Romantic Period Answers – Flashcards

"Holy Willie's Prayer," written in 1785, was printed in 1789 and reprinted in 1799. It was one of the poet's favorite verses, and he sent a copy to his friend, the convivial preacher John M'Math, who had requested it, along with a dedicatory poem titled "Epistle to the Rev. John M'Math" (published in 1808). To M'Math he sent his "Argument" as background information:Holy Willie was a rather oldish bachelor elder, in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling orthodoxy, and for that spiritualized bawdry which refines to liquorish devotion. The real-life "Willie" whom Burns had in mind was William Fisher, a strict Presbyterian elder of the Mauchline church. In his satire on religious fanaticism, Burns cleverly allows Willie to witness against himself. Willie's prayer, addressed to the deity of Calvinist doctrine, is really a self-serving plea to be forgiven for his own sins of sexual promiscuity (with Meg). Willie's God—more cruel than righteous—punishes sinners according to the doctrine of predestination of saints: Only a small number of "elect" souls, chosen before their births, will enter Heaven; the others, no matter their goodness, piety, or deeds, are condemned (predestined) to Hell. Willie exults in thoughts of revenge toward the miserable souls who are doomed to such eternal torment. The victims over whom he gloats are, from the reader's point of view, far less deserving of hellfire than Willie, a hypocrite, lecher, and demon of wrath. In the "Epistle to the Rev. John M'Math," Burns defends his own simple creed as one superior to self-styled "holy" Willie's: "God knows, I'm no the thing I should be,/ Nor am I even the thing I could be,/ But twenty times I rather would be/ An atheist clean/ Than under gospel colors hid be,/ Just for a screen." His argument, he avers, is not against a benign doctrine of Christianity with its reach of forgiveness for sincerely repented sins, but against the hypocrites and scoundrels "even wi' holy robes,/ But hellish spirit!"

This sonnet comprises an apt summary of many of the themes Wordsworth pursued throughout his tumultuous career. Primarily, "The World Is Too Much with Us" is a poem about vision, about lines of sight, about the debris of history that prevents the observer from seeing through to the real meaning and purpose of human life. Throughout the first eight lines of the sonnet, two competing worldviews are silently compared before the poet explicitly declares in line 9 his allegiance to a modified paganism that preserves nature's autonomy and authority apart from human control or divine manipulation. In short, the poet seeks to divorce Christian vice from pagan virtue and form a hybrid ethic that permits the soul to return to its spiritual moorings. The poet's intellectual vista envisions a decadent West poised on utter industrialization and eventually ruin. The incipient "environmentalism" found in the sonnet undergirds most of Wordsworth's other works, especially his long narrative poem, The Prelude (published posthumously in 1850), and his verse drama, The Borderers (1842). Nature is conceptualized as a willing teacher, a personified, secularized "Holy Spirit," who will "guide us into all truth." The "world" that is "too much with us" is the world as stylized, fixed, unmalleable—the world of a sovereign deity who has placed humankind in a cosmos of his and not their making. Echoed here, then, is the poet's rebellion against this fixedness. The sonnet is thus a call to arms, a rallying cry to cease "getting and spending" with the coinage of heaven and to turn to a "creed outworn" for sustenance and guidance. In this, the sonnet reflects the poet's quite explicit preoccupation with expressing the nature and consequences of self-consciousness for an appreciation of nature's role in forming the human spirit. In commenting upon his poetics, Wordsworth offered that "the study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities." In other words, whatever merits Christian civilization may have presented, its excesses breed the very behaviors and social conditions that cause its dissolution. This sentiment is in line with the sonnet's poetic form and theme, and with the poet's own testimony about his life in the autobiographical work, The Prelude. Therein Wordsworth suggests that he had sought a rudder for the future by attaining a clear sense of his own past, and not merely the historian's pseudo-objective reconstruction of the past. That past, the past of each person, is available for introspection, and thus evaluation, in the poet's view only to the extent that one breaks free of the "world" as a prison house. To regain "our powers," people must get "in tune" with nature's melodies. The alternative—from the perspective of the sonnet and the poet himself—is to reap captivity of spirit and poverty of soul. Hence, "The World Is Too Much with Us" is a prototypical Romantic anthem, impishly prodding readers to reconsider the basis of their transcendent faith and their despair at reclaiming nature for their own purposes.

"Dejection: An Ode" is generally considered the last of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems. Coleridge wrote a draft of the poem on April 4, 1802, and published a significantly revised and shortened version in December of 1802 in The Morning Post. As its subtitle indicates, "Dejection" is an ode. The English ode from at least the time of Abraham Cowley in the mid-seventeenth century was an irregular form that generally served as a way for a poet to address interior states of mind and turns of cognitive reflection in an overall lyric frame. Coleridge begins his poem by quoting from the medieval English ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, citing the image of the new moon rising as the last vestiges of the old moon are disappearing. This optical effect is seen by the ballad, and sailors' lore generally, as presaging a dire storm. Coleridge's opening thus recalls the interest in oral and popular tradition that the poet and his sometime friend, sometime rival William Wordsworth produced in their coauthored Lyrical Ballads (1798) and that, in Coleridge's own case, influenced his best-known poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798). However, even as he calls on the sonorous orality of the ballad to begin his ode, Coleridge makes clear the distance of his own poem from that form. Whereas the ballad uses simple, resonant language, Coleridge tends to use more abstract or discursive words. Indeed, the gap between the palpable density of the ballad and the cerebral ruminations of the rest of the poem epitomizes the very distance from primal inspiration that preoccupies the poet throughout the course of the ode. Coleridge uses rhyme in his ode, much like his English predecessors and unlike the ancients, but the rhyme scheme is not in successive pairs of couplets it had been in previous English odes. The rhyme scheme is complex and inconsistent. The first stanza has ten separate rhymes, alternating three times between direct and interspersed rhymes. Formally, it could not be more different from the straightforward rhyme scheme of the ballad. The poem, however, is not blank verse, which Wordsworth certainly found a fitting vehicle for similar poems. The decision to use any rhyme, albeit idiosyncratic rhyme, gives "Dejection" formal ballast that lends a steady beat to its often agonized and contorted line of exposition. Rhyme is used often in the poem—at one point in stanza 5, four end-lines rhyme in a row, "power," "hour," "shower," and "dower"—but the argumentation is so strong that the rhyme is never obtrusive and often barely noticeable. Ironically, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens became part of the canon of Englsih literature almost wholly as a result of the attention Coleridge called to it. The intellectual meditation of Coleridge was needed to bring the oral ballad into scholarly focus. Coleridge himself may have had some wisdom about even such primal forces as the sea and weather that the ballad did not, yet this percipience is virtually annulled by the poem's sense of severance from feeling. The poem's combination of turbulence and malaise is quite unusual: Turmoil usually carries intense emotion with it, but the poem feels innoculated from the intensities of both joy and pain. "Dejection" is often seen as Coleridge's own commentary on his declining poetic powers or as presaging the shift in his intellectual attention from the writing of poetry to the formulation of the vast and intricately organized system of criticism unfolded in his Biographia Literaria (1817). The quandary of the poem is explicitly raised at the end of the second stanza. The poem has earlier complained of a "dull pain," a grief that is not even cathartic in its emotional release but "stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned." Coleridge recounts to the poem's addressee, Sara Hutchinson, his experience of gazing on the beauty of the woods, the sky, the moon, and the stars, registering them mentally without, however, being convulsed by their emotional force as presumably he once had been. The stanza concludes: "I see, not feel, how beautiful they are." This deficiency of inner feeling is the quandary addressed in the remainder of the poem. Given that "Dejection" was Coleridge's last major poem and given that he turned increasingly to criticism after writing it, critics have often read the ode as expressing the problems of affect and creativity that it diagnoses, problems the poem is unable to resolve. There is no ideal meld of ego and other. The poet says he "may not hope from outward forms" to win the spirit of true nature, whose aspiration is epitomized by an image of a green light that lingers in the west. The frustrations of the poem's speaker raise questions. When one sees but does not feel beauty, can one adequately grasp that beauty? How can one be a poet without feeling "inspired"? Can one's mind navigate an act of poetic perception without affect? Coleridge chastises himself for not feeling enough, yet the poem itself is not a failure, even as it seems to chronicle the imaginative shortcomings of the poet. The thematic affirmation of wisdom and persistence at the end is augmented by the imaginative achievement of the poem. "Dejection" shows the poet's mind contesting the problem, not just contemplating it. It is out of this activity that "Dejection" ends up conjuring "the natural man," even if that quality of naturalness is stolen "by abstruse research." Coleridge's optimism may have been manufactured; the resolution at the end may have been willed or premeditated. That does not necessarily mean it is false. Coleridge, who later, in his criticism, so powerfully wrote of how the imagination weaves and knits together disparate phenomena, asserts in "Dejection" that imagination takes effort. Imagination must negotiate both the internal pitfalls of dejection and the outward perils of turbulence. It cannot afford to be naïve or to dispense with the intellect. What on one level is inauthentic is on another level a voluntary exercise. The mind can make experience that does not come naturally. The Eolian lute, which comes to the fore in the poem's sixth stanza, is an unusual instrument, built in order for the wind to play upon it. The poet uses this device to intensify the moods of nature, but he prefers the exclusively natural "music" of the wind playing on mountains and trees. The Eolian lute is a trope for the poet's own will. It represents the sense of something in addition to nature that is concomitant with his mental exertions. It is not a shaping force; it can, in the terms of the poem's lexicon, "receive" but not "give." It is more a meteorological than a musical instrument. The poem has earlier said, in effect, that nature does not really matter unless people make it matter, that humans are the ones who supply nature's "wedding garment" and her "shroud." Coleridge had, seven years earlier, written a poem called "The Eolian Harp" (1795) that pictured the instrument as an accompaniment to domestic happiness amid natural bliss. In "Dejection," the mood has darkened, and Coleridge no longer apostrophizes Sara Fricker—his wife at the time, the "pensive Sara" of the original poem—but rather Sara Hutchinson, his extramarital love interest in 1802. In the original Morning Post version of the ode, Sara Hutchinson is named. In the final version, she is merely addressed as "Lady," possibly to avoid confusing eventual readers of the collected poems by including two poems addressed to different Saras. Not only did Fricker and Hutchinson share the same Christian name, but they were also both sisters of wives of Coleridge's friends and fellow poets. The first Sara's sister Edith had married Robert Southey; the second Sara's sister Mary had married Wordsworth. This repetition of name and circumstance emphasizes the more agitated, less tranquil 1802 revision of the harp-apostrophe combination, yet many critics would argue that Coleridge's agonized address to the second Sara is less a wish-fulfillment of domestic bliss and more a revelation of the poet's troubled state of mind. Thus, "Dejection," wrangles honestly with the affective complexity of its tableau, thereby generating an unfettered joy that rebukes the delights of "the sensual and the proud" because it has required more struggle to achieve it. themes Coleridge composed "Dejection: An Ode" as a direct response to the first four stanzas of William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807), in which Wordsworth lamented the loss of his childhood ability to see nature clothed in celestial light. Some of the phrases in Coleridge's ode are clearly intended as allusions to Wordsworth's poem. Compare, for example, Coleridge's "I see, not feel, how beautiful they are" with Wordsworth's "The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all." In its theory of perception, the ode marks a sharp break with Wordsworth's views, which Coleridge had previously shared. Wordsworth thought that a higher vision of life could be obtained through an "ennobling interchange," or marriage, between the human mind and nature. Coleridge had himself placed a very high value on the role that nature should play in the education of the human mind, especially in poems such as "Frost at Midnight" and "The Dungeon" (1798). In "Dejection: An Ode," he repudiates this view. He gazes out on a beautiful scene, but this does nothing to lift his spirits or rekindle his imaginative power. He concludes that "outward forms" are of no use unless the inner mind is vibrant: "we receive but what we give,/ And in our life alone does Nature live." Only if the mind is full of joy will it be able to perceive the unifying spirit that runs through all things, and so overcome the split between subject and object. Only then can Wordsworth's marriage metaphor, which Coleridge also employs in this poem, have any meaning. Interpreters have differed over the question of whether the poet (as speaker) shows any imaginative growth during the course of the poem. The general view is that he does not and that the final stanza, even though it brings the poem to a peaceful conclusion, is a defeat for the poet, since he can contemplate the possibility of joy only for his friend, not for himself. Unlike Wordsworth in the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Coleridge can find no consoling thoughts to live by or convince himself that he has gained more than he has lost. A minority view sees evidence in stanza 7 that the poet has rekindled an imaginative spark and that as a result, in the calm final stanza, he is able to transcend his sense of separateness and feel compassion for another human being. "Dejection: An Ode" is an ode in eight stanzas that vary greatly in the number of lines, the length of line, and in thought and imagery. The title announces the subject of the poem, which becomes apparent in the first stanza. The poet is surveying the tranquil night sky in which the new moon can be seen. He recalls an old ballad, which predicted that when the new moon can be seen with the old moon "in its arms," a storm may be brewing. He hopes this is true, because he is sunk in depression and remembers past occasions when the driving energy of a storm has enlivened his creative spirit. In stanza 2, the poet elaborates on his dejected state of mind, which is deep and pervasive. Nothing seems able to lift it. Addressing a "Lady" (who is Coleridge's friend Sara Hutchinson), he says that in this mood he has been gazing at the western sky all evening. Although he can see how beautiful the scene is, he cannot feel this beauty in his inner being. This observation leads him, in the short stanza 3, to reflect philosophically on his situation. The source of his poetic power is failing him, and the knowledge of this weighs him down. He realizes that he could gaze out forever on the external scene but that it would be no use to him. The "passion and the life" that he seeks is not to be found outside the human mind, but within it. In stanzas 4 and 5, the poet again addresses Sara directly, elaborating on his philosophy of imaginative perception. He states that if one is to see anything of higher value in nature, one must supply it oneself. For nature to be clothed in light and glory, light and glory must emanate from the soul itself. These qualities cannot be found in outer things, which of themselves are merely cold and dead. The poet calls this power joy. It permits a marriage between man and nature, which creates "a new heaven and a new earth." The reference is to the Christian Millennium, foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Such perception is available only to the pure. In stanza 6, the poet looks back at a time when he possessed this joy, which could even withstand personal misfortune. Then he was full of hope, but now he feels that his imaginative and poetic power, which nature gave him at birth, has vanished. In stanza 7, the poet turns from these dismal thoughts and listens to the wind, which has gathered strength in the time he has been contemplating. In an apostrophe to the wind, he compares it first to a "mad Lutanist," then to an actor, perfectly enunciating a variety of sounds, and then to a poet, moved to the frenzy of inspiration. He wonders what story the wind is telling. First he thinks of the headlong retreat of a defeated army, groaning in pain. Then, with a sudden lessening of the noise, he thinks that it tells another tale, of a lost child screaming for her mother. In the final stanza, the poet's thoughts turn to Sara. He hopes that sleep may visit her, since it is denied to him. Invoking the joy to which he had given so much importance in stanza 5, he expresses the wish that Sara may rise in the morning with an uplifted spirit, and that her life may always be full of rejoicing.

In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley defies the remote, impersonal character of the unseen Power behind Nature and strives to establish a personal relationship with it. The poem manages to reconcile the poet's terrific emotional intensity with the elegant, even stately formal pattern of the regular Horatian ode. Using heroic meter (iambic pentameter) throughout, Shelley made each of the five stanzas into a sonnet with four terza-rima tercets and a closing couplet. The poetical effect is rather unlike that of the usual sonnet. Shelley's interlocking rhymes sweep a reader along like gusts of wind, and the couplet pounds its message home with direct clarity and force. The first three stanzas, addressed to the wild west wind, praise its irresistible power, marking its effects on all things in nature: clouds in the air, waves on the sea, leaves in the forest, even "the oozy woods which wear the sapless foliage of the ocean." Poets usually address the mild, warm winds of Spring that bring nature to life, but Shelley confronts the cold, wild "breath of Autumn's being," which acts as both destroyer and preserver. The hidden Power behind Nature is not always friendly to humankind. The morality or immorality of its operations may not be discernible. Thus, the poet stands, appropriately, in awe of it. Each of the first three stanzas ends with a plea for the wind to take heed and hear the poet's prayer. The fourth stanza turns introspective. The poet wonders whether he might be used as the leaves have been, tossed about and left for dead by the indifferent force. He humbles himself, admitting that his powers have faded since boyhood, when I would ne'er have strivenAs thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowedOne too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. Then in the final stanza the poet casts off the humility with the simile and claims a more intimate, metaphoric, mythic relationship with the wild Spirit. "Make me thy lyre," he demands, first to accompany the Power and turn the wind into sweet music, and then boldly to become it, "Be thou me." The poet has found that "soul out of my soul." He yokes the great hidden Power to his own imagination to scatter among humankind the glowing spark of his verse "to quicken a new birth." Thus, the Shelleyan poet becomes the prophet of an apocalyptic revolution to redeem humankind from torpid experience. Then, suddenly, after such thunderous bursts of emotion, the poem ends as quietly as a sigh with perhaps the finest, most wistful and haunting line in all English poetry, a question: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Like many of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems, "Ode to the West Wind" was inspired by a natural phenomenon, an autumn storm that prompted the poet to contemplate the links between the outer world of nature and the realm of the intellect. In five stanzas directly addressed to the powerful wind that Shelley paradoxically calls both "destroyer" and "preserver" (line 14), the poet explores the impact of the regenerative process that he sees occurring in the world around him and compares it to the impact of his own poetry, which he believes can have similar influence in regenerating mankind. In each stanza, Shelley speaks to the West Wind as if it is an animate power. The first three stanzas form a logical unit; in them the poet looks at how the wind influences the natural terrain over which it moves. The opening lines describe the way the wind sweeps away the autumn leaves and carries off seeds of vegetation, which will lie dormant through winter until the spring comes to give them new life as plants. In the second stanza, the poet describes the clouds that whisk across the autumn sky, driven by the same fierce wind and twisted into shapes that remind him of Maenads, Greek maidens known for their wild behavior. Shelley calls the wind the harbinger of the dying year, a visible sign that a cycle of nature's life is coming to a close. The poet uses the third stanza to describe the impact of the wind on the Mediterranean coast line and the Atlantic ocean; the wind, Shelley says, moves the waters and the undersea vegetation in much the same way it shifts the landscape. In the final two stanzas, the speaker muses about the possibilities that his transformation by the wind would have on his ability as a poet. If he could be a leaf, a cloud, or a wave, he would be able to participate directly in the regenerative process he sees taking place in the natural world. His words—that is, his poetry—would become like these natural objects, which are scattered about the world and which serve as elements to help bring about new life. He wishes that, much like the seeds he has seen scattered about, his "leaves" (line 58), his "dead thoughts" (line 63)—his poems—could be carried across the world by the West Wind so that they could "quicken to a new birth" (line 64) at a later time, when others might take heed of their message. The final question with which the poet ends this poem is actually a note of hope: The "death" that occurs in winter is habitually followed by a "new life" every spring. The cycle of the seasons that he sees occurring around him gives Shelley hope that his works might share the fate of other objects in nature; they may be unheeded for a time, but one day they will have great impact on humankind. forms and devices The structure of "Ode to the West Wind" is exceptionally complex. Each of the five stanzas is itself a terza rima sonnet, consisting of fourteen lines divided into four triplets and a concluding couplet. Through the complex, interlocking rhyme scheme of terza rima, Shelley gives the poem a strong sense of rhythm. The form also gives emphasis to the concluding couplet in each stanza, thereby focusing the reader's attention on the final line or lines. The effect Shelley achieves is important, for he wishes to emphasize, in the first three stanzas, the speaker's plea that the West Wind heed his call, and in the final stanza he wants to highlight the significant rhetorical question with which the poem ends. The primary literary trope in the poem is personification. Shelley repeatedly addresses the West Wind as if it were an animate, intelligent being; one might be reminded of the way elements of nature are represented in classical Greek or Latin literature, or in American Indian writings. Shelley wants readers to consider the Wind a living force that helps shape the landscape—literally, the physical landscape, and metaphorically, the landscape of human minds and attitudes. Shelley uses three major images of the poem—the wave, the leaf, and the cloud—to demonstrate the ways in which the West Wind treats elements of the physical landscape. The poet's scene-painting is especially noteworthy; in a few short lines in each of the first three stanzas he depicts the effects of the fierce autumn wind on the ocean, the earth, and the sky. In the fourth stanza, he applies these descriptions to himself, calling on the West Wind to work its magic on him in the same way it has on the natural world, so he too will "die" only to rise again and give life—intellectual life. One of the most striking images in the poem is used in the fourth stanza to describe the poet's present plight: "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" (line 54) he cries out to the West Wind. In that single line, following his plea that he be made like the wave, the leaf, or the cloud so he can be transformed by the powers of the wind, Shelley expresses the problem of the Romantic poet: He would soar to new heights of understanding and deliver insight into life to all humanity if he could, but his human nature keeps him affixed to the earth, with all its troubles and stumbling blocks. Life itself is seen as a painful rosebush whose thorns afflict one who wishes to rise above the day-to-day humdrum of human existence. Shelley realizes that he cannot do so. Nevertheless, he has hopes that his works may be like those natural objects that seem to die in winter only to rise to new life in spring. He compares his verse to "ashes and sparks" from an unextinguished fire (line 67), which he hopes the wind will scatter so they may flare up in other places, thereby widening his impact on others.

One evening in June, 1820, while walking in a meadow near Livorno (Leghorn), Italy, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley heard skylarks sing. The next day, reflecting upon the experience, he wrote "To a Skylark" and sent it to his London publisher to be added to a forthcoming volume featuring Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (pb. 1820). A similar story is told about "Ode to a Nightingale" (1820), which John Keats wrote in May, 1819, the morning after hearing the song of a nightingale nesting in a tree outside his window. The opening stanza of William Wordsworth's "To a Cuckoo" (1802) anticipates Shelley's poem in language and theme. O blithe newcomer! I have heard,I hear thee and rejoice.O cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird,Or but a wandering voice? Wordsworth's "The Green Linnet" (1803, 1807), a similar paean to a songbird, includes the following lines: Hail to Thee, far above the restIn joy of voice and pinion!Thou, Linnet! In thy green array,Presiding Spirit here to-day,Dost lead the revels of the May;And this is thy dominion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his "To the Nightingale" (1796), calls the bird "Sister of love-lorn Poets." In all of these works, the essential reality of a bird is represented as being manifest not in a physical presence, but in a noncorporeal song that suggests to the poet a permanence denied to humankind. In sum, long before Shelley's 1820 walk in the meadow, songbirds had become commonplace muses to Romantic poets. "To a Skylark" is one of several poems Shelley wrote between 1816 and 1821 that sprang from his contemplation of the natural world. Others include "Ode to the West Wind" (1820), "Mont Blanc" (1817), and "The Cloud" (1820). It is divided into stanzas of four trimeter lines with a concluding alexandrine and has a traditional ababb rhyme scheme. This pattern of short lines with frequent enjambment hastens the progress of each stanza, which Shelley then brings to a brisk close with a final hexameter line. In addition, the opening trochaic foot of each line not only provides emphasis but also, combined with other aspects of the metrics, may be Shelley's attempt to replicate in verse the flight of the bird. The poem effectively breaks into three parts. In the first part (lines 1-30), Shelley describes the flight of an actual skylark, albeit one that already has flown beyond his ability to see. The skylark, unlike most birds, sings only when flying, usually when it is too high to be seen from the ground: "from Heaven, or near it . . . singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." Shelley betrays a note of envy in the opening words of the poem—"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!"—by implying a contrast between the bird and himself. Earthbound, the speaker has suffered emotionally debilitating personal tragedies and is struggling to achieve recognition as a poet, while the unfettered skylark enjoys a joyful freedom that is given expression by the "shrill delight" of its song. By employing the phrase "blithe Spirit" at the start, Shelley instantly focuses attention not only on the sheer joy the bird exudes but also upon its noncorporeal, symbolic quality. He continues this thought in the second line—"Bird thou never wert"—by suggesting that the skylark differs from other birds, which neither rise as high nor sing as "profusely." "Unpremeditated art," which concludes the stanza, suggests a spontaneity central to Romanticism but that humans, constrained by society's mores, usually are forced to sublimate. The next three stanzas trace the upward flight of the singing bird with a series of similes that continues to emphasize the creature's freedom from earthly restraints, in part because the object of each simile also is unseen. The most effective simile compares the bird, whose progress the speaker follows by the sound of its song, to Venus, the morning star, "that silver sphere" whose "arrows" (rays of light) fade in "the white dawn clear," but whose presence continues to be felt. All the earth and airWith thy voice is loud,As, when night is bare,From one lonely cloudThe moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. In the second section of the poem (lines 31-60), Shelley shifts his style and tone. Rather than invoking heaven, sun, clouds, or star, his imagery focuses upon earthbound things: a poet struggling to find an audience, a lovelorn maiden in a tower, a glowworm whose "aereal hue" is hidden by flowers and grass, and a rose deflowered by winds and obscured by its leaves. All of these earthly things, though beautiful, are unseen and thus unappreciated. By contrast, the skylark's song compensates for the fact that the bird is not seen, so it can still be appreciated. There is a universality to Shelley's several similes, as the images encompass the human, animal, vegetable, and mineral realms. What is more, his imagery in these stanzas (lines 36-60) also evokes all five senses. Having liberated the skylark with his opening invocation, Shelley the human poet in the third section (lines 61-105) pays tribute to the skylark as natural poet, whom he then asks to teach him and his fellows the secret of its joy. The opening ("Teach us, Sprite or Bird . . . ") echoes the start of the poem, though "Spirit" now is "Sprite" and the earlier enthusiastic greeting ("Hail to thee . . . ") now is an imploring "Teach us. . . . " (There is a similar pleading in the first line of the last stanza of "Ode to the West Wind," which Shelley wrote a year earlier: "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is." The two poems often are compared.) Nothing else he has heard—neither the traditional Greek poems in praise of love or wine, nor a "Chorus Hymeneal" (marriage song), nor even a "triumphal chant" (an army's victory march)—matches the "flood of rapture so divine" that is the skylark's song. In four questions that compose the next stanza (lines 71-75), Shelley asks what the sources are of the skylark's "happy strain," its "love of thine own kind," and "ignorance of pain," and he again invokes varied aspects of the physical world: fields, waves, mountains, sky, and plain. He proceeds further to highlight differences between the bird and humankind, culminating in the implied contrast to himself personally in line 80: "Thou lovest—but ne'er knew love's sad satiety." In the next stanza, "we mere mortals" also suggests that the poet is speaking both of his situation and of that of humankind generally. Continuing this thought, Shelley further highlights the contrast between the lives of humans and that of the skylark. We look before and after,And pine for what is not:Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. In the next and final stanza, however, Shelley retreats to a self-serving introverted plaint, asking the skylark to help him attain public recognition as a poet. Teach me half the gladnessThat thy brain must know,Such harmonious madnessFrom my lips would flowThe world should listen then— as I am listening now. Because Shelley portrays the skylark as totally happy and not needing to confront mortality, one can conclude that the bird symbolizes ultimate joy, maybe even a Platonic ideal. Like so much Romantic lyric poetry, however, "To a Skylark" ultimately is a personal manifesto: As a poet, Shelley also is a singer and expresses in his poems a yearning for an immortality that he imagines the skylark, through its song, surely has. In the summer of 1816, in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" Shelley asked the awe-inspiring but unseen "loveliness" or "Spirit of Beauty" that pervades the material world to endow him with "whate'er these words cannot express." Four years later, in "To a Skylark," a more straightforward lyric, he continued his quest, which was a quintessential aspect of Romanticism. Like so many of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems, "To a Skylark" describes a natural phenomenon and then uses that event as a jumping-off point for discussing the power of nature to transform men's lives. Shelley wrote the poem near Leghorn, Italy, in 1820, presumably after experiencing the situation he describes in the opening lines of the poem: The sound of a small European skylark, which sings only when in flight, calls the speaker's attention to the presence of the bird soaring so high that it cannot be seen by the viewer. Trying to spot the bird in the sky leads the narrator to imagine what the bird is actually like, and after running through a series of comparisons, he turns to contrasting the joyful life of the bird with that of men who are bound to earth, with all its cares. The poem's twenty-one stanzas divide logically into three parts. In the first section, the speaker addresses the bird whose song he hears but that he cannot see high in the sky, where its warbling fills the air with sweet music. The bird seems to be a kind of "unbodied joy" (line 15) whose "shrill delight" (line 20) makes the whole world a happy place. In the middle section of the poem, the speaker makes a series of comparisons to try to explain what the bird's song is like. Drawing images from the world of men and the world of nature, Shelley likens the bird to a summer shower, a rose, a highborn maiden, a rainbow cloud, even a glowworm. None of these images is sufficient, for none captures the essence of the joy the poet feels in hearing the bird's song. Finally, the speaker asks the bird to share with him the secret of its special joy. The unbridled joy of this creature is unlike that felt by men, who know pleasure only in comparison to the pain and tragedy that are an integral part of human existence. Hence, when possessed of the skylark's secret, the poet will be able to transform the lives of his readers and improve humankind; such, Shelley implies, is the power of poetry when it is suffused with the power of nature.

yron began Childe Harold's Pilgrimage on his first trip abroad, when he and Hobhouse toured Spain, Portugal, Albania, and Greece. It was originally titled "Childe Burun"; "Childe" refers to a young nobleman who has not yet officially taken his title, and "Burun" is an earlier form of Byron's own name. Inspired by his recent reading of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Byron chose to employ the nine-line Spenserian stanza for the major part of this work. The first two cantos were published in 1812, and Byron's ensuing popularity among the social and literary circles of London was unprecedented, in part because the public insisted—with some accuracy and despite Byron's prefatory disclaimer to the contrary—upon identifying the intriguing Harold as Byron himself. Byron's own confusion of the two, however, is evident in his frequent dropping of the story line of the work to engage in repeated authorial digressions, which themselves intrude on the almost gratuitous plot. Harold is a young, though not inexperienced, Englishman who is compelled to flee Britain, although, the reader is told, it is in fact his own psyche he is trying to escape. The young man has a mysterious background, an unspeakably painful secret in his past. Perhaps, it is suggested, the secret is of some illicit love. With Harold, Byron introduces the first of his many Byronic heroes. Canto 3 begins with Byron sadly recalling his daughter, Ada, whom he has not seen since the breakup of his marriage. Byron returns to the story of Harold, first warning readers that the young hero has greatly changed since the publication of the first two cantos. During the interim, Byron has endured the painful separation and the scandal concerning his relationship with Augusta, all of which essentially forced him to leave England. His bitterness is evident in the far darker tone of canto 3, and the character of Harold and that of the narrator, never strikingly different in temperament, now are more clearly merged. Still unable to completely detach himself from feeling the pangs of human compassion, Harold flees to the solitude of natural surroundings, finding nature to be the one true consoler. He feels a communication with the desert, the forest, the ocean, the mountains. Finding Harold at the site of the Battle of Waterloo, "the grave of France," Byron resumes the theme of Napoleon's despotism and takes the opportunity to examine tyranny in general. Praising the heroes of that fateful and momentous battle, Byron blames Napoleon's extremism, arguing that moderation would have prevented the disastrous results of a once noble plan. Harold then travels to Germany, where he still is not immune to feelings of love and joy, however fleeting. Visiting the Swiss Alps leads Harold to the sites of other battles. Lake Leman (Lake Geneva) recalls to Byron the great French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the forerunners of the Romantic movement. This section, it has often been noted, has a distinctly Shelleyan mood, and indeed Byron wrote it while visiting Percy Bysshe Shelley. Byron explores the pantheistic philosophies of William Wordsworth, Shelley, and Rousseau and expresses feelings of oneness with nature, though he ultimately rejects their ideas. These feelings, furthermore, lead him to consider his feelings of alienation in the world of humankind. Insisting that he is neither cynical nor completely disillusioned, Byron insists that he believes that there are one or two people who are "almost what they seem" and that happiness and goodness are possible. Byron concludes the canto as he begins it, lamenting his absence from Ada, imagining what it would be like to share in her development, to watch her grow. it is true that the general consensus is that Canto III holds more leverage overall in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It would also be fair to agree that it is a much better developed canto for many reasons. The first two cantos were mainly written in a variety of locations and, as a result are most admired for the local descriptions. What sets Canto III apart is that it gives us an introspective look into the character of Harold who has become enthralled by the developments in Waterloo and the other Napoleonic battles in the Rhine, and the Alps. Waterloo is specifically described at full splendor which is one other strength of this particular part of the Pilgrimage. There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gather'd then Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men; Canto III also shows Harold as a less haughty and more approachable character who now wants to find the love of his life. The narrative in all is a combination of rich and well-developed thoughts that could very well be the same thoughts as any other drifter in time; any other wanderlust-filled traveler such as Harold. Among other strengths found in Canto III there are also the same locodescriptions mentioned in Cantos I and II, only that these descriptions are actually put together and not just mentioned sporadically like Byron does previously. Harold also engages in deep analytical thought of characters such as Rousseau and Voltaire, among many others. The Canto also denotes a tendency to the bucolic, focusing on the importance of nature and arguing in its defense in a way that a modern reader would understand it under the parameters of environmentalism. He who ascends to mountain tops, shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of those below. Part of the reason why Canto III is outstanding is because the voice of Byron, the author, is completely superseded by Harold, the character. All the beliefs and ideals of Lord Byron go silent, and Harold's deep meditative state combined with rich words and awesome reflections are in full throttle. As a literary technique, this "muting" of the author is pretty outstanding especially when compared to the other Cantos and also to other works from Byron. Therefore, it is a combination of description, stream of consciousness, meditation, analysis and strong comparisons that set the canto apart from the first two.

In A Nutshell When Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819, he told his publisher that he didn't want to get either of them into any trouble. But the fact that he published these cantos anonymously shows that ol' Byron knew people weren't going to react all that well. That's because Don Juan is chockfull of adultery from its very first stanzas. Now, it's true that other writers in Byron's time would have portrayed adultery in their works. The difference is that they would have brutally punished the hero or heroine for committing such sins. Byron, on the other hand, just makes fun of adultery and portrays it in a humorous way. Our hero, Don Juan, grows up with two spoiling and flawed parents, who shield him from all knowledge of sex. This plan backfires when Don hits puberty and starts feeling urges he never felt before. These urges take him into the arms of a married woman named Julia. But Julia's husband finds out about the affair and Don Juan has to leave Spain. The rest of the book tells us about all the wacky and sexy adventures he has afterward. It's hard to overstate just how huge Don Juan is in the canon of world literature. The famous poet Goethe wrote that Don Juan was "a work of boundless genius" and critics have tended to agree ever since. You'll be hard-pressed to find a major anthology of British poetry that doesn't have at least an excerpt of Don Juan in it. This is due to the fact that Byron is both a great rhymester and unique for his time when it comes to humor. Byron was writing during an era when other poets wanted to talk about taking nature walks and the horrors of industrial society. But Byron just wanted everyone to pop a chill pill and stop taking themselves too seriously. Byron starts off by saying that he needs a hero for a long poem he wants to write. It seems as though anyone will do, so he just chooses Don Juan (who was already an established character in Western history). Byron starts off by telling us all about Don Juan's upbringing in the Spanish town of Seville. His parents are from good families and his mother is highly educated for a woman of her time. The problem with her is that she's a little too perfect, which makes her stuck-up. Don Juan's father is more careless than his mother. The dad isn't really interested in learning or working hard. He just wanders around doing whatever he wants. Their contrasting personalities eventually causes Don José and Donna Inez to fight. The speaker talks of how he tried to intervene and bring the two to peace, but it didn't work out. With his parents fighting all the time and trying to make him take their side, Don Juan grows up as a spoiled child. Donna Inez tries to get her husband put away by calling him crazy, but it doesn't work. The two are finally about to get a divorce when Don José dies unexpectedly. The death leaves Don Juan as the heir to a pretty decent estate. With Don José gone, Donna Inez puts all her thoughts into making Don Juan the greatest person he can be. She hires all kinds of tutors to make him super-smart. She has trouble finding literature for him, though, because there's so much sex and violence in the classics. Don Juan ends up reading a lot of church sermons. Over time, the tutors stamp out a lot of Don Juan's spoiled selfishness. By the age of twelve, he's a quiet and thoughtful boy. The speaker makes a personal note of saying that sending young boys away to school is usually better than homeschooling. Next thing you know, Don Juan has turned sixteen and he is one of the handsomest young men you've ever seen. One of Donna Inez's close friends is a woman in her mid-twenties named Donna Julia. This woman is married to a much older Spanish man named Alfonso, and she finds Don Juan's boyish looks refreshing. She tries to resist, but she feels a deep sexual attraction to him. She takes every opportunity to touch him when he's near. One day, Julia decides to end things once and for all and to tell Donna Inez that they can't hang out anymore. She goes to Inez's house to deliver the news, but Don Juan opens the door. Julia convinces herself that an affair with Don Juan will be okay because she'll be giving him a sort of sexual education. Don Juan, in the meantime, doesn't understand the urges taking over his body. He starts spending a lot of time wandering alone in the woods and being philosophical. He knows that nature is trying to speak through him, but he's been so sheltered from sex that he doesn't understand what his body wants. Here, the speaker suggests that Donna Inez knows all about Don Juan's budding affair with Julia. The speaker isn't sure why Donna does nothing to stop it. Maybe she wants her son to become a man or maybe she wants Julia's husband Alfonso to be humiliated. In any case, Alfonso seems to get wind of what's going on with his wife. We look in on Julia sitting alone at the edge of a cliff and thinking about how boring and old her husband is compared to the young and beautiful Don Juan. Julia decides that she'll never dishonor her marriage vows by having sex with another man. But, at this same time, she unknowingly puts her hand on Juan's. It turns out that Juan is sitting next to her. Juan takes the hand and kisses it. The poet suggests that this leads to sex between the two. Byron takes this moment to write satirically about English morality and its squeamish attitude toward sex. His basic argument is that English sexual taboos are lame. He then gives a sincere speech about how sex is awesome, especially when you have it for the first time. Donna Julia is in her bed one night when her husband barges in with a mob of people carrying knives and pitchforks. Alfonso is convinced that Julia is seeing another man, so he and his gang search the room. They don't find anyone, though, and Julia takes the opportunity to give a huge speech about what a jerk Alfonso is. The truth is that Don Juan is hiding in the sheets that are heaped up in Julia's bed. Alfonso and his mob leave, but Alfonso comes back a few minutes later and finds Don Juan's shoes. Alfonso runs to get his sword and a scuffle ensues. Don Juan manages to get away and runs naked into the night. The whole affair becomes a huge scandal in the local newspapers. Donna Inez decides to keep her son out of trouble by shipping him off to live somewhere else. She hopes that this traveling will also help him become wiser. Julia, on the other hand, goes off to live as a nun. We get a letter from her to Juan saying that she'll keep loving him. To end his first canto, Byron goes off on another rant about how the public may see this poem as something that's immoral or dirty. He talks about all the poets who are respected in his time and says they're too boring and too "safe." He also tells his readers not to worry, because later in the poem he plans on showing hell in all its horror to remind people of what happens to those who are immoral. Next, Byron talks about how reluctant his publisher was to publish this first canto at all. Now it looks like he's just thinking out loud. Byron laments that fact that he's too old to be young and beautiful like Don Juan. He feels as though he has wasted his youth. In the end, he doesn't think it matters if he's a famous poet. Everyone dies in the end and everyone gets forgotten no matter how much of a big deal they were in their lives. Um, yay?

Byron opens this canto by talking about how clever he thought he was as a boy. It's funny because he clearly still thinks he's pretty clever. Once again, Byron feels compelled to talk about how many of his readers think he's immoral. That's great and all, but when is he going to get back to the plot? We finally return to Don Juan and Haidée, who still haven't realized that Haidée's pirate father Lambro has returned home. Byron even changes the story a bit to say that Lambro has walked in on them sleeping next to each other with their cheeks pressed together. Haidée is dreaming about being chained to a rock on a distant seashore, while the waves rise all around her. Then she's in some sort of cave. She finally wakes up and shrieks to find her father staring at her and Don Juan. DJ wakes up and draws his sword. Lambro tells him to put the thing away, since he (Lambro) can call on twenty armed men with little effort. When DJ refuses, though, the man finally gets angry. He pulls out his pistol and repeats his order. But Haidée throws herself in front of DJ. Lambro puts away his gun and calls on his guards. He snatches his daughter away with a quick movement while his men grab DJ. DJ takes out a few of Lambro's men before one of them cuts him in the side and he drops to the floor. The last thing Haidée sees is DJ falling. When her father pulls her from the room, she thinks her lover is dead. Haidée is taken away unconscious, for she has fainted from the commotion. She eventually wakes up and half-forgets what happened. She never really regains her former strength. After twelve days, she gives up and dies. We then find out that she was pregnant with DJ's baby, which has also died with her. Byron dwells a while on the sadness of Haidée's death before returning to Don Juan. Lambro has decided to sell him as a slave since that's what Lambro is good at. DJ meets a group of Italian singers who have also been captured as slaves. They chat for a while about where they come from and where they might be going (gulp, as slaves). One by one, we learn that none of the Italian singers are very good at what they do. We have a brief description of some of the people who get sold as slaves at an auction. But we're left hanging when it comes to Don Juan. If you've heard the expression "He's a Don Juan" before, you know that a "Don Juan" is a guy who gets lots of sexual attention. Traditional stories tend to show the character of Don Juan as a middle-aged womanizer, but Byron turns the story on its head to show Don Juan as an innocent young man who has trouble fighting off the advances of women. That's Byron's sense of humor for you. In a time when men were clearly the sexual aggressors, Byron saw fit to make his main male character into the object of women's sexual desire. Don Juan can only resist for so long before he gives into some of these women. But who are we to judge him? Byron asks. In a poem where Byron makes women into sexual aggressors and Don Juan into a passive lover, there are bound to be some interesting points about gender roles and sexual education. For starters, Byron intentionally reverses the traditional stories that portray Don Juan as an adult male who travels around seducing women. The Don Juan in Byron's tale plays a traditionally feminine role by being passive while all sorts of women try to conquer him sexually. By doing this, Byron shows us how absurd it is to think that one gender is naturally more sexual or aggressive than the other. These types of stereotypes shift throughout history and there's no good reason to believe that men are naturally this or women are naturally that when it comes to sex.

The value of the unique individual is upheld in this glorious poem through the way that the character of Don Juan is shown to reject the expectations of society and make his own way through life. Note how Byron presents Don Juan and the kind of challenges he has to face. He has to endure being raised by a narrow-minded mother and then being educated in a hypocritical educational system before losing his innocence and becoming thoroughly disillusioned with the world due to its false values. He however manages to use his passions and ideals, shattered as they are, to insulate himself from the pain of life and determines to live his own life free from the restrictions and control of society. This poem paints Byron's own satirical view of life and society, yet it also seems to offer some kind of philosophical approach to cope with the state of life in Don Juan's determination to live life to the full. Byron, like his hero, comes to realise that any happiness in this life is fleeting, but it should be made an important goal, and when it comes, that happiness should be exploited to the full: A day of gold from out an age of iron Is all that life allows the luckiest sinner. This fine example of Romantic fiction therefore upholds the unique individual through the character of Don Juan and his path through life; disillusionment with society becomes a vehicle that is used by him to chart his own course in life and to develop his own philosophy towards the vicissitudes of human existence. Although some critics have argued Byron's philosophy of life is rather depressing, at the same time it is celebratory in the way it seeks to maximise the joys and live a life focused on pleasure.

There are many men who have argued over the ages that women don't have enough mental strength to become morally good on their own: they need the guidance of men. But Wollstonecraft believes that if women have souls, then they must have the same rational powers as men. The only other option is for men to claim that women don't have souls, which even the worst misogynists in the world would hesitate to argue. The biggest challenge to women's education seems to be the belief that women should be kept innocent like children and taught nothing other than the skills for pleasing their future husbands. Wollstonecraft agrees that to some extent, young children should be kept innocent. But the same can't be said for women. There comes a time for all human beings when they should be encouraged to think for themselves. She thinks that parents should prepare their children for the day when they begin to think for themselves. But she also admits that to some extent, people are always products of the societies they live in. So all education should strive toward making the individual as independent a thinker as possible. Wollstonecraft blames the men of her time (especially Jean Jacques Rousseau) for promoting a type of education that makes women completely useless as members of society. Rousseau thinks that men are so perfectly rational that women should follow their guidance. But Wollstonecraft argues that many (if not most) men are just overgrown children. In the current system, women are only able to learn about the world by looking at the surfaces of things. They are never taught how to figure out larger patterns from individual observations, so they all just end up being superficial and shallow. The same is true of military soldiers, who are taught only how to follow orders and who don't have any core reason or virtue guiding what they do. They live on the surface of life, according to Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft brings us back once again to the decision we have to make. Either women are so weak that they need to be guided completely by men, or they are rational people who are capable of thinking for themselves. Here, Wollstonecraft wants to clarify that she doesn't want to reverse the order of things and place women above men. She just wants women to have the independence they need to develop their minds fully. Even though it might anger some men, Wollstonecraft believes that women were made for something more than making men fall in love. Yes, there's a time for thoughtless love when a person is young. But those years should also be spent preparing for the more important and mature years of life, when reason is most important. Wollstonecraft next critiques the work of a guy named Dr. Gregory, who has written a book on how he chooses to raise his daughters. For starters, Dr. Gregory instructs his daughters to learn how to dress nicely. This actually seems like the most important thing in his books. Wollstonecraft finds it strange that Dr. Gregory thinks that liking dresses is "natural" for women, since this presupposes that the soul (a completely intangible thing) somehow possessed a love for dress before it entered a human body. The truth is that women like to dress nicely because looking good is where they get their power in society. The second piece of advice Dr. Gregory gives his daughters is for them to hide their true emotions whenever they can. It's a woman's duty not to let her frustrations show. The truest bond between men and women, according to Wollstonecraft, is not love. It's friendship. Love is something Wollstonecraft connects to sex and romance. But friendship is a bond between two people who respect one another's intellects. Besides, the shine wears off on love fairly quickly, but friendship lasts a lifetime. If we went nowhere after we died, then Wollstonecraft would agree that the only point of life is to pursue pleasure. But she believes in an afterlife, and therefore thinks that we have to spend our time on Earth doing the right thing. If Dr. Gregory's advice is right, then a woman's purpose in life ends the moment she gets married and has children. There is nothing left for her to accomplish. The truth is that we won't really know what women are capable of until we offer them all of the same social respect and education that we offer to men. In Wollstonecraft's time, society was still a long way from achieving this goal. If men are truly superior to women, then let them prove it by giving women an equal playing field. In a worst case scenario, you're still going to wind up with a bunch of women who are better than they used to be. Men have about as much right to oppress women as kings have to oppress men. And when Wollstonecraft was writing this text, men were definitely turning against the idea of political oppression. Notice here how she's capitalizing on a political movement for democracy by applying the same logic to women's rights

Ostensibly a literary biography, Biographia Literaria: Or, Biograhical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is also one of the greatest works of literary criticism. Coleridge begins by discussing his secondary education, particularly in classical poetry, under James Bowyer at Christ's Hospital Grammar School. From there, he launches a discussion of Wordsworth's poetry, to which he later returns. Coleridge takes Wordsworth at face value and applies to Wordsworth's poetry what Wordsworth in his 1800 preface to the Lyrical Ballads claimed to do. Coleridge shows that Wordsworth's protestations that his craft was the common language of common people was not strictly true, and that his poetry is nonetheless artifice, consciously crafted and not the unreflective, thoughtless speech he said it represented. Still, Coleridge argues that Wordsworth is the finest contemporary poet and an example of poetic genius. He also gives his version of the origin of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, saying that Wordsworth was to write of natural scenes made extraordinary by his craft, while Coleridge was to write of the supernatural rendered credible by his art. This interpretation is somewhat at odds with Wordsworth's emphasis in his preface on the volume's intended singular purpose. Coleridge also proffers his definition of imagination. He distinguishes the "primary," which he describes as the divine ability to create, the source of all animate power. The "secondary" imagination is the human ability to create through the inventive perception and recollection of images. Last is the "fancy," which is simply the ability to remember. Coleridge, in addition, discourses at length on philosophy. Beginning with Thomas De Quincey, who was himself later similarly charged, critics have noted, censured, or excused the extensive portions of the Biographia Literaria that correspond to translations of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Commentator Thomas McFarland has pointed out that Schelling did not consider his work to have been plagiarized and that in large measure what Coleridge was doing was registering a congruence of his thinking with that of Schelling, before both diverged in opposite directions. Moreover, McFarland notes that Coleridge fully intended to return to the manuscript later to insert his own words for the words of the German, which were at the moment merely holding a place in the text, as it were, for Coleridge's words. Alas, Coleridge never returned, never substituted, and never completed the work. Thus, it might be described most accurately as an "anatomy," as critic Northrop Frye defines it, a congeries of digressions, meditations, and reflections, the unity of which may be unclear but the sum of which clearly exceeds its parts.

Another possible "message" in this poem is that of death, repentance, and resurrection. There is a considerable amount of Christian symbolism in the poem as well as outright allusions to Christianity, with many passages to suggest this is a theme of the work. The albatross seems to be a Christ symbol: At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name(63-66). In Christianity, Christ was sent by God to save mankind, as this albatross was sent to save the ship. But the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross: 'God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS (79-82). Subsequently, the men die as the result of being trapped on the ocean with no winds. The Ancient Mariner repents for his crime, and when he prays, the albatross, which had been hung around his neck as punishment for his sin, drops away, he falls to sleep, the winds come, and all the men return to life: Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul (292-296). Of course, a great deal more happens than this in the poem, and there is considerably more Christian symbolism and allusion, but even these selections are ample evidence to support a message of Christian death, repentance, and resurrection. christian themes: Although heavily influenced by William Wordsworth and the pantheist tradition, Coleridge diverged from Wordsworth on the source of inspiration for life and poetry: Where Wordsworth believed nature was his source of inspiration, Coleridge believed love was the source of inspiration. Drawing from Christ's instruction that the greatest commandment is love, Coleridge develops a story that illustrates the importance of love not only for the individual soul but also for the balance and harmony among all living things. The senseless shooting of the albatross, a bird lured to follow the ship by the men's initially friendly treatment, serves as the point of illustration for a parable about right behavior. Even as the hospitality and friendliness toward the albatross and the common sense and decency with which the ship members treated it dried up, the men on the ship are dried to the point that their tongues turn black. Their rottenness causes the sea to rot. The crew is angry and afraid but unaware of its complicity in the sin, hanging the albatross around the Mariner's neck. For their complicity and unwillingness to take responsibility, they are punished with death. However, the Mariner, because he is directly responsible for killing the bird and showing no mercy, is fated to remain alive like the Wandering Jew who refused Christ the mercy of a cup of water. Initially, the Mariner does not fully understand his responsibility for what is occurring and blames others: "And never a saint took pity on/ My soul in agony." Because he refuses responsibility, he feels guilt, hearing the departing souls of his shipmates pass by "[l]ike the whizz of [his] crossbow!" and seeing himself as one of the slimy things that lives on, but he cannot repent. Until blessed with an overwhelming sense of love for the beauty of the sea snakes, the "wicked whisper" of both despair and desire to blame others for his predicament prevents him from praying and moving toward atonement, which consists of repeating his story to those who need to hear it that they might learn, He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all. summary Coleridge's masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was first published as part of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), which thereby secured its position as one of the landmark poems of its age, despite its archaic ballad form. Structured as a frame narrative, the poem begins with the Mariner's detaining a guest on his way to a wedding with the spellbinding account of a most strange ocean voyage. The Mariner tells of a southbound voyage to the Antarctic. He describes how the ship, as it clears the horizon, ominously dips below the church and below all of civilized and conventional authority, descending toward the unknown, the wild, and the hellish. Reaching the frozen, seemingly blank, polar world, the sailors call to and feed a white albatross, a large seabird, as an apparent friend or messenger from another realm. The Mariner inexplicably shoots it, sacrificing it, innocent and pure, with his crossbow (echoing Easter imagery). Thereupon, the ship idles without wind to move it while the superstitious crew grows increasingly thirsty and hangs the dead bird around the Mariner's neck to punish him for his cruelty, which they feel in some way has stalled their trip. At last, a ship is sighted, but it is a skeleton ship, carrying the Spectre-Woman, "Life-in-Death," and her mate Death, who are types of avenging spirits of the albatross. The two of them toss dice to determine who will decide the fate of the Mariner's ship, and the Woman wins. She imposes a penance on the Mariner, which begins with the death of the crew while the Mariner lives on, unable to die, unable even to sleep. Watching the now-beautiful phosphorescent water snakes, which earlier looked monstrous to him, the Mariner is impelled to bless them, and at once the albatross slides off his neck into the sea. His unconscious action restores a balance upset by his murder of the albatross, although his penance is not finished, as disembodied spirit voices assert. The Mariner is now able to sleep, and he dreams while the ship sails home, manned by spirits animating the crew's corpses. At length, the ship escapes the haunted universe to return to home port, but then it suddenly sinks, while the Mariner is rescued and immediately absolved of his sins, if only for a time, by the Hermit of the Wood. Nonetheless, his need for penance remains, for the Mariner must wander endlessly and solitarily, until an agony seizes him, and he in turn seizes one whom he knows must hear his tale. The Wedding Guest misses the marriage ceremony, but he has been irrevocably changed by the Mariner's words. The poem has given rise to a multitude of interpretations, stressing the existential, meaningless murder of the albatross in an incomprehensible world; the Christian pattern of sin, confession, and penance within a sacramental universe; the functioning of the symbolic or nightmare imagination as the Mariner's fate unfolds; and the necessity, even the desperation, of narration. Coleridge himself after the first publication appended marginalia that recapitulated the poem in an effort to clarify, although what it actually did was to retell the plot at a slant and thereby distance the author, as well as the frame, from the poem's peculiar and disturbing nature, relinquishing responsibility for interpretation to each reader. discuss it as a ballad Homework Help > The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Assess "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as a ballad. Download Answer Download Study Guide Asked on February 4, 2011 at 12:39 AM by pavni like 1 dislike 0 1 Answer | Add Yours mshurn's profile pic Susan Hurn | College Teacher | (Level 1) Educator Emeritus Posted on February 4, 2011 at 6:45 PM A ballad in literature is a narrative poem that usually tells a dramatic story. Early ballads in English and Irish literature that were handed down orally are folk ballads; their authors are unknown. Ballads that are composed as literary works by identified authors are literary ballads. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a literary ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one that tells a very enthralling story of supernatural events on a ship at sea. Traditionally, ballads are composed in four-line stanzas. They follow a set pattern of rhythm. The first and third lines are iambic tetrameter, meaning they follow a weak/strong pattern of rhythm; each line has four strong beats as the syllables of the words are pronounced. The second and fourth lines are iambic trimeter, meaning they follow the weak/strong pattern of rhythm, but each line has three strong beats. Coleridge's poem follows this ballad structure with few exceptions. Here is the poem's third stanza with the strong beats underlined: (1) He holds him with his skinny hand. (2) "There was a ship," quoth he. (3) "Hold off! unhand me, graybeard loon!" (4) Eftsoons his hand dropped he. When you read the lines aloud, it is easy to hear the rhythm in them, like beats on a drum: four beats in lines 1 and 3; 3 beats in lines 2 and 4. Also, ballads have a definite rhyme scheme with the second and fourth lines rhyming. In the stanza above, the second and fourth lines both end in "he," but that counts! Other stanzas show perfect rhymes in the second and fourth lines: three/me; kin/din; still/will, for example, the pairs of rhymes from the first, second, and fourth stanzas of the poem. Coleridge's poem doesn't follow perfect ballad structure. Some stanzas have six lines, but they do follow the same pattern of alternating lines in the rhythm pattern. Overall, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an excellent example of a literary ballad: It tells a very dramatic story and closely conforms to the patterns of rhyme and rhythm. There is, however, something unusual about it. It is an example of a lyrical ballad, a new literary form created by Coleridge and English poet William Wordsworth. As a lyrical ballad, the speaker (in this case the old mariner) expresses his feelings and shares his thoughts as the story is told.

The central thematic concerns of Shelley's poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley's era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley's treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes, A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron's pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time. context Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and the infamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives. Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists. Shelley's life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet's individual character. Shelley's joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics; his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth century's most significant writers in English. THE HEROIC, VISIONARY ROLE OF THE POET In Shelley's poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem "To Wordsworth" (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude" (1816). He has the power—and the duty—to translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelley's poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets in Shelley's work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations. THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as "The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester" (1819) and "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature's beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute nature's power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages Shelley's ability to believe that nature's beauty comes solely from a divine source THE POWER OF NATURE Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to nature's power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the "spirit of beauty" in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in "Mont Blanc." This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature's power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelley's delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side.

.The first three chapters of the novel are narrated by Mr. Lockwood as a recollection from his diary several years after the events took place in 1801. Lockwood, a native of London, rents Thrushcross Grange, in the desolate Yorkshire moors, in order to enjoy some solitude. On a visit to his landlord Heathcliff's residence, Wuthering Heights, he encounters some unusually unhappy people: Cathy, Heathcliff's daughter-in-law, whom Lockwood at first mistakes for his wife; Hareton Earnshaw, an ill-bred young man whose social status leaves Lockwood confused; Joseph, the snarling, rude servant; and Zillah, the only helpful person there. Most forbidding is Heathcliff himself, a man whom Lockwood describes as even more unsociable than he. Due to a raging snowstorm on his subsequent visit, Lockwood is forced to spend the night. While sleeping, he dreams of a ghostly child, identifying herself as Catherine Linton, grabbing at his arm and trying to get in through a broken window pane. Heathcliff is devastated to hear the dream and orders Lockwood downstairs so he can beg for the spirit to reappear. Relieved to get away from this unhappy, strange house, Lockwood returns to the Grange. His housekeeper, Nelly, takes over from him as the narrator, due to his prodding about the inhabitants of the Heights. Her narrative returns to her childhood, some thirty years earlier, when she was a servant at the Heights. She was working for the Earnshaw family, and growing up with their two children, Hindley and Catherine, a beautiful, but wild spirited girl. One day, Mr. Earnshaw had returned from a trip to Liverpool with a swarthy street orphan, who he intended to raise with his own children, against the wishes of his family. The boy is named Heathcliff, after a son who had died in infancy. Catherine and Heathcliff soon become close friends, but Hindley views Heathcliff as a rival for his father's affections. Indeed, Mr. Earnshaw does prefer Heathcliff to his own son, whom he views as a disappointment. Hindley's treatment of Heathcliff causes sufficient household friction that Hindley is sent away to college. Soon after, Mr. Earnshaw dies. Hindley returns home for the funeral with a wife, Frances, upon whom he dotes. Redoubling his hatred for Heathcliff, Hindley relegates him to servile status, causing Catherine much unhappiness. She and Heathcliff are frequently punished, but escape to play on the moors. During one such escape, the two venture to Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family and their children, Edgar and Isabella. Catherine, attacked by one of the dogs, is affectionately cared for, while Heathcliff is turned away for appearing to be a villain. When Catherine returns home after a five-week convalescence, she has become a well-mannered young lady. Taking pleasure in humiliating Heathcliff, Hindley tells him to come greet Catherine as if he were one of the servants. Later, when Edgar and Isabella come to visit, Hindley treats Heathcliff with particular humiliation. Heathcliff swears revenge on Hindley, even if it takes a lifetime. Frances dies giving birth to a son, Hareton. Anguished, Hindley soon becomes lost in alcoholic madness. Meanwhile, Catherine tells Nelly that she will marry Edgar because Heathcliff is socially beneath her. Overhearing, Heathcliff runs away before Catherine admits how profoundly she loves him. Three years later, Edgar and Catherine marry. Heathcliff returns, moving in with Hindley in order to gain his revenge by inducing him to gamble away all his money. A frequent visitor to the Lintons, Edgar soon becomes jealous of his wife's attachment to Heathcliff, and orders him to leave. Heathcliff gets his revenge on Edgar by eloping with Edgar's sister, Isabella. Although he despises her, Heathcliff marries Isabella in order to inherit her money. Catherine becomes dangerously ill, and dies after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy. Treated contemptibly by Heathcliff, Isabella runs away to the South, where she gives birth to a sickly son, Linton. Upon her death, Edgar tries to keep Linton, but Heathcliff demands custody. Raising his daughter to avoid Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants, Cathy forgets about Linton until she sees him by accident some years later. Heathcliff's revenge against the Earnshaw and Linton families includes garnering all their property for himself. He already possesses the Earnshaw estate, leaving Hareton an illiterate farmworker, completely dependent on Heathcliff. Heathcliff plans to do the same to Cathy, by forcing her to marry Linton, who cannot live past his teens, and therefore control all her inheritance as well. It is now 1802, and Nelly has brought Lockwood up to date with her history. The story continues. Heathcliff succeeds in accomplishing his plans. Edgar and Linton are dead, and Cathy is as penniless and dependent as Hareton. When the two cousins fall in love, Heathcliff realizes he is no longer interested in destroying anything. He becomes obsessed with a vision of his beloved Catherine's spirit hovering nearby, waiting for him to join her. Within three days of his vision, Heathcliff dies and is buried according to his wishes, alongside Catherine. Local legend claims that their spirits haunt the moors. Hareton and Cathy plan to marry on New Year's Day, moving back to Thrushcross Grange, and taking Nelly with them. Lockwood returns to London. This is a lengthy book. Unless the reader is accustomed to the style of a Victorian novel, he or she may have difficulty understanding the language. Furthermore, Brontë occasionally has her characters speak in phonetic Yorkshire dialect. Therefore, an inexperienced reader will have to read slowly and carefully. The entire book can be read over a period of forty hours, less if the reader has some familiarity with nineteenth century literature. You might want to consider the classic Gothic technique of narration. We have framing narratives and multiple layers of narrative. At some points, we have Lockwood telling us what was told to him by Nelly Dean what was told to her by another character. Such levels of narration create deep uncertainty and force us to ask hard questions about the narrative's reliability. "Love and revenge are the two main themes in Wuthering Heights as they govern the whole story and grip us throughout the novel." Discuss. There is certainly lots of truth in this statement. Love and revenge are two of the key themes in this novel that result in its plot and the way in which Heathcliff sets out to seemingly take over and destroy the Linton family. What drives him is his love for Catherine, and this, even after her death, is something that impels him forward on his path to perdition as he seeks to revenge himself on those who he feels oppose him and opposed his union with her. This is why he gains revenge on Hindley for the way in which he treated him when he was master of Wuthering Heights, and also the way in which he gains revenge on Edgar through the way in which he marries his sister and then forces his beloved daughter into a marriage with his son and tries to keep her from being with him when she dies. However, let us also remember that Catherine is a character who is consumed with revenge just as much as Heathcliff, in some ways. She in effect kills herself because she is so annoyed by the way in which both Heathcliff and Edgar stay away from her at her time of need. Revenge is shown not to be the exclusive property of Heathcliff. In addition, the overarching theme, and in many ways the cause of the theme of revenge, is the love that Heathcliff and Catherine have for each other. Let us remember Catherine's famous description of her love for Heathcliff in Chapter Nine: My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. It is this love that is shown to endure throughout their lives, and even beyond, as the rumours of ghosts and spirits that walk the moors shows. significance of end For such a passionate and intense story of love and revenge, Wuthering Heights has a happy and peaceful ending. That is the purpose of the closing scene. Mr. Lockwood has just finished learning about Heathcliff's last days and Nelly also tells him that young Catherine and Hareton are to be married, once and for all uniting the two families. As Lockwood walks back home, he comes upon the graves of Heathcliff, Catherine and Edgar. Catherine's grave is almost totally covered with brush, Edgar's mildly so, and Heathcliff's is bare, because his death is the most recent. Lockwood sees young Catherine and Hareton walking home, hand in hand, and he says: I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Hareton and young Catherine seem to embody the positive characteristics of their parents. Now that Heathcliff is dead, evil has been removed from their midst and they no longer need to live in fear of what Heathcliff might do next. So we get the idea they will live happily ever after.

where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation. and this happened in the context of a revolution--in american, then france, then haiti--of counter revolution, war, economic cycles of inflation and depression and the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties.] this was a period of harsh and repressive measures. public meetings prohibited in 1795, the right of habeas corpus was suspended for the first time in a hundred tears and advocates of even moderate political change were charged w treason.

legal principle protecting individuals from arbitrary imprisionment

limiting schooling, subjected to a rigid code of sexyal behavior, and were bereft of legal rights (Especially after marriage) women began to be stormed w information that insisted on physical and mental differences of men and women and they should accept that their roles in life revolved around child bearing, house keeping nothing else. a womans private virtues had a public relevance, they were crucial to nations wellfare bc of framework set up by new accounts of english national identity. bluestockings--educated women, objects of scorn. first era in lit history when men and women were competing for book sales

usually treated as independent individuals, or grouped into a number of different schools like "The lake school" -- wordsworth, coleridge, robert southey. valued themselves for having broken loose from the bondage of ancient authority.

there was an increased pressure on the aesthetic sphere to act as a sit in which human beings could rediscover the commonalities linking them as humans 18th century british philosophers devoted energy to demonstrating that human nature must be the same everywhere because it everywhere derived from individuals shared sensory experience of an external world that could be objectively represented. but as century went on hilosophers began to emphasize, and poets developed a language for individual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and re create reality. wordsworth registeredd this shift when in his preface he located the source of the poem not in outer nature but psychology of individual poet. emphatic attention to the operations of consciousness i is now a lyric speaker that shares recognizable traits w the poet. the experiences and states of mind expressed by lyric speaker often accord closely with the known facts of the poet's life.

shatter the lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder in the everyday and the lowly emphasis on unlabored art and on the spontaneous activity of the imagination producing

was also an epoch of individualism in which poets put an extraordinarily high estimate on human potentialities. defiant attitudes towards limits also made many writers impatient w conceptions of literary genre they inherited from the past appeal that nature poetry had for many writers can be attributed to a determination to idealize the natural scene as a site where the individual could find freedom from social laws, an idealization that was easier to sustain when nature was represented not as cultivated fields but uninhabitable wild wastes and chasms. rural community, threatened by enclosures that were breaking up village life was a tenuous presence in poetry as well.

not friendly or pleasant to be around everytime i approach text i should anticipate discovery the reward of discovery is free stickers on my bananas it's the image of a bed that casts the image of sexual transgression or retreat transmitting that vibration across space surely i would prefer to live the asymptomatic cancer ridden life

Pride and Prejudice is the best known of Austen's six novels and ranks among her finest work. As in Sense and Sensibility, its story centers on two sisters, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet. Jane falls in love early in the book with the amiable, wealthy Charles Bingley. Bingley returns her sentiments but is temporarily persuaded to abandon the romance at the urging of his friend, Mr. Darcy, who does not detect love in Jane's discreet manner. The book's true center, however, is the complex relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy. Both are intelligent and forthright, but their initial impressions blind them to the qualities in each other that will eventually form the basis for their love. Darcy is indeed proud and feels himself above the less refined country families in whose company he finds himself during his visit to Bingley. Elizabeth's mother, a vain, silly woman who is often a source of embarrassment to her daughter, is also an object of Darcy's scorn. When she overhears Darcy's assessment of her and her family, Elizabeth's own pride is wounded; she dismisses him as a proud, disagreeable man and is more than willing to believe the lies she is told about him by the charming, deceitful Wickham. For his part, Darcy's pride in his position and his family cause him at first to resist his attraction to Elizabeth and later to propose to her in a manner that she finds even more offensive than his initial hauteur. Yet as time passes and their interest in each other continues, both Elizabeth and Darcy begin to see beyond their original judgments of the other's personality and character. Both possess a measure of pride and prejudice that must be overcome before they will fully understand one another, and Elizabeth's younger sister, Lydia, is unintentionally a catalyst for the change. Foolish and headstrong, Lydia runs away with Wickham, and it is only through Darcy's intervention that the two are married and the Bennet family is saved from disgrace. Elizabeth has already learned the truth behind Wickham's slander toward Darcy, and Darcy's willingness to help her family despite her own stinging refusal of his proposal offers her a glimpse of the true nature of his character. Darcy, too, has changed, losing some of the stiffness and pride that accompanied his wealth and social standing. The substantial emotional shift experienced by Darcy and Elizabeth is indicated by Mr. Bennet's reaction to the news of Darcy's second proposal: "'Lizzy,' said he, 'what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to be accepting this man? Have you not always hated him?'" Mr. Bennet's reaction is understandable, given the disdain with which Elizabeth had expressed her initial reaction to Darcy. What her father has not been witness to—and the reader has—is Austen's gradual revelation of the qualities that Darcy and Elizabeth share and the manner in which each has come to appreciate these qualities in the other. That theirs is a meeting of the mind and heart is clear, and those qualities that at last draw them to each other and impel them to overcome their early misunderstandings will form the basis for a strong and happy marriage. Summary (Critical Survey of Literature for Students) print Print document PDF list Cite link Link The chief business of Mrs. Bennet's life is to find suitable husbands for her five daughters. Consequently, she is elated when she hears that nearby Netherfield Park has been let to a Mr. Bingley, a gentleman from the north of England. Gossip reports him to be a rich and eligible young bachelor. Mr. Bingley's first public appearance in the neighborhood is at a ball. With him are his two sisters, the husband of the older, and Mr. Darcy, Bingley's friend. Bingley is an immediate success in local society, and he and Jane, the oldest Bennet daughter, a pretty girl of sweet and gentle disposition, are attracted to each other at once. His friend, Darcy, however, seems cold and extremely proud and creates a bad impression. In particular, he insults Elizabeth Bennet, a girl of spirit and intelligence and her father's favorite, by refusing to dance with her when she is sitting down for lack of a partner; he says in her hearing that he is in no mood to prefer young ladies slighted by other men. On later occasions, however, he begins to admire Elizabeth in spite of himself, and at one party she has the satisfaction of refusing him a dance. Jane's romance with Bingley flourishes quietly, aided by family calls, dinners, and balls. His sisters pretend great fondness for Jane, who believes them completely sincere. Elizabeth is more critical and discerning; she suspects them of hypocrisy, and quite rightly, for they make great fun of Jane's relations, especially her vulgar, garrulous mother and her two ill-bred officer-mad younger sisters. Miss Caroline Bingley, who is eager to marry Darcy and shrewdly aware of his growing admiration for Elizabeth, is especially loud in her ridicule of the Bennet family. Elizabeth herself becomes Caroline's particular target when she walks three miles through muddy pastures to visit Jane when she falls ill at Netherfield Park. Until Jane is able to be moved home, Elizabeth stays to nurse her. During her visit, Elizabeth receives enough attention from Darcy to make Caroline Bingley long sincerely for Jane's recovery. Her fears are not ill-founded. Darcy admits to himself that he would be in some danger from the charm of Elizabeth, if it were not for her inferior family connections. Elizabeth acquires a new admirer in Mr. Collins, a ridiculously pompous clergyman and a distant cousin of the Bennets, who will someday inherit Mr. Bennet's property because that gentleman has no male heir. Mr. Collins's patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, urged him to marry, and he, always obsequiously obedient to her wishes, hastens to comply. Thinking to alleviate the hardship caused the Bennet sisters by the entail that gave their father's property to him, Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth. Much to her mother's displeasure and her father's relief, she firmly and promptly rejects him. He almost immediately transfers his affections to Elizabeth's best friend, Charlotte Lucas, who, being twenty-seven years old and somewhat homely, accepts at once. During Mr. Collins's visit and on one of their many walks to Meryton, the younger Bennet sisters, Kitty and Lydia, meet a delightful young officer, Mr. Wickham, who is stationed with the regiment there. Outwardly charming, he becomes a favorite among all the ladies, including Elizabeth. She is willing to believe the story that he had been cheated out of an inheritance left to him by Darcy's father, who had been his godfather. Her belief in Darcy's arrogant and grasping nature deepens when Wickham does not come to a ball given by the Bingleys, a dance at which Darcy is present. Soon after the ball, the entire Bingley party suddenly leaves Netherfield Park. They depart with no intention of returning, as Caroline writes Jane in a short farewell note, in which she hints that Bingley might soon become engaged to Darcy's sister. Jane believes that her friend, Caroline, is trying gently to tell her that her brother loves elsewhere and that she must cease to hope. Elizabeth, however, is sure of a plot by Darcy and Caroline to separate Bingley and Jane. She persuades Jane that Bingley does love her and that he will return to Hertfordshire before the winter is over. Jane almost believes her, until she receives a letter from Caroline assuring her that they are all settled in London for the winter. Even after Jane tells her this news, Elizabeth remains convinced of Bingley's affection for her sister and deplores the lack of resolution that makes him putty in the hands of his scheming friend. About that time, Mrs. Bennet's sister, Mrs. Gardiner, an amiable and intelligent woman with a great deal of affection for her two oldest nieces, arrives for a Christmas visit. She suggests to the Bennets that Jane return to London with her for a rest and change of scene and—so it is understood between Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth—to renew her acquaintance with Bingley. Elizabeth is not hopeful for the success of the plan and points out that proud Darcy would never let his friend call on Jane in the unfashionable London street on which the Gardiners live. Jane accepts the invitation, however, and she and Mrs. Gardiner set out for London. The time draws near for the wedding of Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Lucas, who asks Elizabeth to visit her in Kent. Despite feeling that there can be little pleasure in such a visit, Elizabeth promises to do so. She does not approve of Charlotte's marrying simply for the sake of an establishment, and since she does not sympathize with her friend's decision, she thinks their days of real intimacy are over. As March approaches, however, she finds herself eager to see her friend, and she sets out with pleasure on the journey with Charlotte's father and sister. On their way, the party stops in London to see the Gardiners and Jane. Elizabeth finds her sister well and outwardly serene; she had not seen Bingley and his sisters had paid only one call. Elizabeth is sure Bingley had not been told of Jane's presence in London and blames Darcy for keeping it from him. Soon after arriving at the Collins's home, the whole party is honored, as Mr. Collins repeatedly assures them, by a dinner invitation from Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Elizabeth finds her to be a haughty, ill-mannered woman, and her daughter thin, sickly, and shy. Lady Catherine is extremely fond of inquiring into the affairs of others and giving them unsolicited advice. Elizabeth turns off her meddling questions with cool indirectness and sees from the effect that she is probably the first who has ever dared do so. Soon after Elizabeth's arrival, Darcy comes to visit his aunt and cousin. He calls frequently at the parsonage, and he and Elizabeth resume their conversational fencing matches, which culminate in a sudden and unexpected proposal of marriage; he couches his proposal, however, in such proud, even unwilling, terms that Elizabeth not only refuses him but is able to do so indignantly. When he requests her reason for her emphatic rejection, she mentions his part in separating Bingley and Jane, as well as his mistreatment of Wickham, whereupon he leaves abruptly. The next day, he brings a long letter in which he answers her charges. He does not deny his part in separating Jane and Bingley but gives as his reasons the improprieties of Mrs. Bennet and her younger daughters and also his sincere belief that Jane does not love Bingley. As for his alleged mistreatment of Wickham, he writes that he has in reality acted most generously toward Wickham, who is an unprincipled liar, and has repaid his kindness by attempting to elope with Darcy's young sister. At first incensed at the tone of the letter, Elizabeth is gradually forced to acknowledge the justice of some of what he wrote; she regrets having judged him so harshly but is relieved not to see him again before returning home. There, she finds her younger sisters clamoring to go to Brighton, where the regiment formerly stationed at Meryton had been ordered. When an invitation comes to Lydia from a young officer's wife, Lydia is allowed to accept it over Elizabeth's protests. Elizabeth is asked by the Gardiners to go with them on a tour that will take them into Derbyshire, Darcy's home county. She accepts, reasoning that she is not very likely to meet Darcy merely by going into his county. While they are there, however, Mrs. Gardiner decides they should visit Pemberley, Darcy's home. Elizabeth makes several excuses, but her aunt insists. Only when she learns that the Darcy family is not in residence does Elizabeth consent to go along. At Pemberley, an unexpected and embarrassing meeting takes place between Elizabeth and Darcy. He is more polite than Elizabeth has ever known him to be, and he asks permission for his sister to call upon her. The call is duly paid and returned, but the pleasant intercourse between the Darcys and Elizabeth's party is suddenly cut short when a letter from Jane informs Elizabeth that Lydia has run away with Wickham. Elizabeth tells Darcy what had happened, and she and the Gardiners leave for home at once. After several days, the runaway couple is located and a marriage arranged between them. When Lydia comes home as heedless as ever, she tells Elizabeth that Darcy had attended her wedding. Suspecting the truth, Elizabeth learns from Mrs. Gardiner that it was indeed Darcy who brought about the marriage by giving Wickham money. Soon after Lydia and Wickham leave, Bingley returns to Netherfield Park, accompanied by Darcy. Elizabeth, now much more favorably inclined toward him, hopes his coming means that he still loves her, but he gives no sign. Bingley and Jane, on the other hand, are still obviously in love with each other, and they soon became engaged, to the great satisfaction of Mrs. Bennet. Soon afterward, Lady Catherine pays the Bennets an unexpected call. She hears rumors that Darcy is engaged to Elizabeth. Hoping to marry her own daughter to Darcy, she had come to order Elizabeth not to accept the proposal. The spirited girl is not to be intimidated by the bullying Lady Catherine and coolly refuses to promise not to marry Darcy, even though she is regretfully far from certain that she will have the opportunity to do so again. However, she does not have long to wonder. Lady Catherine, unluckily for her own purpose, repeats to Darcy the substance of her conversation with Elizabeth, and he knows Elizabeth well enough to surmise that her feelings toward him must have greatly changed. He immediately returns to Netherfield Park, and he and Elizabeth became engaged. Pride has been humbled and prejudice dissolved. Social class plays a huge role in this novel. All of English society in Jane Austen's time and in her books is based on social class. The Bennet's are not poor, but they are not wealthy and are in a position to lose their home to a relative, Mr. Collins. Society is organized according to where you fall on the social ladder. When Darcy meets Elizabeth, he is repulsed by his feelings for a young woman whose family is not only rather common, but not wealthy. They have no impressive family connections either. Technically, Elizabeth is not eligible to be a possible wife for Darcy who is far above her on the social ladder. Another example of social class dominating the novel, is Mr. Collins constant fawning all over Lady Catherine DeBourgh. Mr. Collins brags constantly about Rosings, Lady Catherine Debourgh's beautiful home as if it should be worshipped. The fact that Darcy cannot shake his feelings for Elizabeth is troubling for him. He tries desperately to rid himself of his feelings for someone who is far below him socially. So, in the end, when Darcy and Elizabeth do get together, it is a triumph for love over social class and class structure. That is what Jane Austen loves to celebrate in her novels, because, she herself, was a victim of social class prejudice in her own love life. A great deal of Austen's wit is actually seen through the use of irony. In Pride and Prejudice, we see all three types of irony displayed: verbal, situational, and dramatic. The use of verbal irony particularly expresses Austen's use of wit. Verbal irony is usually recognized as sarcasm. It is the moment someone, such as a character or narrator, says one thing, but means the complete opposite. One perfect example of verbal irony can be seen in the very opening line of the book, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" (Ch. 1). The irony in this line is that, while the women of an English village in Austen's time might "acknowledge" the truth above, the wealthy men the line is referring to actually might not; therefore, the above is not really a "truth universally acknowledged." Instead, this opening line is a perfect example of sarcasm, or verbal irony, and a perfect example of Austen's wit. Situational irony describes a moment when something occurs and the exact opposite was expected to occur. Either the audience or the characters can have the opposite expectations. One instance of situational irony can be seen early on in the novel at a party that takes place at Lucas Lodge. After Elizabeth is asked to play and sing, the party begins to dance. At the same moment that Sir Lucas is trying to convince Mr. Darcy to join in the dancing, Elizabeth begins walking towards them. Mr. Darcy so adamantly protests dancing to Sir Lucas, even insulting the activity, saying, "Every savage can dance," that when Sir Lucas sees Elizabeth and encourages Darcy to dance with her the reader as well as Elizabeth are very surprised when Darcy "requested to be allowed the honour of her hand" (Vol. 1, Ch. 6). Darcy's behavior in this instant is a true reversal of his earlier behavior, especially at the Meryton assembly. Hence, this is a perfect example of situational irony. In addition, the moment is also amusing due to the sudden change of behavior, also making it another example of Austen's wit. Dramatic irony occurs when the reader is aware of something that the characters have no idea of. This scene is also a fine example of dramatic irony. The reader has already begun to get the impression that Darcy feels an attraction for Elizabeth, which the reader began to see when she was tending to her sister at Netherfield. Therefore, the reader knows that Darcy's sudden interest in dancing with Elizabeth is actually genuine while Elizabeth still believes that he dislikes her and is merely asking in an attempt to be well mannered. Again the situation is amusing due to both Elizabeth's and Darcy's reactions to the situation. Hence, again, this use of dramatic irony also demonstrates Austen's wit.

"Ode to a Nightingale," along with "Ode on Indolence," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn," all of which were written between March and September of 1819, document Keats's ongoing struggle to reconcile himself to his own mortality. The deaths of his father (1804) and mother (1810), combined with the imminent death of his brother, Tom, who was in the last stages of tuberculosis, as well as the recent diagnosis of his own contraction of tuberculosis, brought the poet to consider the transient nature of human existence and to search for some form of permanence in nature or in art. The song of the nightingale, which is seen as a kind of natural poet, offers Keats such a symbol of permanence. The poem records Keats's struggle to merge his life with the immortal song of that bird and thereby escape, at least temporarily, his own mortality. The poem can be divided into three movements or parts. The first part, stanzas 1 to 3, describes the narrator's anguish upon hearing the immortal song of the bird in the distance. The "full-throated ease" with which it sings completely captures the poet's attention, causing him to forget, temporarily, his own mortality. That happiness, however, is short lived, for it quickly becomes the occasion for the poet to remember his own temporary existence. The pain of that recognition is what generates the desire for escape through wine in the second stanza. Through wine, the poet may find some release from the pain invoked by the bird's song. Clearly, the poet sees the wine as an agent of nature, which further suggests that he sees nature as a source of escape from his own mortality, a common notion among many Romantic poets. The poet reasons that if he can forget his impending death, he will be able to join the bird and subsequently escape what the bird has never known: "The weariness, the fever, and the fret/ Here, where men sit and hear each other groan." In stanza 4, which begins the second movement, the poet rejects wine and turns instead to "the viewless wings of Poesy." Wine enables him to forget, but it dulls the senses and obstructs vision. Poetry, on the other hand, engages the imagination, enlivens the senses, and empowers the poet to transcend himself and become one with the bird. "Already with thee!" the poet announces his imaginative oneness with the bird. Stanzas 5, 6, and 7 describe the poet's close union with the bird. The poet "cannot see" what flowers are at his feet, but his imagination can create the scene unavailable to his eyes, including such minute and hidden details as the "Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves." As his imagination works to re-create the bird's world, the poet's attention is temporarily diverted from "The weariness, the fever, and the fret" of human existence. Vision gives way to sound in stanza 6, where the poet reveals that he has long been "half in love with easeful Death." The transcendental experience of the previous stanza leads him to recall past times when he had wanted to escape his mortal condition. "To cease upon the midnight with no pain" now seems particularly inviting. Yet, as the poet notes at the end of stanza 6, were he to die, he would be surrendering to the very thing that he hopes to escape—mortality. Moreover, to die is to become deaf to the song of the bird, "To thy high requiem become a sod." There the poet discovers the painful paradox of human existence: Life is a source of great pain and anguish, and yet, oddly enough, to escape the pain and anguish through death is to lose the very thing that makes death desirable. To die is to forfeit all access to beauty and joy. The final turn comes in the last stanza where the spell is broken, the poet is imaginatively disengaged from the bird, and he returns to the mortal world "Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,/ Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies." The poet concedes that "the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is fam'd to do" and is left to wonder if what he has experienced was in fact a visionary moment of transcendence or only a "waking dream." In either case, the poem ends on the ironic note that, although the poet believes that he is trapped within the mortal world of death and change, in fact, like the nightingale whose immortal song is heard by succeeding generations, the poet, through his poetry, has achieved a kind of immortality after all. The poem, like the bird's song, will be heard by future generations, and with each hearing or reading, the spirit of John Keats will live again. In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats is really only talking about the beauty of nature and how painful it is to think of dying and having to leave it. These are thoughts with which every reader can identify. What makes Keats a great poet is that the feelings he expresses are common to all humanity. This feature, found in all of his greatest poetry, is called universality, and it is generally regarded as the distinguishing feature of all great art. An aspiring writer can learn from Keats that the secret of creating important work is to deal with basic human emotions. Keats was going through considerable mental anguish when he wrote this poem. His brother Tom had just died of tuberculosis. He himself had premonitions of his own death from the same disease, which turned out to be true. He was in love with young Fanny Brawne but found it impossible to marry her because he had rejected the career in medicine for which he had been trained; he was finding it impossible to make a living as a writer. Like many present-day poets, he was tortured by the fact that he had chosen an impractical vocation; yet, it was the vocation for which he believed he was born, and it was the only thing he wanted to do. The ode has a piquant, bittersweet flavor, not unlike the flavor of a good red wine, because it deliberately blends thoughts of beauty and decay, joy and suffering, love and death. Keats had rejected the teachings of the established church, as can be seen in his posthumously published sonnet entitled "Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition," in which he describes Christian church dogma as a "black spell." This left him in the position of having to find his own answers to questions that the church had automatically answered for centuries. Keats thought that all religions consisted of stories made up by imaginative individuals to mask the real truth about life. Borrowing from Greek mythology and other sources, he tried to create new stories; however, as a modern man with a modern scientific education, he knew that his stories were inventions, whereas the poets and prophets of the past really believed in the gods about which they talked; they were not using them as mere poetic metaphors. This is why Keats cannot stay with his nightingale. The elusive bird might even be seen as a metaphor for the alienated condition of modern man.

Keats' concept of negative capability was one of the most philosophically profound elements of both his work and Romanticism, in general. Essentially, the concept argued that there is something beautiful and acceptable in living with the unknown. This idea flies in the face of the Neoclassical Enlightenment belief systems that preceded Romantic thought. It suggests that there is a beauty about that which is unknown and that not everything in consciousness requires a direct and absolute answer. Keats saw consciousness as something in which negative capability played a major role. Consider how Keats felt about the poet's need to convey this to the audience, defining negative capability in terms that would make an empiricist stammer at its lack of totality: capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason... For Keats' and his poetry, exploring this domain was extremely important. No better is this seen than in his closing couplet to "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The idea of "all ye need to know" is something rooted in negative capability, learning to live within limits of one's state of being in the world. Interestingly enough, this helps to set the stage for Modernist thought, which takes the idea of negative capability to its logical conclusion in its suggestion that everything is subject to negative capability. Negative capability is a term that was first coined by Keats, and is used to refer to the ability that humans have to transcend and think beyond the way that humans are conditioned to think. It is a phrase that refers to the power of imagination in relation to our ability as humans to think above and beyond our contexts. Keats used it in one instance, where he was criticising Coleridge, who, in the opinion of Keats, wrote his poetry in order to search for truth and as a result missed out on beauty and its elevating affects. Negative capability can be seen in many of the poems of Keats and is clearly something that is vital to his poetry, as they all focus on nature or beauty and the ways that they allow humans to transcend their limitations. Note, for example, the following example from "Bright Star!": No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft swell and fall, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest... For the speaker, the power of the imagination allows him to look at the moon and imagine possessing a combination of the moon's steadfastness and the human ability to be intimate and close to capture the moment he is enjoying so deeply forever. Negative capability is something therefore that lies at the very heart of the poetry of Keats in the way that it allows humans to escape the restrictions of their lives and imagine and experience different worlds.

Coming to terms with human loss and the power of love to support an otherwise unbearable situation are the poem's basic themes. The rich meanings of the poem, however, depend on how one interprets the character of Michael. Michael, as an archetype, represents the collective entity of humanity. He is the shepherd or patriarch for humankind and the mother who rocks the cradle. He manages material loss with a cheerful hope, and he remedies and accepts the loss of his son in silent grief and stubborn perseverance. Throughout his life, he functions as the guide for a public life, the educator of youth, and the guardian of nature. Under Wordsworth's Romantic exaltation, Michael, an archetypal hero of unusual strength at an incredibly great age, embodies a natural paradigm, an inextinguishable spirit crystallized out of the good qualities bequeathed from generation to generation. Michael can also be seen as a man of his time. As social history, Michael is relatively accurate; it records the infiltration of new capitalism into rural areas and the encroachment of trade upon the land. The prototype of Michael is that small independent proprietor of land called a "statesman." If one regards Michael as a lamentation over the rapid disappearance of this class of men, one may find Wordsworth politically quite conservative. In fact, Wordsworth does instill the spirit of his age into his imaginary character. To some extent, Michael is a rustic version of a self-made man; through his own efforts, he doubles his inheritance and wins the freedom of the land. He cherishes the freedom of the land as a sign of his individualist independence. Yet he is also tempted by the rags-to-riches story and by the opportunities of getting rich in the cities. Michael's pragmatic judgment of gain and loss eventually leads to his choice of property over his son. Michael's tragedy reveals the demoralization of domestic affections in the face of commercial realities. Luke's corruption is very much an extensive projection of Michael's inner corruption. At the loss of Luke, the individualist Michael, purged of the contamination of the material age, merges into the collective entity of the archetypal Michael. Michael, above all, is Wordsworth's vision of Natural Man. Being a shepherd of nature, he merges his whole life with nature. Nature is the test of his courage, the fruit of his labor, and his ever-faithful companion. His blood and sweat nourish nature, and nature repays him with pleasure (lines 65-79). The covenant between him and nature is stronger than the covenant between him and his son, because nature is the anchor of human integrity and purity. In his creation of Michael as a man of nature, Wordsworth not only expresses the "passions that were not my own" and his concern with the bond between nature and man, but also identifies himself with Michael to explore the bond between the rustic life and the poet. He shares Michael's sensitivity to nature, his experience and wisdom gained from nature, his singularity, and his solitude. Wordsworth's description of Michael as having breathed "the common air" and "learned the meaning of all winds,/ Of blasts of every tone" pictures an ideal natural poet who has gained freedom in the poetic representation of nature and human life. To create a new poetic path, Wordsworth needs Michael's indestructible spirit and must refuse to cater to the depravity of the age. Michael's stubbornness in not giving an inch of the free land expresses Wordsworth's determination to strike ahead, by himself, even when other poets fail to follow. Although Wordsworth was only thirty when he wrote Michael, he seemed to imagine himself as an old poet of natural heart, using the tale to show "youthful Poets" his experience in composing poems. He notices what others might "see and notice not." From "a straggling heap of unhewn stones," the shapeless material of nature, he spins endlessly, as with Isabel's two wheels of "antique form." The natural objects, like "dumb animals," and the characters, like restless "summer flies," come and go in his murmuring imagination until his senses are blurred. Then he recollects the eternal truth in tranquil solitude. With this heap of rough stones, he hews and builds a sheepfold—a tombstone for Michael and an eternal monument for the poet. It is unfinished, for the old poet expects continuity. It turns back into its original material, "a straggling heap of unhewn stones," for the old poet hopes that the youthful poets can start anew. Michael is a long poem in blank verse, its 490 lines divided into sixteen stanzas. The Michael of the title is the poem's protagonist. The subtitle, "A Pastoral Poem," seems to challenge the traditional conception of pastoral poetry as a form for the idyllic and the bucolic, and to prepare the reader to accept the "low and rustic life" as the ideal pastoral. The poem is written in the third person. The poet himself assumes the role of narrator, guiding the reader to a tragic scene. There, he relates the tale of Michael with intense love and pure passions. In spite of some homely conversations, the poet speaks in his own character. From the viewer of a tragic scene to the listener of a tragic tale, the narrator emerges as the creator of a tragic poem in new style and new spirit. The poem begins with a two-stanza prelude. The poet, almost like a tour guide, introduces to the reader a hidden valley in pastoral mountains and advises the reader to struggle courageously in order to reach it. There, through "a straggling heap of unhewn stones," the poet thinks "On man, the heart of man, and human life." He decides to dignify the aged Michael for the delight of men with natural hearts and for the sake of youthful poets. The main body of the poem can be divided into three parts. Part one (stanzas 3 to 5) extolls the unusual qualities of Michael, an eighty-year-old shepherd—his gains from nature and his love for nature. Together with his wife Isabel and son Luke, Michael's household presents a picture of endless industry. Through the images of an ancient lamp and the evening star, the poet depicts that archetypal family as "a public symbol." The second part (stanzas 6-12) reveals the conflict between Michael's love for his inherited property and his love for his son. It vividly portrays Michael's care and love for his son from cradle to the age of eighteen. When he is summoned to discharge a forfeiture, however, Michael eventually chooses to send Luke to the city to earn money rather than sell a portion of his patrimonial land. Before Luke leaves, Michael takes him to the deep valley where he has gathered up a heap of stone for building a sheepfold. He not only educates Luke with two histories—the history of Luke's upbringing and the history of their land—but also asks Luke to lay the cornerstone of the sheepfold as a covenant between the father and the son. The last part contains only three short stanzas. It briefly recounts Luke's good beginning and eventual corruption in the city. Luke is driven overseas by ignominy and shame. Despite his grief over the loss of his son, the strength of love enables old Michael to perform all kinds of labor and to work at building the sheepfold from time to time as before. He lives another seven years, then dies with the sheepfold unfinished. Three years later, at his wife's death, their estate goes into a stranger's hand. All is gone except the oak tree, which embodies both nature and Michael's indestructible spirit.

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is intended primarily to give readers a sense of the excitement that comes from discovering for themselves the works of a great author. Concurrently—and this is a point not often stressed—Keats suggests that the delight in this discovery is often an experience dependent on circumstances beyond those over which the author himself or herself has had direct control; in this case, the narrator's experience comes from reading the Homeric epic in translation. It is important, then, to recall that it is "Chapman's Homer" that excites the narrator; the translator has had a major role in creating the experience by serving as a bridge in communicating the story through language the reader understands. The impact of the reading experience, which Keats describes metaphorically as "breath[ing] the pure serene" air in a beautiful land, comes not directly from Homer's Greek, but from Chapman's rendition of that Greek into polished English verse. Keats wants readers to realize the impact that a great work of literature can have. There is a clear sense that the narrator has come to his reading of Homer with some anticipation—"Oft," he says, "had I been told" of the greatness of the Greek epic (line 5). Nevertheless, the experience itself far surpasses any second-hand account; hearing of something is no substitute for experiencing it oneself. The two examples in the poem's sestet are intended to convey the sense of wonderment that can come only from direct experience. Keats wants readers to understand that reading great literature can bring the same kind of excitement to them that scientific discovery and travel can engender. On a larger scale, the poem deals with the process of discovery itself, a human activity that has excited men since the dawn of recorded history (and before, no doubt). It is important to note that "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is about the process of discovery that every individual goes through when having any kind of experience for the first time—no matter how many people have had the experience before. This distinction is important, for it explains what many critics have considered the great "mistake" in the final lines of the poem: the apparent misidentification of Cortés as the first European to "discover" the Pacific Ocean. Because historians usually attribute the "discovery" of the Pacific to Vasco Núñez de Balboa, some scholars have accused Keats of not knowing his history. That may be true, but it would have no bearing on the meaning of this poem. There is no suggestion in the poem that Cortés or his men (both mentioned in lines 11-12) are the first to see the Pacific; rather, the implication is that they are viewing it for the first time in their lives. Similarly, Keats is suggesting, the reader who comes upon great works of literature for the first time will experience a sense of awe and wonder at the power of literature to excite them and to make a difference in their lives. "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet describing the excitement experienced by the narrator upon reading a translation of Homer's Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.) by the sixteenth century poet George Chapman. Though it is often unwise to equate the narrator of a poem with the author, in this instance it seems appropriate to assume that John Keats himself is speaking of his own sense of amazement and delight in discovering the joys of reading Homer in such a vibrant English rendition. The focus throughout the poem is on the feelings engendered in a person when a discovery is made. The narrator expresses himself directly to the reader, attempting to find parallels to explain what it feels like to make a great discovery for oneself. To make that feeling clear, the narrator speaks of himself as a traveler who has set out to explore uncharted lands—at least, uncharted by him. He portrays himself as someone experienced in visiting exotic places ("realms of gold," in line 1) and as having seen "many goodly states and kingdoms" (line 2) among the "western islands" (line 3) that are inhabited by "bards" who pay homage to the god "Apollo" (line 4). The conscious reference to poets and to the Greek patron of poetry should suggest to readers that this is not a literal journey; instead, it is intended to represent the mental travel one undergoes when one enters the imaginative world of literature. The narrator describes his journey around those imaginary islands, noting finally that, though he is quite a veteran of such traveling, he had never set foot on the land ruled by the revered Homer until introduced there by Chapman, who serves as a kind of herald into the epic bard's court. Through Chapman's introduction, the narrator is able to breathe in the "pure serene" (line 8)—literally, the stimulating quality of the air in that favored land, but metaphorically, the exhilarating atmosphere that Homer's poetry creates. The results of the narrator's arrival in the land of Homer are almost overwhelming. He feels himself like a scientist who discovers a new planet or like an explorer setting foot in the new world of America and seeing the hitherto unknown sights there. He compares himself specifically to Hernando Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico: The experience of being enveloped in the land of Homer (the environment created by Homer within his epic poem) is much like that felt by Cortés and his men when they first saw the Pacific Ocean; it leaves the traveler speechless.

An ode, typically a lengthy lyric poem dealing with lofty emotions, is dignified in style and serious in tone. Lyric poems, in general, explore elusive inner feelings. John Keats, a widely admired poet of the English Romantic period, composed his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in five stanzas (sections), each containing ten lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. Keats invented his own rhyme scheme for the ode. In stanza one, the poet speaks of a ceramic urn from ancient Greece; such urns often were used to hold the ashes of the dead and were decorated with scenes from daily life or from myth and legend. The imaginary urn of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a composite of several urns that Keats probably had seen at the British Museum or in books. He also might have been influenced by the Elgin Marbles, decorated portions of the Parthenon in Athens that had been brought to England, not without much controversy, in the early nineteenth century. One could thus imagine the poet either standing in front of a museum exhibit or looking at an illustration in an art book. In describing the urn, Keats is reflecting on what he sees, engaging in an internal debate. The term "ekphrasis" means a description of or a meditation on a visual work of art; there exist examples of ekphrasis in literature from the classical to the modern. The poet is impressed with the antiquity of the urn and its pictured scenes, images that appear to affect the poet more strongly than do the poem's words—the poet, though, seems unsure of the exact legend being conveyed by the pictured scenes. The urn depicts several scenes, including a wild party in which men chase after girls, the playing of musical instruments such as pipes and timbrels (tambourine-like percussion instruments), and a sacrificial ritual. The poet is impressed by both the frenzy of action on the urn and the urn's status as a still object—an artifact quietly persisting for ages—but is frustrated by the silent urn's inability to answer questions. In stanza two, the poet addresses particular parts of the urn's images—the pipes and their imagined melodies and a lover attempting to kiss the maiden—and comments on their eternal sameness. He notes that although the melodies being played by the pipers on the urn cannot be heard, this silence is somehow better, perhaps because the melodies dwell in a higher part of the mind, or the imagination or fancy, as this part of the mind had been termed at the time: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter." The poet also addresses the youthful lover, presumably one of the pursuing men of stanza one. Though this lover will never catch his maiden for a kiss, she can never fade nor ever become less than fair, thus implying that the imagined world on the vase is superior to the real world of experience. In stanza three, the poet seems to envy the figures fixed on the urn, whose happiness and love will remain forever. To some readers, however, the middle of the stanza shows the poet, in his progressive reflection on the urn, not so sure of the superiority of art (the pictorial representation on the urn) to experience. The repetitive language here is perhaps indicating an ironic tone, and there is a release from a rapt contemplation of the urn. In stanza four, the poet describes a different side of the urn, which depicts a heifer being led to a ritual slaughter while a small town is abandoned by its inhabitants—a desolate scene, an apparent change of tone from the previous stanza (unless read as ironic). To some critics the second and third stanzas are digressions; the poet returns to the urn and its meaning in this fourth stanza. Finally, in the last stanza, the poet makes his last pronouncements to the urn, which seems to speak in the final two lines. The poet is released from his reverie, or rapt contemplation, of the urn. The pastoral scene (the word "pastoral" brings to mind rural perfection and happiness) is thought of as cold, though it is reaffirmed as lasting longer than the present generation. In the final two lines, the poet tells readers what message the urn would pronounce, if it could speak: that truth and beauty are equivalent—an idea that was current in the Romantic criticism and philosophy of Keats's time. The central theme of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is the complex nature of art. The dramatic situation—the narrator's puzzling one-way exchange with the urn as he views the scenes painted upon it—is intended to provoke in the reader an awareness of the paradoxes inherent in all art, but especially visual art. The central question raised by the narrator is: What good is art? What purpose does it serve? The urn is beautiful, to be sure, but as a vehicle for conveying information it is woefully inadequate. No story on the urn is ever finished and communicated; all action is arrested at a single instant. Only through imagination is the narrator able to come to some human understanding of the "message" on the urn; hence, the work of art does not really have a message for its viewers at all, but only serves as a stimulus for engaging the imaginations of those who look upon it. Perhaps Keats is suggesting that the "message" of art is always achieved through a participatory act. If there is a "truth" to be gleaned from the appreciation of art, it is a truth found only when the viewer serves as a co-creator with the artist in developing meaning. Such an interpretation helps to make sense of the final enigmatic lines of the poem: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty—That is all/ Ye know of earth, and all ye need to know" (lines 49-50). Even that interpretation is subject to question, however, since readers cannot be certain exactly what the urn actually "says" to the narrator. In most publications, some or all of the words in the final lines are placed in quotation marks; in Keats's manuscripts, no quotation marks are used. The shift from "thou" (used by the narrator to address the urn) to "ye" (used in the final lines only) suggests that the entire sentence in the final lines are to be read as the urn's "message" to viewers. If that is the case, then the lesson of the poem is that one can never arrive at logical truth through an apprehension of art, since art does not work in the same way that logical thought does. The narrator's observation that the urn seems to "tease us out of thought" (line 44) supports such an interpretation. Nevertheless, art—here personified by the urn—has great value to serve as a form of pleasure and solace; it "remain[s]" a "friend to man" in the "midst of other woe" (lines 47-48). Keats is making a case for art on its own terms; he wants readers to see that appreciation of art for its own sake is as valuable as—perhaps even more valuable than—the extraction of meaning from works intended primarily to uplift the spirit of man simply by conveying a sense of the beautiful.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner begins with one of three wedding guests being accosted by the Ancient Mariner and kept from attending the wedding first by the Mariner's grasp and then by his hypnotic gaze as the Mariner begins to tell the story of his fateful voyage. The Mariner gives no reason for the voyage, saying that they sailed south until they reached the South Pole, where they became icebound and enshrouded in fog. They see and hear nothing but the ice The ice was here, the ice was there,The ice was all around:It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound Then an albatross flies into view through the fog. Happy to see another living creature, the men aboard the ship treat it "As if it had been a Christian soul" and they hail it "in God's name." It circles the ship, accepting the crew's hospitable offerings of food, and then the ice splits and a wind begins to blow, allowing the ship to move again. For nine days the bird follows the ship, coming when the men call and occasionally perching on or near the mast. Then, for no reason, the Mariner shoots it with his crossbow. His shipmates' initial responses are horror and anger. They blame him for killing the creature responsible for the wind that helped free them from the ice and fear that something bad will happen. However, shortly after the bird's death, the fog clears and the shipmates change their mind, claiming now that the bird was responsible for the fog and saying that the Mariner was right to kill the bird. As soon as they have gone around Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean, the wind stops, and the ship comes to a standstill beneath the blazing sun, now at the other extreme from the earlier cold and ice, though parallel in immobility, as highlighted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's paralleling of word choice and order: Water, water every where,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, every where,Nor any drop to drink. The crew now again changes its mind and hangs the dead albatross around the Mariner's neck. Shortly thereafter the Mariner spots a ship approaching. In initial joy, the desperate Mariner bites his arm and drinks his own blood to get enough moisture in his mouth to announce what he sees. However, as the ship draws closer it occurs to him to wonder how the other ship can be moving when theirs is not. The ghost ship draws close enough to reveal Life-in-Death and Death gambling for the Mariner. Life-in-Death wins the Mariner and Death takes his consolation prize, the two hundred other men on the ship. A week passes with the Mariner alone with the dead bodies, whose eyes curse him, and guilty but unable to pray. One night as he watches water snakes swimming in the moonlight, he is so struck by their life and beauty that he loves them and blesses them. Now that he has repented, the journey homeward begins: The albatross drops from his neck, rain begins to fall, and a strange wind begins to blow above the ship, mysteriously moving it along. The Mariner falls into a trance as the ship speeds faster than mortal endurance, driven by the spirit of the South Pole and manned by spirits who assume the bodies of the fallen crew. While in this trance, the Mariner hears two voices discussing his crime/sin, the fact that he will have to continue to do penance, and the manner by which the ship is moving. When he revives from his trance, he again witnesses the curse on him visible in the dead men's eyes, which prevents him from looking away from them and from praying. Then the spell snaps, "the curse is expiated," Coleridge explains, and the Mariner feels a gentle breeze just as he spies the familiar landscape of home. As his ship enters the harbor, it is approached by a boat containing a Pilot, the Pilot's boy, and a Hermit. All but the Hermit are afraid of the appearance of the Mariner's ship. As the Pilot's boat draws close, the sea rumbles, and the Mariner's ship suddenly breaks in two and sinks. The Pilot collapses in a fit and the Pilot's boy goes mad, leaving the Hermit to fish the Mariner from the water and the Mariner to row the boat to shore. Once on land, the Mariner begs the Hermit to shrive him, which the Hermit does by having the Mariner answer his question concerning what manner of man the Mariner is. The Mariner responds by feeling a terrible agony that forces him to tell his story; only after he has finished does he feel free. From that point on the Mariner periodically and unexpectedly feels the same agony and travels "from land to land" until he spots the face of the person that he somehow knows must hear his tale. The poem draws to a close just as the bridal party is leaving the church. The Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that far better for him than any wedding is a walk in good company toward a church to pray and that the best way to pray is to love all things. With that the Mariner bids the Wedding Guest farewell, and the Wedding Guest is left to wake up the following morning a "sadder and a wiser man." Although heavily influenced by William Wordsworth and the pantheist tradition, Coleridge diverged from Wordsworth on the source of inspiration for life and poetry: Where Wordsworth believed nature was his source of inspiration, Coleridge believed love was the source of inspiration. Drawing from Christ's instruction that the greatest commandment is love, Coleridge develops a story that illustrates the importance of love not only for the individual soul but also for the balance and harmony among all living things. The senseless shooting of the albatross, a bird lured to follow the ship by the men's initially friendly treatment, serves as the point of illustration for a parable about right behavior. Even as the hospitality and friendliness toward the albatross and the common sense and decency with which the ship members treated it dried up, the men on the ship are dried to the point that their tongues turn black. Their rottenness causes the sea to rot. The crew is angry and afraid but unaware of its complicity in the sin, hanging the albatross around the Mariner's neck. For their complicity and unwillingness to take responsibility, they are punished with death. However, the Mariner, because he is directly responsible for killing the bird and showing no mercy, is fated to remain alive like the Wandering Jew who refused Christ the mercy of a cup of water. Initially, the Mariner does not fully understand his responsibility for what is occurring and blames others: "And never a saint took pity on/ My soul in agony." Because he refuses responsibility, he feels guilt, hearing the departing souls of his shipmates pass by "[l]ike the whizz of [his] crossbow!" and seeing himself as one of the slimy things that lives on, but he cannot repent. Until blessed with an overwhelming sense of love for the beauty of the sea snakes, the "wicked whisper" of both despair and desire to blame others for his predicament prevents him from praying and moving toward atonement, which consists of repeating his story to those who need to hear it that they might learn, He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all. The Mariner kills the albatross because he associated the lack of wind with it. At first all the men thought the bird was good luck since a good wind blew and they moved swiftly. Then, the wind died and they blamed the bird. THe sailors cheered when the Mariner killed the bird which is symbolic of animal abuse. By killing the bird, he is disrespecting all of nature--a sin since the poem states: all creatures great and small the lord God created them all. Once the Mariner "blesses the snake unaware," then he begins the long trek back to being forgiven and living out the rest of his life wandering the earth and teaching others how to treat mother nature and all her creatures.

innocence and experience, liberty Theme is self and imagination. Self is focal point in romantic period. This is the growth of self-reliance, but loneliness and doubt is introduced. The concept of the self is explored yet we still feel trapped. Place/space, pity abolition, over dramatization, supernatural (ballads), imagination a dominate forc e, landscape and feeling, abnormal/ grotesque, rejection of neoclassical sensibilities, personal will, wilderness is a response to industrialization, glorified women's rights, change in rhetorical direction, liberty, shock in abolition poetry, political guilt/shame landscape imbued with feeling anthropomorphic value, eternity, focus on personal freedom every individual is allowed to make money for themselves. Time.