Romanticism

“If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all,” proposed
John Keats in an 1818 letter, at the age of 22. This could be called romantic in sentiment,
lowercase r, meaning fanciful, impractical, unachievably ambitious. But Keats’s axiom could also
be taken as a one-sentence distillation of British Romanticism—with its all-or-nothing stance on
the spontaneity of the highest art, its conviction of the sympathetic connections between nature’s
organic growth and human creativity, and its passion for individual imagination as an originating
force. This period is generally mapped from the first political and poetic tremors of the 1780s to
the 1832 Reform Act. No major period in English-language literary history is shorter than that
half-century of the Romantic era, but few other eras have ever proved as consequential.
Romanticism was nothing short of a revolution in how poets understood their art, its provenance,
and its powers: ever since, English-language poets have furthered that revolution or formulated
reactions against it.
In Britain, Romanticism was not a single unified movement, consolidated around any one person,
place, moment, or manifesto, and the various schools, styles, and stances we now label capital-R
Romantic would resist being lumped into one clear category. Yet all of Romanticism’s products
exploded out of the same set of contexts: some were a century in the making; others were overnight
upheavals. Ushered in by revolutions in the United States (1776) and France (1789), the Romantic
period coincides with the societal transformations of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of liberal
movements and the state’s counterrevolutionary measures, and the voicing of radical ideas—
Parliamentary reform, expanded suffrage, abolitionism, atheism—in pamphlets and public
demonstrations. Though Britain avoided an actual revolution, political tensions sporadically broke
out into traumatizing violence, as in the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which state cavalry killed
at least 10 peaceful demonstrators and wounded hundreds more.
Emboldened by the era’s revolutionary spirit, Romantic poets invented new literary forms to
match. Romantic poetry can argue radical ideas explicitly and vehemently (as in Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s England in 1819, a sonnet in protest of Peterloo) or allegorically and ambivalently (as
in William Blake’s The Tyger, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience). To quote from
William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking collection he wrote with
fellow poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romantic poets could “choose incidents and situations
from common life” as its subjects, describing them not in polished or high-flown diction but

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instead in everyday speech, “a selection of language really used by men.” Romanticism can do
justice to the disadvantaged, to those marginalized or forgotten by an increasingly urban and
commercial culture—rural workers, children, the poor, the elderly, or the disabled—or it can
testify to individuality simply by foregrounding the poet’s own subjectivity at its most
idiosyncratic or experimental.
Alongside prevailing political and social ideas, Romantic poets put into practice new aesthetic
theories, cobbled from British and German philosophy, which opposed the neoclassicism and rigid
decorum of 18th-century poetry. To borrow the central dichotomy of critic M.H. Abrams’s
influential book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Romantic poets broke from the past by no
longer producing artistic works that merely mirrored or reflected nature faithfully; instead, they
fashioned poems that served as lamps illuminating truths through self-expression, casting the
poets’ subjective, even impressionistic, experiences onto the world. From philosophers such as
Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the Romantics inherited a distinction between two aesthetic
categories, the beautiful and the sublime—in which beautiful suggests smallness, clarity, and
painless pleasure, and sublime suggests boundlessness, obscurity, and imagination-stretching
grandeur. From the German critic A.W. Schlegel, Coleridge developed his ideal of “organic form,”
the unity found in artworks whose parts are interdependent and integral to the whole—grown, like
a natural organism, according to innate processes, not externally mandated formulas.
The most self-conscious and self-critical British poets to date, the Romantics justified their poetic
experimentations in a variety of prose genres (prefaces, reviews, essays, diaries, letters, works of
autobiography or philosophy) or else inside the poetry itself. But they never wrote only for other
poets and critics: the Romantics competed in a burgeoning literary marketplace that made room
for the revival of English and Scottish ballads (narrative folk songs, transcribed and disseminated
in print), the recovery of medieval romances (one etymological root of Romantic), and prose
fiction ranging from the psychological extremes of the gothic novel to the wit of Jane Austen’s
social realism. Romantic poets looked curiously backward—to Greek mythology, friezes, and urns
or to a distinctly British cultural past of medieval ruins and tales of knights and elves—to look
speculatively forward. Perhaps no pre-Romantic author inspired the Romantics more than William
Shakespeare, who exemplified what Keats termed Negative Capability, that is when a man is
capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason.” For Keats, “a great poet” such as Shakespeare opened his imagination to all possibilities,

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limited neither by an insistent search for truth nor by his own egocentric gravity: “the sense of
Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Drawing on unrestrained imagination and a variegated cultural landscape, a Romantic-era poem
could be trivial or fantastic, succinctly songlike or digressively meandering, a searching fragment
or a precisely bounded sonnet or ode, as comic as Lord Byron’s mock epic Don Juan or as
cosmologically subversive as Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If any single innovation
has emerged as Romanticism’s foremost legacy, it is the dominance among poetic genres of the
lyric poem, spoken in first-person (the lyric I) often identified with the poet, caught between
passion and reason, finding correspondences in natural surroundings for the introspective workings
of heart and mind. If any collection cemented that legacy, it would be Wordsworth and Coleridge’s
landmark collection Lyrical Ballads, first published anonymously in 1798. The collection
provokes with its title alone, inverting hierarchies, hybridizing the exalted outbursts of lyric poetry
with the folk narratives of ballads. In a retrospective preface added for the 1800 second edition
and expanded in later editions, Wordsworth set out his polemical program for a poetry grounded
in feeling, supplying Romanticism with some of its most resonant and lasting phrases: “all good
poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; “it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility.”
The following poems, poets, articles, poem guides, and recordings offer introductory samples of
the Romantic era. Included are the monumental Romantic poets often nicknamed the Big Six—the
older generation of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge and the so-called Young Romantics—
Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Indispensable women poets such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson,
and Felicia Dorothea Hemans; the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns; and the farm laborer–
poet John Clare are also represented. But even this collection is only a beginning: no introduction
to Romanticism can encompass the entire period in all its variety and restless experimentation.

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The First-Generation Romantic poets
The first-generation romantic poets created and established a poetic form deeply indebted to
classical Greek tradition. The first-generation romantic poets owed their inspiration to classical
motifs of the ancients. Form was paramount, even blank verse was meticulously laid out, and the
works represents traditional poetic structures. Wordsworth and Coleridge largely carried on the
Southey tradition. Their work is stirring, often patriotic in terms of venerating English landscape
and life, reverent to God and conforming to established ideas of virtues.
Perhaps the major difference between the two schools, or generations, can be summed up with the
Byronic hero. In the poet’s verses, this hero was typically gifted, passionate, riddled with flaws,
larger-than-life, and removed from societal restraints, as his creator so often was. He was,
moreover, a type Wordsworth and Coleridge would never create, nor be able to view as heroic.
The second generation of romantic poets chose to enter realms of relative realism, and interpret
experience on a more earthbound and sensual level.

William Blake
After Jerusalem, Blake wrote very little poetry and devoted himself to his work as painter and
engraver. The most considerable poem left in manuscript from his later years is The Everlasting
Gospel, a series of notebook fragments on the theme of the necessity for the forgiveness of sins.
There are powerful passages among these fragments, but they do not add anything to Jerusalem as
imaginative thought, and Blake did not bother to arrange them in any definite form. The rhetorical
directness of some of the fragments has made them popular, but their very freedom from the
inventiveness of Blake’s mythmaking has the effect of rendering them poetically uninteresting.
This is not true of Blake’s last engraved poem, The Ghost of Abel, a dramatic scene composed in
1822 as a reply to Byron’s drama Cain. Byron’s Cain fights free of natural religion and its fears
only to succumb to a murderous dialectic by which every spiritual emancipation of a gifted
individual is paid for through alienation from his brethren, the consequence being that a dissenter
from the orthodoxy of negations in moral values is compelled to become an unwary Satanist.
Blake’s very subtle point is that the covenant of Christ, as he interprets it, takes man beyond the
“cloven fiction” of moral good and moral evil, the “hateful siege of contraries” experienced by
Milton’s Satan on Mount Niphates, and into the clarification of seeing that only a part of what is
called moral good is actually good to the imagination of the real life of man. Vengeance and every

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similar mode of hindering another can have no part in an imaginative morality, and for Blake there
is no other morality worthy of the name. The Ghost of Abel, which makes surprisingly effective
use of Blake’s long line, the fourteener, as a medium for dramatic dialogue, is the true coda to
Blake’s poetry, rather than The Everlasting Gospel, for it makes explicit the moral basis of the
laconic Marriage of Heaven and Hell. At about the time he wrote The Everlasting Gospel, Blake
reengraved a little emblem book, The Gates of Paradise, which he had first engraved as early as
1793, adding a number of rhymed couplets and an epilogue in two quatrains to the engravings and
their inscriptions. The Gates of Paradise are “Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice,” and the story told
in epilogue is something rarer, an address To the Accuser who is the God of This World, and one
of Blake’s most perfect short poems:

Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,

And dost not know the Garment from the Man.
Every Harlot was a Virgin once,
Nor can’st thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Tho’ thou are Worship’d by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline,
The lost Traveller’s Dream under the Hill.

The tone of this is unique in Blake, and I have not found the equivalent in any other poet. There is
enormous irony here, mitigated by a gentle and mocking pity for the great antagonist, the Satan
adored as Jesus and Jehovah by the religious of this world. Blake is past argument here; he has
gone beyond prophetic anger and apocalyptic impatience. The Accuser is everywhere and at all
times apparently triumphant, yet he is a delusion and so but a dunce. He cannot distinguish the
phenomenal garment from The Real Man, the Imagination, and his spouse Rahab is only a delusion
also. States change; individuals endure. The god of the churches is still that light bearer, son of the
morning, who fell, and he is now in his weary night’s decline as history moves to a judging climax.
The vision of a restored man, Blake’s vision, is the clear sight of a mental traveller in the open
world of poetry. The Accuser is the dream of a lost traveler in the phenomenal world, but Blake
has found his way home and need not dream.

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William Wordsworth
After Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton, Wordsworth is the strongest poet in the English language.
Shakespeare and Chaucer created men and women, which is the highest poetic achievement.
Words worth, like Milton, is a poet of the sublime, of the transcendental striving that is a vital part
of the human endowment. Sir John Falstaff and Hamlet, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner—these
are beyond Milton and Wordsworth. Milton’s Satan is an extraordinary creation, but he belongs to
a different order of persuasiveness than Shakespeare’s Iago represents. Wordsworth’s Margaret,
in The Ruined Cottage, is a figure of heroic pathos, but again this is in a different realm from the
terrifying pathos of King Lear and Cordelia. This of course is to catalog the modes of greatness
and is intended to appreciate Wordsworth, since no other poet writing in English, after nearly two
centuries, approaches Wordsworth’s power and originality. Originality is the key term in
apprehending Words worth; he made a larger break with literary tradition than anyone after him,
be it Whitman, Dickinson, or Eliot. After Wordsworth, poetry became Wordsworthian, which is
still its condition. Modern and postmodernism alike are still in Words worth’s shadow. Before
Wordsworth, poems had subjects; after Wordsworth, poems are subjective, even when they
struggle not to be. The change, so commonplace that we now have difficulty in observing it, is the
largest I know of in literature since Shakespeare’s pragmatic invention of the human—that is to
say, of the ever-growing inner self. No one before Words worth would have written a poem at all
comparable to The Prelude, an epic whose principal concern is the growth of the poet’s own mind.
“Mind,” for Words worth, was a very complex metaphor for consciousness, not just in the
cognitive sense but also in the mode of affect. Words worth’s best critics always have emphasized
his uncanny fusion of the sublime- “Something evermore about to be”—and of the educational
mission of teaching us how to feel, more subtly and more acutely. The most profound function of
Words worth’s poetry is consolation, not through otherworldly hopes and speculations but through
the human heart and its universal struggle with the burden of mortality. No poet since Wordsworth
can rival him in his power of evoking our deepest fears, longings, and anxieties of expectations.
Wordsworth’s cognitive originality, profound as it is, nevertheless is dwarfed by his emotional
range and intensity. We are at a bad moment, at least in the English-speaking world, in the study
and appreciation of the greatest literature, whether it be Shakespeare or Words worth. An
extraordinary number of those who now teach Wordsworth, and write about him, manifest their
political and cultural exuberance in denouncing the poet of The Prelude, “Tintern Abbey,” and

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The Ruined Cottage because of his “betrayal” of the French Revolution. This peculiar fashion of
academic abuse will pass away in a decade or so, while Words worth’s greatest poetry will abide.
To be one of the four most essential poets of the English language is to be inescapable. Words
worth will bury his historicist, Marxist, and pseudofeminist undertakers. Even those who never
have read Wordsworth are now overdetermined by him; you cannot write a poem in English
without treading on his ground. Doubtless all of us would prefer that Wordsworth had retained the
generosity and social vision of his youth in his later years, but political objections are absurdly
irrelevant to the perpetual greatness of The Prelude, Tintern Abbey and The Ruined Cottage. If we
reach the twenty-second century, then Wordsworth will be there, undiminished and imaginatively
powerful, a blessed consolation in our distress.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Coleridge had the dark fortune of being eclipsed by his best friend,
William Words worth. What we think of as modern poetry is Wordsworthianism, the evanescence
of any poetic subject except for the poet’s own subjectivity. Two years younger than Words worth,
Coleridge actually invented what was to be the Wordsworthian mode in such early poems as “The
Eolian Harp” (1795) and “Frost at Midnight” (1798), the immediate precursors of Words worth’s
“Tintern Abbey” (written later in 1798). But Coleridge had an almost Kafkan sense of guilt and of
self-abnegation. He became Wordsworth’s follower, enhancing their joint volume, Lyrical Ballads
(1798) with his magnificent The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Since the two parts of Christabel
were composed in 1798 and 1800, “Kubla Khan” around 1798, and “Dejection: An Ode” in 1802,
Coleridge’s crucial poetic achievement is pretty much the work of four years and essentially ended
when he was 30. When one considers how unique and original Coleridge’s poetic endowment was,
it is a great sorrow that only a few fragments attest to his gift after 1802. Perhaps Coleridge’s
greatest achievement, like Emerson’s after him, was in his notebooks, which afford an
extraordinary image of his complex and restless mind. Yet, for the common reader, Coleridge is
no longer the Sage of Highgate but the author of a few absolute poems, “Kubla Khan,” and Th e
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in particular. Coleridge had projected an epic on the fall of Jerusalem
to the Romans (c.e. 70), and rather wonderfully “Kubla Khan” somehow issued from that
outrageous ambition. No reader could know this from chanting the gorgeous fragment, which
should be memorized and indeed recited aloud. But this foreground helps explain the sense of

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“holy dread” in “Kubla Khan” and its general atmosphere of potential profanation. The hidden
theme of “Kubla Khan” appears to be Coleridge’s fear of his own genius, his own daemonic
powers. Th e poem’s genre is what William Collins, following John Milton, established in his
“Ode on the Incarnation of the Poetical Character.” Th ere a new Apollo, a “rich-haired youth of
morn,” is manifested in the guise of the post-Miltonic, preromantic Bard of Sensibility, a direct
ancestor of William Blake as well as of Coleridge. “Kubla Khan” concludes with a vision of a
youth with flashing eyes and floating hair, who has found his way back to an unfallen existence,
where he has drunk “the milk of Paradise.” Th is youth is the poet that Coleridge both longed and
feared to become, the celebrant of a new imaginative power, one who would repair the fall not
only of Jerusalem but of Man. Th e Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so frequently interpreted as a
Christian parable of the Fall of Man, instead is a phantasmagoria of the unlived life, one so
compulsive that the poem never will know (nor can we) why gratuitous crimes and gratuitous
releases should take place. Whereas the Christian Fall results from an act of disobedience, the
Ancient Mariner simply acts, without willing and yet with terrible consequences. As I read this
great ballad, it is a poem of the imagination’s revenge on those who live in a world without
imagination. Coleridge rightly said that it had no true moral and indeed should have had no moral
at all. Instead, it offers a visionary cosmos as compelling as that in Kafka’s stories and parables.
Coleridge, like Kafka, makes his work uninterpretable, but in turn the matter for interpretation
becomes just that movement away from interpretability. Kafka gives us a New Kabbalah, and so
does Coleridge. Th e cosmos of Th e Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not sacramental but Gnostic;
the divinity is estranged or hidden, and we find ourselves in the emptiness the ancient Gnostics
called the Kenoma. There we wander, there we weep, unless we suffer the ultimate, compulsive
fate of the Ancient Mariner, who ends as a haunter of wedding feasts, always retelling his own
story, in a kind of parody of ecological wisdom. We can surmise that the two extreme figures of
Coleridge’s bipolar vision are the youth of “Kubla Khan” and the Ancient Mariner. Perhaps they
are caught in a perpetual cycle together, in which at last the newly incarnated poetic character must
age into a fundamentalist of what Coleridge called the primary imagination. Th at is “primary”
only in being initial; otherwise it is repetition, unlike the secondary or higher imagination that has
drunk the milk of Paradise, with consequences immediately ecstatic but finally catastrophic.

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Robert Southey
Robert Southey was born in Bristol in 1774 and went on to become one of the most prolific writers
of his time. Now often overlooked in the literary wake of such giants as Wordsworth and
Coleridge, he was the poet laureate for over thirty years and had a profound effect on the literary
landscape. He was brought up from the age of 3 by his mother’s half-sister in Bath but before he
was 10 years old he was reading Shakespeare and other popular literature of the time, including
romances. He began writing seriously at an early age and was even expelled from school for a
diatribe against flogging.

Southey attended Oxford but always admitted that he got little or nothing from studying there,
though he did begin an important friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During a break in
1793, he wrote the epic poem Joan of Arc (published later in 1796) based on his opinion of the
revolution going on in France which he supported at the time. With Coleridge, in 1794, he wrote
the three act play The Fall of Robespierre about the execution of the revolutionary leader. Whilst
he, Coleridge and others debated moving to America to set up a writing community, this never
came to fruition.

In 1795, Southey married and, after trying various employments, he and his wife moved to the
Lake District. Their home at Greta Hall was said to be filled with some 14,000 books, a testament
to his love of writing, history and science and was the focal point for many writers, lending them
the title The Lake Poets. Coleridge and his wife and family moved in, but when his writer friend
left, Southey was burdened with supporting everyone. He would work tirelessly on several projects
at a time, writing a history of Portugal whilst also compiling a collection of poetry. He wrote some
of his most famous poems at the time including Inchcape Rock and After Blenheim which is often
cited as one of the first poems taking a stance against war.

Southey published Metrical Tales and Other Poems in 1805 and later became firm friends with
writer Walter Landor. By 1809 he was contributing to the literary and political magazine The
Quarterly Review and his fame began to spread, so much so that he was made Poet Laureate in
1813. In 1814 he wrote the epic poem Roderick the Last of the Goths which was set in Spain and
is often seen as one of his best works. In 1819 Southey toured Scotland with Thomas Telford, an

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engineer, keeping copious notebooks concerning their travels which he later turned into book that
was published in 1829. By now, he had moved away from the radicalism of his youth, where he
supported the French Revolution, to a more conservative state of mind, something that caused
criticism from certain quarters. In 1838 his wife died and Southey, while he was beginning to
suffer from health problems, married poet Caroline Anne Bowles. Southey died himself in 1843
at the age of 68 and was buried in the cemetery at Keswick.

Walter Scott
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 15, 1771. His father was a farmer and his
mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, who was one of the founders
of the medical school of Edinburgh. Mrs. Scott was fond of poetry and anecdotes and it was from
her that Walter received inspiration.
Walter was one of ten children. The other children's only claim to fame was that they had, "good
health and untamable spirits." In contrast, Walter was afflicted at twenty-one months with
something which a biographer describes as, "a paralytic affection, superinduced, or at least
aggravated by scrofulous habit of body." It is, sufficient to say that it made him lame and doubtless
pushed him into more academic pursuits. He spent much time with his grandparents, but it was
"Aunt Jenny" who took a special interest in him and influenced him to write. His visits to an uncle,
Dr. Rutherford, professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh, brought him into contact with
scholarly people.
His parents were very religious and imposed strict piety upon all their children. Walter was never
very deeply affected religiously, however. His works, which contain much about the church, seek
neither to elevate nor to censure it, but rather to depict it, for it was history and not philosophy that
interested him most.
His first novel, Waverly, was published anonymously. Although Scott probably never intended
that "Laurence Templeton" should be taken as a real person, he was attempting to remain in
anonymity by the use of the name. His publishers persuaded him to allow further novels to be
designated as "by the author of Waverly," and for this reason some of his novels were called the
"Waverly Novels." Although he published biographies of Swift and Dryden and some history, as
well as poems and novels, his chief claim to distinction is his contribution to Romanticism and the
historical novel.

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He suffered from many physical ailments, one particularly serious one in adolescence, which made
him, in his own words, "a glutton of books." Scott became seriously ill before Ivanhoe was finished
and dictated much of it from his sickbed. His popularity, both socially and as a writer, was almost
unparalleled. He was married in 1797 to Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, who bore him three sons
and two daughters. Scott received his title and baronetcy from King George IV in the spring of
1820. He died, Sir Walter Scott, in 1832.

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Second Generation Romantic Poets
The poets of the second generation, Gorge Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats,
all had intense but short lives. They lived through the disillusionment of the post-revolutionary
period, the savage violence of the terror and the threatening rise of the Napoleonic Empire. George
Gordon Byron was the prototype of the Romantic poet. He was heavily involved with
contemporary social issues and like the hearers of his long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage and Don Juan, was a melancholy and solitary figure whose action often defied social
conventions. Like Shelley, he left England and live on the continent. He pursued adventure in Italy
and Greece. Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic
poets. He was an individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of family, church,
marriage, and the Christian faith and rebelled against all forms of tyranny. Shelley’s ideas were
anarchic and he was considered dangerous by the conservative society of his time. Many of his
poems address social and political issues. John Keats had a really brief life. The main theme of his
poetry is the conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of
beauty, imagination and eternal youth.

George Gordon, Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron, is literature’s most notorious instance of a writer’s life becoming his
work, indeed taking the place of it. The illustrious Goethe is something of a rival instance, and
later examples include Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. To endeavor to
speak of the work in the writer in regard to Byron is therefore a considerable challenge, which I
will take up here, though on a modest scale. Byron was a cinema idol two centuries before there
was a cinema, and a rockstar centuries before rhythm and blues metamorphosed into rock-and-
roll. Valentino and Elvis lag in the Byronic wake, as any other popular luminary would have to
run well behind the noble Lord Byron: great poet, gallant martyr to Greek independence from the
Turks, reformist British politician, and an authentic anthology of every sexual possibility:
incestuous heterosexuality, sodomizing of male and female, Satanic sadomasochism, pederasty,
and whatever else nature makes available (with perhaps a restraint or two). Externally, Byron’s
work strongly affected his life with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, cantos 1 and 2,
in 1812, when the twenty-four-year old poet “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” But
that is hardly a matter of the work in a writer, except that Byron’s persona or mask as romantic

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adventurer never left him after that. It was not a question of following the big wars, like the Byronic
Hemingway, nor even of achieving authentic disgust with the limits of sexual experience. Instead,
there was the impossible quest somehow to reconcile personal idealism and the demands of
celebrity, probably the ultimate instance of celebrity ever, in the long cavalcade from Cleopatra in
the ancient world down (very much down) to the present. Everything crucial about Byron is an
enigma, simultaneously ambiguous and ambivalent. Th e best of him emerged in his long, complex
friendship with Shelley, a kind of a brother in poetic greatness, aristocratic ambivalence, and
revolutionary temperament but hardly a double or twin. Byron, according to the flamboyant
Trelawny, wished to save Shelley’s skull from the funeral pyre, but Trelawny would not consent,
saying he feared Byron was capable of using it as a drinking cup. And yet Byron said to his London
friends that they were all wrong about Shelley, who made everyone else seem a beast in
comparison. Shelley, a superb critic, uniquely saw and said that Byron’s Don Juan was the great
poem of the romantic age, surpassing even Goethe and Wordsworth. It depends on perspective, to
some degree, but time seems to have agreed with Shelley. Certainly, the effect of Don Juan on
Byron himself was extraordinary. At last, the work became the life. William Hazlitt found
throughout Byron’s poetry the story of “a mind preying upon itself.” Th at can be phrased, more
generously, as the record of a mind influencing itself. Byron exuberantly said of Don Juan: “It may
be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?” Indeed it is the celebrated thing-in-itself, the
reality for which all of us search. Its protagonist, the amiable but passive Juan, decidedly is not
Byron. Rather, the great voice narrating the poem is more than Lord Byron’s, the voice is Byron
himself, in all his diversity and self-contradictions, an identity larger than that of the noble lord.
George Wilson Knight brilliantly remarks that, in Don Juan, Byron and the ocean became one, as
if to resolve the poet’s simultaneous faith both in nature and in eternity. I think of Hart Carne
invoking the Caribbean as “this great wink of Eternity” in Voyager II and reflect at the closeness
of sexual dynamics in Byron and in Hart Crane. Northrup Frye remarks that Byron, unlike his
public, was not enthralled by the Byronic hero. Since that hero reappeared, in the next generation,
in Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester and Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and lived on in Hemingway’s
bullfighters, big-game hunters, and heroically literate soldiers, Byron had no way of stopping what
he had begun. He might have blanched at many of our current female Byrons, who have a charming
way of turning into vampires. Byron’s chief debt to Don Juan was that it turned him inexorably to
revolutionary action, perhaps because he needed to demonstrate that he was not Don Juan. The

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first two cantos of Don Juan were published in July 1819. A year later, Byron joined the Carbonari
in their revolution against Austrian rule. The Carbonari were defeated, but in 1823 Byron and
Trelawny were exiled to Greece, where “the Trumpet Voice of Liberty” died a hero’s death at
Missolonghi on April 19, 1824. After that, his life and work fused forever.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley was a lyric and Pindaric poet who desired to write revolutionary epic and lyrical drama.
At heart a skeptic and not a Platonic visionary, he nevertheless broke through to a Gnostic vision
very much his own, curiously parallel to the work of William Blake, whom he never read. A.D.
Nuttall, in his Alternative Trinities, studies Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and Blake as three
intricate instances of poetic heresies that approach Gnosticism. The Gnostic religion, to most
scholars, is a second century of the common era Christian heresy. I myself agree with Henry
Corbin, who argued that Gnosticism (or esotericism) was an eclectic world religion and the truest
form therefore of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Perhaps Shelley’s gnosis, his poetic way of
knowing, was not altogether a Gnosticism, but his visionary drama Prometheus Unbound opposes
Jupiter as a kind of Gnostic archon or Demiurge to Prometheus as a Gnostic savior, almost indeed
a stranger or alien god. Shelley’s magnificent “Ode to the West Wind,” composed between the
third and fourth acts of Prometheus Unbound, demands to be read on several levels of
interpretation: political, personal, heretical-religious, and agonistic in relation to Shelley’s poetic
precursors, John Milton and William Wordsworth, in particular. Politically, Shelley was of the
permanent left: almost the Leon Trotsky of his day. Yet Shelley’s personal stance strangely
blended hope and despair. Like Job, the poet falls on the thorns of life, and he prays to the wind to
lift him as a leaf, a wave, a cloud, as anything but a human being. From this nadir, Shelley makes
a great recovery when he urges the West Wind to make him its lyre and to be “through my lips . .
. the trumpet of a prophecy.” A revolutionary spirit, the west wind is also the harbinger of a Gnostic
revelation, correcting the Creation-Fall by going beyond nature. I suspect that Shelley’s deepest
struggle in the poem is with Wordsworth, the prophet of nature, whose “sober coloring” is
answered by the “deep autumnal tone” of “Ode to the West Wind.” Shelley’s impatient and
apocalyptic temperament will not wait on nature’s revelation of herself. Shelley set himself against
Milton in Prometheus Unbound and against Words worth in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,”
“Mont Blanc,” and the “Ode to the West Wind.” In his final poem, the great death march of the

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fragmentary The Triumph of Life, Shelley turned to Dante, whose Inferno and Purgatorio provided
the context for a vision of judgment. Shelley hymns the triumph of life over individual human
integrity, while showing how the natural sun blots out the light of the stars, or poetic imagination,
while the sun itself vanishes in the glare of the cold Chariot of Life. Something like a new Gnostic
heresy is darkly suggested by Shelley’s last vision, a sublime fragment but profoundly despairing
of any hope in ordinary human life.

John Keats
John Keats is unique among all major poets after Shakespeare in that his consciousness is so
profoundly normative; that is, it is so natural, sane, sympathetic, balanced, and equable as to give
us an example of what human life can be at its most wise and compassionate. A normative person
is very rare, whether in life or in literature, and this rareness enhances Keats’s value for us as a
poet and as a human being. Keats died at twenty-five and left us a truncated canon. His two major
long poems—Hyperion and Th e Fall of Hyperion—are fragments, but they manifest a greatness
that transcends his art in the great odes, the sonnets and major lyrics, and in Lamia and Th e Eve
of St. Agnes. Here I desire only to note a few of the particular excellences of the great odes, and
of the astonishing ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Th e most famous of the odes is “On a
Grecian Urn,” which has haunted poetic tradition down to its reappearance in Wallace Stevens’s
“Th e Poems of Our Climate,” where Keats’s powerful estrangement: “Th ou, silent form, doth
tease us out of thought / as doth eternity: Cold pastoral” is echoed as: “cold, a cold porcelain.” It
is strikingly bitter that Keats becomes more and more distant from what he contemplates on the
urn as the poem proceeds. This is akin to the transition from the last line of stanza 7 to the opening
of stanza 8 in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” “Faery lands forlorn” leads to the tolling of the word
forlorn, like a bell, as Keats is tolled back from the state of being one with the nightingale’s song
to the isolation of “my sole self.” I have a personal preference for the “Ode to Psyche” and the
“Ode on Melancholy” but would have to grant that the superb “To Autumn” is probably the most
eminent of the Great Odes of Keats. But, in these poems, we choose among sublimities:

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

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Keats’s harvest girl, profoundly erotic, lingers halfway between Milton’s Eve and Tennyson’s
Mariana. The influence of Keats has been enormous; he fostered not only Tennyson and the pre-
Raphaelites but rather more subtly helped to form Emily Dickinson’s oxymoronic rhetoric. Keats
has remained a presence in subsequent American poetry from Trumbull Stickney, Wallace
Stevens, and Hart Crane on to the remarkable Henri Cole, one of the most accomplished of our
contemporary poets. In England, Keats fathered Wilfred Owen, the great poet of World War I,
while in Ireland his effect lingered always on William Butler Yeats. In his closing days, Keats
began a crucial transition from his agon with Milton and with Words worth to a larger, loving
contest with Shakespeare. The sonnet “On the Sea” suggests King Lear’s: “When last the winds
of Heaven were unbound,” while Keats’s final fragment could be inserted in many Shakespearean
contexts and be altogether at home, in its power of apprehension and its eloquence:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
Th at thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

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Examples of Romantic Poetry
The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.8

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,

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And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more

Explanation of the poem

“The Solitary Reaper” is a clear example of Wordsworthian Romanticism, since its speaker
reflects on a powerful experience of nature from a tranquil distance. Though he does not know
what she’s singing about, the speaker seems to ascribe to the reaper a sort of virtuousness and
purity on the basis of her simpler existence and relative proximity to nature. The poem seems to
subtly suggest the nobility and honesty of physical labor like that which this girl performs. In doing
so, however, the poem reduces the reaper’s participation in human history and politics. The poem
presents two sets of actions. On the one hand, the reaper “cuts and binds the grain / and sings a
melancholy strain.” On the other hand, the speaker and the reader “Behold” and “listen.” There is
thus an implicit distinction between the reaper and the speaker in terms of their relationships with
nature: while the reaper works directly on it, the speaker observes it and her from a distance. She
is a participant while he is a spectator. The reaper is implied to be closer to a “natural” existence
than the speaker. In the terms of Romantic thought, she is also therefore implied to be closer to the
source of poetry itself, since poetry comes from nature. In “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” the
Romantic poet and critic Friedrich Schiller argues that the poets of his time have lost their intimacy
with nature. They observe it from a distance and long to recover their proximity to it, whereas
early poets participated in it directly. The reaper seems almost a model of this direct participation.
As the speaker admires the reaper’s proximity to nature, however, he reduces her participation in
human history and politics. He treats the reaper as something to observe, to draw inspiration from,
and something ultimately separate from his world and its concerns. The poem was written at a time
of political and economic upheaval, just after the French Revolution and in the midst of the
Industrial Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. But in the poem, the reaper works with pre-
industrial tools in a landscape unmarred by factories, mines, or railroads. Indeed, in stanza 3, as
the speaker tries to imagine what the reaper might be singing about, he allows that she might be
interested in politics—but only the politics of the past: battles and catastrophes that happened long

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ago. The reaper is thus sequestered from the present, from its political and economic struggles. In
contemplating her song, the speaker transforms her into something like nature itself: beyond or
outside of human history, apt for contemplation.

Symbols used in the poem

Nightingale
The nightingale is a small, migratory bird native to England. (It winters in sub-Saharan Africa, not
Arabia, as the speaker suggests). It is known for its loud and beautiful song—which it often sings
at night. It is often invoked by poets. Indeed, it often serves as a symbol for poets themselves:
perhaps flattering themselves, they compare their own song to a beautiful bird's warbling. More
broadly, the bird is associated with creativity and inspiration, with mourning and passionate
speech. This tradition stretches to classical poetry. The Latin poet Virgil compares Orpheus'
mourning, after he loses Eurydice to the "lament of the nightingale.” In Renaissance English poetry
too, the nightingale is frequently invoked. Using a classical name for the nightingale, Philomel,
Shakespeare mentions the bird in Sonnet 102 Sonnet 102:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays; As
Philomel in summer's front doth sing, And stops his pipe in growth of riper days...
Romantic poets like Wordsworth drew upon and expanded this tradition. For them, the nightingale
was not simply a symbol for the poet; the bird also served as a symbol for a creativity that exceeds
and challenges human power, something just out of reach to which a poet might aspire. The bird's
invocation in stanza two of "The Solitary Reaper" is thus complex and historically rich. It is, on
the one, hand a high compliment: the speaker suggests that the reaper's song is more beautiful than
the song of a bird whose song was proverbially beautiful. On the other hand, the speaker's
compliment engages with the history of poetry, a long tradition of poets who compare themselves
to the nightingale to valorize their art. That tradition falls short in this case: it does not adequately
describe the reaper's song. Through the speaker's specific use of this symbol, then, the poem subtly
suggests that the tradition itself needs to be reevaluated and revised.

Cuckoo
The cuckoo is a family of birds, which includes several common European songbirds. Like the
nightingale, they are known for the beauty of their singing. Unlike the nightingale, they do not

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migrate—so they are present from the very earliest weeks of the spring. And, fittingly, they are
solitary birds, like the reaper herself. While the above characteristics are probably the primary
reasons the speaker uses the bird to describe the solitary reaper, the cuckoo is also widely invoked
in European mythology and literature. For example, in Greek mythology, Zeus transforms himself
into a cuckoo to seduce Hera, prior to their marriage. As with his use of the nightingale, then, the
speaker offers an elegant and complicated compliment to the reaper when he compares her to a
cuckoo bird. On the one hand, her song is like a beautiful bird's song. On the other hand, her song
is measured against a tradition in European literature. And yet, as with the nightingale, the speaker
asserts that the cuckoo's song is in factlessbeautiful than the reaper's. In other words, the speaker
finds this entire poetic tradition—and this specific comparison—insufficient to the beauty of her
song. That the girl's song is too beautiful to be captured by this traditionalsymbol symbol, suggests
that new traditions, new forms of comparison, are thus necessary to adequately describe her song.

Arabia and the Hebrides

Arabia is a historical region of the mid-east, comprising present-day Saudi Arabia and surrounding
regions. Romantic poets and painters often invoke it in their work, using it as asymbol symbolfor
distant and exotic lands. Further, they often eroticize the Middle East, emphasizing the sensual
pleasures of life there. Wordsworth, though, takes a slightly different tack: emphasizing instead
the climate, its desert terrain, and the difficulty of traveling across it—as many traders and
merchants did during the period. Nonetheless, it remains an exotic and distant locale for an English
readership of the 19th century. Arabia, though, is almost the opposite of the Hebrides, which are
mentioned in line 16. Where Arabia is a hot arid climate, the Hebrides, a chain of islands north of
Scotland, are maritime and cold. Where Arabia is distant and exotic, the Hebrides are much closer
to home. Between the two locales, then, the speaker spans the whole world: suggesting that
nowhere in the world can one find a more beautiful singer than the reaper, and, further, that there
is no traditional poetic metaphor that is up to the task of capturing the full beauty of the song.

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Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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

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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 crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

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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!

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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?

Explanation of the poem

Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker describes the West Wind as a powerful and
destructive force: it drives away the summer and brings instead winter storms, chaos, and even
death. Yet the speaker celebrates the West Wind and welcomes the destruction that it causes
because it leads to renewal and rebirth. The West Wind is not peaceful or pleasant. It is, the speaker
notes, “the breath of Autumn’s being.” Autumn is a transitional season, when summer’s abundance
begins to fade. So too, everywhere the speaker looks the West Wind drives away peace and
abundance. The West Wind strips the leaves from the trees, whips up the sky, and causes huge
storms on the ocean. And, in the first section of the poem, the speaker compares the dead leaves
the West Wind blows to “ghosts” and “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” The West Wind turns the
fall colors into something scary, associated with sickness and death. Similarly, the clouds in the
poem’s second section look like the “bright hair uplifted from the head / of some fierce Mænad.”
In Greek mythology, the Mænads were the female followers of Dionysus (the god of Wine). They
were famous for their wild parties and their dancing, and are often portrayed with their hair askew.
The West Wind thus makes the clouds wild and drunk. It creates chaos. Unlike its “sister of the
Spring”—which spreads sweet smells and beautiful flowers—the speaker associates the West
Wind with chaos and death. Yet despite the destructive power of the West Wind the speaker
celebrates it—because such destruction is necessary for rebirth. As the speaker notes at the end of
the poem’s first section, the West Wind is both a “destroyer” and “preserver.” These are the
traditional names of two Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu. Vishnu’s role is to preserve the world;

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Shiva is supposed to destroy it. The West Wind combines these two opposite figures. As the
speaker announces in the final lines—"O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"—
the West Wind is able to merge these opposites because death is required for life, and winter for
Spring. In order to have the beautiful renewal and rebirth that Spring promises, one needs the
powerful, destructive force of the West Wind.

Throughout "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker praises and celebrates the West Wind’s power—
it is destructive, chaotic—and yet such destruction is necessary for rebirth and renewal. Indeed,
the speaker so admires the wind that he wants to take, adopt, or absorb the West Wind’s power’s
into his poetry. The speaker describes himself as a diminished person: he is “chained and bowed.”
Far from condemning the destructive power of the wind, the speaker hopes the West Wind will
revive him. At different points in the poem, the speaker has different ideas about what this might
look like. Most simply, the wind simply becomes the speaker, or becomes part of him. “Be thou
me,” the speaker tells the wind. But the speaker also proposes more complicated interactions
between himself and the wind. At one point, he asks the Wind, to “make me thy lyre, even as the
forest is.” In other words he wants to be a musical instrument, specifically the lyre, the musical
instrument that poets traditionally play while they perform their poems. In this scheme, the speaker
helps the wind—he’s like a musical accompaniment to it. The speaker doesn’t take an active role,
the wind does. (These roles are reinforced later when the speaker imagines the Wind “driv[ing]
my dead thoughts over the universe”—it certainly seems that the Wind is doing the real work).
The speaker wants to be (or to help) the West Wind because he wants to create something new, to
clear away the old and the dead. Under the West Wind’s influence, his or her “dead thoughts” will
“quicken a new birth”—they will create something living and new. The speaker doesn’t say exactly
what new thing he hopes to create. It might be a new kind of poetry. Or it might be a new society.
(Indeed, many readers have interpreted the poem as a call for political change). Either way, for the
speaker, that newness can’t be achieved through compromise with the old and dead; it can emerge
only through the cleansing destruction that the West Wind brings.

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Symbols used in the poem
Seeds
In lines 6-7, the speaker describes how the West Wind carries “winged seeds” to their “dark wintry
bed.” In other words, the wind knocks loose seeds from the plants holding them, and carries the
seeds to the ground, where they lie all winter. This is something that really happens in the fall—
and the speaker is, partially, describing literal seeds involved in an actual natural process. But the
seeds also play a symbolic role in the poem. They symbolize the possibility of rebirth and renewal.
As the speaker notes in the next few lines, as soon as spring comes, the seeds sprout, producing
“sweet buds” and “living hues and odours.” If the seeds are like “corpse[s]” in their “grave[s],”
then their rebirth in the Spring is something like resurrection. (Shelley was, famously, an atheist,
and so this image of resurrection is notably secular: instead of involving God, he portrays it as an
entirely natural process). For all its destructive power, the West Wind plays an important role in
bringing about that rebirth and renewal: without it, the seeds would never get to the ground and
start growing. In this way, the West Wind earns the title the speaker gives it later in the poem: it
is both a “destroyer” and a “preserver.”

Flocks
In line 11, the speaker describes the Spring wind “driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air.” In
other words, the wind is like a shepherd; it helps bring out the buds of flowers in the same way a
shepherd drives their sheep, their “flocks,” to pasture. Thissimile simileis already pretty
complicated, and it’s made even more so by the symbol in the middle of it, the “flocks.” “Flocks”
of sheep are a traditional symbol in poetry for innocence and beauty. In pastoral poetry—a whole
genre of poetry dedicated to talking about shepherds and sheep—the presence of the "flock" often
suggests that the shepherd is free from politics and all the dirt and complication of life in the city.
In this sense, the “flocks” suggest an important contrast with the speaker’s characterization of the
West Wind, which is so closely associated with death, violence, and chaos. As a symbol, the
“flocks” suggest a world where such negative things are of no concern, because it is so pure,
innocent, and beautiful.

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Old palaces and towers
In line 33, the speaker describes the “blue Mediterranean” asleep, dreaming of “old palaces and
towers.” The speaker is careful to place this dream vision in a specific place, the Bay of Baiae near
Naples, in Italy. And so the speaker may have specific buildings in Naples in mind, buildings he
wants the reader to see in their mind. But the “old palaces and towers” also take on a symbolic
significance in the line. They symbolize the past itself—history—the glorious accomplishment of
previous generations. The personified “Blue Mediterranean” looks at these symbols of the past
with comfort and complacency: he doesn’t feel any need to challenge or change them. It seems
likely, though, that the West Wind might feel differently. (Indeed, the speaker brings the “blue
Mediterranean” into the poem in order to draw a contrast between it and the violence and energy
of the West Wind). The symbol thus gives the reader a quiet, implicit hint: part of what the speaker
hopes the West Wind will destroy is the past, in order to make space for a new society to emerge.

Thorns of life
When the speaker complains about falling on the “thorns of life” in line 54, he isn’t talking about
literal thorns. Instead, the thorns are symbols—symbols for the difficulties that one faces in life:
perhaps pain, disappointment, or aging. The speaker doesn’t specify what, exactly, he’s struggling
with—what precise forces or feelings have limited his capacities and creative powers. What
matters, instead, is simply that the speakerdoesfeel limited and diminished, like he has lost
something important about himself—something the West Wind would help him regain. The
“thorns of life” are thus a very vague, general symbol: they stand for the difficulties that the speaker
faces in general, without embodying a particular or specific problem or disappointment.

Lyre
In line 57, the speaker expresses a strange desire: he wants the West Wind to “make [him its] lyre.”
A lyre is a small hand-held harp. In ancient Greece, poets would play the lyre as they performed
their poems. As a result the lyre often serves as a symbol for poetry itself. It does that here: it
symbolizes poetry. But the way the symbol is used in the poem suggests that the speaker has an
unusual relationship with poetry. The speaker doesn’t want to play the lyre, he wants to be the lyre,
the instrument that the poet plays—in which case, the West Wind itself would be the poet. In other
words, the poet is not asking the wind for inspiration or for it to make him into a poet. He wants

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to be in a more subservient position—he wants to accompany the wind, to help make the wind's
poem sound sweeter.
Spring
Throughout the poem, the West Wind has been a force of destruction and death. But the speaker
has celebrated its power. In the last line, it becomes clear why. The speaker wants renewal and
rebirth, a transformation of society. And the wind helps to bring about that rebirth, by sweeping
away everything that has grown tired, old, and oppressive. In this sense, it is like "Winter." And
the renewal that it promises to help bring about is like “Spring.” Spring, in the last line of the poem
(and also in line 9), is thus a symbol for renewal and rebirth—the emergence of something radically
new. This symbol is at the heart of the poem, the thing it wants to see happen. The poem is an
“Ode” to the West Wind because the West Wind, with all its destructive force, is necessary to
make this symbol real.

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 Metaphysical Poetry
‘About the beginning of the 17th century’, writes Dr. Johnson, ‘there appeared a race of poets that
may be termed the metaphysical poets’. Dr. Johnson seems to have borrowed the term
‘metaphysical’ from Dryden who said that he ‘affects the metaphysics’. Johnson’s phrase ‘may be
termed’ indicates that he used the term rather loosely, says Helen Gardner.
Metaphysical poetry eludes all attempts at definition, and the critics have restrained themselves by
pointing out certain special features of this class of poetry. The term ‘metaphysics’ means ‘beyond
matter’ (meta means beyond and physics means matter). But metaphysical poetry as a principle
does not deal with spirituality; it is so called because of its certain characteristics.
The metaphysical poets ‘were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole
endeavour’. They neither copied nature nor life, neither painted the forms of matter nor represented
the operations of intellect. Their thoughts are often new but seldom natural. The most
heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by violence; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations,
comparisons and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises’. These startling
comparisons between things more unlike than like are called conceits. Another trait of
metaphysical poetry is concentration, and another one is argumentation. The metaphysical poets
write both on religious and secular themes, but their amatory poems do not deal with Platonic love.
While the love poems betray deep emotion and passion, they are remarkably tinged with
sensuousness. Use of hyperboles alongside far-fetched images is another feature of metaphysical
poetry, and while lyrical grace is ever present, they combine ‘levity with seriousness’.
Although Donne was the father of this class of poetry, the metaphysical school included some
other name like George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Robert Herrick, Thomas
Carew, Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. While all of them were directly or indirectly
influenced by Donne, they differ in many respects from the pioneer.

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Metaphysical poets
John Donne
The founder of this school of poets was John Donne who broke away from the traditional easy,
fluent style, stock imagery, and pastoral conventions of the day. He aimed at reality of thought and
vividness of expressions, and his poetry is graceful, vigorous, and despite faults in rhythm, often
strangely harmonious.
In 1601 came out Of the Progres of the Soule, one of the satires written in the couplet form that
later imitated by Dryden and then by Pope. The satires express Donne’s dissatisfaction with the
world around him and point to his cynical nature and keenly critical mind.
His love poems, the Songs and Sonnets, were written in the same period and are intense and subtle
analyses of all the moods of a lover expressed in vivid and startling language which is colloquial
rather than conventional. The poems of Donne, essentially a psychological poet whose concern is
feeling are all intensely personal and reveal a powerful and complex being. Besides Songs and
Sonets, other well-known poems of this group are Aire and Angels, A Nocturnal Upon S. Luce’s
Day, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and The Extasie.
Donne wrote religious poetry after 1610. Holy Sonnets, nineteen in number and the lyrics such as
A Hymn to GOD THE FATHER written after his wife’s death in 1617 are also too intense and
personal and reveal the struggle in his mind before he took orders in the Anglican Church. They
also reveal hi horror of death, his fear of the wrath of God and his yearning for God’s love. Donne
startles us by his unusual and striking imagery and his conceits. He compares the lovers to the two
legs of a compass, his sick body to a map and his physicians to cosmographers, to name a few.

George Herbert
George Herbert (1593-1633) is the name that follows next to Donne. None of his poems were
published during his life-time. The Temple which was published in 1633 shows his zeal for the
Church of England and his concern with practical theology. He himself described the work as ‘ a
picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul , before I could
subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master ; in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.’
The poems are peculiarly honest, intimate, sincere and modest. They are homely, quiet and
colloquial and touched with a quaint humour. They are metaphysical in their use of unusual
conceits (though Herbert does not cultivate the learned, scholastic imagery of Donne) and in the

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blend of thought and feeling. Herbert was a colourful artist, precise and simple in expression, fond
of unusual metrical patterns as in Easter Wings, and a lover of harmony. His poetry is sensitive
to the most delicate changes of feeling. All his verses are the expression of piety as a man and as
a priest. His theory was that should dedicate all his gifts to God’s service. “He is the saint of the
metaphysical school,” writes Emile Legouis.

Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw (1612-1649) was the son of a Puritan clergyman but he did not remain within
the Anglican fold and became a Catholic when he was about 22 years old. He ended his life in
Rome as secretary to Cardinal Palotta. While still at the university, he was an expert Latin poet.
The first collection of his poems which was published after his death was Delights of the Muses.
There is in this collection an imitative poem on the song of a nightingale, Music’s Duel . His
earliest poem Wishes to his Supposed Mistress is rhythmically unique and enumerates the gifts
which he would like his beloved to possess. In 1646 he published Steps to the Temple which was
a collection of poems written before his conversion. In this collection Sospetto d’ Herode and
The Weeper inspire admiration. While yet an Anglican, Crashaw conceived ardent veneration for
Saint Teresa, and he returned to her as a Catholic in order to write his most magnificent hymn,
The Flamimg Heart, Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa . The flight
of holy love which ends this poem is perhaps the most ardent product of English religious poetry.
Crashaw’s poems, all of them, have several faults. Occasionally absurd, he scattered conceits
everywhere. While he was less intellectual that Herbert, and while his language was less simple
and precise, he was more warmth, colour and harmony. “His lyric flights”, says Emile Legouis,
“have been equaled only by Shelley”.

Henry Vaughan
Henry Vaughan, the mystical Welsh doctor began writing secular poetry which shows the
influence of Ben Jonson upon him. But an acute illness turned his thought to spiritual things. He
imitated George Herbert in Silex Scintillans which appeared in two parts in 1650 and 1655. He is
perhaps the only 17th century poet who was scorned in his early career but who was widely
esteemed in his later life. Of Vaughan’s poems, only a few have indubitable value, but “these are
pure gold”. His mysticism is more fluent and less argumentative, and his imagination is mellower.

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He prayed not in a church like Herbert but in the open air. His love for nature mingles with
Christian meditativeness and adds a romantic and modern value to poetry. Vaughan had a hermit’s
soul, He lacked the art to construct even a few stanzas nor could he always conclude a poem.
Although his versification is far less skillful than Herbert, his meditations on life and death draw
attention. His Retreat which is an exquisite poem glorifies childhood and anticipates
Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Although Vaughan was looked down upon by his
contemporaries, he had a follower named Thomas Trahne who was born about 1634 and emulated
Vaughan’s glorification of childhood.

Thomas Carew
Thomas Carew ( 1594 – 1639 ) wrote Poems which was published in 1640. They demonstrated
his lyrical ability, and although they betray the influence of Donne and Jonson, they have a
character of their own. The fancy is warmly coloured though it is marred by license and bad taste.
His lines

“Ask me no more if east or west

The phoenix builds her spicy nest,
For unto you at she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.”
are marked by rich and beautiful fancy and golden felicity of diction which is rarely equalled.

Abraham Cowley
Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), even more than Pope and Macaulay, is the great example of the
infant prodigy. When he was ten, he wrote a long epical romance, Pyramus and Thisbe and two
years later composed an even longer poem, Constantia and Philetus. He not only wrote poems
but also plays and histories. The Davideis which was published in 1656 is his best known poem,
written in heroic couplet. It is a rather dreary epic on King David. His other poetical works include
The Mistress (1647), a collection of love poems and the Pindarique Odes which combine the
classicism of the later generation with Elizabethan romanticism. In Cowley, the metaphysical
strain is feeble. He was a learned man but his work suffered from a lack of deep feeling and his
use of wit and conceits was artificial and lacked in artistry. Milton considers that Cowley was one

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of the three great English poets, the other two being Shakespeare and Spenser. But his renown
dwindled with the passage of time. Interestingly Dr. Johnson began his Lives of the English Poets
with Cowley whom considered him as heading the moderns. Cowley’s other works include
Miscellanies occasionally filled with verse. In this work, we find On the Death of Mr. William
Hervey, a Cambridge friend and On the Death of Mr. Crashaw, which show him at his best as a
man. His Of Wit defines wit in classical manner and Against Hope seeks to define hope. He also
wrote verses on reason in which he defines piety, and after the Restoration, he addressed an Ode
to the Royal Society which is an eloquent tribute to Bacon. Today, the pleasant prose of his Essays
is more read than his verses.

Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was a Puritan songster. But he was not, however, a conventionally
harsh and gloomy Puritan, the enemy of worldly artistic amusement. His verses written in 30th year
glow with human love and feeling for nature. On the whole religion has far less place in Marvell’s
verses than in those of other Puritans. Marvell loads his own feeling in the longest of his poems
Upon Appletone House which shows his familiarity with the countryside and its trees and birds.
His feeling for animals, his suffering when they suffer is voiced with infinite gracefulness in his
semi-mythological poem, The Nymph , complaining for the death of her fawn. He was the first to
see the glory of gardens and orchards. Marvell’s Garden foreshadows Keats by its sensuousness
and Wordsworth by its optimistic and serene meditative mood. Still he prefers wild to cultivated
nature, and he protests against grafting, budding and selection in the Winter’s Tale and in The
Mowers Against Garden. Sometimes Marvell turns to the pastoral but he gives it a new emphasis
of truth and even of realism. The short idyll Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-ropes is very
original and graceful. Love poems of Marvell are not many, but several like the graceful Gallery
and the slightly ironical Mowning, Daphnis and Chloe hold us by their passion. The latter
demonstrates woman’s tricks, artifices and coquetry. His To His Coy Mistress is a marvellous
love poem which runs easily and harmoniously and bears the marks of Donne’s strength and
passion minus his obscurity and bad taste. It is a masterpiece of metaphysical poetry based on the
carpe diem theory.

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The strange, sensuous and passionate Marvell was also an ardent patriot, and his patriotism is
reflected in Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland , First Anniversary of the
Government Under His Highness, the Lord Protector and Poem Upon the Death of His Late
Highness, the Lord Protector. Marvell paid too little regard to versification. His lyrical works
are written in almost entirely eight-syllable couplets, a pleasant metre. He ought to have a more
exacting standard of art, and more whole-hearted devotion to poetry, greater mastery of words and
rhyme to rank among the greatest.

Examples of Metaphysical Poetry

The Sun Rising by John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide5 Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

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She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Explanation of the poem

In "The Sun Rising," the speaker wants to bend the rules of the universe. Rather than allowing the
sun's "motions" across the sky to govern the way the speaker spends his time, the speaker
challenges the sun's authority and claims that love gives him (the speaker) the power to stay in bed
all day with his lover. In this way, the poem elevates the importance and power of love above
work, duty, and even the natural rhythms of the day itself. From the start the speaker talks down
to the sun, robbing it of the authority it presumes to have when it shines "through windows, and
through curtains" upon lovers in the morning. In the first line, the sun appears as a "busy old fool"
and "unruly." This language suggests that not only is the sun foolish, but also that it ought to be
"ruled" by some greater authority that it's failing to heed. Although the speaker concedes that the
sun is free to rule over "late school boys" (as well as several other parties for whom the speaker
seems to have little respect), he claims that allhewould have to do to "eclipse and cloud" the sun
would be to close his eyes. The ease of this action demonstrates that the sun is indeed "foolish" to
think that its beams are "reverend and strong" in the face of a lover. By the thirdstanza stanza, the
speaker is not only giving the sun orders to annoy others instead of him and his lover, but he's also
ordering the sun to actuallyservethe lovers by warming them in their bed. The lovers thus become
the greater authority that the sun itself ought to obey. By assertinghimselfas the ruler of the sun,
the speaker claims the authority to indefinitely extend the dawn so that he can stay with his lover.
The speaker asks the sun early on, "Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?" Thisrhetorical
question rhetorical question suggests that the speaker wants lovers' "seasons" to be exempt from

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the daily rhythms dictated by the rising of the sun. The speaker goes on to distinguish love as
unfamiliar with "the rags of time," suggesting that love is everlasting and therefore not subject to
the starts and stops of "hours, days, months," and other temporal units that govern the lives of
"school boys," "horsemen," and "country ants." Time, including the rising and setting sun, works
differently for lovers than for anyone else. By the end of the poem, the speaker has "contracted"
the entire world to the bed, so that the sun’s job is to "warm" there. Whereas most people must
leave their beds during the day in order to accomplish their jobs, the speaker's insistence that love
is the most important occupation anyone could have makes the bed into a sort of daytime
workplace. What's more, that workplace is so important that the sun must drop what it is doing
everywhere else in order to make the "work" of the bedroom possible. The way the speaker
reverses power in the poem doesn't simply make the sun into a servant of the speaker: the speaker
diverts the sun from everyone else, demanding that it shine only on him and his lover. In this way,
the speaker puts the rest of the world's productivity on hold. Instead of seizing the day by jumping
out of bed, he is seizing everyone else's day for himself.
Like much of Donne's poetry, "The Sun Rising" uses metaphor pack the entire world into a small
space. This technique is grounded in the idea of a "microcosm," a popular Renaissance belief that
the human body was a small-scale model of the whole universe. In the case of "The Sun Rising,"
the small space is not a single body but rather the lovers' bed. The speaker claims that "to warm
the world" is the same thing as "warming us," transforming himself into a kind of king of the world
and the center of the universe. In fact, love in the poem is so grand that the universe itself exists
within the relationship between the two lovers. The speaker uses extended metaphor not only to
compare his bed to an empire but also to annex (that is, to take in) all of the world's empires into
his own bed. In so doing, he collapses the expansive world into the space of his bedroom. In the
second stanza stanza, the speaker demands of the sun to look for "both th' Indias of spice and mine"
in the place where they were last located. (The "Indias" referenced are the East Indies and the West
Indies, both of which had been colonized by European nations by the time Donne was writing.)
The speaker goes on to claim that these peripheral sources of imperial wealth and power now "lie
here with me," meaning that they have been incorporated into the body of the speaker's lover. The
speaker goes on to claim that the kings of the empires that extend into the East and West Indies
"All here in one bed lay." The speaker doesn't mean that the bed is literally full of kings. Rather,
this line suggests that the kings and the power they represent have all been incorporated into the

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body of the speaker. As the kings conquer more nations in an effort to expand their empires, these
far-ranging empires are simply relocated to and consolidated in the lovers' bed. Because the
speaker's lover is figured as "all states" and the speaker himself is figured as "all princes," the
world outside the bedroom falls away. The speaker is able to claim that "Nothing else is," meaning
that the relationship between the two lovers is all that matters (or, that this relationship is so
expansive that it contains the entire universe within it). The speaker's transformation of himself
into the rightful heir to all the world's thrones gives him greater sovereignty (ruling power) than
any individual ruler has. By turning the bed into a microcosm, then, the speaker is able to inflate
his own importance so that his orders to the sun are justified rather than insubordinate (unlike the
sun, the speaker isn't "unruly"). Although the "court huntsmen" of the first stanza serve the king—
who can decide whether or not to ride on any given day—the king still must time his rides
according to daylight and weather patterns. The speaker, meanwhile, is able to assign the sun
"duties" according to his will. The sun thus serves the speaker as the court huntsmen serve the
king. This impossible reordering of the universe inflates the speaker's power past the point that
any earthly prince or king's power can grow. And if the subordination of the sun is not enough, the
speaker also undermines the power of political rulers directly in comparison to himself. He insists
that he is not mimicking a prince but rather that, "Princes do but play us." The speaker and his
lover are the paragon of imperial power. Real princes only imitate the lovers. By "contracting" the
entire world to the microcosm of the bed, the speaker asserts the authority and all-encompassing
power granted to him by love.
The speaker's inflation of his importance in relation to political rulers is underscored by a playfully
bold insinuation that to wake up in bed with a lover is analogous to an ascent to divine power. In
other words, waking up to your beloved can make you feel like a god. Although the speaker never
explicitly names any religious themes, the poem's preoccupation with sovereignty (ruling power)
evokes the notion of the divine right of kings. Kings in Donne's day were traditionally thought to
derive their ruling power directly from God. If the speaker becomes more powerful than all of the
world's rulers put together, he thus approaches godlike power. On top of this implicit gesture to
the divine, which Donne's readers would definitely have understood, the speaker calls into question
that idea that the sun's beams are "reverend," or worthy of being worshipped like God. Whereas
earthly kings must still kneel before the sun because it is one of the few things God does not place
in their control, the speaker manages to transform the sun into a servant that kneels before him.

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The speaker thus becomes more "reverend" than the sun. The poem's title furthermore likens the
speaker to Christ upon his resurrection. Although the sun is explicitly the one who is "rising"
according to the title, the entire poem is a meditation on the speaker's imperative to rise from bed.
Because of this double "rising," and because the speaker positions himself as the one the sun must
worship as kings worship the sun, the speaker might be said to be a second "sun rising ." Read
aloud, as this poem was meant to be, the title contains adouble double entendre entendre: "sun
rising" also sounds like "son rising." The phrase "son rising" naturally evokes the rising or
resurrection of Christ, the son of God. The speaker's thwarting of natural laws over the course of
the poem is similar to Christ's thwarting of death via crucifixion. This similarity supports the notion
that when the speaker wakes up in bed with his lover, he is experiencing a kind of divine
resurrection that vests him with new Christlike sovereignty over kings, time, and nature. The
speaker's near-heretical claim to divine power is built upon his relationship with his lover. Only
by likening her body to all the world's empires is the speaker able to assert himself as this Christlike
figure who is exempt from the natural laws to which emperors must defer. Love, sex, and religion
are intertwined in much of Donne's poetry. In this poem, love and sex are not only as powerful as
religious devotion. Furthermore, love and sex forge an incredible intimacy between the lover and
God. To lie in bed with a lover is not to refuse God. On the contrary, it is to rise as God's son.

Symbols used in the poem

The sun
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" addresses the poem to the sun, but the sun is more than an
annoyance the speaker wants to banish. The sun sits at the top of the cosmological hierarchy: it
controls the solar system, and it answers, according to popular thought in Donne's day, only to
God. The sun represents immense, near divine power. And when the speaker overthrows the sun
and turns it into his servant, he is upending the entire order of the universe. This order was
conceived by the ancient Greeks as the "Great Chain of Being," and the concept was later revived
by Renaissance philosophers. It placed everything in the world, living or not, somewhere along a
chain that stretched from God all the way down to rocks. The sun was high on the chain. The
anonymous speaker would have been much lower. In his effort to switch places with the sun, the
speaker climbs up this chain, past the kings and princes thought to occupy the highest possible
human link in the chain. The speaker's intellectual joust with the sun thus tangles up the Great

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Chain of Being. By the end of the poem, the speaker has eliminated every link except for himself
and the sun, reforging the chain so that he is not only the top link, but also an enormous link. By
addressing the poem to the sun, which is already very high up on the Great Chain of Being, the
speaker can rise to a near godlike position and stature in the universal hierarchy.

Empire
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" is obsessed with carving out an empire for himself. However, he
refuses to leave his bed. By comparing his lover to "th' Indias of spice and mine," then to "all
states," and by comparing himself to "all kings" and "all princes," the speaker expands his power
beyond that of any earthly ruler. An empire represents, to the speaker, an extreme position of
power. Running all the empires in the world is beyond human power. By claiming to run all these
empires within the comfort of his bed, the speaker accomplishes two things. First, he demonstrates
that he doesn't need to get up in the morning in order to work his way into a position of power.
The sun might as well let him sleep in. Second, he demonstrates that he is even more powerful
than the sun by stealing entire empires out from under its nose. The sun, kings, and princes were
all thought during the Renaissance to derive their power directly from God. By consolidating the
power of all kings and princes, and by demonstrating that he is more powerful than the sun, the
speaker becomes the most powerful being in the universe apart from God. In this way, the speaker's
conquest of all empires turns him into a Christ-like figure. He is God's "Son Rising" to challenge
the "Sun Rising" in the poem's title.

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To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;

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The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Explanation of the poem

“To His Coy Mistress” is a love poem: it celebrates beauty, youth, and sexual pleasure. However,
the speaker of the poem is haunted by mortality. Though he imagines a luxuriously slow love that
takes thousands of years to reach consummation, he knows such a thing is impossible: he will die
before it can be accomplished. Death cannot be delayed or defeated; the only response to death,
according to the speaker, is to enjoy as much pleasure as possible before it comes. He urges the
woman he loves not to wait, to enjoy the pleasures of life without restraint. The poem draws a
contrast between two kinds of love: the full, rich love that would be possible if everyone lived
forever, and the rushed, panicked love that mortal beings are forced to enjoy. The first stanza of
the poem poses a question and explores a hypothetical world: what would love be like if humans
had infinite time to love? In response, the speaker imagines a world of unlimited pleasure. For
example, he describes his mistress finding precious stones on the banks of the Ganges; he describes
himself spending two hundred years praising a single part of her body. The key to this paradise,
then, is that the normal limitations of human life have been removed. The sheer length of the

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mistress's and the speaker's lives allows them to delay consummation of their love indefinitely: the
speaker announces that his mistress might “refuse / ‘Till the conversion of the Jews”—which, in
the Christian theology of Marvell’s time, was expected to occur during the biblical Last Days. In
this ideal world, the speaker feels no urgency to consummate their relationship. The speaker has
no questions about whether his mistress deserves this long courtship, but he does have qualms
about its viability. He is, he notes at the start of stanza 2, always conscious of the passage of time—
and thus of the fact that both he and his mistress will eventually die. Stanza 2 diverges from the
beautiful dream of stanza 1, reflecting instead on the pressing, inescapable threat of death. Death,
as the speaker imagines it, is the opposite of the paradise presented in stanza 1: instead of endless
pleasure, it offers “deserts of vast eternity.” The speaker’s view of death is secular; he is not afraid
of going to Hell or being punished for his sins. Instead, he fears death because it cuts short his and
his mistress’s capacity to enjoy each other. In death, he complains, her beauty will be lost and—
unless she consents to have sex before she dies—her virginity will be taken by worms. The
language of this stanza is grotesque. This is a poem of seduction, but it feels profoundly unsexy.
The speaker’s horror of death overshadows his erotic passion, but it also makes the speaker seem
more sincere: while at first it might seem that the speaker is saying all these things primarily
because he just wants to have some sex, the despair in the poem implies that the speaker's
arguments are not mere rhetorical statements but rather deeply held beliefs and fears. In the final
stanza of the poem, the speaker finally announces his core argument: since death is coming—and
since it will strip away the pleasures of the flesh—his mistress should agree to have sex with him
soon. What's more, he imagines that their erotic "sport" will offer compensation for the pain and
suffering of life. “Our pleasures,” he argues, will tear through “the iron gates of life.” Though he
does not imagine that their pleasure will defeat death, he does believe that pleasure is the only
reasonable response to death. Indeed, he even says that enjoying pleasure is a way to defy death.
However, the grotesque language of stanza 2 may overwhelm the poem’s insistence on the power
of pleasure. If sexuality is a way to contest the power of death, it nonetheless seems—even in the
speaker's own estimation—that death is an overwhelming, irresistible force.

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Symbols used in the poem
Heart
The speaker spends much of stanza 1 imagining that he will spend eternity slowly, luxuriously
describing and praising each part of his mistress's body. His focus is on physical features and
physical beauty: her forehead, eyes, and breasts. In line 18, however, the speaker turns to the
mistress's "heart." One hopes this is not literal: that he does not plan to cut into her chest and
describe the organ itself. Rather, the heart functions symbolically here, representing the mistress's
innermost character. The use of the symbol—and the timing of its introduction—suggest some
important things about the utopian world the speaker imagines in this stanza. In this world, the
mistress can delay revealing her true self until the very end of time. Though the speaker continues
to love her, passionately, she does not have to reciprocate until she's good and ready. It also
suggests something about what's at stake for the speaker: he wants to have his mistress's heart,
hinting at a genuine romantic love rather than simple lust. This is a rather chaste desire: the rest of
the poem is much more explicit. The speaker withholds the full force of his desire here, early in
the poem, restraining his more sexual ambitions until much later.

Deserts of Vast Eternity

In line 24, the speaker compares death to "deserts of vast eternity." The deserts he has in mind are
not literal spaces. Instead, they represent time itself, symbolically. In using this symbol, the speaker
draws on a key tradition in western thought. Deserts are important spaces in western religion and
art. In Christianity, for example, the desert is often a space of trial and tribulation. Jesus, for
example, is tempted by Satan in the desert. (This temptation forms the subject of a poem by
Marvell's close friend, John Milton—Paradise Regained). And the early saints of Christianity often
retreated to the desert to attain spiritual clarity and to live free of sin. Marvell's speaker, however,
consciously rejects this tradition: instead of being a space of religious meaning, it is a blank and
empty space, devoid of pleasure, devoid of content. It does not contain either the punishment or
the paradise that Christians expect after death. It belongs, in other words, to a surprisingly secular
worldview: one in which death is an absolute end with nothing beyond it. This view of the world
suits Marvell's speaker, since he wants to convince his mistress to have sex with him immediately,
without saving her honor for the afterlife. The desert thus symbolizes the speaker's nihilistic, even

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atheistic beliefs about the afterlife, and it also marks the extent to which he has turned his back on
the traditional images of Christianity.

Dust and Ashes

At the end of stanza 2, the speaker notes that, in the grave, his mistress's virginity (and the honor
it represents) will "turn to dust." Death reduces something vital and living to an inert substance.
Dust is an important symbol of death and decay in the history of western thought: for example,
casting Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, God announces to them, "For dust thou art and
to dust thou shall return." To be mortal, in this Biblical framework, is to be made of dust. Life
itself is only a temporary escape from being dust. The speaker extends and even subverts this
traditional symbol. In his account, it is not the mistress's body but her honor which is dust. Honor
is an abstract concept, a social convention, rather than something physical. But the speaker's use
of the symbol suggests that it does have material value. He makes this claim strategically, to
support his argument. Honor, he suggests, is just as fragile as the body. Like the body, it will be
devoured by death. There is no sense in trying to preserve it, since it will turn to nothing as soon
as death comes. In this sense, the symbol is similar to, but also different from, the "ashes" that
appear in the next line. It is traditional to invoke ashes when discussing lust: lust is like a fire, and
like a fire it burns out. Like the dust in the previous line, death reduces a vital, living force to an
inert substance. However, Marvell is content to employ the symbol of ashes in a relatively
traditional way, in contrast to his subversive discussion of dust in the previous line.

Morning dew
In line 34, the speaker compares the mistress's youthful skin to "morning dew." Dew is often used
as a symbol for youth—and for fragility. Dew is a liquid that appears on plants and grasses in the
morning, as the temperature changes. It generally evaporates as the sun rises, disappearing by mid-
morning. These properties make it an attractive symbol for poets to use. Human life is often
compared to a day, with the morning symbolizing youth and the evening symbolizing old age. The
dew seems almost an ideal symbol for youth itself: the way it is beautiful and delicate; the way it
evaporates quickly as life progresses. Here, the speaker uses the symbol in this traditional—indeed,
almost clichéd—sense.

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 Conclusion
The outcome of the study traces out the presence of intellectuality, imageries and conceits,
expression of ideas and feelings, and development of logical arguments, are essentially connected
to each other, supporting the core of metaphysical poetry. The imageries are of intellectual nature
that requires intellectual abilities not only to create but also to comprehend. Donne first uses his
intellectual abilities to create a series of elaborate metaphysical imageries. Then, with these
complex imageries, he conveys and expresses the experience and emotions of love, which is
presented in logical arguments of the past, present and the future. Undeniably, intellect is required
to create such arguments, hence completing the cycle of characteristics under discussion. By the
same token, Marvell brilliantly creates a series of elaborate metaphysical imageries drawn from
many different intellectual sources. Through the imageries, he expresses his thoughts and
emotions, presenting them in logical arguments by first recognising the circumstances, then
reasoning the circumstances, and finally concluding the circumstances. In the attempt to reason,
Marvell constantly analysed and argued about the ideas and feelings that have been presented,
which obviously involves intellectual abilities to comprehend. Clearly, all four characteristics
under discussion are served throughout the poems, underlining the uniqueness of what is known
as metaphysical poetry.
The romantic poet seeks a way to reactivate the world by discovering the creative perceptiveness
which will allow the writer to draw aside the veils which modern living has laid across the senses
and seek a perception where the false separation of Nature (fixed, external objects) and nature (the
living being of the perceiver) can be reconciled: a new synthesizing vision. The romantic thinker
often feels that such a faculty is not an invention, but a rediscovery of the truth about the way we
perceive and create which has been lost in the development of more complicated social forms and
the growth of rational and self-conscious theories of human thought. This belief leads to a marked
historicism, to an increased interest in primitivist theories of culture: to a persistent strain of
historical reconstruction in romantic writing, a medieval element in poetry and the novel, and an
idealized resurrection of ballad and folk-song.

Metaphysical poetry uses tools like extended images, metaphors, conceits and wit. They underline
the theme of love, nature, sin, hope and grief. Meanwhile romantic poetry uses the tools of
imagination which is somewhere similar to images used in metaphysical poetry but here the images

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are quite clear and soothing. Metaphysical poetry keeps questioning the existence. But romantic
poetry justifies, beautifies and exaggerates the importance of common man. Romantic poetry leads
to sublimity but metaphysical poetry leads to questions.
Though both talk of few same themes but they differ in diction, style and approach. Poetry though
conveys and gives aesthetic pleasure but sometimes it questions the real being and sometimes it is
an escape from reality. Romantic Poetry is an escape from reality although it portrays the common
man. And Metaphysical Poetry is a question on the existence of our being.

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 Bibliography

Primary sources

Long, J, William. English Literature. India. Rupa Publications. (2015)

Bloom, Harold. The Romantic Poets. New York. An imprint of Infobase Learning. (2011)
Bloom, Harold. John Donne and the Metaphysical poets. The Macmillan Press. (1976)

Secondary sources
Bennett, J. Five Metaphysical poets. Cambridge University Press. (1971)
Beer, P. An introduction to the Metaphysical poets. The Macmillan Press. (1972)
Burrow, C. Metaphysical poetry. United Kingdom: Penguin Classics. (2006)
The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. Routledge. (20050
Harold Bloom. John Donne and the Metaphysical poets. The Macmillan Press. (1976)
A.E. Dyson and Julian Lovelock. English Poetry From Metaphysicals to Romantics.

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 Appendix
William Wordsworth was one of the first English Romantic Poet, who along with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge began the wave of Romanticism in English Literature with their joint publication
“Lyrical Ballads”. A poet laureate, William Wordsworth remains one of the most popular romantic
poets.

The Best Coleridge Poems Everyone Should Read Six of Coleridge’s finest poems selected by Dr
Oliver Tearle Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the leading English Romantic
poets, whose Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 collection Coleridge co-authored with Wordsworth,
became a founding-text for English Romanticism. In this post, we’ve picked six of Coleridge’s
best poems, and endeavoured to explain why these might be viewed as his finest poems.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote a great deal of poetry before his early death, in
his mid-thirties, while fighting in Greece. But what are Byron’s best poems? Here we’ve selected
some of his best-known and best-loved poems, spanning narrative verse, love poetry, simple lyrics,
and longer comic works.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote a considerable amount of poetry in his short life, as well
as penning pamphlets such as The Necessity of Atheism (which got him expelled from Oxford)
and ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (which contains his famous declaration that ‘poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world’). But which are Shelley’s very best poems. Undoubtedly,
a number of poems immediately spring to mind.

John Keats (born October 31, 1795 – died February 23, 1821) began life as the son of a stable-
owner, and ended it as an unmarried, poor and tuberculosis-ridden young man. Somewhere along
the way, he managed to become one of the most beloved poets of the English language and a
perfect example of Romanticism.

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John Donne’s poetry is a curious mix of contradictions. At once spiritual and metaphysical, it is
also deeply embedded in the physicality of bodies: love as a physical, corporeal experience as well
as a spiritual high. His style can often be startlingly plain (‘For God’s sake hold your tongue’, one
of the poems on this list begins), yet his imagery is frequently complex, his use of extended
metaphors requiring some careful unpacking. Here we’ve condensed the complete poetical works
of John Donne into ten of his best-known and most celebrated poems.

The Best George Herbert Poems Everyone Should Read George Herbert’s most famous poems
selected by Dr Oliver Tearle LATEST VIDEOS George Herbert (1593-1633) published none of
his poetry during his lifetime, instead sending his poetic works to a friend shortly before his death,
with the instruction that if his friend thought the poems worth publishing, he should do so.
Thankfully, they were published, in The Temple in 1633, a few months after Herbert’s death.

Richard Crashaw, was an English poet, teacher, and Anglican cleric, who was among the major
figures associated with the metaphysical poets in seventeenth-century English literature. Crashaw's
poetry, although often categorized with those of the contemporary English metaphysical poets,
exhibits similarities with the Baroque poets and influenced in part by the works of Italian and
Spanish mystics. It draws parallels between the physical beauties of nature and the spiritual
significance of existence.

Andrew Marvell, (born March 31, 1621, Winestead, Yorkshire, England—died August 18, 1678,
London), English poet whose political reputation overshadowed that of his poetry until the 20th
century. He is now considered to be one of the best Metaphysical poets. Marvell was educated at
Hull grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a B.A. in 1639. His father’s death in
1641 may have ended Marvell’s promising academic career.

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