since at least Aristotle's
time. The Romantics, on the other hand, embraced commonplace subject matter,
such as Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage, with common characters and
protagonists and low language of common people (Coleridge rejected the notion
that poetry could be written in common language because all poetic utterances were
filtered through the poet's imagination, Biographia Literaria). Because of these
departures from historic poetic tradition, Romantic poets faced backlash from
critics who despised and despised the new directions poetry had taken. Shelley was
defending the Romantic poets' poetry against these adversaries.

Shelley defines poetry as the intellect at work on notions formed by the faculty of
synthesising reason with the analytical imagination. The reason “enumerates” the
“qualities” of the objects of cognition, whereas imagination “perceives” their
relationships and worth. Under their roles as “writers of language... institutors of
laws... creators of civil society... inventors... [and] teachers,” Shelly opens and ends
his article by arguing that poets are the “prophets” and “legislators” of society.

7.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley's Writing Style

The romantic age, which began in Europe at the end of the 18th century, is notable
for its artistic, musical, literary, and intellectual movements. The poetry of the
romantic age is a reaction against the Enlightenment's dominant beliefs.
Sentiments, emotions, and sensations are expressed in romantic poetry. Bysshe,
Percy Shelly is regarded as one of the most important romantic poets.

Shelley's poetic style is like that of Romantic poets. Shelly mimicked William
Wordsworth's style to a large extent. Shelly's poetry was full of tremendous
imagery and symbolism. His imagery is primarily visual. He used a lot of metaphors
and similes as well. For example, in the poem “To the Skylark,” he used a sequence
of amazing similes.

Shelly's diction is sensuous and luscious. He, on the other hand, never used fancy
terms. Every word has its value and is placed in the appropriate location. Shelly
portrayed a wide range of emotions using exceptional diction. Shelley's musical
note is enticing to the listeners. In his poem “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley used
the terza rima metre. The poem makes excellent use of this metre. Shelley's poetry
contains elements of imagination, nature, supernaturalism, sadness, Beauty,
Hellenism, lyricism, subjectivity, idealism, and many others. The following
characteristics distinguish Shelley's poetry.

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7.3.1 Lyricism
The reading of Shelley's poem demonstrates why he is regarded as one of the
English language's greatest lyrical poets. Shelly's poetry is noted for its depth of
emotions and feelings and its spontaneity and momentary and emotional impulses.
His lyrics appear to be written with ease.

His phrases are as lovely and melodious as a skylark's melody. The following lines
from Shelley's poem “To a Skylark” demonstrate the tranquil, fluid, and exquisite
spontaneity in his poetry.

“Teach me half the gladness.

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow.
The world should listen to thee-as! am listening now.”

Shelly's lyricism was exceptional. Shelly's lyricism, according to Charles Morgan,

was his one-of-a-kind instrument. Shelly's lyrical powers are unrivalled by
Shakespeare's. Shelley's lyrics were not composed; rather, they were born from the
sun, the windbreak, and the air. His lyrics give the listener a sense of deep rupture.
Love and nature provide this experience, not any instrument such as poetry.

Shelley's poetry has a melodic quality due to the meticulous word choice in his
writing. His poetry has a fluid, impetuous, serious, and joyful rhythm and
musicality. It is used to express the nature of the emotions represented in poetry.
Shelly's lyrics, for example, appear to be in perfect accord with the calm, turbulent
march of the wind in “Ode to the West Wind”:

“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: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed”

His poem “To a Skylark” appears to be a stanza-based translation of a Skylark song.

The first four words of the verse match the bird's singing, becoming louder.
Shelley's rhythm in the poem “The Cloud” depicts the movement of the clouds as
they race over the sky. Shelly is a master at blending sense with versification.
Shelly's poetry has the highest musical quality because of this synthesis. Shelley's
lyricism is his most asset. He is known as the “Prince of English Lyricism.” His

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lyrics are unsurpassable and touch the hearts of listeners due to his involuntary art,
personal appeal, musical beauty, and spontaneity.

7.3.2 Note of Longing/Yearning

There is a thoughtful tone of longing or yearning for the unreachable and impossible
desires in Shelly's poems. Shelly appears to be tormented by the Eternal Mind in
his poetry. He is always looking for impalpable and unseen objects, attempting to
see beyond life's misery. He writes about a moth's need for a star (light), the night's
desire for the morning, and the urge to devote something far from the world to
sadness in his poem “To—.”

Shelley also gave this unattainable item in the poem many names. Similarly, he
depicts this unattainable thing as a spirit of beauty in the poem “Hymn To
Intellectual Beauty.” He refers to it as an “unseen force” that lies in people's hearts.
It manifests as “terrible Loveliness,” which has the potential to free the globe from
injustice and tyranny.

Shelly's poetic bird is the skylark. It is not just a bird; he used the bird to symbolise
his principles, even though Shelley can hear but not see it. The tone of Shelley's
poetry, according to Canadian commentators, reveals intense aspiration and is
fraught with spiritual ruptures and terrible sorrows. Furthermore, it transcends the
pain and joys of regular people.

7.4 Idealism is Shelley's Poetry

A strong sense of idealism distinguishes Shelley's poetry. Idealism is sparked in his
poetry by reformers' enthusiasm. Because he uses idealism in his poetry, he appears
to have a prophetic voice. He claims in his poems that this desolate and flawed
planet must be changed into a land of love, blessing, freedom, and pure delight. He
eagerly declares his hope that his poems will one day change the world.

His poetry has a note and a feeling of escapism in it. It is because of this high-
quality escapism that he is unmistakably romantic. His gloomy haste compels him
to flee from this world of misery and hostility to a location where the world's
afflictions and pains will not follow him. In his poem “To the Skylark,” he
celebrates the Skylark's ability to reject the ground and wishes he could soar to
heaven. He also requests the west wind to uplift him from the “thorns of life” in
“Ode to the West Wind.”

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7.5 Platonism or Hellenism
Ancient Greece strongly influenced Shelley, and he was fascinated by its images.
His poetry demonstrates his thirst for the wisdom of Greek philosophers. Plato
appears to have had a significant influence on Shelley. Shelley's poetry, like Plato's,
depicts human existence and natural objects as an imperfect imitation of an ideal
form. Shelley can enjoy natural objects with greater clarity because of this. He also
evaluates the premise that poets and painters must strip away the worldly surface
of natural objects to uncover the underlying ideal model.

Platonism's ideas appeal to Shelly because they provide him with the guiding
principles that underpin ideal forms. He begins to follow Platonism when he begins
to create poetry and defines the “unseen power” that lies behind the ideal forms of
natural objects. The concept of guiding power comes in several forms throughout
his later poetry, all of which have a strong pantheistic flavour. In his poem Adonais,
Shelley elaborates on his Platonism. He says in his letter:

“The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
Lifelike a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”

Some regard this line as the best concise expression of Platonism in English poetry.
Shelly's views on nature frequently devolve into pantheism. He believes that nature
only exhibits one soul, which is indivisible. When one's earthly existence ends,
everything returns to its soul. In Adonais, for example, Shelley characterises Keats'
afterlife as a bit of loveliness that he previously made more appealing. He also
claims that when a spirit sweeps from the dull and dense earth, it travels to the other
realm with “all-new successions to the forms they wear.”

Shelley also took Plato's thoughts about love. Shelley, like Plato, regards love as a
universal force that extends throughout nature. It has authority over both human
and divine matters. Shelley depicts love in his poem Adonais as an immortal love
that is like a web woven blindly by man, earth, beast, sea, and air. Like Plato's,
Shelly's conception of love is unconcerned with sexual passion. He separates his
notion of love from the usual notion of love in the poem “One Word is Too Often
Profaned,” as follows:

“I can give not what men call love.”

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7.6 Vagueness
Shelley's poetry, according to Mathew Arnold, is unsustainable. The same facts
underpin Arnold's criticism. Shelley's poetry appears to be hazy. Shelley had been
concerned with visions from childhood. For example, in the poem “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty,” Shelley recalls looking at ghosts in a listening chamber, ruin,
and cave when he was a youngster.

In any aspect of his life, he was plagued by visions. Shelley was unable to convey
his visions with earthly representations. As a result, Shelly flies higher and higher
to the ethereal world, searching for symbols to communicate his views. The poetry
he created in the ethereal world seemed hazy to those of ordinary intellect. His
Skylark, Cloud, and West Wind are well-known. However, Shelly's poetry they
have taken on an ethereal quality that is difficult to grasp completely. Shelley's
poetry is difficult to admire without achieving his heights.

7.7 Melancholy and Optimism in Shelley's Poems

Optimism and pessimism run together throughout Shelley's poetry. Shelley's tone
becomes exceedingly negative if he expresses corruption, oppression, or personal
pain. “Stanza Written in Dejection,” “O Life!” “O World!” and “O Time!” are
examples of his anguish and pessimism. He writes, for example, in the poem “The
Indian Serenade,”
“O, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I Fail!”

Shelley's cry of suffering arises from unaffected frustration and private anguishes
in the line.

Similarly, in the poem Adonais, Shelley describes himself as Shelley's agonising

wail is born by untainted frustration and intimate anguish in the line. Shelley also
identifies himself in the poem Adonais as:
“He came the last, neglected and apart:
A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart.”

Shelley's poetry is dominated by sorrow. On the other hand, Shelley appears to be

very enthusiastic about the world's future. He is convinced that a golden age is
approaching, which will bring him bliss. All the existing oppression, corruption,
and servitude will be replaced by this happiness. Shelley appears to be filled with
excitement when he talks of the future in his poetry. In his entire poetry, his forecast
in “Ode to the West Wind” is the most optimistic statement. He addresses the west

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wind at the end of the poem, asking him to carry him through the universe's death
thoughts, sweep him away like weathered leaves to speed up the rebirth, and arouse
the dead hearts by the effect of his poetry.

Furthermore, he commands the west wind to spread the sparks and ashes from the
unlit hearth and awaken the sleeping world with his words. He refers to the west
wind as the trumpet of a prophecy and wonders if the rebirth (spring) is still a long
way off, given that winter has already arrived. Shelley's poetry is distinguished by
its unusual ability to combine optimism and despair.

7.8 Nature
Shelley, like other Romantic poets, was a fervent nature lover. According to
Shelley, nature is one spirit and the supreme power that acts through all objects. He
glorifies nature in most of his poems. Most of the poems have nature as their main
focus. Natural themes can be found in his poems “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,”
“Ode to the West Wind,” “To the Moon,” and “A Dream of the Unknown.”
He approaches to nature by describing things as they seem in the wild. He gives
those items colour and gives them human attributes by personifying them. For
example, in his poem “Ode to the West Wind,” he personifies the west wind. He
humanises the thing to make it feel capable of performing all the humans' tasks. He
also believes in nature's healing power, making him a mythopoeic poet. Shelly's
handling of nature is one of the most appealing aspects of his poetry. Shelley draws
inspiration from nature in all he writes. He gets his new thoughts from nature's
powers and objects. Though he borrows ideas from nature, the legendary handling
of these concepts makes them appealing, which is only conceivable with Shelley.
He doesn't just make inanimate items come to life by making them look human.
Shelly's poems demonstrate love and a deep awareness of nature.

7.9 Imagination
Poetry, according to Shelley, is the manifestation of one's imagination. He is a firm
believer in the power of imagination, believing that it can bring disparate objects
together in harmony. The purpose of imagination, according to Shelley, is to create
shapes through which reality can be represented to the world.
Shelley's poetry is characterised by lofty imagination and uncontrollable emotion.
In his poems, his imagination and passion are both there at the same time and find
a moving expression. With his careful imagination, he investigates the world. He
weaves together associations and impressions in his poetry to express his ideas and
objectives. He paints his mind with a variety of colours, making his poetry both
sensual and metaphorical.

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7.10 Supernaturalism in Shelley's Works
Shelley, like other romantic writers, used supernatural themes in his poems. In his
poems, he used images of ghosts and spirits to suggest the idea of a realm other
than our own. For example, in the poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the speaker
searches for the ghost and describes how a ghost can exist in a world other than our
own. In the Cave of Poesy, the speaker experiences shadows and ghosts of real
items in the poem “Mont Blanc.” Both poems depict ghosts that are not real. It
highlights the supernatural forces' mystery and elusiveness.

7.11 Beauty
Shelly's poetry is also notable for its beauty. Shelly's conception of beauty is ideal.
He refers to nature's beauty as “intellectual beauty.” He celebrates beauty as a
mystical power in his poems. He claims in his poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
that if “Intellectual Beauty” is no longer there on the earth, it will become barren
and vacant inside a huge valley of tears.
To summarise, P.B. Shelley is one of the most known poets of his day and future
generations due to distinctive attributes such as lyrical, the personification of
inanimate objects, Platonism, and many other characteristics.

7.12 The Treatment of Nature

7.12.1 Attitude Towards Nature
Like other Romantic writers, Shelley is an enthusiastic admirer and worshipper of
nature. Nature is a spiritual reality for Shelley, as it is for Wordsworth. Shelley, like
Wordsworth, sees nature as a never-ending source of comfort and inspiration. He,
like Wordsworth, believes that nature has the potential to communicate with man's
thoughts and emotions. However, there is a significant contrast in how these two
poets approach to nature. While Wordsworth gives nature a soul, Shelley goes
further by giving it intelligence. He also gives the forces of nature a dynamic
character that none of the other Romantics have been able to achieve. “Shelley is
one with the romantic mood of his day in ascribing a spiritual element and meaning
to Nature and viewing man's life as dynamic and progressive,” writes J. A.
Symonds. But he transcends beyond romanticism in his vision of a vibrant, dynamic
life of nature.” Shelley adores nature and finds solace in its presence so that he can
forget about his sorrows and loneliness. “There is eloquence in the tongueless wind,
and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rumbling of the reeds beside them,
which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awakens the
spirit to a dance of breathless rapture and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to
the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one's beloved
singing to you alone,” he writes in his essay On love.

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7.12.2 Utilitarian Aspects of Nature
Nature, according to Shelley, is a partner who has the potential to relieve human
beings of their suffering. Shelley's personal experience influenced his vision of
nature. Whenever he is depressed, he goes to nature for comfort and is successful.
He tries to find joy in the gorgeous Italian surroundings, even on the toughest days
of his life in Italy. Shelley demonstrates a spiritual involvement with Nature in
Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills. Nature provides him with an endless
supply of wonderful images. To him, the sun is something “large, crimson, brilliant,
half-reclined on the level quivering line of the seas crystalline,” not merely a natural
event. The Euganean Hills' surrounding visual splendour succeeds in temporarily
calming his despair and instilling in him a bright optimism heightened by his
meditations on the so-called islands of Delight:

Delight:
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep, wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on-
Day and night and night and day,
Drifting on his dreary way

7.12.3 Shelley's Love for the Dynamic in Nature

While Wordsworth enjoys nature's peaceful and motionless features, Shelley is
enthralled by the dynamic. “I take great delight in seeing the atmosphere change,”
he said. This explains his deep affection for the sky and the creation of his sky-
lyrics. To A Skylark, The Cloud, and Ode to the West Wind, The West Wind never
stops moving, performing its functions over the land, sea, and sky. The cloud and
the skylark both show signs of unrest. Shelley is always aware of the changes in
nature and her cyclical regeneration; these lines from Adonais serve as an example:

Ah, Woe is me! Winter is come and gone,

But grief returns with the revolving year:
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear.

Shelley may like seeing nature in all its forms, but there is little doubt that nature's
things are more important to him than the forms themselves.

7.12.4 Symbolism Drew from Nature

Shelley frequently goes outside searching for symbols to give his abstract thoughts
and feelings physical forms. He has a deeper understanding of nature than other
poets, and he finds an endless supply of symbols in it. When he discovers a cymbal
to suit his goal in nature, his poetry becomes more significant and robust. Shelley

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discovers different metaphorical interpretations in The West Wind. The wind is a
destroyer and a preserver to him, a symbol of change. He uses the wind as a
metaphor for himself, calling it “tameless, quick, and proud.” Finally, the wind is
elevated to the status of a symbol of the energies capable of bringing about the
golden millennium, in which mankind's sorrows are replaced by pure enjoyment.
Shelley sees the flower, which changes but never dies, as a metaphor for his
conviction in immortality and desire for supernal position, and the skylark as a
symbol of his optimism for mankind's freedom via the efforts of a poet-prophet.
“Pansies” represent the fate of Shelley's poetry in Adonais, while “violets”
represent his modesty and innocence. Shelley constantly invoked the sky, stars, sun,
moon, wind, and river as emblems of Eternity. Such an allusion to the immortality
of stars can be found in Adonais:

The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn;

He sets, and each ephemeral insect then
Is gathered into death without a dawn,
And the immortal stars awake again.

7.12.5 Nature Imagery

Shelley's poetry is full of images borrowed from nature. His visuals frequently have
a graphical character that is not found in paintings. His depiction of the Cloud is
more colourful and lovely than Constable's or Turner's cloudscapes. In terms of
Beauty, The Cloud's sunrise image is unrivalled:

The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

And his burning plumes Outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead.

To A Skylark, image after image has been stacked up in rapid succession to provide
an idea of the bird a “cloud of fire,” a “unembodied delight,” a “poet concealed in
the light of thought,” “a golden glow- worm”; a rose “embowered in green foliage”
but still “scattering” its perfume. Through a sequence of photographs, the changing
qualities of the West Wind are also depicted. The imagery in Adonais is especially
vivid in the stanzas depicting the arrival of spring:

The cheerful tone of the airs and streams is renewed;

The ants, bees, and swallows return;
The bier of the deceased seasons is adorned with fresh foliage and flowers.
Every brake now has a pair of adoring birds;

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And the green lizard and the golden snake, like unimprisoned flames, emerge from
their trance to build their mossy nests in the field and breed.

Shelley has a natural ability to bind images at command. When Wordsworth comes
across an image, he thinks about it until the poetry that flows from it is spent; he is
frugal with images since he doesn't come across many of them. On the other hand,
Shelley is known for using one image for a brief period before discarding it in
favour of another; unlike Wordsworth, he can afford to do so.

7.12.6 Myth Making Out of Nature

Another feature of Shelly's Nature poetry is his proclivity to create tales out of the
natural world. His vast understanding of nature and his ability to feel it deeply
account for his myth-making prowess. He Personifies the forces of nature in his
poems, giving each of them individuality, feelings, and the ability to act. Morning,
thunder, ocean, winds, echo, spring, and other elements are impersonated and made
for sharing in the grieving for Keats in Adonais, for example. “His stories were not
to him simple caprices of imagination,” Clutton-Brock adds. They expressed the
sense, which he possessed, of a more intense reality in nature than is felt by other
men, using the only tools available to human language for the articulation of such
things. Nature's forces have little realism for most of us. However, these forces had
as much reality for Shelley as humans do for most of us. Shelley and primitive myth
creators differ in that they appear to regard natural forces as disguised beings more
powerful than themselves but still fundamentally human, or else as expressions of
such beings' power. But, to Shelley, the West Wind was still wind, and the cloud
was still a cloud, no matter how vivid they were to him. In his poems, they retain
their character and do not take on human characteristics, yet their traits may be
represented in imagery derived from humans.”

7.12.7 Scientific Knowledge of Nature

During his youth, Shelley was an enthusiastic scientific student. As a result, most
of his portrayals of nature are based on popular science at the time. The Cloud is a
complete representation of Shelley's scientific knowledge. The poem has the
appearance of being written by a meteorologist. His lines are as follows:

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits-

His understanding of the link between clouds and electricity is evident. Another
remark;

I change, but I cannot die………. is founded on another important scientific truth:

the continuous circulation of the water droplets that make up clouds. The poem's

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image of “Sunbeams with their convex gleams” can also be used to demonstrate
that Shelley is well-versed in the atmospheric refraction of sun rays.

“Writers who feature in the history of science, like Bacon and Goethe, are few; but
Shelley's skill of expressing a scientific outlook in his poems that 'permeates it
through and through' is more unusual,” adds Desmond King. This distinct scientific
flavour is difficult to describe.

The most important component is probably a persistent analysis of nature: a desire

to delve beneath the surface of appearance, rather than seeing things whole as Keats
and Shakespeare did, to find the causal chain between one facet of nature and
another and to link those facets imaginatively or metaphorically to interpret the
scene described.

Shelley succeeds because of his mastery of this last technique.”

7.13 To the Sky Lark

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest 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 thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an 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,
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 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,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.

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
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 glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aëreal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower'd

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflower'd,
Till the scent it gives

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Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken'd 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,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd 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?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

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;

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 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

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.

All twenty-one of “To a Skylark's” quirky, songlike five-line stanzas follow the
same pattern: the first four lines are metered in trochaic trimeter, the fifth in iambic
hexameter (a line which can also be called an Alexandrine). Each stanza's rhyme
scheme is fairly simple: ABABB.

Speaking to a skylark, the speaker describes it as a “blithe spirit” rather than a bird
because its singing emanates from Heaven and “profuse strains of unpremeditated
art” flow from its entire heart. The skylark sings as it rises higher and higher in the
blue sky, “like a cloud of fire.” It floats and flows like “an unbodied delight” in the
sun's “golden lightning.” The speaker loses sight of the skylark as it flies higher and
higher but can still hear its “shrill joy,” which descends as sharply as moonbeams
in the “white dawn,” which can be felt even when they are not seen. When the moon
shines out from behind “a lonely cloud,” the ground and air resound with the
skylark's song, just as Heaven overflowing with moonbeams.

No one knows what the skylark is, according to the speaker, because it is unique:
even “rainbow clouds” do not rain as brightly as the skylark's shower in the song.
The bird is “like a poet hiding in the light of thought,” capable of causing the world
to feel “sympathy with wishes and concerns it ignored.” It's like a lovelorn maiden
in a royal tower which uses her song to comfort herself. It looks like a golden glow-
worm, dispersing light amid the flowers and grass it hides. It's like a rose encased
in its own green leaves, whose aroma is carried by the wind till the bees are

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overcome by “too much sweetness.” Whether the rain falls on the “twinkling grass”
or the flowers the rain awakens, the skylark's singing surpasses “everything that
ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh.” The speaker addresses the skylark as
“Sprite or Bird,” asking it to share its “beautiful ideas,” as he has never heard
anyone or anything summons “a stream of pleasure so divine.” Any song would
seem inadequate in comparison to the skylark. “What objects are the fountains of
thy pleasant strain?” inquires the speaker. Is it the plain, the sky, the waves, or “love
of thy kind” or “ignorance or pain”? Pain and languor “never came close to” the
skylark, according to the speaker: it loves but has never tasted “love's mournful
satiety.” “Things more profound and deep” than mortals can dream, the skylark
must know of death; otherwise, the speaker wonders, “how might thy notes flow in
such a crystal stream?”

For mortals, happiness is intrinsically linked to sadness: mortal men “pine for what
is not” as they reflect on memories and dreams for the future; their laughter is
“fraught” with “some agony”; and their “sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thinking.” But the speaker claims that even if men could “scorn, hate, pride, and
dread” and were born without the ability to weep, they would never be able to match
the ecstasy conveyed by the skylark. He describes the bird as a “scorner of the
ground,” claiming its melody is superior to all other music and poetry. He requests
the skylark to teach him “half the gladness / That thy brain must know” because
then he will be overflowing with “harmonious lunacy,” His song will be so lovely
that the world will listen to him, just as it does now to the skylark.

The skylark is Shelley's greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the
“harmonious madness” of pure inspiration. If the West Wind was Shelley's first
convincing attempt to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through nature metaphors,
the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the
“harmonious madness” of pure inspiration. The skylark's song arises from a
condition of cleansed existence, a Wordsworthian notion of total union with
Heaven through nature; its singing is inspired by the delight of that simple purity
of being and is free of any sense of melancholy or bittersweetness, as human joy is
so often. The skylark's unhindered song overwhelms the environment, evoking
metaphor and convincing the speaker that the bird is not a mortal bird at all, but
rather a “Spirit,” a “sprite,” a “poet veiled / In the light of idea.”

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7.14 Ode to the West Wind
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: 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 shall blow

Her clarion 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, oh hear!

II
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: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, 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, 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: oh hear!

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 III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path, the Atlantic's level powers

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 gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest 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 was 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 heavyweight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

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 V
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 wither'd 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 unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

“Ode to the West Wind” is a poem composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an English
Romantic poet. The poem was written in the autumn of 1819, according to Shelley,
in the forests outside of Florence, Italy. The speaker of the poem speaks directly to
the west wind. The speaker views the west wind as a force of death and decay,
which he loves since it indicates that rejuvenation and rebirth are coming. The
speaker argues in the poem's final two sections that he wishes to contribute to this
rebirth through his poetry, and that the rejuvenation he expects to see is both
political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its writing styles. “Ode to the West
Wind” is divided into seven parts, each with five stanzas—four three-line stanzas
and a two-line couplet—all in iambic pentameter. Each part's rhyme scheme is
based on the terza rima pattern, a three-line rhyme scheme popularised by Dante in
his Divine Comedy. The first and third lines of the three-line terza rima stanza
rhyme, but the middle line does not; the final sound of the middle line is then used
to rhyme the first and third lines in the next stanza. The concluding couplet rhymes
with the last three-line stanza's middle line. As a result, each of “Ode to the West
Wind's” seven parts follows this pattern: ABA BCB CDC DED EE. Shelley takes
a huge thematic leap beyond the scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in the airy,
fluid terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind,” blending his work into his meditation
on beauty and the natural world.

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Shelley begs the wind to sweep him out of his slumber “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”
Shelley conjures the wind magically, describing its strength and duty as both
“destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his slumber “as a
wave, a leaf, a cloud!” The poet then takes a startling turn in the fifth part, changing
the wind into a metaphor for his creativity, the expressive power that propels “dead
thoughts” like “withered leaves” across the world in order to “quicken a new
birth”—that is, to hasten the arrival of spring.

The spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness,

imagination, liberty, or morality, all of which Shelley felt his work could aid in the
development of the human mind. Shelley requests the wind to be his spirit and his
metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical
instrument, similar to how the wind strums the leaves of the trees. Thematically,
although the older generation of Romantic poets saw nature as a source of truth and
true experience, the younger generation saw nature primarily as beauty and
aesthetic experience. Shelley effectively ties nature and art in this poem, using
powerful natural analogies to communicate his beliefs about aesthetic expression's
strength, import, quality, and final consequence. The poet addresses the west wind
as “you” and says:

The unruly west wind, you are the essence of Autumn. You're undetectable, but
you disperse the fallen leaves, which appear to be ghosts fleeing from a witch or
wizard. The leaves come in a variety of colours, including yellow, black, white, and
wild red. They appear to be swarms of sick people. You transport the seeds down
to the earth as if you were their chariot, where they will rest for the winter. They lie
there like dead bodies in graves, cold and modest, until your blue sister, the Spring
wind, blasts her trumpet and awakens the ground. She then pulls out the buds. They
are similar to flocks of sheep in that they graze in the open air. And she perfumes
the meadows and hillsides with lovely scents and hues. You are both an
exterminator and a rescuer, with unruly west wind moving everywhere. Please pay
attention to me!

You send the clouds swirling in the high and swirling reaches of the sky: they seem
like dead leaves shaken loose from the branches of the heavens and the sea. They
look like angels, with rain and lightning falling from the sky. Or they're strewn
across the azure sky like the blond hair of a Dionysiac follower's frantically dancing
female. Like the hair of a looming storm, the clouds reach from the horizon to the
apex of the sky—your sorrowful tune of the end of the year, West Wind. The night
sky will be like a big tomb's dome, with the clouds you gathered flowing across it
like archways. Dark rain, lightning, and hail will descend from the solid top of the
tomb. Please pay attention to me!

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You jolted the Mediterranean out of its slumber. In the Bay of Baiae, near Naples,
that blue sea was dozing near an island constructed of volcanic rock, immersed in its
clear currents. The remnants of old palaces and towers could be seen in the bay's
waters, now submerged in the water's denser form of daylight. Sea plants that
appeared like blue moss and flowers had overtaken the remains. They are so lovely
that they make me dizzy just thinking about them. Listen to me, wind—you, who
change the Atlantic Ocean's smooth surface into high waves, while deep beneath the
surface, sea-flowers and seaweed forests with sapless leaves hear your voice and turn
grey from dread, quivering, and losing their blooms and leaves—listen to me, wind!

You could carry me if I were a dead leaf. If I were a cloud, you might let me fly
with you. Or, if I were a wave, you propelled onward, I'd share your power—though
I'd be less free because no one can control you. If only I could be the way I was as
a child, when I was your buddy, traveling through the sky with you—then it
wouldn't have seemed so absurd to think I could be as swift as you are—then I
wouldn't have called out to you, pleaded to you in desperation. Please, like a wave,
a leaf, or a cloud, carry me up! I'm bleeding because I'm tripping over life's harsh
thorns! Though I was once as proud, swift, and wild as you, the time has shackled
me and lowered my pride. Make me into a musical instrument for you, exactly like
the forest becomes when you blow over it. So, what if my leaves fall like the leaves
of the forest? Both I and the forest will be filled with deep, autumnal music due to
the uproar created by your tremendous music. Even if it is painful, it will be lovely.
You should become my soul, unruly soul. You should transform into me, you
erratic beast. To spark something new and fascinating, scatter my lifeless thoughts
around the cosmos like fallen leaves. Allow this poem to be a prayer that sends
ashes and sparks throughout the human race, as if from a left unattended fire. Speak
through me, and make my words become a prophecy of the future in this way. Isn't
it true, O wind, that if winter is on its way, Spring will be just after it?

7.15 Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said— “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . .. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

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 Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an English

Romantic poet. Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817 for a poetry contest with a
friend, and it was published under the pen name Glirastes in The Examiner in 1818.
The name “Ozymandias” comes from an alternate name for Ramses II, the ancient
Egyptian king. Shelley uses a crumbling statue of Ozymandias in “Ozymandias” to
depict political authority's transience and celebrate art's ability to preserve the past.
Although the poem is a 14-line sonnet, it deviates from the sonnet tradition in both
form and rhyme scheme, revealing Shelley's concern in questioning political and
poetic standards.

The Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II was known as Ozymandias in Greek. The period
saw a resurgence of interest in Ancient Egyptian history, and the export of statues
to British and French museums began in earnest. It's unclear if Shelley saw
sculptures in person or was inspired by an actual sculpture work.

Sonnet is a poem with fourteen-line single-stanza form popularized in England by

Shakespeare and originated in Italian love poetry. The majority of sonnets are
divided into two sections: an 'octet' (the first eight lines) and a sextet (the last six
lines), with the second half reflecting on the first. The first section of this sonnet
establishes the frame narrative before describing the statue, while the second
portion cynically repeats the king's comments before concluding with a description
of the desert setting. The poem is composed in iambic pentameter; however, there
are a few deviations, such as inverted initial feet ('Nothing aside remains' and 'Tell
that its sculptor...').

This sonnet from 1817 is undoubtedly Shelley's most renowned and anthologized
poem—which is odd, given that it is an uncommon Shelley work in many ways,
and it touches on a few of the essential issues in his output as a whole (Beauty,
expression, love, imagination). Nonetheless, “Ozymandias” is a superb sonnet. It
focuses on a single metaphor: the shattered, damaged statue in the desert wasteland,
with its haughty, enthusiastic expression and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on
my handiwork, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The haughty boast of the once-great
monarch has been humorously falsified; Ozymandias' works have collapsed and
vanished, his civilisation has vanished, and all have been reduced to dust by
history's impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power. The destroyed statue is now

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only a memorial to one man's arrogance and a strong statement about human beings'
insignificance in the face of time.

Ozymandias is primarily and principally a metaphor for the fleeting nature of

political power. In that sense, the poem is Shelley's most remarkable political
sonnet, substituting the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue for the specific
wrath of a poem like “England in 1819.” However, Ozymandias represents more
than just political power; the monument can also represent humanity's pride and
arrogance in all of its forms. The fact that all that remains of Ozymandias is a piece
of art and a collection of words is noteworthy; like Shakespeare's sonnets, Shelley
proves that art and language outlive other forms of power.

Of course, Shelley's superb poetic representation of the story makes the poem
unforgettable. By framing the sonnet as a narrative recounted to the speaker by “a
traveller from an antique nation,” Shelley can further obscure Ozymandias' location
in relation to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, we hear
about it from someone who heard about it from someone who saw it. As a result,
the ancient king is rendered even less compelling; the narrative's distancing serves
to destroy his influence over us just as thoroughly as time has. Shelley's description
of the statue gradually reconstructs the figure of the “king of kings”: first, we see
only the “shattered visage,” than the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip
and sneer of cold command”; then we meet the sculptor, and can imagine the living
man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now
inferable; finally, we meet the king's people in The kingdom is now fully imagined,
and we are exposed to the king's astonishing, boastful boast: “Look on my works,
ye Mighty, and despair!” “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” says the
poet, demolishing our imagined image of the king and interposing centuries of
destruction between it and us:” 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' The
lone and level dunes spread far away around the decay of that huge wreck, vast and
naked.”

Ozymandias refers to himself as “king of kings,” a word derived from Biblical

language that suggests arrogance. It could imply that his ensuing obscurity was a
divine punishment, a theme that Shelley addressed in several of his earlier writings.
In this poem, Shelley coined several more striking phrases, and the poem's closing
lines have become part of the language, appearing in the titles of several books and
games. Alliteration is used in both 'boundless and bare' and 'the lone and level
sands,' and the sneer of 'cold command.' The term 'colossal wreck' merely refers to
the statue; 'colossal' refers to large monuments such as the Colossus of Rhodes, and
'wreck' refers to anything that has been shattered or ruined.

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Within a line, a caesura is a break in meaning and rhythm. Shelley employs many
of them throughout the poem, and each has a distinct impact. The first comes after
the second line, 'Who said:' The pause here imitates the traveller's inhalation before
recounting his story, dramatizing the moment while also creating space between
the statue's description and the poet's retelling, almost as if from memory.

After 'Stands in the desert' follows the second caesura. The final full stop and end
of the sentence add to the impression of solitude that surrounds these weird, broken
legs. Following 'Nothing aside remains,' the final caesura repeats this excellent
tactic. Like the statue in the desert, this short, grammatically complete, and isolated
sentence stands alone within the poem. The rest of the poem, on the other hand, is
made up of long, convoluted phrases that stretch on forever, like the desert or time
itself.

The statue is ruined; the legs are still there, but the torso has collapsed. The face
('visage') is half-sunk and fragmented in the sand, making it difficult to recognize.
According to the inscription, King Ozymandias erected the monument to draw
attention to his' works,' yet neither his face nor the empire he may have once
governed has survived. The 'lone and flat sands' stretch in every direction, covering
any structures or fertile fields that may have thrived here. One survivor, aside from
Ozymandias' words, is the sculptor's skill, as evidenced by the statue's success in
expressing the king's 'those passions,' even when partially wrecked. It is the
sculptor, who goes unnamed, whose work is still cherished, just as Shelley's poem
is still valued today.

The narrator of Ozymandias claims to have encountered a traveller (story 1 or

'framing narrative') who talks of his own experience in a remote desert (story 2).

Caesura - a point in a poem's line where both the grammar and the rhythm come to
a halt.

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7.16 Summary
The unit on Percy Bysshe Shelley provided an in-depth analysis of the themes and
writing style present in his poetry. Shelley's idealism is a prominent theme,
reflected in his use of vagueness as a literary device. His Platonist and Hellenist
beliefs are also discussed, as they influence his poetry and writing style.

Shelley's treatment of nature is another major theme, as he sees it as a source of

spiritual and moral inspiration. His use of the supernatural is also analyzed, adding
to the mystical quality of his poetry. The unit explores Shelley's use of imagery and
symbolism to convey his ideas and beliefs.

The melancholy and optimism present in Shelley's poems are examined, as they
provide a glimpse into the poet's own personal struggles and beliefs. His writing
style is described as passionate and lyrical, reflecting his idealistic beliefs.

The unit also included a detailed analysis of three of Shelley's most famous poems:
“To the Sky Lark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and “Ozymandias.” Through the
examination of these works, we gain a deeper understanding of Shelley's
contributions to the Romantic era and his enduring legacy as a poet.

Overall, this unit provided a comprehensive analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's

poetry, exploring his major themes, writing style, and literary techniques. Through
our exploration of his works, we gained an understanding of the poet's beliefs and
philosophy, and his contributions to English literature.

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7.17 Self-Assessment Questions

1. What are some of the major themes present in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry?

2. How does Shelley use nature in his poetry?

3. What is Shelley's writing style and how does it contribute to the appeal of his
poetry?

4. What is the relationship between Platonism and Hellenism in Shelley's

poetry?

5. How does Shelley employ vagueness as a literary device in his poetry?

6. What is the role of imagination in Shelley's poetry?

7. How does the supernatural appear in Shelley's works?

8. How does Shelley convey his idealistic beliefs in his poetry?

9. What is the significance of the imagery and symbolism present in Shelley's

poems?

10. How does Shelley's use of language and literary techniques contribute to the
overall meaning of his poetry?

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Unit–8

JOHN KEATS

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqbool

Reviewed by: Sajid Iqbal

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 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 123

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 123

8.1 John Keats ............................................................................................... 125

8.2 John Keats’s Works ................................................................................. 125

8.3 Themes in Keats's Major Poems .............................................................. 126

8.4 Poetic Theory ........................................................................................... 129

8.5 Ode on a Grecian Urn ............................................................................. 130

8.6 Ode to a Nightingale ................................................................................ 138

8.7 Ode on Melancholy .................................................................................. 147

8.8 Summary .................................................................................................. 153

8.9 Self-Assessment Question ....................................................................... 154

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 INTRODUCTION

John Keats is one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the Romantic era.
Born in 1795, Keats lived a short but prolific life, producing some of the most iconic
and enduring works of poetry in the English language. In this unit, we will explore
the life and legacy of John Keats, as well as his major works, including his poems,
letters, and other writings.

Throughout this unit, we will delve into the themes present in Keats's major poems,
including love, beauty, mortality, and nature. We will also examine Keats's poetic
theory and its impact on the development of literary movements during his time.

In particular, we will closely analyze three of Keats's most famous odes: Ode on a
Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode on Melancholy. These poems
showcase Keats's unique ability to weave together intricate themes and poetic
devices, such as symbolism, metaphor, and imagery.

By the end of this unit, students will have a comprehensive understanding of John
Keats's life, his major works, and their significance in the wider context of literature
and culture. Students will also be able to identify and analyze the themes present in
Keats's poems and understand the importance of his contributions to poetic theory.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able to:

 identify the life and major works of john keats, including his poetry, letters,
and other writings.

 analyze the themes present in keats's major poems, including love, beauty,
mortality, and nature.

 evaluate the impact of keats's work on the romantic literary movement and
the development of poetic theory during his time.

 compare and contrast keats's poetic theory with that of his contemporaries,
such as william wordsworth and samuel taylor coleridge.

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 examine the use of figurative language and poetic devices in keats's works,
including imagery, symbolism, and metaphor.

 interpret the meaning and significance of keats's ode on a grecian urn,

including its themes of beauty, timelessness, and the relationship between art
and life.

 analyze the use of nature imagery in keats's ode to a nightingale, including its
representation of the human condition and the struggle between mortality and
immortality.

 interpret the symbolism and themes present in keats's ode on melancholy,

including its exploration of the relationship between joy and sadness, and the
transformative power of art.

 evaluate the lasting impact of keats's works on literature and culture,

including their influence on later poets and artists.

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8.1 John Keats
John Keats was a notable English poet and one of the Romantic movement's
younger poets. In 1795, he was born in Moorefield, London. His father, Thomas
Keats, died when he was only eight years old. When John was 14, his mother,
Frances Jennings Keats, died of TB. These tragic events greatly affected his
thinking, bringing him closer to his other siblings, Tom and George, and his sister
Fanny. Following his parents' deaths, Keats found solace in books and painting. He
built a close relationship with the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who was like
a father figure to the orphaned learner. He also encouraged his young disciple's love
of art and literature.

In 1810, Keats left Enfield to pursue a profession as a surgeon. In 1816, he finished

medical training and became a qualified apothecary at London Hospital. His
passion for art and literature never waned, even though his medical career never
took off. In the meantime, he met The Examiner's publisher, Leigh Hunt, through
a personal friend, Cowden Clarke.

In 1817, he relocated to Hampstead, London, but his connection with Hunt

remained. For Keats, the beginning of 1819 was full of difficulties. He became
discouraged due to the negative press his long poem “Endymion” received from
critics. The Brawne family also relocated to Hampstead shortly after he did.

Soon after engaging with Fanny Brawne, he authored his renowned poems “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”. Then, in February of 1820, Keats
developed TB symptoms. Despite his severe sickness, he attempted to complete his
final poetry, and his poems received excellent reviews. However, Keats gave up
writing and travelled to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn for treatment due to
declining health, devastation and depression. However, he did not survive and died
on February 23, 1820. He was laid to rest in Rome.

8.2 John Keats’s Works

John Keats lived for only twenty-five years and four months (1795-1821), but he
left an indelible mark on poetry. His writing career lasted just over five years (1814-
1820), and three of his most famous odes— “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” and “Ode on Melancholy”—were composed in less than a month.
He wrote most of his essential poems between twenty-three and twenty-four and all
his poetry by twenty-five. He drafted poems that placed him among the great
English poets throughout this brief era. T.S. Eliot referred to his letters as “the most
remarkable and important ever written by any English poet.”

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His genius was widely recognised during his lifetime and shortly after his death.
As the epitaph he carved for his headstone reveals, Keats expected his poetry to be
forgotten as he died. “Here rests one whose name was writ in water,” he wrote.
However, nineteenth-century reviewers and readers came to like him, even if they
only had a rudimentary knowledge of his work. They regarded Keats as a sensual
poet, praising his vivid, tangible imagery, description of the physical and
enthusiastic, and engagement in the present moment. One nineteenth-century critic
said that Keats “had no mind,” rather than having “a mind intrinsically inapt for
abstract thought.”

“O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!” (Letter, November 22, 1817)
has been used many times to support this viewpoint. With the arrival of the
twentieth century, Keats' poetry gained a wider audience; he was and continues to
be admired for his seriousness and thoughtfulness, managing complex human
dilemmas and aesthetic concerns, and his enthusiastic mental quest for truth.

Keats pushed for experiencing “the most ripe, the fullest experience that one is
capable of,” believing that experience is what decides truth (“axioms are not axioms
until they are proved upon our pulses”). With their sharp intellectual interrogation
and concern for moral and artistic issues, the publishing of Keats' letters aided in this
re-evaluation. His letters shed light on his particular poetic methods and provide
insight into the writing process. Excerpts from Keats' letters can be found here.

Keats was a member of the romanticist literary movement. Romantic poets were drawn
to lyric poetry because they believed in literature and life, and they even created a new
type of ode, known as the romantic meditative ode. The regular movement of the
romantic ode is described by literary scholar Jack Stillinger as follows:

Unhappy in the real world, the poet escapes or tries to escape into the ideal. He
returns to the actual world, dissatisfied with his mental flight. He usually returns
because human beings can't live in the ideal.

However, the experience alters his perception of his situation, the world, and so on;
his views/feelings by the end of the poem are drastically different from those he
held at the beginning.

8.3 Themes in Keats's Major Poems

8.3.1 Inner Struggle
“Keats' essential poems are tied to, or emerge directly out of...inner struggles,”
Douglas Bush wrote. In “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for
example, anguish and pleasure are linked; love and pleasure are intertwined with

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death in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Isabella; or
the Pot of Basil.” “The world of imagination offers a reprieve from the harsh world
of actuality, yet at the same time it made the world of actuality more painful by
contrast,” Cleanth Brooks said of the dichotomy that is the theme of “Ode to a
Nightingale.”

Other conflicts that appear in Keats's poetry are:

• transient sensation or passion / enduring art
• dream or vision/reality
• joy/melancholy
• the ideal / the real
• mortal/immortal
• life / death
• separation / connection
• being immersed in passion/desiring to escape the passion

In both his life and poetry, Keats frequently linked love with pain. “When she
comes into a room, she produces an effect the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess...
I should like her to ruin me...” he wrote about a young woman he found attractive.
In “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil,” “Bright Star,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “La
Belle Dame sans Merci,” love and death are linked. In “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
and “Lamia,” the Fatal Woman (the woman who is detrimental to love, such as
Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) emerges.

In his odes (e.g., “Ode to a Nightingale”) and narrative poems, identity is a concern
for the poet and the dreamers. “It is not itself—it has no self—it is all and nothing—
it has no character—it appreciates light and shade—it lives in gusto, whether it is
foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or lofty,” he says of the poetic
character. He refers to the poet as a “chameleon.”

Beyond the unmistakable awareness that we are entirely corporeal in a physical

universe and the accompanying realisation that we are impelled to conceive more
than we can know or understand, there is a third feature in Keats that no other poet
since Shakespeare has possessed. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which
convinces us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, capable of grasping the
individuality and existence of selves quite different from his own and an outside
world that would outlive his awareness of it. They believe that Keats came to accept
this world, the here and now, as the ultimate value. They believe Keats came to see
this world as the most valuable thing in the present moment.

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8.3.2 The Imagined/Ideal versus the Experienced/Real
There is a perpetual conflict between these two realms in Keats' poetry. Characters
in works such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” and others show dissatisfaction when comparing perfect worlds created in
the imagination to the inherently mediocre world of reality.

8.3.3 Romance
The term “romance” refers to a movement that valued and prioritised vivid moods
and flights of fancy. Keats' obsession with early death (which, in his case, proved
to be a genuine preoccupation) and his concentration on the impossibility of
obtaining artistic/romantic satisfaction during his lifetime are both Romantic
themes. Another Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, inspired him tremendously
in depicting such issues, as he emphasised the moments of drama and insight that
can occur in everyday life.

8.3.4 The Natural World

As a true Romantic, Keats expresses deep love for the natural world in his poems.

Many of his works, like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Psyche,” have detailed
descriptions of plants (with over a hundred species names). The natural world is a
form of Eden for Keats, and it is the only place that comes near to reflecting the
ideal world of his vision.

8.3.5 The Nature of Beauty

In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats writes that the most prominent impulse for
his poems is “the mere desire and fondness” he feels for the Beautiful. However, in
a few poems, Keats delves into the nature of beauty itself. He conveys the Romantic
belief that beauty and joy can only be found in opposition: beauty can only be
discovered in sadness in “Ode on Melancholy.” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” on the
other hand, ends with the classic lines, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” a possibly
more straightforward concept and reassuring response. One of Keats' work's
touchstones is a love of beautiful physical and metaphysical things.

8.3.6 Mortality
Any casual reader of Keats will quickly notice that one of the poet's principal
concerns is mortality. Keats was forced to confront the human condition from an
early age, having lost his father at the age of eight, his mother at the age of fifteen,
and his brother at twenty-three.

The subject of death is addressed in poems like “When I have a dread that I may
cease to be,” in which Keats expresses his worry about dying before achieving
artistic accomplishment. Similar concerns are addressed more subtly in “Ode to a
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Nightingale,” in which he aspires to die while listening to the songbird of the title
(but perhaps merely for theatrical effect).

8.3.7 Paradox
Keats' poetry is defined by the ultimate inextricability of pleasure from pain,
sorrow, happiness from sadness, and life from death. The recognition of these
relationships, according to Keats, is a characteristic of practical education. “Do you
not see how vital a World of Pains and Troubles is to teach an Intelligence and
make it a soul?” In a May 1819 letter to his brother George and sister-in-law
Georgiana, Keats says. Pleasure could never be genuinely enjoyed without pain.

This paradox is best explained in “Ode on Melancholy,” but it's also mentioned in
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

8.3.8 Romantic Notions of the Female

Psyche, the Belle Dame, and the female characters of Love, Ambition, and Poesy
all appear throughout Keats' poetry, ranging from Psyche in “Ode to Psyche” to the
Belle Dame in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” to the female forms of Love, Ambition,
and Poesy in “Ode on Indolence.” Even mortal women, like the mistress in “Ode
on Melancholy,” have “peerless eyes” to be “fed upon” when they are angry.
Although Keats' male characters are frequently chivalrous, he frequently portrays
himself as a spectator-poet in relation to the women he describes.

8.4 Poetic Theory

Romanticism and negative capability are two of Keats' most prominent philosophy
points on poetry. Keats did not write a formal theory of poetry; instead, he
articulated his poetics (theory of poetry) via letters to family, friends, and Fanny
Brawne. He disagreed with Wordsworth's prominent Romantic viewpoint that
poetry is an “egotistical sublime” expression of the poet's self (perhaps as part of
Wordsworth's thesis that Wordsworth was unfaithful without recognising it, e.g.,
“A Ruined Cottage”). This celebration of the individual self, according to Keats,
was far too limited in scope for the creative imagination to investigate and portray.
This view of Romanticism was disputed by Keats' conception of “empathy,” in
which the poet immerses her or his senses and perceptions in the experience of
another being or even object (e.g., “Ode to a Grecian Urn”) and empathetically
portrayed its experience and sentiments. This is in line with Keats' concept of
negative capability.

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Keats was an intuitive poet who could reside in the space between perception and
knowledge. This contrasts with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetic positions,
which sought rational explanations based on knowledge (despite Coleridge's
specialisation in blending knowable experience with spiritual meaning (e.g., The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner). This ability to embrace the uncertainty and mystery
that exists between perceiving and knowing was regarded by Keats as a negative
capability. With fact and reason suspended, negative capability invites doubt to
reign. Furthermore, in his letters, Keats hypothesised imagination, an essential
notion for Romantic writers.

In the same way, the classic idea of mimetic poetry believed that the ideal was
revealed via the poet's inspiration; Keats argued that the ideal was revealed through
the poet's inspiration. The truth was revealed to Keats through imagination, and the
centre of truth was a beauty, with the ideal arising from the synthesis of truth and
beauty. In poems like “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” this could explain why Keats used
what is now known as synesthetic imagery. Such imagery combines disparate
sensory impressions to produce imagery in which plots of green are melodic (colour
plus sound in a metonymy for grass); singing has “sunburnt merriment” (sound is
burned by the sun's rays, requiring touch); and light blows on the breeze (sight [i.e.,
light] has mass and motion).

This synthesis motif that runs through Keats' poetic theory is represented in his
belief that pain creates soul; it is soul-making. According to Keats, the soul
develops imagination; imagination apprehends beauty, and beauty represents truth,
all of which combine to show the ideal, which the poet's inspiration discloses. Thus,
in his idea of poetry, Keats counters and separates from the Romantic era's
egocentric self-expression and reflects ancient poetic theory, shining in a new light.

8.5 Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

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 Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
Forever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or seashore?
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets forevermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

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John Keats, an acclaimed English poet, wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 1819. It's
a complicated, mysterious poem with a deceptively basic setup: an unidentified
speaker gazes at a Grecian urn adorned with evocative pictures of ancient Greece's
rustic and rural life. These scenes fascinate, mystify, and excite the speaker equally
as if they have captured life in all of its glory while remaining frozen in time. The
speaker's response varies depending on his mood, and the urn eventually raises
more questions than answers.

The poem's conclusion has been and continues to be a source of debate. The urn
appears to be telling the speaker—and, by extension, the reader—that truth and
beauty are synonymous. This poem was written during Keats' legendary surge of
invention, generating his other famous odes (e.g., “Ode to a Nightingale”).
Although this poem was not well appreciated in Keats' day, it has since become one
of the most famous in the English language.

8.5.1 Form of Ode on Grecian Urn

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” has the same ode-stanza form as “Ode on Melancholy,”
but the last three lines of each stanza have a different rhyme scheme. “Grecian Urn”
is divided into five stanzas, each 10 lines long, metered in a somewhat accurate
iambic pentameter, and divided into a two-part rhyme scheme, with the last three
lines being varied. The ABCDE rhyme system is used for the first seven lines of
each stanza, although the second occurrences of the CDE sounds are not in the same
order. Lines seven through ten in stanza one rhyme DCE; CED in stanza two; CDE
in stanzas three and four; and DCE in stanza five, as in stanza one. The two-part
rhyme scheme (AB rhymes in the first half, CDE rhymes in the second) generates
the idea of a two-part thematic structure, as it does in other modes (particularly
“Autumn” and “Melancholy”).

Each stanza's first four lines essentially identify the stanza's subject, while the last
six lines roughly explain or develop it. (As with other odes, this is just a general
guideline that applies to some stanzas more than others; stanzas like the fifth do not
have a strong connection between rhyme scheme and thematic structure.)

8.5.2 Themes of Ode on a Grecian Urn

If Keats' speaker's engagement with the lyrical expressiveness of music is depicted
in “Ode to a Nightingale,” his attempt to deal with the static immobility of sculpture
is depicted in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Grecian urn, which has been passed
down through the ages to the speaker's sight, exists outside of time in the human
sense—it does not age, it does not die, and it is alien to all such conceptions. This
provides an intriguing paradox for the human forms carved into the side of the urn
in the speaker's meditation: They are unaffected by time, but they are also frozen
in it. They don't have to deal with ageing or death (their love is “forever young”),
but they also don't have any prior experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden;
the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

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The speaker makes three efforts to interact with the sceneries engraved onto the
Urn, asking it a different question. In the first stanza, he looks at the picture of the
“mad pursuit” and wonders what the actual narrative is: “What men or gods are
these?” “What maidens loth?” says the narrator. Of course, the urn can't tell him
who, what, when, or where the stories depicted are, so the speaker is compelled to
quit this line of inquiry.

Theme Mortality
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a multi-layered meditation on death. The speaker seems
preoccupied with death, and his response appears to be a mix of celebration and
dread for life's transient nature. The scenes on the urn reflect a Classical world that
has long since passed, yet they also create a sense of eternity because they are fixed
to the urn itself. As a result, the urn is a contradiction: its scenes speak of vital
humanity while reflecting a form of perpetual life because they are trapped in time.
Simultaneously, everything and everyone in the urn's universe has vanished. The
poem might be understood as a response to this conflict, in which the speaker strives
to make meaning of mortality—both that of others and their own—without ever
reaching a satisfactory conclusion.

One of the essential functions of an urn was to hold the deceased's ashes. Though
it is impossible to say that this is the type of urn Keats had in mind when drafting
this poem, he would have been aware of this as a possibility. The urn is the poem's
main focus of attention, and as a result, death—and the transient nature of human
life—are present from the start.

The speaker's anxiously fluctuating views about mortality are projected onto the
urn, representing life and death. The images on the urn seem to come alive for the
speaker at various times throughout the poem. Stanzas 2 and 3 are full of praise for
the current scenes, in which the figures on the urn appear blissful and carefree.
Lovers at play, pipe-playing musicians, and abundant nature make the speaker feel
“happy, joyful.” Then, the speaker celebrates life, and the sights frozen on the urn
indicate a triumph of life over death. The speaker praises the lovers on the urn as
“forever panting and forever young” and says the tree beneath which they sit will
never “be bare.”

However, the urn's pictures are ultimately just that—pictures. All the lives shown
in the urn and the urn's creator have passed away. They only appear alive because
they are so wonderfully depicted, executing acts that suggest vitality and humanity
but aren't truly alive. Furthermore, because the damsel represented “cannot fade,”
her lover can't have “thy bliss”—he can't kiss her in his frozen state. This adds to
the concern over time's inevitable march, for stopping time effectively stops death
and life. As a result, death is shown as a conclusion to life and a separate element.

Throughout the poem, the speaker comes to this realisation. This is perhaps marked
in line 8 of verse 3 when the speaker reveals their mortality: “All breathing human
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desire far above.” The speaker's breath settling on the object of thought comes to
mind at this point. To breathe is to be alive—and, in this case, to be reminded of
death's impending arrival.

The poem becomes less joyous and more worried from this point forward. The urn's
busy images seem to allude to an emptiness that is inextricably related to mortality.
The speaker is troubled by the idea that the folks pictured on the urn can never
return to their “desolate” village in stanza 4.

The urn becomes “cold” to the speaker towards the poem's end because its lifeless
aspect provides no permanent solace to the speaker's contemplation of mortality.
The speaker applies this insight to their generation, which will be “trash” due to
“old age.”

Throughout the poem, the speaker wrestles with the issue of mortality. The urn's
beauty appears to bring its protagonists back to life at first, as the stillness of the
photographs immortalises their existence. But eventually, reality comes in, and the
urn serves as a stark reminder of mortality.

Theme Art, Beauty, and Truth

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” looks at how art, beauty, and truth are intertwined.
According to the speaker, humans come closest to truth through beauty, and human
beings can acquire this beauty through art (though it remains a bittersweet
achievement). The poem acknowledges the mystery of existence at its core but
contends that good art provides a necessary, if fleeting, means of representing and
perceiving that wonder.

The poem's famous ending is crucial to understanding the speaker's perspective on

art, beauty, and truth, and it contextualises the previous lines. “Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,” the speaker concludes, demonstrating that beauty and truth are the same
in the context of this poetry. The speaker does not depict beauty and truth as clearly
defining parts of human existence, but art's function is to create them. The speaker
intuitively senses this connection, and the one-way dialogue with the urn and what
it represents is an attempt to make sense of these feelings.

On the other hand, the speaker emphasises the urn's aesthetics throughout the poem,
matching the object's alluring beauty with a sensuous and beautifully wrought
verbal beauty of its own. Though the poem cannot—and does not attempt to—
precisely define the relationship between art, beauty, and truth, its language strives
to be beautiful and convey that beauty is valued and essential to humanity. One
example is the gentle /f/ sound in “soft pipes”, which makes the /p/ sound of “pipes”
itself grow softer. The poem aims to bring “truth” and “beauty” to its representation
of the urn, just as the urn's maker strove to give an honest and beautiful account of
the world it was built.

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As a result, the poem does not provide a simple response to how art, beauty, and
truth are related. It does, however, state categorically that these three are
interdependent and indispensable to one another. Furthermore, the mystery of this
relationship may contribute to its strength. “All you need to know,” perhaps,
implies that individuals must also be at ease with not knowing. If you take the last
few lines out of context, you could think this is poetry about beauty. However, the
speaker's stance is far more nuanced in the end. The scenes on the urn become
inanimate, symbolising humanity's ambition to portray itself and its environment.

Regardless of whether humans can reach permanent beauty through art, the speaker
emphasises the significance of attempting it. The sounds of the pipes cannot be
heard, the trees cannot shed their leaves, and the people walking cannot arrive at
their ceremony since the scenes on the urn have been frozen in time. Briefly,
everything is frozen in time. As a result, the lovely sound of the pipes is a type of
silence. As a result, the scenes become more than just depictions of human life;
they also become abstract representations of beauty—pure beauty, free of the
constraints of needing to exist or die. As the last lines imply, if beauty is something
to strive for, then the urn's beauty is more absolute since it embodies the notion of
beauty itself, rather than just an attempt to achieve it. As a result, the poem takes
on a complicated philosophical dimension, contemplating beauty as a human
aspiration and an abstract concept that may ultimately be beyond human reach.

Theme History and the Imagination

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the speaker makes a solid attempt to bring history to
life. The poem is structured as a dialogue between a speaker from the early
nineteenth century and Ancient Greece on the one hand and a speaker from Ancient
Greece on the other. Of all, this conversation can only go one way—up; it's to the
speaker to conceive the lives and experiences that were once real but only
represented in the urn's photographs. Overall, the poem argues that while
imagination is vital for comprehending and sympathising with the past, it can never
fully capture the depth and detail of worlds that have passed us by.
The fact that the urn is a valid historical object made around the time of the
historical event it depicts is part of the speaker's interest. The urn's artistry, mixed
with sheer serendipity, has allowed a small piece of the history it represents to be
preserved for millennia. The speaker emphasises the significance of items in history
by referring to the urn as a “Sylvan [rural] historian,” instantaneously creating a
connection between the speaker's historical moment and the urn's and remarking
that the urn has endured as a “foster-child of silence and slow time.” The speaker
thus highlights both the urn's long history and its “quiet,” lifeless nature. That is to
say, the urn itself tells nothing about history until the spectator uses their
imagination. As a result, the poem serves as a real-time illustration of this attempt
to actively engage with the past.

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The speaker eventually discovers that the urn is “cold” and that it cannot fulfil the
speaker's goal to bring the ancient world back to life. Of course, this does not imply
that the effort was in vain. Just as the urn could never convey a complete picture of
the world when it was built, the speaker could never aspire to gain a complete
picture of history through the urn.

Nonetheless, if incompletely, a sense of the Ancient Greek world has been gained.

The speaker's inventive work brings the reader's imagination to life and the
ambiance of a specific historical time. The cow being carried to the sacrifice, for
example, appears to both root and bring the urn's action in Ancient Greece to life—
the speaker imagines the cow lowing towards the sky, a detail that appears to be
expressly designed to make the scenario livelier for the reader. The poem
recognises that no generation will ever have a complete picture of the world as it
once was. Objects and imagination, on the other hand, aid in telling history's
narrative.

And, just as the urn allowed the speaker to explore this subject within the form of
the poem, the poem itself becomes an object that allows readers to explore both the
historical atmosphere of the urn and the 19th century moment in which the poem
was written; Romantic poets were fascinated by the Classical world, and this ode
shows a speaker attempting to make sense of the relationship between those two
historical moments.

Whether it's an urn or a written report, nothing can ever bring a historical event into
the present to be fully experienced. However, artefacts combined with the
imagination may help bring historical stories to life, and it is through these stories
that one generation connects with previous generations. The poem's description of
the urn's universe is full of human activity that felt familiar in the 19th century and
still feels familiar now; history and imagination, therefore, aid humankind in
relating to its past and seeing what one moment has in common with the next.

Summary of Ode on a Grecian Urn

As though he were thinking about a genuine urn, Keats addresses his imaginary
urn. It has been preserved in its original state from antiquity. It's a “sylvan historian”
telling us a storey that the poet hints at through a sequence of questions. Who are
these carved or painted gods or men on the urn? What are the names of these
hesitant maidens? What exactly is this irrational quest? Why are you attempting to
flee? What is the significance of musical instruments being present? What is the
source of this insane ecstasy?

Melodies imagined are more beautiful than those heard by human ears. As a result,
the poet encourages the musician depicted on the urn to continue playing. His
melody will never finish, and the leaves will never fall from the trees. The lover on
the urn will never get his beloved's kiss, but she will never lose her beauty. The

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trees on the urn are happy since they never lose their leaves. The musician who is
always playing new songs is happy. The lovers on the urn experience a love that is
always warm, panting, and youthful, vastly superior to real love, leading to
frustration and discontent.

Who are the folks who have come to make a sacrifice? A garlanded cow is led to
what altar by the priest. What city are they from? That village will always be silent
and desolate. You bring our thoughts to a point where thought leads nowhere, like
a meditation on eternity, writes Keats, embellished with representations of men and
maidens, trees and grass. You will still be here, a friend to man, after our generation
has passed away, informing him that beauty is truth and truth is beauty - that is all
he knows on earth and all he needs to know.

Keats has fashioned a Greek urn and embellished it with three scenes from his
thoughts. The first is full of frantic action, with men (or gods) and maidens as the
protagonists. Musical instruments are being played by other figures, possibly the
masculine ones. The maidens are most likely nymphs from Greek mythology. Love
has stricken the men or gods, and they are pursuing them. Keats, a big fan of Greek
mythology, was undoubtedly familiar with stories of such love games. He relates
Alpheus' pursuit of Arethusa in Book II of his Endymion and Glaucus' pursuit of
Scylla in Book III.

In stanzas II and III, the second situation is developed. A lover serenades his darling
beneath the trees. In the first stanza, Keats limited himself to implying a situation
through inquiries. The second scene is delivered through description rather than
questions. We witness a young man playing a musical instrument in a grove,
seemingly waiting for a kiss from his girlfriend. The scene elicits Keats's thoughts
on the function of art. Reality is given a sense of permanence through art. The
youngster, the damsel, and the musical instrument are trapped and held indefinitely
by being portrayed on the urn. As a result, Keats might find pleasure in the concept
that the music will continue to play indefinitely and that the girl will never grow
old or lose any of her beauty, although the lover will never obtain the desired kiss.
They are superior to human love, leaving “a heart high sorrowful and cloy'd, / A
scorching forehead, and a parching tongue” behind. Satiety and dissatisfaction are
the results of human love. The lovers depicted on the urn signify a state of perfect
existence, which Keats imagines in these two stanzas. Art captures a pleasurable
experience just as it is about to become unpalatable. This, Keats says, is one of art's
positive contributions to man.

A group of people on their way to conduct a sacrifice to some god is depicted in

the third image on Keats' urn. A priest holds the sacrifice victim, a lowing heifer.
Instead of restricting himself to the sacrifice procession as another scene on his urn,
Keats describes how the procession has emptied the town of its inhabitants. The
town is desolate and will remain silent forever.

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The beauty-truth equation is found in the final stanza, and it is the most contentious
passage in all of Keats' poetic criticism. No one critic's reading of the line, on the
other hand, will satisfy any other critic, and they will not likely continue to battle
with the equation for as long as the poem is read. Keats also makes two significant
observations about his urn in this verse. The urn, like an eternity, teases him out of
his thoughts; that is, the problem of a work of art's effect on time and life, or simply
of what art does, is as puzzling as the attempt to grapple with the concept of eternity.
Art's (perceived) halting of time is a type of eternity, and it's most likely what
inspired the poem's use of the word forever.

The truth-beauty equation is the second notion. Thanks to the poet's imagination,
the urn has retained a transient and blissful condition in perpetuity, but it cannot do
the same for Keats or his generation; old age will waste them and bring them pain.
Yet, the urn depicted can do something for them and future generations for as long
as it lasts. It will give them a vision of happiness (truth) available in eternity, in the
hereafter, by its visual beauty, just as it gave Keats a vision of bliss by empathically
sharing its existence and bringing its scenes to emotional life through his
imagination. Everything you know and need to know about beautiful works of art,
whether urns or poetry about urns, is that they hint at the unchanging contentment
that awaits you in the afterlife. When Keats writes, “that is all ye know on earth,”
he implies that there is something else.

Although Keats was not a particularly religious man, his brief meditation on
pleasure while writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” gave him a glimpse of paradise, a
state of existence that he did consider in his letters. “Another favourite Speculation
of mine, that we shall delight ourselves hereafter by having what we called bliss on
Earth repeated in a finer tone,” he wrote to Benjamin Bailey in a letter dated
November 22, 1817.

8.6 Ode to a Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One-minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

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 Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
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:

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;
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.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
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;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

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 Call him soft names in many a mused 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.

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:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, 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 forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: —Do I wake or sleep?

The Romantic poet John Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” in 1819. It is the
longest of Keats' odes, at 80 lines (which include poems like “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” and “Ode on Melancholy”). The poem's speaker is standing in dark woodland,
listening to the captivating and lovely nightingale bird's song. This prompts the
speaker to reflect profoundly and meanderingly on time, mortality, beauty, nature,
and human suffering (all of which the speaker would wish to avoid!). At times, the
speaker finds solace in the nightingale's song and even hopes that poetry will bring
him closer to the bird symbolically. However, towards the end of the poem, the
speaker appears to be a lonely figure—the nightingale has flown away, and the
speaker is confused if the entire event was “a vision” or a “waking dream.”

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8.6.1 Form of Ode to a Nightingale
“Ode to a Nightingale,” like most of the other odes, is written in ten-line stanzas.

It is, nevertheless, metrically flexible, unlike most of the other poems—though not
as much as “Ode to Psyche.” Each stanza's first seven and last two lines are written
in iambic pentameter, whereas the eighth line is written in trimeter, with just three
emphasised syllables rather than five.

“Nightingale” is notably distinct from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is
consistent throughout each stanza (every other ode, except for “To Psyche,” which
has the loosest structure of all the odes, modifies the sequence of rhyme in the final
three or four lines).

In “Nightingale,” each stanza rhymes ABABCDECDE, Keats' most fundamental

rhyme scheme throughout the odes.

8.6.2 Themes Ode to a Nightingale

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats' speaker embarks on his most comprehensive and
in-depth examination of the topics of artistic expression and human death. The ode
contrasts the perpetual recurrence of the nightingale's fluid singing (“Thou wast not
born for death, immortal bird!”) with the transience of life and the misery of old age
(“where palsy shakes a few, mournful, final grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and
spectre-thin, and dies”). Whereas in “Ode on Indolence,” the speaker's “drowsy
numbness” was a sign of separation from reality, in “Nightingale,” it's a sign of over
connection: “being too joyful in thine bliss,” as the speaker tells the nightingale.

When the nightingale sings, the speaker wants to leave the human world and join
the bird.

His initial thought is to achieve the bird's state through wine; in the second stanza,
he yearns for a “draught of vintage” to whisk him away from himself. However,
after reflecting on the transience of life in the third stanza, he rejects the idea of
being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine
and was said to have been carried by a chariot drawn by leopards) and instead
embraces “the viewless wings of Poesy” for the first time since refusing to follow
the figures in “Indolence.”

8.6.3 Death, Time, and Impermanence

“Ode to a Nightingale” is a song about how nothing lasts. The speaker sits in a
woodland, listening to the nightingale's wonderful song. According to the speaker, the
speaker sees “immortality” in the bird figure—a species free of human anxiety about
the inevitable march of time toward death and whose song has resonated across the

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generations. However, even the nightingale eventually flies away, leaving the speaker
with a deep sense of loss and the apparent certainty that all will eventually fade.

The poem can thus be thought of as an elegy for things that haven't yet died. The
speaker's ability to appreciate the world is hampered by the knowledge that nothing
lasts forever. Perhaps this is why the speaker in the first stanza feels paradoxically
“too delighted” to hear the nightingale's song. This delight is, in a way, over—and,
as a result, the speaker feels it is excessive.

Later in the speech, the speaker discusses how time continually pounds down on
humans, causing “weariness”, sickness and ageing. As a steady march towards
death takes hold, youthful energy and beauty “fade.” “Beauty cannot maintain her
lustrous eyes, / Nor young Love pine at them beyond tomorrow,” writes the author.
In other words, beauty can't last forever, and “new Love” will fade away. Even the
natural environment symbolises the speaker's frustration with time, as flowers fade
“quickly” and are replaced by a mush of fall leaves surrounded by buzzing flies
(insects that are often representative of death in literature).

The speaker declares that “it now appears richer than ever to die” and no longer lives
with “suffering.” The speaker believes that it would be easier (or “easier”) to just
eliminate time and impermanence at the earliest possible opportunity—through death.

The speaker also compares human circumstances to those of the nightingale,

describing the latter as “immortal” and picturing its song the same as that heard in
“ancient” and even biblical times. Of course, this is an exaggeration. The bird isn't
truly immortal; its song is so lovely that it looks to be a minor win over time and
death, temporarily—and only temporarily—distracting the speaker from all of their
fear and anguish about life's impermanence.

Even the nightingale, in the end, cannot provide enduring comfort. The speaker
continually says “adieu” (goodbye) as it flies away, reinforcing the speaker's fear
that nothing nice or lovely can stay forever. This throws the speaker off, and he
wonders if the entire event was a “vision” or a “dream.” The poem's concluding
question can be taken in a variety of ways, but “Do I wake or sleep?” may perfectly
encapsulate the speaker's sentiments regarding death, time, and impermanence:
That is, perhaps the speaker is already asleep while still living because the
inevitability of death reduces life to a type of waking dream.

8.6.4 Intoxication, Consciousness, and Isolation

The speaker wants to be free of all the pressures and sorrow that come with being
human, and he or she considers drinking or using drugs as a way to do so. This is
because the speaker believes that consciousness is a burden in and of itself, that “to

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think is to be full of sadness.” As a result, the speaker wonders if drunkenness, by
dulling the senses, would be able to help alleviate that sadness. Though the speaker
claims not to be envious of the “happy” nightingale, who does not appear to be
bothered in the same way as the speaker, the bird serves as a reminder that the
speaker can't truly escape human awareness (other than through death). The bird,
and the beauty of its song, begin to signify liberation from the restless human mind's
confining, isolating bounds.

The speaker's weariness appears in the poem's opening and closing lines, implying
that the speaker finds consciousness tiresome. The speaker describes a “drowsy
numbness” in the poem's first words as if he or she is inebriated or has taken an
“opiate” (opiates are drugs derived from the poppy plant, including heroin,
morphine, and, of course, opium). The speaker compares it to sink in the River
Lethe, which is said to produce forgetfulness in people who drink its waters in
Greek mythology.

The speaker addresses a specific desire for booze in the second stanza. “A draught
of vintage” or “a beaker full of the warm South,” says the speaker. As a result,
intoxication and comfort are linked (the temporary relief from suffering). The
speaker's perceptions would be dulled by drinking, “leaving the world unseen.” But
the speaker doesn't honestly want to get intoxicated; instead, he or she yearns for
purity and beauty, and it is this yearning that drives the speaker's attention to the
nightingale's lovely song.

It's noteworthy that the speaker doesn't go into great detail about the nightingale's
song. Instead, the poem concentrates on the speaker's consciousness and how the
beauty of the nightingale's singing affects it. Even while attempting to concentrate
on something external, the speaker's experience is always filtered through his or her
vision; consciousness encircles the speaker like prison walls. Thus, consciousness
is both taxing and alienating.

Finally, the speaker abandons intoxication to escape the pain that comes with being
cognizant. The speaker prefers the “viewless wings of Poesy” to “Bacchus and his
pards,” the Greek God of Wine and his monstrous followers. In other words, even
“though the dull brain perplexes and retards,” the speaker briefly believes that
poetry and imagination will solve the problem of consciousness (that is, conscious
thought gets in the way of poetry).

The speaker considers death as an option for intoxication in the sixth stanza. This
would end the speaker's pain, but it would also render him “a sod” (a piece of the
earth) incapable of appreciating the beauty of the nightingale's song, as the speaker

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concedes. Suddenly, the poem makes a briefcase for human awareness, arguing that
it allows for the perception of beauty, whether in nature or art.

The speaker's uneasiness regarding conscious cognition is not alleviated in any

way. Although the poem contemplates what it means to be humanly aware, the
speaker recognises that there are no simple answers. The thrill of the nightingale's
song, which seemed to divert the speaker's attention away from these problems,
fades quickly. This returns the speaker to his or her “sole self,” implying that people
are ultimately alone, locked within the confines of their thinking. And, as if to
emphasise this indecision, the poem concludes with a central question: is the
speaker awake or asleep? Of all, dreaming allows dreamers to transcend the
confines of their reality, which is why the speaker suspects that the poem's
occasional glimpses of freedom were illusory.

8.6.5 Art, Nature, and Beauty

“Ode to a Nightingale” examines the relationship between two different sorts of
beauty: the realm of human-created art and nature's wide variety of life. The poem
asks whether nature—represented by the nightingale and its song—represents a
form of beauty more extraordinary than anything humans can create, a beauty that
is purer and more timeless than anything humans can create. The speaker mulls
over this subject throughout the poem, yet there is no straightforward answer.

The speaker in “Ode to a Nightingale” is not divorced from the poem; the reader is
aware that the speaker is a poet and thus is engrossed in pursuing beauty and art.
The speaker compares the potential beauty of poetry (which serves as a metaphor
for all art) to the overpowering natural beauty of the nightingale's song. From the
outset of the poem, the poetry establishes a contrast between two sorts of beauty.
The speaker claims to enjoy the nightingale's song in the first stanza. The speaker
is “too thrilled” to hear the bird's call, which he describes as “full-throated ease.”
Nature is depicted here as indulging in a spontaneous and unadulterated form of
creativity. The speaker does not “envy” the bird, but the fact that envy is mentioned
shows a reason to be resentful of what the bird represents. The speaker sees the bird
song as a form of timeless perfection, a beauty created by nature that humankind,
despite its best efforts and struggles, cannot match.

However, in the fourth stanza, the speaker expresses a fleeting belief that human
art is a worthy partner to nature's beauty. On “the viewless wings of Poesy,” the
speaker will “fly” to the nightingale. Perhaps poetry can become the speaker's
birdsong, the speaker ponders (and the sheer beauty of the poem itself might
support this view). The speaker's consideration of the nightingale, on the other
hand, intensifies and undoes this fleeting sense of self-assurance. The speaker

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considers the nightingale's singing to be “immortal,” believing that the bird's sound
has stayed virtually constant for millennia (even back to “Ruth's” biblical times).

Interpersonal rivalry and competition, on the other hand, corrupt human art—the
“hungry generations” that “tread” people down (and it's worth mentioning that
Keats was no stranger to literary society's scorn and wrath!). The speaker quickly
dismisses “fancy” (creative imagination) as a “cheat[er].” Fancy, portrayed as a
“deceiving elf,” will never be able to match the nightingale's pure and
straightforward beauty. The nightingale's song begins to sound “plaintive” when it
flies away from the speaker, unconcerned with any of the speaker's problems.
Because the speaker is reminded of their limits, the tune turns sorrowful and
mournful (no longer the cheerful song of stanza 1). And while human art can
certainly be lovely, the poem argues that art and nature are two separate entities.

8.6.6 Summary of Ode to a Nightingale

Keats is drowsy to the point of being groggy. Envy of the nightingale's imagined
happiness is not to blame for his predicament; instead, it is a reaction to his
enjoyment due to partaking in the nightingale's happiness. The bird's joy is
transmitted through its song. Keats yearns for a sip of wine that will lift him out of
himself and allow him to merge his life with that of the bird. The wine would put
him in a state where he would no longer be himself, conscious that life is full of
suffering, that the young die, that the elderly struggle, and that even thinking about
life brings sadness and misery. But wine isn't required for him to flee. His creativity
will suffice in this situation. As soon as he recognises this, he is pulled up above
the trees in spirit and can see the moon and stars, even if there is only a flicker of
light where he is physical. He can't see the flowers blooming around him, but he
can predict based on their odour and his knowledge of what flowers should be in
bloom at the time.

He listens to the nightingale in the darkness. He now believes that dying, “to end
upon the midnight with no agony” while the bird sings ecstatically, would be a rich
experience. He admits to being “half in love with easy Death” on several occasions.
The human face of death does not bind the nightingale. The nightingale's song,
which he listens to, was once heard by both emperors and peasants. Ruth (whose
tale is recounted in the Old Testament) may have heard it.

The last word of the preceding verse, “forlorn,” pulls Keats back to awareness of
who he is and where he is in the concluding stanza. Even with the aid of his
thoughts, he is unable to flee. The bird's song becomes fainter and eventually fades
altogether. He can't tell if it was a vision or a fantasy because the experience was
so bizarre and perplexing. He's even unsure whether he's awake or asleep.

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8.6.7 Analysis of Ode to a Nightingale
The “Ode to a Nightingale” is an ode in the traditional sense. There are ten
pentameter lines in each of the eight stanzas, with a consistent rhyme scheme.
Despite the poem's regular structure, it feels like a rhapsody, as if Keats is allowing
his thoughts and feelings to flow freely. One thought leads to another, and the poem
comes to an arbitrary end.

The poem leaves the reader with the impression that it was written spontaneously,
without regard for a pre-set plan. The poem depicts Keats in the act of sharing an
experience with the reader rather than recounting an experience. The experience is
a little disjointed. It's what goes on in his head while he listens to a nightingale's
song.

In the ode, three key ideas stand out. One is Keats' assessment of life, which is that
it is a vale of tears and frustration. The happiness Keats hears in the nightingale's
singing has made him joyful for a short time, but it has been followed by a feeling
of torpor, which has been followed by the belief that existence is not only tricky
but also intolerable. Hearing the nightingale gave him a taste of bliss, but it also
made him more aware of life's sorrow.

Keats seeks to escape life, not through liquor, but through a more powerful agent:
his imagination. The poem's second key topic and theme is Keats' yearning to die
and be free of existence entirely, as long as he could die as quietly and painlessly
as he could fall asleep. Keats' preoccupation with death does not appear to have
been triggered by a change in his fortunes when he penned the ode (May 1819).
Keats' life had been unsatisfying in many ways before he composed the poem. The
departure of one brother to America and the death of the other from tuberculosis
destroyed his family life.

His second collection of poetry had received negative feedback. Since he had
abandoned his medical education, he had no income and no prospects. His financial
situation was precarious. He hadn't been feeling well in the fall and winter of 1818-
19, and it's possible he had tuberculosis. He could not marry Fanny Brawne because
he could not financially support her. Thus, the death wish in the ode could be a
reaction to a slew of problems and disappointments that he was still dealing with.
The weight of existence crashing down on him compelled him to write “Ode to a
Nightingale.” Keats voiced a desire for “easy Death” on several occasions, but
when he was in the late stages of illness, he resisted death by travelling to Italy in
the hopes of being cured by the climate. In the ode, the death wish is a fleeting but
recurring attitude toward a life that was unpleasant in many ways.

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The power of imagination or fancy is the ode's third key theme. (Keats does not
distinguish between the two.) In the ode, Keats foregoes liquor in favour of poetry,
the creation of the imagination, to connect himself with the happy nightingale.
However, poetry does not always operate as it should. He quickly reverts to his
usual, troubled self. In the final lyric, he concedes that “fancy cannot cheat so well
/ As she is fam'd to accomplish.” The imagination isn't the all-powerful function
that Keats believed it to be at times. It can only provide a brief respite from the
stresses of life.

In stanza VII, Keats bestows immortality on the nightingale, causing much

consternation among readers. Keats could have been thinking of an actual
nightingale, but he was more likely thinking of the nightingale as a metaphor for
poetry's persistence.

Keats' descriptive skill is particularly evident in stanza II, where he equates a beaker
of wine “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim,” with sunny France and the
harvesters' “sunburnt joy,” and in stanza VII, where he depicts Ruth suffering from
homesickness “among the strange maize.” The entire ode is a triumph of the tonal
richness of Keats' unique contribution to the various voices of poetry and adagio
vocal melody.

8.7 Ode on Melancholy

A British Romantic poet, John Keats, wrote “Ode on Melancholy.” It's one of five
odes Keats wrote in 1819 that are often regarded as among his best. Essentially, the
poem is about dealing with tremendous sadness—and how not to deal with it. The
speaker comes across as an advisor who advises against seeking solace in alcohol
or death. On the other hand, the speaker believes that melancholy should be
embraced. The poem also makes a connection between happiness and melancholy.
Because all beautiful things must end, the poem implies that every beauty is tinged
with profound grief.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

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 For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

8.7.1 Summary of Ode on Melancholy

The “Ode on Melancholy's” three stanzas address how to deal with sadness. The
opening verse instructs the reader on what not to do: The victim should not “go to
Lethe,” or forget their sorrow (Lethe is the Greek mythological river of
forgetfulness); they should not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of
Proserpine,” is a poison; Proserpine is the mythological queen of the underworld);
and should not become obsessed with objects of death and misery (the beetle, the
death-moth, and the owl). Because, according to the speaker, this will make the
sufferer's inner pain drowsy, the sufferer should do everything he can to be
conscious of and alert to the depths of his suffering.

The speaker tells the suffering what to do instead of the things he forbidden in the
first verse in the second stanza. When suffering from “the gloomy fit,” the sufferer
should gorge himself on natural beauty, feasting on the morning rose, “the rainbow

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of the salt sand-wave,” or his beloved's eyes. The speaker explains these
prohibitions in the third line, noting that pleasure and suffering are intimately
linked: beauty must perish, joy is ephemeral, and the flower of pleasure is
constantly “changing to poison while the bee-mouth sips.” The speaker claims that
the shrine of melancholy is located within the “temple of Delight” but that it can
only be seen if one can “burst[ing] Joy's grape against his palate nicely” until it
displays its centre of grief. The one who succeeds will be able to “experience the
misery” of melancholy's might and “hang among her hazy trophies.”

8.7.2 Analysis of Ode on Melancholy

The “Ode to Sadness” is one of a group of eighteenth-century poems with
melancholy as a central theme. The “Graveyard School of Poetry” was born, with
Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” being the most well-known
example. This custom was passed down to the romantic poets. A pleasant feeling
of melancholy was one of the results of this dark poetry about death, graveyards,
and the brevity of pleasure and life.

Because beautiful objects were destined to expire, Keats claimed that the most
intense sensation of melancholy might be obtained not through death but from
contemplation of beautiful objects. As a result, the most sensuous man, who can
“burst Joy's grape against his palate lovely,” as Keats phrased it, is capable of the
most enthusiastic response to sorrow. Keats was intensely aware of the tight
relationship between joy and sorrow due to his own life experience and
temperament. Frustration was continuously chipping away at his contentment. He
was a seductive man in his own right. Instead of rejecting melancholy, Keats
expresses a healthy attraction to it in “Ode to Melancholy” because one cannot
understand joy unless one has experienced it first-hand. The poem's first stanza was
initially the second stanza accounts for the abruptness with which “Ode to
Melancholy” begins. The opening stanza was original.

Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy — whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.

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We can only speculate as to why Keats abandoned this original first verse. He was
attempting to generate images of death that would express something of the
repulsiveness of death — to give the reader a romantic Gothic shudder — yet what
he achieved was unattractive rather than delicately evocative and out of character
with the rest of the poem. Furthermore, he may have considered that two stanzas
about death were sufficient. The stanza is clumsy, and Keats was aware of this.

The stanza Keats chose to begin the poem is unusual but not crude. In the poem,
Keats gathered an incredible array of items. Lethe is a river in the underworld of
Greek mythology. Plants like wolfs bane and nightshade are poisonous. The yew
berry is the toxic seed of the yew tree, which is usually planted in English
cemeteries because it is durable and evergreen. Egyptians frequently placed replicas
of a black beetle in tombs; the scarab or black beetle symbolised resurrection to the
Egyptians, but it was a symbol of death to Keats because of its link with tombs. The
death-moth or butterfly symbolised the soul's departure from the body after death.
Because of its nocturnal habits and frightening hooting, the owl was often
associated with otherworldly symbols. The unifying denominator of Keats' natural
history museum exhibits is death. The stanza's wording is much superior to the
eliminated stanzas. Nothing compares to naming nightshade the “ruby grape of
Proserpine,” the queen of the underworld, or creating a rosary out of yew berries
and instantly suggesting prayers for the dying or dead. The stanza is one of Keats'
most affluent and weird in his poetry.

8.7.3 Form of Ode on Melancholy

The smallest of Keats' odes, “Ode on Melancholy,” is composed in a traditional
form that corresponds to its logical, argumentative subject framework. Each stanza
is ten lines long and metered in iambic pentameter, which is reasonably exact. The
first two stanzas, which offer advice to the suffering, have the same rhyme scheme,
ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, use a slightly different
ending, ABABCDEDCE, with the eighth and ninth lines rhymed in the opposite
order as the previous two stanzas. The two-part rhyme scheme of each stanza (one
group of AB rhymes, one group of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part
thematic structure, in which the first four lines of each stanza define the stanza's
subject, and the last six lines develop it, as in some other odes (especially “Autumn”
and “Grecian Urn”). (This is especially true of the second and third stanzas.)

8.7.4 Themes of Ode on Melancholy

If the “Ode to Psyche” is primarily distinguished from the other odes by its form,
the “Ode on Melancholy” is distinguished chiefly by its style. “Melancholy,” the
only ode not written in the first person, finds the speaker admonishing or instructing
melancholy suffering in the imperative form, presumably based on his own hard-

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won experience. In many ways, “Melancholy” tries to bring together the language
of all the previous odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the
beautiful descriptions of nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of
“Nightingale,” and the philosophy of “Urn” all find expression in its three stanzas—
but it's more than that. In it, the speaker finally delves into the nature of transience
and the relationship between pleasure and misery in a way that allows him to
progress beyond the superficial aesthetic comprehension of “Urn” to a deeper
understanding of “To Autumn.”

The speaker in “Melancholy” urges action rather than quiet contemplation for the first
time in the odes. Rejecting both “Indolence's” joyfully accepted slumber and
“Nightingale's” euphoric “drowsy numbness,” the speaker proclaims that he must
remain attentive and receptive to “wakeful sorrow” and that rather than fleeing misery,
he will feast it on the joys of beauty. Instead of numbing himself to the fact that his
mistress will grow old and die (as he noted in “Nightingale,” “Beauty cannot keep her
lustrous eyes”), he uses it to intensify his feelings for her beauty. He will “feed deep,
deep upon her matchless eyes” because she dwells with “beauty that must die.”

The speaker gives his most compelling synthesis of melancholy and delight in the
third stanza in a way that acknowledges life's tragic mortality while keeping him
connected to his own experience. The fact that joy will pass makes the experience
of joy more enthralling; the fact that beauty will pass makes the experience of
beauty all the more acute and exhilarating.

He argues that to “bust joy's grape” and gain access to the inner temple of melancholy,
the key is to see the kernel of grief that lies at the centre of all pleasure. Though the
“Ode on Melancholy” is not directly about art, it is evident that the speaker's previous
attempts to enjoy art lack this synthetic understanding of joy and suffering.

Melancholy, Beauty, and Impermanence

The “Ode on Melancholy” by John Keats is a rich and complicated poem that offers
a way of dealing with severe sadness. Simply put, it encourages people to embrace
grief by living within it, actively acknowledging its presence rather than attempting
to end or alleviate it. People should embrace “melancholy” since it is an essential
aspect of beauty, joy, and pleasure, even if it brings “sorrow.” Furthermore, the
poem contends that the most acceptable kinds of beauty are made lovely by their
inability to last—and it is for this reason that melancholy, beauty, and time are so
profoundly interwoven, according to the poem.

The poem functions as a forerunner to self-help literature, explaining what to do

and what not to do when one is depressed. To that purpose, the first stanza serves
as a kind of cautionary note, laying out how people may react to sadness. Self-

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poisoning and drinking from the ancient river of Lethe are two examples (which
cause the drinker to forget whatever is troubling them). The poem argues that if
people strive to numb or eliminate their “anguish,” they won't be able to make the
most of it—they won't be able to perceive its close relationship with beauty up
close. Instead, they will simply be overcome by their grief.

The second verse then instructs readers on what to do if they are in a depressed
mood. This essentially boils down to embracing melancholy by searching out the
beauty in nature. People should look at a “morning rose,” a rainbow over the sea,
or a peony to “glut”—feed—their grief. However, all these things are transient; a
morning rose blooms in the morning, a rainbow fades, and globular peonies brown
and wilt rapidly. Some of their allure appears to stem from the fact that they are
only here for a short time. As a result, the speaker argues that individuals should
embrace their melancholy by bearing witness to the saddest fact of all: that the most
incredible beauty in the universe is, by its very nature, fleeting, and that beauty,
therefore, contains and even amplifies melancholy.

Beauty and sorrow are thus linked in the poem by their impermanence. “Beauty [...]
must die,” just as “Joy” constantly says “goodbye” to the happy person (goodbye).
And while humans can experience pleasure, it is constantly in the process of
“turning to poison” symbolically because time will eventually bring it to an end.
The poem argues that beauty is accompanied by a terrible grief, given the
understanding that beauty will vanish one day.

As a result, “Melancholy” is treated as if she were a goddess ruling over the “temple
of Delight.” Expanding on this theme, the poem states that nothing good can last
indefinitely. As a result, anything good in life is tinged with melancholy before it's
even begun—but the best response to this tragic fact, according to the poem, is to
accept it. At the poem's conclusion, those who “can burst Joy's grape against [their]
mouth fine” are praised.

Someone like that acknowledges that beauty and melancholy “live” together and
“bursts” this metaphorical grape—a stand-in for all the beautiful things in life—
knowing full well that doing so will eventually lead to the loss of “Joy.” This is a
somewhat realistic answer in a world that isn't built to survive and where death is
the only absolute certainty.

Finally, “Ode on Melancholy” reveals a close relationship between melancholy,

beauty, and the passage of time. The poem seems to be saying that if lovely things
could remain forever, they wouldn't be so sad. But, of course, nothing lasts forever,
and the more beautiful anything is (and beauty might refer to joy, pleasure, or
overall happiness), the more melancholy it contains.

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Intoxication vs. Nature
“Ode on Melancholy” can be read as a warning against a specific type of self-
destructive drunkenness. Though it isn't said explicitly, the poem implies that the
natural world has more to offer people—even those who are sad—than the world
of drugs and drink. Indeed, in a letter around the time of this poem's production,
Keats stated that he desired to keep “a peaceable and healthy spirit”—and perhaps
therefore the poem seems to prefer the natural world to intoxication.

The poem offers the first stanza as a list of self-destructive actions; all presented as
potential (but unwise) responses to melancholy or a pervasive sense of deep
sadness. When you remove away the rich imagery and countless classical allusions,
you're left with a stanza mainly about drinking and drugs. Poisonous drink, the
deadly nightshade plant, and a goddess's seductive grapes are all mentioned in the
poem. But, rather than alleviating misery, booze and drugs, the poem claims, hasten
it to the point of no return, “drown[ing]” people's “soul[s].”

The elegance of the wording in this line seems to relate to the allure of such
substances and how intoxication's promised comfort can lure people. To put it
another way, it's natural that people react to sadness by engaging in destructive self-
medication, but it's not how the speaker believes they should behave.

The second stanza offers the speaker's alternative to intoxication: admiration of the
natural world. The verse is filled with natural imagery, instructing anyone who is
depressed to look for roses, peony blooms, and rainbows. Together, they appear to
provide an alternative to the first stanza's list of intoxicants.

That isn't to imply that people's unhappiness can't be alleviated by spending time in
nature. The speaker believes that sadness is just a part of existence and that it exists
in nature as well. With that in mind, the speaker believes that rejecting intoxicant
temptations is ultimately a better way to experience the world's beauty, joy,
pleasure, and delight—even if they are all tinged with melancholy.

8.8 Summary
Keats's major works include a wide range of poetry, letters, and other writings, such
as Endymion, Hyperion, and Lamia. His poetry is notable for its rich, sensory
imagery, profound philosophical insights, and masterful use of poetic devices, such
as metaphor and symbolism.

The themes that are present in Keats's major poems are an essential aspect of his
work. These themes include love, beauty, mortality, and nature. He explored the

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complexities of the human condition through his poetry and showed a deep
understanding of the interconnectedness of life and death.

Keats's poetic theory is also a vital aspect of his legacy. He believed that poetry
should be an expression of intense emotion, and he rejected the idea that poetry
should serve a moral purpose. His ideas about poetry, which emphasized the
importance of sensory experience, have had a significant influence on the
development of literary movements.

Three of Keats's most famous odes, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale,
and Ode on Melancholy, showcase his unique ability to weave together intricate
themes and poetic devices. Ode on a Grecian Urn explores the themes of beauty,
timelessness, and the relationship between art and life. Ode to a Nightingale deals
with the human condition, mortality, and the struggle between the transient and the
eternal. Ode on Melancholy delves into the transformative power of art and the
relationship between joy and sadness.

8.9 Self-Assessment Questions

1. What is the significance of John Keats in the Romantic literary movement?

2. Name three of Keats's major works and discuss their themes.

3. How does Keats's poetic theory differ from the prevailing ideas about poetry
in his time?

4. Analyze the themes present in one of Keats's famous odes, Ode to a Nightingale.

5. What is the relationship between mortality and nature in Keats's poetry?

6. How does Keats use sensory imagery to convey his philosophical insights in
his poetry?

7. Discuss the role of art in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn.

8. What is the central idea explored in Ode on Melancholy?

9. How did Keats's ideas about poetry influence later literary movements?

10. In what ways does Keats's poetry continue to resonate with readers today?

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Unit–9

LORD BYRON

Written by: Dr. Saira Maqool

Reviewed by: Sajid Iqbal

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 CONTENTS

Page #
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 157

Objectives ......................................................................................................... 157

9.1 Lord Byron .............................................................................................. 158

9.2 She Walks in Beauty ................................................................................ 158

9.3 Major Themes in She Walks in Beauty ................................................... 159

9.4 When We Two Part .................................................................................. 160

9.5 Critical Appreciation of When We Two Part .......................................... 161

9.6 Summary .................................................................................................. 163

9.7 Self-Assessment Questions ...................................................................... 163

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 INTRODUCTION

Lord Byron is a prolific and influential writer of the Romantic period. In this unit,
we will explore two of his most notable works: “She Walks in Beauty” and “When
We Two Part,” both of which provide insight into Byron's complex and
multifaceted approach to writing.

OBJECTIVES

After reading this unit, you will be able to:

 identify the life and works of lord byron, including his contributions to english
romantic poetry.

 analyze the language, structure, and literary techniques used in “she walks in
beauty.”

 identify the major themes explored in “she walks in beauty,” such as beauty,
love, and the power of nature.

 interpret the symbolism used in “when we two part” and discuss its
significance.

 discuss the themes of love, loss, and separation in “when we two part” and
how they relate to byron's personal life.

 evaluate the critical reception of “when we two part” and its significance in
byron's literary career.

 analyze the impact of byron's work on english romantic poetry and its lasting
influence on modern literature.

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9.1 Lord Byron
Lord Byron was an English poet and peer, born George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron
Byron, FRS (Greek: v, romanized: Lórdos Vronas; 22 January 1788 – 19 April
1824). One of the most critical players in the Romantic Movement, Byron is
considered one of England's finest poets. He continues to be well-read and
influential. The long narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are
among his best-known works; many of his shorter compositions in Hebrew
Melodies also became popular.

He travelled widely throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, where he spent seven

years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa. In Italy, he paid frequent visits to Percy
Bysshe Shelley, a friend and fellow poet. Later in life, Byron fought in the Greek
Conflict of Independence against the Ottoman Empire and died as the commander
of a campaign during that war, for which Greeks held him in high regard. He died
of a fever suffered after the First and Second Siege of Missolonghi in 1824 at the
age of 36.

Based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, his sole legitimate
child, Ada Lovelace, is considered a pioneering figure in computer programming.
Allegra Byron, who died as a child, and maybe Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the
daughter of his half-sister Augusta Leigh, were among Byron's adulterous
offspring.

9.2 She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

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 And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Lord Byron's poem “She Walks in Beauty,” published in 1815, is a masterpiece.

The poem includes a beguilingly romantic description of a lovely woman with
whom the speaker appears to be acquainted. It is about her extraordinary inner and
exterior attractiveness. The popularity of this poem can be attributed to the way it
depicts the beauty of “a mind at peace.”

The poet is enthralled by the women's exquisite beauty celebrated in the poem. Lord
Byron sends a strong message to his audience, stating that true beauty is a blend of
external and interior beauty. The lady, he claims, is gifted with a stunning
appearance and bodily and spiritual peace. Her innocent and pure thinking enhances
her attractiveness. Byron's innocent soul is revealed through her beautiful
movement and charming features. The poem's central theme is the expression of
beauty.

9.3 Major Themes in She Walks in Beauty

The poem's main themes are beauty and mental and physical balance. Lord Byron
uses adjectives like “sensitive light” to describe and compare beauty as he produces
exquisite imagery for her charming features, fluency of speech, and purity of love.
Byron uses classical diction to emphasise beauty. He feels that beauty comes from
within and that the body only reflects it. Also, the perfect balance of light and dark
emphasises the perfection of that beauty, where even a minor adjustment can detract
from its attractiveness. Throughout the poem, the theme of beauty and harmony is
present.

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9.4 When We Two Part
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever 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 thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well—
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too 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.

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9.5 Critical Appreciations of When We Two Part
Lord Byron, a British Romantic poet, wrote “When We Two Parted” in 1816. It
portrays the anguish and disappointment that follows the speaker's breakup with his
sweetheart. Despite the lack of specifics, it's inferred that the original relationship
was private and that the speaker is now furious after learning of his lover's
involvement with someone else.

We were silent and emotional when you and I broke up. For years, our hearts were
torn as we tore ourselves apart from each other. Your cheek turned pale and frigid
to the touch during the break-up, and your kiss was much colder. The way we split
up foreshadowed the agony and sadness I'm experiencing now.

“When We Two Parted” is depressing poetry about a relationship's termination.

The speaker addresses the poem to an ex-lover, giving insight into the never-
ending—and ever-shifting—pain of a breakup. According to the poetry, exes do
not simply go their separate ways after a breakup. Instead, they're frequently
marked by enduring, complex pain and rage. As the speaker finds that his
sweetheart has moved on, he feels disillusioned and frustrated and even questions
how he ever cared so much about her in the first place. The poem, then, is about
how messy breakups can be and how rapidly lovers' impressions of one another
may shift after they're no longer together.

The poem starts with a description of the breakup itself. The “broken-hearted”
lovers “parted in silence and tears”—they were “sever[ed]” from one another,
implying the near-physical pain of breaking up. However, something about the
rapid physical and emotional separation between the two lovers seemed to
foreshadow the speaker's subsequent feelings of betrayal. This sudden absence of
affection, according to the speaker, foreshadows the lover's future infliction of even
greater anguish. The circumstances of this relationship and the following
breakdown are not revealed, but the sense of betrayal is palpable.

The speaker then describes how hearing other people talk about the lover hurts him.
But it's also because of the nature of the hearsay: it appears to be the gossip of some
sort, and the rumour is likely about the speaker's ex's new affair. Perhaps a little
cruelly, the speaker then wonders how he could have held his beloved “so dear.”
How could he care so much for someone who appears to have forgotten about
him—and was their love as genuine as he had assumed?

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These considerations lead him to declare that he will “rue” the lover for a “long,
long” time, illustrating the lingering messiness of breakups. In some ways, the
speaker's attitude shifts due to his perception of the lover's change. It's almost as
though, despite their breakup, he still wants his ex to be his (again speaking to the
complicated feelings that come with the end of a relationship). Hearing tales about
the lover suggests that she has moved on: the lover has given her heart to someone
else, jeopardising her and the speaker's relationship.

Despite the passage of time, the speaker is still moved to “tears” by this bond. The
poem says that people go on with their life, but this does not mean that they are
entirely free of old loves. Feelings are tangled and confusing, hanging around
uninvited and unjustifiably—and, in this case, remaining as unpleasant as they were
before, despite other changes.

It's also worth mentioning that the poem was written in a particular setting. The
poem is supposed to be about Byron's connection with Lady Webster, an aristocrat.
Following the conclusion of their affair, Byron learned that she had also had an
affair with the Duke of Wellington, a British military leader who had recently
vanquished Napoleon. It's supposed that hearing about this second affair enraged
Byron, prompting him to pen the poem. This would explain why the lover's name
was (and still is) connected with “shame” and “fame” by the speaker and why the
affair was (and still is) shrouded in secret.

The morning dew sank bitterly into my brow, presaging the emotional chill I'm
experiencing today. Your promises have been breached, and people are talking
about you. I'm humiliated when I hear your name spoken.

Hearing your name makes me shudder like a death bell ringing in my ear. Why did
I ever feel so strongly for you? People have no idea how well I knew you or knew
you. I will regret that for a long time, more than I can express.

Because our connection was private, I lament it privately—and I despise that you
have forgotten about me and misled me. What should I do if I run into you again
after a long time? I'll meet you quietly and tearfully.

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9.6 Summary
Lord Byron was an English poet born in 1788, who was one of the leading figures
of the Romantic literary movement of the early 19th century. His works are
characterized by their emotional intensity, vivid imagery, and lyrical beauty.

One of Byron's most famous poems is She Walks in Beauty, which explores the
beauty and grace of a woman. The poem is known for its use of contrasting imagery
and its romantic idealization of the subject. The poem's major themes include the
power of beauty, the nature of love, and the interplay between light and darkness.

When We Two Part is another significant poem by Byron, which deals with the
pain of separation and the longing for lost love. The poem is a poignant reflection
on the transience of love and the inevitability of loss. It is noted for its use of
melancholic imagery and its intense emotional depth.

A critical appreciation of When We Two Part would reveal its significance as a

prime example of Byron's ability to convey complex emotions through poetry. The
poem's themes of loss, longing, and nostalgia are presented with a lyrical elegance
and a profound understanding of human emotions.

Overall, Lord Byron's life and works have had a significant impact on literature and
culture. His poetry continues to be celebrated for its passionate lyricism, its
poignant exploration of the human condition, and its influence on the development
of literary movements. She Walks in Beauty and When We Two Part are prime
examples of his poetic genius, and they continue to resonate with readers today.

9.7 Self-Assessment Questions

1. Who was Lord Byron, and what were some of the major themes in his poetry?

2. What is the central theme explored in She Walks in Beauty, and how is it
conveyed through the poem's imagery?

3. How does Byron use contrasting imagery in She Walks in Beauty to convey
the beauty of his subject?

4. What is the significance of When We Two Part in Byron's body of work, and
what themes does it explore?

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5. Analyze the use of melancholic imagery in When We Two Part and discuss
how it contributes to the poem's emotional impact.

6. What is the role of love in Byron's poetry, and how does it manifest in She
Walks in Beauty and When We Two Part?

7. How does Byron's use of language and form contribute to the overall effect
of his poetry?

8. What is the importance of imagery in Byron's works, and how does it help
convey his themes?

9. Discuss the influence of Lord Byron on the Romantic literary movement and
on later poets.

10. In what ways does Byron's poetry continue to be relevant and meaningful to
contemporary readers?

_____[ ]_____

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 Department of English
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY