Post on 24-Oct-2014
CONTEXT ROMANTICISM
Dates
From 1798 (Publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge) to
1832 (death of Walter Scott/Enactment by Parliament of the First Reform Bill)
Importance
The Romantic period was an era in which a literary revolution took place
alongside social and economical revolutions. It is also known as the “Age of
Revolutions”. It is a crucial time in history. It embodies many of the conflicts at
the heart of the modern world:
• Political freedom/repression,
• Individual and collective responsability
• Masculine/feminine roles
There are often contrasts between radicalism/tradition, change and stability,
the old and the new and these were just as vital as the traditional themes of
innocence/experience, youth/age, country/city, man/nature.
Economical and social changes
1. The nation was transformed from an agricultural country into an industrial
one
2. Economic ideology: free market: Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776)
3. A shift in the balance of power took place. Power and wealth were gradually
transformed from the landholding aristocracy to the large-scale employers of
modern industrial communities. An old population of rural farm labourers
became a new class of urban industrial labourers.
4. The industrial Revolution created social change and unrest. The landscape of
the country was altered: in the countryside the open fields and communally
worked farms were “enclosed”.
5. The country was divided into those who owned property or land -who were
rich-and those who did not.
Political changes
The Industrial Revolution paralleled revolutions in the political order. In fact,
Britain was at war during most of the Romantic period, with a resultant political
instability.
6. The American Declaration of independence struck an early blow for the
principle of democratic freedom and self-government, (1776)
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7. The French Revolution, with its slogans of “Equality, Liberty and
Fraternity”
influenced the intellectual climate in Britain. The storming of the Bastille in
1789 acted as a symbol which attracted the strong support of liberal opinion.
But the French
Revolution had a mixed and changing reception. Early enthusiasm among
British writers and intellectuals was modified by the Terror, when thousands of
people were killed.
8. Some influential intellectuals were:
Tom Paine, a hero of the American Revolution and radical author of Rights of
Man (1791) in
which he called for greater democracy in Britain, was welcome in France, but
he was later put in
prison and near the guillotine because his opposition to the death of Louis XVI.
Later in the 1790's, more measured ideas are contained in the writings of
William Godwin (the father of Mary Shelley), an important influence on
the poets Wordsworth and Shelley. Also important is Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), an adaptation of French
revolutionary theory to the universal needs of women. “While women are
encouraged to ornament their persons at the expense of their minds, while
indolence renders them helpless and lascivious (for what other name can be
given to the common intercourse between the sexes?) they will be, generally
speaking, only objects of desire” (Mary Wollestonecraft, 1798)
9. However, as the French Revolution developed, support for it in Britain
declined. There was violence, extremism, and much bloodshed as section of
the old aristocracy were massacred, as the members of the new French
Republic fought among themselves and with other countries, and as Napoleon
Bonaparte became emperor (1804), aiming to conquest all of Europe
(including Spain!), and then dictator in France.
10. In 1793 England joined The Wars of Coalition against France, which
was aiming forsupremacy throughout Europe, and after many years finally
defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo (1815)
11. The victory was followed by years of social unrest at home. These
culminated in “the Peterloo Massacre” of 1819, in which government troops
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charged a large group of workers who were meeting in Manchester to demand
social and political reform (the word Peterloo) ironically recalls the battle of
Waterloo. This event had an influence on Shelley’s poetry: it inspired his poems
“England in 1819” and “Ode to the West Wind.”
12. Under the economic philosophy of the “laissez-faire”, the wealth of the
country grew, but it was concentrated in the hands of the new manufacturing
and merchant classes. This new middle class wanted to see its increased
economic power reflected in greater
political power. A general alliance arose between working-class reformers,
liberal (called Whig) politicians and this new middle class, resulting in pressure
on the Tory
government for political reform. After many struggles the first Reform Act was
passed by Parliament in 1832. The bill extended voting rights to a more
representative proportion of the country.
Literary History
The publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The
volume
contains some of the best known romantic poems.
The second edition in 1800 contained a preface in which Wordsworth discusses
the
theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and
Coleridge’s
contemporaries.
The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of
the age. The movement towards greater democracy in political and social
affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and
establish a new, more “democratic” poetic order. To do this, the writers used
“the real language of men” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of
Byron and Shelley, got involved in political activities themselves.
Contrast between Romantic Age and the Augustan Age (previous
literary movement)
CLASSICAL/AUGUSTAN
(early and mid 18th c)
ROMANTIC
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• Importance of reason and order reason, intellect and the head
• Poetry is objective (poetry in early 18th c. was not regarded as an expression
of individual personal feelings)
• Poetry as an expression of feelings, intuition and the heart.
• Poetry looks outward to society
• Poets looks inward to their own soul and to the life of the imagination
• Poetry concentrates on what can be logically measured and rationally
understood
• Romantic poets are attracted to the irrational, mystical and supernatural
worlds
• Augustan poetry supports the social order
• It defends freedom of nature and individual human experience.
• Nature is of course a reaction to the forces of industrialization.
• They defend the dignity of man at a time when the machine is beginning to
control his life
• A poetry which is critical of society and its injustices
• It is a formal and ordered way of writing characterised by the heroic couplet
in poetry
• It tries to capture individual experience in forms and language which are
close to everyday speech.
No set forms.
Romanticism was not a sudden, radical transformation, but grew out of
Augustans.
Furthermore, English Romanticism is less philosophically radical than the
European.
The Chimney sweeper (Innocence), William Blake
In general the poem talks about small children being use as chimney sweepers
and the experiences that some of them suffer. The first stanza relates to the
previous story of a child that is now working as a chimney sweeper. His mother
died and his father sold him when he was very young. In this stanza we realize
that the young boy comes from a poor background and that he was sold to
save money. We can guess that he was sold because of line three “could
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scarcely cry “weep! weep! weep!”. The second stanza introduces another
character, Tom Dacre, who is a younger boy and is working also as a chimney
sweeper. This boy cries when they save his hair and the narrator tries to
console him by explaining why they have got his hair (so it doesn’t catch on
fire). Stanza three still focuses on Tom Dacre. In lines 8-9 the little boy has a
dream where he sees other children that work with him stack up in dark and
black chimney. In stanza four the dream continues and there is a change of the
topic. Another figure appears an angel that is like a savour that sets the
children free of their heavy work. He dreams of Paradise were all is good, there
is no evil and they do not have to work. On stanza five the angel tells Rom that
if he is good he can come to heaven but for that he is going not have to keep
on cleaning chimneys (basically he’s got to keep on being exploited).The last
stanza we are back to reality, routinely day of work. The child is happy even if
he is still forced to keep on working.
The poem is criticising the use of small children to clean chimneys. Most of
these kids were treated in dreadful conditions; many times they got injured by
getting stack up the chimneys. It also has a religious connotation. Religion is
not seen as salvation. The angel gives an empty promise to Tom Dacre. He
ends up living in ignorance and bless because he knows that if is good he will
go to Paradise. Blake represents children’s innocence (dream). He also uses the
figure of a children to show his dissatisfaction with society. Oppression is
represented with urban landscapes. He uses nature to symbolize paradise, so
we have a contrast between nice and worse. He imitates child’s vocabulary, the
language he uses is easy to understand, limited.
In 1788, the number of working hours were restricted for kids.
VOICE: the poet uses a fictional voice. He presents himself as a boy as the
main character, who works as a chimney sweeper. He uses this voice as a critic
to the society of the moment.
METRE: they are quatrains that rhyme a-a-b-b… It contains feminine or half-
rhyme. He sometimes uses anapaestic rhythm.
IMAGERY: semantic fields: religion: God, angel, joy; chimney: soot, dark,
brushes, sweep; feelings: happy, joy, fear, warm.
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Metaphor: line 12: coffins of black: vehicle- coffins of black, tenor- chimney,
ground- dark and narrow places, also unpleasant places.
Line 16: wash in a river and shine in the sun: vehicle- wash in a river an shine
in the sun, tenor- baptized and purified, ground- they are clean from shoot.
Lisping: line 3: weep! Weep! Weep! : Blake alters the word to make it similat
to what a child would say. Weep would mean sweep
Hyperbaton: line 1: the author changes the order of the words in the
sentence to make relevant in this case that his mother is death.
Enjambment: we find several enjambments in lines 2, 6, 7 and 9 : when the
line continues in the next one, there is not a pause between them.
Alliteration: In line 4 with the sound s (so, sweep, soot, sleep) to symbolize
the sound that you make when you are sweeping.
In this poem there seems to be movement. Tom Dacre goes from being
miserable to a happy little boy but there is not really a change because he is
still working in bad conditions. It is like a veil on his eyes that makes him
believes that everything is better now and he works because of a price in the
end.
The figure of innocence is very important in this poem.
The chimney sweeper (experience) William Blake
It is a dark and pessimistic poem. We have two people in it, one of them a child
(chimney sweeper) and the other an older man (an adult narrator). The
chimney sweeper in this poem does not free himself from his misery.
The first stanza: The two first lines describe and image of a child crying in the
snow and the narrator asks him where his parents are. The boy answer that
they have gone to church, to pray. We have a contrast between black (the kid)
and white (the snow).
The second stanza: In the second stanza we go from a happy mood to a sad
one. Because he was happy his parents ended up (cover him in clothes) of
death. With this a mean making him a chimney sweeper.
The third stanza: The child has been hurt by his parents, his feelings, but he
does not want to show them (happy and dancing and singing).
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The poem is criticising the Anglican Church and the behaviour of the parent to
their children. Criticising the church he is also criticising the king who is the
head of the Church of England. They become rich thanks to our misery.
STRUCTURE: Two couplets and two quatrains. There is half masculine rhyme.
AA,BB in the couplets. CD CD EF EF in the quatrains. There is iambic
pentameter.
VOICE: the voice would be William Blake who witnesses a poor child crying and
decides to ask what happens to him.
IMAGERY: semantic field: pessimism: woe, dark, death, black, misery, injury
Institutions: God, priest, king
Contrast: in line 1, the child is represented as an animal, dressed in black
surrounded by the purity and whiteness of the snow. Another contrast (lines 9,
10) the parents believe that even if they have hurt him he is still fine but really
the kid is hurt. There is another contrast between the wealth of the king and
the church compared to the rest of society.
Ellipsis: in line 6 (I), in line 11 (they).
William Blake, London
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 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.”
. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to
emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.
Commentary
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:
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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.
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
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Blake’s final image is the “Marriage hearse,” a vehicle in which love and desire
combine with death and destruction.
VOICE: the own speaker is the person who tells the story
METRE: The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. It has
iambic pentameter. There is more masculine than feminine rhyme. There is a-
b-a-b, c-d-c-d-, e-f-e-f g-h-g-h.
We are seven, William Wordswoth
was written in 1798, when Wordsworth was only 18 years old. Wordsworth has
noted that he wrote the last line of this poem first, and that his good friend
Samuel Coleridge wrote the first few stanzas.
The poem is an interesting conversation between a man and a young girl. It is
especially intriguing because the conversation could have been less than five
lines, and yet it is 69 lines long. The reason for this is that the man cannot
accept that the young girl still feels she is one of seven siblings even after two
of her siblings have died, and even though she now lives at home alone with
her mother.
The speaker begins the poem with the question of what a child should know of
death. Near the beginning it seems as if the little girl understands very little.
She seems almost to be in denial about the deaths of her siblings, especially
because she continues to spend time with them and sing to them. By the end
of the poem, however, the reader is left with the feeling that perhaps the little
girl understands more about life and death than the man to whom she is
speaking. She refuses to become incapacitated by grief, or to cast the
deceased out of her life. Instead she accepts that things change, and continues
living as happily as she can.
VOICE: the voice is the old man, who tells the story. He met a young girl and
started to talk to her.
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METRE: The poem is composed of sixteen four-line stanzas, and ends with one
five-line stanza. A-b-a-b rhyming pattern. It also contains cross rhyme.
Masculine rhyme predominates than feminine rhyme.
IMAGERY: enjambments: Lines 7, 15,23, 67. The sentence continues in the
next line of the text.
Semantic field: family: sisters, brother, child, mother; parts of the body; limb,
head, eyes, hair; religion: God, heaven, pray; places: Cornway, church-yard,
Cottage, sea; nature: grass, sunset, sea, tree, woodland.
Bright Star, Would I were Steadfast As Thou Art, John Keats
The poem expresses the poet’s desire to be like a star because it’s the only
way that he can remain with his love. He talks shows us what type of love he
feels for her, he is madly, crazy in love with her, at the hight of his love for her.
Another possible interpretation is that the poet is trying to freeze the sweet
moment he is living by her side by wishing to die at the moment when he is
experimenting this ecstasy of love. This presents a paradox of having love and
immortality, an impossible combination for human beings. It symbolizes pure
and true love that will always survive (gallant idea) We have also got a couple
of religious connotations (line 4-6). In the first one, the author compares the
star with an eremite because the Eremite have a life of celibaty and seclusion.
In the second one the author talks about ablution, a religious cleaning, as in
saying that the star is pure.
STRUCTURE: This is a Shakespearean sonnet, 3 quatrains and a couplet. The
first quatrain talks about the characteristics of the star. It watches us up from
above, watching over earth. The second quatrain mentions what the star can
see from the sky (water, sea, shores, mountains, moors). The third quatrain
centers more in the feelings and emotions of the speaker, he wants to be with
his beloved one for ever and ever (for all eternity) The last couplet works as a
clousure, a conclusion of the whole poem.
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VOICE: the speaker in this poem is the actual poet, John Keats. He is expressing
the unconditional love he professed to Fanny Brawne, his fiancé. It’s an
autobiographical poem.
IMAGERY: Semantic fields: Nature is the main semantic field in this poem
(star, night, water, shore, earth, mountain, moors, snow) This semantic field
can be slip up in different groups according to specific lexic. Sky: star and
night. Sea: water and shore. Land (works like an opposite to sea) earth,
mountain, moors and snow. These last three semantic fields could also be
rounded up in a single semantic field, universe. Another semantic field would
be religion: (priestlike, eremite, eternal, pure, ablution). Lover´s vocabulary
(soft, tender, sweet, feel). Star: (splendor, eternal, sleepless, patient)
Simile: (line 1) he envies the star for being immortal, he wants to be like it in
this sense. (line 3-4) he compares the bright star’s situation with that of a
religious eremite, who lives in seclusion, and has a lot of patience to observe
the world that surround him, carefully.
Personification: of the star line 3 (eternal lids)
Oxymoron: line 12, “awake for ever in a sweet unrest”. A statement in which
two parts seem contradictory. He wants to take care of his beloved although
this task would be sour because he want be able to be with her. Keats knows
the impossibility oh his desire to live in an unchanging state (to be together for
ever without the passing of time)
Metaphor: line 3, the speakers names the the Eremite (vehicle) referring to
the star (tenor). Both share the quality of being patient, never asleep (ground).
This metaphor is emphasizing the loneliness of the star. Line 7, the mask is the
snow of the mountains. The “mask” is the covering of snow on the ground. This
snow has pleasing connotations, being “new” and “soft”.
Pun: line 13, the word still is used as an adj and an adverb.
Imagery: visual images during the whole poem of the landscape, the
mountains, the moors…
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Change: the poem suffers a turn when describing the star. At first it observes
nature and the landscape from the sky. But then it goes from merely describing
(superficial) to showing us the true feelings that take over him when he thinks
of his loved one (deeper and more profound meaning). He wishes to feel her
forever, to have her with him, listening to her sweet, tender awakenings. He
doesn’t want to die, in order to be with her for as long as he can and to take
care of her.
Importance of the end couplet: it gives the conclusion for his torment. He is
forced to choose and he’d choose to stay with her and die rather than being
steadfast and immortal, as a star in the sky. In the last stanza the repetition of
the sound f and h can be interpreted as a sigh, a final good bye because he
knows that he’s going to die leaving his beloved one alone. The real fact is that
in 1818 Keats was aware that he was dying due to tuberculosis. He was afraid
of leaving his fiancé Fanny Brawne. Consequently, he wants to be a star in
order to protect her despite his imminent death, he wants to be with her
forever (forces an unreal idea to stay with her)
The sonnet devotes most of its lines to syntactically negative clauses.
There is no movement in the poem.
I Wonder Lonely Like A Cloud, William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a lyric poem focusing
on the poet's response to the beauty of nature. (A lyric poem presents the
deep feelings and emotions of the poet rather than telling a story or presenting
a witty observation.)
CONTEXT: The poem recaptures a moment on April 15, 1802, when
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, were walking near a lake at Grasmere,
Cumbria County, England, and came upon a shore lined with daffodils.
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to a cottage at Grasmere in 1799.
After Wordsworth married in 1802, his wife resided there also. The family
continued to live there until 1813. The Lake District was the haunt of not only
Wordsworth but also poets Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
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Thomas De Quincey. Dorothy, who kept a diary, described what she and her
brother saw on that April day in 1802.
SUMMARY: Stanza 1 While wandering like a cloud, the speaker happens upon
daffodils fluttering in a breeze on the shore of a lake, beneath trees. Daffodils
are plants in the lily family with yellow flowers and a crown shaped like a
trumpet. Stanza 2 the daffodils stretch all along the shore. Because there are
so many of them, they remind the speaker of the Milky Way, the galaxy that
scientists say contains about one trillion stars, including the sun. The speaker
humanizes the daffodils when he says they are engaging in a dance. Stanza 3
In their gleeful fluttering and dancing, the daffodils outdo the rippling waves of
the lake. But the poet does not at this moment fully appreciate the happy sight
before him. Stanza 4 Not until the poet later muses about what he saw does
he fully appreciate the cheerful sight of the dancing daffodils.
VOICE: The author, William Coleridge.
METRE: .......The lines in the poem are in iambic tetrameter, as demonstrated in
the third stanza:
..........1..............2..................3...................4
The WAVES.|.be SIDE.|.them DANCED;.|.but THEY
......1................2..................3................4
Out-DID.|.the SPARK.|.ling WAVES.|.in GLEE:—
....1.............2.............3.............4
A PO.|.et COULD.|.not BUT.|.be GAY
......1.............2...........3............4
In SUCH.|.a JOC.|.und COM.|.pa NY:
.......1................2..................3.................4 . . .
The poem contains four stanzas of six lines each. In each stanza, the first line
rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth. The stanza then ends
with a rhyming couplet. Wordsworth unifies the content of the poem by
focusing the first three stanzas on the experience at the lake and the last
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stanza on the memory of that experience.
.....
IMAGERY: Semantic fields: nature: sky : cloud, milky way, stars; earth: vales,
hills, daffodils, trees water: lake, waves. Verbs of movement: wander, float,
flutter, dance, toss. Happiness: gay, jocund, bliss, pleasure
Alliteration: lonely as a cloud (line 1).
Simile: Comparison (using as) of the speaker's solitariness to that of a cloud
(line 1).
Personification: Comparison of the cloud to a lonely human. (line 1)
Alliteration: high o'er vales and Hills (line 2).
Alliteration: When all at once (line 3). (Note that the w and o have the same
consonant sound.)
Personification/Metaphor: Comparison of daffodils to a crowd of people
(lines 3-4).
Alliteration: golden Daffodils (line 4).
Alliteration: Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Personification/Metaphor: Comparison of daffodils to dancing humans (lines
4, 6).
Metaphor: comparison of daffodils (vehicle) with an army (tenor). The ground
is that both (daffodils and army) are many and move all together.
Enjambment: In lines 1, 7, 9, 14, 17, 19, 21. it uses the enjambment to reflect
the movement of the daffodils.
This poem does have movement. The flowers move by the wind and also the
speaker attitude towards reflections also changes. He learns to appreciate
nature and that makes him happy.
TEACHERS INTERPRETARION: the content of the poem is a description of a field.
Daffodils are compared to a crowd.The poem could be interpreted as nostalgia
for better past.
The rhyme of the ancient mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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The rime of the ancient mariner is a narrative poem in the form of a medieval
ballad. The poem was full of archaisms and in the 1815 was modernized and
the glossary was included.
Summary
Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when one of them is
detained by a grizzled old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily demands
that the Mariner let go of him, and the Mariner obeys. But the young man is
transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s “glittering eye” and can do nothing but sit
on a stone and listen to his strange tale. The Mariner says that he sailed on a
ship out of his native harbor—”below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the
lighthouse top”—and into a sunny and cheerful sea. Hearing bassoon music
drifting from the direction of the wedding, the Wedding-Guest imagines that
the bride has entered the hall, but he is still helpless to tear himself from the
Mariner’s story. The Mariner recalls that the voyage quickly darkened, as a
giant storm rose up in the sea and chased the ship southward. Quickly, the ship
came to a frigid land “of mist and snow,” where “ice, mast-high, came floating
by”; the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. But then the sailors
encountered an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew around the ship, the ice
cracked and split, and a wind from the south propelled the ship out of the frigid
regions, into a foggy stretch of water. The Albatross followed behind it, a
symbol of good luck to the sailors. A pained look crosses the Mariner’s face,
and the Wedding-Guest asks him, “Why look’st thou so?” The Mariner
confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow.
At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner for having killed the bird
that made the breezes blow. But when the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors
decided that the bird had actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they
now congratulated the Mariner on his deed. The wind pushed the ship into a
silent sea where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds died down, and
the ship was “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The ocean
thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the sea were rotting, slimy
creatures crawled out of it and walked across the surface. At night, the water
burned green, blue, and white with death fire. Some of the sailors dreamed
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that a spirit, nine fathoms deep, followed them beneath the ship from the land
of mist and snow. The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight and hung the
corpse of the Albatross around his neck like a cross.
A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their mouths so dry, that
they were unable to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner saw a
tiny speck on the horizon. It resolved into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-
mouthed to speak out and inform the other sailors, the Mariner bit down on his
arm; sucking the blood, he was able to moisten his tongue enough to cry out,
“A sail! a sail!” The sailors smiled, believing they were saved. But as the ship
neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew
included two figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the
form of a pale woman with golden locks and red lips, and “thicks man’s blood
with cold.” Death and Life-in-Death began to throw dice, and the woman won,
whereupon she whistled three times, causing the sun to sink to the horizon, the
stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a single star, the sailors
dropped dead one by one—all except the Mariner, whom each sailor cursed
“with his eye” before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt from their bodies
and rushed by the Mariner.
The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner, with his glittering eye
and his skinny hand. The Mariner reassures the Wedding-Guest that there is no
need for dread; he was not among the men who died, and he is a living man,
not a ghost. Alone on the ship, surrounded by two hundred corpses, the
Mariner was surrounded by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures that crawled
across its surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a “wicked whisper” that
made his heart “as dry as dust.” He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of
the dead men, each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse.
For seven days and seven nights the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was
unable to die. At last the moon rose, casting the great shadow of the ship
across the waters; where the ship’s shadow touched the waters, they burned
red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery moonlight, glittering;
blue, green, and black, the snakes coiled and swam and became beautiful in
the Mariner’s eyes. He blessed the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that
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moment, he found himself able to pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell
from his neck, sinking “like lead into the sea.”
The Mariner continues telling his story to the Wedding-Guest. Free of the curse
of the Albatross, the Mariner was able to sleep, and as he did so, the rains
came, drenching him. The moon broke through the clouds, and a host of spirits
entered the dead men’s bodies, which began to move about and perform their
old sailors’ tasks. The ship was propelled forward as the Mariner joined in the
work. The Wedding-Guest declares again that he is afraid of the Mariner, but
the Mariner tells him that the men’s bodies were inhabited by blessed spirits,
not cursed souls. At dawn, the bodies clustered around the mast, and sweet
sounds rose up from their mouths—the sounds of the spirits leaving their
bodies. The spirits flew around the ship, singing. The ship continued to surge
forward until noon, driven by the spirit from the land of mist and snow, nine
fathoms deep in the sea. At noon, however, the ship stopped, then began to
move backward and forward as if it were trapped in a tug of war. Finally, it
broke free, and the Mariner fell to the deck with the jolt of sudden acceleration.
He heard two disembodied voices in the air; one asked if he was the man who
had killed the Albatross, and the other declared softly that he had done
penance for his crime and would do more penance before all was rectified.
In dialogue, the two voices discussed the situation. The moon overpowered the
sea, they said, and enabled the ship to move; an angelic power moved the ship
northward at an astonishingly rapid pace. When the Mariner awoke from his
trance, he saw the dead men standing together, looking at him. But a breeze
rose up and propelled the ship back to its native country, back to the Mariner’s
home; he recognized the kirk, the hill, and the lighthouse. As they neared the
bay, seraphs—figures made of pure light—stepped out of the corpses of the
sailors, which fell to the deck. Each seraph waved at the Mariner, who was
powerfully moved. Soon, he heard the sound of oars; the Pilot, the Pilot’s son,
and the holy Hermit were rowing out toward him. The Mariner hoped that the
Hermit could shrive (absolve) him of his sin, washing the blood of the Albatross
off his soul.
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The Hermit, a holy man who lived in the woods and loved to talk to mariners
from strange lands, had encouraged the Pilot and his son not to be afraid and
to row out to the ship. But as they reached the Mariner’s ship, it sank in a
sudden whirlpool, leaving the Mariner afloat and the Pilot’s rowboat spinning in
the wake. The Mariner was loaded aboard the Pilot’s ship, and the Pilot’s boy,
mad with terror, laughed hysterically and declared that the devil knows how to
row. On land, the Mariner begged the Hermit to shrive him, and the Hermit
bade the Mariner tell his tale. Once it was told, the Mariner was free from the
agony of his guilt. However, the guilt returned over time and persisted until the
Mariner traveled to a new place and told his tale again. The moment he comes
upon the man to whom he is destined to tell his tale, he knows it, and he has
no choice but to relate the story then and there to his appointed audience; the
Wedding-Guest is one such person.
The church doors burst open, and the wedding party streams outside. The Mariner declares
to the Wedding-Guest that he who loves all God’s creatures leads a happier, better life; he
then takes his leave. The Wedding-Guest walks away from the party, stunned, and awakes
the next morning “a sadder and a wiser man.”
There are three plots that the rhyme of the ancient mariner is referred to: the
quest, voyage and return and tragedy.It tells a story.
Figurative language: use of symbolism. Lack of water means the dryness of the
spirit. Becalmed sea means the aimless soul who has sinned and wait for
redemption.
The figure of the ancient mariner is related to other characters who committed
a great sin and were condemned to wander around the world: Cain, the
wandering Jew…
The poem is about two voyages: one literal and one symbolic (a journey to the
inner self)
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VOICE: The ancient mariner tells his story to one of the wedding guest because
the action takes place during a wedding. There is a contrast between the
wedding (the real life) and the poem (the supernatural).
METRE: they are quatrains and there is an alternation of lines with three and
four stressed (iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter): In syntactical structure
it uses a lot of repetitions and parallelism. The rhyme is A B C B which makes
the poem easier to remember (dogge Besides end rhyme,
Coleridge also frequently uses internal rhyme. Following are examples.
The guests are met, the feast is set (line 7)
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast (line 49)
And through the drifts the snowy clifts (line 54)
The ice did split with a thunder-fit (line 69)
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud (line 75)
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew (line 103)
red).
The poem has been interpreted as the suffering of a person.
IMAGERY:
Enjambment
.......Coleridge occasionally uses enjambment, the practice of carrying the
sense of one line of verse over to the next line without a pause. Here are
examples:
And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong (lines 41-42)
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We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot. (lines 137-138)
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung. (lines 141-142)
'There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parch'd, and glazed each eye. (lines 143-144)
Figures of Speech
.
The poem is rich in figures of speech. Here are examples:
Alliteration
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye (line 3)
He holds him with his skinny hand (line 9)
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon. (lines 31-32)
The merry minstrelsy (line 36)
The furrow followed free (line 104)
Anaphora
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around. (line 59-60)
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked (line 157)
Without a breeze, without a tide (line 169)
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy (lines 190-192)
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They groan'd, they stirr'd, they all uprose,
Irony
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. (lines 119-122)
Water is everywhere, but there is none to drink.
Metaphor
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye. (lines 215-216)
Comparison of the appearance of the eye to a curse
They coil'd and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire. (lines 281-282)
Comparison of the wake left by the sea snakes to fire
Onomatopoeia
It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd (line 61)
Personification
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he !
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea. (lines 25-28)
Comparison of the sun to a person
Simile
[E]very soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my crossbow! (lines 223-224)
Comparison of the passing of a soul to the sound of a shot arrow
[T]he sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye (lines 251-252)
Comparison of the sky and sea to a weight on the eye
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Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread (lines 268-269)
Comparison of reflected sunbeams to frost
The bride hath paced into the hall,.................
Red as a rose is she (lines 33-34)
Comparison of the bride to a rose
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white. (lines 129-130)
Comparison of water to witch's oils
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean. (lines 115-118)
Comparison of the motionless ship and ocean to paintings
Synecdoche
The western wave was all a-flame (line 171)
Wave refers to the ocean.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Don Jua n was Byron’s last work. It is a long poem left unfinished at the poet’s
death. It includes sixteen complete cantos, each of them containing over a
hundred stanzas. Its publication caused great scandal in England because it
was considered immoral. The story deals with the adventures of Juan, a young
Spaniard brought up by a rigid mother to become a man of strict morals.
Instead he turns to a life of sexual adventure and travel. The figure of Juan and
his mother are partly based on autobiographical experience.
The figure of Don Juan is originated in a Spanish play by Tirso de Molina. This
character was represented as a libertine, a kind of devil, which in the end is
punished by his crimes. Byron’s Don Juan it’s different in this aspect. He is the
one being seduced, not the one who seduces. He is also passive. In this case,
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the narrator is the one who has an evil and diabolical tone. Byron uses a
narrator to express his own ideas on a wide range of subjects.
VOICE: in the dedication, the speaker is Byron who criticizes Robert Southy
(first romantic generation) who no longer believes in the true romantic spirit.
He has become comfortable man, poet laureate. Then in the cantos, we only
know that the speaker is a man. The protagonist is the first Byronic Hero.
METRE: There are eight line stanzas with six lines rhyming and a final couplet.
It possesses full rhyme (feminine). The first six lines are used to explain
something and the last two are used to make fun of what has just being said.
Don Juan ends his lines with / X , which is very difficult. Byron uses it to create
a special effect on the rhyme. It’s iambic pentameter. A-b-a-b-a-b-c-c… (pattern
for the hole poem)
IMAGERY:
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