British: Romantic Poetry Flashcards
British Romantic Poetry
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth is a GRE heavy-weight, so learn him well. There are, no doubt, other poems of his besides the ones presented here that could possibly show up on the GRE, but these poems, especially the “Lucy poems,” are GRE favorites. It is also worth noting that along with Coleridge and Robert Southey, Wordsworth is considered a “Lake poet.”
Preface to Lyrical Ballads* (published with Coleridge)
The Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In the Preface, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the constituents of a new type of poetry, one based on the “real language of men” and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry in the Preface as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility.”
“It Is a Beauteous Evening (Calm and Free)”
IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder–everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
“My Heart Leaps Up (When I Behold)”
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky :
So was it when my life began ;
So is it now I am a man ;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die !
The Child is father of the Man ;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
“The World Is Too Much with Us”
The world is too much with us ; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers :
Little we see in Nature that is ours ;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon !
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune ;
It moves us not. – Great God ! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Lucy poems*
These poems are collectively known as the “Lucy poems,” though each is considered a seperate work and is named by its first line; if these poems appear on teh GRE, they will appear seperately.
(i) Strange fits of passion have I known: And I will dare to tell, But in the Lover’s ear alone, What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea ;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot ;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature’s gentlest boon !
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on ; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped :
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head !
‘O mercy !’ to myself I cried,
‘If Lucy should be dead !’
(ii)
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love :
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye !
– Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be ;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
(iii)
I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England ! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
’Tis past, that melancholy dream !
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time ; for still I seem
To love thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy’s eyes surveyed.
(iv)
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
‘Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse : and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
‘She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
‘The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her ; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden’s form
By silent sympathy.
‘The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her ; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
‘And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell.’
Thus Nature spake – The work was done –
How soon my Lucy’s race was ru !
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
(v)
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The Prelude
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page on the The Prelude.
“Tintern Abbey”
Here’s a link to the full text.
Overview
British Romantic Poetry
The British Romantic poets occupy a pretty central position on the GRE for Lit. Some poets, like Keats, have lots of poems that are likely to appear on the exam; all the same, I think it’s worth the time and the effort to read each and every poem I list here in their entirety a number of times. For those whose field is not 19th century British literature, like me, spending some time simply studying who wrote what may be in order since confusing a poem by Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, is easy to do.
*William Wordsworth Percy Bysshe Shelley Lord Byron *Samuel Taylor Coleridge *John Keats William Blake
British Romantic Poetry
John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) Keats has a lot of poems worth knowing. Chances are good that the poem/poems that appear on your exam will be the more famous ones like "Upon First looking Into Chapman's Homer." Keep in mind that Keats wrote a lot of odes, so if you see one, chaces are good that you're looking at Keats. Also check out the notes for Keats' Cristabel at Hapax Legomena -- http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/alison/hapaxlegomena/index.html
John Keats was one of the principal poets in the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks, and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats’s poetry is characterised by an exuberant love of the language and a rich, sensuous imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.
Endymion
John Keats starts off the poem Endymion with the line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. In this epic, Keats takes the tale of Endymion, the shepherd who falls in love with Selene, the moon goddess, and adds the details to their story. It starts by painting a rustic scene of trees, rivers, herders, and sheep. They gather around an alter and pray to Pan, god of shepherds and flocks. As the youths sing and dance, the elder men sit and talk about how life would be like in the shades of Elysium. However, Endymion is trancelike, participating in none of their discourse. His sister takes him away and brings him to her resting place where he sleeps. After he wakes, he tells Peona of his encounter with Selene, and how much he loved her.
Book I gives an account of Endymion’s dreams and experiences and give the background for the rest of the poem.
Book III reveals Endymion’s enduring love, and he begs the Moon not to torment him any longer.
Book IV, “And so he groan’d, as one by beauty slain.” He is miserable, till quite suddenly he comes upon her. She then tells him of how she tried to forget him, to move on, but that in the end, “‘There is not one,/ No, no, not one/ But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;’”
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
“The Eve of St. Agnes”
A long poem, “The Eve of Saint Agnes” was written immediately after Keats met Fanny Brawne, who would eventually become his fiancée in October 1819. The basis of the poem is the superstition that a woman would see her future husband if she performed a certain ritual on the eve of Saint Agnes. If she were to go to bed without looking behind her back, her future partner would appear in a dream, eat with her and kiss her. In his original version, Keats emphasised the sensuality but his publishers persuaded him to change the wording so as to avoid a controversy. The main characters are Madeline and Porphyro. Porphyro sings to her “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
The first of 42 stanzas:
ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
Isabella
Isabella’, an adoption of the story of the ‘Pot of Basil’ in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron
It begins:
Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well 5
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci”
O what can ail thee Knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering ?
The sedge has withered from the Lake
And no birds sing!
O what can ail thee Knight at arms,
So haggard, and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lilly on the thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too
I met a Lady in the Meads
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild–
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone;
She look’d at me as she did love
And made sweet moan–
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sidelong would she bend and sing
A faery’s song–
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said
I love thee true–
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d, Ah Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale Kings, and Princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried ‘La belle Dame sans merci
Thee hath in thrall.’
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering
Though the sedge is withered from the Lake,
And no birds sing.
Theory from the Letters
Keats has garnered some celebrity for ideas he expressed in his letters. They may come up on the GRE. “Negative Capability” is by far the more famous and important of the two concepts.
The Mansion of Many Apartments is a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated Sunday, 3 May 1818.
I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors the rest being as yet shut upon me - The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think - We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by awakening of the thinking principle - within us - we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight.
Keats thought that people were capable of different levels of thought. People who did not consider the world around them (probably people who did not write poetry) remained in the thoughtless chamber. Even though the door to move on to the next “apartment” was open, they had no desire to think any deeper and to go into that next apartment.
When you did move on into the next chamber, you would for the first time have a choice of direction, as from this apartment there were several different park passages. Keats believed that he when he wrote the letter was at this point, as was William Wordsworth when he wrote Tintern Abbey.
*Negative Capability is a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason
Keats believed that great people (especially poets, whom he considered to almost be on another level to the rest of humanity) had the ability to accept that not every thing can be resolved - being capable of remaining negative on something. Keats was a Romantic and believed that truth does not lie in science and philosophical reasoning, but in art. In art the aim is not, as in science, to solve problems, but rather to explore them. Hence, accepting that there may not be a solution to vexing problems is important to artists.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
1.
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme :
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these ? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit ? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels ? What wild ecstasy?
2.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on :
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3.
Ah, happy, happy boughs ! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love ! more happy, happy love!
For every warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
4.
Who are those coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
5.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity : Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
“Ode on Melancholy”
1.
No, no go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
2.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
3.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
“Ode to a Nightingale”
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk :
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness, -
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
2
O for a draught of vintage ! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth !
O for a beaker full of the warm South !
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth ;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim :
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies ;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs ;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
4
Away ! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards :
Already with thee ! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays ;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown,
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves ;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6
Darkling I listen ; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath ;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy !
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird !
No hungry generations tread thee down ;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown :
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8
Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self !
Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side ; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades :
Was it a vision, or a waking dream ?
Fled is that music : - do I wake or sleep?
**“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”
MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 10
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
“Ode to Autumn”
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
British Romantic Poetry
Lord Byron
Lord Byron
Byron is not as much of a player on the GRE as you might imagine, though the fact that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages is written in Spensarian stanzas is the kind of thing that those GRE people would love to quiz you over.
“She Walks in Beauty”
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Manfred
A 1817 poem by Lord Byron, and considered by some to be his response to the ghost story craze sweeping through England at the time, Manfred is a dramatic poem very much in the tradition of Goethe’s Faust. It begins:
Mandred: The lamp must be replenish’d, but even then
It will not burn so long as I must watch.
My slumbers– if I slumber– are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men.
But grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Philosophy and science, and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,
I have essay’d, and in my mind there is
A power to make these subject to itself–
But they avail not: I have done men good,
And I have met with good even among men–
But this avail’d not: I have had my foes,
And none have baffled, many fallen before me–
But this avail’d not: Good, or evil, life,
Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear
Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes
Or lurking love of something on the earth.
Now to my task.–
Byronic Hero
A theme that pervades much of Byron’s work is that of the Byronic hero, an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:
- being a rebel
- having a distaste for social institutions
- being an exile
- expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege
- having great talent
- hiding an unsavoury past
- being highly passionate
- ultimately, being self-destructive
Not only is the character a frequent part of his work, Byron’s own life could cast him as a Byronic hero. The literary history of the Byronic hero in English can be traced from Milton, especially Milton’s interpretation of Lucifer as having justified complaint against God. One of Byron’s most popular works in his lifetime, the closet play “Manfred,” was loosely modeled on Goethe’s anti-hero, Faust. Byron’s influence was manifested by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement during the 19th century and beyond. An example of such a hero is Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages
A long narrative poem about masculinity. In Byron’s poem, the main character is portrayed as a dark brooding man, who doesn’t like society and wants to escape from the world because of his discontent with it. It deals with the underdog and Military might. Byron uses gothic literature imagery to get sublime nature, representing adventure, such as climbing mountains for sport. Previous to this, mountain climbing had been thought of as being associated with evil. Instead this poem deals with engaging and conquering the dark side of nature. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.
(Note: The term childe was a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.)
**It has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and rhyme ababbcbcc.
British Romantic Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
You definitely want to familiarzie yourself with “Ozymandias” and “To a Skylark” as well as Prometheus Unbound. A biography can be found here.
“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”
This is a long work written in Spensarian stanzas. It begins:
I
I weep for Adonais–he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: “With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!”
II
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierc’d by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
‘Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamour’d breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies,
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorn’d and hid the coming bulk of Death.
“Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”
a long poem with irregular stanzas, it begins:
I
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark–now glittering–now reflecting gloom–
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters–with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
“Ode to the West Wind”
The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABA BCB CDC DED FF, and it is written in iambic pentameter.
I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
*“Ozymandias”
Ozymandias is a famous 1818 sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This short poem, probably Shelley’s most famous due to its frequent appearance in anthologies, combines a number of great themes — the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, the contradictory and critical character of the relationship between artist and subject — with striking imagery, a setting that merges exotic distance (Egypt, Ozymandias, the desert) with the more familiar and topical (Napoleon I of France and a European, presumably English, traveller/commentator — an echo of the viator of classical epitaphs), and virtuoso diction.
OZYMANDIAS of EGYPT
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
*“To a Skylark”
The text of the poem can be found here.
“To Wordsworth”
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship, and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
Prometheus Unbound
Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820. It is inspired by Aechylus’s Prometheus Bound and concerns the final release from captivity of Prometheus.
For the GRE, you probably need only know that Shelley wrote this play, and you ought to have a general background of the story of Prometheus.
British Romantic Poetry
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One important thing to note about Coleridge, which I do not discuss below, is that he co-wrote The Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth. For my money, I’d bet on seeing “On Donne’s poetry” and “Frost at Midnight,” but there are a fair nuumber of works by Coleridge that could appear on your exam.
“Frost at Midnight”
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
`Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
>From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shall learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
*“On Donne’s Poetry”
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.
Biographia Literaria
Coleridge’s thesis is that the imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both a prerequisite and the aim of poetry. For him, “imagination” is the process of keenly perceiving the phenomena of the world and self, and then re-expressing phenomena through the creative faculties of the poet’s whole being, the mind and the soul, the rational and the irrational.
All that is necessary to identify this passage is the following information:
Coleridge always capitalizes the words “Imagination” and “Fancy,” which recur throughout the work.
For more, see here.
“Kubla Khan”
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” probably won’t come up on the exam because of its length, but since it is perhaps Coleridge’s most famous poem, you might want to read it once
Here’s what wikipedia has to say about it:
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” relates the supernatural events experienced by a mariner on a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony, and begins to recite his story. The wedding guest’s reaction turns from bemusement and impatience to fascination as the mariner’s story progresses.
The mariner’s tale begins with his ship leaving harbour; Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven off course by a storm and, driven south, eventually reaches Antarctica. An albatross, traditionally a good omen, appears and leads them out of the threatening land of ice; even as the albatross is praised by the ship’s crew, however, the mariner shoots it with a crossbow, for reasons unknown. The other sailors are angry with the Mariner and blame him for the change in weather that subsequently occurs as he killed the bird that brought the wind. This crime also arouses the wrath of supernatural spirits who then pursue the ship; the south wind which had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed. When the weather becomes misty, the sailors change their minds and hail the Mariner for killing the bird that brought the fog.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.
However, the sailors change their minds again and blame the Mariner for the torment of their thirst, and hang the albatross around the mariner’s neck as a sign of his guilt. Eventually, in an eerie passage, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. Onboard are DEATH (a skeleton) and the “Night-Mare” LIFE-IN-DEATH (a pale, deathly-fair woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue as to the mariner’s fate; he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross. One by one all two hundred crew members die, but the Mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, the Mariner’s curse is lifted when he sees sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as “slimy things” earlier in the poem, he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them (a spring of love gush’d from my heart and I bless’d them unaware); suddenly, as he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the Mariner behind. As penance for his deed, the Mariner is forced to wander the earth and tell his story, and teach a lesson to those he meets:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
British Romantic Poetry
William Blake
William Blake (1757–1827) Your GRE exam will probably have a poem from either Songs of Experience or from Songs of Innocence -- almost certainly either "The Tyger" or "The Lamb." Chances are good that the more psychedlic stuff like Visions of the Daughers of Albion will not be on the test, but they might.
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Innocence is a collection of illustrated lyrical poetry, published by William Blake in 1789. Its companion volume is Songs of Experience.
Blake believed that innocence and experience were “the two contrary states of the human soul,” and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. This collection includes “The Lamb.”
“The Lamb”
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight;
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Songs of Experience
The Songs of Experience is a poetry collection, forming the second part of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Many of the poems appearing in Innocence have a counterpart in ‘Experience’, with quite a different perspective of the world. The disastrous end of the French Revolution caused Blake to lose faith in the goodness of mankind, explaining much of the volume’s sense of despair. Blake also believed that children lost their innocence through exploitation and from a religious community which put dogma before mercy. This collection includes “The Tyger.”
“The Tyger" Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back they blind the mocking eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, is the most complex work of Blake’s early years. It consists of 24 Plates (as well as three further Plates under the separate title “A Song of Liberty”) and has at its heart an opposition between Heaven, conceived as an image of restraint and passivity, and Hell, an image of energy and action. Both of these “contraries”, Blake claims, are necessary for human life; but there is little doubt as to which is more to his taste. In the fourth Plate we hear the voice of the Devil, making three crucial claims which in turn underpin Blake’s own world-view:
- Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
- Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
- Energy is Eternal Delight.
This rejection of reason as the touchstone of the human in favour of a revaluation of the body and its desires is pursued throughout the Marriage, perhaps most famously in some of the “proverbs of Hell” which comprise Plates 7 to 10 of the poem. Some of the best-known, frequently to be found as recently as the 1960s as emblematic graffiti, are the following:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Some of these aphorisms, especially the last-quoted, may appear mystically anarchic; but it must be remembered that Blake is trying to assert a different set of values against the received wisdom of his day. Later in the poem, the narrator has an encounter with an “Angel”, who threatens him with Hell for his beliefs; but the narrator counters by delving into his own imagination and showing the “Angel” that his vision of Heaven and Hell is merely an extension of his belief in the changelessness of society, and that an alternative vision, based on change and potentiality, is also possible.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen as a kind of treatise on how to think beyond confining limits, on how to value energy and excitement and not to be restrained by conventional patterns of thought. If it speaks in its title of a “marriage”, the reader is nonetheless at liberty to question whether this marriage will necessarily be a smooth one, and whether what is really at stake here is an eternal battle between order and chaos, between reason and energy, between social constraint and imaginative freedom.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
The central action of Visions of the Daughters of Albion is clear. The maiden Oothoon, accepting love, goes fearlessly to her lover Theotormon, but her happiness is short-lived. She is raped by a figure of violence, Bromion, but worse, Theotormon thereafter regards her as defiled; in his jealousy he ties Oothoon and Bromion back to back, and it is with this unmoving scene that the poem concludes. What, then, is the poem about? At one level, it is clearly about sexual jealousy and about double standards. In the last part of the poem, Oothoon has a long and very powerful speech on these themes:
I cry, Love! Love! Love! Happy, happy love, free as the mountain wind!
Can that be love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day,
To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary, dark,
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?
Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.
But it also needs to be remembered that alongside this indictment of the curtailment of sexual freedom, Oothoon is referred to as the ‘soft soul of America’, and throughout the poem there runs a critique of both British oppression of the colonies and also the American slave trade.
“London” I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls ;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
