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ROMANTIC POETRY

Isabel Soto

Romanticism
-theory and practice
Poetry
-preface to the Lyrical Ballads
-nature
-primacy of poetic vision
William Blake
-Infant Joy
-Infant Sorrow
-The Tyger
William Wordsworth
-Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-Ode to the West Wind

ROMANTICISM (1780-1830)
There is some discussion about when Romanticism (or the Romantic Movement) actually
begins and ends: like all 'isms', its essential characteristics, and duration, are perhaps more a matter of
convenience for literary historians than they are perceivable fact. The Norton Anthology (2000) states
that "Writers in Wordsworth's lifetime did not think of themselves as 'Romantic'; the word was not
applied until half a century later by English historians" (5). The Oxford Companion to English
Literature (1985) gives perhaps the most generous parameters for the period, situating its beginnings in
the 1770s and its close in 1848. Curiously, for The Short Oxford History of English Literature (2000)
the Romantic period covers 1780 to 1830, while M.H.Abrams, a leading scholar in Romanticism,
admits that the period can be said to commence either "at 1789 (the beginning of the French
Revolution)" or "1798 (the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads)" (165).
Literary historians are clearly also undecided as to when to draw the curtain on Romanticism: 1830
(before the First Reform Bill of 1832), or 1832 (with the First Reform Bill, and the year in which Sir
Walter Scott died), or 1848, the year Europe was swept by revolutions.
Despite uncertainty over the parameters within which to insert the Romantic period, literary
historians agree that Romanticism was a phenomenon experienced by all European countries, as well as
America (understood as the fledgling United States). It is also agreed that Romanticism was shaped
politically and socially by certain historical circumstances; it was profoundly influenced by the
revolutionary uprisings in North America and France and also by popular independence movements
elsewhere in Europe.
Theory and Practice
It makes sense therefore to try to understand Romanticism in terms of its wide-ranging
ideological and literary sensibilities, what was referred to by some as the spirit of the age. As with
other periods, what helped define Romanticism was its response to prior and/or contemporary
historical and intellectual circumstances. Thus Romanticism espoused progressive political and
social causes in the wake of the revolutionary and popular independence uprisings of the period.
The challenge to and overthrow of prevailing and entrenched political systems found its intellectual
and literary counterpart in the Romantics' assertion of bold innovation and individual experience
over the traditionalism and rationalism characteristic of the preceding century. The goal was
intense, spontaneous self-expression and 'imagination' the guiding principle: the "egotistical
sublime", in Keats' not altogether approving expression.
That the sympathy felt for progressive social causes was echoed in the commitment to
pursuing individual artistic aims can be stated another way: literary innovation found its raison d'tre in
the promising new social order signalled in the early stages, at least by the 1789 French Revolution.
Author of a book of essays entitled The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt felt the spirit driving
his literary contemporaries "had its origin in the French Revolution...It was a time of promise, a
renewal of the world and of letters" (qtd. In Norton Anthology 6). The example, then, of the
revolution in France, as distinct from its later excesses, generated the sense that this was an age in
which the overturning of the old order and hence the emergence of new beginnings social, political,
literary were possible. In his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, William Wordsworth
captures that 'spirit of the age' and the immediate, heady aftermath of the French Revolution:
everything appeared possible: "France standing on the top of golden hours,/ And human nature
seeming born again" ('Book Sixth' ll. 341-342).
Even when the early hopes generated by the revolution had been all but dashed, Wordsworth,
in conjunction with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, produced in 1798 what was perhaps the key literary
document of the age, the Lyrical Ballads. Of critical importance and interest was the Preface, published

in full version in 1802, and based on conversations between the two writers. This radical literary
manifesto sought nothing less than to revolutionize the theory and practice of poetry along lines
consistent with recent attempts in Europe to democratize politics and society. The Preface overturned
the guiding principles of neoclassic poetry, in which poetic genres were hierarchically arranged with
tragedy and the epic at the top and the brief lyric at the bottom. The subject matter of traditional poetry
and the social class of main characters, and poetic register, similarly constrained by the principle of
'decorum', were also contested by Wordsworth and Coleridge's manifesto which instead asserted that
poetry should represent incidents and situations from common life and be written in a selection of
language really used by men. The impact of the convergence advocated between prosaic and lyrical
registers there is no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition"
together with the inclusion of previously proscribed subject matter, is difficult to measure. The Preface
has been directly instrumental in hugely broadening the range of subjects and poetic language which
literary texts of the modern era have felt justified in incorporating.
Of the Romantic writers discussed in this section, the poet William Blake and novelist Jane
Austen, perhaps more than others of the period, highlight the difficulty in defining Romanticism in
terms of a precise literary sensibility and practice. Both belong to the period and are consistently
anthologized alongside other Romantic writers, yet the appropriateness of their grouping under the
Romantic rubric is frequently questioned, perhaps because neither could be said to be typically
Romantic. Austen fails directly to reflect or give account of the upheavals of her time, whether political
as in the French and other revolutions, or social, as in the transformation of Britain into an industrial
power and the attendant demographic shift from countryside to town. A significant feature of Blake's
works lies in their resistance to an unproblematiac representation of received notions of human
experience, in his willingness to probe such cherished myths as the idyllic and inviolate nature of
childhood. The density and rich referential potential of his images and symbols together with, among
other strategies, his stress on the play of opposites or contradictions such as we find in his Songs of
Innocence and of Experience (1794), make of Blake an intensely original author at a time when
originality was both an ideological and aesthetic rallying point. The fact remains that the disconformity
of so much Romantic theory and practice found no better exponent than William Blake, who
represented individualism, hallmark of the age, at its most radical. Together, Austen and Blake
exemplify Andrew Sanders' candid assessment of the wide-ranging eclecticism of the period:
[Romanticism] is more open to conflicting interpretation than most others...It was an age of
'Romanticism', but the complex definition of 'Romanticism', or of 'Romanticisms', could be variously
ignored, challenged, subsumed, debated, or simply questioned by writers who were not necessarily
swimming against a contemporary tide. A variety of ways of writing, thinking about, criticizing, and
defining literature co-exist in any given age, but in this particular period the varieties are especially
diverse and the distinctions notably sharp (The Short Oxford History 334-335).
Poetry
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads declared that all things from the language really spoken
by mento the humble and rustic life are equally fit subjects and vehicles for poetry. While perhaps
more a social than an aesthetic call to arms, Wordsworth did in fact raise humble and rustic life to an
unprecedented level of poetic prominence. The commonplace, whether as applied to people, objects or
nature, is disinvested in Wordsworth of its routine familiarity and becomes fresh again: Wordsworth
teaches us to see, and feel, anew. The democratization of content and language proposed in the Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads was the culmination of a growing opposition to the traditions of the preceding
period, as represented by such authors as Pope, Johnson, Dryden. The "mirror held up to nature" that
poetry was believed to be by earlier eighteenth-century theorists was replaced by a Wordsworthian
"spontaneous overflow of feelings". The conception of poetry as the means by which unproblematically
to reproduce a source of inspiration ("nature" or the world) located outside the poet, was now opposed

by the new theory which held that the source of inspiration resided within the poet. Objects external to
the individual poet were a subject fit for poetry only after they had been stamped with the writer's
unique inner perspective and feelings.
Not coincidentally, the exultant evocation of nature is a striking feature of much of the period's
poetry. The unprecedented centrality of the natural world and landscape has led to a popular
identification of Romantic poetry as nature poetry. The evocation of the natural world is not gratuitous,
however, and nearly always in symbolic correspondence with something else -- usually the lyrical
speaker's feelings, mood, or state of mind. The highly nuanced descriptions of nature in Romantic
poetry serve, in short, as medidative vehicles for emotional states. (It would be a mistake, for example,
to read Blake's The Sick Rose from Songs of Experience simply as a poem about a dying rose).
The primacy of the poets consciousness had the effect of elevating the first person lyrical
form, previously regarded as a minor mode of expression, to major status. The first person speaker of
the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley moreover conveys moods and experiences
that have equivalences in the author's own life. Byron characteristically and explicitly appealed to
readers to associate author with hero. Wordsworth's Prelude is an undisguised autobiographical
statement of epic extension.
The poet, therefore, was the source of poetic inspiration and the poet's life a main source of
poetic subject matter. Wordsworth's insistence on spontaneity as the initial guiding force behind poetic
composition (even if tempered by reflection and emotion recollected in tranquillity) further
highlighted the disconformity with previous theory which had stressed the artificiality of poetry as a
practice, the effects of which relied upon well-established rules. For the Romantics the principles to
adhere to were instinct, imagination, feelings the heart rather than the head, even if for Coleridge
poetic composition involved reconciling certain polarities such as passion and will, spontaneous
nature and voluntary purpose.
In what follows, a close reading guide is offered of several poems included in the units: Infant
Joy, Infant Sorrow, The Tyger (by Blake), Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey(by Wordsworth) and Ode to the West Wind (by Shelley). Though clearly not an exhaustive
list, the poems have been chosen both for their established status within the Romantic canon and
because it was felt they give a fairly accurate reflection of the wide range of Romantic sensibilities and
styles (evident, for example, in a cursory comparison between Blake and Wordsworth). The focus will
be on how to approach these works as poems by drawing attention to their specifically poetic features
and to understand how these features contribute to our understanding of the poem's thematic content.
The three Blake pieces in particular will take into account the guidelines for reading and interpreting a
poem included in the addenda. By way of contrast and in view of the comparatively greater length of
the Wordsworth and Shelley works, a general overview plus a detailed commentary of generous
extracts of each, will be offered. Little, if any, biographical information is offered since the Norton
Anthology provides excellent introductions to the authors (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley) in question.

William Blake
What strikes readers first encountering Blake's work if it is reproduced in full, quite aside from
the complexity and range of symbols, metaphors, allusions, is the sheer visual impact of a written text
accompanied by often apocalyptic illustrations. (The Norton Anthology provides black and white
reproductions of the respective title pages of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and 'The Tyger', all
originally in colour). This duality of representation is consistent with Blake's preoccupation with the
tension and interplay between polarities or opposites, alternatives or pairings. The title of Songs of
Innocence and of Experience (1794), foregrounds this concern, made explicit in the subtitle: "Shewing
the two contrary states of the human soul". Hence, while the speaker of the cycle of poems initially
claims to be writing happy songs/Every child may joy to hear (Songs of Innocence. Introduction,

ll.19-20), the later Songs of Experience evokes the post-Edenic moment of human experience: the
lapsd Soul, weeping in the evening dew and fallen, fallen light (Introduction, ll. 6, 7, 10). In
content and in title, the prelapsarian Infant Joy and the experienced Infant Sorrow can be
considered paradigmatic of the avowed concern of the cycle with the contrary states of the soul,
frequently articulated through pairs such as the two Infant poems (the companion piece, for example,
of the postlapsarian The Tyger is called The Lamb). For this reason it makes sense to read and
analyse the innocent Infant Joy in close conjunction with the experienced Infant Sorrow.
Infant Joy

Initial reading(s)
A first reading of Infant Joy produces an impression of brevity (the poem extends only
twelve lines) and simplicity: the diction is unaffected, the lexicon and metre repetitive and reminiscent
of a childs register, or of literature written for children (as in Isaac Watts Divine Songs for Children
[1715], with which Blake would have been familiar). The poem appears to be a short dialogue between
two speakers, indicated by appropriate use of quotation marks, one of whom is the infant of the title;
the other speaker is probably an adult of unspecified gender, class, age. The subject of their
conversation turns on the name of the infant of the title, and just who is responsible for the act of
naming. That responsibility is appropriated by the infant - Joy is my name - and accepted by the other
speaker: Sweet joy I call thee. The last line echoes this naming ceremony -Sweet joy befall theeand appears to bring the conversation and the poem to conclusion.
Beginnings
The title has of course already thrust us into, or makes us expect to find ourselves in, a childs
world. Successive readings of Infant Joy begin to yield more nuanced interpretations, however. The
title, always a critical component in a literary work and especially so in a poem, connotes ambivalence:
is the second word a proper noun (the childs name) or is it a noun synonymous with happiness? If
meaning is already unstable at this early stage, what can we expect from the rest of the poem, brief as it
is?
Tensions/Structures of doubleness
The meaning of the word joy is raised in the course of the work and ambivalently
answered: What shall I call thee?/.../Joy is my name./Sweet joy befall thee! Joy thus refers
both to an emotion (Sweet joy befall thee!) and the infants name ( Joy is my name .) The
ambivalence or doubleness attached to the word is reinforced by its being the subject of a dialogue
(itself an ambivalent or double structure) between two speakers, the infant and an unidentified
though presumably older speaker (already directing us, let it be noted, to the companion song of
experience). In the course of this dialogue, which forms the entire text of the poem, the infant
speaker appropriates one of the two given meanings (joy as a name), while the other speaker
appropriates both meanings (joy as a name and an emotion).
Even though the word joy is uttered seven times, or perhaps on that account, its meaning
remains unfixed. The instability of meaning, already latent in the title Infant Joy, thus becomes central
to the poem with the seven-fold appearance of the word joy in effect forcing the reader to focus on the
word and its possible meaning(s). As readers we are thus forced to explore not just the meaning of a

given word, but the issue of meaning itself. Such insistence, such repetitiveness further lends the poem
an incantatory tone reminiscent of nursery rhymes, or prayers, or spells. One is reminded of the
wonder- or fairy-tale paradigm in which fairies are frequently invited to be present at the birth of an
infant girl in order to bestow on her gifts of beauty, happiness, wealth and ward off such non-gifts
as sickness, old-age, poverty.

Repetition is present not just in the lexicon but in other poetic equivalences: the
syllabic structure is identical in both stanzas with the exception of the first two lines of each
verse, which have four and three syllables, respectively. We find end rhymes within each
stanza: name/.../thee/.../name/thee (stanza one) and .../.../thee;/smile,/while /thee (stanza two);
and between both stanzas: .../old./thee/.../.../thee! (stanza one) and .../old,/thee;/.../.../thee.
(stanza two).
Lastly, there is repetition or doubleness of the two speakers themselves, one an
infant, the other not, and hence already latently in representation of the two contrary states
of the soul.
Unusual language
The most unusual or striking linguistic feature of the poem is its exaggerated repetitiveness:
of lexicon, syllabic count, rhyme...Since these elements are essentially simple ones, the effect is not
so much of simplicity, but an accumulation of simplicity leading to a hyper-simplicity a simplicity
that exceeds itself, is thus no longer itself and thereby calls itself into question. The poem we are
reading, in short, is far from simple but, on the contrary, rather complex. The foregrounding of
technique moreover is a reminder that poetry is craft (Matterson and Jones 25) and, as such, selfconsciously distinct from the language of everyday speech.
Theme(s)
As stated above, indeterminacy, ambivalence or even ambiguity of meaning is a central
concern of the poem, conveyed through the repetition above all of the word joy which sets in
motion an unending chain of potential interconnections. Repetition of other poetic features also
enhances the works interpretative range: this is not a simple poem, with a clear, fixed meaning.
The reader is left with not insignificant (and unanswered) questions: what does joy mean? does it
mean joy at all? is the poem really about joy? what is the purpose of so much repetition? what is
the precise nature of that which so much repetition is presumably intended to repel, as in a magic
spell? from what, in other words, might the word joy guard the infant? Blake resorts once more to
poetic equivalence by locating the potential threat or opposition to joy in a nebulous realm outside
the poem, a realm which materialises in a refracted self-image: the companion work Infant
Sorrow.
Infant Sorrow

Initial reading(s)
As with Infant Joy, the readers first impression is of a brief, relatively straightforward
work about early infancy. This first reading, however, must be considered unreliable, since it is

inevitably compromised by familiarity with the earlier piece and the awareness that the poem under
consideration, Infant Sorrow, belongs to a different section: it is a song of experience.
Beginnings
As with our initial reading, the beginning to Infant Sorrow is a false one in that the
readers expectations and subsequent interpretation are already being shaped by the knowledge that
Infant Sorrow is part of Songs of Experience, and by the interpretative ambiguities of the
preceding Infant Joy. This prior knowledge prepares us for approaching the present poem as one
which simultaneously reinforces and is in contrast with the earlier work: sorrow co-exists alongside
joy, and also opposes it (while joy may act as an antidote to sorrow). This complex paradox is
already contained in the tense oxymoron of the title. The poems opening line thrusts us into a
world of physical and emotional pain My mother groand! my father wept. that is in stark
contrast to the almost ethereal stillness of its companion piece: I have no name... . The pairings,
contrasts and oppositions will spill forth from these antithetical beginnings.
Tensions/Structures of doubleness
The most striking tension lies between what is being expressed and how it is expressed,
between content (the world is full of pain, present even at the moment of birth) and form (simple
child-like rhyme scheme, metre and vocabulary).
That Infant Sorrow makes sense above all in relation to Infant Joy highlights what some
critics have labelled Blakes method of multiple dialectics (Matterson and Jones 18), whereby a
given thematic or stylistic aspect is defined in relation to its contrastive pair, creating further
tensions and/or mutually illuminating analogues. An example of this lies in how the dialectical
relationship of the two speakers in Infant Joy is further developed and defined in Infant Sorrow:
the infant retains his/her role as speaker, while the unidentified adult speaker is reconfigured as my
mother' and my father. The dialogic equilibrium of the previous poem is likewise transformed. In
Infant Joy the adult speaker sings, and the child smiles and experiences happiness and joy; in
Infant Sorrow the parents and child are locked in an antithetical struggle for power: Helpless,
naked.../.../Struggling in my fathers hands,/Striving against my swadling bands; (ll. 3, 5-6).
The nature of the latter infant is as indeterminate as his earlier counterpart or, rather, is
associated with a wide range of conflicting possibilities. This infant brings sorrow into a dangerous
world; is helpless and naked, yet also a fiend; struggles and strives, only to sink weary and sulking
on his mothers breast.
Unusual language
Acoustically, too, the human relationship is much darker in the later work: the adult half of
the dialogue no longer sings or bestows the gift/name of joy, but is reduced to inarticulate groaning
and weeping. This shift towards acoustic harshness is further reflected in the greater use of clipped
monophthongs groand, wept, leapt, hands, bands, sulk as opposed to the mellifluous diphthongs
of the earlier work: name, old, joy, smile, while...
Themes

As I hope is clear from the preceding discussion, the concerns at the heart of Infant
Sorrow (and of Infant Joy) emerge directly from the terms in which they are expressed. For
example, the theme that life is built on a series of contrasts, or opposites, or dialectical pairs lies in
the very texture of the intra- and inter-poetic language Blake uses. Stylistic features resonate and
clash with each other within the poem itself (Infant Sorrow, helpless/fiend, struggling/weary) and
between the two works under discussion (joy/sorrow, contrasting end-rhymes). Overall, there is
tension between the child-like register adopted to explore and convey the mature reflection that
things are never what they seem: joy is not an unproblematic word, an infant both causes and is
born into a world of pain, danger and sorrow. Even birth, it would appear, cannot be dissociated
from the unpleasant side of life, which ultimately includes death itself. Note that this unsentimental
representation of existence contains no direct reference to any agency (divine, for example) beyond
the human: individuals cause and are responsible for the ways of the world
The Tyger
The Tyger is among Blakes most enduring pieces, not least because of the seemingly
open-ended and widely-divergent range of readings it appears to invite. The rich history of the
poems reception has even given rise to a field called Tyger studies, a summary of which would
be clearly impossible to reproduce here, though the Gua includes a useful webpage on The Tyger
that gives an extensive annotated bibliography on the poem.
Initial reading(s)
A longer poem than either of the preceding two works, The Tyger is also more complex
and you may well need to read it through more than once before attempting to identify and explore
its most striking features and concerns. However, you will probably find in it find echoes of the
techniques and themes of Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow: a simplicity of rhyme and metre,
repeated structures, a battery of now explicit though still unanswered questions. The work appears
to revolve around a series of interrogations posed by an unidentified speaker about the nature and
origins of the Tyger. Ultimately, the speaker wants to know, Did he who made the Lamb make
thee? (l. 20). You may also have detected a more explicitly Christian concern echoed in the
obsession with genesis, the presence of the word immortal (ll.3 and 23) and in the brief
invocation of the Lamb, a name for Christ (cf. The Lamb of God, Agnus Dei).
Beginnings
Even those English readers not conversant with Blakes work will probably be able to quote
the poems first two lines, a collective familiarity which precedes most readers initial contact with
the poem proper. What uninitiated readers may not know is that this famous beginning Tyger!
Tyger! burning bright,...etc. replicates almost word for word the poems ending. Circularity,
where beginning and end are one and the same, and repeated structures (for example, refrains), are
characteristic of traditional expressive forms such as folk songs and folk tales, and childrens genres
such as fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and is a particularly apt technique in a work which exploits a
child-like form and register.
What of this beginning, then? The rhythm is very marked (a trochee: a stressed followed

by an unstressed syllable) and the rhyme likewise pronounced (aabb). The first two words repeat the
title and the third and fourth lines ask a question: What immortal hand or eye/could fame thy
fearful symmetry? A quick scan down the rest of the poem reveals lots more question marks. A
reader might reasonably expect the rest of Blakes poem to concern a Tyger, about which many
questions are raised.
Tensions/Structures of doubleness
The first stanza, then, presents us with a double (at the very least) configuration: that of the
addresser and the addressee, the questioner and the subject of the question. We have met this bipartite structure before in the Infant poems; The Tyger takes it to extremes. The poem is
constructed around a deliberate and, in the opening stanza, an explicitly invoked symmetry or
principle of self-repetition. The unvarying metre and rhyming couplets; the almost identical first
and last stanzas; the numerous caesuras or half-way breaks within a line; the assonating stressed
syllables; the lexical, syntactic and imagistic resonances; the already noted echoes with such works
as the Infant poems- all contribute to the chain of rebounding images and spiralling associations.
The associations multiply, of course, because the poems features are not simply and meaninglessly
replicated: what we have are near-replicas which draw our attention to the original and its variant.
The principle of symmetry is compromised in such shifts from the initial Could frame... (1 st
stanza, l. 4) to the final Dare frame... (last stanza, l. 24), precluding a comfortable, reassuring
closure to the work. That the verb dare has already been used three times (ll. 7, 8, 16) before its
final appearance in the last line of the poem, and that the context varies on each occasion, echoes
the semantic instability central to Infant Joy. The subtle punning throughout The Tyger further
intensifies the effect of what one critic calls the deadly terrors of language overload1.
Unusual language
The poems unusual language is of course indistinguishable from the linguistic
equivalences and patterning just noted. As with all literary texts and especially so in the case of
poetry, which tends to concentrate such language patterning to a greater degree than other textual
forms, the reader must pose the following questions: what effect(s) does the poems language
produce? how do the poems technical features generate and influence meaning?
Themes
To start with perhaps the simplest feature, the pounding and obsessive trochaic metre
recreates the unstoppable strength of the tiger itself , a relentlessness reinforced by the strict
adherence to an aabb rhyme scheme. The associative tension between the Tyger and the questions
surrounding it leads us as readers to restate them: who or what is the Tyger? who made it? Critical
attempts to explain this, among Blakes most compressed, metaphor have ranged widely. Some
have located it within the tiger literature of Blakes day, in which a French revolutionary was a
tiger, but was also a beast closely associated with the considerable popular and scholarly surge in
natural history. Other critics have focused on the latent (Christian) doctrinal problem, which
1

Quoted in Bruce Borowsky. The Tyger


http://virtual.park.uga.edu/ wblake/SIE/42/42borowsky.bib.html

An

Annotated

Bibliography.

18.

juxtaposes the grace and gentleness of the Lamb (divine forgiveness) with the wrath and ferocity of
the Tyger (divine retribution).
Several Post-II World War readings have focused on the representation of the Tyger as pure
irrational energy that can only be checked by being given artistic shape, a process which would
enable the Tyger to survive in the world of Experience. The use of words such as frame,
symmetry, together with the images of creative activity contained in the cascading questions
would support this view. I personally find myself in some sympathy with a reading which holds the
poem to be a fearless record of the artistic process itself, the taming (framing) of unruly, tygerish
creative energy. This interpretation would of course substitute the poet (Blake?) for the Christian
god as creator for it is the speaker of the poem who dares formulate the questions that gradually
bring the Tyger into shape before our very eyes (And what shoulder, & what art,/Could twist the
sinews of thy heart?, etc. ll. 9-10).
Yet, like the beast it represents, the metaphor of the Tyger is too fluid and complex to be
able to ascribe to it a fixed or single interpretation and, indeed, it has provided convincing grist to
the mill of widely divergent late twentieth century schools of criticism from deconstructionism to
Freudian and Lacanian analysis, the New Historicism to Marxist theory. The richness of
associations evoked by the metaphor of the Tyger means that the Tyger is all things to all readers.
Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798) and Ode to the West
Wind (1820)
Considered, respectively, among Wordsworths and Shelleys finest poems, Tintern
Abbey and Ode to the West Wind, also occupy a canonical status within the Romantic repertoire
itself. A reader can understand why: the centrality of the natural world as it is perceived and shaped
by the eye/voice of the poetic speaker, is common to both and makes of them quintessentially
Romantic poems. The concordance of nature and the poetic sensibility, while not exclusive to the
Romantic age, was unquestionably one of its defining features.
Tintern Abbey
A reader may feel not a little intimidated by the length of Tintern Abbey (nearly 160 lines,
according to the Norton Anthology) but as with all poems, and especially here in view of the
somewhat daunting extension, an initial exploratory reading pays off. Such a reading uncovers key
aspects, from which I would stress the following: the first person speaker, time as an experienced
rather than observed phenomenon, the natural world, the primacy of inner over physical vision.
These elements combine to produce a lengthy meditation in which the speaker retraces from his
position in the present time the major phases of his life the coarser pleasures of boyhood, the
dizzy raptures of adolescence, his present maturity and casts an eye towards a future when this
moment will in turn be remembered. Each of these phases is accompanied by a corresponding shift
in verb tense. As to the poems form, I am initially struck by the length; its irregular stanzaic
organization; the iambic pentameter (unstressed followed by stressed syllable and close to the
rhythm of spoken English) and unrhymed lines, the combination of which gives blank verse; the
enjambement (= run-on lines) and numerous caesuras or mid-line breaks. The effect produced is an
approximation of the poets diction to the cadence of natural speech or thought, fulfilling the
principle declared in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that language really spoken by men was
a subject fit for poetry.
As regards the key aspects just noted, the following central passage in the poem provides

good illustration:
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
O present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded oer the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. (ll. 58-85).
The poems key aspects are reflected in that the speaker the central controlling intelligence, or I
stands at a site where present self, landscape and moment in time conjoin to generate previous
selves (the celebrated Wordsworthian stages of growing up), selves which mutate and evolve in
correspondence with the landscape and the moment. This is geography, and time, as self.
And yet, as with all first-person narratives, there is a dissociation between the narrator and
the narratee, the I and the subject/character who actually experiences the coarser pleasures,
whom the sounding cataract/Haunted...like a passion and for whom the tall rock,/ The mountain,
and the deep and gloomy wood,/Their colours and their forms, were.../An appetite. The
dissociation enables the conscious creative process to guide perception which would otherwise be a
mere passive repository of disordered memories and sensations linked to external reality.
Thus the poets authority establishes a correspondence between everything he sees the
natural world and the poetic sensibility itself, with the latter impregnating the former. This is what
gives Wordsworths evocations of nature their symbolic intensity:
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky. (ll. 4-8)

No doubt located in the real world, this natural scene nevertheless cannot be disengaged
from the consciousness that evokes it and orders its constituent components: the steep and lofty
cliffs are beheld, the landscape and sky are connected. Indeed, the primacy of poetic vision,
whether as projector and regulator of the external world or as a distinct manner of perception, is a
constant throughout Tintern Abbey. The longer passage above speaks of half-extinguished
thought, recognitions dim and faint and The picture of the mind which revives again and cues
in the speakers boyhood and adolescent past. Earlier, the speaker notes that with an eye made
quiet by the power/of harmony,.../We see into the life of things (ll. 47-49). This is clearly not the
faculty of physical sight, nor yet a blind mans eye (l. 24), but a privileged inner vision that
empowers the speaker to penetrate into the life of things.
Yet, for all the insistence on the poetic sensibility as supreme mediator of sensations and
experience, some critics have detected a tension in Tintern Abbey between that controlling
authority and a sense that the world and human experience may remain in some way disharmonious
or unfathomable, that even the poets eye may not reach into the ultimate life of things. For John
Peck, the order and harmony in the world as perceived by the speaker in the poems first long
stanza (as in ...these little hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines/Of sportive wood run wild...
ll.14-15) yield to intimations of something less orderly and more disquieting in the poems brief
third stanza, with its mention of darkness and...the many shapes/Of joyless daylight (ll. 51-52).
Peck notes that this stanza comprises a single long, complex sentence that stresses all the disorder
of the world and that the last lines return to the comfort of nature O sylvan Wye! only
underscores the gap between prosaic reality and the inspiring poetic rhetoric that can transform
reality (116). Peck also suggests that the order and harmony imposed by the poetic sensibility is in
danger of being compromised by the poems rambling contours, as if the untidy nature of reality
(118) threatened the shape the poets vision wishes to impose.
Ode to the West Wind
The title announces that this is a work which adopts a classical lyric form of address an
ode and that the address is to the West Wind. The rising west wind becomes a metaphor for
cyclical, seasonal rebirth and in the process sets in motion a series of further, sometimes opaque, yet
stirring , metaphors. Throughout the speaker urges the wind to inspire and revive his imaginative
powers, in the same way as it the wind acts as conduit from a season of apparent slumber to one
of awakening and regeneration, to end with the poems famous last words: If Winter comes, can
Spring be far behind?
Technically, the work merges sonnet-length (fourteen lines) stanzas of four tercets and one
couplet together with the Italian terza rima (aba bcb cdc, etc.), resulting in a vigorous verse
structure that gives the poem much of its forward drive. The dynamic form provides an apt
technical vehicle for the force and energy of the West Wind itself (and some of the turbulent
weather it unleashes) and is not the least arresting of the multiple poetic equivalences in the work.
This is a poem that rests on the metaphor, the principle whereby an object or an action or an
emotion is imaginatively redefined in terms of something else. Thus the first line addresses the
wild West Wind as thou breath of Autumns being, metamorphosing the wind into an animate
force (breath) and Autumn into the animate receptacle (being) of that breath.
Other metaphors are less transparent or comprehensible. Already in the first stanza, the
swirling autumn leaves are atypically dead/...like ghosts (ll. 2-3) or Pestilence-stricken
multitudes (l. 5) in their yellow, black and hectic red tones. The interpretive difficulties that lie
ahead in the poem are compounded by the fact that the metaphors come in cascading succession.
Virtually every syntactic unit establishes a fresh correspondence. Take the rest of the first stanza:
O Thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed


The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion oer the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
with living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
The wind, no longer mere breath of Autumns being, now is a chariot driving winged
seeds into a dark wintry bed, that is, the ground, each like a corpse within its grave. That unit
contains multiple correspondences: the wind as charioteer, the seeds bearing wings, the wintry earth
as bed and grave, the seeds as dead bodies. The reader is aware of another layer of metaphor, where
the vehicle (= figurative element) is death. But death corresponds to...what? The wind? the seeds?
the ground? the implied season of winter? all of these? only some? It is impossible to know.
The next line likens the Spring wind to the sister of the West Wind of the title, a feminized
breeze that is also a trumpet (clarion) rousing the earth from its dreaming (presumably also the
frozen seeds) to fill its plains and hills with a fresh set of living colours and smells. The closing
stanza of this the first of five sections returns to the apostrophic mode, addressing the wind as Wild
Spirit, Destroyer and Preserver and enjoining it to hear the speaker. Despite the dizzying speed
with which the metaphors succeed one another, the reader is more or less able to keep track of them
and their sense. However, the eleventh line disrupts the syntactic and semantic coherence of Spring
shall blow her clarion...and fill...with living hues and odours plain and hill by inserting yet another
level of metaphoric correspondence: (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air). Spring is now
both trumpet and shepherd driving the burgeoning buds like flocks to graze (feed) in the sky (in
air)! For Tom Furniss and Michael Bath this is, to put it mildly, stretching it a bit especially
since we are being asked simultaneously to imagine them [the seeds] as people leaving their beds
and as corpses rising from their graves (147).
Important twentieth century critics have drawn attention to Shelleys seemingly nonsensical
or irrational metaphors; F.R. Leavis (1895-1978), for instance, accused him of having a weak grasp
of the actual (qtd. in Furniss and Bath 148), that is, the rational ground or real world from which
metaphors are supposedly constructed. Furniss and Bath, however, counter that Shelleys poetic
strategy revels in the generative power of metaphor unfettered by [= free of] the demands of literal
sense and sensory perception...Leavis is thus rejecting Romanticisms tendency to reverse the
subordination of figurative to literal (148). Indeed, Furniss and Bath go so far as to assert that the
tumultuous virtuosity of Shelleys metaphors recreate at the reading level the turbulence of the
storm unleashed in section two precisely because Shelley does not balk at creating fresh
correspondences.
Not the least startling instance of Shelleys reversal strategy, in which the literal flows
from the figurative, is the speakers urgent desire to become one with the wind, a desire which is
arrived at incrementally in prior stages where the speaker wishes he were
...a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
...a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength... (ll. 43-46)

Desire is transformed into a series of imperatives: lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! (l. 53),
Make me thy lyre (l. 57), culminating in the climactic Be thou me, impetuous one! (l. 62).
Shelley subordinates his speaker (the literal) to the regenerative power of the wind (the figurative)
and, not content to let the natural world occupy a central position in the creative process, further
confers upon nature the agency to determine poetic vision. If nature provided the starting focal point
in Tintern Abbey and prompted much of the speakers meditation on time, self and the poets
vision, it nevertheless remained dependent on that vision and power of perception, through which it
acquired meaning and significance. Shelley considerably extends Romantic celebration of the
natural world in Ode to the West Wind: nature appears now to generate its own manner of
apprehending reality, its own perceptual order.
Works cited
ABRAMS, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rineholt, Winston, 1981.
DRABBLE, Margaret (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985.
FURNISS, Tom and BATH, Michael. Reading Poetry. An Introduction. London: Prentice
Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996.
MATTERSON, Stephen and JONES, Darryl. Studying Poetry. London: Arnold, 2000.
PECK, John. How to Study a Poet. MacMillan Study Guides. London: Macmillan, 1988.
SANDERS, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

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