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For Monday: Wordsworth's Short Poems

[English Romantic Poetry]: Wordsworth, We Are Seven(23-25), Strange fits of passion (30-31), She dwelt among the untrodden ways (31-32), Lucy Gray (33-34), My heart leaps up (35), In London, September 1802 (41)

Answer TWO of the following questions based on the poems above in a short response (a few sentences--but let me see you thinking, not just answering questions). Do your best, and don't be afraid to think out loud rather than give definitive answers. When in doubt, read the poems out loud and consider the sounds, the repetition, the imagery, and the speaker (who are they? who are they writing to? why are they writing?)

Q1: How might many of these poems, esp. "We Are Seven": and "My heart leaps up" trying to capture the same sense of childhood and innocence as Blake's The Tyger? What does Wordsworth seem to think is the advantage of the perspective of innocence/childhood? Likewise, what do we seem to lost in adulthood, that the narrator in "We Are Seven" can't seem to understand?

Q2: Many of these poems were published in a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (later revised several times throughout the early 1800's), where Wordsworth tried to write poetry in the speech of common men. While it might still sound like poetry to us, how do these poems try to sounds like 'anti-poetry' poetry? What makes them more 'down to earth' than, say, a Shakespearean sonnet?

Q3: Many of these poems, notably "In London, September 1802" express Wordsworth's Romantic philosophy in a very small package. How would you describe his philosophy--what does he believe, and what does he fear most about the modern world? Consider the lines, "We must run glittering like a brook/In the open sunshine, or we are unblest" (41).

Q4: Three of the poems--"Lucy Gray," Strange fits of passion," and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"--are about a character named Lucy. Is Lucy the same girl in each poem? Or is she a symbol for a specific character that interests Wordsworth? Why is he so fixated on her? What does she seem to represent for him, besides a woman (or a child) he loves? 

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