I.

 Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes, they smiled,
And then we parted,--not as now we part,
But with a hope. -
Awaking with a start,
The waters heave around me; and on high
The winds lift up their voices: I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by,
When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

II.

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead!
Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvas fluttering strew the gale,
Still must I on; for I am as a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail.

III.

In my youth's summer I did sing of One,
The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;
Again I seize the theme, then but begun,
And bear it with me, as the rushing wind
Bears the cloud onwards: in that tale I find
The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears,
Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,
O'er which all heavily the journeying years
Plod the last sands of life--where not a flower appears.

IV.

Since my young days of passion--joy, or pain,
Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string,
And both may jar: it may be, that in vain
I would essay as I have sung to sing.
Yet, though a dreary strain, to this I cling,
So that it wean me from the weary dream
Of selfish grief or gladness--so it fling
Forgetfulness around me--it shall seem
To me, though to none else, a not ungrateful theme.

lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron.
Spenserian stanzas like the Faerie Queen. -post Napoleonic landscape, trying to make sense of it.

The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poemThe Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."

The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.

The work provided the first example of the Byronic hero. The hero must have a rather high level of intelligence and perception as well as be able to easily adapt to new situations and use cunning to his own gain. The hero also has a tendency to be arrogant and cynical, indulging in self-destructive behaviour which leads to the need to seduce women.

“untaught in my youth my heart to tame,/My springs of life were poison’d.” line 60 p 902

This book is the equivalent of a thoughtful documentary

Child herald is poetic personal

narrator and child herald begin to merge: final canto is written in 1st person.

Byronic hero is to some extent a mask.

splitting narrator and child herald - distance on own experience, not implicate himself in huge emotional...it’s a thing for privacy.

-mask for Byron.

artistic creation = most intense way of living. give thought a form, otherwise you’re in a world of nothing. jaded about everything but creating.

Napoleon - also exiled from France to island of Elba. Governed himself.

why do we create? he’s jaded. old and can’t feel anymore.

-opposite of I wandered Lonely as a cloud. (single image remembered). sustained narrative. child herald. place to place, point to point. influence of grand tour in European travel by privileged.

psychological version of imagination. go back to Coleridge?

novelization of poetry. plot lie. progression. pilgrimage/process rather than lyricization of a moment.

defends novelwriting.

I.

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,[15]
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.

II.

Vernon,[16] the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk,
And filled their sign-posts then, like Wellesley now;
Each in their turn like Banquo's monarchs stalk,
Followers of Fame, "nine farrow"[17] of that sow:
France, too, had Buonaparté[18] and Dumourier[19]
Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.

III.

Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette[20]
Were French, and famous people, as we know;
And there were others, scarce forgotten yet,
Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Desaix, Moreau,[21]
With many of the military set,
Exceedingly remarkable at times,
But not at all adapted to my rhymes.

IV.

Nelson was once Britannia's god of War,
And still should be so, but the tide is turned;
There's no more to be said of Trafalgar,
'T is with our hero quietly inurned;
Because the army's grown more popular,
At which the naval people are concerned;
Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service.
Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.

LINES WRITTEN IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering-no", reflecting gloom
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings 5
Of waters-with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river 10
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine-
Thou many-colored, many-voicéd vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, 15
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest; thou A lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, 20
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging
To hear-an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep 25
Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;
Thy caverns echoing to the Argues commotion, 30
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound-
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange 35
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around; 40
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that 'pass by 45
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

Some say that glean-is of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, 50
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep 55
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles? For the very spirit falls,
Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep
That vanishes among the viewless gales!
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, 60
Mont Blanc appears-still, snowy, and serene-
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread 65
And wind among the accumulated sleeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there--how hideously
Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, 70
Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply-all seems eternal now. 75
The wilderness' has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal 80
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

I

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 wingèd 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, O 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 airy 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: O hear!

 
III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled 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 grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

All the things happening in late 1819s allows for spirit of change

Terza rima – rhyme scheme that is aba bcb cdc then ends with couplet

Seeing what the West wind can do over the land/sea- wakes up everything over land and in sea.

1^st stanza- earth

2nd- wind

3^rd- Water

4^th- Speaker looking at himself, hailing the wind and its power, wind changes speaker, but speaker is like the wind “tameless, swift, proud”

            The speaker himself is the substitute for fire

5^th- prayer-> command “be thou me” Now commanding the West wind

            “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken new birth”= return to 1^st verse

            Leaves- poetic pun- pages of a book. Take my thoughts and poetry and spread across the world to create new birth

Trumpet- powered by breath tied to wind, now that the speaker has harnessed the wind the speaker can control it and “Blow the prophecy of change”

Points us to a hope of the future- on you as a reader to answer questions about the future.  “If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley understanding that he won’t be around when poem is read in future so up to reader to figure out openness of own futures

Argues as a poet would - through metaphors, tropes, analogies, images.

• Lyre -- “Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them.”
• Nature responds to the melody but it’s what is in us that responds and makes harmony
• Wind strokes the lyre
• Intermittent
• Invisible force
• Breath

Nightingale

            Poetry as a bird song- have to sing because can’t come straight out and say what they want. The poet sings but not to inspiration change, or transmit a message. Poet isn’t trying to create a revolution.

Mirror

            What’s in your mind is not just what’s up there on the page b/c the limitedness of the page. There is a world of pure ideas but we’re not in it, we’re fallen from that world.

Flower-

            Changing and growing over time (color, etc) All things (seed, growth, flowering, fading) all part of the flower. If you can see the flower’s natural history then you can understand it as a whole.

            Future in this image and showing the potential of it

Spark in Dante

Come to terms with “being in history” 18^th century- “Poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present”

            Shadows of future seen after the poetry has been written, one cant seen it at present time w/present poetry. We can look back and see what shadows futurity casts. Makes piece about the reader as well as the poet, and is located in time too.

Why do we love looking back at old poetry?

            To see our future (Shelley’s belief ) A future the poetry did not intentionally put in there. The poet channels imagination which portrays the future through poetry, the reader must interpret the poem and find the message within. The case he makes for the futuricity of poetry is also a case

• Poetry portrays the ideas of domesticity
• Considered cosmopolitan writer

  Popular in 19^th and 20^th century- not liked by Byron called “He-mans”

              Themes- different than others at her time, in 20^th century ppl discussed that her work was not elevated as others (not fancy enough) used a lot in schoolhouses

              Domestic Poetry- local and national

Flecia Hemans

The boy stood on the burning deck
  Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
  Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
  As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
  A proud, though child-like form.

The flames rolled on–he would not go
  Without his Father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
  His voice no longer heard.

He called aloud–'say, Father, say
  If yet my task is done?'
He knew not that the chieftain lay
  Unconscious of his son.

'Speak, father!' once again he cried,
  'If I may yet be gone!'
And but the booming shots replied,
  And fast the flames rolled on.

Upon his brow he felt their breath,
  And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death
  In still yet brave despair.

And shouted but once more aloud,
  'My father! must I stay?'
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
  The wreathing fires made way.

They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
  They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
  Like banners in the sky.

There came a burst of thunder sound–
   The boy–oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
  With fragments strewed the sea!–

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
  That well had borne their part–
But the noblest thing which perished there
  Was that young faithful heart.

• In Hemans' and other tellings of the story, young Casabianca refuses to desert his post without orders from his father. (It is sometimes said, rather improbably, that he heroically set fire to the magazine to prevent the ship's capture by the British.) It's said that he was seen by English sailors on ships atta

cking from both sides but how any other details of the incident are known beyond the bare fact of the boy's death, is not clear.

• Shows nationalism and the value of duty and dedication, service, obedience
• Children recited it in massive groups
• Breaks down classes in different levels of homes -- classification -- showing that any home/class can love country in the same way.

by: Felica Hemans

COME from the woods with the citron-flowers,
Come with your lyres for the festal hours,
Maids of bright Scio! They came, and the breeze
Bore their sweet songs o'er the Grecian seas;–
They came, and Eudora stood rob'd and crown'd,
The bride of the morn, with her train around.

Jewels flash'd out from her braided hair,
Like starry dews midst the roses there;
Pearls on her bosom quivering shone,
Heav'd by her heart thro' its golden zone;
But a brow, as those gems of the ocean pale,
Gleam'd from beneath her transparent veil;
Changeful and faint was her fair cheek's hue,
Though clear as a flower which the light looks through;
And the glance of her dark resplendent eye,
For the aspect of woman at times too high,
Lay floating in mists, which the troubled stream
Of the soul sent up o'er its fervid beam.

She look'd on the vine at her father's door,
Like one that is leaving his native shore;
She hung o'er the myrtle once call'd her own,
As it greenly wav'd by the threshold stone;
She turn'd–and her mother's gaze brought back
Each hue of her childhood's faded track.

• The Bride and the Greek Isle - page 1230
• Bride is troubled, worried, reluctant to leave home
• Leaving her home, sad to leave her fam
• found holy place of rest
• Bids farewell to her fam before she gets married
• Imagining poem
• sweet, little poem about marriage -- till “hush, be still...”
• Pirates!!
• Abducted on the verge of switching homes, by pirates who have no home
• Figure of the bride, holding fire, removed from economy of home, belonging, moves from passive figure to standing up for herself and defending herself -- suicidal heroism, operating under no order

Bride on the verge of marriage, telling her family goobye, sad yet still exciting

·      Stanza 1- bride saying goodbye, sort of sad

·      Stanza 2 Imagining of home; then in middle of wedding pirates come out

o   Logic of pirates- interrupt the poem

BY Felica Hemans

THE stately Homes of England,
  How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
  O'er all the pleasant land.
The deer across their greensward bound
  Thro' shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
  Of some rejoicing stream.
[Page 170]
The merry Homes of England!
  Around their hearths by night,
What gladsome looks of household love
  Meet in the ruddy light!
There woman's voice flows forth in song,
  Or childhood's tale is told,
Or lips move tunefully along
  Some glorious page of old.
The blessed Homes of England!
  How softly on their bowers
Is laid the holy quietness
  That breathes from Sabbath-hours!
Solemn, yet sweet, the church-bell's chime
  Floats thro' their woods at morn;
All other sounds, in that still time,
  Of breeze and leaf are born.

The Cottage Homes of England!
  By thousands on her plains,
They are smiling o'er the silvery brooks,
  And round the hamlet-fanes.
Thro' glowing orchards forth they peep,
  Each from its nook of leaves,
And fearless there the lowly sleep,
  As the bird beneath the eaves.
The free, fair Homes of England!
  Long, long, in hut and hall,
May hearts of native proof be rear'd
  To guard each hallow'd wall!
And green for ever be the groves,
  And bright the flowery sod,
Where first the child's glad spirit loves
  Its country and its God!*

“stately home” from this poem

            Breaks down classes in different levels of homes- classification- showing that any home/class can love country in the same way. Model of unity, takes in accounts of class but brings together in common idea of nationality.

·      England is England b/c its homes and not its houses. House is just a building, physical space. A home is a place that is defined by the emotions and family unit.

London:Educated to be a pharmaist (apothacry)

Focus on the body/healing within poetry

Died young from TB- desired to live intensly through imagination

"cockney school of poetry"- working class poet

by John Keats

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
   Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
   That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
   Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
   When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
   He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

by John Keats

Homer would have been studied w/proper education--keats not properly educated, did not learn Greek

Chapman=english translation

Italian Patrician Sonnet

Senses fusing in his poetry- reading chapman like hearing, breathing in

Competing layers of one sense over another

By John Keats

• Conveys importance of imagination, even if not projected to art
• Basic form is famous myth
• Looser than other odes, more rhapsodic
• Psyche = soul
• Psyche didn’t have a temple so Keat’s work is her temple
• He is giving her his imagination, a region of his mind
• Ode to Psyche is a song to love and the creative imagination
• Step between Ode on Indolence (numbness) and Ode to Nightingale
• He is preoccupied with creativity but isn’t interested in the outward expression of art yet
• Unique rhyme scheme because it is just an overflow of creativity
• Keats comes to poetry too late

Myth of cupid and psyche - given immortality- most accessible of the gods

Came into olympus too late-> correlates to Keats coming into poetry too late.

Wanting to be in pantheon of poetrey, leaving behind legend

By John Keats

• Speaker feels numb, not from envy of nightingale’s happiness, but from sharing it too much
• He is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer
• The second stanza he longs for the oblivion of alcohol and to “leave the world unseen”
• In the third stanza he wants to forget his troubles and fade away
• In the fourth stanza he tells the nightingale to fly away and he will follow through poetry (not alcohol)
• In the fifth stanza the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers int he glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”
• In the 6th stanza the persona listens to the nightingale in the dark and and thinks about dying and how it is richer than ever but he wouldn’t be able to hear the nightingale sing
• In the 7th stanza the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not born for death - goes through history of the nightingale
• In the 8th stanza the speaker is restored to melancholy and laments imagination failing him
• Form is metrically variable
• rapture of poetic imagination matches rapture of the nightingale’s music

    The Eve of St. Agnes

• Splendid language, sharply etched setting, and vivid mood--"The Eve of St. Agnes" has them all.
• What the poem lacks for some readers is significant content; it is, for them, "one long sensuous utterance," "a mere fairy-tale romance, unhappily short on meaning."
• Clearly, the portrayal of ardent young love dealing with a hostile adult world and contasted with aging and death has an inherent appeal.
• A closer reading reveals more than just a gorgeous surface; it reveals many of the same concerns that Keats explores in his odes--imagination, dreaming and vision, and life as a mixture of opposites.

BY John Keats

ABABBCBCD

Iambic Pentameter w/spencerian Stanza

Romeo and Juliet Set up

Begins in realm of religious-> Living

• Splendid language, sharply etched setting, and vivid mood--"The Eve of St. Agnes" has them all.
• What the poem lacks for some readers is significant content; it is, for them, "one long sensuous utterance," "a mere fairy-tale romance, unhappily short on meaning."
• Clearly, the portrayal of ardent young love dealing with a hostile adult world and contasted with aging and death has an inherent appeal.
• A closer reading reveals more than just a gorgeous surface; it reveals many of the same concerns that Keats explores in his odes--imagination, dreaming and vision, and life as a mixture of opposites.
• iambic pentameter
• Spenserian stanzas

By John Keats

• First stanza the speaker addresses urn
• describes urn as historian
• wonders what story is
• 2nd stanza - the speaker looks at another picture on the urn of man lying with lover underneath a tree, the two lovers will last forever because they are immortalized on the urn
• 3rd stanza - look at the trees and is happy they won’t shed leaves
• 4th stanza - the speaker examines another picture on the urn the speaker says that it will last, even when everything else has faded away
• each of the 5 stanzs are 10 lines long
• Portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture
• The urn doesn’t age
• the figures are free but frozen in time
• the speaker tries to engage with scenes carved into the urn - each time he asks three different questions of it
• 1st stanza - examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture
• 2nd and 3rd - he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the treees and tries to emphathize
• He thinks their loves is above human passion and knows he can’t identify with them
• In 4th stanza the speaker attempts  to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time
• He thinks that if they leave their origin they will never return
• He confronts the statiticness of art and realizes there’s nothing the urn can tell him

By John Keats

By John Keats

done immortal b/c poem will live forever even though he will not. love and fame is supposed to come at end of Shakespearean sonnet, but he doesn’t get them. and he’s okay.
fear to redemption to acceptance
never finding love or being famous.
fame and love = redeem shortcomings in Shakespeare. language is Shakespearean but they’re acceptance instead of escaped. negative capability.

Shakesperian Sonnet form= Problem then resolution

Problem- fears of death w/o living enough. High romance- adventure and love and furthering works. Miss out on literay production and unreflecting love-

Resolution- Little bit of resolution b/c acceptance and peace not through love or fame but through thought.

Imagination vs truth

Willing suspension of disbelief compaison, disbelief never completely suspended

Imagination gives us a kind of truth itself

***Negative Capability- walking back w/ artist friends. when a man is capable of being in uncertainties. it’s his own idea. when man is capable of being in uncertainties w/out reaching out for fact and reason.

do i wake or dream? what kind of experience is the experience of imagination?
contrasts to Coleridge’s willing dispen. of disbelief - allow yourself to be fooled.
to Keats, it’s different. not that disbelief is suspended. imagination gives us virtual experience of truth. imagination gives us a kind of truth itself. (not belief v disbelief). more like seeing truth in imagination.

“O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts” - Blake - senses are open portals to the world. keats is not interested in world of pure thought.

Heaven is earthly happiness in a finer tone repeated.

not as rational but as sensation, bodily as well as truthful.

“excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate”

meter in verse allows you to write things that would be too hard to write in prose...verse can be less vivid than prose. meter by being more deliberate/artificial gives you a bit of pleasure and repetition so poetry can write about things that are sad b/c it gives you a little bit of pleasure.

Coleridge - harmonizing all different things. concrete w abstract. local detail w/ overall theme.
power of art/poetry to harmonize opposites.

here, the intensity of are makes disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship w/ Beauty and Truth. closeness w/ them overrides everything else. overcoming all disagreeables.

"too rural" agricultural laborer

a lot published after death, institutionalized later in life

Wrote "Nightingale's Nest"

"I am"

"Pastoral Poesy"

By John Clare

Up this green woodland-ride let’s softly rove,
And list the nightingale - she dwells just here.
Hush ! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love ;
For here I’ve heard her many a merry year -
At morn, at eve, nay, all the live-long day,
As though she lived on song. This very spot,
Just where that old-man’s-beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road, and stops the way -
And where that child its blue-bell flowers hath got,
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails -
There have I hunted like a very boy,
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn
To find her nest, and see her feed her young.
And vainly did I many hours employ :
All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn.
And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among
The hazel’s under boughs, I’ve nestled down,
And watched her while she sung ; and her renown
Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird
Should have no better dress than russet brown.
Her wings would tremble in her ecstasy,
And feathers stand on end, as ’twere with joy,
And mouth wide open to release her heart
Of its out-sobbing songs. The happiest part
Of summer’s fame she shared, for so to me
Did happy fancies shapen her employ ;
But if I touched a bush, or scarcely stirred,
All in a moment stopt. I watched in vain :
The timid bird had left the hazel bush,
And at a distance hid to sing again.
Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves,
Rich Ecstasy would pour its luscious strain,
Till envy spurred the emulating thrush
To start less wild and scarce inferior songs ;
For while of half the year Care him bereaves,
To damp the ardour of his speckled breast ;
The nightingale to summer’s life belongs,
And naked trees, and winter’s nipping wrongs,
Are strangers to her music and her rest.
Her joys are evergreen, her world is wide -
Hark! there she is as usual - let’s be hush -
For in this black-thorn clump, if rightly guest,
Her curious house is hidden. Part aside
These hazel branches in a gentle way,
And stoop right cautious ’neath the rustling boughs,
For we will have another search to day,
And hunt this fern-strewn thorn-clump round and round ;
And where this reeded wood-grass idly bows,
We’ll wade right through, it is a likely nook :
In such like spots, and often on the ground,
They’ll build, where rude boys never think to look -
Aye, as I live ! her secret nest is here,
Upon this white-thorn stump ! I’ve searched about
For hours in vain. There! put that bramble by -
Nay, trample on its branches and get near.
How subtle is the bird ! she started out,
And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh,
Ere we were past the brambles ; and now, near
Her nest, she sudden stops - as choking fear,
That might betray her home. So even now
We’ll leave it as we found it : safety’s guard
Of pathless solitudes shall keep it still.
See there! she’s sitting on the old oak bough,
Mute in her fears ; our presence doth retard
Her joys, and doubt turns every rapture chill.
Sing on, sweet bird! may no worse hap befall
Thy visions, than the fear that now deceives.
We will not plunder music of its dower,
Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall ;
For melody seems hid in every flower,
That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song ;
And gaping cuckoo-flower, with spotted leaves,
Seems blushing of the singing it has heard.
How curious is the nest ; no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots : dead oaken leaves
Are placed without, and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair ;
For from men’s haunts she nothing seems to win.
Yet Nature is the builder, and contrives
Homes for her children’s comfort, even here ;
Where Solitude’s disciples spend their lives
Unseen, save when a wanderer passes near
That loves such pleasant places. Deep adown,
The nest is made a hermit’s mossy cell.
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five,
Of deadened green, or rather olive brown ;
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.
So here we’ll leave them, still unknown to wrong,
As the old woodland’s legacy of song.

By John Clare

Response to Keats

Speaker is familiar with land- specific poetic geography vs. keats in darkness, unfamiliar, ambiguous

Form- Not a lot of punctuation *more authentic b/c rural*

Irregular rhyme, Iambic pentameter

Speaker seeks to see bird, description

Wants to explore nature but not destory it

By John Clare

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Iambic pentameter- alternating ABABAB CDCDEE

I am of the Bible & Creative imagination (Coleridge)

Ability to perceive Gods creation

NOt assesing us as our global position in the world more of a personal position in the world-

Ends suspended bw ground and sky

Everything besides I AM gone- the self insolation

Reducation to pure isolated existence- different than wordsworth who trie to connect w/others

• Burke argued that the sublime was large, rough, powerful, angular, and obscure.
• The beautiful is small, smooth, you exert power over it, it gives you pleasure, you desire it.
• Wordsworth thought the sublime was the fusion of harmony and the deep power of joy. The sublime has the power to corrupt and destroy.

• Lowest form of imagination, because “it has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites.” i.e. no creation involved, just a reconfiguration of existing ideas, putting them in a fresh relationship to each other
• The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space. It is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice.
• Equally with the ordinary memory the fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law association. Fancy is different from secondary imagination because it is a list of stuff to be rearranged and reshuffled.
• Views world as a mash up, while imaginative views world as having deep constructed meaning.
• Coleridge’s idea in Biographia Literaria

Coleridge said imagination was the key to poetry

• Two types:
• 1.)   The primary imagination the living power and prime agent of all human  perception  and as a repetition in the finite of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM. Spontaneous creation of new ideas, which are perfectly expressed.
• 2.)   The secondary - an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet identical in its agency, and different in degree and mode of its operation.

• The formulation "...that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith"
• Chapter XIV of Biographia Literariadescribes the preparations with Wordsworth for Lyrical Ballads and the importance of suspending disbelief

organic form” - work of art is like a living thing in that every part of that poem conduces to the whole experience.

• “It is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”
• From Coleridge
• The structure of a work that has grown naturally from the author’s subject and materials as opposed to that of a work shaped by and conforming to artificial rules.

• The term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry.
• William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in Preface to the third (1802) edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798).
• Wordsworth proposed that a "language near to the language of men" was as appropriate for poetry as it was for prose.

• 1789 – 1799
• France’s absolute monarchy collapsed and society went through transformation as radicals jettisoned traditions and hierarchy of monarchy, aristocracy, and religious authority, and implemented new Enlightened principles of equality, citizenship, inalienable rights, nationalism, and democracy.
• Began when members of the third estate proclaimed the Tennis Court Oaths and assaulted the Bastille.
• A republic was proclaimed in September 1792 and Louis XVI was executed a year later.
• Soon after the wars started and ultimately featured French victories that took over the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, and most territories west of the Rhine
• There’s little upward mobility – just nobility, clergy, and everyone else
• Kings try to raise taxes – estate general, discuss class rights – establish national assembly make the “Rights of Man”
• Political prison – Bastille is broken into and prisoners are freed
• 1791  royal family tries to fell and captured and all royal monarchies wage war on France
• 1792  Louis 17th on trial  and found guilty

period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution."

• Estimates vary widely as to how many were killed, with numbers ranging from 16,000 to 40,000; in many cases, records were not kept or, if they were, they are considered likely to be inaccurate.
• The guillotine (called the "National Razor") became the symbol of the revolutionary cause, strengthened by a string of executions: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans) and Madame Roland, as well as many others, such as pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade.

• French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution
• He was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815
• Made Napoleonic code, which was a major influence of many civil law jurisdictions worldwide
• Best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars, during which he established hegemony over most of continental Europe and sought to spread the ideals of the French Revolution, while consolidating an imperial monarchy which restored aspects of the deposed ancient regime
• Defeated at Elba in 1814

• Shaped the history of literature
• Watershed in history of literature
• From personal experience but also about a group
• Story of redemption and punishment
• Tension between the lyric and ballad created ambiguity
• Flexible structure
• Blank verse
• Iambic pentameter
• Elevates speak above those that speak

• In ancient Greece it equals a poem of celebration
• By the 18th century there is the tradition of an irregular ode
• Begins with a problem/crisis
• Combines celebration traits and irregularity of Latin odes
• Horation ode is about controversial figures
• About loss
• Teaches us that we lament loss of fresh spirit but celebrate that we had it at all

• Rhyme = is similar to memory

• fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter

• Lyrical Ballads mostly written in blank verse

• Tintern Abbey written in blank verse
• Shows that poetry can be close to prose

• rhythm of pairing ten syllables for each line into five pairs.
• Tintern Abbey

• the four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folkballad.
• Iambic tetrameter
• Rime of Ancient Mariner (Coleridge)

• Epic in prose with more of character and less of supernatural machinery
• Have social function and entertainment value
• Realistic fiction makes sense of “real life” while the power of the novel was showing real life
• Just coming of age in 1790s, many thought it the novel was petty and not taken seriously
• Novelist during this time tried to prove the novel’s legitimacy  
• Anna Barbauld explained why novels are respectable

• 1780s-90s= very popular
• Creepy, old buildings, sublime, getting looked up (usually heroine)
• Offers adventures for heroine (although creepy) in danger, mystery that has implication in present
• Horrors of patriarchy out of your control-
• psychology- becomes way of expressing concerns of social system and psychology

• Method by which William Blake published most of his works
• AKA- Relief Etchings
• Involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts
• Had to write the text/pictures backwards to put on page

• Gentleman class
• Had ample leisure time to travel, and read- educated
• Highest of Gentry= Darcy (Pride and Pred.)
• Lowest of Gentry= Country Clergyman (like Catherine Morland’s Father)

• In a novel, a story or character that is able to be written about.
• The challenege of a novel was to set up something to tell your readers then wrap it up
• Catherine was not a narratable character until she went to Bath because something needed to change in her life to become “novel worthy”

• Coming of age story
• Belinda
• Childe Harold - Lord Byron
• Casabianca - Felicia Hemans

• Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."

• The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters.

• Edgeworth- domestic happiness in the family (Percivals) a space of rational discussion- children w/adults, mutual respect- shared community of reason
• Difference in Lady Delacor throughout book, movement towards domestic happiness
• Felica Hemans
  

• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
• Defense of Poetry
• “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
• Subtly comment on the culture but are recognized till after

• Idea that sprang out of Paradise Lost by Milton comes up in Wordsworth’s Ode
• Having lost the imaginative joy of nature he possessed in his childhood, Wordsworth finds that it was worth sacrificing it for the wisdom that comes with age.
• Fall from Christianity paralleled w/fall from childhood> absence of memory of both
• Begin with crisis that the thrill of life is gone
• Also in Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• attuned to rationality rather than feeling, to calculation rather than sentiment, to self-reflection rather than self-expression.
• contradicts the pervasive popular view of what Romanticism means.
• Poetry is always other than what it names
• Like language a poem can never truly define the world it only represents it
• Truth doesn’t lie in adequate representations but the questioning of and play on representations
• There is always something not intended in the creation of the original poem
• They recognize existence of the intended and unintended
• This is a paradox because irony is a paradox and points out contradictions
• Shelley- Defense of Poetry

• an arena of discourse and relation in which actors learn to vest themselves as a public entity with enough ethical clout to challenge the absolute authority of the state
• "public sphere" is basically the idea that there's a part of social life where people can come together and discuss social or political issues--for instance, Romantic-era print culture.
• The existence of the public sphere is implicit in the print arguments over feminism and the French Revolution in the 1790s, for example, but you could also see Byron's later satires on literary and journalistic celebrity as a recognition that the public sphere could also be a realm of trivia, loss of privacy. and novelty for novelty's sake.

• Keats
• the concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.
• When man is capable of being in uncertainties/doubts without reaching after facts or reason.
• Beauty overcomes- take on different roles without own ego
• compared to Wordsworth egotistical sublime

Poetry- great and unobtrusive in lives- its subject should amaze us not itself

• Thoughts of future unknown
• "Well--I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me--The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think--We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening the thinking principle--within us-we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight:
• However among effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of Man--of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression--whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages--We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist--We are now in that state--We feel the 'burden of the Mystery'. . ."
• Keat's Letters