ROMANTIC POETRY

ENGL 433
 Romantic Poetry: Definition and
Characteristics

Definition of Romantic Poetry and Romanticism

Before we dive into the characteristics of romantic poetry, it is important to clarify the
meaning of Romanticism. Romanticism has been the subject of hot controversy among
the world's critics for centuries, yet nobody has ever really been able to present or coin
a universally accepted meaning of the term. Generally speaking, romanticism was a
literary and intellectual movement in Europe that started in the late decades of the 18th
century. When Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798 by William Wordsworth and
Samuel Coleridge, it gave birth to Romanticism in the history of English literature.
Legouis and Cazamian's work A History of English Literature states,

“The Romantic spirit can be defined as an accentuated

predominance of emotional life, provoked or directed by the
exercise of imaginative vision, and in its turn stimulating or
directing such exercise.”

Some critics considered Romanticism as a “renascence of wonder.” Whatever the case

may be, it is evident that Romanticism came into being as a reaction against the
neoclassicism of the preceding age. Romantic poetry exhibits elements of emotion,
imagination, escapism, supernaturalism, hellenism, medievalism, love for nature, etc.
Now, let’s move ahead and discuss the salient characteristics of romantic poetry.

Key Characteristics of Romantic Poetry

Several characteristics distinguish romantic poetry from other forms of poetry. The
following are key characteristics of the form:
1. A Reaction Against Neoclassical Poetry
2. Imagination
3. Nature
4. Escapism
5. Melancholy
6. Supernaturalism
7. Subjectivity

1. A Reaction Against Neoclassical Poetry

Romantic poetry carries unique features which distinguish it from other kinds of poetry.
It is in absolute contrast to neoclassical poetry. Neoclassical is the poetry of intellect
and reason, while romantic poetry is the product of emotions, sentiments and the voice
at the heart of the poet. It is a catharsis of the poet’s emotions, thoughts, feelings and
ideas bound within their hearts.

Romantic poetry is a reaction against the set standards, conventions, rules and
traditional laws of poetry. That's the reason romantic poetry is acknowledged as a
progressive form, at least in contrast to neoclassical. According to William J. Long, “The
Romantic Movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and
protest against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well
as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit.”

The romantics were against the influence of reason in their poetry. They didn’t give any
preference to reason and intellect in their poetry. On the other hand, neoclassical poets
believed in the influence of reason. Alexander Pope said,

"True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,

What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d."

2. Imagination

Imagination is a hallmark of romantic poetry. It is part and parcel of romantic poets like
John Keats, Coleridge and P.B Shelley. Unlike neoclassical poets who shunned
imagination, romantic poets emphasized it and discredited the influence of reason and
intellect in any form in their work. Coleridge considered imagination to be an integral
part of his poetry.

In Biographia Literaria, he discussed two types of imagination—Primary and Secondary

Imagination. He said, “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime
agent of all human perception, and a repetition in the finite of the external act of creation
of the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with
the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and
differing only in degree, and in the mode its operation.”

Keats was another supporter of using imagination in poetry. He wrote, “I am certain of

nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination. What
the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” It is Keats’s plight of imagination that
helps him leave the natural world and transport himself into the world of nightingale.
Look at the following example:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
– "Ode to Nightingale" by John Keats
Imagination is an important element of romantic poetry.
3. Nature

A love for nature is another important feature of romantic poetry and came to hold a
pivotal position in Romantic poets' work. Nature was a wellspring of inspiration,
satisfaction and happiness. It is pertinent to mention here that all the romantic poets
differed in their views about nature. Wordsworth was considered a great lover of nature
and recognised it as a living thing—like a teacher or a god. He was the true adorer of
nature. He wrote,

"One impulse from the vernal wood

Can teach you more of man
Of moral, evil and good
Than all the sages can."
– "The Tables Turned" by William Wordsworth

Shelley was similarly an extraordinary lover of nature, yet he didn't think about nature as
an instructor, aide and a wellspring of pleasure. He believed that nature was a living
thing and that there was a union between nature and man. Shelley likewise put stock in
the recuperating force of nature like Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave nature a
philosophical touch, while Shelly focused on the intellectual aspects.

Keats was also an eminent lover of nature. He didn’t love nature just for the sake of
guidance or spiritual inspiration; instead, he adored nature for its sensuousness and
beauty. Keats enjoyed nature in its full essence and wrote,

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,

We know here woof; texture she is given
In the dull catalogue common things."
– "Lamia" by John Keats
Coleridge was completely different from other romantic poets of his age. He considered
nature as it was and held a very realistic perspective of it. He believed that nature was
not the source of joy and pleasure. Instead, it all depended on one's mood and
disposition. He was of the opinion that joy doesn’t come from any external nature;
instead, it emanated from the heart of our hearts. In this regard, he said,

"I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!"
– "Dejection: An Ode" by Samuel Coleridge

Another important feature of romantic poetry is the love for nature.

4. Escapism

Escapism is another striking characteristic of romantic poetry. It is a term implying a

writer's failure to face the agonies of real life. They instead take shelter elsewhere and
decide against fighting the odds. Escapism is perhaps the main theme of romantic
poetry.

As most of the romantic poets were in the grip of miseries, they tried to take asylum in
their poetry's power. It was their most loved pastime to escape from reality and take
asylum in the realm of their imagination. As an example, Keats desires to fly away with
the nightingale to forget the miseries of the world:

"Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy."
– "Ode to Nightingale" by John Keats
Escapism plays a pivotal role in romantic poetry.

5. Melancholy

Melancholy similarly occupies a prominent place in romantic poetry and was a major
source of inspiration for romantic poets. Due to extreme melancholy, all romantic poets
have a tendency to compose subjective poetry.

They write poetry that is the heart's voice and don’t try to compose philosophical or
complicated poetry. Instead, they just wanted to vent their feelings and emotions in an
attempt to ease their minds. They want to take a load off their minds. Look at the
following example:

"………………………….for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
– "Ode to Nightingale" by John Keats

6. Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism is another essential aspect of romantic poetry, and it is yet another

unique trait employed by romantic poets. Supernaturalism was used not just to create
horror and awe but also for the reader's pleasure.

Coleridge is the leading romantic poet in this regard. His poem "Kubla Khan" is the most
romantic in the history of English literature and is completely the product of his
imagination. The whole poem is a collection of supernatural elements. Look at the
following example:

"And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His fleshing eyes, his floating hair!
weave a circle round him thrice and
Close eyes with holy dread for him on
Honey – drew hath fed and drunk the
Milk of paradise."
– "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Coleridge

7. Subjectivity

Romantic poetry is the poetry of the miseries, despairs, and personal stories of the
poets; it is the poetry of sentiments, emotions and imagination of the poets. Romantic
poetry is against the objectivity of neoclassical poetry, whose authors avoided
describing emotions in their work. They wanted to present a true picture of society,
while the romantic poets avoided descriptions of their contemporary age. Keats is the
leading poet in this regard, and his work is like a biography. He wrote poetry just for the
sake of writing poetry, not wanting to convey any moral message to his readers.
Instead, he wanted to create and prove himself to be the best poet of his age.
Throughout his work, you can find numerous clues to his personal life. Look at the
following example:

"or many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
– "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats
 William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) was an engraver who also pursued the careers of
poet and painter. For a while, he was part of a radical group of thinkers and writers
that included Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. His best-
known works are the Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, and then, in 1794, the
Songs of Experience were added. Collections of apparently simple poems, they
deal with two contrary states: the state of innocence, in which the world is
unthreatening, there are no moral restrictions, and God is trusted implicitly, and the
state of experience, which reflects a fallen world of repression and religious
hypocrisy. Both books try to imagine life as it might exist outside conventional
habits of thinking, and, indeed, see conventional attitudes as the prejudices that
destroy and deny life.

This is a typical stance in Romantic literature: that the writer detaches his or
her self from received ideas and values. This can lead to fierce social indignation, a
feeling that comes across forcefully in 'London', from the Songs of Experience:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

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How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

Every black'ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the newborn Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The pattern of 'London' is characteristic of Blake's shorter poems: a simple

ideal is set against the knotted corruption of modem life. In the final verse here, the
child's life is tainted even as it is born. It is the city that is at the heart of the
problem, for the city both restricts and exploits people. This is a concept that is
encountered again and again in Romantic literature: an idea of the freedom
associated with nature is set against the mire of the city.

Blake welcomed the French Revolution as an apocalyptic event that would

sweep away old exploitative patterns of social relations and old ways of thinking.
Part of what Blake opposed was the rationalism and moderation of eighteenth-
century Enlightenment thinking, which he saw as demeaning life: society had
become too narrowly committed to the idea of reason and a soul-destroying pursuit
of material progress. What Blake lamented was the absence of any sense of the
spiritual dimension of experience. Against a notion of shared values and a shared
way of thinking, Blake develops a private creed in which his imagination plays a
vital role in rediscovering a sense of unity in experience. He consistently stresses
the importance of freedom, as opposed to the tyranny that he feels to be
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characteristic of the government of his day, and attacks negative moralizing, which
he associates with the church, as opposed to a true sense of religion.

Overview of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience juxtapose the innocent, pastoral

world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such
poems as “The Lamb” represent a meek virtue, poems like “The Tyger” exhibit
opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and
limitations of two different perspectives on the world.
Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from
which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In
particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality,
repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these
separate modes of control work together to crush what is most holy in human
beings.
The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the
lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood.
Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are
about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw
attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the
corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward
innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the
emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes—over the
heads, as it were, of the innocent—Christianity’s capacity for promoting injustice
and cruelty.

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 The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways
in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence,
while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective (“The
Tyger,” for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe,
which innocence fails to confront). With regard to religion, these later poems are
less concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the
Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind.
Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while
compensating for some of its blindness.
The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but
the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore
are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others,
like “The Sick Rose” and “The Divine Image,” make their arguments through
symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake’s favorite rhetorical
techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and
language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes,
and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This
combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blake’s
perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human
thought and social behavior.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience Glossary
Abstract: Thought or idea apart from concrete reality; having to do with non-
material realities or truths.
Albion: Albion is the ancient name for Britain. Blake tends to use it ironically,
recalling the "glory days" of the Empire and alluding to the reign of King

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 Arthur while drawing attention to the moral and social blights affecting his
country.
Ale: Alcoholic drink similar to beer, but darker and heavier and with a more bitter
taste.
Bereaved: Having experienced loss, usually of a loved one, but the loss may also
refer to loss of material items or abstract qualities.
Dell: A small, wooded valley.
Eschatological: Having to do with the "end times" as foretold in Biblical
prophecy.
Gambol: To skip about in a playful manner.
Green: In the context of William Blake's poetry, a "green" is a grassy area forming
the common of a village.
Hallowed: Set apart for use by God or a religious institution representing God.
Hearse: A vehicle used to convey the coffin of a deceased person from the place
of ceremony to the burial ground. Blake uses it ironically when he describes
a "marriage hearse."
Hoary: White, as if covered by frost.
Innocence: The state of naïveté or lack of religious knowledge that comes before
an understanding of sin and evil through experience.
Irony: The use of language to convey a meaning opposite to the one ostensibly
stated.
Manacles: Chains used to bind prisoners.
Materialism: Philosophical thought in which only the measurable physical world
is held to exist or be of importance.
Nature: In Blake's poetry, nature is a living, sentient thing that possesses qualities
embodied in the world at creation, and which nature has been slower to lose
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 than human beings have. The natural state of man is one full of joy and free
from the restrictions of man-made authorities.
Parson: A Protestant minister or pastor.
Reason: The capacity of human beings to think, often placed in opposition to
imagination or emotion.
Symmetry: The balanced and well-proportioned arrangement of the parts of a
whole item or creature.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience Character List
The Shepherd
Blake's primary persona in Songs of Innocence, the Shepherd is inspired by a
boy on a cloud to write his songs down. The Shepherd writes of Innocence, about
lambs and the Lamb, about nature, and about the experiences of children. The
Shepherd is intended as a (biased) view of the world from a more naive perspective
than Blake himself holds.
The Bard
The Bard is Blake's persona for several poems in Songs of Experience.More
worldly-wise than his counterpart, the Shepherd, the Bard is also more a craftsman
of words than is the rustic singer. The Bard also has a prophetic voice and claims
to see past, present, and future all the same.
Tom Dacre
One of the few named characters in Songs of Innocence, Tom Dacre is the
young boy who cries at night after a hard day as a chimney sweeper. He eventually
sleeps and has a dream of an Angel, who reassures him that his present suffering
will end one day, and that he will be welcomed into an afterlife without pain.
The Little Black Boy

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 A character from the poem of the same title, the Black Boy is used by Blake
to critique "hope for the future" religious and social beliefs and also to point out
the flaws of racism. The Little Black Boy at first dislikes his dark complexion in
contrast to the white English boys, but is assured by his mother that all outward
appearances will fall away one day, leaving only the pure (but white) souls to
enjoy the love of God.
The School Boy
The School Boy typifies the desire of youth to be outdoors without
restrictions, despite the confines of institutionalized education. He speaks of the
drudgery he must undertake to be in school and compares it to the wonders he
might experience outside on a summer's day.
The Lost Little Boy
A recurring character (possibly different characters), the Little Boy who is
lost appears in two poems from Songs of Innocence and in one poem in Songs of
Experience. In each case, Blake uses the character to point out the failure of
parents and of society to meet the needs of the children, and also the harm which
blind religious devotion often entails. In Songs of Innocence, the Little Boy is
rescued by God and finds comfort with his mother; in Songs of Experience he is
discovered by a Priest as he questions his apprehension of God, and he is
eventually burned alive for his alleged heresy.
The Lost Little Girl
The Lost Little Girl appears in Songs of Experience as a counterpoint to the
"Little Boy Lost" of Songs of Innocence. She is pursued by her parents through the
desert in which she wanders, but a lion and a lioness find her and bring her to their
cave for safety. The poem suggests that they may have killed her in order to free
her from her earthly suffering.
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 Songs of Innocence and of Experience Themes
The Destruction of Innocence
Throughout both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake
repeatedly addresses the destruction of childlike innocence, and in many cases of
children's lives, by a society designed to use people for its own selfish ends. Blake
romanticizes the children of his poems, only to place them in situations common to
his day, in which they find their simple faith in parents or God challenged by harsh
conditions. Songs of Experience is an attempt to denounce the cruel society that
harms the human soul in such terrible ways, but it also calls the reader back to
innocence, through Imagination, in an effort to redeem a fallen world.
Redemption
Throughout his works, Blake frequently refers to the redemptive work of
Jesus Christ. While he alludes to the atoning act of Christ Crucified, more often
Blake focuses on the Incarnation, the taking on of human form by the divine
Creator, as the source of redemption for both human beings and nature. He
emphasizes that Christ "became a little child" just as men and women need to
return to a state of childlike grace in order to restore the innocence lost to the social
machinery of a cruel world.
Religious Hypocrisy
In such poems as "Holy Thursday" and "The Little Vagabond," Blake
critiques the religious leaders of his day for their abuse of spiritual authority. The
men who should be shepherds to their flocks are in fact reinforcing a political and
economic system that turns children into short-lived chimney sweepers and that
represses love and creative expression in adults. Blake has no patience with clergy
who would assuage their own or their earthly patrons' guilt by parading poor

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children through a church on Ascension Day, as in "Holy Thursday" from both
sections, and he reserves most of his sharpest verse for these men.
Imagination over Reason
Blake is a strong proponent of the value of human creativity, or Imagination,
over materialistic rationalism, or Reason. As a poet and artist, Blake sees the
power of art in its various forms to raise the human spirit above its earth-bound
mire. He also sees the soul-killing materialism of his day, which uses rational
thought as an excuse to perpetuate crimes against the innocent via societal and
religious norms. Songs of Experience in particular decries Reason's hold over
Imagination, and it uses several ironic poems to undermine the alleged superiority
of rationalism.
Blake was not opposed to intelligent inquiry, however. In "A Little Boy
Lost" from Songs of Experience, Blake admires the boy's inquiries into the nature
of God and his own Thought, even as he sharply criticizes the religious leaders of
his day for demanding mindless obedience to dogma.
Nature as the Purest State of Man
Like many of his contemporary Romantic poets, Blake sees in the natural
world an idyllic universe that can influence human beings in a positive manner.
Many of his poems, such as "Spring," celebrate the beauty and fecundity of nature,
while others, such as "London," deride the sterile mechanism of urban society.
Blake's characters are happiest when they are surrounded by natural beauty and
following their natural instincts; they are most oppressed when they are trapped in
social or religious institutions or are subject to the horrors of urban living.
The Flaws of Earthly Parents
One recurring motif in both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is
the failure of human parents to properly nurture their children. The "Little Boy
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Lost" is abandoned by his earthly father, yet rescued by his Heavenly Father. The
parents of "The Little Vagabond" weep in vain as their son is burned alive for
heresy. Both mother and father seem frustrated by their child's temperament in
"Infant Sorrow." This recurring motif allows Blake to emphasize the frailty of
human communities, in which the roles of mother and father are defined by society
rather than by natural instincts, and to emphasize the supremacy of Nature and of
divine care in the form of God the Father.
Social Reform
While much of Blake's poetry focuses on leaving behind the material world
in favor of a more perfect spiritual nature, his poetry nonetheless offers realistic
and socially conscious critiques of existing situations. Both of his "Chimney
Sweeper" poems highlight the abuse of children by parents and employers as they
are forced into hazardous, and potentially fatal, situations for the sake of earning
money. Both "Holy Thursday" poems decry the overt display of the poor as a
spectacle of absolution for the wealthy and affluent. "The Human Abstract" points
out that our virtues are predicated on the existence of human suffering. Although
Blake is certainly more spiritually than practically minded, the seeds of social
reform can be seen in the philosophy underlying his verses: innocence is a state of
man that must be preserved, not destroyed, and the social systems that seek to
destroy innocence must be changed or eliminated.

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 “The Lamb” by William Blake

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

Summary

The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a
child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its

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particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next
stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was
made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his gentleness
both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on
the lamb.

Form

“The Lamb” has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in
the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps
to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds
contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping
character of a child’s chant.

Commentary and Analysis

The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question and answer. The first
stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual
matters and contains explanation and analogy. The child’s question is both naive
and profound. The question (“who made thee?”) is a simple one, and yet the child
is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have,
about their own origins and the nature of creation. The poem’s apostrophic form
contributes to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child talking to an
animal is a believable one, and not simply a literary contrivance. Yet by answering
his own question, the child converts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the
initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is presented as a puzzle or
riddle, and even though it is an easy one—child’s play—this also contributes to an
underlying sense of ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The child’s answer,

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however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent
acceptance of its teachings.

The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a

lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The
image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a
special solicitude for children, and the Bible’s depiction of Jesus in his childhood
shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from
which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like
many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive
aspects of conventional Christian belief. But it does not provide a completely
adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil
in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of
Experience, is “The Tyger”; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on
religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable.
These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers
independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere
outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.

The Lamb is the most representative poem of the poems of ‘innocence’. It

tells almost everything it needs to for making us understand its symbolic theme.
The child is a symbol of innocence, the state of the soul which has not yet been
corrupted by the world of conventionalized pretensions called religion, culture,
society and state and other codified systems. This overtly simple poem also subtly
approaches the subject of creativity and the creator. While the speaker is speaking
about a real physical lamb on the surface of it, the subtext of the poem derives
from both Christian and classical mythology. The child is the symbol of Christ, the

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physical incarnation of the deity. The fact that it has been sent to feed among the
meadow and along the stream indicates that it is to live by natural, instinctual
means, or the Divine law of the nature. The wooly softness and the brightness that
comes from within also support the divine nature of the lamb symbol. The voice of
the lamb is also equally significant. The child, the lamb and the Christ are all close
to the creative being; creativity is a childlike occupation, since it also involves the
natural spirit, sense of wonder and undefiled imagination.

Each stanza of “The Lamb” has five couplets, typifying the AABB rhyme
scheme common to Blake's Innocence poems. By keeping the rhymes simple and
close-knit, Blake conveys the tone of childlike wonder and the singsong voice of
innocent boys and girls. The soft vowel sounds and repetition of the “l” sound may
also convey the soft bleating of a lamb.

One of Blake’s most strongly religious poems, “The Lamb” takes the
pastoral life of the lamb and fuses it with the Biblical symbolism of Jesus Christ as
the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” By using poetic rhetorical
questions, the speaker, who is probably childlike rather than actually a child,
creates a sort of lyric catechism in which the existence of both a young boy and a
tender lamb stand as proof of a loving, compassionate Creator.

The lamb stands in relation to the boy as the boy stands in relation to his
elders; each must learn the truth of his existence by questioning the origin of his
life and inferring a Creator who possesses the same characteristics of gentleness,
innocence, and loving kindness as both the lamb and the child. Then the direct
revelation of the Scripture comes into play. The Creator, here identified
specifically as Jesus Christ by his title of “Lamb of God,” displays these
characteristics in his design of the natural and human world, and in His offer of

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salvation to all (hence the child is also “called by his name”) through his
incarnation (“he became a little child”) and presumably his death and resurrection.

“The Tyger” by William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

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And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Summary

The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine
being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful
symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine
this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come,
and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and
what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews”
of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to
beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the
creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project
would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the
job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? “Did he smile
his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?

Form

The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular
and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s
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central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the poems form perfectly suit
its regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation
of a single, central idea.

Commentary and Analysis

The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the
poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building
on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a
reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its
capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a
terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable
existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and
what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty
and horror?

The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the

poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the
spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet
perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an
investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger’s remarkable
nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker’s questions about its
origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem’s
series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the
“fearful symmetry” of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and
powerful being could be capable of such a creation.

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 The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake
applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger
suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes
the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a
creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also
continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its
simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker
stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he
recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem
addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but
who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of
will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of
physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,”
as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is
being forged. The repeated use of word the “dare” to replace the “could” of the
first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer
might of the creative act.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a
tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the
implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of
“experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.” “The
Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at
the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God’s power, and the
inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a
sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting
evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not
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withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with
the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent
universe.
The use of smithing imagery for the creation of the tiger hearkens to
Blake’s own oft-written contrast between the natural world and the industrialism
of the London of his day. While the creator is still God, the means of creation for
so dangerous a creature is mechanical rather than natural. Technology may be a
benefit to mankind in many ways, but within it still holds deadly potential.
In form and content, "The Tyger" also parallels the Biblical book of Job.
Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks the
suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead Job not to an
answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in human wisdom. This
limitation is forced into view by the final paradox: "Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?" Can the God of Innocence also be the God of Experience? If so, how
can mere mortals, trapped in one state or the other, ever hope to understand this
God?

"The Tyger" follows an AABB rhyme scheme throughout, but with the
somewhat problematic first and last stanzas rhyming "eye" with "symmetry." This
jarring near rhyme puts the reader in an uneasy spot from the beginning and returns
him to it at the end, thus foreshadowing and concluding the experience of reading
"The Tyger" as one of discomfort.

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 “London” by William Blake

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every black’ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

Summary

The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his
observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and
repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a

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chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the
monarch’s residence. The nighttime holds nothing more promising: the cursing of
prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the “Marriage hearse.”

Form

The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is the most
striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of
the horrors the speaker describes.

Commentary and Analysis

The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of
stains in this poem’s first lines recall the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but
with a twist; we are now quite far from the piping, pastoral bard of the earlier
poem: we are in the city. The poem’s title denotes a specific geographic space, not
the archetypal locales in which many of the other Songs are set. Everything in this
urban space—even the natural River Thames—submits to being “charter’d,” a term
which combines mapping and legalism. Blake’s repetition of this word (which he
then tops with two repetitions of “mark” in the next two lines) reinforces the sense
of stricture the speaker feels upon entering the city. It is as if language itself, the
poet’s medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction of resources. Blake’s
repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the city.
But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus “mark,”
between the third and fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of nouns—from
an act of observation which leaves some room for imaginative elaboration, to an
indelible imprint, branding the people’s bodies regardless of the speaker’s actions.

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 Ironically, the speaker’s “meeting” with these marks represents the
experience closest to a human encounter that the poem will offer the speaker. All
the speaker’s subjects—men, infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlot—are
known only through the traces they leave behind: the ubiquitous cries, the blood on
the palace walls. Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human form—
the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to personify and
render natural phenomena—is lacking. In the third stanza the cry of the chimney-
sweep and the sigh of the soldier metamorphose (almost mystically) into soot on
church walls and blood on palace walls—but we never see the chimney-sweep or
the soldier themselves. Likewise, institutions of power—the clergy, the
government—are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they
reside. Indeed, it is crucial to Blake’s commentary that neither the city’s victims
nor their oppressors ever appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of
institutions or a system of enslavement for the city’s woes; rather, the victims help
to make their own “mind-forg’d manacles,” more powerful than material chains
could ever be.
The poem climaxes at the moment when the cycle of misery recommences,
in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a
cursing, prostitute mother. Sexual and marital union—the place of possible
regeneration and rebirth—are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus
Blake’s final image is the “Marriage hearse,” a vehicle in which love and desire
combine with death and destruction.

"London" follows an ABAB rhyme scheme throughout its three stanzas with
little deviation from iambic tetrameter. Only "Mind-forg'd manacles" and "How"
and "Blasts" in lines 14-15 are irregularly stressed. "Mind-forg'd" is stressed to

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further its contrast from the preceding three lines, each of which begins "In every"
to create a litany of cries throughout London. Lines 14 and 15 give irregular stress
to the two words in order to further disturb the reader, leading up to the oxymoron
of the "marriage hearse" in line 16.

The poet expresses his disdain for the urban sprawl of post-Industrial
Revolution London in terms as harsh as his praise for nature and innocence are
pleasant. A society of people so tightly packed into artificial structures breeds evil
upon evil, culminating with the “Harlot’s curse” that harms both the young and the
married. It is as if a system has been created specifically to destroy all that is good
in humankind, a theme Blake takes up in his later works. The reader is warned off
visiting or dwelling in London, and by implication urged to seek refuge from the
world’s ills in a more rural setting.

Blake's critique is not aimed only at society or the system of the world,
however. Only the third stanza directly addresses one group's oppression of
another. Instead, much of the poem decries man's self-oppression. One reading of
the poem suggests that the Harlot of the last stanza is in fact Nature herself,
proclaimed a Harlot by a narrow-minded, patriarchal religious system. In this
interpretation, Nature turns the marriage coach into a hearse for all marriage
everywhere, because marriage is a limiting human institution that leads to the death
of love rather than its fulfillment in natural impulses.

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 “The Sick Rose” by William Blake

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Summary

The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible”

worm has stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night.
The “dark secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life.

Form

The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these
short, two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or dread and
complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she is
dying.

Commentary and Analysis

While the rose exists as a beautiful natural object that has become infected
by a worm, it also exists as a literary rose, the conventional symbol of love. The
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image of the worm resonates with the Biblical serpent and also suggests a phallus.
Worms are quintessentially earthbound, and symbolize death and decay. The “bed”
into which the worm creeps denotes both the natural flowerbed and also the lovers’
bed. The rose is sick, and the poem implies that love is sick as well. Yet the rose is
unaware of its sickness. Of course, an actual rose could not know anything about
its own condition, and so the emphasis falls on the allegorical suggestion that it is
love that does not recognize its own ailing state. This results partly from the
insidious secrecy with which the “worm” performs its work of corruption—not
only is it invisible, it enters the bed at night. This secrecy indeed constitutes part of
the infection itself. The “crimson joy” of the rose connotes both sexual pleasure
and shame, thus joining the two concepts in a way that Blake thought was
perverted and unhealthy. The rose’s joyful attitude toward love is tainted by the
aura of shame and secrecy that our culture attaches to love.

Nature brings this sickness to the worm with “the howling storm.” Although
the speaker decries the rose's sickness in the first line, the rest of the poem subtly
suggests that the rose is not innocent of her own destruction. The worm has
incidentally "found out" the rose's bed, which is "crimson joy" even prior to the
worm's arrival. The red of passion and of the vaginal "crimson bed" image
counterpart to the worm's phallic one suggests that the rose has already been
experiencing some kind of lustful passion.

"Worm" and "storm" are rhymed, connecting the agent of destruction with a
force of nature. In the second stanza, "joy" and "destroy" are connected, linking
what should be a positive experience to the decaying disease that the rose has
contracted.

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 William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth and educated

at Hawkshead near Esthwaite Water. After studying at Cambridge, he visited
France, was infected with revolutionary fervour (‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive’) and fell in love with a royalist surgeon’s daughter, Annette Vallon, by
whom he had a child. The Terror that succeeded the Revolution reinforced private
distresses and unhinged the young poet for a time. He toyed with the philosophy of
reason expounded in Godwin’s Political Justice, and vented his pessimism in Guilt
and Sorrow, a narrative of suffering, and The Borderers, a tragedy of treachery, but
he recovered his balance fully under the influence of Nature and with the help of
his sister, Dorothy, whose Journals prove how indebted he was to her sensitivity
and perceptiveness (‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears’, he said in ‘The
Sparrow’s Nest’).

Friendship with Coleridge strengthened his inspiration, while a donation

from a friend, Raisley Calvert, freed him from financial worry. Intimacy with
Coleridge bore fruit in their publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798). Later, in his
work of philosophical and literary criticism, Biographia Literaria (1817),
Coleridge was to recall how the two poets decided to collaborate, the one to deal
convincingly with incidents and agents ‘in part at least supernatural’, the other with
subjects ‘chosen from ordinary life’.

It was for an enlarged edition of the joint volume, published in 1800, that
Wordsworth wrote the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads in which he attacked
the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ of much current poetic diction, pressed for
use in poetry of ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men’, asserted that
‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and made the

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climactic claim that ‘Poetry is the breath and spirit of all knowledge…the first and
last of all knowledge…immortal as the heart of man’.

In earnest realization of his grandiose conception of the poet’s role,

Wordsworth started work on The Prelude in 1798. Intended to be the introductory
portion of a long work, The Recluse, it undertook a preliminary survey of the
growth of the poet’s mind and powers. As such, it became itself a full-length study
and, together with The Excursion (1814), represents what the whole project
eventually came to.

In the first two books of The Prelude Wordsworth traces the nourishing of
the poetic spirit in childhood as he was ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’ at the
hands of Nature herself. Nature educated him by awe and fear. It, first a
background of delight to boyish games, is eventually loved ‘for her own sake’ and
becomes a means of spiritual exaltation. Philosophical reflection is sparked off by
recorded instances of Nature’s touch upon him in boyhood, and they are some of
the finest things in our poetry.

In later books Wordsworth pursues the story of his life at Cambridge, his
reading, his travels on the Continent, his residence in London and then in France at
the time of the Revolution. Here, we are told, his heart and love were given to the
people. His subsequent disillusionment and spiritual rootlessness was healed only
when ‘Nature’s self,/By all varieties of human love/Assisted’, led him back to the
peace and understanding found in reconciliation between heart and head. In Books
XII and XIII Wordsworth records the full recovery of spiritual poise and strength
and he dedicates himself to sing of the heart of man as ‘found among the best of
those who live’…‘In Nature’s presence’, deeply aware that Nature has the power
‘to breathe/Grandeur upon the very humblest face/Of human life’.

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 Wordsworth’s best poetry revolves around himself, but then his deepest
personal concerns reach out to the whole body of Nature and to his fellow
creatures contained within her embrace. Wordsworth, at his finest, has a sturdy
simplicity of idiom that matches the profound solemnities of country life he so
feelingly recaptures.

Wordsworth is actually the most radical of the Romantic poets, simply

because he is the most accomplished and subtle poet. Initially enthusiastic about
the French Revolution, the reign of 'Terror' in 1793 changed Wordsworth's view.
The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 marks a withdrawal from public and political life, the
poems, in a language that professes to be close to the language of everyday life,
tending to focus on solitary or isolated figures. Whereas Pope and early eighteenth-
century writers emphasized the general truths that should be at the heart of poetry,
Wordsworth focused on unique experiences and private insights; the characters in
the poems in Lyrical Ballads are, however, it is implied, also close to a pattern of
life evident in nature itself. It is the subjective insight of the poet, aided by nature,
that sees a pattern in life, in which meaning comes to reside in experience reflected
upon in moments of tranquility.

Overview of Wordsworth’s Poetry

Wordsworth’s monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of

important poems, varying in length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of
the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long in
its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry, and the
language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably
consistent throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets
Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here,

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Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of
common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then
considered “poetic.” He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions
contained in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be
pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and
beautiful expression of feeling—for all human sympathy, he claims, is based on a
subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native dignity of man.”

Recovering “the naked and native dignity of man” makes up a significant

part of Wordsworth’s poetic project, and he follows his own advice from
the 1802 preface. Wordsworth’s style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand
even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have changed from
those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth’s poems (including
masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations of Immortality” ode)
deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the
adult in particular, childhood’s lost connection with nature, which can be preserved
only in memory.

Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious

symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” in which
the evening is described as being “quiet as a nun”), and the relics of the poet’s
rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity
intersects gently and easily with nature.

Wordsworth’s poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling,

instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before
him, Wordsworth gave expression to developing human emotion; his lyric
“Strange fits of passion have I known,” in which the speaker describes an

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inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have been
written by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly
toward the future, many of Wordsworth’s important works are preoccupied with
the lost glory of the past—not only of the lost dreams of childhood but also of the
historical past, as in the powerful sonnet “London, 1802,” in which the speaker
exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John Milton to teach the modern world
a better way to live.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Wordsworth’s Poetry

Themes

THE BENEFICIAL INFLUENCE OF NATURE

Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on

the human mind. All manifestations of the natural world—from the highest
mountain to the simplest flower—elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate
emotions in the people who observe these manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly
emphasizes the importance of nature to an individual’s intellectual and spiritual
development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect to both the
spiritual and the social worlds. As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of
nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as “The World Is Too Much
with Us” (1807) and “London, 1802” (1807) people become selfish and immoral
when they distance themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate
empathy and nobility of spirit becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as
well as by the squalor of city life. In contrast, people who spend a lot of time in
nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their souls.

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THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND

Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and
imagination, individuals could overcome difficulty and pain. For instance,
the speaker in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
relieves his loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech gatherer in
“Resolution and Independence” (1807) perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty
by the exertion of his own will. The transformative powers of the mind are
available to all, regardless of an individual’s class or background. This democratic
view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness. Throughout his work, Wordsworth
showed strong support for the political, religious, and artistic rights of the
individual, including the power of his or her mind. In the 1802 preface to Lyrical
Ballads, Wordsworth explained the relationship between the mind and poetry.
Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the raw
emotion of experience into poetry capable of giving pleasure. Later poems, such as
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), imagine nature as the source of the
inspiring material that nourishes the active, creative mind.

THE SPLENDOR OF CHILDHOOD

In Wordsworth’s poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence.

Children form an intense bond with nature, so much so that they appear to be a part
of the natural world, rather than a part of the human, social world. Their
relationship to nature is passionate and extreme: children feel joy at seeing a
rainbow but great terror at seeing desolation or decay. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote
several poems about a girl named Lucy who died at a young age. These poems,
including “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” (1800) and “Strange fits of
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passion have I known” (1800), praise her beauty and lament her untimely death. In
death, Lucy retains the innocence and splendor of childhood, unlike the children
who grow up, lose their connection to nature, and lead unfulfilling lives. The
speaker in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” believes that children delight in
nature because they have access to a divine, immortal world. As children age and
reach maturity, they lose this connection but gain an ability to feel emotions, both
good and bad. Through the power of the human mind, particularly memory, adults
can recollect the devoted connection to nature of their youth.
Motifs

WANDERING AND WANDERERS

The speakers of Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers: they roam

solitarily, they travel over the moors, they take private walks through the highlands
of Scotland. Active wandering allows the characters to experience and participate
in the vastness and beauty of the natural world. Moving from place to place also
allows the wanderer to make discoveries about himself. In “I travelled among
unknown men” (1807), the speaker discovers his patriotism only after he has
traveled far from England. While wandering, speakers uncover the visionary
powers of the mind and understand the influence of nature, as in “I wandered
lonely as a cloud” (1807). The speaker of this poem takes comfort in a walk he
once took after he has returned to the grit and desolation of city life. Recollecting
his wanderings allows him to transcend his present circumstances. Wordsworth’s
poetry itself often wanders, roaming from one subject or experience to another, as
in The Prelude. In this long poem, the speaker moves from idea to idea through
digressions and distractions that mimic the natural progression of thought within
the mind.
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MEMORY

Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of the

contemporary world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to
reconnect with the visionary power and intense relationship they had with nature as
children. In turn, these memories encourage adults to re-cultivate as close a
relationship with nature as possible as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and
despair. The act of remembering also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued
in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the calm
remembrance of passionate emotional experiences. Poems cannot be composed at
the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead, the initial emotion must be
combined with other thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past experiences using
memory and imagination. The poem produced by this time-consuming process will
allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers and
will permit the readers to remember similar emotional experiences of their own.
VISION AND SIGHT

Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the vehicles
through which individuals are transformed. As speakers move through the world,
they see visions of great natural loveliness, which they capture in their memories.
Later, in moments of darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in “I
wandered lonely as a cloud.” Here, the speaker daydreams of former jaunts
through nature, which “flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude”
(21–22). The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find comfort
even in our darkest, loneliest moments. Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes the
connection between seeing and experiencing emotion, as in “My heart leaps up”
(1807), in which the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across the
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sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s poems, including
descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be seen, rather than
touched, heard, or felt. In Book Fourteenth of The Prelude, climbing to the top of a
mountain in Wales allows the speaker to have a prophetic vision of the workings of
the mind as it thinks, reasons, and feels.
Symbols

LIGHT

Light often symbolizes truth and knowledge. In “The Tables Turned” (1798),
Wordsworth contrasts the barren light of reason available in books with the
“sweet” (11) and “freshening” (6) light of the knowledge nature brings. Sunlight
literally helps people see, and sunlight also helps speakers and characters begin to
glimpse the wonders of the world. In “Expostulation and Reply” (1798), the
presence of light, or knowledge, within an individual prevents dullness and helps
the individual to see, or experience. Generally, the light in Wordsworth’s poems
represents immortal truths that can’t be entirely grasped by human reason. In “Ode:
Imitations of Immortality,” the speaker remembers looking at a meadow as a child
and imagining it gleaming in “celestial light” (4). As the speaker grows and
matures, the light of his youth fades into the “light of common day” (78) of
adulthood. But the speaker also imagines his remembrances of the past as a kind of
light, which illuminate his soul and give him the strength to live.

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"STRANGE FITS OF PASSION HAVE I KNOWN" by Wordsworth

STRANGE fits of passion have I known:

And I will dare to tell,

But in the Lover's ear alone,

What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day

Fresh as a rose in June,

I to her cottage bent my way,

Beneath an evening-moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,

All over the wide lea; 10

With quickening pace my horse drew nigh

Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;

And, as we climbed the hill,

The sinking moon to Lucy's cot

Came near, and nearer still.

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 In one of those sweet dreams I slept,

Kind Nature's gentlest boon!

And all the while my eyes I kept

On the descending moon. 20

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopped:

When down behind the cottage roof,

At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a Lover's head!

"O mercy!" to myself I cried,

"If Lucy should be dead!"

Summary

The speaker proclaims that he has been the victim of “strange fits of passion”; he
says that he will describe one of these fits, but only if he can speak it “in the
Lover’s ear alone.” Lucy, the girl he loved, was beautiful—“fresh as a rose in
June”—and he traveled to her cottage one night beneath the moon. He stared at the
moon as his horse neared the paths to Lucy’s cottage. As they reached the orchard,

41
the moon had begun to sink, nearing the point at which it would appear to the
speaker to touch Lucy’s house in the distance. As the horse plodded on, the
speaker continued to stare at the moon. All at once, it dropped “behind the cottage
roof.” Suddenly, the speaker was overcome with a strange and passionate thought,
and cried out to himself: “O mercy! If Lucy should be dead!”

Form

The stanzas of “Strange fits of passion have I known” fit an old, very simple ballad
form, employed by Wordsworth to great effect as part of his project to render
common speech and common stories in poems of simple rhythmic beauty. Each
stanza is four lines long, each has alternating rhymed lines (an ABAB rhyme
scheme), and each has alternating metrical lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic
trimeter, respectively—which means that the first and third lines of the stanza have
four accented syllables, and the second and fourth lines have only three.

Commentary

This direct, unadorned lyric is one of the most striking and effective of the
many simple lyrics like it, written by Wordsworth in the mid to late 1790s and
included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. This little poem, part of a sequence
of short lyrics concerning the death of the speaker’s beloved Lucy, actually shows
extraordinary sophistication and mastery of technique. The sophistication lies in
the poet’s grasp of human feeling, chronicling the sort of inexplicable, half-fearful,
morbid fantasy that strikes everyone from time to time but that, before
Wordsworth, was not a subject poetry could easily incorporate. The technique lies
in the poet’s treatment of his theme: like a storyteller, Wordsworth dramatizes in

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the first stanza the act of reciting his tale, saying that he will whisper it, but only in
the ear of a lover like himself. This act immediately puts the reader in a
sympathetic position, and sets the actual events of the poem’s story in the past, as
opposed to the “present,” in which the poet speaks his poem. This sets up the
death-fantasy as a subject for observation and analysis—rather than simply
portraying the events of the story, Wordsworth essentially says, “This happened to
me, and isn’t it strange that it did?” But of course it is not really strange; it happens
to everyone; and this disjunction underscores the reader’s automatic identification
with the speaker of the poem.
Also like a storyteller, Wordsworth builds suspense leading up to the climax
of his poem by tying his speaker’s reverie to two inexorable forces: the slowly
sinking moon, and the slowly plodding horse, which travels “hoof after hoof,” just
as the moon comes “near, and nearer still” to the house where Lucy lies. The
recitation of the objects of the familiar landscape through which the speaker
travels—the paths he loves, the orchard-plot, the roof of the house—heightens the
unfamiliarity of the “strange fit of passion” into which the speaker is plunged by
the setting moon.

“The World Is Too Much With Us” by Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

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And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Summary

Angrily, the speaker accuses the modern age of having lost its connection to nature
and to everything meaningful: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: /
Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid
boon!” He says that even when the sea “bares her bosom to the moon” and the
winds howl, humanity is still out of tune, and looks on uncaringly at the spectacle
of the storm. The speaker wishes that he were a pagan raised according to a
different vision of the world, so that, “standing on this pleasant lea,” he might see
images of ancient gods rising from the waves, a sight that would cheer him greatly.
He imagines “Proteus rising from the sea,” and Triton “blowing his wreathed
horn.”

Form

This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the
early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic

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pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; “The world is too much with
us” takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an
Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts,
an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). The
rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is somewhat variable; in this case, the octave
follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme
of CDCDCD. In most Petrarchan sonnets, the octave proposes a question or an
idea that the sestet answers, comments upon, or criticizes.
Commentary

“The world is too much with us” falls in line with a number of sonnets
written by Wordsworth in the early 1800s that criticize or admonish what
Wordsworth saw as the decadent material cynicism of the time. This relatively
simple poem angrily states that human beings are too preoccupied with the
material (“The world...getting and spending”) and have lost touch with the spiritual
and with nature. In the sestet, the speaker dramatically proposes an impossible
personal solution to his problem—he wishes he could have been raised as a pagan,
so he could still see ancient gods in the actions of nature and thereby gain spiritual
solace. His thunderous “Great God!” indicates the extremity of his wish—in
Christian England, one did not often wish to be a pagan.
On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry summation of the familiar
Wordsworthian theme of communion with nature, and states precisely how far the
early nineteenth century was from living out the Wordsworthian ideal. The sonnet
is important for its rhetorical force (it shows Wordsworth’s increasing confidence
with language as an implement of dramatic power, sweeping the wind and the sea
up like flowers in a bouquet), and for being representative of other poems in the

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 Wordsworth canon—notably “London, 1802,” in which the speaker dreams of
bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.

London, 1802 by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Summary

The speaker addresses the soul of the dead poet John Milton, saying that he should
be alive at this moment in history, for England needs him. England, the speaker
says, is stagnant and selfish, and Milton could raise her up again. The speaker says
that Milton could give England “manners, virtue, freedom, power,” for his soul

46
was like a star, his voice had a sound as pure as the sea, and he moved through the
world with “cheerful godliness,” laying upon himself the “lowest duties.”

Form

This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the
early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic
pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; “The world is too much with
us” takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an
Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts,
an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). The
Petrarchan sonnet can take a number of variable rhyme schemes; in this case, the
octave (which typically proposes a question or an idea), follows a rhyme scheme of
ABBAABBA, and the sestet (which typically answers the question or comments
upon the idea) follows a rhyme scheme of BCCDBD.
Commentary

The speaker of this poem, which takes the form of a dramatic outburst,
literally cries out to the soul of John Milton in anger and frustration. (The poem
begins with the cry: “Milton!”) In the octave, the speaker articulates his wish that
Milton would return to earth, and lists the vices ruining the current era. Every
venerable institution—the altar (representing religion), the sword (representing the
military), the pen (representing literature), and the fireside (representing the
home)—has lost touch with “inward happiness,” which the speaker identifies as a
specifically English birthright, just as Milton is a specifically English poet. (This is
one of Wordsworth’s few explicitly nationalistic verses—shades, perhaps, of the
conservatism that took hold in his old age.)

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 In the sestet, the speaker describes Milton’s character, explaining why he
thinks Milton would be well suited to correct England’s current waywardness. His
soul was as bright as a star, and stood apart from the crowd: he did not need the
approval or company of others in order to live his life as he pleased. His voice was
as powerful and influential as the sea itself, and though he possessed a kind of
moral perfection, he never ceased to act humbly. These virtues are precisely what
Wordsworth saw as lacking in the English men and women of his day.

It is important to remember that for all its emphasis on feeling and passion,
Wordsworth’s poetry is equally concerned with goodness and morality. Unlike
later Romantic rebels and sensualists, Wordsworth was concerned that his ideas
communicate natural morality to his readers, and he did not oppose his philosophy
to society. Wordsworth’s ideal vision of life was such that he believed anyone
could participate in it, and that everyone would be happier for doing so. The angry
moral sonnets of 1802 come from this ethical impulse, and indicate how frustrating
it was for Wordsworth to see his poems exerting more aesthetic influence than
social or psychological influence.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

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Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Summary

The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he
encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers
stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced
beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a

49
poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that
he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him.
For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that
inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and
dances with the daffodils.”

Form

The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme:
ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.

Commentary

This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth
canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a
particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple,
depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake,
the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or
restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—the daffodils
“flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”—is psychologically
acute, but the poem’s main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early
stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I
wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are
continually personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their heads” in “a
crowd, a host.” This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature,
making it one of Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for instilling in
the reader the feeling the poet so often describes himself as experiencing.

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 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.

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,
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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,
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.

Summary

The poet orders his listener to behold a “solitary Highland lass” reaping and
singing by herself in a field. He says that anyone passing by should either stop
here, or “gently pass” so as not to disturb her. As she “cuts and binds the grain” she
“sings a melancholy strain,” and the valley overflows with the beautiful, sad sound.
The speaker says that the sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale
to weary travelers in the desert, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with
a voice so thrilling.

Impatient, the poet asks, “Will no one tell me what she sings?” He speculates that
her song might be about “old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago,” or
that it might be humbler, a simple song about “matter of today.” Whatever she
sings about, he says, he listened “motionless and still,” and as he traveled up the
hill, he carried her song with him in his heart long after he could no longer hear it.

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Form

The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter.
Each follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD, though in the first and last stanzas
the “A” rhyme is off (field/self and sang/work).

Commentary

Along with “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper” is one of

Wordsworth’s most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. In “Tintern Abbey”
Wordsworth said that he was able to look on nature and hear “human music”; in
this poem, he writes specifically about real human music encountered in a beloved,
rustic setting. The song of the young girl reaping in the fields is incomprehensible
to him (a “Highland lass,” she is likely singing in Scots), and what he appreciates
is its tone, its expressive beauty, and the mood it creates within him, rather than its
explicit content, at which he can only guess. To an extent, then, this poem ponders
the limitations of language, as it does in the third stanza (“Will no one tell me what
she sings?”). But what it really does is praise the beauty of music and its fluid
expressive beauty, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” that
Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry.

By placing this praise and this beauty in a rustic, natural setting, and by and
by establishing as its source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth acts on the values
of Lyrical Ballads. The poem’s structure is simple—the first stanza sets the scene,
the second offers two bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the
content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the
speaker—and its language is natural and unforced. Additionally, the final two lines
of the poem (“Its music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more”)

53
return its focus to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of
beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings.

“The Solitary Reaper” anticipates Keats’s two great meditations on art,

the “Ode to a Nightingale,” in which the speaker steeps himself in the music of a
bird in the forest—Wordsworth even compares the reaper to a nightingale—
and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the speaker is unable to ascertain the stories
behind the shapes on an urn. It also anticipates Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” with the
figure of an emblematic girl reaping in the fields.

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 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), son of a Devon parson, was gifted

with a scholarly and inquiring mind. In his early twenties he shared his
revolutionary ardor with Robert Southey, and the two of them planned a
communistic community in North America called a ‘Pantisocracy’ (eule for all).
The immediate result of this collaboration was marriage to the two Flicker sisters,
marriage which in Coleridge’s case proved unfortunate. The Coleridges were
living at Nether Stowey in Somerset when Wordsworth came to the district and the
remarkable friendship, rooted in intense mutual admiration, began.

Coleridge’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads included ‘The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner’, on which his high poetic status very largely, and justly, depends.
The old mariner detains a wedding guest at the very doors of the bridegroom’s
home and pins him with his compulsive tale. And so the ballad, hauntingly urgent
in rhythm, eerily bold in image, unfolds the story of how the mariner’s ship was
tossed towards the South Pole and locked in a desolation of ice till an Albatross
came through the fog and ate at the sailors’ hands. Then the ice split and they
steered through it; but the mariner shot the bird that had brought them luck, and a
terrible price was paid. Becalmed/stuck on the Equator, one after another of the
crew died of thirst, each one cursing the mariner. Back home after his ghastly
adventure, the mariner is shriven (a priest heard his confession and absolved him),
but a lifetime’s penance periodically compels him by a renewal of his agony to
retell his tale. Unforgettable pictorial horrors are stamped on the reader’s mind by
its telling, yet one can scarcely ask why Coleridge never produced another ballad
of such power when our entire literature could not provide one. He managed at
least to match its archaic and haunting mystery in Christabel (1816). In this lovely

55
fragment the Lady Christabel finds in the forest one who claims to be a forlorn
maiden, ‘Geraldine’, and takes her home to the castle to help her. But ‘Geraldine’
is an evil being in disguise and at night she takes Christabel in her arms to lay a
spell on her. The plot scarcely develops in the two sections which were all that
Coleridge’s laziness and, no doubt, flagging inspiration, allowed him to complete.

The Lyrical Ballads collection was a joint venture with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. These two writers, Wordsworth and Coleridge, have a great deal in
common, but there is also much that separates them. Coleridge, as is the case with
Wordsworth, can present a totalizing vision, in which he unites all the disparate
elements of experience into one coherent picture. This is apparent in the most
extraordinary manner in 'Kubla Khan':

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Coleridge's imagination has created a make-believe, alternate world. While

Wordsworth limits himself to his own experiences and the materials of everyday
life, Coleridge leaps into a fantasy world. And powerfully so: there is something
magical about Coleridge's vision, and the intense and exotic manner in which
Xanadu is created. But this is more than a poem of escape. Indeed, one reason why
the poem works so well is that there is always a tension between the dream and
reality, with dark notes of anxiety and military confrontation intruding into the

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perfect vision. 'Kubla Khan' reaches after totality, but we are also aware of the
unreality, and even frightening quality, of Coleridge's vision.

Not all of Coleridge's poems are so exotic. As is the case with Wordsworth,
Coleridge often turns to nature, and writes of how imagination can perceive a sense
of harmony in the natural scene. In his 'conversation poems', however, such as
'Frost at Midnight' (1802), Coleridge's most common theme is the inability of his
imagination to sustain itself. There are lines in the poem where a vision of
something that transcends the untidiness of daily life is offered to the reader, but
the most emphatic stress is on how Coleridge cannot make the move he craves
from fragmented, and troubling, reality to a coherent vision. If Wordsworth's most
consistent theme as a poet is a questioning of his own imagination, Coleridge's is
the failure of his imagination.

Coleridge’s poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for

granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult’s reconnection
with nature through memories of childhood; in poems such as “Frost at Midnight,”
Coleridge indicates the fragility of the child’s innocence by relating his own urban
childhood. In poems such as “Dejection: An Ode” and “Nightingale,” he stresses
the division between his own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally,
Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace,
rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the “thousand thousand slimy things”
that crawl upon the rotting sea in the “Rime” would be out of place in a
Wordsworth poem.

If Wordsworth represents the central pillar of early Romanticism, Coleridge

is nevertheless an important structural support. His emphasis on the imagination,
its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such

57
as those found in the “Rime,” exerted a profound influence on later writers such as
Shelley; his depiction of feelings of alienation and numbness helped to define more
sharply the Romantics’ idealized contrast between the emptiness of the city—
where such feelings are experienced—and the joys of nature. The heightened
understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering
Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the
idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for
Coleridge in his poetry.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Coleridge’s Poetry

Themes

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for
transcending unpleasant circumstances. Many of his poems are powered
exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein the speaker temporarily abandons his
immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an entirely new and completely
fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this way is both empowering and
surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the confines of
time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded.
Perhaps Coleridge’s most famous use of imagination occurs in “This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison” (1797), in which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that
allows him to take part in a journey that he cannot physically make. When he
“returns” to the bower, after having imagined himself on a fantastic stroll through
the countryside, the speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty of things to enjoy from

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inside the bower itself, including the leaves, the trees, and the shadows. The power
of imagination transforms the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot.

THE INTERPLAY OF PHILOSOPHY, PIETY, AND POETRY

Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious
piety. Some critics argue that Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was simply his
attempt to understand the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his
poetry. To support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces were, in
fact, organic and derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked them to God,
spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry, philosophy, and piety
clashed, creating friction and disorder for Coleridge, both on and off the page. In
“The Eolian Harp” (1795), Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here,
the speaker’s philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an “intellectual
breeze” (47) brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness, collide
with those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and
urges him to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker agonizes over his
spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique, individual spirituality
that equates nature with God. The poem ends by discounting the pantheist spirit,
and the speaker concludes by privileging God and Christ over nature and praising
them for having healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these
unorthodox views.

NATURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered,

imaginative soul of youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it.
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According to their formulation, experiencing nature was an integral part of the
development of a complete soul and sense of personhood. The death of his father
forced Coleridge to attend school in London, far away from the rural idylls of his
youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered, city-bound
adolescence in many poems, including “Frost at Midnight” (1798). Here, the
speaker sits quietly by a fire, musing on his life, while his infant son sleeps nearby.
He recalls his boarding school days, during which he would both daydream and
lull himself to sleep by remembering his home far away from the city, and he tells
his son that he shall never be removed from nature, the way the speaker once was.
Unlike the speaker, the son shall experience the seasons and shall learn about God
by discovering the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given
the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity
denied to both the speaker and Coleridge himself. For Coleridge, nature had the
capacity to teach joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy,
developed individual.
Motifs

CONVERSATION POEMS

Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his
poetry. Many of his poems openly address a single figure—the speaker’s wife, son,
friend, and so on—who listens silently to the simple, straightforward language of
the speaker. Unlike the descriptive, long, digressive poems of Coleridge’s classicist
predecessors, Coleridge’s so-called conversation poems are short, self-contained,
and often without a discernable poetic form. Colloquial, spontaneous, and friendly,
Coleridge’s conversation poetry is also highly personal, frequently incorporating
events and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen the scope of possible
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poetic content. Although he sometimes wrote in blank verse, unrhymed iambic
pentameter, he adapted this metrical form to suit a more colloquial rhythm. Both
Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that everyday language and speech rhythms
would help broaden poetry’s audience to include the middle and lower classes,
who might have felt excluded or put off by the form and content of neoclassicists,
such as Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Dryden.

DELIGHT IN THE NATURAL WORLD

Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized poetry’s
capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. Nearly all of Coleridge’s
poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close observation, great
attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly demonstrate Coleridge’s
respect and delight. Some poems, such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,”
“Youth and Age” (1834), and “Frost at Midnight,” mourn the speakers’ physical
isolation from the outside world. Others, including “The Eolian Harp,” use images
of nature to explore philosophical and analytical ideas. Still other poems, including
“The Nightingale” (ca. 1798), simply praise nature’s beauty. Even poems that
don’t directly deal with nature, including “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” derive some symbols and images from nature. Nevertheless,
Coleridge guarded against the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling
to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature contained an innate, constant joyousness
wholly separate from the ups and downs of human experience.

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Symbols

THE SUN

Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of
expressing deep religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of
God. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge compares the sun to “God’s
own head” (97) and, later, attributes the first phase of the mariner’s punishment to
the sun, as it dehydrates the crew. All told, this poem contains eleven references to
the sun, many of which signify the Christian conception of a wrathful, vengeful
God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the day, while smooth sailing
and calm weather occur at night, by the light of the moon. Frequently, the sun
stands in for God’s influence and power, as well as a symbol of his authority. The
setting sun spurs philosophical musings, as in “The Eolian Harp,” and the dancing
rays of sunlight represent a pinnacle of nature’s beauty, as in “This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison.”
THE MOON

Like the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive
connotations than the sun. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the sun and the
moon represent two sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the angry,
wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent, repentant God. All
told, the moon appears fourteen times in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and
generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors that occur
during the day. For example, the mariner’s curse lifts and he returns home by
moonlight. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802) begins with an epitaph about the new
moon and goes on to describe the beauty of a moonlit night, contrasting its beauty

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with the speaker’s sorrowful soul. Similarly, “Frost at Midnight” also praises the
moon as it illuminates icicles on a winter evening and spurs the speaker to great
thought.

DREAMS AND DREAMING

Coleridge explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate the power
of the imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision. “Kubla Khan” is
subtitled “A Vision in a Dream.” According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while
reading and dreamed of a marvelous pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon
awakening, he began transcribing the dream-vision but was soon called away;
when he returned, he wrote out the fragments that now comprise “Kubla Khan.”
Some critics doubt Coleridge’s story, attributing it to an attempt at increasing the
poem’s dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the poem speaks to the imaginative
possibilities of the subconscious. Dreams usually have a pleasurable connotation,
as in “Frost at Midnight.” There, the speaker, lonely and insomniac as a child at
boarding school, comforts himself by imagining and then dreaming of his rural
home. In his real life, however, Coleridge suffered from nightmares so terrible that
sometimes his own screams would wake him, a phenomenon he details in “The
Pains of Sleep.” Opium probably gave Coleridge a sense of well-being that
allowed him to sleep without the threat of nightmares.

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 Coleridge's "Sonnet: To the River Otter" (1793)

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!

How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child!

Summary

The unnamed speaker of this sonnet returns to a brook near his rural birthplace and
reflects on the “sweet scenes of childhood.” Coleridge claims that he has never
forgotten the intricacies of the brook and that as an adult, he can still clearly
picture the brook in his mind. Coleridge further says that recalling such fond
childhood memories of his rural home only make him long more for those years of
carefree innocence.

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Analysis

In “Sonnet: To the River Otter,” Coleridge explores the most familiar

themes in his poetry: the adult’s longing for childhood innocence; the connection
between pastoral life and happiness, particularly childhood happiness; and the
power of the imagination. In the sonnet, the speaker’s imagination transports him
back to his beloved childhood memories and restores his intimacy with nature.

The words "Dear native brook!" (line 1) indicate that the speaker is
remembering a stream near his childhood home, placing the poetic memory
squarely in the halcyon days of youth from the outset. Although "many various-
fated years have past" since he has been near this brook, the speaker still
remembers it clearly and with fondness. He longs for the time he used to skip "the
smooth stone along thy breast" (line 4), connecting the brook to the feminine form
of nature which he sees as both nurturing and alluring. He echoes this sense of
enchantment in lines 12-13, wherein the visions of childhood the brook offers "oft
have...beguiled/Lone manhood's cares." While not necessarily a strong sexual
image, Coleridge still leaves the hint of sexual duality in the male speaker and the
female brook; he also goes another direction, invoking the nurturing spirit of
Nature as mother (although the act of the child skipping stones across the brook's
"breast" seems to indicate that, to the child at least, the femininity of nature is
neither sexual nor maternal, but simply there).

The visions of the speaker's childhood are"so deep imprest" (line 5) that he
cannot close his eyes without vividly replaying a scene from his youth near the
brook within his mind's eye (lines 8-11). What stands out to him are the colors
associated with the brook: the "tints" of the water (line 8), the grey willows along

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the side of the brook (line 9), and the "various dyes" of the sediments that have
collected along the stream bed (line 10). It is the color of childhood that Coleridge
wants to recall, but in all that the only color he actually names, grey, is the color of
old age and melancholy. He realizes that the act of longing for one's childhood is in
itself tinged with despair, for to long for youth is to admit that one no longer
possesses it.

It is important to note that the speaker finds pleasure in the constancy of the
features of the brook. The speaker’s admiration of this constancy could reflect his
own desire that human life could possess such a constancy. During a person’s
lifetime, he or she grows from being “a careless child” into dealing with “many
various-fated years” as an adult.

“Kubla Khan” by Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

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With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

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Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

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 A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

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For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Summary

The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according

to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran
“through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers
were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful
gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a green hill,
occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it
flung boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.” The river ran five miles through
the woods, finally sinking “in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” Amid that tumult, in the
place “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By
woman wailing to her demon-lover,” Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing
prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated on the waves, where the
mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a miracle of
rare device,” the speaker says, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an

Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.” He says
that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the
pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His
flashing eyes, his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close
their eyes with “holy dread,” knowing that he had tasted honeydew, “and drunk the
milk of Paradise.”

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 Form

The chant-like, musical incantations of “Kubla Khan” result from

Coleridge’s masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The
first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE,
alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands
into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming pattern, also expanded—
ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJJ. The third stanza tightens into tetrameter and rhymes
ABABCC. The fourth stanza continues the tetrameter of the third and rhymes
ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG.

Commentary and Analysis

Along with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan” is one of
Coleridge’s most famous and enduring poems. The story of its composition is also
one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explains in the
short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne”
prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition” (this is a euphemism for opium,
to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). Before falling asleep, he had been
reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace;
Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed
simultaneously—while sleeping—some two or three hundred lines of poetry, “if
that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him
as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any
sensation or conscious effort.”

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 Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing
furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt
poem—the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it—he was
interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” who detained him for an hour.
After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he
had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem,
thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the “damsel with a
dulcimer” and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious
person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in
Coleridge’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or
what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true. But
the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the
world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and “Kubla Khan,” strange and
ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the
obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius.

Regrettably, the story of the poem’s composition, while thematically rich in

and of itself, often overshadows the poem proper, which is one of Coleridge’s most
haunting and beautiful. The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination:
The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is not a useful metaphor for anything in
particular (though in the context of the poem’s history, it becomes a metaphor for
the unbuilt monument of imagination); however, it is a fantastically prodigious
descriptive act. The poem becomes especially evocative when, after the second
stanza, the meter suddenly tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost
beating out the sound of the war drums (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure /
Floated midway on the waves...”).

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 The fourth stanza states the theme of the poem as a whole (though “Kubla
Khan” is almost impossible to consider as a unified whole, as its parts are so
sharply divided). The speaker says that he once had a vision of the damsel singing
of Mount Abora; this vision becomes a metaphor for Coleridge’s vision of the 300-
hundred-line masterpiece he never completed. The speaker insists that if he could
only “revive” within him “her symphony and song,” he would recreate the
pleasure-dome out of music and words, and take on the persona of the magician or
visionary. His hearers would recognize the dangerous power of the vision, which
would manifest itself in his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” But, awestruck,
they would nonetheless dutifully take part in the ritual, recognizing that “he on
honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

A recurring motif throughout Coleridge’s poetry is the power of dreams and

of the imagination, such as in “Frost at Midnight,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and
“Christabel.” In “Discovery and the Domestic Affections in Coleridge and
Shelley,” Michelle Levy explains that Coleridge’s “fascination with the unknown
reflects a larger cultural obsession of the Romantic period” (694).
Perhaps the most fantastical world created by Coleridge lies in “Kubla
Khan.” The legendary story behind the poem is that Coleridge wrote the poem
following an opium-influenced dream. In this particular poem, Coleridge seems to
explore the depths of dreams and creates landscapes that could not exist in reality.
The “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” exemplifies the extreme fantasy of
the world in which Kubla Khan lives.

Similar to several of Coleridge’s other poems, the speaker’s admiration of

the wonders of nature is present in “Kubla Khan.” Yet what is striking and

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somewhat different about the portrayal of nature in this particular poem is the
depiction of the dangerous and threatening aspects of nature.

In “Secret(ing) Conversations: Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Bruce Lawder

highlights the significance of Coleridge’s use of a feminine rhyme scheme in the
above stanza, in which the last two syllables of the lines rhyme (such as “seething”
and “breathing”). Lawder notes that “the male force of the ‘sacred river’ literally
interrupts, and puts an end to, the seven successive feminine endings that begin the
second verse paragraph” (80). This juxtaposition of female forces versus male
forces parallels the juxtaposition of Coleridge’s typical pleasant descriptions of
nature versus this poem’s unpleasant descriptions. In most of Coleridge’s works,
nature represents a nurturing presence. However, in “Kubla Khan,” nature is
characterized by a rough, dangerous terrain that can only be tamed by a male
explorer such as Kubla Khan.

The last stanza of the poem was added later, and is not a direct product of
Coleridge's opium-dream. In it the speaker longs to re-create the pleasured-dome
of Kubla Khan "in air," perhaps either in poetry, or in a way surpassing the
miraculous work of Kubla Khan himself. The speaker's identity melds with that of
Kubla Khan, as he envisions himself being spoken of by everyone around, warning
one another to "Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!" Kubla
Khan/the speaker becomes a figure of superstition, around whom those who would
remain safe should "Weave a circle[...] thrice" to ward off his power. Coleridge
conflates the near-mythic figure of Kubla Khan manipulating the natural world
physically, with the figure of the poet manipulating the world "in air" through the
power of his words. In either case, the creative figure becomes a source of awe,
wonder, and terror combined.
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 A Broken Friendship - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alas! they had been friends in youth;

But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus is chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother:
They parted - ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from painting -
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary see now flows between; -
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been

Sonnet Xxi. - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Pensive, at eve, on the hard world I mused,

And my poor heart was sad: so at the Moon
I gazed--and sighed, and sighed--for, ah! how soon
Eve saddens into night! Mine eyes perused,

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With tearful vacancy, the dampy grass,
That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray,
And I did pause me on my lonely way,
And mused me on the wretched ones, who pass
O'er the black heath of Sorrow. But, alas!
Most of myself I thought: when it befell,
That the sooth Spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear--'All this is very well;
But much of one thing is for no thing good.'
Ah! my poor heart's inexplicable swell!

Sonnet Xxii. To Simplicity - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

O! I do love thee, meek Simplicity!

For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress--
Distress tho' small, yet haply great to me!
'Tis true, on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; yet tho' I know not why,
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Grow cool and miff, O! I am very sad!
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general:
But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity.

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 Sonnet III. - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thou gentle Look, that didst my soul beguile,

Why hast thou left me? Still in some fond dream
Revisit my sad heart, auspicious Smile!
As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam:
What time, in sickly mood, at parting day
I lay me down and think of happier years;
Of joys, that glimmered in Hope's twilight ray,
Then left me darkling in a vale of tears.
O pleasant days of Hope -- forever flown!
Could I recall you!-- But that thought is vain.
Availeth not Persuasion's sweetest tone
To lure the fleet-winged travellers back again:
Yet fair, tho' faint, their images shall gleam
Like the bright Rainbow on an evening stream.

Sonnet Xix. To A Friend, Who Asked How I Felt When The Nurse First
Presented My Infant To Me - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Charles! my slow heart was only sad, when first

I scanned that face of feeble infancy;
For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst
All I had been, and all my babe might be!
But when I saw it on its Mother's arm,
And hanging at her bosom (she the while
Bent o'er its features with a tearful smile),
Then I was thrilled and melted, and most warm

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Impressed a Father's kiss: and all beguiled
Of dark remembrance, and presageful fear,
I seemed to see an Angel's form appear--
'Twas even thine, beloved Woman mild!
So for the Mother's sake the Child was dear,
And dearer was the Mother for the Child.

Sonnet VIII. To Mercy - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Not always should the tear's ambrosial dew

Roll its soft anguish down thy furrowed cheek!
Not always heaven-breathed tones of suppliance meek
Beseem thee, Mercy! Yon dark Scowler view,
Who with proud words of dear-loved Freedom came--
More blasting than the mildew from the south!
And kissed his country with Iscariot mouth;
(Ah! foul apostate from his Father's fame!)
Then fixed her on the cross of deep distress,
And at safe distance marks the thirsty lance
Pierce her big side! But oh! if some strange trance
The eye-lids of thy stern-browed Sister press,
Seize, Mercy! thou more terrible the brand,
And hurl her thunderbolts with fiercer hand!

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 Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) had himself a fertile lyrical gift. The
central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that
defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s
era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the
imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his
philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and
articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of
Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and
responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary
capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of
realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of
darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the
monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing
that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.
Shelley’s intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in
poems such as “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he invokes
metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his
aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in
which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues,
exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of
sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into
the position of another person. He writes,

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he

must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and

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pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good
is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with
thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating
to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty
which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise
strengthens a limb.

No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the

connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of
art’s sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron’s pose was one of amoral
sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and
aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes
people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral
optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and
morally, all at the same time.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Shelley’s poetry

Themes

THE HEROIC, VISIONARY ROLE OF THE POET

In Shelley’s poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of
Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist
but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for
nature, as in the poem “To Wordsworth” (1816), and this intense connection with
the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in “Alastor; or,
The Spirit of Solitude” (1816). He has the power—and the duty—to translate these
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truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry
that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and
through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to
bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelley’s poet is a near-divine
savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in
Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets
in Shelley’s work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power
isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because
they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by
conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet
triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government,
religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.

THE POWER OF NATURE

Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley

demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely
connected to nature’s power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic
interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through
everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems,
describing it as the “spirit of beauty” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and
identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in “Mont Blanc.” This force is
the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source
of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force
can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley
simultaneously recognizes that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature
destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and

81
indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelley’s delight in nature is mitigated by an
awareness of its dark side.

THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND

Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such

poems as “The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at
Manchester” (1819) and “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley suggests that the natural
world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come
from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s
beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over
Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative
power over nature. It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory
perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which
help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of
the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of
beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver
and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he
senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to
attribute nature’s power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages
Shelley’s ability to believe that nature’s beauty comes solely from a divine source.

Motifs

AUTUMN

Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn, including “Hymn to Intellectual

Beauty” and “Ode to the West Wind.” Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it
shows both the creative and destructive powers of nature, a favorite Shelley theme.
As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelley’s vision of political
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and social revolution. In “Ode to the West Wind,” autumn’s brilliant colors and
violent winds emphasize the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay
and death inherent in the season suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-
like poet.

GHOSTS AND SPIRITS

Shelley’s interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The

ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond
the one in which we live. In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” the speaker searches
for ghosts and explains that ghosts are one of the ways men have tried to interpret
the world beyond. The speaker of “Mont Blanc” encounters ghosts and shadows of
real natural objects in the cave of “Poesy.” Ghosts are inadequate in both poems:
the speaker finds no ghosts in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and the ghosts of
Poesy in “Mont Blanc” are not the real thing, a discovery that emphasizes the
elusiveness and mystery of supernatural forces.

Symbols

MONT BLANC

For Shelley, Mont Blanc—the highest peak in the Alps—represents the

eternal power of nature. Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an
idea he explores in “Mont Blanc.” The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but
its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying. Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders
if the mountain’s power might be meaningless, an invention of the more powerful
human imagination.

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 THE WEST WIND

Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the
imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is
active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the West Wind.” While Mont Blanc
is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change. Even as it destroys, the wind
encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.

THE STATUE OF OZYMANDIAS

In Shelley’s work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or
Ozymandias, symbolizes political tyranny. In “Ozymandias,” (1817) the statue is
broken into pieces and stranded in an empty desert, which suggests that tyranny is
temporary and also that no political leader, particularly an unjust one, can hope to
have lasting power or real influence. The broken monument also represents the
decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after all, a human construction, a
piece of art made by a creator, and now it—and its creator—have been destroyed,
as all living things are eventually destroyed.

“Ozymandias” by Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

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The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Summary

The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told
him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast
legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head
lies “half sunk” in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer
of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well
the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions
survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his
subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My
name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and
level sands,” which stretch out around it.

Form

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic

pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it
does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a

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term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six
lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form
ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Commentary and Analysis

This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most
anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many
ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most
important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination).
Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single
metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant,
passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty,
and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved;
Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all
has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of
history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a
powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of
time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of
political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political
sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing
impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political
power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in
any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a
work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley
demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

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 Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the
subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the
sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables
Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to
the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear
about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the
ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative
serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of
time. Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure
of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face
itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are
introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man
sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now
inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete,
and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on
my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary
picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘Look on
my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay /
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far
away.”

"Ozymandias" is a fourteen-line, iambic pentameter sonnet. It is not a

traditional one, however. Although it is neither a Petrarchan sonnet nor a
Shakespearean sonnet, the rhyming scheme and style resemble a Petrarchan sonnet
more, particularly with its 8-6 structure rather than 4-4-4-2.

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 Here we have a speaker learning from a traveler about a giant, ruined statue
that lay broken and eroded in the desert. The title of the poem informs the reader
that the subject is the 13th-century B.C. Egyptian King Ramses II, whom the
Greeks called “Ozymandias.” The traveler describes the great work of the sculptor,
who was able to capture the king’s “passions” and give meaningful expression to
the stone, an otherwise “lifeless thing.” The “mocking hand” in line 8 is that of the
sculptor, who had the artistic ability to “mock” (that is, both imitate and deride) the
passions of the king. The “heart” is first of all the king’s, which “fed” the
sculptor’s passions, and in turn the sculptor’s, sympathetically recapturing the
king’s passions in the stone.

The final five lines mock the inscription hammered into the pedestal of the
statue. The original inscription read “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings; if anyone
wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my
exploits.” The idea was that he was too powerful for even the common king to
relate to him; even a mighty king should despair at matching his power. That
principle may well remain valid, but it is undercut by the plain fact that even an
empire is a human creation that will one day pass away. The statue and
surrounding desert constitute a metaphor for invented power in the face of natural
power. By Shelley’s time, nothing remains but a shattered bust, eroded “visage,”
and “trunkless legs” surrounded with “nothing” but “level sands” that “stretch far
away.” Shelley thus points out human mortality and the fate of artificial things.

The lesson is important in Europe: France’s hegemony has ended, and

England’s will end sooner or later. Everything about the king’s “exploits” is now
gone, and all that remains of the dominating civilization are shattered “stones”

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alone in the desert. Note the use of alliteration to emphasize the point: “boundless
and bare”; “lone and level.”

It is important to keep in mind the point of view of “Ozymandias.” The

perspective on the statue is coming from an unknown traveler who is telling the
speaker about the scene. This helps create a sense of the mystery of history and
legend: we are getting the story from a poet who heard it from a traveler who
might or might not have actually seen the statue. The statue itself is an expression
of the sculptor, who might or might not have truly captured the passions of the
king. Our best access to the king himself is not the statue, not anything physical,
but the king’s own words.

Poetry might last in a way that other human creations cannot. Yet,
communicating words presents a different set of problems. For one thing, there are
problems of translation, for the king did not write in English. More seriously, there
are problems of transcription, for apparently Shelley’s poem does not even
accurately reproduce the words of the inscription.

Finally, we cannot miss the general comment on human vanity in the poem.
It is not just the “mighty” who desire to withstand time; it is common for people to
seek immortality and to resist death and decay. Furthermore, the sculptor himself
gets attention and praise that used to be deserved by the king, for all that
Ozymandias achieved has now “decayed” into almost nothing, while the sculpture
has lasted long enough to make it into poetry. In a way, the artist has become more
powerful than the king. The only things that “survive” are the artist’s records of the
king’s passion, carved into the stone.

Perhaps Shelley chose the medium of poetry in order to create something

more powerful and lasting than what politics could achieve, all the while
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understanding that words too will eventually pass away. Unlike many of his
poems, “Ozymandias” does not end on a note of hope. There is no extra stanza or
concluding couplet to honor the fleeting joys of knowledge or to hope in human
progress. Instead, the traveler has nothing more to say, and the persona draws no
conclusions of his own.

“England in 1819” by Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

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 Summary

The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is “old, mad,
blind, despised, and dying.” The princes are “the dregs of their dull race,” and flow
through public scorn like mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their people,
clinging like leeches to their country until they “drop, blind in blood, without a
blow.” The English populace are “starved and stabbed” in untilled fields; the army
is corrupted by “liberticide and prey”; the laws “tempt and slay”; religion is
Christless and Godless, “a book sealed”; and the English Senate is like “Time’s
worst statute unrepealed.” Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave
from which “a glorious Phantom” may burst to illuminate “our tempestuous day.”

Form

“England in 1819” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic

pentameter. Like many of Shelley’s sonnets, it does not fit the rhyming patterns
one might expect from a nineteenth-century sonnet; instead, the traditional
Petrarchan division between the first eight lines and the final six lines is
disregarded, so that certain rhymes appear in both sections:
ABABABCDCDCCDD. In fact, the rhyme scheme of this sonnet turns an accepted
Petrarchan form upside-down, as does the thematic structure, at least to a certain
extent: the first six lines deal with England’s rulers, the king and the princes, and
the final eight deal with everyone else. The sonnet’s structure is out of joint, just as
the sonnet proclaims England to be.

Commentary and Analysis

For all his commitment to romantic ideals of love and beauty, Shelley was
also concerned with the real world: he was a fierce denouncer of political power
and a passionate advocate for liberty. The result of his political commitment was a
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series of angry political poems condemning the arrogance of power, including
“Ozymandias” and “England in 1819.” Like Wordsworth’s “London, 1802,”
“England in 1819” bitterly lists the flaws in England’s social fabric: in order, King
George is “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying”; the nobility (“princes”) are
insensible leeches draining their country dry; the people are oppressed, hungry, and
hopeless, their fields untilled; the army is corrupt and dangerous to its own people;
the laws are useless, religion has become morally degenerate, and Parliament (“A
Senate”) is “Time’s worst statute unrepealed.” The furious, violent metaphors
Shelley employs throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy water, the army
as a two-edged sword, religion as a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law) leave
no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation. Then, surprisingly, the final
couplet concludes with a note of passionate Shelleyean optimism: from these
“graves” a “glorious Phantom” may “burst to illumine our tempestuous day.” What
this Phantom might be is not specified in the poem, but it seems to hint
simultaneously at the Spirit of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and at the
possibility of liberty won through revolution, as it was won in France. (It also
recalls Wordsworth’s invocation of the spirit of John Milton to save England in the
older poet’s poem, though that connection may be unintentional on Shelley’s part;
both Wordsworth and Shelley long for an apocalyptic deus ex machina to save
their country, but Shelley is certainly not summoning John Milton.)

Another example of Shelley’s devotion to liberty and equality and his radical
denouncement of tyranny and power, The sonnet “England in 1819” directly
attacks the King and his successor, his son. The current King has gone mad in old
age and is hated by the people of England. The problem is, under the current
system the only thing to replace him with, when he dies, is a continuing monarchy

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under the King’s son, who is not expected to improve matters for England. Shelley
accuses the monarchy of having no true human emotion, relying on the labor of the
country’s poor to provide for the ruling class, at least until the common people are
killed for no reason by their own army, which they live to provide for and serve.

The speaker thus has no faith left in the leading institutions in England; he
condemns the army, the law, religion, and the senate. The speaker goes into detail
over the troubles in England: the madness and blindness of the King; the muddied
genetic line that includes the Prince; the ignorance of the nation’s “Rulers”; and the
tired and hungry masses. Shelley also alludes again to the Peterloo Massacre (see
“The Mask of Anarchy”), calling the people “stabbed in an untilled field.”

His disgust with the state of the nation is deepened with his use of imagery
and metaphor (“dregs,” “muddy,” “leeches,” “blood,” “sanguine”). The ruling
classes are figured as blood-sucking leeches who are mainly parasites on the
people. The army is needed, yet it has turned against the people; similarly the laws
are a “two-edged” sword, and even the religion of the rulers is “Christless” and a
tool of oppression instead of its opposite.

Still, as Shelley often does, the poet ends in optimism. The last two lines
optimistically yearn for revolution. Despite all of these corrupt establishments
throughout the land, there is a chance the people will rise up and a revolution of
illumination (signifying reason) will calm the anarchic tempests of the ruling class.
The “glorious Phantom” of line 13 is, we know from other poems, something like
the recovery of reason and understanding, the basis for a revolution that will
revitalize the best old traditions and institutions of England on a new basis of
rationality and appreciation for nature.

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 This sonnet uses an ababab rhyme scheme in the first six lines, followed by
cdcdccdd in the final octet. There is no clear break between the two parts of the
poem, however, for the whole poem is a single sentence. There is not even a break
between the pessimistic first 12 and a half lines and the final optimistic one and a
half lines. It is one complete thought about the state of England in 1819. If there is
to be revolution, it will occur later; the phantom of enlightenment has not yet
arrived among the people.

“The Indian Serenade” by Shelley

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odours fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

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The Nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must on thine,

Oh, belovèd as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

Summary

Addressing his beloved, the speaker says that he arises from “dreams of thee
/ In the first sweet sleep of night, / When the winds are breathing low, / And the
stars are shining bright.” He says that “a spirit in my feet” has led him—”who
knows how?”—to his beloved’s chamber-window. Outside, in the night, the
“wandering airs” faint upon the stream, “the Champak odours fail / Like sweet
thoughts in a dream,” and the nightingale’s complaint” dies upon her heart—as the
speaker says he must die upon his beloved’s heart. Overwhelmed with emotion, he

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falls to the ground (“I die, I faint, I fail!”), and implores his beloved to lift him
from the grass, and to rain kisses upon his lips and eyelids. He says that his cheek
is cold and white, and his heart is loud and fast: he pleads, “Oh! press it to thine
own again, / Where it will break at last.”

Form

The trancelike, enchanting rhythm of this lovely lyric results from the poet’s
use of a loose pattern of regular dimeters that employ variously trochaic, anapestic,
and iambic stresses. The rhyme scheme is tighter than the poem’s rhythm, forming
a consistent ABCBADCD pattern in each of the three stanzas.

Commentary and Analysis

This charming short lyric is one of Shelley’s finest, simplest, and most
exemplary love poems. It tells a simple story of a speaker who wakes, walks
through the beautiful Indian night to his beloved’s window, then falls to the
ground, fainting and overcome with emotion. The lush sensual language of the
poem evokes an atmosphere of nineteenth-century exoticism and Orientalism, with
the “Champak odours” failing as “The wandering airs they faint / On the dark, the
silent stream,” as “the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright.”
The poet employs a subtle tension between the speaker’s world of inner feeling and
the beautiful outside world; this tension serves to motivate the poem, as the inner
dream gives way to the journey, imbuing “a spirit in my feet”; then the outer world
becomes a mold or model for the speaker’s inner feeling (“The nightingale’s
complaint / It dies upon her heart, / As I must die on thine...”), and at that moment
the speaker is overwhelmed by his powerful emotions, which overcome his body:
“My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast...”

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 In this sense “The Indian Serenade” mixes the sensuous, rapturous
aestheticism of a certain kind of Romantic love poem (of Keats, for example) with
the transcendental emotionalism of another kind of Romantic love poem (often
represented by Coleridge). The beautiful landscape of fainting airs and low-
breathing winds acts upon the poet’s agitated, dreamy emotions to overwhelm him
in both the aesthetic and emotional realm—both the physical, outer world and the
spiritual, inner world—and his body is helpless to resist the resultant thunderclap:
“I die! I faint! I fail!”

The first thing to address is the speaker’s voice. Is the speaker male or
female? Arguments have been made on both sides. There is not a lot to go on;
recall that Shelley was also something of a nonconformist when it came to sexual
practices both in and out of marriage. The evidence seems to weigh on the side of
the speaker being female. There is a comparison to a female nightingale (“it dies
upon her heart”), although the nightingale is a general symbol for poets, who
usually were male. Taking a traditional view of gender, moreover, note the tone of
submissiveness and helplessness, even though this is the way a male lover would
also feel about his beloved. The question is open, but let us call the speaker “she”
for now.

This young Indian girl wakes from dreaming about her lover, finding a
mysterious “spirit” in her feet, which causes her to wander to her lover’s window.
She is overcome with love for her mate, comparing herself with the song of the
saddened nightingale, and she collapses outside of his window, imploring him to
come out and rescue her, to lift her up and hold her close to him, saving her from
her lovesickness.

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 This love poem is a break from Shelley’s more contemporary themes of
revolution, nature, and philosophy. Mimicking what was seen as an oriental style
of love poems, Shelley enters the poetic world inspired by love and desire. Setting
the aromatic scene with “Champrak [pine] odours” and the dreamy night with
“winds that are breathing low” and “stars that are shining bright,” Shelley sets a
mood much different from what we are used to in Shelley’s poetry.

Thus, should we expect that the whole poem is a metaphor? In “A Defense

of Poetry,” Shelley describes a poet as a nightingale: “A poet is a nightingale who
sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors
are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are
moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.” This description of the poet
suggests that, as we are used to thinking, the first-person persona of the poem is a
stand-in for Shelley himself. If Shelley is the lover, who is the beloved? For
Shelley as poet, the beloved is usually nature or nature’s spirit or the spirit of
reason. But we know almost nothing of the beloved. The beloved has a “chamber
window” and has some ability to come out to save the speaker, lift him/her up, and
kiss him/her, and the beloved seems to have its own “heart,” but otherwise the
beloved is completely unknown. The lover, however, experiences the beloved in
his/her imagination and dreams.

There is still a case to be made, at any rate, that this is not meant to be a
thoughtful poem. It could be a bawdy poem disguised in romantic sentiments,
especially considering the traditional pun of “dying” meaning sexual climax.
Shelley was known for his ribald temperament, and the third stanza of this poem
could be interpreted as a description of the fervor of lovemaking. Perhaps the

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“chamber window” and the “grass” refer to the female anatomy, and when the poet
“arises” in the first stanza it is a reference to the male anatomy.

“A Dirge” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches strain,

Deep caves and dreary main--

Wail, for the world's wrong!

Summary and Analysis of "A Dirge"

Themes of isolation, loneliness, and death characterize this eight-line poem.

The wind moans in grief beyond words; the storm rains in vain; the trees are bare
and straining under their own weight. The world is all caves and gloom, all wrong!

Analysis

A dirge is a song that is sung at a funeral. The speaker piles one image of
nature upon another to describe the grief he feels, including the moaning and wild
wind, the sullen clouds, the sad storm, the bare woods, the deep caves, and the
dreary main. Note that the speaker is anthropomorphizing his surroundings to
express his grief, and almost all of the nouns are anthropomorphized via sad and

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gloomy adjectives. Put all together, the poet expresses the frustration of feeling
that the whole world is “wrong” and is grieving its own sorry state.

It is normally assumed that in this poem Shelley is mourning both the death
of Keats and the death of his son William, who was buried in the same place in
Rome as Keats. The untimely death of Keats reopened the floodgates of emotion
for Shelley, inevitably leading him to revisit the sadness and pain he felt for the
death of his infant boy.

The rhyme scheme of these eight lines is abab cccd. The triplet of
vain/strain/main in the second half of the poem adds to the sense of the piling up of
emotions. It also has the effect of slowing down the poem.

The second line, “Grief too sad for song,” is a common poetic trick—stating
that the emotion is so strong that it cannot be put into words. Here, the emotion is
grief, an uncommon emotion in Shelley’s poems, despite the sadness he often felt
in life. In his more “political” poems, Shelley has answers: rise up against the
oppressor, turn to reason, appreciate life for what it is. Here, nature itself is
profoundly disturbed and is no solace. Indeed, the whole world is “wrong.”

The last line, “Wail, for the world’s wrong!” is thus the one source of hope,
despite everything. The world itself has not been wrong before; nature has always
been greater than man and beyond understanding, yet approachable enough to
understand. Here, nature is grieving with him, so if the world is wrong, so is he,
and the answer seems to be that eventually, both nature and the poet need to stop
moaning and mourning. If he knows what is wrong, he must also know that there is
something somewhere that is right, and we know from Shelley’s other poems that
he has a lot of ideas about how to seek out what is right and good.

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 “Mutability” by Shelley

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings

Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;

We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,

The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Summary and Analysis of "Mutability"

A first-person poetic persona compares people to restless clouds. Clouds

speed brightly across the sky but disappear at night, presumably like a human life.
The persona then compares people to lyres, stringed instruments, that are always
playing different tunes based on different experiences. The persona then complains

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that whether we are asleep or awake, a bad dream or a “wandering thought”
interferes with our happiness. Whatever we think, however we feel, “It is the
same,” meaning that all will pass away and people will change. Thus, the one thing
that endures is “Mutability.”

Analysis

In typical Romantic fashion, Shelley immediately places humans in the same

physical realm as nature, opening with “We are as clouds.” Immediately following,
however, Shelley focuses on human agency and compares humans to things
invented, this time using the simile “like forgotten lyres.” (A lyre is a musical
instrument, a Greek wind harp.) The purpose of the two comparisons is to
emphasize the eternal human condition of change, in other words, to be mutable.
This is both a natural condition, such as the clouds that are one minute here and the
next minute there, “restlessly speeding, gleaming, quivering, and streaking across
the dark night” only to be soon thereafter “lost for ever,” on the one hand, and a
human-caused phenomenon, such as a lyre, “whose strings give a various response
to various blasts” and on which no new “modulation sounds like the last.” The
point is that all things, natural or created, are always changing. Nothing is constant.

We can recognize early on that the poetic form of “Mutability” is a lyric, a

poem that is “brief and discontinuous, emphasizing sound and pictorial imagery
rather than narrative or dramatic movement” (Frye 268). In “lyrical poetry”
generally, the poet is speaking to himself, musing, or asking rhetorical questions to
an unknown third party, not necessarily addressing the reader. Finally, the lyric
usually takes the form of the rhyming couplet, with an abab cdcd efef ... pattern,
just as Shelley does here (moon/quiver/soon/ever ...). Shelley uses the similes to
draw us into the natural and artificial worlds (“We are as clouds”; “Or like

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forgotten lyres). This poetic technique is quite common among Romantic poets.
Romantics both before Shelley (such as Wordsworth and Coleridge) and after him
(Keats) used the same lyrical style and imagery with natural similes to describe
people’s place in the universe.

In the third stanza, Shelley introduces a third dimension to his argument—

human thought and emotion. Whether our thoughts occur during sleep (“we rest”)
or while we are awake (“we rise”), our thoughts, too, are forever changing. Change
is not good or bad for its own sake; Shelley notes that a dream has the “power to
poison our sleep” just as “a wandering thought pollutes the day,” yet our thoughts
and emotions also can lead us to “laugh” or “cast our cares away.” In some of these
mental states, we have no control over the forever changing mutability of our
mind, but in others, we make our own change.

In the final stanza, Shelley makes thoughts and emotions “free,” suggesting
a political dimension to the poem. It helps to keep in mind the historical context of
the poem. The French Revolution was probably the most significant event to hit
Europe in over one hundred years. Not only did it change the political contours of
Europe, but it also led European societies outside of France to re-evaluate their
own political systems, and it inspired interest in overcoming tyranny. Shelley
chooses to rhyme “morrow” with “sorrow,” suggesting that despite the sorrows of
today, there will be a brighter future tomorrow, for all things do eventually change:
“Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow.” In this sense, in politics just as
within a person’s own mind, looking for eternal stasis and sustainability is a lost
cause.

Another way to analyze “Mutability” is to look at what Shelley is suggesting

about the human condition of narcissism and vanity. The first stanza suggests the

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theme of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ since the clouds are “lost forever” once they
pass out of our sight. Similarly, notice how the lyre is “forgotten.” If nobody is
playing it, the sound is gone and the instrument is forgotten. This has sometimes
been interpreted as Shelley saying that people are only as real and “responsive” as
the musician who plays us, in other words susceptible to some higher being who
toys with our “strings” (compare Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Do you think I am easier
to be play’d upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, thou you fret me,
you cannot play upon me,” III.ii.369-72). Yet, we humans play on our own strings
and on one another’s strings, so no higher power need be invoked here. The point
is that like clouds and instruments, people are easily forgotten when they stop
making change or doing anything significant in the world—especially once they
die and pass away into night.

The tone, mood, and point of view in Mutability are up for debate. While
some find the speaker to be pessimistic about change, focusing on the way it
interrupts what is good (like the excesses of the French Revolution), others find the
speaker optimistic, coming to terms with the forever changing state of the universe
and finding the human ability at least to make sense of a world that changes.

“Love’s Philosophy” by Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,

And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
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In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,

And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

Overall Meaning
The narrator sees all these examples of love and how nature is natural and its
natural for things such as mountains kissing the heavens or fountains mingling
with rivers. But for some reason this girl wont be with him. Hes trying to convince
her to be with him.
Analysis of Percy Shelleys "Love's Philosophy" by Tray Robbins
First Stanza Meaning
In the First paragraph Shelley talks about how all these things in nature mingle or
mix together.
Its a "sweet emotion" and "divine law"
Since all these things in nature mix why wont you miongle or mix with me
First Stanza Literary Devices
Personification- Fountains cant mingle with the river, and its not a sweet emotion
Imagery-nature, oceans, sweet emotion

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Repetition-mingle
Rhetorical Question- "Why not I with thine"
Second Stanza Meaning
The second stanza correlates with the first stanza in that it talks about things in
nature mixing together,
And hes saying your disrespecting m by not being with me
And how all these things mixing together mean nothing if im not with you
He is repeating and saying all this things are together, so its just natural for you and
me to be together.
Second Stanza Literary Devices
Personification- Mountains kiss the high heavens, waves clasp one another,
sunlight clasps the earth, moonbeans kiss the sea
Imagery- everything together in nature

“A Lament” by Shelley

O World! O Life! O Time!

On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more -Oh, never more!

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 “Good Night” by Shelley

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill

Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,

Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood --
Then it will be -- good night.

To hearts which near each other move

From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.

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 John Keats

John Keats’s (1795–1821) short life of rich productiveness, terminated by

consumption at the age of twenty-four, added another facet to the figure of
Romantic poethood personified. Wordsworth’s solitary spiritual grandeur,
Coleridge’s drug-fed exoticism, Byron’s volcanic emotional lawlessness, Shelley’s
rapturous idealism, Keats’s poetic priesthood of beauty—these traits combine with
an immense cult of revolutionary ardor on behalf of the uncorruptedly natural and
human, to form the image of the Romantic poet.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm

Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.
So Keats voiced his self-dedication in ‘Sleep and Poetry’, one of the poems
in the volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. A month after its
publication we find him writing to John Reynolds: ‘I find I cannot exist without
Poetry—half the day will not do—the whole of it…’ What gave surest promise of
the future in the 1817 volume was the group of sonnets. Some of them voiced the
young poet’s delight in poetry: ‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’ pays
tribute to Wordsworth; ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’ praises
Milton and Petrarch; and there is also the famous ‘On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer’.
The transience of earthly beauty, joy and love is the theme of ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode on Melancholy’. Over against the
‘weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of human ageing and suffering, the song of the
nightingale outlasts the ‘hungry generations’ and lifts the poet out of himself

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momentarily to share its ecstasy. The Greek urn, ‘unravish’d bride of quietness’,
has a frieze on which men and women are immortalized at their time of beauty and
love, lifted thus above the tormenting and cloying experience of human passion.
The generations waste away, but the work of art will remain, a permanent ‘friend
to man’, testifying that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. And the ‘Melancholy’ ode
shows melancholy present at the heart of all joy in the knowledge that beauty must
die and happiness pass. A less philosophical vein enables the poet to create a rich
texture of sensuous awareness in the ode ‘To Autumn’ and to give himself
acceptingly to the mood of the scene and the season so potently evoked. Here, and
in the haunting verses, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Keats’s strangely
concentrated talent races to a breathtaking level of maturity.
The most obvious thing about Keats is that he is an extremely distinctive
new voice, something that was apparent when an early reviewer referred to him as
a member of the 'Cockney School'. What the modem reader is most likely to notice
is the rich sensuality of Keats's writing, but the fact that this has broader social
implications might not be immediately obvious. The beautiful quality of Keats's
verse is apparent in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

I met a lady in the Meads,

Full beautiful - a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light.

And her eyes were wild.

(II. 13-16)

Keats can be regarded as searching for sources of value, support and

consolation that are different from those inscribed in the dominant religious and

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political systems of his day. In 'Ode to a Nightingale', one of a series of reflective
odes which are Keats's most celebrated and well-loved poems, the poet revels in
the bird's song, indulging himself in feelings of excess. It is as if he escapes from
the real world, until the end of the poem where he re-establishes his awareness of
the everyday world. Traditionally the poem has been praised for the poise with
which it maintains a balance between the ideal of escape and the necessity of the
return to reality, but a sense of poise in the poem seems less important than the
extraordinary way in which a sense of excess is evoked. There is again a political
dimension to Keats's writing. It is not the pragmatic, overt politics of Byron or
Shelley, but a more oblique refocusing of the relationship between the individual
and society, in which, through a concentration on human emotional and physical
needs and desires, a new kind of resource is found in the self and private feeling.
Not that such a clear position is ever formulated in Keats's poetry; his works do not
offer anything even remotely resembling a philosophy, and even in his very short
poetic career, Keats dying at the age of 26, his ideas changed rapidly.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols in Keats’s Poetry

Themes

THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH

Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death

and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred
every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lover’s
embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these
are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art
also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817).
As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of
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becoming as great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in “Sleep and Poetry” (1817),
Keats outlined a plan of poetic achievement that required him to read poetry for a
decade in order to understand—and surpass—the work of his predecessors.
Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene
and terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the
mournful 1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.”

THE CONTEMPLATION OF BEAUTY

In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of

delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can
choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and
landscapes. Keats’s speakers contemplate urns (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), books
(“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], “On Sitting Down to
Read King Lear Once Again” [1818]), birds (“Ode to a Nightingale”), and stars
(“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” [1819]). Unlike mortal beings,
beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time.
Keats explores this idea in the first book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” envies the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on
the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they
ever shed their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though
they shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful.
The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences.
They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and
eventually dies.

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 Motifs

DEPARTURES AND REVERIES

In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a
transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker
returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a new
understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful object makes
the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart conscious life
for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or rationality, is part of
Keats’s concept of negative capability. In “Bright star, would I were stedfast as
thou art,” the speaker imagines a state of “sweet unrest” (12) in which he will
remain half-conscious on his lover’s breast forever. As speakers depart this world
for an imaginative world, they have experiences and insights that they can then
impart into poetry once they’ve returned to conscious life. Keats explored the
relationship between visions and poetry in “Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a
Nightingale.”

THE FIVE SENSES AND ART

Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected
with various types of art. The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the
pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another, musicians
playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the figures remain
motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the urn, and
they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the
vessel. Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the
musicians playing, we cannot hear the music. Similarly, the speaker in “On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer” compares hearing Homer’s words to “pure
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serene” (7) air so that reading, or seeing, becomes associating with breathing, or
smelling. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear
water or wine so that he might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing
nearby. Each of the five senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences,
which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE POET AND THE SPEAKER

In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the

work—that is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the
reader recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention
or explanation of the poet. Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an object
that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of that object. In
essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and indistinguishable from the object
being described. For instance, the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the
scenes on the urn for several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and
truth, which is enclosed in quotation marks. Since the poem’s publication in 1820,
critics have theorized about who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker,
the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the poet
is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and
troubling.

Symbols

MUSIC AND MUSICIANS

Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry

and poets. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes
musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by
using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of “To
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Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to sing. Fall, the
season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season
of flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses the bird’s music to
contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful
birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of using poetry to join the bird in
the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music represents the ecstatic, imaginative
possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay
death through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.

NATURE

Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of
poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care.
Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley,
among others, to create extended meditations and thoughtful odes about aspects of
the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” hearing the bird’s
song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of
humans. The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy” compares a bout of depression to a
“weeping cloud” (12), then goes on to list specific flowers that are linked to
sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In “Ode to
Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky to find ways to worship the Roman
goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and the
moon rests amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a
springboard from which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes,
symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe.

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 THE ANCIENT WORLD

Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer
poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a mythical
world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient
mythology to populate poems, such as “Ode to Psyche” and “To Homer” (1818).
For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn, have a
permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life.
In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if
an urn still spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope
that a poem or artistic object from Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers
or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator. This achievement
was one of Keats’s great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats
quietly prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

“Bright Star” by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

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 Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Summary of "Bright Star":

The narrator wishes that he were as "stedfast" -- as unchanging -- as a star. A star is

"hung aloft" (2) in the sky, watching the natural processes of the earth with "eternal
lids apart" (3). The narrator describes what a star's view of the world would be: the
"moving waters" (5) of oceans and rivers, snow-capped mountaintops, and valleys
also covered in snow. However, rather than be a distant spectator of the world, the
narrator would be pleased to stay, unchanged, in the arms of his love. He would
rather have his head "pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast" (10), and
observe "its soft swell and fall" (11) as his lover breathes, than find himself
anywhere else.

Analysis of "Bright Star":

Keats may well have written this poem with Fanny Brawne in mind; in an
1819 letter to her, Keats had written the following: "I will pray, pray, pray to your
star like a Hethen." The poem addresses the competing themes of remoteness and
coldness versus closeness and warmth, the unchangeable versus objects in flux,
and the lived world versus the imagined world.

The "star" that Keats describes is most likely Polaris, the North Star, the
only one that remains unmoving in the sky. It is described in "lone splendor" and
its task -- watching the natural processes of the earth as they continue -- itself
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sounds cold and lonely. Keats employs religious language at several points: the
waters of the earth are engaged in a "priestlike task" (5) of ablution, and the "new
soft-fallen mask/ Of snow upon the mountains and the moors" (8-9) replaces the
earth's soiledness with whiteness (purity). These natural processes are described
with some sense of detachment. The star itself is personified as "nature's...Eremite"
(4), a religious hermit.

In opposition to this rather sterile world, the narrator describes the mortal
world as being constantly in flux: his love's breast is "ripening" (10), which signals
a constantly changing state. Further, as he listens to her breathing, he is in a state of
"sweet unrest" (12), a typical Keatsian paradox. While the star has no choice in
keeping its "eternal lids apart" (3) -- since everything about the star is
metaphorically frozen in place -- the narrator, a mortal, is legitimately "awake"
(12) to his love.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be" by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

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 That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Summary of "When I have fears that I may cease to be":

Keats expresses the fear of meeting his end without fulfilling his poetic potential,
without "tracing" (7) (writing about or experiencing) a great romance, and without
looking upon the face of a woman he loves. He compares the poetry that he will
have written to harvested grain. He also states that when he has these fears, he
retreats to "the shore/ Of the wide world" (12-13) and thinks, until his ideas of
"love and fame to nothingness do sink" (14).

Analysis of "When I have fears that I may cease to be":

Keats' fear of death, here, is nuanced: it is not just mortality taken broadly,
but specifically the chance that he will not have produced enough in his short span
of life to be "satisfied," that he fears. However, the closing lines suggest that, while
mortality is the enemy of artistic production, it also somehow frees the artist from
worry. In the end, no matter what, "love and fame to nothingness do sink" (14).
Perhaps such matters are not worth worrying about anyway.

Keats repeatedly uses imagery from the harvest -- "glean'd" (2), "garners"
and "full-ripen'd grain" (4) -- to describe the thoughts emerging from his "teeming
brain" (2). The phrases "high-piled" and "rich" (3-4) suggest abundance. Again,
Keats sets forward a paradox: he is both the field of grain and the harvester of this
grain. In the next lines (5-8), he describes the poet's work: to grasp "high cloudy
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symbols" (6) in natural phenomena, and use a "magic hand" (8) to transform them
into poetry.

When it comes to love, Keats' beloved is the "fair creature of an hour" (9);
such brevity evokes both mortal impermanence and the impermanence of love
itself. And Keats notes that "unreflecting love" is only a "faery power" (11-12);
faeries are capricious illusionists, so love itself is hardly a reliable and solid
phenomenon. But Keats also uses the sonnet form of "When I have fears" to
underscore these ideas. Most Shakespearean sonnets establish their themes, and, in
the final lines, "turn" on such themes or comment on them. The final two lines of
this sonnet describe Keats' response to these depressive realities: to stand alone "on
the shore of the wide world... and think/ Till love and fame to nothingness do sink"
(12-14). This is a rather nihilistic response, but it ultimately confers upon Keats a
kind of negative freedom from worry, because death renders human activity
meaningless. The poet is, in a typically Keatsian paradox, "ecstatically hopeless"
about the nature of human and artistic striving.

Ode on Melancholy BY JOHN KEATS

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

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A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

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 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Summary

The three stanzas of the “Ode on Melancholy” address the subject of how to
cope with sadness. The first stanza tells what not to do: The sufferer should not “go
to Lethe,” or forget their sadness (Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek
mythology); should not commit suicide (nightshade, “the ruby grape of
Prosperpine,” is a poison; Prosperpine is the mythological queen of the
underworld); and should not become obsessed with objects of death and misery
(the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl). For, the speaker says, that will make the
anguish of the soul drowsy, and the sufferer should do everything he can to remain
aware of and alert to the depths of his suffering.

In the second stanza, the speaker tells the sufferer what to do in place of the
things he forbade in the first stanza. When afflicted with “the melancholy fit,” the
sufferer should instead overwhelm his sorrow with natural beauty, glutting it on the
morning rose, “on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,” or in the eyes of his
beloved. In the third stanza, the speaker explains these injunctions, saying that
pleasure and pain are inextricably linked: Beauty must die, joy is fleeting, and the
flower of pleasure is forever “turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.” The
speaker says that the shrine of melancholy is inside the “temple of Delight,” but
that it is only visible if one can overwhelm oneself with joy until it reveals its
center of sadness, by “burst[ing] Joy’s grape against his palate fine.” The man who

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can do this shall “taste the sadness” of melancholy’s might and “be among her
cloudy trophies hung.”

Form

“Ode on Melancholy,” the shortest of Keats’s odes, is written in a very

regular form that matches its logical, argumentative thematic structure. Each stanza
is ten lines long and metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter. The first
two stanzas, offering advice to the sufferer, follow the same rhyme scheme,
ABABCDECDE; the third, which explains the advice, varies the ending slightly,
following a scheme of ABABCDEDCE, so that the rhymes of the eighth and ninth
lines are reversed in order from the previous two stanzas. As in some other odes
(especially “Autumn” and “Grecian Urn”), the two-part rhyme scheme of each
stanza (one group of AB rhymes, one of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-
part thematic structure as well, in which the first four lines of each stanza define
the stanza’s subject, and the latter six develop it. (This is true especially of the
second two stanzas.)

Themes

If the “Ode to Psyche” is different from the other odes primarily because of
its form, the “Ode on Melancholy” is different primarily because of its style. The
only ode not to be written in the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker
admonishing or advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode;
presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In many ways,
“Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes—the Greek
mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the beautiful descriptions of nature in
“Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of “Nightingale,” and the philosophy of
“Urn,” all find expression in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy” is more than
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simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at last explores the
nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that lets him
move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of “Urn” and achieve the
deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”

For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy” urges action
rather than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the eagerly embraced drowsiness
of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy numbness” of “Nightingale,” the speaker
declares that he must remain alert and open to “wakeful anguish,” and rather than
flee from sadness, he will instead glut it on the pleasures of beauty. Instead of
numbing himself to the knowledge that his mistress will grow old and die (that
“Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,” as he said in “Nightingale”), he uses that
knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely. Because she dwells with “beauty
that must die,” he will “feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.”

In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing synthesis of
melancholy and joy, in a way that takes in the tragic mortality of life but lets him
remain connected to his own experience. It is precisely the fact that joy will come
to an end that makes the experience of joy such a ravishing one; the fact that
beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more thrilling. The key, he
writes, is to see the kernel of sadness that lies at the heart of all pleasure—to “burst
joy’s grape” and gain admission to the inner temple of melancholy. Though the
“Ode on Melancholy” is not explicitly about art, it is clear that this synthetic
understanding of joy and suffering is what has been missing from the speaker’s
earlier attempts to experience art.

“Ode on Melancholy” originally began with a stanza Keats later crossed out,
which described a questing hero in a grotesque mythological ship sailing into the

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underworld in search of the goddess Melancholy. Though Keats removed this
stanza from his poem (the resulting work is subtler and less overwrought), the
story’s questing hero still provides perhaps the best framework in which to read
this poem. The speaker has fully rejected his earlier indolence and set out to
engage actively with the ideas and themes that preoccupy him, but his action in this
poem is still fantastical, imaginative, and strenuous. He can only find what he
seeks in mythical regions and imaginary temples in the sky; he has not yet learned
how to find it in his own immediate surroundings. That understanding and the final
presentation of the odes’ deepest themes will occur in “To Autumn.”

Keats addresses the reader directly from the outset: "No, no! Go not to
Lethe, neither twist/ Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine" (1-2). In the
first stanza, he lists various ways that people might escape pain or melancholy
through death, prefacing each method with a negative exhortation. He would prefer
that the reader not attempt to drown the "wakeful anguish of the soul" (10).
Although the present may be painful, it is at least "wakeful" -- that is, alive.

Keats' narration speaks of melancholy "fits" that strike people and come
from "heaven" (11-12), and encourages the reader to view phenomena with
melancholic eyes instead of hiding from such moods. Melancholy can imbue the
already-beautiful with even more beauty. A "morning rose" (15) can only be
viewed for a few hours at most, and Keats' typical emphasis on the passing of time
heightens the perception of beauty. He also uses metaphor to describe April clouds
and rain as forming "a shroud" (14). The stanza ends with a lover showing "rich
anger," and Keats encourages the reader to, while the lover is "raving," observe the
beauty of her eyes. In the next stanza, he writes, "She dwells with Beauty -- Beauty

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that must die" (21); "she" refers, at once, to the aforementioned mistress and to
melancholy itself.

In the third stanza, Keats describes where melancholy can be found: in

beauty, pleasure, joy, and delight. This poem, more than most of Keats' others,
typifies the poet's stance on the nature of happiness and pleasure, pain and
melancholy. It is the fleeting nature of life and of beauty that amplifies beauty; joy
itself is an "aching Pleasure" (23).

Throughout "Ode on Melancholy", Keats was likely influenced by Robert

Burton's 1621 collection of essays, Anatomy of Melancholy, which exhaustively
analyzes the melancholic mood. This poem, with its love of the tragic, reflects
Keats at the height of his Romantic persona.

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 George Gordon, Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was, in fact, the most famous and popular poet
in the Romantic era. He spent much of his life in exile from England, dying in
1824, at the age of 36, in Greece, where he was organizing forces fighting against
the Turks for Greek independence. These biographical details are consistent with
the character-type that always appears in Byron's poems: the Byronic hero is a
solitary, somewhat misanthropic figure, defying nature, and cursed with guilty
secrets, usually of a sexual nature, from his past. But if this figure outside social
convention seems to have something in common with the solitary figures in
Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry, what must also be acknowledged is that Byron
was scornful of the philosophical affectations of his contemporaries, stressing wit
and common sense as against imagination.

In addition, as against the emphasis on withdrawal from society that we find

in Wordsworth's poetry, Byron is politically engaged, with a particular hatred of
hypocrisy and tyranny. There is a consistent stress in his poems on the importance
of independence, an ideal that connects with ideas of sincerity and natural
spontaneity. In his poetic dramas Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), for example,
Byron reflects on the tension between the potentialities of the individual and the
restraints of the world in which the individual lives. There is a desire to strike out a
new path, surpassing conventional behavior and conventional morality, but at the
same time the texts betray a sense of guilt, as well as nostalgia for the old order, in
this lonely, isolated stance. Don Juan (1819-24) again features the typical Byronic
hero, but what is particularly apparent here is Byron's good-humored ironic stance:
he takes his hero seriously, but also treats him dismissively. Don Juan is gallant,
charming and reckless, and led by desire. Politically, this is fairly straightforward,

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in that Don Juan, as with Byron's other works, articulates the language of liberty,
but there are clearly complications when the hero is a sexual libertine.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, began writing poetry in his youth. He

published his first book of verse, Fugitive Pieces, at age 18, and he continued to
write and publish poetry until his untimely death at 36. Although a lifelong poet,
Byron did not consider poetry his primary vocation; he saw himself as a man
destined to achieve greatness, primarily through helping end the oppression of
various peoples, including the Spanish and especially the Greeks.

Byron's poetry is characterized by the experimentation and focus on emotion

common among Romantic poets. He often tempers his avant-garde selection of
subjects with poetic forms which hark back to older days, such as heroic verse,
Spenserian stanzas, and a rigid rhyme scheme to invoke the classical world he
loved.

Byron's poetry also is intensely personal, usually filled with

autobiographical references. This self-portrait is often coupled with a sense of the
larger world's political, moral, historical, or even natural situation. Thus, Byron
makes his internal journey either a reflection of or a cause for the external world's
circumstances.

Byron was concerned not only with the traditions of poetry, but also with his
legacy in the poetic world. This helps explain his extensive self-reference in his
works. The reader can develop some understanding of Byron's self-concept by
looking at his protagonists, who usually are outcasts (through the work of others or
by self-imposed exile) who do not fit into societal norms, but who simultaneously
are heroic in nature and "larger than life." Through his poetry, Byron sought to

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create a persona who possessed qualities he may have thought the real-world
George Gordon lacked.

“SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY” by George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)

HE walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow'd to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair'd the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o'er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

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A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

Summary

The poet describes a woman who “walks in beauty, like the night/Of
cloudless climes and starry skies” (lines 1-2). Immediately the light of stars and the
shadow of night are brought forth as contrasts, foreshadowing the further contrasts
the poet notices regarding this beautiful woman. Seeing her eyes, he declares that
in her face “all that’s best of dark and bright” are joined. Her beauty is contrasted
to the “gaudy” daylight.

In the second stanza, the poet reflects on the balance in the woman’s beauty:
“One shade the more, one ray the less” (line 7) would hinder the “nameless grace”
which surrounds her. He then turns to her inner life, seeing her external beauty as
an expression of thoughts that dwell in a place (perhaps her mind, or her beautiful
head and face) both “pure” and “dear” (line 18).

The final stanza returns to her face, but again sees the silent expression of
peace and calm in her cheek, brow, and smiles. Her pleasant facial expressions
eloquently but innocently express her inner goodness and peacefulness.

Analysis

“She Walks in Beauty” is written in iambic tetrameter, “a meter commonly

found in hymns and associated with ‘sincerity’ and ‘simplicity’” (Moran 2).
Byron’s chosen meter conveys to the reader both his purity of intent (there is but
one subject for this poem, the lady’s virtuous beauty) and a poetic parallel to his
subject (the lady’s beauty arises from her purity or simplicity of nature). It is an
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astonishingly chaste poem given its author’s reputation for licentiousness, lust, and
debauchery.

Byron wrote this poem about Mrs. Wilmot, his cousin Robert Wilmot’s
wife. It echoes Wordsworth’s earlier “The Solitary Reaper” (1807) in its conceit:
the speaker’s awe upon seeing a woman walking in her own aura of beauty. While
ostensibly about a specific woman, the poem extends to encompass the
unobtainable and ideal. The lady is not beautiful in herself, but she walks in an
aura of Beauty (Flesch 1). In contrast to popular conceptions, her beauty is not
easily described as brilliant or radiant, but it is also dark “like the night” (line 1)
However, “all that’s best of dark and bright” (line 3) meet in her face and eyes,
suggesting that while she walks in a dark beauty, she is herself a brighter, more
radiant beauty. To further convolute the image, the woman is described as having
“raven tress[es]” (black hair) (line 9), connecting her to the darkness, while the
“nameless grace” (line 8) “lightens” her face—possibly a play on the word,
meaning the grace alights on her face, but also including the brighter aspect of
lightening her countenance.

Indeed, the beauty of Wilmot is found largely in its balance of opposites: the
darkness she walks in (and her dark hair) counterpoise her fair skin and the bright
pureness of her soul. In this lady, the “tender light” is “mellowed,” in contrast to
the “gaudy day” which has only the glaring sun and no shade to soften its radiance.
Thus the lady’s simple, inner perfection produces a beauty superior to nature itself.

This grace is “nameless” in that it is ineffable. It is a common idea to say

that there is no way for human word or verse to encompass it, so it must remain
nameless even as the speaker perceives it clearly. Prose cannot come close to a
description of this abstract beauty, so the speaker must attempt it in verse.

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 These issues raise a concern that the woman seems so pure because she is so
simple; she wears her thoughts directly on her face, and she shows no evidence of
discrimination of better from worse. Her mind is “at peace with all below” (line
17), and she loves innocently. If she is beautiful like the night, perhaps her mind
truly is like a sky without any clouds of trouble or confusion. In contrast, she has
been able to spend her days in “goodness,” the tints in her face glowing like stars
in the sky, small punctuations in a vast emptiness above.

Some critics maintain, however, that the glimpse of Wilmot which inspired
this poem was afforded Byron at a funeral; thus the images of darkness which
surround the lady can be drawn from the mourning clothes she and those around
her wear. This beauty is “like the night” because this time of spiritual darkness—
mourning the passing of a loved one—does not detract from her beauty, but instead
accentuates it.

In any case, in this woman dark and light are reconciled. This reconciliation
is made possible by the main sources of the lady’s beauty: her mind “at peace with
all below” and her “heart whose love is innocent” (line 18). By possessing a genial
mind and innocent heart, the lady can bring the beauty of both darkness and light
out and together without contradiction; her purity softens the edges of the
contrasts.

Byron eschews erotic or physical desire in this poem, preferring instead to

express the lady’s beauty without professing his own emotions. He restricts his
physical descriptions of her to her eyes, brow, hair, and smiles. Her loveliness has
to do with her innocence and her “days in goodness spent” (line 16), whether it
results from her virtue or simply from the poet’s imagination of that virtue. After
all, if we bracket the likely autobiographical element of the poem, we do not know

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whether the speaker has caught anything more than a few moments’ glimpse of a
beautiful woman walking by.

Lord Byron's "When We Two Parted"

HEN we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow--

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken,

And light is thy fame:

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame.

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They name thee before me,

A knell to mine ear;

A shudder comes o'er me--

Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well:

Lond, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.

I secret we met--

I silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?

With silence and tears.

Summary
The first stanza of “When We Two Parted” sets up the parting of the two lovers:
for some reason their split was accompanied by “silence and tears” (line 2). Upon

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parting, the speaker’s beloved became physically cold and pale, a change
foreshadowing later sorrow which is taking place as the poet writes.

The second stanza continues the sense of foreboding as the speaker awakes
with the morning dew “chill on my brow” (line 10). He believes this chill to have
been a “warning / Of what I feel now” (lines 11-12). His beloved has broken all
vows (line 13), and the sound of the beloved’s name brings shame to both lover
and beloved (lines 15-16).

The name of the beloved carries over into the third stanza as an unknown.
An equally unknown “they” speak the beloved’s name, which sounds as a “knell”
(line 18) in the speaker’s ear. He shudders and wonders why the beloved was so
dear (either to him or to others). He compares his love to those others’ concern;
they do not know of the speaker’s intimate knowledge of the one they name so
casually (lines 21-23). The speaker concludes that he shall mourn the beloved’s
loss “Too deeply to tell” (line 24).

In the fourth stanza, the speaker reflects upon his relationship with the
beloved. They met “in secret” (line 25) and so he must mourn “in silence” (line
26). What he mourns is that the beloved could forget him and be deceitful (lines
27-28). Thus, the speaker concludes that he could not again meet the beloved many
years hence without expressing his pain “with silence and tears” (line 32).

Analysis

“When We Two Parted” is a lyric poem made up of four octets, each with a
rhyme scheme ABABCDCD. The concept at the end of each of the first three
stanzas is carried over into the first two lines of the following stanza, linking the
poem’s content together across the stanza breaks to unify the author’s sense of
sorrow at the loss of his beloved.
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 The poem was first published in 1816, but Byron falsely attributed its
writing to 1808 in order to protect the identity of its subject, Lady Frances
Wedderburn Webster. Many scholars believe the poem to have actually been
written in 1816, when Lady Frances was linked to the Duke of Wellington in a
scandalous relationship. The poem is highly autobiographical in that it recounts
Byron’s emotional state following the end of his secret affair with Lady Frances
and his frustration at her unfaithfulness to him with the Duke. If we did not know
this, however, the poem would be mysteriously vague, since the sex of neither the
lover nor the beloved is revealed, and the poem provides virtually no clue
regarding the time, place, or other setting of the poem beyond its being a place
with morning dew (and the fact that the poem is written in an older English with
the use of “thy”).

The poem begins with the bleak tone of despair which will characterize the
entire work. Immediately the reader is introduced to the speaker’s “silence and
tears” (line 2) upon the breakup. Her own reaction is to grow cold—the physical
description of her cheek as “cold” and “pale” hints at sickness, but her “colder”
kiss (line 6) implies an emotional detachment growing from the very moment of
their parting, which Byron finds unbearable. He sees her immediate response and
his own emotional reaction at the time as a portent of the future (the present of the
poem) as “that hour foretold / Sorrow,” which would reach from the past to today.

The imagery of coldness carries over from the end of the first stanza into the
beginning of the second stanza with the chilly dew upon Byron’s brow, suggesting
his own emotional detachment, but also calling to mind the cold sweat from which
one might wake after a particularly harrowing nightmare. He awakens into a world
still as desolate as the one he ended the previous night. He thus turns his attention

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to his beloved’s apparent infidelity to him. Her “vows are all broken” (line 13),
implying she had made some promises to Byron despite the clandestine and illicit
nature of their affair, and further suggesting Lady Frances’ scandalous relationship.
The speaker notes that her fame is now “light”—without weight or guilt and easily
blown about—yet there should be shame in the speaking of her name because of
him, which he at least will feel for them both (lines 14-16).

The beloved’s tarnished name carries over into the third stanza, as Byron
compares hearing her name spoken by outsiders to the “knell” of a heavy bell—
like a church bell tolling a funeral. He shudders when he hears her name,
indicating that he cannot shake the power of their relationship. Now that she is
publicly scandalized, those who gossip about Lady Frances do not know her the
way Byron knows her—all “too well” (line 22). Now his pain turns to “rue” or
even bitterness as he regrets his relationship, especially because of the pain it
brings him. Although he is writing a poem about his suffering, he claims the hurt is
still too deep to speak of (line 24)—using the poetic convention of having
emotions too deep for words even while he tries to write.

The unspeakable nature of Byron’s pain recurs in the beginning of the final
stanza, as he reflects that the secret nature of their affair leaves unable to tell of
their affair for a second reason: he is unable to mourn publicly for her or her
unfaithfulness to him since their romantic relationship had been a secret. He
grieves silently over her neglectful heart and deceitful spirit (lines 26-28).

He ends the poem predicting his reaction at some future meeting years later:
how would he greet her? Again there would be silence, but also sadness: “silence
and tears” (line 32). His pain will not diminish, nor his sense of being wronged by
her actions, even after many years. Nonetheless, he will maintain silence forever to

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prevent further scandal being attached to her name. After all, he does an excellent
job of hiding her identity in this poem. (Byron’s contemporaries might have been
able to make a guess, but Byron had so many liaisons, who could know?)

The repetition of “silence and tears” at the beginning and end of the poem
denotes the poet’s inability to leave his moment of pain behind. He is trapped in a
state of grieving a lost love. It is all the more hurtful that he lost her to another
man, and all he can offer her is that he will protect her identity by grieving alone.

“My soul is dark” by Lord Byron

My soul is dark – Oh! quickly string

The harp I yet can brook to hear;
And let thy gentle fingers fling
Its melting murmurs o’er mine ear.
If in this heart a hope be dear,
That sound shall charm it forth again:
If in these eyes there lurk a tear,
‘Twill flow, and cease to burn my brain.

But bid the strain be wild and deep,

Nor let thy notes of joy be first:
I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep,
Or else this heavy heart will burst;
For it hath been by sorrow nursed,
And ached in sleepless silence, long;
And now ’tis doomed to know the worst,
And break at once – or yield to song.

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 “Remember thee! remember thee!” by Lord Byron

Remember thee! remember thee!

Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.

Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

“Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom” by Lord Byron

Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom,

On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
But on thy turf shall roses rear
Their leaves, the earliest of the year;
And the wild cypress wave in tender
gloom:

And oft by yon blue gushing stream

Shall sorrow lean her drooping head,
And feed deep thought with many a dream,
And lingering pause and lightly tread;
Fond wretch! as if her step disturbed the
dead!

Away! we know that tears are vain,

That death nor heeds nor hears distress:

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Will this unteach us to complain?
Or make one mourner weep the less?
And thou – who tell’st me to forget,
Thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet.

THERE BE NONE OF BEAUTY'S DAUGHTERS by Lord) Byron

HERE be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like Thee;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charméd ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:

And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep,

Whose breast is gently heaving

As an infant's asleep:

So the spirit bows before thee

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

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 WE'LL GO NO MORE A-ROVING by Lord) Byron

O, we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have a rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.

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