Citations: Romantic Poetry Flashcards
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right! 1
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign 7
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar 11
Try all that wit and art suggest to bend 17
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
The Rights of Woman - Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1692-1795)
But hope not, courted idol of mankind, 25
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.
Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, 30
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
The Rights of Woman - Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1692-1795)
I heard a thousand blended notes, 1
While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link 5
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
If this belief from heaven be sent, 21
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
“Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon, 1
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; 5
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; 10
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.
The World Is Too Much With Us - William Wordsworth (1807)
Five years have past; five summers, with the length 1
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 5
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines 15
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din 25
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too 30
Of unremembered pleasure
“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
[…] Nor less, I trust, 35
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world, 40
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 45
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope, 65
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills
[…] —I cannot paint 75
What then I was.
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. 85
“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, 115
My dear, dear Friend
“Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- William Wordsworth
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 1
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
But yet I know, where’er I go, 17
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) - William Wordsworth
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy 35
Shepherd-boy!
Whither is fled the visionary gleam? 56
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) - William Wordsworth
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 60
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home: 65
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy; 70
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) - William Wordsworth
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep 110
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, —
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest, 115
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live, 130
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) - William Wordsworth
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 200
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) - William Wordsworth
Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made 1
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,
This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence
Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade
Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, 5
Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes
Upon the strings of this Æolian lute,
Which better far were mute.
Dejection: An Ode (1802) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, 25
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! 30
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail 40
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win 45
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within
Dejection: An Ode (1802) - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
… On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! …
“Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1796, 1816)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 1
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. 5
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 20
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.
“Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1796, 1816)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
That with music loud and long, 45
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! 50
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.
“Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1796, 1816)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.
Biographia Literaria (1817)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.
Biographia Literaria (1817)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. […]
Biographia Literaria (1817)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
[…] Fancy, on the contrary, […] is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
Biographia Literaria (1817)
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 1
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 5
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: 10
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.
“To Wordsworth” (1814-15) - Percy Shelley
