Paper #1 Assignment: Romantic Collaborations

Paper #1: Romantic Collaborations

Nor perchance,/If I were not thus taught, should I the more/Suffer my genial spirits to decay” (Wordsworth, “Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey”)

My genial spirit fail,/And what can these avail/To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?” (Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”

The Romantic Period of British Poetry (roughly 1799-1830) is a period of intense collaboration between poets, some of whom were close friends, others who were fans and admirers of other poets (Shelley adored Wordsworth and Coleridge, as did Keats). When reading through the poems of this period, we often feel as if we’re reading one vast poem parceled out to several different poets. These poets often use the same ideas, metaphors, imagery, and even exact phrases (see quotes above) as they transform their lived experience into poetic expression. (click below to see the rest...) 

For Monday: Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality

“Ode, Intimations of Immortality”: Stanzas 8-11

For Monday’s class, choose TWO of the metaphorical lines below (taken from the poem) below, and explain how Wordsworth uses it to translate his philosophical musings into a comparison we can see, feel, and understand.  Also, how does this metaphor build on some aspect of the poem from previous stanzas (as we discussed in class on Friday)?

Stanza 8:

a. “thou Eye among the blind,/That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep”

b. “Thou, over whom thy Immortality/Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave”

Stanza 9:

c. “Those shadowy recollections,/Which, be they what they may,/Are yet the fountain light of all our day,/Are yet a master light of all our seeing”

Stanza 10:

d. “Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower”

Stanza 11:

e. “To me the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” 

For Friday: Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood” (pp.51-57): read the entire poem, but the questions will only focus on Stanzas 1-7

NOTE: This is a longer poem, though it’s broken up into short stanza chapters.  Read it slowly, and focus on each stanza as an individual poem.  Then consider how each one develops a general ‘story’ or narrative about Wordsworth’s life.  Consider this, too, as a kind of mid-life crisis poem: Wordsworth feels himself pulling away from the innocent joys he used to experience in life, and the poem is an attempt to find himself—and to convince other readers to find themselves in the thickets of adulthood. 

Answer TWO of the following...

Q1: According to Stanzas 1-4, what causes the poet to feel distanced from the natural world?  What has come between him and his imagination/emotions?  In Stanza 2 he writes that “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”  What is this “glory” that has passed away?  Can we hint at what he feels or sees that is missing? 

Q2: Read Stanza 5 carefully: how are the metaphors trying to explain the nature of life on earth?  Why is birth “a sleep and a forgetting”?  Why do “shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy”?  And why might a young boy/girl be “Nature’s Priest”? 

Q3: In Stanza 6, Wordsworth uses the metaphor of Nature as a Nurse, and the Youth being her “Foster-child.”  In what way are we to understand Nature as nursing a child that is not her own, but which she loves “with something of a Mother’s mind”?

Q4: Stanza 7 is one of the most important in the entire poem for explaining a very Romantic philosophy of adulthood.  What does he mean by the phrase “The little Actor cons another part…As if his whole vocation/Were endless imitation.”  How might this be another way of stating Shakespeare’s famous line from As You Like It that “All the world’s a stage”?  

For Wednesday: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Parts V-VI (and web link)

No questions for Wednesday: instead, I'll give you an in-class writing response based on some passage toward the end of the work. So make sure you finish reading (or ideally, re-reading!) the poem for Wednesday's class. 

ALSO--here's an article that just came out in the BBC News: a mass grave from the 1820's was found with the bodies of thousands of children. These were children who died of various infections due to poor sanitation and disastrous living conditions during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. This is the world Blake was writing about in "London," and that Wordsworth and Coleridge (among others) were railing against in their poetry. We'll see more of this condemnation on Friday for Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."

You can read the article here: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-35408967?ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=facebook

For Tuesday: Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (at least through Part IV)

NOTE: I encourage you to read the entire poem, but feel free to read slowly, even if you don’t quite finish it.  In this poem, the details are more important than the overall story, so look at it less as an actual narrative than a series of short poems that cohere into a larger theme.  But most of all, read carefully and look for the metaphors, since poetry is all about how metaphors transform our perception/experience of the world.

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1:. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner opens with a frame narrative, that of the Mariner stopping a Wedding Guest and putting him under a spell so he can tell his story: “He holds him with his glittering eye.”  Why do stories typically employ a frame narrative (think of ones you know from previous classes) and why might it be especially important in a work of fantasy?  Why not simply tell the Mariner’s tale without the artifice of telling it to someone else? 

Q2: Read the glosses on the left side of the poem carefully: are they really there to clarify the action of the poem?  While at times they seem to merely summarize the events, where do they do something else?  Do you find passages that seem to add unnecessary detail or comically deflate the narrative?  Consider particularly this gem: “Like vessel, like crew!”  (also consider, if the glosses are so important, then why not simply write prose instead of a poem?)

Q3: Why does the Mariner kill the Albatross?  How does the crew initially react to this death, and why does their reaction change over time?  In the fantasy logic of the poem, why does this seem to be a “sin”?  Is it a sin cosmically, or merely a sin in the minds of the men?  Or simply in the mind of the Mariner himself? 

Q4: We’ve already discussed the sublime in art/poetry, and in many ways, this poem is a built on the bones of the sublime. Where do we see this specifically in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?  Where does the poem trying to inspire awe, fear, and reverence in the metaphors and imagery?  How might this underline the theme or ideas in the poem itself?  

For Friday: Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”

An image from the "Elgin Marbles"

[Note: both poems are about looking at art in a museum. The “Grecian Urn” is an old Greek vase with images going around it, as he describes in the poem; the Elgin Marbles are a series of sculptures taken from the Parthenon in Greece (stolen, actually) and displayed in the British museum. The poem is a reflection of contemplating this ancient wonder.]

Answer TWO of the following…

Q1: Why is the poet’s spirit “weak” when he contemplates the Elgin marbles? How does this relate to his metaphor that he “must die/Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky”? Why would art affect him in this way?

Q2: In the first stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he personifies the urn, calling it a “bride,” a “foster-child,” and a “historian”. How do these metaphors add up and describe his relationship to the work of art? Also note that he addresses it as “thou” rather than “you” (the intimate form of address). What is the urn to him?

Q3: One of the most famous lines of the poem is “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.” How do you understand these lines? What do they express about the nature of art itself, and why Keats struggles to understand his relationship/feelings to the urn?

Q4: The famous final lines of the poem are a quote: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Who is speaking in the quoted section? And who is the “ye” the poet is addressing? Why might the answers to these questions change how we read the entire poem?

For Wednesday: Short Poems by Percy Shelley (see below)

For Wednesday:   Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” “Love’s Philosophy,” “The

Waning Moon,” “Song,” “Lines: When the Lamp is

Shattered”

Q1: In many of these poems, Shelley personifies natural forces: the moon, the West Wind, various “Spirits,” etc. Choose a specific example and explore how this personification changes how we see/experience this object or place. What personality or ideas does he invest it with? How does this make a natural object think and feel in a ‘Romantic’ sense?

Q2: In “Ode to the West Wind,” re-read Stanza V carefully (even if you don’t understand the rest of the poem completely): Shelley is using the metaphor of a lyre (harp) and falling leaves to relate to his poetry. How does this work? What does he want the West Wind to do this his verse, and what might the “west wind” stand for in this sense? You might also consider how this ties into the autumn/spring imagery in the poem as well.

Q3: Remember that the philosopher Kant defined the sublime as “the tall cliffs, towering thunder clouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless ocean… we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level.” How does Shelley invoke this feeling of the sublime in his poetry? Where do the sounds, images, or other devices make us see/feel the nature world as if in a painting (or in real life?)

Q4: Choose one of the stanzas in “Lines: When the Lamp is Shattered” and explore the metaphors and images Shelley uses. What are they trying to show us? What do we ‘see’ with each one, and how do they point to something beyond the literal? Also, how does each one relate to the title of the poem “when the lamp is shattered”? 

For Friday: Coleridge, Kubla Khan (pp.105)

For Friday: Coleridge, Kubla Khan (pp.105)

Step One: Read the poem aloud. Really. Read it aloud, even more than once. You need to hear your own voice. You might even want to record  yourself, and then play it back and hear yourself reading the poem. You can listen to someone else read it online (You tube, etc.) but you should read it as well.

Step Two: Answer Two of the following questions and bring them to class on Friday. Answer in a short paragraph--a few sentences each. Be specific!  

Q1: Discuss the sounds of this poem—not just the rhymes, but also the sounds inside the lines. What kinds of sounds and repetitions does Coleridge create in this poem? What is the rhyme scheme, and where does he use assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), consonance (repetition of consonant sounds), alliteration (repetition of a single letter at the beginning of words), or other devices? Focus on one or two that you notice.

Q2: Discuss the metaphors he employs in the poem: how does he make us see and experience this ‘sublime’ spectacle? What does he compare it to? Why are these metaphors effective for the reader?

Q3: This poem seems to be in two parts, the second part beginning on page 106 with the line “A damsel with a dulcimer…”  How do these two parts of the poem relate to each other? Are they two separate poems/thoughts? Or is this a contintuation of the “story” or mood of the poem?

Q4: Coleridge claimed that this poem came to him in an opium trance, and he merely wrote it down the second he woke up. While this is probably an author’s gimmick, how does he try to preserve the sense of a ‘dream’ in this poem? Why would this poem strike readers expecting an ordered, logical poem as something strange, disturbing, or even schizophrenic?  

For Wednesday: Intro to Romantic Poetry (Blake)

For Wednesday we'll be reading a few short Blake poems in class: “The Tyger,” “The Garden of Love,” “London,” and “A Poison Tree”.  You don't need to read these before class, since the goal of tomorrow's class will focus on approaches to reading poetry, esp. Romantic poetry.

For those interested in the poems, here is a link that shows you the artwork Blake produced for each poem: he was as visionary an artist/illustrator as a poet, and some people know him even better as an artist: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copy.xq?copyid=songsie.b  

Welcome to the Course

“Literature is the sum of its discoveries.  What is derivative can be impressive and intelligent.  It can give pleasure and it will have its season, short or long.  But we will always want to go back to the originators…what is good is always what is new, in both form and content.  What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing” (V.S. Naipaul)

Welcome to the blog for British Literature to 1800: As the second part of the British Literature survey at ECU, this class picks up at a crucial point in literary/world history—the rise of the artistic/philosophical movement known as Romanticism. The entire 19th century lived in Romanticism’s shadow, even as the Victorians were trying to distance themselves from its more alarming excesses. This class will focus solely on the rise and repercussions of Romanticism throughout the 19th century, beginning with the “Lake Poets” and ending with first flickerings of Modernism. It’s rare that a single class can offer so many iconic literary works (though we can only touch on a few), but British Literature from 1800 is just such a class. From Frankenstein’s monster to the first alien invasion from Mars, this class is full of “firsts,” and I hope you can read these works in the light of what was to come, yet without seeing them as mere precursors to the “future.” In many ways, the 19th century is the most modern century of all, as every book we read today owes something to the literary pioneers of this era.

Be sure to buy the books for this class as soon as possible--we start reading next week!

Required Texts

Ø  English Romantic Poetry (Dover)

Ø  Austen, Persuasion (Norton ed. required)

Ø  Shelley, Frankenstein (Norton ed. required)

Ø  Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Oxford)

Ø  Kipling, The Jungle Books (Penguin)

Ø  Wells, The War of the Worlds (Penguin)