Romantic poetry Flashcards
‘The Tyger’
AABB rhyme - creates symmetry
Refrain ‘Tyger tyger’
God is worshiped as a fearless creator and compared to a blacksmith
The poem questions the nature of God how can God create both evil and good
Old Testament vs New Testament God
The metaphors of the tiger describe the difficulty the speaker has in understanding the nature of God
Sublime
‘Symmetry’ comments on the perfection and is also associated with beauty
Plosives ‘burning bright’ the spitting of fire and the power and majesty of the tiger
At the time in David Henry’s ‘A historical description of the Tower of London and its curiosities’ containing a list of animals in the tower confirmed that between 1771 and 1792
The presence of such magnificence in an urbanised city shows the corruption of the city
Blake lived very close to the exhibition of tigers
PROMETHEUS
The first and last stanza are identical however, ‘could’ changes to ‘dare’ highlights a shift in understanding the characteristics of the creator.
‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’
Use of prepositions creates a sense of encirclement and claustrophobia
Indentation creates an unsettling feeling
The loss of the moon the only light source has links to Golgotha which is furthered by the images of ‘thorns’
Nature which previously provided comfort to the speaker is dead and decaying much like the speakers mind
‘Moon’ links to female hysteria
‘Serpentine’ is the river in which Harriet drowned herself in
Mary Shelley changed the date and the poem was published posthumously
The rhyme scheme changes in the final stanza
Religious allusions contrast Shelleys strong atheist beliefs while it could be argued he is turning to Christian belief it seems to be a more cynical allusion of the only parts of the Bible which are about death and sin
‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’
Ekphrasis - poem about an art object
The speaker is jealous of the stasis that the urn possesses that love is not transient and neither is spring
Abundance of rhetorical questions the urn outlives time and is not plagued by human transience
The stanzas mimic the shape of the urn
Iambic pentameter this traditional form of metre could be an attempt to show the eternity of literature and poetry ‘Shakespeare’ was a figure for the romantic movement
The urn itself is a contradiction it immediately reminds a reader of death but is covered in images of life
Dr Sudarsan Sahoo “In a noisy, changing world here is something beyond sound and beyond change”
“The poet asks that we should see the urn in all the mystery of unchanging silence”
Apostrophe the speaker directly addresses something that cannot respond
The questions do not need to be answered the speaker is engrossed in the complexity and the silence of the urn
‘Lines Written In Early Spring’
Shift from declarative to question ‘what man has made of man’
‘Notes’ and ‘Thoughts’ half rhyme immediately highlights that nature is not as perfect as it is supposed to be
Sublime and the reconciliation of the mind nature provides
Pantheism - nature
Nature is associated with the female because it provides a maternal and caring consoling feeling to those that are surrounded by it
‘Budding twigs’ opportunity and rebirth suggest the feelings that the opposing movement of the ‘Enlightenment’ proposed
Humans fail to emulate the feeling that nature provides
Robert Ready “There is pleasure their where? In the twigs To what extent does Wordsworth believe that? The poem I will argue is mined with its own doubts”
“Just as we have become disconnected from external nature we have become alien to human nature that should connect us”
“The notes are not sung but written by man”
‘Sonnet on the sea’
The sea is duplicitous in its nature it is both powerful and beautiful
Sibilance depicts the consistency of the sea the tide which continues and waves
The sea returns man to its primitive state
The punctuation and short sentences mimic the erratic power of the sea mimicking Shakespeare’s depictions of the sea in The Tempest and King Lear
‘Feast’ nature is a cure for the insatiable greed of man
Anaphora through ‘Oh ye’
Petrarchan sonnet
Apostrophe
Iambic pentameter mimics the sea
The poem reflects escaping the industrial revolution and the corruption of the earth
‘Ode To The West Wind’
The wind acts as a force of decay and death
The speaker finds that with death and decay rebirth can occur and so can spring
‘I fall upon the thorns of life!’ life is not simple and fair it alludes to religion and divine providence
The wind parallels much to Noah’s Arc when the storm is gone the earth is cleansed
Each section is a sonnet
Sublime the dual complexity of nature
Iambic pentameter - meditative
The Maenads were the followers of Dionysus they were famous for their wild parties and their dancing often portrayed with their hair askew
‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth year’
‘Yellow leaf’ is a metaphor employed in Macbeth which could parallel himself to Macbeth’s greatness as a soldier
‘Volcanic isle’ something that is entirely destructive but not if it is isolated
‘Chain’ man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’
Semantic field of victory and glory
Being a fighter allows the speaker to immortalise himself and become a symbol of power and worthiness
Form resembles the Greek poet Sappho
“There is ‘double-acting’ in that the author is playing the part of the usual byronic hero at the same time combining this with the part of the deserted and defiant Macbeth”
Jones “Macbeth can discover nothing to do except go into battle”
On December 24th he wrote to Thomas Moore ‘My ‘way of life’ is fallen into great regularity”
‘London’
‘Charter’d’ echoes a feeling of imprisonment and restriction
The use of anaphora creates a sense of exhaustion and frustration
‘Blackening’ present participle verb suggests that the process of corruption is ongoing and the blackening is increasing
‘Palace’ a critique of monarchy and institution relates to Rousseau’s essay on the corruption of morals
Juxtaposition between ‘Marriage’ and ‘Hearse’ highlights that death and destruction are infused with everything that brings happiness in life
Blake was highly concerned with the abuse of children similarly to JJR
‘HEAR’ Blake creates an acrostatic to echo his message for people to look at the suffering world around them
Paul Miner in true Christian religion hell is accessed through a grinding mill and in September 1796 the horizontal mill at Battersea was converted into a mill for grinding corn
Iambic tetrameter breaks every line in stanza three
‘Ode To A Nightingale’
The speaker envies the Nightingale and its perceived infinite song and the speaker wishes to be free from human anxiety and destruction
The speaker appears to be intoxicated and cannot understand if this is a dream or a hallucination
Apostrophe
The speaker is attracted to death a trope which was common in the Romantic movement
The speaker is captivated by the beauty of the nightingale
Trivial sublime
Iambic pentameter the nightingale has a hypnotic effect on the speaker
Synthenasia - the combining of senses
The human and the nightingale both are animals who want to survive and who have the freedom that the earth provides but it is humanity that has destructed the primitive pure image of man
“The Nightingale is a symbol of self annihilation the means of this attainment”
One year before the poem was written his brother died and when writing this Keats was experiencing the first symptoms of TB.
‘Holy Thursday’ (Songs of Experience)
Is all of the corruption that Blake implicitly alludes to in Songs of Innocence
‘Cold and usurous hand’ the corruption of adults also alludes to Rousseau’s theory and his writing about childhood
The use of anaphora depicts a bleak image of the future
‘Can it be a song of joy’ is a direct reference to Holy Thursday Songs of Innocence
“Hands which offer a false charity cold because it lacks affection and usurous because in the words of M.G Jones those who operated in charity schools sometimes “lined their pockets with money saved from the children’s rations”
ABAB rhyme - nursery rhyme
Celestial imagery highlights the divinity of children
‘The Sick Rose’
Highly ambiguous and could be interpreted in multiple different ways a metaphor for love and sex or one for death and corruption
Dental alliteration highlight an abrasive corruptive force
The image of a rose is of love and affection but there is an external corrupting force which embodies humanity
‘Sick’ humanity has plagued nature much like the appearance of suit on buildings and nature may have given the Rose a sick appearance
Only two sentences
Two quatrains could mimic the transience of life but also the worm and the rose which symbolise death and decay that humanity exerts
Blake was an advocate for sexual liberty the worm is an image of the ‘id’
Blake believed in spirits especially ‘larvae’ which had the power to jump from one person’s mind to another
‘Ode On Melancholy’
The beginning is abrupt and sudden the speaker has experienced an awakening
The first stanza acts as a sort of listing of destructive behaviours and negation is used through ‘No,no’
Using nature as a source of rejuvenation and reconciliation
This relates to the turmoil Keats experienced in his life
‘And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul’ initially the poem seems nihilistic but in melancholy their is beauty and in beauty there is melancholy
Melancholy is a universal experience
The use of iambic pentameter creates a meditative and reliable rhythm that is a reminder that life always returns to a state of equilibrium emotions fluctuate
E.C Pettet “Sorrow and happiness were cherished because they were (or felt to be) stimulants to an intensified aesthetic experience”
Nature is a reminder without death and melancholy beauty in nature would not exist
‘The Question’
Trivial sublime
The setting of a dream exemplifies the meditative power of nature that it exerts
The question which the title refers to is ultimately a contemplation of his isolation
‘Nosegay’ is a reminder of love and beauty but it is also a reminder that once a flower is removed from its roots that marks the beginning of its death
Each stanza finishes with a couplet which creates a sense of harmony and unity
“Its green arms round the bosom of the stream”
Iambic pentameter it is highly relaxing and almost produces a trance like effect embodying the dream
‘Arcturi’ is a star in Northern Hemisphere nature provides a direction
‘Stanzas Written In Dejection, near Naples’
‘Buds’ hope and a reminder that in death rebirth comes
The sea is a constant reminder of tranquility and a catalyst for calmness
Repetition and anaphora of ‘nor’ is a reminder of all that he has lost
The poem is also a plea to humanity when experiencing ‘dejection’ nothing can comfort like nature
‘Green’ and ‘Purple’ is a reminder of death
Asyndeton and parallelism in the first two sentences
Iambic tetrameter
Fascination with the concept of God even though he was publicly atheist
The memory of this setting will provide future comfort to the speaker
“My dearest Mary wherefore hast thou gone and left me in this dreary world alone”
‘Holy Thursday (Innocence)’
Abundance of religious imagery suggests the belief Blake held that Children hold a celestial light
‘Clean’ is a reminder that this act is a facade the children are given clothes and treated as humans only once a year
‘Two and two’ links to Noah’s Arc suggesting that the children need to be saved from the sinning older humans
AABB rhyme couplets
Ironic condemnation of charity
Charity is a manifestation of capital greed that hide behind a facade for wanted health and prosperity to all in reality this cannot happen
