Q1: Discuss Similarities & Differences btw Classical and Wordsworth use of the nobly-plain style has something
Wordsworth use of the nobly-plain style has something unique and unmatchable.
Romantic Poetic Style?
1. CLASSICAL POETIC STYLE:
Classicism is aesthetic attitudes and principles based on culture, art and literature
of ancient Greece and Rome, and characterized by emphasis on form, simplicity,
proportion, and restrained emotion.
Its characteristics are belief in reason, civilized, modern, sophisticated, interest in urban society, human nature, love,
satire, expression of acceptance, moral truth, realism, beleif in good and evil, religion, philosophy, generic
obstruction, impersonal objectivity, public themes, formal correctness, idea of order.
Some of the most famous lines in the history of literature come from the writing of
William Shakespeare. Shakespeare used a metrical pattern iambic penta verse. His
plays were composed using blank verse, although there are passages in all the plays
that deviate from the norm and are composed of other forms of poetry and simple
prose.
Shakespeare sonnets are in the iambic pentameter. Shakespeare wrote his earlier
plays in the traditional style of the time. He relied heavily on using drawn out
sometimes extravagant, metaphorsand narcissisms. His style often sounded
pompous and pretentious. Shakespeare first original comed called “The Two
Gentlemen of Verona” shows an undeveloped and conflicting writing style.
The style of writing lent itself to the theatricality of a play, which was as much
about using the language beautifully as it was about telling a good story or
furthering the plot. Shakespeare gradually developed and changed his writing style
from the traditional form to a more self expressive.
John Donne, whose poetic reputation languished before he was rediscovered in the
ealy part of the twentieth century is remembered today as the leading exponent of
a style of verse known as “metaphysical” poetry, which flourished in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Donne is valuable not simple as a
representative writer but also as a unique one. In his best poems, Donne mixes the
discourses of the physical and the spiritual; over the course of his career, Donne
gave sublime expression to both realism.
Donne, who lived a generation after Shakespeare, took advantage of his divided
nature to become the greatest metaphysical poet of the seventeenth century;
among the poets of the inner conflict, he is one of the greatest of all time.
Ben Johnson was an English playwright and best known for his satiric comedies. In
many peoples opinion he was next to William Shakespeare the greatest dramatic
genius of the English Renaissance roughly the fourteenth through sixteenth
centuries.
He was always considered an impressive and respected figure Jonson wrote a large
number of poems. Jonson’s poetic style also tends to be simple and unadorned yet
highly polished as in the pigram. He continued his scholarly students of the classics,
which occupied him throughout his active life.
The poetic style of John Milton, also known as Milton verse, Miltonic epic, or
Milton blank verse was a highly influential poetic structure popularized by Milton.
Milton was not the first to use blank verse, his use of it was very influential and he
became known for the style. Milton verse style was very influential.
In particular, Miltonic balnk verse became the standerd for those attempting to
write English epics for centuries.
2. ROMANTIC POETIC STYLE:
Romanticism emerged as a reaction against Neoclassicism. The Neoclassical age
emphasized on reason and logic. The Romantic period wanted to break away from
the traditions and conventions that were dear to the Neoclassical age and make
way for individuality and experimentation. One of the fundamentals of
Romanticism is the belief in the natural goodness of man, the idea that man in a
state of nature would behave well but is hindered by civilization.
belief in feelings, imagination, Intuition, Primitive, Medieval, natural modes, rural solitude, aesthetic, spiritual, value
of external nature, love for vision, mysteriousness, idea, infinite, myth-making, beauty, truth, faith in progress, belief
in man and goodness, individual speculation, revelation, concrete particulars, subjectivity, private themes, individual
expressiveness, intensity, curiosity, images, symbols, common language, self-consciousness, romantic Hellenism are
the Characteristics of Romanticism.
Style is adebatable thing about Worsworth. Many critics say that he has two styles.
A few argue that he has many styles and still some even go to the extent of saying
that he has no style at all.
Wordsworth had a belief that poetic style should be as simple and sincere as the
language of everyday life, and that the more the poet draws on elemental the
better for his art. A poem like the one on daffodils represents the successful simple
style too.
Wordsworth prefers generally to employ an unostentatious ascetic style.
Samuel Taylor Colridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement. Colridge
renounced poetic vocation in his thirtieth year and set out to define and defend
heart as a practicing critic. Poetry arrived at truth in its own way, and that way was
“more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and
more fugitive causes”.
John Keats was a romantic poet who wrote Ode. An Ode is a type of lyrical stanza.
The Odes are Keats most distinctive poetic achievement were love, beauty, joy,
nature, music and the morality of human life. He used a bold and daring writing
style. His style is characterized by Sexual imagery and contains many poetic devices
such as alliteration, personification, assonance, metaphors and consonance. All of
these devices work together to create rhythem and music in his poems.
Shelley discuss the power of both seen and unseen nature throughout his entire
canon. This is primarily how critics have come to classify the bard as a “Romantic”.
If there is one element of social theory to take from Shelley’s poetry. He was
standing up against the wickedness of authority in the name of free people, he was
outcast by the very people he sought to encourage, for they disapproved of his
unconventional lifestyle in love and marriage in addition to his personal goal.
Q2. Main Charactaristics of the Romantic poetry.
The age of Romanticism is considered to be the most remarkable age in the history
of English literature within fifty years after the death of Dr. Johnson. English poetry
was once again magnificently driven by the brilliant outbust of the imaginative
genius. The rise of Romanticism needs to be seen in the context of the changes that
marked the historical and philosophical aspects of the English social life. It must be
noted that the period between 1776 and 1832 was one of the remarkable progress
and national achivements for England. Industrial development were growing day
by day. In this age of industrial progress the Romantics rise with a view to making a
balance between dehumanised men and women.
Romanticism has been described and defined in defferent ways. The word
Romantic has been used traditionally in oppsition to the word classicism. Classicism
is considerd and connected with the social, the formal, the intellectual and the
static whereas Romanticism is connected and concerned with the individual,
informal, the emotional and the dynamic. The Romantics believed in the absolute
freedom both in terms of formal presentation and the content. Let us descus about
the important feature of Romanticism.
Mystique of the past is another important feature for the Romantics. Keats’s “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” is a fine example of how the ancient past inspired the poets.The
past provided all the romance and charm that the Romantic imagination needed.
Imagination is the soul of romantic poetry. The Romantics believed that
imagination can give shelter to a troubled mind. This very idea has been reflecled
throught the romantic poetry of different poets in this age. Through imagination
the inanimate cold world is transformed into something real and living.While
Cpleridge seeks to transform the given world through imagination. To Wordsworth
visionary world is more real than the world of sense. For Keats imagination which
leads to beauty is not a simple way but a power by which he has made imagination
more powerful and acceptable than reality. Keats in a letter to Benjamin Baily says:
“I am certain of nothing but of the
holiness of the Hearts affection and
truth to the imagination…”
Comman place and ordinary are the most significant characteristics of Romantic
poetry. The Romantics had intention in the ordinary forms of life. The Romantics
turned the full force of their humanitarianism upon the simple life of the peasant
(farmar), secluded workers and innocent children who derived the sustenance of
life from the luxerious profasion of nature ready to shelter and preserve them.
Particularly Wordsworth celebrated and sang the simplicity and common place of
life. Wordsworth says, …the earth , And commn face of Nature spoke to me
Rememberable things our simple childhood sits upon a thorn
That health more powerful than all elements.
Subjectivity is another important feature of the Romantic poets. Subjective poetry
is a kind of poetry in which the poet goes into himself and finds his inspiration from
his own experiences, thoughts and feelings. Most of the Romantic poets are subject
in this sense. For example, Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale” is basically based on
personal matter. His life is full of tragedy. When his brother died he wrote this
poem being annoyed with the practical world. So it is a subjective poem. Other
subjictive poems are Keats’s “Ode to Fanny” and Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey etc.
Love of liberty is another important feature of the Romantic poets. They expected
both poetic and national liberty. In poetic liberty the poets wanted to write free
hand poems. They didn’t want to be confined within the particular framework of
poetry. Means rules and regulation were not inportant feature for them.They
emphasized on the subject matter.In their writings the poets also showed a type of
raction and revolt.
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Use of nature is a prominent feature of the Romantic poets. They have frequently
used nature in their poetry. But nature has taken different shape in different poets.
To Shelley nature was a poewr. To Keats nature was a beauty and Wordsworh
considered nature mystically. Coleridge treated nature supernaturally.
Frence Revolution and Romantic poetry are related to each other. The historical
significance of the Frence Revolution of 1789 is destruction of the old order and
initiated a new philosophy of liberty. One can measure its impact from the wide
spread changes that took place in the whole of Europe including Englad. In the first
of the revolution the English Romantic poets saw the freedom for the mankind
.Especially Shelley’s poem are full of a revolutionary zeal.
It is to be noted that all the poets of the Romantic age were not influenced by the
Frence Revolution because,the poems of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge are not
related with Frence Revolution. The Romantic poets created an especial type of
poetry that marked the age an humanity where subject matter was high and lofty
because they were not confined with particular rules and regulation in writing
poetry.
Q3: Comparative analysis of Odes by john Keats?
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31,1795, in London. Keats
published three books of poetry in life time but was dismissed as a middle-class
interloper by most critics. He had no advantages of birth, wealth or education; he
lost his parents in childhood. Yet grief and hardship never destroyed his passionate
commitment to poetry. Keats died at the age of 25 years. He was the younger poet
in the history of English literature.
Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its
inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day,
and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. Examples of great beauty and art
also caused Keats to ponder morality, as in “on seeing the Eligin Marbles”. Keats
hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great
as Shakespeare or John Milton. In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of
beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death.
When reading the titles of the two “poems” one immediately recognizes that they
have got something in common. This common “propriety” is referred to by the
teaching term “Ode”, which originally was to denoted a song. Favorite topics of the
Ode are God, Religion, the State, Art, Nature, Truth, Love, Enjoyment of life, or
Fame after Death. I have chose two famous Odes by Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
and Ode on a Grecian Urn, both of them exemplify Keats’ style and main topics are
pretty well.
In Ode to a Nightingale the poet projects his yearning for ideal beauty onto a
symbol which takes part in both time and eternity. Thus, the tension between the
world of being and the world of flux are overcome. The symbol of the merging of
the two contradictory “States” is the nightingale which on the one hand is a
subjective and moral bird and which on the other hand due to its singing which can
be enjoyed independently of a single bird. Keats describes an experience in the
course of its very happening, and so he allows the reader to take part in it directly.
The direct description of the experienced emotions and the write down of each
stirring in the very moment of its arising supplies the Ode with dynamism and
tension.
The same to is dealt with in Ode on a Grecian Urn. A now antique piece of art
symbolizes eternity which then contained the ashes of a dead person. The use of an
object as a symbol remindes of the literary genre of the picture poem,
(“Gemaldegedichty”) whose main content is the enthusiastic description of a
painting or a sculpture. The respective piece of art, in this case the Urn, can be
regardedas a permanent manifestation of perfect beauty. Consquently, the Urn
does not only stand for eternity and Art but also for Nature and Love, for ideal
beauty depends on Nature. If there is reflection on reality and the ideal world
which is always imaginative, people must be able to imagine and invent a situation
or “State” in which the two contrasting notions are merged. This “State” is
regarded as paradise.
Death and loss are prevalent in John Keats Ode To Autumn and Ode on Melancholy,
and comparison can be made between the two concerning the imagery,
metaphoric language and philosophical ideas put forward by Keats in his
exploration of these to themes.
In Ode To Autumn, Keats puts forward the concept of death more subtly: he
chooses not to implicity show it off to the reader, however it is implied as an
underlying tone of the poem.
Happiness and beauty are two devices used to highlight their opposites, loss and
death themselves, the way happiness and beauty are included by Keats is similar in
both poems, as they need to be obvious to the reader in both pieces. In TO
Autumn, we see natural beauty being described as a refulgent thing; “fill all fruit
with ripeness to the core”. Keats’ idea and loss are different in each poem; or
rather his ideas death and loss in Ode on Melancholy have been unexaggerated and
reworked in Ode To Autumn.
In Ode on Melancholy, death and loss are grandly set up next to happiness and
beauty ; the whole first stanza warns the reader against death. Keats attempts to
tell the reader that beauty and death go hand in hand, and this quotation is perfect
for the image, the happen acting almost as a mirror for beauty and death. The poet
is explaining that true happiness and beauty cannot be experienced without also
knowing bitter melancholy; no one will experience happiness save him whose
strenuous tongue can brust joy’s grape against his palate fine.
Q. 4. “Keats‟ Odes grow directly out of inner conflicts.”Explain.
The Odes, a product of Keats‘ Inner Conflicts:-
It would be true to say that the odes of Keats are the product of certain inner
struggles or conflicts. The principal stress in the most important of these odes is a
struggle between ideal and actual. They also imply the opposition between
pleasure and pain, imagination and reason, fullness and privation, permanence and
change, Nature and the human, art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and
dream.
The ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖: Its Duality of Theme:-
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the duality of the theme is indicated in the very
opening stanza where Keats gives us a contrast between something unchanging
(the urn) because it id dead and something transient because it is alive. This
equipoise is continued in the second stanza, but but the poet continues to toy with
his dual matter without asserting or implying that lifeless peremanence is superior
or transient reality. Nor does he indicate any preference in the third stanza, though
the emphasis here, as in the second stanza, is upon the warmth and the turbulence
of life. We have not been made to feel that Keats has any distinct preference for an
unrealized but permament love over an actually experienced transient but actual
passion. In the fourth stanza, we are carried into world (the little town) that is
permanent, but permanently empty, just as the figures on the urn are permanent
but permanently lifeless. In the final stanza , the poet ends his dual game. Here he
emphatically addresses this thing of beauty as just what it is a Grecian Urn. This
work of art , he says, has ―teased‖ us out of thought , that is, out of the actual
world into an ideal world where we can momentarily and imaginatively enjoy the
life that is free from the imperfections of our lot here. But this ideal world is not
free of all imperfections: it has very grave deficiencies because it is lifeless,
motionless, cold , unreal (―silent form‖, ―cold pastoral‖, etc.)
The ―Ode on Melancholy‖, Also a Poem of Contrasts:-
The ―Ode on Melancholy‖ is another poem of contrasts. The general idea of this
poem is that true melancholy is to be found not in the sad and ugly things of life,
such as wolf‘s bane, nightshade, yew-berries , the beetle, and death moth, but in
the beauty and pleasures of the world. The world‘s true sadness dwells with
beauty and joy will soon fade. The poem expresses Keats‘s experience of the
habitual interchange and alteration of the emotions of joy and pain.
But in ―Ode to Autumn‖ poet keeps completely out of picture. He only describes
certain sights and sounds without expressing his personal reaction to these sights
and sounds. The poem is a perfect Nature-lyric. No human sentiment finds
expression ; only the beauty and bounty of nature during autumn are described.
Q.5 Summary of Prelude written by William Wordsworth.
The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem is an
autobiographical epic poem in blank verse by the English poet William
Wordsworth. The Prelude affords one of the best approaches to Wordsworth's
poetry in general and to the philosophy of nature it contains. However, the
apparent simplicity of the poem is deceptive; comprehension is seldom immediate.
Many passages can tolerate two or more readings and afford new meaning at each
reading. Wordsworth, it will be recalled, likened his projected great philosophical
work to a magnificent Gothic cathedral. And he explained (in the Preface to The
Excursian) that The Prelude was like an antechapel through which the reader might
pass to gain access to the main body of the structure.
The poem begins in his boyhood and continues to 1798. By the latter date, he felt
that his formative years had passed, that his poetic powers were mature, and that
he was ready to begin constructing the huge parent work. Alternating with his
almost religious conviction, there is an unremitting strain of dark doubt through
the poem. The poem itself therefore may be considered an attempt to stall for time
before going on to what the poet imagined would be far more difficult
composition. As he tells the reader repeatedly, his purpose was threefold: to
provide a reexamination of his qualifications, to honor Coleridge, and to create an
introduction to The Recluse.
It was actually finished in 1805 but was carefully and constantly revised until 1850,
when it was published posthumously. It had been remarked that Wordsworth had
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the good sense to hold back an introductory piece until he was certain that what it
was to introduce had some chance of being realized. Moreover, The Prelude
contained passages which promised to threaten the sensibilities of others, as well
as himself, during the rapidly changing course of events after 1805. The year 1805 is
the approximate date of his conversion to a more conservative outlook. However,
his later-year recollection was that this change occurred some ten years earlier, and
he tries in his revisions to push the date back.
The 1805 original draft was resurrected by Ernest de Selincourt and first published
in 1926. A comparison of it with the 1850 (and final) version shows the vast change
the work underwent. Some passages in the earlier version do not appear at all in
the later; others are altered almost beyond recognition. The 1805 draft contains
the clearest statement of Wordsworth's philosophy and is fresher and more
vigorously written. The toned-down work as published in 1850 represents the shift
of his thought toward conservatism and orthodoxy during the intervening years.
The student is likely to find the 1850 version much more accessible for the purpose
of reading the whole poem. Yet on the whole, critics tend to prefer the 1805
version when citing actual lines from the poem.
The only action in the entire poem is an action of ideas. Similarly, it would be
inaccurate to speak of the poem has having a plot in any standard sense. Its "story"
is easily summarized. The poem falls rather naturally into three consecutive
sections: Books 1-7 offer a half-literal, half-fanciful description of his boyhood and
youthful environment; Book 8 is a kind of reprise. Books 9-11, in a more fluid and
narrative style, depict his exciting adventures in France and London. Books 12-14
are mostly metaphysical and are devoted to an attempt at a philosophy of art, with
the end of the last book giving a little summary.
Each of these three "sections" corresponds roughly to a phase in Wordsworth's
poetic development and to a period in his life. The first dates from the time of his
intuitive reliance on nature, when he wrote simple and graceful lyrics. The second
represents his days of hope for, and then disappointment with, the Revolution, and
his adoption of Godwinian rationalism, during which he wrote the strong and
inspiring sonnets and odes. The last coincides with his later years of reaction and
orthodoxy, when he wrote dull and proper works such as The Excursion and
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. The Prelude is critically central to his life work because it
contains passages representing all three styles. In the last analysis, The Prelude is
valuable because it does precisely what its subtitle implies: It describes the creation
of a poet, and one who was pivotal in English letters. In fact, The Prelude was so
successful in its attempt that there was nothing left to deal with in The Recluse.
Wordsworth could reach the high level of abstraction needed for a true
philosophical epic only sporadically, in some of the shorter lyrics and odes, and
could not sustain the tone.
Q. John Keats as an ESCAPIST
Firstly, all the poets of Keats’s time were influenced by the ideas and ideals of the
French Revolution. The ideas of the French Revolution had awakened the youthful
nature of both Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had moved the wrath of Scott;
they had worked like Yeats on Byron and brought forth new matter for Shelly.
There was only one poet, Keats, of that age whom they could not affect on any way
whatsoever.
Secondly, Keats longed to escape from the realities of life in a mood that seized him
when he was contrasting the lot of man with that of the nightingale. Sorrows and
sufferings were expected in life and he had fully realized that escape from the
realities of life was neither possible nor desirable. Keats’s lifelong creed was: “A
thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He wanted to plunge into. ”the realm of Flora and
Pan …. Sleep And Poetry. Keats was so preoccupied with beauty that he turned a
deaf ear to the actualities of life around him.
Pure poet: Keats always tried to attain peacefulness of mood in the midst of all the
sufferings which he was undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him
in life. For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the boring and painful
effects of life. Keats was not a Revolutionary idealist like Shelley, nor had the
Shelley’s reforming zeal. Keats was a pure poet. He had aesthetic taste in the
masterpieces of the past.
The artist’s vision of beauty: Every great poet must follow the bent of his genius: ---
he has his own vision of life, and he expressed it in his own way. Wordsworth has a
spiritual vision and he expresses it in simple style; Shelley has an idealistic vision
and he expresses it in musical verse; Keats had the artist’s vision of beauty, and he
expresses it in picturesque style.
‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’, that is well known on the earth, ad all ye need
to know.
A process of gradual development: The poetry of Keats shows a process of gradual
development. His earlier experiments in verse are products of youthful
imagination, immature and overcharged with imagery. The youthful poet has
abnormal sensibility, but lacks experience of life.
Thus he longed to escape from the realities of life. But it was a passing mood that
seized him when he was contrasting the lot of man with that of nightingale.
Sorrows and sufferings: Sorrows and sufferings were inevitable in life and he fully
realized that escape from the realities of life was neither possible nor desirable.
Keats was trying to attain peacefulness of mood in the midst of all the sufferings
which he was undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him in life.
This mood of serenity is expressed in the Ode to Autumn.
The fundamental truths of life: Keats remained untouched by the ideas of the
Revolution which filled the atmosphere of Europe at the time: at least from his
poetry we do not find any indication of his interest in the Revolution. Though the
contemporary facts of history have not left any impression on his poetry, he deeply
realized and expressed in his poetry the fundamental truths of life. Keats was a
pure poet, would not allow any extraneous things like politics or morality to disturb
the pure waters of poetry. And poetry is the expression of the poet’s own
experience of life
In the Ode to Melancholy, he points out how sadness inevitably accompanies joy
and beauty. The rose is beautiful indeed but we cannot think the importance of the
beauty without its thorn. It is therefore impossible to escape from inevitable pain
in life.
Melancholy arises from humanity of joy, and joy is transient by its nature.
Therefore, Keats accepts life as a whole—with its joy and beauty as well as its pain
and despair. The Ode on Grecian Urn is not a dream of unutterable beauty nor is
the urn itself the song of an impossible bliss beyond mortality. It has a precious
message to mankind, not as a thing of beauty which gives exquisite delight to the
senses, but as a symbol and prophecy of a comprehension of human life to which
mankind can attain. Keats was not an escapist from life, as he is sometimes
supposed to be.
Q. JOHN KEATS (Romantic, Escapist and Pure Poet of Nature)
“First the realm I’ll pass
Of Flora of Pan, sleep in the grass,
Feed upon apples and strawberries
And choose each pleasure my fancy sees.”
(Sleep and Beauty)
Like all romantic poets, Keats seeks an escape in the past. His imagination is
attracted by the ancient Greeks as well as by the glory and splendour of Middle
Ages. He rarely devotes himself to the pressing problems of the present. Hyperion,
Endymion and Lamia are all classical in theme, though romantic in style. Keats this
finds an escape into the past from the oppressive realities of the present.
Also Keats’ themes are romantic in nature. Most of his poetry is devoted to the
quest of beauty. Love, chivalry, adventure, pathos --- these are some of the themes
of his poems. Another strain that runs through his poetry is the constant fear of
death, which finds very beautiful expression in his sonnet, ‘When I Have Fears’.
Another theme of his poetry is disappointment in love, which can be seen in ‘La
Belle Dam Sans Merci’.
Like all romantics, Keats loves nature and its varied charms. He transfigures
everything into beauty that he touches with magic hand of chance. He says in ‘Ode
to Nightingale’,
“Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,”
Beauty is Keats’ religion and he is very romantic is his frank pursuit of beauty and in
that pursuit of beauty, he completely forgets himself and the world around him.
The romantic quality in literature has been defined by Pater as,
“The addition of strangeness to the beauty.”
All sorts of poetry deals with beauty in one way or the other, but romantic poetry
goes a step ahead and imparts strangeness to the beauty. Keats sees beauty in
ordinary things of nature. Earth, to him, is a place of where beauty renews itself
everyday, the sky is full of huge cloudy symbols of high romance. Keats loves
beauty in the flower, in the stream and in the cloud but he loves it in each thing as
a part of Universal Beauty, which is infinite --- ‘the mighty abstract idea of Beauty’.
“Thou was not born for death, immortal bird”
The song of the nightingale becomes a symbol of the universal spirit of beauty. The
nightingale is, for Keats, the symbol of unlimited joy, infinite happiness and
universal spirit of beauty. Pursuit of the unknown, the invisible and infinite inspires
the creation of all the romantic poetry of the world.
Last but not least, both in terms of diction and metres, Keats’ poetic style is
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romantic. Though it has classical finish, it possesses that romantic tough of
suggestiveness by which “more is meant than meets the ear.” Keats has employed
various kinds of metres and stanzaforms in his poetic work. He is one of the
greatest sonneteers in English language and his Odes with their musical flow in long
stanzas, stand as unique specimen of romantic poetry.
Keats was true romantic poet, because his attention was not only beauty but also
truth. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
He persistently endeavoured to reconcile the world of imagination with the world
of reality. Therefore, Middleton Murray calls Keats “a true romantic.”
A pure poet feels and expresses his joy in beauty, but when he feels this joy, he
realizes also a new aspect of beauty, which is truth. In this identity of beauty and
truth, lies the harmony of universe. Keats realizes this harmony when he says that
“truth and beauty are the same thing.”
“Wordsworth and Shelley both had theories but Keats has none. We cannot accuse
Keats of any withdrawal or refusal; he was merely about his business and his
business was that of a pure poet.” (T. S. Eliot)
For Keats, the necessary quality of poetry is submission to the things as they are,
without any effort to intellectualize them into something else. Keats often says that
the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others, and must do good, but
he must do so by being a poet, not by being a teacher or moralist. There is no
didacticism in Keats as there is in Wordsworth. He delivers what he sees; the
pleasures of seeing nature and beauty.
“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
At one time he regrets about the songs of Spring and but then he sees the beauties
of Autumn and involves himself in them. He instantly forgets the pain of losing
songs of Spring and starts admiring Autumn.
The idea of French revolution had awakened the youthful passions of both
Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had stirred the wrath of Scott; they had worked
like yeast on Byron. They had brought forth new matters for Shelley who re-
moulded them and turned them into prophecy of the future. There was only one
poet, Keats, of that age who they could not affect in any way whatsoever.
“Keats was so preoccupied with beauty that he turned a blind eye to the actualities
of life around him.” (Stopeford Brooke)
It is true that Keats’ poetry does not express the revolutionary ideas of his age, but
Keats was a pure who expressed in his poetry the most worth while part of himself
and it was his vision of beauty, which was also truth to him. If his aim was to
pursue beauty, which was also truth to him, he cannot be called an escapist, for in
pursuing beauty, he pursued truth.
The poetry of Keats shows a gradual process of development. His earlier
experiments in verse are products of youthful imagination, immature and
overcharged with imagery. The young poet has abnormal sensibility, but lacks
experience of life. Endymion opens with the famous line --- ‘A thing of beauty is a
joy forever’, it is full of glorious promise but it is lost in shadows and uncertainties,
because it is not based upon experiences of life. In the Odes, Keats’ poetry assumes
a deeper tone. There he faces the sorrows and sufferings of life. He would wish for
a life of joy and happiness, like that of nightingale.
“Fade far away, and quite forget
What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
There, where men sit and hear each other groan;” (Ode to Nightingale)
Thus he longed to escape from realities of life, but it was a passing mood that
seized him when he was contrasting the lot of man with that of the nightingale.
Sorrows and sufferings are inevitable in life and he fully realized that escape from
realities of life was neither possible nor desirable. In Hyperion, he wrote:
“None can usurp the height ….
But those to whom miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.”
In a sonnet, he says:
“How fevered that man who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood.”
Keats was trying to attain serenity of mood in the midst of all the sufferings which
he was undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him. This mood of
serenity is expressed in “Ode to Autumn”, which accordingly to Middleton Murray,
“The perfect and unforced utterance of the truth contained in the magic words (of
Shakespeare): Ripeness is all.”
For Keats, earlier hankering for the world of Flora and Pan for unreflecting
enjoyment of sensuous delights--- is past; he now subjected himself persistently
and unflinchingly to life. He faced life with all uncertainties and contradictions, its
sorrows and joys. The lines ---
“Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.” (Ode to Nightingale) are thrilled with
aching hopelessness. In ‘Ode to Melancholy’, he says,
“dwells with beauty --- beauty that must die”
Melancholy arises from transience of joy and joy is transient by its nature.
Therefore Keats accepts life as a whole --- with its joys and beauty as well as its
sorrows and despair.
To quote the words of Middleton Murray about ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’,
“These lines contain deep wisdom purchase at the full price of deep suffering. They
are symbol and prophecy of a comprehension of human life to which mankind can
attain.”
Keats’ study of Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary fully acquainted him with the Greek
mythology; and he loved every bit of it, and freely used it in his poetry. The stories
of Endymion, Lamia and Hyperion, are based upon Greek legends. In his Ode to
Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn, the subjects are Greek, and the poet while
expressing his passion for beauty transports himself in his imagination to the days
of ancient Greeks.
But the most important factor is Keats’ Hellenism was his own Greek temper --- the
inborn temperamental Greekness of his mind. The power of seeing things with a
child’s amazement and forgetfulness was the temper of Keats, as it was the temper
of Greeks --- i.e.; half-worship added half-joy.
The instinctive Greekness of Keats’ mind lies in his passionate pursuit of beauty,
which is the very soul of his poetry. His passion for beauty finds a concrete
expression in his ‘Ode to Psyche’:
“Yes, I will be thy priest and buld a fane
In some untrodden regions of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pine shall murmur in the wind.”
The Greek did not burden their poetry with philosophy or spiritual message. Their
poetry was incarnation of beauty, and existed for itself. Similarly, Keats was pure
poet. He enjoyed unalloyed pleasure in nature, which for him, did not carry any
philosophical or spiritual message.
Concluding it, Keats, possesses the qualities of romantic and pure poet he loves
nature, which is seen by him with Greek temper. He never thinks about past and
future and his only concern is the present time; the present moment of beauty and
truth. In his early poetry, one can perceive him as an escapist because there was
joy and delight and overcharged imagination because of inexperience youth. But
with gradual development of thought and experience, he comes to the conclusion
that sorrows and joys are always together; rose cannot be taken without its
thrones. One can clearly sees in his Odes that he is not an escapist but he is
accepting the realities of life.
“There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he
wrote.” (Tennyson)
Q. Escapism in “Ode to A Nightingale”
In English Romantic Movement John Keats and many other poets uses Escapism in
their works . Escapism is an immensely a major element of Keats‘ poetry, through
his poetry he tries to escape from undesired situation and worries into the world of
eternal beauty and nature. The repetition escape in his poems is not only a part of
romanticism, but also greatly a result of his personal unfortunate experiences in
life. No the whole poem appears ―escapism‘. There is rather an eagerness of the
escape theme.
He thinks that the sweet song of the nightingale is a evidence of the perfectly
happy world of the bird. Failure in the poetic career and in love and loss of younger
brother seek shelter in the forest world of the nightingale. The nightingale‘s song
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give him a environment which have made him forget all pains of life. Now we can
have a glance of his fancy world.
―...Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget ...The weariness, the fever and the
fret...‖ (Stanza 3, line 1-3)
Keats escape is from his real life to an imaginative and ideal world. But according
to Keats this escape from the unavoiding place is , ‗reality of human life is full of
suffering, pain etc; this world is not a desirable place‘. He has accumulated up his
personals as well as common sufferings of life in the following lines of poem.
―Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;‘ Where palsy shakes a few, sad,
last gray hairs Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies; Where but to
think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep
her lustrous eyes, Or, new love pine at them beyond tomorrow‖ (Stanza 3, line 24-
30)
He reminds us that life is full of grief , sickness, sorrows, and tiring struggle, of
restlessness and pain; here life is nothing but a sequence of moan and objection
,the poet
here remembers of his young brother Tom, dying in presence of him; that for
thoughtful or sensitive but thoughtless persons, there is no happiness in reality;
that beauty of anything in the nature is temporary; that one‘s love for another does
not eternal – that is, the rejection of his love from Fanny Browne‘s frustrated him.
Keats asserts for death without any pain in order to escape continually from painful
life with the song of nightingale. In his imagination he wishes the state of death
also. He declares that simultaneously nightingale as ‗not born for death‘ and
‗immortal bird‘. Keats tries to escape from this world, which is threatened by
death, to capture the world of beauty and immortality aroused by the song of the
nightingale. We should take care that Keats' escape is not in the bad sense but is
rather an escape that is necessary for the poet to achieve his goals. The poet tries
to achieve permanence and overcome the shortness of his life by escaping from the
world of reality to a creative life, that is, from his world to the world of the
nightingale.
Moreover, the poetic imagination symbolized by the song of the nightingale is the
poet's refuge and escape from all problems, particularly the existential problem of
the shortness of life, which seems to haunt Keats .
The poem shows that the poet manages to escape from the window of this
"charmed" world when opened and the nightingale is free to experience flying over
the open ocean of this fantastic, "faery land", which is completely different from
the world of realities known to us:
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. (stanza VII , Lines 68-70)
These lines of poetry refer to the dangerous sea within man, and for the poet, it is
his experience of voyaging on the sea of imagination.
He delves into his fears about his own mortality. Throughout the poem he tries to
escape his fears, but keeps bouncing back into anxiety. He tries alcohol, pain killers,
escaping in nature and finally finds that death is the only escape from the pretty
melancholy. The poet therefore eagerly wants to escape from the life of reality,
which has given him a surfeit of torment and misery in the form of ill
health, failure in the poetic career and in love, and bereavement of a younger
brother, and seek refuge in the forest world of the nightingale.
Keats admits that he cannot permanently escape the everyday world and remains
in the world of imagination: "Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well" (stanza7,
Line73). Thus, he bids good-bye to the bird and then describes his imagination as
being a "deceiving elf". As a result of the end and the fulfillment of creativity, it is
natural that the nightingale escapes by flying away and disappearing. Keats bids
farewell to the world of imagination, symbolized by the nightingale, using the
French word "adieu", which means, "good-bye for a long time".
Q. Theme of Death in “ Ode to a Nightingale ”
Death was a constant theme that permeated aspects of Keats poetry
because he was exposed to death of his family members throughout his life .
Within the poem there are many images of death .In stanza six –
―Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in
love with easeful Death… Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. (Lines 51-60)
In this stanza the poet is so much feel with ecstatic delight by the song of the
nightingale that he thinks it to be the most appropriate moment to die. Keats says
he has an instinctive attraction for death, because death would end all his troubles.
Death would soothe him . Therefore often in his thoughts he called upon death and
appealed it to put a stop to his life .Now at this moment he is in his happiest mood,
so that I believe this is the best time to embrace death.
The six stanza of the poem offers readers a somewhat an unsettling revelation .The
reason for this desire ,however are more complex than misery .The speaker notes
that the nightingales song would continue long after his death-― Still wouldst thou
sing, and I have ears in vain—To thy high requiem become a sod.‖ Which means
the speaker imagines his death and uses musical composition called ‗requiem‘
that is performed after
someones death . Downer calls Keats feelings as the ―sensuous in the highest
degree and at the same time sentimental and reflective‖ (2)
Towards the end of the poem Ode to Nightingale , Keats realizes the song of
nightingale even if it is mortal ,will not always within his range of hearing .
―Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the
still stream, Up the hill-side;‖(Stanza VIII Lines75-77)
This is a crucial insight for the speaker who until this moment has wanted nothing
more than to leave the physical world and follow the nightingale into a different ,
higher realm. And finally The last two stanza that the speaker cannot decide what
is real and what is not .He asked rhetorical question to express his confusion –
―Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or
sleep?‖ ( Stanza VIII ,Lines79-80)
At the end of the poem he wakes up from his indolent dream to face actual life on
its terms. Thus Ode to a Nightingale may truly be described as a wonderful poetic
record of the poet's reflection of human experience.
Q. KEATS AS A POET OF BEAUTY.
In nothing else is Keats as romantic as in his frank pursuit of beauty to him. Beauty
for him is synonymous with truth. A thing of Beauty is for him a joy forever. Beauty
is his religion, a Deity. It is in this pursuit of Beauty that he completely forgets
himself and the world around him. Beauty was for Keats the moving principle of
life. He loved beauty in its forms and shapes in the flower and in cloud, in the song
of a bird and in the face of a workman, in a work of art and in tales of romance and
mythology. He utters fervently,
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases, It will never pass into
nothingness.”
Keats did not care for history, or for politics or for religions. The ruling principle of
his life was worship of beauty. He declared, “With a great poet, the sense of beauty
overcomes every other consideration.”His (Keats) friend Hayden tells us that;
“The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to
make his nature tremble, then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his mouth
quivered.”
He was as sensitive to the beauty of art and literature as to that of life and nature.
Keats in his last days wrote:
“If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make
my friends prove of my memory, but I have loved the principle of beauty in all
things and if I had time I would have made myself remembered.”
In his earlier poem “Sleep and Poetry”, the vast idea (beauty in all things) had
involved the poets passing beyond the realm of Flora and old Pan — that is away
from the realm of beautiful things. He had asked:
“And can I ever bid, these joys farewell?”
And he had answered,
“Yes I must pass them for nobler, life
where I may find the agonies, The strife of human hearts.”
He had thus, in that prophetic poem, seen beyond the principle of beauty that the
beauty in all things. But in “Endymion” he remained wholly within the realm of Flo
ra and old Pan because the agonies and strife of human heart had not yet touched
him directly. He knew that he had to triumph over pain, but pain had not yet come
an d he was not one to invoke it intellectually — Death of his brother. For Keats
beauty is truth. He loved not merely beauty but truth as well and not merely the
world of imagination but that of reality. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty.
He had the artist’s vision of beauty and he expresses it in picturesque style. To him
beauty and truth were identical and he expresses it most emphatically because in it
lays the secret harmony of the universe.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty That is all ye know on earth, And all ye need to
know.”
He never escaped from the realities of life in pursuit of the beautiful vision of his
imagination. In fact, the visions of his imagination are based on reality. He
persistently endeavoured to reconcile the world of imagination with the world of
reality. He accepted life as it is, joy and sorrow, happiness and melancholy both
exist side by side; if there is discord in life, it has its music too. That’s why he loves
foul and fair, joy and sorrow mean and elevated alike. He turns unflinchingly to life
and human experiences, and byan act of imagination transmutes the bitterest
human experiences into beauty which is truth.To understand the true nature and
beauty we go to his famous sonnet, “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?” where he says:
“Why did I laugh tonight? No voice’ …..………………Verse, fame and beauty are
intense Indeed, But death intenser………Death is life’s need.”
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Here, Keats is disowning and putting away the Keats who laughed. It is conquering
of despair by a deeper faith. Poetry, Fame and Beauty are glorious, none lights so
great a fame in soul as death. Death is the crown of life.
“Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death.”
In part the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is a very triumph song to death; as it is a song of
despair; as the song of the bird is an invitation to the supreme ecstasy of death, the
voice of immortality is sounding clear amid the agony of mortality. These two
movements of the divided soul are now blending into one strange and unearthly
harmony; it is as though that deep division of his soul had been reconciled with no
joy diminished and no pain denied. All that Keats had felt and thought is there with
all its contradictions; but now the contradictions are made one. This acceptance of
his love of good and ill is manifest in all Keats’s poetry as in “Ode to a Nightingale”,
so it is in “Ode to a Melancholy”:
“She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die And joy whose hand is ever at his
lips bidding Adieu”
To Keats, death is not a mockery, but a triumph; not a darkness that blots out the
soul’s ecstasies, but the greatest ecstasies of all.
Keats wrote his great odes when his inward victory was accomplished. In “Ode to a
Nightingale” we find that the poet is drowsy with happiness at the Nightingale’s
song and he dreams that he might follow the voices of the bird into a realm of utter
forgetfulness of the pair of the world and wants an escape from;
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret’ Here where men sit and hear each other’s
groan, Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale and
spectre-thin and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden – eyed
despairs, Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,”
Suddenly the dream is real. On the viewless wings of poesy he is fled after the voice
to a place of ‘embalmed darkness’ where he is conscious only of the bird’s song. He
islost in the world which was his life’s achievement, he finds beauty at its peak,
here are colours, flowers, dreamlike forgetfulness, fragrance and most beautiful
not a tinge of bitter real life. He becomes a worshipper of beauty, finds a religious
coexistence with its appearance. eats concept of beauty is prone to change as well,
he has been in love with the beauty of imaginative world but in “Ode to Autumn”
he understands the real meanings of beauty, when he accepts life with its all
apparently drawbacks. He declares “Thou hastthy music too”. This is what makes
him a real follower of real beauty.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever” This was the lifelong creed of Keats.. Keats
pursued beauty everywhere in nature, in art, and in the great tales of ancient
Greece and to Keats beauty and truth were identical. This was the profoundest and
innermost experience of Keats’s soul and he expressed it most emphatically.
“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty — that is all,
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know,”
If his aim was to pursue Beauty, which was also truth, he cannot be called an
escapist, for in pursuing Beauty, he pursued truth. Sorrows and sufferings, as we
know, are inevitable in life. And an escape from the realities of life is neither
possible nor desirable. Keats does not think of the rose without its thorns. He
accepts life as a whole with its joy and beauty as well as its pain and despair. He
attempts to reconcile the loveliness of the world with its transience; its pleasures
with its pains, the longing to enjoy the beautiful with the suspicion that it cannot
be long enjoyed unless much that is not beautiful is faced.
This is how Keats presents the theme of “romantic escapism” in his poems, as a
depiction of his own sorry state and terribly agonizing experiences. This desire of
‘escaping’ is actually a result of a very lonely and miserable life that he has spent,
wherein his career was ruined; his family lost; he couldn’t get the love of his life
due to poverty and then had to combat tuberculosis in the end. All these factors
made him pessimistic and compelled him to turn towards the option of escapism,
projected in his poetry as “romantic escapism”.
Q. KEATS' HELLENISM / was Keats a Greaek?
1. Definition of Hellenism
The word 'Hellenism' is derived from the word 'Hellene' which means
‘Greek’. 'Hellenism' therefore stands for Greek culture and fine arts (poetry,
music, painting, sculpture and architecture) as developed by Greek cities in
the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. KEATS' Hellenism is represented by his
different kinds of interest in his poetry.
2. Keats dissatisfaction with materialistic life
The Romantic poets of the 19th century were all dissatisfied with the
materialistic life of the age. WORDSWORTH in a mood of annoyance wished
to be a Pagan and a Greek rather than to remain a Christian, lost in the game
of money making. In the sonnet 'The World is Too Much For Us', he says:
'Great God, I'd -rather be
A pagan suckled on a creed outworn'
3. Hellenism and other Romantic poets
SHELLEY too had a fascination for Greece and his adoration of the Greek way
of life and Hellenic attitude towards art. BYRON too was attracted by the
Greeks and fought for Greece against the Turks. But of all the Romantic poets,
it was JOHN KEATS who had the warmest admiration for Greece and
cultivated the Hellenic love in his poetry. SHELLEY once said: "KEATS was a
Greek".
4. Keats study of Greek Classics and Sculpture
KEATS was the Englishman. KEATS did not know the Greek language and
therefore, he had no opportunity of reading Greek literature of knowing
anything about Greek customs and ways of life. Still KEATS was Greek in temper
and spirit. The Greek influence came to him through his reading of.
i. Translation of Greek Classics.
ii. Lempriere's Classical Dictionary
iii. Through Greek Sculpture
But more important than these three sources was -- his own tendency and
nature.
One of his friends lent him a copy of Chapman's Translation of Homer. He was
attracted by the new world of wonder and KEATS described its effect upon him
in the famous sonnet, On First looking into Chapman's Homer'. He felt as he had
discovered a new planet.
His study of Lempriere's Classical Dictionary fully acquainted him with the Greek
mythology and he loved every bit of it and freely used it in his poetry ‘The
stories of Endymion’, ‘Lamia and Hyperion’, are based on Greek legends. It is
admitted that the subjects of 'Ode to Psyche' and `Ode on a Grecian Urn' are
Greek. The poet while expressing his passion for beauty transports himself in his
imagination to the days of ancient Greeks.
The third source is Greek sculpture. His sonnet On Seeing the English Marbles'
indicates his emotional reaction to the sculptured "wonders" of ancient Greece
5. Different Hellenic traits and their effects on Keats poetry
The same spirit exists in his 'Ode on Indolence' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. But
the most important factor of KEATS' Hellenism was his own Greek temper.
Examining the Hellenic traits and Greek qualities in KEATS ' poetry. The most
important trait is his love for Greek legends and stories as in 'Endymion',
'Hyperion', 'Lamia', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to Psyche'. Then there are
hymns to pagan gods and goddesses; 'Diana', 'Neptune', 'Venus', 'Cupid', 'Pan',
'Bacchus' and 'Hermes'. In 'Ode to Psyche':
' O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus faded hierarchy:
Another quality of KEATS' Hellenism is his mastery in statuesque effect in his
'Ode to Autumn' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.
KEATS' adoration of beauty and sensuousness are again typical Hellenic
qualities. In his worship of concrete beauty, with all its loveliness of form and
colour KEATS is Greek.
KEATS' poetry is an extraordinary mixture of Hellenism, Classicism and
Romanticism. His enthusiastic love for Greek mythology, great admiration for
Classicism and the stirring influence of liberal Romanticism compelled him to
compose something containing all these three elements as in 'Lamia',
‘Endymion’ and 'La Belle Dam Sans Merci'.
KEATS' attitude towards nature is particularly Hellenic and the personification of
the powers of nature as in 'Ode to autumn' is a Hellenic quality. In the human
interest which, he at times, as in "Lamia", allows to dominate minor details,
KEATS has been considered as Greek. His attitude towards life is coloured with
some fantastic tone which marked the works of Greek dramatists.
6. Conclusion
The above mentioned qualities show that KEATS was a Greek but a deep analysis
of his works also reveals some romantic and non Greek elements, so he was not
a complete Greek. He stands with the Elizabethans and has close proximity, Like
the Elizabethans and much unlike the Greeks KEATS loved 'fine excess' in poetry.
He was exuberant and ornate (fully adorned) and lacked the restraints and
discipline of Greeks, He loved richness, colour, picturesqueness and changed the
restraints of discipline imposed by Greeks, KEATS was moved not by the form of
Greek art but by the deeper significance of figures by the emotional appeal and
the life truth embodied in them. But in his poetry, we can find a fine blend of
Classicism of Greece and Romanticism of Elizabethans.
Q. Critical Appreciation of Keats’s Odes (All).
Keats’s personal life was one of despair and suffering and the echoes of that
despair and gloom are found in his odes prominently. Keats, like Shelley, was
overpowered by the feeling of pessimism and melancholy and both these romantic
poets invited death to come and take away the sorrows of their miserable
existence. Keats’s, vision of human life had a touch of melancholy and just like his
other odes, he expresses the same through the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, stating
therein that human life is a tale of miseries and sufferings.
The odes of Keats are not only the greatest lyrical achievement, but they are also
the finest expression of his genius. Nothing like his odes is to be found in English
literature of the earlier date. He may be said to have created in them, a new class
of lyrical poetry. In the odes, he is at his best and they have achieved a deathless
glory. They are eight in number, namely-
Ode to a Nightingale , Ode on a Grecian Urn , Ode to Psyche, Ode on Poets, Ode to
Autumn, Ode to Melancholy, Ode on Indolence, Ode to Fancy and Ode to Maia (a
fragment).In these poems, there is no rhetoric or rhapsody. They are composed in a
reflective spirit- now pensive, now joyous, according to the theme or mood but
always self-contained and natural.
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The Ode, not the lyric, was to be the field of Keats’s triumph over his
contemporaries. The Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to
Melancholy and the Ode to Autumn are among the mightiest achievement of
English poetry.
A note of sadness sounds through all. All of Keats’s odes possess the beauty of the
finest passages in Endymion or the Eve of St. Agnes. Indeed, their music is of a
higher and subtler quality. In these poems, we find the intense perception of
beauty in Nature, in Art, in Literature and in the world imagination can create.
According to Dr Bridges, “Ode to Autumn is the most perfect of all the odes. It has
unusual restraint and yet every line brings some new picture to the eye. The
personification of autumn is exquisitely imagined and such an ode pleases equally
the classic and the romantic.”
The Ode to a Nightingale has the greatest emotional quality and like some splendid
tapestry, blends many colours. We have almost a Byronic mood in the picture of
the weariness and fever of modern life:
“Here where men sit and her each other groan...”
We have a richness of description that vies with Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ and
surpasses it because of the modern sense of mystery:
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs”
And above all, we have that perfect union of the real and the unreal, for as surely
as we hear the song of the bird, we hear other notes that charm the magic
casement of fairylands. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Greek element shows
itself more plainly than in any other Ode.
“Had Keats left us only his odes”, writes Dr Bridges, “His rank among the poets
would not be lower than it is”.
The live odes contained in the volume of 1820 are Keats’s greatest contribution to
lyric poetry. It would be invidious to attempt to distinguish between these-to one
reader the embalmed darkness through which the song of the Nightingale comes to
the listener and to another, the personification of Autumn, which appeals as the
perfect expression of Keats’s devotion to beauty. But from the perfection point of
view, the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is unsurpassed. The site of the sculptures on a
Grecian Urn awakens for his imagination, melodies to the ear. The song of a
Nightingale floating on the dark is the symbol to him of stable beauty in the midst
of perpetually changing human miseries. It is in his odes that Keats has most
enduringly enshrined his idea of ‘Abstract Beauty’.
“To link the poetry of the future to the best in the poetic achievements of the past,
was the mission of John Keats. With him, poetry was supreme. It existed not as an
instrument of social or of philosophical doctrine, but for the expression of beauty.
Real poetry is not of any of school. Its sweetness and its grace are romantic and
classical alike. Freedom of conception and restraint of style are the twin servitors of
beauty for which poetry exists. This is the aesthetic view of literary art handed
down to us not only by Tennyson, but by Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne and more
or less adopted by them from Keats.”
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Q. Elaborate upon Keats‟s description of Nature and Beauty in poem
Ode to Autumn.
Odes often address an inanimate object or abstract idea directly, but they do not
always portray that object/idea as a person, as Keats does. We think that autumn is
a woman, because the seasons were typically personified as beautiful women in
European Art. The Italian painter Botticelli, for example, depicted spring as a
pregnant woman. (Check out the painting here.) In this poem, the lady autumn
teams up with the sun, basks in the breeze of a granary, and takes lazy naps in a
field.
Lines 2-3: Autumn is personified for the first of many times in the poem. She and
the sun whisper together like a bunch of gossipy teenage girls. But the goal is
serious and necessary: they are responsible for the bounty of fruit and crops that
will sustain people through the winter.
Line 12: The speaker asks a rhetorical question to introduce a connection he
believes the reader will recognize, between autumn and the harvest.
Lines 13-15: The personification of autumn feels most explicit in these lines, where
her long hair is gently lifted by the wind. "Winnowing wind" is an example of
alliteration. Implicitly her hair is compared to chaff, the inedible part of a grain that
blows away after the threshing process.
Lines 16-18: Autumn has several different roles in this poem. Here she is a laborer
in the fields, taking a nap after working hard to harvest the flowers with her
"hook." The hook, too, is personified. It is presented as a conscious thing that
chooses to "spare" the flowers, rather than as a tool that just lies idle.
Lines 19-20: From a laborer, autumn then becomes like a "gleaner" in this simile,
which compares her to the people who pick up the scraps from the field after the
harvest.
Lines 21-22: Autumn's "look," the appearance on her face while watching the cider,
is an example of metonymy when the word "patient" is attached. An expression
cannot itself be patient, but her look is associated with the patience of her
character.
Line 24: Autumn is addressed for the final time, as the speaker tells her not to feel
jealous of spring.
Q. Keats’ Concept of Beauty/
Discuss Keats ‘Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty’
Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate
lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty
constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman
and in art. For him, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.
When we think of Keats, ‘Beauty’ comes to our mind. Keats and Beauty have
become almost synonymous. We cannot think of Keats without thinking of Beauty.
Beauty is an abstraction, it does not give out its meaning easily. For Keats, it is not
so. He sees Beauty everywhere. Keats made Beauty his object of wonder and
admiration and he became the greatest poet of Beauty. All the Romantic poets had
a passion for one thing or the other. Wordsworth was the worshipper of Nature
and Coleridge was a poet of the supernatural. Shelley stood for ideals and Byron
loved liberty. With Keats the passion for Beauty was the greatest, rather the only
consideration. In the letters of Keats, we frequently read about his own ideas about
Beauty. In one of his letters to George and Tom, he wrote:
“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other
consideration, or rather obliterates another consideration.”
He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is
one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most
passionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many
imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened emotional appeal.
Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for
the expression of religious or social philosophy. Keats loved ‘the mighty abstract
idea of Beauty in all things’. He could see Beauty everywhere and in every object.
Beauty appeared to him in various forms and shapes—in the flowers and in the
clouds, in the hills and rills, in the song of a bird and in the face of a woman, in a
great book and in the legends of old. Beauty was there in the pieces of stone with
carvings thereon. He hated didacticism in poetry. For the poetry itself was beauty
so he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” ’The lines of his
poem ‘Endymion’ have become a maxim:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness”
He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object
of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as
For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or
experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the
realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he
remained untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His
later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Hyperion” show an increasing
interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have
established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of
escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of
philosophical doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing
beauty for its own sake. Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful
according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to see beauty even in
those things are hostile to beauty for ordinary people. He said:
“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
Keats perceives Beauty through his natural and spontaneous application of senses.
He has an extraordinary sense-perception. He could perceive objects more
intensely than other people. He derived great aesthetic delight at the sight of
objects of Nature, of a fair face, of the works of art, legends old and new. Haydon,
his friend, observed that “the humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of
the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks
glowed and his mouth quivered.” Every moment revealed to him a sensation of
wonder and delight. He wrote, “The setting sun would always set me to right, or if a
sparrow were before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the
gravel.” He derived aesthetic delight through his senses. He looked at autumn and
says that even autumn has beauty and charm:
“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too”
Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott
was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the
moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his
own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee,
perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendour
of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that
poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or
politics. Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great
and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential
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oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His
ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse
and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the
wish to preach. Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures,
sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great
odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; and the season of
autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. The appreciation of Beauty in
Keats is through mind or spirit. The approach becomes intellectual as he endorsees
in ‘Ode on Grecian Urn’:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
Art has captured Beauty of life and made it a truth for all the ages to be “a friend to
man.” It is not the logical reaching after facts that helps in understanding the truth
of things. Keats wrote, ‘What the imagination seizes as beauty must be true’ and it
is his powerful assertion. His logic is simple: what is beautiful is truthful. What is
ugly cannot be truthful. Find truth through beauty and beauty through truth.
Beauty is no more a sensuous, physical or sentimental affair. It has spiritual
associations; it is a concern of the soul of man for the salvation of man. Search for
salvation must come from the heart of man and Keats knew it: “I am certain of
nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—
what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” But a true poet sees life as a
whole. A true poet, in the words of Keats, enjoys light and shade foul and fair with
the same delight. Thus, his concept of beauty encompasses Joy and Sorrow and
Melancholy and Happiness which cannot be separated. Imagination reveals a new
aspect of beauty, which is ‘sweeter’ than beauty which is perceptible to the senses.
The senses perceive only the external aspect of beauty, but imagination
apprehends its essence.
Q. KEATS AS A POET OF SENSUOUSNESS
The poetry of Keats is characterized by ‘sensuous’ uses of language. The
sensuousness of Keats is a striking characteristic of his entire poetry All his poems
including his great odes contain rich sensuous appeal. The odes, which represent
the highest poetic achievement of Keats, are replete with sensuous pictures.
I “Ode to a Nightingale” is one of the most remarkable poems of sensuousness. In
the second stanza of this ode, there is a description of the gustatory sensation of
drinking wine. There are references to the visual and auditory senses too. The poet
also paints the picture of a drunken whose mouth is purple stained because of the
red wine he has drunk:
“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;”
The descriptions of the wine are so sensuous that we see the bubbling wine, we
also hear the dance and sun-burnt mirth; we also get an inkling of the taste of the
long cooled wine. In the 5th stanza the poet gives a highly sensuous description of
the Nightingale world:
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet;
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
———————————————————
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies onsummereves.”
The description of the nature alludes to the sense of sight or its absence (1 cannot
see); the sense of touch and of smell (soft incense) and by the end of the verse,
with the evocation of “the coming musk-rose, full of dew wine”, the sense of taste
and hearing have also been incorporated.
“Ode to Autumn” is considered to be the perfect embodiment of concrete
sensuous experience. The poem gives a graphic description of the season with all
its variety and richness. The whole atmosphere and the mood of the season are
presented through sensuous imagery and descriptions:
“With fruits the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples and moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruits with ripeness to the core.”
In “Ode on Melancholy” again, we have several sensuous pictures. There is the rain
falling from a cloud above and reviving the drooping flowers below and covering
the green hill in an “April”. There is the morning rose, there are the colors produced
by the sunlight playing on wet sand; and there is the wealth of “globed peonies”.
And then there is another exquisitely sensuous picture:
“Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand and let her rave
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes”
Keats always selects the objects of his description and imagery with a keen eye on
their sensuous appeal. This sensuousness is the principal charm of his poetry. A
general recognition of this quality leads to the consensus that Keats’s poetry is
particularly successful in depicting, representing or conveying ‘reality’ or
experience that his -poetic language displays a kind of ‘solidity’ or concreteness
capable of convincing the reader of the reality of what it communicate & —
persuading him, almost, to imagine that he is literally perceiving the objects and
the experiences that the verse describes.
Q. Keats’ ODE TO AUTUMN (Inroduc/ Summary/ Critical Appreciation
1. INTRODUCTION
The Striking Beauty of Autumn
This poem was written by Keats in September, 1819. He was greatly
struck by the beauty of the season. The air was fine, and there was a temperate
sharpness about it. The weather seemed “chaste”. The stubble-fields looked better
than they did in spring. Keats was so impressed by the beauty of the weather that
he recorded his mood in the form of this ode.
One of Keats’s Finest Poems
The Ode to Autumn ranks among the finest poems of Keats. The
treatment of the subject is perfectly objective or impersonal. The poet keeps
himself completely out of the picture. He only describes certain sights and sounds
without expressing his personal reaction to these sights and sounds. The poem is a
perfect Nature-lyric. No human sentiment finds expression; only the beauty and
bounty of Nature during autumn are described.
An Autobiographical Element in the Poem
Sometimes this ode is taken as having an autobiographical quality: it is
possible to connect its serenity with the way of Keats’s own life. However, it is
almost certain that he simply tried to catch the spirit of an autumn afternoon.
2. CRITICAL SUMMARY
The Progress of Thought and Feeling in the Poem:
Here is a poem in which a season has been personified and made to
live. In the first stanza, the poet describes the fruits of autumn, the fruits coming to
maturity in readiness for harvesting. In the second stanza, autumn is personified as
a woman present at the various operations of the harvest and at cider-pressing. In
the last stanza, the end of the year is associated with sunset; the songs of spring
are over and night is falling, but there is no feeling of sadness because autumn has
its own songs. The close of the ode, though solemn, breathes the spirit of hope.
The Fruits of Autumn:
Autumn is a season of ripe fruitfulness. It is the time of the ripening of
grapes, apples, gourds, hazelnuts, etc. It is also the time when the bees suck the
sweetness from “later flowers” and n\ake honey. Thus autumn is pictured in the
stanza as bringing all the fruits of earth to maturity in readiness for harvesting.
The Occupations of Autumn:
In the second stanza, autumn is seen in the person of a reaper, a
winnower, a gleaner, and a cider-presser. Reaping, winnowing, gleaning and cider-
pressing are all operations connected with the harvest and are, therefore, carried
on during autumn. Autumn is depicted firstly as a harvester sitting carelessly in the
field during a winnowing operation; secondly, as a tired reaper fallen asleep in the
very midst of reaping; thirdly, as a gleaner walking homewards with a load on the
head; and fourthly, as a cider-presser watching intently the apple-juice flowing out
of the cider-press.
The Songs of Autumn:
Autumn is not altogether devoid of music. If spring has its songs,
autumn too has its sounds and songs. In the evening, when the crimson light of the
setting sun falls upon the stubble-fields, a chorus of natural sounds is heard. The
gnats utter their mournful sounds; the full-grown lambs bleat loudly; the hedge-
crickets chirp; the robin’s high and delicate notes are heard; and the swallows
twitter in the sky. In this last stanza the close of the year is associated with sunset
and night-fall.
3. CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Its Faultless Construction:
This is the most faultless of Keats’s odes in point of construction. The
first stanza gives us the bounty of Autumn, the second describes the occupations of
the season, and the last dwells upon its sounds. Indeed, the poem is a complete
and concrete picture of Autumn, “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.
Its Sensuousness:
The bounty of Autumn has been described with all its sensuous appeal.
The vines suggesting grapes, the apples, the gourds, the hazels with their sweet
kernel, the bees suggesting honey—all these appeal to our senses of taste and
smell. The whole landscape is made to appear fresh and scented. There is great
concentration in each line of the first stanza. Each line is like the branch of a fruit-
tree laden with fruit to the breaking-point.
Its Vivid Imagery:
The second stanza contains some of the most vivid pictures in English
poetry. Keats’s pictorial quality is here seen at its best. Autumn is personified and
presented to us in the figure of the winnower, “sitting careless on a granary floor”,
the reaper “on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep”, the gleaner keeping “steady thy
laden head across a brook”, and a spectator watching with patient look a cider-
press and the last oozing there from. The reaper, the winnower, the gleaner, and
the cider-presser symbolise Autumn. These pictures make the poem human and
universal because the eternal labours of man are brought before the eyes of the
reader.
The Poet’s Keen Observation of Nature:
The third stanza is a collection of the varied sounds of Autumn—the
choir of gnats, the bleating of lambs, the singing of crickets, the whistling of red-
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breasts, and the twittering of swallows. Keats’s interest in small and homely
creatures is fully evidenced in these lines. The whole poem demonstrates Keats’s
interest in Nature and his keen and minute observation of natural sights and
sounds. Keats’s responsiveness and sensitivity to natural phenomena is one of the
striking qualities of his poetry.
Its Objectivity and its Greek Character:
The poem is characterised by complete objectivity. The poet keeps
himself absolutely out of the picture. Nor docs he express any emotion whether of
joy or melancholy. He gives the objects of feeling, not the feeling itself. The poem is
written in a calm and serene mood. There is no discontent, no anguish, no
bitterness of any kind. There is no philosophy in the poem, no allegory, no inner
meaning. We are just brought face to face with “Nature in all her richness of tint
and form”. The poem breathes the spirit of Greek poetry. In fact, it is one of the
most Greek compositions by Keats. There is the Greek touch in the personification
of Autumn and there is the Greek note in the poet’s impersonal manner of dwelling
upon Nature.
Felicity of Diction:
We have here the usual felicity of diction for which Keats is famous.
Phrases like “mellow fruitfulness”, “maturing sun”, “hair soft-lifted”, “barred
clouds” which “bloom the soft-dying day”, “hilly bourn” are examples of Keats’s
happy coinages. Nor is poetic artifice wanting to add beauty to the verse. The
alliteration in the following lines is, for instance, noteworthy:
To smell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Several words here contain the same “z” sound—hazel, shells, flowers, bees, days,
cease, cells. The abundance of “m” sound in these lines is also noteworthy: plump,
more, warm, summer, brimni’d clammy.
Its Form:
The rhyme-scheme in this ode is the same (except for a little variation)
in all the stanzas each of which consists of 11 lines. Thus it is a “regular” ode.
A Critic’s Comment:
“Most satisfying of all the Odes, in thought and expression, is the Ode
To Autumn. Most satisfying because, for all the splendour of diction in the others,
there are times when the poetic fire dwindles for a moment, whereas in
this ode, from its inception to its close, matter and manner are not only superbly
blended, but every line carries its noble freight of beauty. The first stanza is a
symphony of colour, the second a symphony of movement, the third a symphony
of sound. The artist shapes the first and last, and in the midst the man, the thinker,
gives us its human significance. Thus is the poem perfected, its sensuous imagery
enveloping as it were its vital idea.” (A. Compton-Rickett)
Q. Ode to Nightingale Analysis
Summary/ analysis
The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as
though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he
hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not
from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely;
he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some
unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his
wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like
peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim
forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away,
saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the
weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that
everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will
follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but
through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the
nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlight is hidden by
the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the
branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the
glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine,
violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” In the
sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has
often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in
many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the
idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight
with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to
die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in
vain” and be no longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it
was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been
heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song
has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous
seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to
restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into
himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his
imagination has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the
nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the music is gone,
the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.
Form
Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas.
However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so
much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are
written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter,
with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from
the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other
ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,”
which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is
rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.
Themes
With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest
exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In
this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a
few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is
set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not
born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he
experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a
sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a
connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the
nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the
human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through
alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him
out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life,
he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the
Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by
leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to
follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”
The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the
nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine
himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages
the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while
enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further pain or
disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,”
he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape
from the inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to
do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s
experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or
asleep.
In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to
embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in
the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the
work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that
compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the
nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record,
existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the
speaker’s language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight
in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there
is no light”; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what
flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the
later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any
of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative expression and
has placed his faith in it, but that expression—the nightingale’s song—is
spontaneous and without physical manifestation.
Q. Ode to “Grecian Urn” Critical Appreciation?
'Ode to Grecian Urn' is, probably, a homage to the permanence of beauty;
especially the beauty of art in general and Hellenistic in particular. The poet
observed the painting of a village ceremony on a Grecian Urn. Keats, a die heart
romantic, ventures on to capture not only what the sculpture might have intended
but also what the flight of poet's fancy could produce from yonder lands. We are
amazed at the artistic intrigues and fascinating power of eloquence with which the
purely romantic poet gives vent to his inner emotions. Keats seems to have
journeyed, through the powerful effect of fancy, to the foreign lands of the past to
discover the true attributes of the civilization he saw on the urn. For Keats the
Grecian Urn's silence is "unravished bride of quietness"; the poet takes the
opportunity to express story of this bride, the Grecian Urn. He reminds us that the
Grecian Urn and the story sculptured onto it is the one such that cannot be
narrated by any historian with the charm and captivation that poetry has in store
for us. Therefore, he wants us to expect "flowery tale" from ancient times. The
romantic poet has a powerful fancy to bring out fascinating stories out of the
engravings of the Grecian Urn. He can visualize the legendary figure. He imagines it
to be of a human. Then he thinks it might be of some deity. Then counting on the
Hellenistic allusions, he terms it a demigod; a legendary figure both human and
godly. From the imagery in the stone, the poet crafts a romantic scene where the
lovers are chasing their beloveds. Then he adds minute details of how they must be
"panting" with the "burning foreheads" and "dried tongues" in their "mad" and
playful "pursuit" of love making. However, the poet feels that their happy lot of
chasing would ever remain unchanged. Their love can never be complete for the
9
chase is on forever. With the music added to the pleasures of the youth, Keats
considers it a "wild ecstasy" because the height of this joy could neither be limited
nor could have an end to it. It's the permanency of this very pleasure which forces
the poet consider an "ecstasy". It is the same "ecstasy" the poet wishes to join by
plunging into the time and age of the people in this urn; he wishes to celebrate and
rejoice with them. He wishes to enjoy the melodies of the Grecian Urn. Keats
declares: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard "Are sweeter"...
The trees of the urn can never be bare and the season of joys, spring, may continue.
The song played by the musicians would ever remain new for it is never finished;
neither the song will become old nor would it end tire them. It is "more happy
love" because it is to be youthful and enjoyable for times to come. He styles the
urn "fair attitude" and a civilization of marble men. The poet can see that the trees'
branches and weeds have quite surrounded the urn. The urn is "cold pastoral"
because it has rural scenery and a silent race that cannot speak. The poet "may
cease to be" but the urn shall remain in the world, in the midst of human woes and
agony. The urn and its civilization is a happy lot and it convinces the poet that art,
in the form of beauty, is capable of enduring the damages of time and age. The
poet is happy to have seen the beauty of the Grecian Urn. "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Summary:
John Keats calls the Grecian Urn a bride which is not touched by anyone. The stone
has remained silent in the passing years of history and no historian could narrate a
better story than that of the poet. There is some legendary figure, a human, a god
and perhaps both that urn in the valley or regions of Arcady. There are some
figures on the urn and the poet speculates if they were humans or gods. There are
women too. There are men in pursuit of women and the poet deems it a "mad
pursuit". The poet imagines that the women would certainly struggle to escape.
The poet can also see musical instruments like "pipes and timbrels". Keats
considers it a "wild ecstasy" because the height of this pleasure would have neither
limit nor an end to it. Keats declares that "Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard "Are sweeter"... He would relish the pleasure of looking at the urn and
enjoying the history of beauty engraved onto the stone. Music has a sensual appeal
to all the lovers of music but Keats would wish to imagine unheard musical charm.
He wishes to encourage the pipers in the urn to "play on" for the spiritual
appeasement of the deities they were played for. He idealizes the happy state of
the civilization in the urn. The songs would never end. The trees would never be
bare. There is a ripple of sorrowful thinking that the lovers cannot kiss though they
are very close. But the beloved would never "fade" and they can love forever. The
leaves of these trees can never fall and the spring season would ever abide here in
the urn. The musicians would keep on piping new song; neither the song will
become old nor would it end tire them. It is "more happy love" because it will
remain young and enjoyable forever. The poet can visualize the chasing lovers and
the struggling beloveds; they must be panting and the poet can understand their
happy lot of love's pursuit which would remain the same with heated forehead and
dried tongues. The poet spots a group of people that seem to have been there for
sacrifice. Then the fancy of the poet would relate stories of some green altar and
"mysterious priest". The group is moving with a heifer laden with garlands. The
engraving on the urn has a town with water nearby. The poet tries to think of the
name. He also thinks if it is near some river or sea. The imaginary city and its
fortress might have been built amid strong and peaceful surroundings. The poet
thinks that the city is empty because all the people have come out for either
celebration on some pious day. He addresses the town and declares that it would
ever remain silent and desolate. He titles the urn with "fair attitude" and a breed of
civilization of marble while the forest branches and weeds have partly covered the
stone. The stone and the engravings on it do tease the poet to think forever. He
calls the urn "cold pastoral" for its rural scenery and silent race. Then the poet
realizes that with the passage of time the poet and his generation would die and
the urn shall remain there in the midst of all the troubles and woes of man. The
race on the urn would ever be a happy lot and it shall keep reminding the poet and
the humans that beauty is the only truth which can survive the onslaught of time.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know."
Q. Ode to “Autumn” Critical Appreciation?
Keats, a wonderful romantic, personifies Autumn in conveying the message that
the beauty of autumn is ought to be enjoyed though it be transitory and short
lived. Keats sees autumn separate from winter, a season of fog associated with
sadness and sorrow. The poet appears to profess the need to enjoy the beauty
though it be for present hour, though it may soon be followed with greater grief,
winter. The description of the landscape is perfect. The poet has used extensive
imagery to create the sensual experience even more enrapturing. Actually, Keats
was impressed by the beautiful imagery of the autumn period which inspired him
to write this poem. The poem begins with the concrete images of autumn and ends
on the images of approaching winter. In autumn, fruits are ripe. There are mists.
The sun and autumn appear "close bosom friend" because they conspired for the
ripeness of the fruits of all kinds. The sensual imagery of trees bent with the load of
apples is very appealing. The ground has swollen with several plants and shrubs
while hazel nuts are pulpy now. After visual imagery, the poet imagines that soon
there will be flowers and bees shall visit them for collecting nectar. The bees, or
perhaps the poet, may believe that the blessed "warm days will never cease"
though it winter is looming. It seems as if the role of autumn is "to load", "to
bend", "to swell" and "to set" the process of nature. "Who hath not seen thee
often mid thy store" is the emotional reaction of the poet. For Keats autumn is
always there working on the ripening of the fruits. Autumn is in the fields, on the
"granary floor" and on a "half reaped furrow". Since the poet has personified
autumn, hence, we may even see her as a harvester working in the fields, storing
the harvest and oozing at some half reaped furrow. We may clearly sight a halt in
the activity of autumn. However, it is quite evident that after the harvest it is the
time for entry of winter while autumn must leave. "Sound asleep" and "the last
oozing hours" suggest awakening of winter, a change or perhaps end if seen at
deeper and symbolical levels.
For a moment the poet is anxious for "where are the songs of spring" but recovers
and realizes that the beauty of autumn is enjoyable and it has its charms too. He
rejects the idea of spring: "think not of them" for autumn has its "music too". We
may see the longing of the poet in several layers of meanings. First of all, he might
be relating the beauties of spring to that of autumn. He finds autumn beautiful like
spring is. However, it may also be seen as the poet is well aware that autumn is
dying or is in the process of change with "soft dying day". It will soon be followed
by winter. The longing for avoiding the dark and gloomy winter is urging the poet
to lament the loss of spring though he feels the beauty of present hour i.e. autumn
must be enjoyed.
Q. Ode to “Nightingale” Critical Appreciation?
Keats, a wonderful romantic, seeks beauty wherever he may find it. For him, "a
thing of beauty is a joy forever" no matter how short lived it might be. Keats
happens to listen to the song of a nightingale in the woods. He follows the sound of
the bird. The song has a magical effect on the poet. He cannot but remember the
song and its beauty. The poem is a fine example of "negative capability" of the
poet, the ability to experience phenomena free from the bounds of "theory of
knowledge" or presupposed conceptions and beliefs. Like a true romantic, Keats
attaches all his emotions to the song of the nightingale. The poem lists the themes
of nature, transience, beauty and mortality. The nightingale is "not born for death"
whereas the poet, man, is incapable of living through like the bird. Death
approaches as an inevitable climax in the overall scheme of nature. Keats' "heart
aches" and he feels he has drunk "hemlock" or "opiate" and sunk into the "Lethe",
a mythological river of forgetfulness. Such is the result of overhearing to the song
of a nightingale. The poet is neither jealous nor uneasy at the song of the "happy
bird". The poet has forgotten his identity, his self and is "too happy in thine
happiness". The nightingale is spreading the joys of spring by singing welcome
notes to the season of life and beauty. The song of the bird is so delighting that the
poet is captivated by its alluring music. Keats feels intoxicated with the song. The
poet assimilates the song of nightingale and the related intoxication to a "draught
of vintage" cooled for a long time and could taste of Flora, the mythical goddess of
flowers known for its dances and the associated mirth. Keats, being a Hellenistic,
wishes for a beaker full of Southern wine "full of the true; the blushful
Hippocrene", "Blushful Hippocrene" means the red wine of Mount Helicon, sacred
to the muses and a source of poetic inspiration. In other words the bird as well as
the song is a source of creativity. The escapist idealism forces the poet to leave the
painful realism and enter into ideal life of nightingale. The poet wants to disappear
with the joyous nightingale. He wishes to "fade far away, dissolve and quite forget"
the human miseries and pains; the nightingale has never tasted of such "weariness"
and sings. The poet and his fellow humans groan because human happiness is not
permanent: some are paralyzed with old age and others lose childhood to youth.
No joy is everlasting in the life of man. For man beauty is not forever. "New love"
cannot be attracted to "lustrous eyes" "beyond tomorrow" because human joy
fades away.
The poet says to the nightingale "I will fly with thee". The poet may not have
chariots and pards like Bacchus, Dionysus- the god of wine but he intends to reach
the happy bird "on the viewless wings of Poesy". Though dull brain of the poet
perplexes and hinders, yet he says "already with thee". In this soft night, symbols
of romance i.e. "Queen Moon" and "her starry Fays". There is darkness under the
leaves of the trees except a few gleams. The darkness may also symbolize the
dismay and sorrow of the poet. The poet describes turns to the landscape which is
somewhat dark. He "cannot see what flowers" are at his feet. He cannot even
ascertain the different fragrances endowed by the summer season. The flowers of
various species are about him that include "hawthorn", "pastoral eglantine", "fast
fading violets" and "musk rose". The poet has aptly presented graphic description
of several of the perfume bearing flowers. These images add to the romantic
appeal of the overall mood of the poem. Captured by the alluring song of the
nightingale, the poet listened to the song in sheer darkness. The poet relates that
during his lifetime he has desired of death many a times. In order to attract death,
the poet "called him soft names in many a mused rhyme" so that death may take
along. But the poet feels :
"Now more than ever it seems rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,"
10

Q. The Eve of St. Agnes John Keats: Summary and Analysis
The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats was written in 1819 and published in 1820. This
poem is taken as one of the finest and the most prominent in the 19th century
literature. This poem is written in Spenserian stanzas: eight lines in iambic
pentameter followed by a single line in iambic hexameter. St. Agnes’s eve is the
evening before the day on which the memory of St. Agnes is celebrated and fast is
kept. The eve of St. Agnes is 20th January and the consecrated day in January 21st.
The eve is called the vigil and the day is called the feast. And so St. Agnes eve is
January 20th. St Agnes was a young Roman girl who became a convert to
Christianity, and who was persecuted and finally she suffered death for her faith
under the emperor Diocletian. She was subsequently canonized and declared a
saint by the Christian church and a day was devoted to her memory.
The setting of the poem is a medieval castle, the time is cold January 20th, the eve
of the Feast of St. Agnes. Madeline is assured that if she keeps fast and performs
some special rites, she will have a clear vision of her lover at midnight. That is why
she is impatiently waiting for the midnight to fall and goes to bed without supper
as a ritual.
On this same evening, Porphyro, who is the lover of Madeline, comes to her castle
without being noticed. Porphyro is regarded as the enemy by Madeline’s family
and they want to kill him on sight. Luckily he meets Madeline’s old nurse, Angela,
who is friend to Porphyro. She tells him the plan of Madeline and her belief on the
ritual. He suddenly thinks of making Madeline’s dream a reality by his presence in
her bedroom at midnight. He requests Angela to help her and also makes her
believe that he will do no harm to her. Then she leads him to Madeline’s chamber
and hides him in a closet.
Madeline in a beautiful thought of her lover to come in the dream enters her room
and falls asleep. As expected, her fast and the ritual bring positive result. Her sleep
becomes the sleep of enchantment and her lover Porphyro comes in her dream as
if immortalized. After she falls asleep, he comes closer to her and awakens her by
playing a lute. When her eyes open she was still in the grip of the magic spell of the
wonderful dream. She lost the pleasure of her dream and she finds Porphyro in his
ordinary form not in the immortal form like in the dream. She was so enchanted
with the visionary Porphyro that she wanted him back. And her wish is granted.
They got mystic marriage. The spell of the magic of the night came to an end. But,
Madeline fears that he would leave her alone. To make her sure, he urged her to
run away with him from the castle. Finally, they run away from the castle without
anyone’s notice.
In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats is not interested in the story or in the characters, but
in the romantic love and its celebration. For him, romantic love is a heavenly
experience and to give his romantic lovers this beautiful and enchanting
experience, he puts them under the spell of magic. This narrative poem is full of
supernatural elements which is one of the main features of romanticism.
This poem is descriptive in nature like a painting where every minute detail is
vividly presented. The scene in the chamber is so colorfully explained that one can
make the scene in his mind and feel the innate sensuousness of the poet. Every
minute detail gives special contribution to praise the romantic love in the poem.
Some critics compare this expression of romantic love to Keats’s love affair with
Fanny Brawne.
The use of contrast in The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats is one of the dominant artistic
devices implemented in the poem. The deliberate use of bitter cold contrasts with
the warm love of Madeline and Porphyro. The love of Madeline and Porphyro is
foregrounded against the hatred of Madeline’s family to Porphyro.
Though all the senses are enticed by the poet, the sense of sight is mainly attracted
in the poem. The description of the stained window glass in the chamber of
Madeline is the most beautiful example of his influential appealing power to the
sight. This window was "diamonded with panes of quaint device, / Innumerable of
stains and splendid dyes." Madeline is transformed into a "splendid angel" by the
stained glass as the moonlight shines through it.
The death of Angela and the Beadsman at the end of the poem shows his abrupt
and unfinished ending of the poem.
Q. SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (17 94 ) juxtapose the innocent,
pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression;
while such poems as “The
Lamb”represent a meek virtue, poems like “The Tyger” exhibit opposing, darker
forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two
different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that
the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and
then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of
the poems are dramatic—that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet
himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position
from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In
particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual
repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these
separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human
beings.
The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives
of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood.
Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are
about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw
attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the
corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance
toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the
emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes—over the
heads, as it were, of the innocent—Christianity’s capacity for promoting injustice
and cruelty.
The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in
which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence,
while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective ( “The Tyger,”
for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which
innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of
the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the
ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned
with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its
role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus
adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for
some of its blindness.
The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the
language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore
are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others,
like “The Sick Rose” and “The Divine Image,” make their arguments through
symbolism or by means of abstract concepts.
Some of Blake’s favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the
reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the
familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his
own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the
unfamiliar is consonant with Blake’s perpetual interest in reconsidering and
reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior.
Q. William Blake’s Symbolism
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions.
Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. A symbol is an object
which stands for something else as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s
tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted
Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Blake’s
symbols usually have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics
would now wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is
markedly different from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited
by his mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of complex
significance, and such images are no less important in his lyrical poetry. The use
of symbols is one of the most striking features of Blake's poetry.
There is hardly any poem in the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" which
does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or
surface meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible language,
that fact does not deprive them of a depthof meaning. The language of these
poems is like that of the Bible—at once simple and profound as the following
lines read: “O Rose, thou art sick!”
When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how mysterious evil
attacks the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular importance in Songs of
Innocence and Experience, being connected with the Fall by the motif of the
garden; and its traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’
and the design for ‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for
‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a
greater variety of responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme
poems’, we can interpret the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but
‘yearns after the liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the
aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker
as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-symbolism to animal symbols as in
11
the ‘Tyger’: “Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”
If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of
the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb, innocent
and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger
makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood, and that is
why the question arises "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" At the same
time, the tiger is symbolic of the Creator's masterly skill which enabled Him to
frame the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem
Night (in the "Songs of Innocence") offers an interesting contrary to the tiger of
the "Songs of Experience". Both the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the
beast of the fairy tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle
creature: the tiger cannot. In the world of Experience the violent and destructive
elements in Creation must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is
also symbolic of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the
Reason. Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all
restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise restraints upon
others.
Q. William Blake as a Thinker
Blake's Christian Polytheism
Blake's pantheon, renamed and given the modern dress of his time and nation, is
native not only in Blake's imagination, but in those of his countrymen and
contemporaries, down to this day. He restored to the English nation a long-
lacked pantheon, those gods whom he saw at their immortal tasks in South
Moulton Street, Lambeth, Battersea, and Hampstead, in Wordsworth's Lake
District, and on "Snowdon sublime".
It maybe said that all imaginative poets are polytheists insofar as they personify
those energies of the soul which antiquity named gods. The imaginative
polytheism of Shelley and Keats is explicit, of Milton and Spenser and Coleridge,
implicit. But Blake is perhaps unique in the explicit nature of his Christian
polytheism. He restored the gods to England, Christianized one and all.
The Holy Quality of His Visions
Blake combined the imaginative genius of the poet with the symbolic learning of
tradition and the psychological insight of modern mankind. His attitude towards
his vision partakes more of the intellectual truthfulness of the 20th century than
of the pious obsurantism of the religion against which he had so much to say. But
the visions retain that holy quality which has at all times characterized the
religious thought of mankind. He stands as a bridge between the institutional
religion of the past and the tendency of the present time to seek the celestial
powers within the soul
His Theory of the Imagination
He admired Law and Wesley, and was himself, as a young man, a follower of
Swedenborg. As an old man his respect for the Catholic religion grew, perhaps
through his love of Dante (whose poem he so sublimely illustrated during the last
years of his life). But his religion is of the indwelling Logos, the imagination. He
used synonymously "Jesus, the Imagination", the "Bosom of God", the
"Saviour", and the "Divine Humanity", and declaredhimself to have been at
all times a "worshipper of Jesus". The imagination is, for Blake as for Coleridge,
the divine presence in man; and his theory of the imagination is thus one that
makes him, in the only significant sense, a religious genius. His spiritual aim was
the widening of consciousness and the destruction of the "Satanic" kingdom of
the selfhood or ego.
Views on Morality
To Blake conventional morality seemed almost entirely unrelated to the true
nature of man. Good and evil, as we conceive them, have little meaning in the
world of the gods and goddesses, of the unconscious regions of the psyche, that
obey laws unknown to reason and convention. Blake therefore became, as
Swedenborg had never become, the courageous prophet of a new morality, a
"Marriage of Heaven and Hell", of "reason" and "energy", or we might say, of the
conscious and the unconscious halves of man's original wholeness. Legalistic
morality is, for Blake, the greatest of spiritual evils. His Jesus is the Divine
Humanity—the potential human Self that lies beyond the conscious ego
and its moral formulations.
Imaginative Interpretation of Christianity
Painting, music, and poetry were for Blake man's "three ways of conversing with
Paradise". Jesus and his disciples were for him; "all artists" since they spoke from
and to the imagination. There are many who are prepared to accept Blake's
imaginative interpretation of Christianity in an age when theology has become
discredited in the light of reason. Imagination, so he believed, communicates its
wisdom from a deeper source than reason; and the poet, rather than the
theologian, communicates knowledge of holy mysteries.
Regarded as artist, poet, or religions revolutionary, Blake is a figure whose
stature is greater than that of any but the greatest men of genius that England
has produced.
Biblical Imagery and Rhythms
Some time between 1796 and 1800, the political undertone fades from Blake's
poetry and its mood becomes more and more Christian. About this time, his
imagery and his rhythms, for example in Vala or The Four Zoos, take on the
Biblical airs, the visionary warnings, and the unending swell which mark his later
poems.
View of God and of Christ
Blake's later poems have given him the reputation of a Christian hermit who
lived remote from the world and was lost in his own mystic vision. Yet this
picture of Blake is not strictly true. His form of Christianity was heretical, for it
identified Christ the Son with all spiritual goodness and made God the Father a
symbol of terror and tyranny. God to Blake personified absolute authority, and
Christ personified the human character; and Blake was on the side of man
against authority, at the end of his life when he called the authority Church and
God as much as at the beginning when he called it State and King. To him all
virtue is human virtue, and in his most religious poems he acknowledges no
other Christianity:
The Worship of God is honouring his gifts
In other men and loving the greatest men best, each according To his genius
which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other God than that God who is the
intellectual fountain of Humanity.
This is the unity between the early Blake and the late, the Radical and the
heretic, and it joins the lyric poems, whose meanings seem so much simpler than
they are, to the tortuous and smoky rhetoric of the later prophetic books.
Most religions, including Christianity, present more than one possible vision of
theDivinity. One view, the most often given in the "Songs of Experience", is that
of a Jehovah-like figure, a Nobodaddy who controls the universe from a vast
distance according to laws which, like the movements of stars, are fixed and only
partly comprehensible. To man, this God's ways seem tyrannical and
unpredictable and, though he is the Father, He is a stern and forbidding one. His
children are ignorant; He regards their ways as evil, and they need the threat of
punishment constantly held over them if they are to be controlled at all. The
"Songs of Innocence" present a very different view of God.
Q. William Blake, the Theorist
"Poetry fettered", said Blake, "fetters the human race; nations are destroyed or
flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or
flourish."
Condemned Traditional Verse-forms
In theory as well as practice, the Romantic Movement began with the smashing
of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake condemned the verse forms which had
become traditional. In the preface to Jerusalem he says: "I have produced a
variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and
every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved
for the terrific parts, and the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and
the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other."
Opposed to Neo-classical Doctrines
Blake poured scorn upon all that he associated with classicism in art and in
criticism. In the preface to Milton, he says: "We do not want either Greek or
Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations." In his
comments on Homer and Virgil, he says: "It is the Classics, and not Goths nor
Monks that desolate Europe with wars." The whole criticalvocabulary of neo-
classical criticism had evidently disgusted him. He cannot endure it. In his
favourite Scriptural language, he declares: "Israel delivered from Egypt is Art
delivered from Nature and Imitation." He is irritated by any doctrine that has
been handed down in the name of Aristotle. He says, for instance: "Unity is the
cloak of folly", and "Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with character."
Opposed to the Divorce of Imagination from Reason
Blake reacted strongly against conventional thought and customary morality,
againstblind laws which extinguish individuality, energy, and spiritual delight.
The great tragedy for him was the parting of Reason and Imagination. "The
Reasoning Power", divorced from the Imagination, was:
An abstract objecting power that negatives everything. This is the Spectre of
Man, the Holy Reasoning Power, And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of
Desolation.
Believer in Natural Energy
Blake wanted to sweep the hurdles out of the way and release man's natural
energy. "Energy is eternal delight", he said. He tried to make his "furnaces roar"
in order that "Enthusiasm and life may not cease". Art for him was not a side-
issue. It was not a vehicle of formal instruction. It was something that should
"move" man in the fullest sense of the term. It was a vision of fundamental living
realities, as perceived not by the Reason, but by the eyes of the mind. He denied
the validity of ideas imposed by custom. He declared that his vision was a vision
of truth.
Some of His Noteworthy Utterances
Some of Blake's utterances deserve special attention. For instance: "He who sees
the Infinite in all things, sees God." "Christianity is Art." "Human Imagination is
the Divine vision and Fruition." "I come in self-annihilation and the grandeur of
Inspiration to cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration." Here is
something from his Milton: These are the destroyers of Jerusalem.....
12
Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination By imitation of
Nature's images drawn from Remembrance.
Inspiration
According to Blake, no formal rules or external literary laws have any authority.
The artist must look within himself. Of many of his poems he said that they were
"dictated" to him by spirits. In this most literal sense he held that "inspiration"
could come to the aid of a poet. When he was inspired he made use of his
Imagination or the Divine Vision. Energy and delight accompany this expression
of the Divine Vision.
The Poet's Aim is to Reveal
Blake holds that the aim of the poet is not to please or to offer rational
instruction, but to reveal: to reveal what is given to him as true. This means two
things in Blake's actual practice. It means that he presents through the sensible
forms of art that which his "mind's eye" sees—a world of reality, not as it can be
judged by the reason, but apprehended in imaginative experience. This is very
different from trying to express in art an explicit account of a system of the
universe. When the poet attempts the latter task, he is confusing the task of the
artist with the task of the philosopher or theologian. And this, Blake often does.
When he gives way to his impulse to expound, he portrays knowledge, not Art.
Then he regards Art not as an expression of the individual, but as the
representation of eternal truth.
Not the Method of Logic
But when Blake ceases to expound, to argue, to prove, to persuade, and is
content to showus his world, to reveal that in experience which is significant to
him, then he is functioning as a poet. It does not matter if the portrayal of his
imaginative world lends itself to interpretation in the logical terms of a
metaphysical or mystical system. A work of art may stimulate logical judgments,
but its own method is never that of logic.
Blake the Artist Versus Blake the Poet
And here, precisely, Blake's theory is better than his poetical practice. He asserts
that art depends upon vision, perceptions, and the feeling of energy
accompanying it, and not upon ratiocination. Painting and engraving did not
offer the same temptation to wander from the path. Thus whilst his poetry is
marred by the mystic's practice of mingling imagery and dogmatism, his painting
and engraving more consistently reveal his true artistic genius. There, the artist is
seldom confounded with the prophet and preacher.
Q. William Blake’s Romanticism
William Blake is a romantic poet. The sparks of romanticism are vividly marked
on his poetry. The question arises what is Romanticism? The answer is that it is a
phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of
approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.
It was Schelling who first defined romanticism as ‘liberalism in literature’.
Though romanticism officially started by the Lyrical Ballads jointly penned by
Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1830, poets like William Blake made cracks to
classicism towards the end of the18th century. In Romanticism, a piece of work
could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagination
and vision.” Many of the writers of the Romantic period were highly influenced
by the war between England and France and the French Revolution. In the
midst of all these changes, Blake too was inspired to write against these ancient
ideas. ‘All Religions Are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ were composed
in hopes of bringing change to the public’s spiritual life. Blake felt that, unlike
most people, his spiritual life was varied, free and dramatic. Blake’s poetry
features many characteristics of the romantic spirit. The romanticism of Blake
consists in the importance he attached to imagination, in his mysticism and
symbolism, in his love of liberty, in his humanitarian sympathies, in his
idealization of childhood, in the pastoral setting of many of his poems, and in his
lyricism. “Bring me my spear! O clouds,
unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire”
The above lines from, ‘Jerusalem’ amply justifies the point. "Poetry fettered",
said Blake, "fetters the human race". In theory as well as practice, the Romantic
Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake
condemned the verse-forms which had become traditional. He poured scorn
upon all that he associated with classicism in art and incriticism. "We do not
want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own
imaginations", he said. The whole critical vocabulary of neo- classical
criticism had evidently disgusted him. He could not endure it. The visions that
Blake started seeing in his childhood and which he kept seeing throughout his life
were doubtless a product of his ardent imagination. His visions profoundly
controlled both his poetry and his painting. Of many of his poems he said that
they were dictated to him by spirits. In this most literal sense he held that,
inspiration could come to the aid of a poet. In a state of inspiration, the poet
made use of his imagination. "Human imagination is the Divine Vision and
Fruition", he said. Energy and delight accompany this expression of the Divine
Vision. All these views on the subject of poetry spring from the intensely
romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the revolutionary spirit that permeates
his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial to his art. We see in Holy Thursday
I: “These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own”
The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the
human mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of
them in the highest degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of
Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence.
Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much less degree, such as the
obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. Everything that the eyes
of the child see is bathed in a halo of mystery and beauty. The words in these
poems are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as
possible, and the thought itself is simple. Blake's first style is in a way a juvenile
form of Romanticism. The "Songs of Innocence" most completely fulfil the
definition of Romanticism as "the renascence of wonder". The world of Nature
and man is the world of love and beauty and innocence enjoyed by a happy child,
or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision.
Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form
wonderfully limpid and melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a
key role in his poetry as Tyger embodies:
““When the stars threw down their pears,
And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”
Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination
which occupy a commanding position in Blake's thinking. The tiger is Blake's
symbol for the "abundant life", and for regeneration. The poem effectively
conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger. The climax of
the poem's lyricism is reached in the lines which, though somewhat cryptic,
effectively produce and effect of wonder and amazement. Blake was a great
champion of liberty and had strong humanitarian sympathies. This is another
aspect of his Romanticism. Blake's humanitarian sympathies are seen in such
poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper,
and above all London as in the following lines:
“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear”
In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself
in the chimney sweeper's cry, the hapless soldier's sigh, and the youthful
harlot's curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls "the-mind-
forged manacles". Nor does, Blake show any mercy to the Church. The boy in
Blake’s poetry finds the church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is
warm and friendly because the church imposes religious discipline like fasting
and prayer. Pastoralism, too is feature of poetry. The little pastoral poem ‘The
Shepherd’ has a delicate simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural
responsibility and trust. Noteworthy also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its
picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its expressive
melody.
Q. Blake’s As Poet / Critical Approaches to his Poetry
Ruled by Instinct
As a writer, Blake is much less occupied with theory than Wordsworth, Blake's
new departures follow no set programme. No reformer was ever more
thoroughly ruled by instinct. That is why in certain directions, and at the very
first attempt, he goes farther than Wordsworth. He surpasses Wordsworth in the
wealth of his prophetic gospel and in the simple purity of his inspiration. But he
lacks Wordsworth's sense of balance. Wordsworth is still in our eyes the leader
of a school; Blake remains a solitary figure.
Originality: Intuition; Symbolism
Blake's extreme originality kept him apart from the general public, and from
official recognition. Only a small group knew his genius or dimly felt his
greatness. Never did atemperament show greater individuality. He did feel some
influences: but in his mode of thinking, in his imagination, and in his artistic
tastes, all his main decisions are solely his own. His drawings bear the stamp of
an inimitable vision. His poetry deals in the subtlest kind of symbolism with a
matchless skill. His philosophy is a series of intuitive flights into theregions of the
Absolute. To our minds his philosophic intuitions are presented as a group of
strange, complicated symbols which to him are the clearest, the most familiar
realities. His mind works in open defiance of all the normal laws of logic. The
language which he speaks, in the latter part of his work, is sometimes
unintelligible.
Elements of Romanticism in his Early Poems
The first poems of Blake form a body of poetry different from every other. They
show the working of an inner light, and they show the working of mysticism. The
predominant theme of this poetry is the feelings of a child's impassioned soul.
The language of this poetry is that of a moving simplicity. Its emotions possess a
pure ardour. These short poems have in them the essence of Romanticism,
whether the main subject be love and happiness, as in the "Poetical Sketches"
and the "Songs of Innocence"; or the note of grief and rebellion against a world
given over to evil be more pronounced, as in the "Songs of Experience". The
universe is here seen through the eyes of a child, felt through the senses of a
child, and judged through the heart of a child. The child is here the symbol of the
most delicate and courageous intuitions in the human mind. The elements of
Romanticism are present in these poems, some of them in the highest degree,
such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of Nature through fresh eyes, an
intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence most distant from the reach of
our intelligence. Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much lesser
degree, such as the obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. The
clear eyes which questioningly look at Nature, animals, and man, show a single
acuity of vision; but everything they see is bathed in a halo of mystery and
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beauty; there radiates from them meek pity no less than holy anger. Blake's first
style is in a way a juvenile form of Romanticism.
Simple but Expressive Words
The words in these poems are as smoothly joined as the molecules of a liquid.
They are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as possible,
and the thought itself is simple. They do not strive after elegance, and yet they
achieve it by means of their perfect adaptation. They do not aim at being intense,
and yet are expressive because they are soaked in the feeling from which they
sprang. They have the cadenced flow of natural music. Here is the melody,
somewhat thin but supremely spontaneous, of the soul in its moments of
emotion. In the poetry of Blake the dried-up spring of Elizabethan lyricism may
be said to have flowed again.
Prosaic Touches
These first poems, however, are not all of an equal quality. They are not free
from prosaic touches. Jarring or weak notes are heard, traceable to the over-
impatient ardour of the poet. Here and there a painful feverishness invades and
disturbs the quiet outburst of thought.
The Gospel of Liberty
The doctrine of Blake is a confused assemblage of desires and impulses. It may be
compared to a vast gospel of liberty. It shows a daring outlook, and embraces all
the political ideas of the French Revolution. It even goes so far as the bounds of
anarchic individualism, free mysticism, and the modern criticism of moral values.
All established standards and beliefs are upset by Blake at one stroke. Whether it
be the orthodox religion of Christ, or the traditional notion of good and evil, or
again, rational and scientific beliefs, the same revolutionary spirit reverses the
previous order of things. On one hand, it reaches and even goes beyond the
religion of a Swedenborg and the beliefs of the mystics of the Puritan Republic;
on the other, it foretells all the work of liberation by which modern psychology
has tried to overthrow moral inhibitions and restraints. Blake is the prince of
spiritual revolt, but his doctrinal ideas have wielded no influence.
Mythical Vision
A manifold and yet coherent symbolism expresses these ideas. The mythical
vision of Blake creates an original cosmogony. The metaphysical or religious
concepts are imbued with life, given a form, and clothed in a gigantic humanity.
The work of Blake is an apocalypse, a realm of darkness peopled by supernatural
beings, where one and the same idea develops throughout a continued series of
signs and conventional equivalents, but where any attempt at a precise
interpretation would be risky.
Style in the Prophetic Books
Blake does not, in the "Prophetic Books", conform to any of the normal
conditions of literary or picturesque expression. To find a close connectedness
between the successive terms is well-nigh impossible. The style has often a
biblical grandeur. The rhythm of the verse is ample, free, rugged, but sometimes
highly majestic. But the language, to be understood, demands a sight practised
and trained in interpreting it. And the "Prophetic Books" have had no influence
except on a small group of faithful admirers.
Q. William Blake as a Lyric Poet
William Blake is a lyric poet. He was born in the neo- classical age, but the things
that distinguish him from other poets of his age are the lyrical qualities of his
poetry. By the lyrical qualities we understand such poetic features as subjectivity,
melodiousness, imagination, description and meditation. Moreover a lyric poem is
usually short and may fall into such genres as elegy, ode, ballad, sonnet etc. A lyric
poem expresses a poet’s private thoughts and emotions rather than telling a story.
From all these perspectives the poems of Blake in Songs of Innocence and
Experience are lyrics.
The first quality that makes his poems lyrics is subjectivity. The neo-classical
approach to poetry was objective. Blake on the other hand took a subjective
approach. Blake was a disturbing prophet who desired social change. He was
personally against all kinds of repressions, materialism, institutional corruption,
racism, worship of money and hypocrisy.
Blake voiced against repression and constrains. He did not follow the neo-classical
restrains of writing poem. He also expressed his hatred towards institutional and
personal repressions in such poems as- The Holy Thursday, The Nurse’s Songs
(Experience),
In Blake’s time many children had to depend upon charity. In his poem ‘Holy
Thursday’, Blake raises his voice against such repression.
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their as are filled with thorns
It is eternal winter there.
Blake means here that all children are angles, not scapegoats to be the butchered
on the altar of the society. How can England call herself rich and fruitful land if she
has hunger children waiting for food from the so-called benefactors of society?
Blake believes that children should be free and their life should be colorful. But the
guardians always try to restrict them. Blake opposes such kind of restriction. In
Nurse’s Song, the nurse keeps a constant watch over the children and her instincts
reflect her disposition. From her angle of view, life is aimless, a useless waste of
time in childhood and in old age, a shame. It has no purpose as she says:
Our spring and our day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
She sets all her views in a depressing background such as winter, night, and dew
darkness and so on. She looks back with frustration on her childhood, and instead
of feeling merry she grows pale. Her ‘spring’ and “day” seem to express the agony
of growing up to a regretful maturity. She is hostile and insensitive to innocence.
She takes the children back home, leaving them unable to protest, to play and
enjoy.
William Blake dislikes Industrial Revolution and in his poems he focuses how the
Industrial Revolution represents the devil and that it must be purged. Blake focused
on child labor and prostitution-the two adverse effects of Industrialization
Revolution in his poems The Chimney Sweeper and London.
Blake hated the exploitation of children's labor because of Industrial Revolution.
Blake believed in the innocence of childhood pleasures. The Chimney Sweeper by
William Blake expressed the difficult lives of working children. As the title reveals
it, the children are cleaning chimneys all day long in unimaginable conditions. Blake
gives his readers a clear understanding of the harsh conditions of these young
chimney sweepers. He says:
“There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl’d like a lamb’s back,” ( lines 5-6)
Blake focuses how badly these children are left powerless and with no escape. On
another instance, the poem relates the misery felt by these children when it says:
“A little black thing among the snow/
Crying “ ‘weep, ‘weep,” in notes of woe!” (lines 1-2).
Blake is here pointing out that man is responsible for evils of society. The picture
drawn by Blake is disturbing and heartbreaking at the same time.
In his poem "London," from his work Songs of Experience, Blake describes the woes
of the Industrial Revolution. He describes the Thames River and the city streets as
"chartered," or controlled by commercial interest. He refers to "mind-forged
manacles"; he relates that every man's face contains "Marks of weakness, marks of
woe"; and he discusses the "every cry of every Man" and "every Infant's cry of
fear."
In “London” Blake describes a world during and after the industrial revolution in
which there have been many ill-fated side effects as people move away from the
traditional farming families and their beliefs.
Blake vividly portrays another worse effect of Industrial revolution, “prostitution”,
in his poem “London”. A prostitute or an unwed mother is unable to rejoice in her
child’s birth. It tells of a married couple looking down upon her for what she does
in order to make a living. This is ironic because the business of prostitution is
caused in part by the restrictions placed upon the married man. It is also ironic
because the married man is what has created the need for, and use of prostitutes.
The harlot curses the respectable and polite society because it is they who have
created the demand for her, and then look down upon what she does. “Blights with
plagues” implies that perhaps she also infects them with some sort of venereal
disease. The final words of the poem, “Marriage hearse” compares marriage to
death. The narrator sees marriage as another type of restriction placed upon man
by society, marriage is a sort of death in man’s ability to be free to do as he wishes.
Blake believed in equality for all men, and this is reflected in his poem. William
Blake's The Little Black Boy revolves around the theme of slavery and the ideal
14
slave's mentality. Blake wrote about a black African-American and his experience
with slavery. Blake probably expressed his own feelings towards the whites' racism
and suppression acts towards African-Americans through the black boy, which is
the speaker of the poem.
The poem is about an African-American, who is the speaker of the poem, who
remembers his childhood with his mother where she used to indoctrinate her child
with the racist beliefs of slavers. The black boy has a dream, that all humans will be
equal.
Blake stands against puritan hypocrisy. Two of his poems from Songs of Experience
present his views on the matter: ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and “The Garden of Love’.
In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, the child (Blake) is telling society that his pain is being
caused by those in whom he put his trust— his parents. They abandon him and go
...to praise God & his Priest & King (Blake, 11). Perhaps they do this, because on the
outside their child looks happy and they probably think that they are helping him
more than anything:
‘ And because I am happy, & dance& sing
They think they have done me no injury,’
In the meantime, the church is also playing a part in his misery. How? Because it
allows the parents to come inside its building to pray when they should be
protecting their child from all harm:
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray ……………..
a heaven of our misery “
In another of his poems, ‘The Garden of Love,’ Blake portrays religion as the
oppressor of human kind. Blake sees the church as an obstacle between men and
God. He attacks the Priests because, instead of offering God's comfort as they were
meant to do, they become like judges or police officers telling men what they can
or cannot do.
“And priests in lack gowns were walking their round
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”
Blake asks society to take a second look at the way the church treats them and to
realize that God cannot found among oppressions.
All of Blake’s poem are short, some very short indeed. All are written in apparently
simple style, and the most usual verse form in the rhymed quatrain. (stanza of four
lines). A lyric poem is usually melodious. In many of Blake’s poem like “The Tyger”
we find melodious tone.
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
For Blake “imagination” is that gift in man, which can hear the prompting’s of God,
or “spiritual sensation”. ‘Introduction’ is a canonical poem of the romantic period.
In it lies the key romantic element: imagination, emotion, idealism. In
“Introduction” to Songs of Innocence Blake as a poet, playing his simple and
innocent music attracts the attention of a muse or spirit that appears to him as a
child on a cloud. The child encourages him to play a song about a “Lamb” and being
impressed with the musician asks him to drop his pipe and write a book “that all
may read”. In this way the spirit is asking Blake to share his inspiration with a wider
audience, an audience that would not depend on his presence to experience the
happiness his imagination can bring.
Sometimes Blake asks question about creation: how can we understand a God who
is capable of creating the innocence of the lamb and the fury of the tiger? The Tyger
(Songs of Experiece) is Blake’s famous meditative poem. The tiger is Blake’s symbol
for the “abundant life”, and for regeneration. Centrally, it Tyger! Tyger! Burning
bright;
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful smmetry?
Nature was not the central focus of Blake's poems, but it was a theme that did
occur in many of his works, such as "Nurse's Song" "The Lamb", "Earth's Answer",
"The Garden of Love", "To Spring" and "To the Evening Star". 
In "Nurse's Song" (from Songs of Innocence), Blake describes children playing
outside, enjoying nature and having the time of their lives. In this verse, time is
marked by signs in the natural world. The nurse implores: "[t]hen come home, my
children, the sun is gone down / And the dews of night arise. . ." (lines 5-6). Nature
acts as a gentle guide for the children. Their only concept of time comes from the
luminaries and the light they give. The children respond to the nurse, wanting to
play until the last lights in the sky are gone. Again, scenes from nature appear.
"Besides, in the sky the little birds fly /
And the hills are all covered with sheep."
Each of his poems is a vehicle of expressing his personal emotion. It seems his art
had been too adventurous and unconventional for the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, and we may even say he was ahead of his time.
Q. Consider William Blake as a Revolutionary Poet
Blake has often been described to be the “Precursor of Romanticism.” The
Romantic poets of the nineteenth century struck a note of protest against the
conventional literature as well as the social injustices. Blake, having written
immediately preceding the Age of Romanticism, paved the way for them, at least
for Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron. Although his voice against the oppression of
institutional laws and rules was not so strong, he made a pointed attack on the
social injustices and cruelty towards the down-trodden people in the name of
philanthropy.
Blake was primarily an artist, so his way of fighting against the social vices is
through the media of art. He uses symbols to indicate the tyranny of the so-called
social and political institutions over human liberty and freedom. In the poems
‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’ we find a lot of symbols
representing the oppressing agent. In ‘London’ we get a vivid and pungent
picturization of the 18th century London. (Its roads and rivers are ‘chartered’-
indicating the tyranny that rules over the people.) The cries of London are the cries
of misery. Its children are miserable; its citizens are the victims of oppression by
State or Church. A society has been created in which corruption has become so
rampant that marriage is without love and harlot’s curses lie heavily on the
newborn children. In ‘The School Boy’ we get a milder attack on the system of
education. Schooling, as Blake observes it, thwarts the natural growth of the child
and binds him to rigid unimaginative discipline. He ridicules the artificial ethos of
religion that professes a total denial of man’s sensual life and strongly advocates
for the combination of the sense and the spirit. He stands against those aspects of
the contemporary society detrimental to the uninterrupted growth of mental
powers of man.
The industrial growth of England during the eighteenth century had many ills. One
of them was the inhuman use of children in machines and factories causing worst
suffering to them against which Charles Dickens had to fight much later. Not only
the children, but the poor people as a whole also suffered. The lack of healthy
working environment even that of ventilation in the mills led the poor people,
especially children to lose health and strength. The low wages compelled them to
live their lives in extreme poverty. At this juncture of affairs, Blake was one among
a few that fought to set the things right by highlighting the misery of the sufferers.
The ‘Songs of Innocence’ deals with the pure innocence of children and the
heavenly, secure and gleeful pastoral world of sport and merry-making. But even in
the midst of joy, he does not forget ‘The Little Black Boy’ or ‘The Chimney
Sweeper’. The little black boy speaks out against racial discrimination. The little boy
laments the black color of his skin which makes him inferior to the white angelic
English boy. But he learns from his mother that the skin is a cloud and it is the soul
that counts. The poem, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ throws light upon the miserable life
of young children who are subject to inhuman treatment in the society of
Industrialised England. Blake portrays greedy fathers who sell their children for a
few pounds and abandon them to the eternal hell of suffering. Since the chimneys
were too narrow, only small children like Tom Dacre were employed as chimney
sweepers. He says:
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
The ‘Songs of Experience’ is the fruit of his experience about the society in which he
lived. He saw with his own eyes and experience taught him how innocent joy
ultimately turned into miserable cries. In experience, we notice guilt, misery, and
tyranny in lies of joys, security and the air of innocence in Innocence. Here the
mood is one of total disillusionment. The beatific vision of the angels and guardians
is no more since they are replaced by mighty tyrants like Urizen or Iehovah. In
Blake, Urizen is the symbol of the arch-tyrant and his ministers are those in
authority on earth- the king, the priest, the parent, the nurse and so on.) In facts
Urizen has been mentioned specifically only in three poems namely ‘Earth’s
Answer’, ‘Human Abstract’, and ‘A Divine Image’. He is ‘starry jealous’ or ‘cruel’. His
loath life and joy have brought the world under his iron law of prohibition.
In the poem, ‘Holy Thursday’ Blake hurts his defiance at the unjustifiable attitude
of society towards the poor children of the charity school. The cold-blooded and
insincere philanthropists treat the children with utmost negligence and cruelty the
poet is furious against. He says;
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
The poet calls the so-called rich England ‘a land of poverty’ where the sun never
shines and eternal winter exists. He even speaks against Christianity which
trumpets the gospel of love and kindness but the church where people come to
pray in indifferent towards the empty-bellied children. Thus church and religion are
nothing but hollow and devoid of love.
In the poem, ‘Angel’, Blake speaks against conventional morality that works as an
obstacle in the maiden’s way of her enjoyment of her own passions. In the poem,
‘The Chimney Sweeper’ belonging to ‘Experience’, the poet condemns the cruel
parents who leave their children as a waif in the street and take themselves to the
church to praise God, the king, and the priest. The child answers to the question
about his parents;
They clothed me in the clothes of death
And taught me to sing the notes of woe,
Blake rejects the conventional codes of orthodox Christianity and attacks it for
causing oppression to man, ‘The Garden of Live’, ‘A Little Girl Lost’, ‘A Divine Image’
are some of Blake’s most powerful poems showing his revolutionary view of
religion.
To sum up, Blake, revolted against all those institutions, customs, and conventions
of the society, the tyranny of the king and the church that cause sufferings to man.
15
He voiced his protest as a passionate rebel and wanted the end of all miseries
physical and spiritual.
Q. William Blake as a Transitional Poet
It was the mid-eighteenth century and poets were tiring of the neoclassical ideals
of reason and wit. The Neoclassic poets, such as Alexander Pope, "prized order,
clarity, economic wording, logic, refinement, and decorum. Theirs was an age of
rationalism, wit, and satire." (Guth 1836) This contrasts greatly with the ideal of
Romanticism, which was "an artistic revolt against the conventions of the
fashionable formal, civilised, and refined Neoclassicism of the eighteenth
century." (Guth 1840) Poets like William, "dropped conventional poetic diction
and forms in favour of freer forms and bolder language. They preached a return
to nature, elevated sincere feeling over dry intellect, and often shared in the
revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century." (Guth 589) Poets wanted
to express emotion again. They wanted to leave the city far behind and travel
back to the simple countryside where rustic, humble men and women resided
and became their subjects. These poets, William Blake, Thomas Gray, and Robert
Burns, caught in the middle of neoclassic writing and the Romantic Age, are
fittingly known as the Transitional poets.
William Blake is, however, arguably the most important transitional poet. As a poet
he did away with the common standards of "rationality and restraint" (Guth 589),
instead favouring to write using "bold, unusual symbols to elaborate the divine
energies at work in the universe" in poems such as The Tyger. This poem makes use
of an awe-inspiring mood, coupled with deeply universal concerns and experiences.
In this case, the tiger is a symbol of the evil in mankind, and the heavy knowledge
of experience that is brought with adulthood. His poems also made great use of
repetition and parallelism, sometimes to gain the effect of a nursery rhyme, simple
soft and sweet, as read in The Lamb: "Little Lamb God bless thee, / Little Lamb God
bless thee." However, the same device also emphasises the rhetorical nature of his
famous question "Tyger…what immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful
symmetry?" which makes up both the first and last stanza of The Tyger.
The transitional poets were no longer afraid to feel and were brave men who put
their hearts on paper for all to see. They expressed a simple affection for
uncomplicated country life, and used such settings to make profound comments on
mankind in general, death, and religion. These poets idealised the humble man, the
country setting, and universal truths. It is fitting to call Gray, Burns and Blake
adventurers, whose guides to new lands were their pens. They dared change
through the use of unconventional devices, such as dialect, the invocation of
emotions, and the egotistic use of the first person singular. These changes in verse,
and the subsequent popularity, and admiration received from the public, for Gray
and Burns (Blake was not appreciated until the next century) and their transitional
poetry marked the beginning of the end of Neoclassicism. Now, these three poets
having forged the way, it was time for the Romantics to follow.
Q. Features of Romanticism in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience
William Blake, the son of a London hosiery tradesman was a strange imaginative
child, whose soul was at home with books and flowers and fairies than with the
crowd of the city streets. The seeds of Romanticism had been sown into his nature
much earlier than Romanticism was officially proclaimed by the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads in 1798 by Wordsworth and Coleridge. If the Romantic poetry of the
early nineteenth century is to be understood in contrast with the poetry of the neo-
classical period, Blake is a great romantic poet because his poetry is richer in the
elements of romanticism than in the classical elements. Even it can be said that he
has the least classical qualities in his poetry and his poems, can perhaps equal the
poems of the Romantic poets in many aspects.
Romanticism lays stress on the elements of imagination, nature worship,
humanitarianism, liberty, mysticism and symbolism. The exploitation of all kinds-
social, religious and political and by the introduction of a new poetic diction in
theme and style as opposed to the reasoned, logical and superficial poetry of the
eighteenth century. If the poems of the ‘Songs of Innocence’ and of the ‘Songs of
Experience’ are read with attention, the readers will be convinced that almost all
the qualities of Romanticism are available in his poems. For this, perhaps, he has
been rightly called the ‘Precursor of Romanticism’. It is the poetry of Blake that
proclaims the down of Romanticism in the eighteenth century.
Speaking historically, Romanticism has begun with Blake because he for the first
time broke away from the literary tradition and poetic diction of the so-called
Augustan age. The Romantics believed in the freedom of art in their creations. The
poetry of the preceding period suffered from an excessive adherence to rules and
monotony of heroic couplets. All the branches of literature were confined to the
four walls of classical norms. But Blake refused to adhere. He said we do not want
either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations.
In diction, he introduces a new style. The theme and style of the ‘Songs of
Innocence’ and the ‘Songs of Experience’ are simple and easy to understand. The
common man’s sons and daughters who work in the mills and factories live in the
orphanage and become the victims of social oppression, are taken as the subject-
matter of the poetry. In short poems like ‘The Chimney Sweepers’ and ‘The Echoing
Green’ the joys and sufferings of poor children have found expression before
Wordsworth.
Imagination is the most vital characteristic of Romanticism coupled with intuition;
imagination plays a dominant role in Blake’s poetry. The poetic creed of Blake is
based on imagination. According to him, “mental things are alone real”. Blake is a
visionary and imaginative poet. He wants to restore ‘the golden age’. Blake’s
imaginative faculty is evinced in his concept of God explained in the poem the
‘Divine Image’. Here he asserts that God is the creative and spiritual power in man:
And all must love human form,
In heathen, Turk or Jew
Where mercy, love and pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
Nature was not a considerable factor in the poetry of the Neo-classical period but
love or worship or in other words, ‘The deep interest in nature’ is one of the salient
features of Romantic poetry. In Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of
Experience’ nature is associated with human activities. The sound of the bell in the
spring season and the merry voices of thrush and sparrow do co-operation with the
songs of children. In the poem, ‘The Echoing Green’ nature echoes the happiness of
children:
The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring.
Therefore, nature is a part of the human universe and sympathies with the human
heart in Blake. The pastoral setting in his poetry gives an added spiritual color and
conforms to the innocence of the children. In describing the scenes of beauty Blake
is skillful as Spenser. The poem, ‘The Laughing Song’ provides an example. It is a
vibrant scene. Nature in ‘Songs of Innocence’ smells of Eden where sin is absent in
man’s conscience. It is full of romantic joy. There is the other aspect of nature in his
poem. It has symbolical undertones in the ‘Garden of Love’ in the ‘Songs of
Experience’, its spiritual significance is asserted by the fact that the poet, in a valley
meets the child on a cloud who inspires in the beginning of the ‘Songs of
Innocence’.
Blake was the poet of revolt and he thundered, like Shelley in the ‘Queen Mab’ at
kings and priest in his ‘Songs’. He mercilessly attacked priest craft and hackneyed
conventions of the contemporary church. He considered them as to be the greatest
obstacle in the way of human progress. The poem, ‘The Little Bay Lost’ is a direct
blow at the cruelty of religion which seeks to replace natural love by the authority
of Priests.
Blake has made use of symbols to express his ideas like Shelley. ‘The Little Black
Boy’ and ‘Clod and The Pebble’ are symbolical. The symbolic use of natural objects
says Brooke “is very interesting and imaginative. The sun, the moon, the stars,
mountains, streams, and flowers are loaded with spiritual meaning.”
In a mechanical age like the eighteenth century, Blake had a small number of
readers because they could not appreciate his genius. But later on, he has been
placed at the top of the poets who are considered to be the ‘precursors of
Romanticism’. Actually, he rang the kneel of the parting century in his poetry to
herald a new age in English poetry, later on, known to be the Romantic revival.
Q. The Lamb: Summary and Critical Analysis
The lamb is one of the simplest poems of Blake. The symbolic meaning of it is
almost clearly stated in the poem The Lamb which is probably the most important
among the poem of innocence. Here the symbols of child, lamb and Christ are
assimilated each other. The poem begins with a child like directness and natural
world that show none of the signs of grownups.
The poet addresses lamb itself. Lamb is pure, innocent and it is associated with
Christ. Being a visionary Blake invites the reader to world free form reasoning. He
describes the lamb as he sees it. The lamb has been blessed with life and with
capacity to drink from the stream and feed from the meadow. It has been allotted
with bright, soft and warm wool which serves as its clothing.
It has a tender voice which fills the valley with joy. The child, too, is an innocent
child. Christ was also a child when he first appeared on this earth as the son of God.
The child enjoys the company of the lamb who is analogous to the child. The poem
displays the innocence the joy and affection. The lyric is counterparts to the tiger.
“The Lamb” and “The Tyger” represent the two contrary states of the human soul.
The lamb represents innocence and humanity whereas the tiger represents a fierce
force within man.
The child asks who made the little lamb in a typical child’s tone, rhythm and
diction. The lamb, he says, has been given the “clothing of delight”, soft and ‘wooly’
clothing, and such a tender voice that makes all the values rejoice. Besides, God has
given the lamb the feet and told it to go and feed itself by the stream and over the
meadow. But in the next stanza, the speaker himself tells the little lamb that his
maker is known by the very name of the lamb. He is also gentle and mild. “I a child
and thou a lamb, we are called by His (Christ’s) name”. We have here a realistic and
sympathetic portrait of a lamb. But, the symbolic meaning goes much deeper. The
poem seems that it is based on the biblical hope that "meek shall inherit the
world”.
In the second stanza there’s an identification of the lamb, Christ, and the child.
Christ has another name, that is, lamb, because Christ is meek and mild like lamb.
Christ was also a child when he first appeared on this earth as the son of God. The
child shows his deep joy in the company of the lamb who is just like him, meek and
mild. Even on its surface level the poem conveys the very spirit of childhood the
purity, the innocence, the tenderness, as well as the affection that a child feels for
little creatures like the lamb. There are also overtones of Christian symbolism
suggested by Christ as a child. The pastoral setting is also another symbol of
innocence and joy.
The lamb has got not ordinary clothes but clothes of “delight”; this is the first
indication of the symbolic meaning in this poem. The lamb itself is a symbol: it
stands for the innocent state of the soul, a dweller of the world of innocence and
an emblem of purity, naturalness, and spiritual, original and natural being. The
word ‘wooly’ also reminds of Christ was being born with a soft wooly hair. The
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brightness may also be an indication of the halo or shining on the pure being. The
voice could also be the word of Christ or that or the visionary and creative being,
the poet and the prophet.
The Lamb is the most representative poem of the poems of ‘innocence’. It tells
almost everything it needs to for making us understand its symbolic theme. The
child is a symbol of innocence, the state of the soul which has not yet been
corrupted by the world of conventionalized pretensions called religion, culture,
society and state and other codified systems. This overtly simple poem also subtly
approaches the subject of creativity and the creator. While the speaker is speaking
about a real physical lamb on the surface of it, the subtext of the poem derives
from both Christian and classical mythology. The child is the symbol of Christ, the
physical incarnation of the deity. The fact that it has been sent to feed among the
meadow and along the stream indicates that it is to live by natural, instinctual
means, or the Divine law of the nature. The wooly softness and the brightness that
comes from within also support the divine nature of the lamb symbol. The voice of
the lamb is also equally significant. The child, the lamb and the Christ are all close
to the creative being; creativity is a child like occupation, since it also involves the
natural spirit, sense of wonder and undefiled imagination.
Q. The Devine Image: - Summary and Critical Analysis
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are the essential qualities of God. We pray God to
these qualities when we are in distress. Mercy has a kind human heart, pity a
human face, love is the human form and peace is the human dress. Where, mercy,
pity, peace and love live, God, too, lives there.
Blake in this poem has tried to adduce an idea that God is the essence of all virtues.
A man who possesses the divine virtues is no less than God. God’s abode is not the
heaven, says Blake; he dwells within our hearts. And if a man shows the qualities of
mercy, pity, peace and love, these qualities are the qualities of God too, if follows
that man has a divine character and with these viruses man can become an avatar
of God.
Blake’s ‘The Divine Image’ celebrates the traditional Christian virtues of Mercy,
Pity, Peace and Love. Man also possesses these virtues, but they fail to realize it. In
fact, they are oblivious to the qualities which are inside them. A man can rise up to
the level of God if he realizes the inherent qualities in him. In this regard a poem
adopts a didactic tone. It is a sermon in verse. It is extremely simple but simplicity
deepens once the reader deviates his thought towards the philosophical
suggestions of the poem.
'The Divine Image' personifies God in human terms: god is no one but the
apotheosis of the human ideals and desire. Anthropomorphism is here treated
more positively than derogatively. Whoever or even the God we have
conceptualized doesn’t much matter: what matters to us is the concept of god,
made up of the good that we all need and desire. When we are in distress, when
we are in need of help, sympathy, support or encouragement, we desire for a
perfect being who can give them all. It is then that we imagine and make god, the
psychologically real imaginary being, a symbol of love, prosperity, strength,
wisdom, a curer of maladies, and a reliever of pain. This is what we find in the
underlying patterns of all mythologies of the world, including the myth of the Bible,
the Vedas, the Quran, and all other myths of the world. This poem is a simple
statement about the way human beings make their gods, apparently different but
actually embodying the same human dreams and desires. The four personified
figures of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are virtues of delight for us to get relief from
distress; living in the world of imperfections, human beings create them especially
in moments of distress.
The present poem is in ballad-like stanzas of four lines each. The singsong quality of
the verses reinforces the calmness of the speaker’s emotion. There is also the
seriousness in the theorizing of the idea, though it is done in so simple words that
make us miss its seriousness. The trochaic meter has given the lines the lilting
rhythm and movement like in most of the ‘innocence’ poems: the trochaic meter is
suitable for poems of happy mood and in describing children’s like merry worlds.
The lines are alternately tetrameter and trimeter. The frequent repetition of words
contributes the simple hymn-like quality of the poem.
Q. Summary and Analysis of "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little
Boy Found"
Summary
A little boy cannot keep up with his father, so he cries out for the older man to slow
down or speak to him so he can find his way. No one answers and the darkness
rolls in, so the boy begins to weep.
In the companion poem, God hears the little boy’s weeping and appears to him in
the image of his father dressed in white. He leads the boy home to his mother,
whom the boy greets with weeping.
Analysis
Both “The Little Boy Lost” and “The Little Boy Found” are two-stanza poems
composed of two quatrains. The first poem has an erratic rhyme scheme, ABCD
ABCB (although it is possible line 2's “fast” is a slant rhyme with line 4's “lost,”
making the first stanza ABCB). By contrast, the second poem is clearly ABCB in both
stanzas. The first poem's near rhyme adds to the tone of discomfort and fear the
boy feels toward his too-quick father. The second poem's rhyme is more easily
identified, making it seem more organized and “right” to the reader's senses.
The little boy of these two poems represents the human soul or spirit, seeking God
the Father in a sin-wracked world that seeks to obliterate the signs of His presence.
In the first of the two poems, the boy calls out to his earthly father, but is left
behind to fend for himself. Blake suggests that earthly religious practices,
philosophies, or institutions cannot lead the soul to absolute truth and peace. In
following the “father” of the world, the boy only becomes more lost.
It is only through the intervention of God Himself in the second poem that the child
returns to a state of safety, possibly intended to suggest the salvation of the
regenerate soul, in the arms of a maternal figure. The nurturing mother is able to
give comfort where the earthly father and or the society created by such men only
offer abandonment and hopelessness. That it is the female figure who actually
comforts the boy is telling. Blake may be suggesting a stronger healing power
within “mother earth” than within the “father church” of his day. He may also be
seeking to balance the male and female aspects of creation: the male, in this case
God the Father, leads the soul to its destination, while the female passively awaits
the soul to offer it bliss. Nonetheless, the mother figure is more positively
represented in these two poems.
Q. The Sick Rose: - Summary and Critical Analysis
The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible” worm has
stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night. The “dark
secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life.
The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these short,
two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or dread and
complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she
is dying.
The decoration for The Sick Rose mocks that of The Blossom. The Rose is love, and
the invisible worm represents conventional morality and the possessive jealousy
that encourages it. The speaker wonders at the secret destruction of the rose by
‘the invisible worm’.
The sick rose might be seen as the contrary of the ‘blossom’. Far from presenting an
image of freshness and beauty, it reminds us of sickness, death and decay.
Remember, how horrid an overblown rose can look as it begins to rot. The ‘worm’
(which might also be a serpent or a penis) is destroying the rose from within, as
jealousy and fear, in the world of experience, perpetually destroy our hopes for a
better life. Remember, too, how the innocent happiness of Othello and Desdemona
was destroyed by the green-eyed monster of jealousy.
The worm certainly seems, nonetheless, to represent a kind of love; but this is the
‘dark secret love’ intimately linked to jealousy and possessiveness, the kind of love
that seeks to bind, not free, the beloved, and the love which in the end destroys
itself. There is a kind of ‘coming together’ of the rose and the worm here, but it is
not a sharing of mutual respect which but a power struggle that can only become a
fight to the death.
Why is the worm ‘invisible’? Why does he fly through a ‘howling storm’? Perhaps
the invisibility is to do with the secrecy of this (sexual) liaison, and the storm
signifies a kind of passion; but this passion is in the end destructive and self-
destructive, the very opposite of the kind of ‘free love’ that Blake regards as the
greatest of all human gifts. Remember, for Blake human love is an expression of the
love God has for His Creation.
The miracle of The Sick Rose is that Blake has distilled all of this into thirty-four
simple words.
Q. London: - Summary and Critical Analysis
Summary
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his
observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear
and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a
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.”
Analysis
This is a poem that makes sense to the modern reader, as it exposes the gulf
between those in power and the misery of poor people. The picture of the city as a
place of nightmare is common in the 20th century, but is perhaps surprising to find
in such an early text as this. We have to wait for the novels of Dickens and James
Thomson's Victorian poem The City of Dreadful Night, before we find such a grim
view of the city reappearing.
Although there are several details which we need to note, we should begin with the
central metaphor of this poem, the “mind-forg'd manacles” of the second stanza.
Once more a vivid symbol explains a deep human truth. The image of the forge
appears in The Tyger (stanza 4). Here Blake imagines the mind as a forge where
“manacles” are made. “Manacles” (for the hands - French les mains) and shackles
for the legs, would be seen on convicts, perhaps passing along the streets on their
way to prison or, commonly in London in Blake's time, on their way to ships, for
transportation to Australia. For Blake and his readers, the image is a very striking
and contemporary one: they will have seen “manacles” and will view them with
horror. The image is also an allusion (reference, loose quotation) to an even more
famous statement. In 1762, some thirty years before Blake wrote London, the Swiss
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract: “Man is born free,
but everywhere he is in chains”. Blake agrees with Rousseau that man's lack of
freedom, his “manacles” are “mind-forg'd” - they come from the ideas and outlook
imposed on us by external authority.
We see this beautifully in the poem's opening: it is a matter of fact that charters
were granted to powerful people to control the streets of London and even the
river. It is absurd that the streets are “chartered” (not free to ordinary people) but
blatantly so in the case of the mighty river, which cannot really be controlled by the
passing of a law. Blake writes ironically of “the chartered Thames”. The “weakness”
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and the “woe” (a strong word in 1794; =misery) of every person is plain to see “in
every face”, as in their cries, whether of adults or babies (stanza 2).
Blake gives us three powerful examples of this “weakness” and “woe”, starting
with the chimney-sweep. As the church building is literally “black'ning” with smoke
from the chimneys, so the church as an organization, which should help the poor, is
blackened, metaphorically, with shame at its failure to give that help. The church
should be appalled, as the poet evidently is, by the cry of the “chimney-sweeper”.
(There is a pun here: “appals” means “goes pale”, as with fear, but these churches
are going black, with smoke and soot.)
The second image, of the “hapless” (unfortunate) soldier is topical: the poem was
written shortly after the start of the French Revolution: this was so bloody an
uprising that the figure of speech called hyperbole (=exaggeration) was often used,
as blood was said to be running down the walls. Blake shows how the unhappiness
of the English soldier could, if its causes were ignored, lead to similar bloodshed
here.
But the last image is the most shocking to Blake, as to us: the cry of the child-
prostitute is the truth behind respectable ideas of marriage. New birth is no happy
event but continues the cycle of misery, and the wedding carriage is seen as a
hearse, leading to a kind of death (of innocence? of happiness?). The word
“plagues” here suggests the sexually transmitted diseases which the “youthful
harlot” would contract and pass on to others (men married for convenience but
with no desire for their wives), giving her cursing words real destructive power.
Q. William Wordsworth as a poet of nature?
As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is a worshipper of
Nature, Nature’s devotee or high-priest. His love of Nature was probably truer, and
more tender, than that of any other English poet, before or since. Nature comes to
occupy in his poem a separate or independent status and is not treated in a casual
or passing manner as by poets before him. Wordsworth had a full-fledged
philosophy, a new and original view of Nature. Three points in his creed of Nature
may be noted:
(a) He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a
divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature. When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The author used personification to describe beauty of daffodils. They becomed to
have action and mind like people. Those lines are as beautiful as a picture. If
Wordsworth didn’t have love of nature, he couldn’t write good verses.
(b) Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human
heart and he looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-
stricken hearts. The poet felt happy and pleasant when he saw golden flowers
smiling in the sunshine:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
Perhaps to him, the daffodil’s charm was a gift which God granted.
Many years later, the daffodil’s beauty still haunted Wordsworth. Whether he
stayed in empty or thoughtful mood, the images of daffodils came to mind and
flashed upon his eyes:
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
(c) Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He
spiritualised Nature and regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best mother,
guardian andnurse of man, and as an elevating influence. He believed that between
man and Nature there is mutual consciousness, spiritual communion or ‘mystic
intercourse’. He initiates his readers into the secret of the soul’s communion with
Nature. According to him, human beings who grow up in the lap of Nature are
perfect in every respect.
Wordsworth believed that we can learn more of man and of moral evil and good
from Nature than from all the philosophies. In his eyes, “Nature is a teacher whose
wisdom we can learn, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete.”
He believed in the education of man by Nature. In this he was somewhat influenced
by Rousseau. This inter-relation of Nature and man is very important in considering
Wordsworth’s view of both.
Cazamian says that “To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative influence
superior to any other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our
hearts of the deep-laden seeds of our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child in
the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the young poet to an ecstasy, the
glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life.”.
Development of His Love for Nature
Wordsworth’s childhood had been spent in Nature’s lap. A nurse both stern
and kindly, she had planted seeds of sympathy and under-standing in that growing
mind. Natural scenes like the grassy Derwent river bank or the monster shape of
the night-shrouded mountain played a “needful part” in the development of his
mind. In The Prelude, he records dozens of these natural scenes, not for themselves
but for what his mind could learn through.
Nature was “both law and impulse”; and in earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Wordsworth was conscious of a spirit which kindled and restrained. In a variety of
exciting ways, which he did not understand, Nature intruded upon his escapades
and pastimes, even when he was indoors, speaking “memorable things”. He had
not sought her; neither was he intellectually aware of her presence. She riveted his
attention by stirring up sensations of fear or joy which were “organic”, affecting
him bodily as well as emotionally. With time the sensations were fixed indelibly in
his memory. All the instances in Book I of The Prelude show a kind of primitive
animism at work”; the emotions and psychological disturbances affect external
scenes in such a way that Nature seems to nurture “by beauty and by fear”.
In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth traces the development of his love for Nature. In
his boyhood Nature was simply a playground for him. At the second stage he began
to love and seek Nature but he was attracted purely by its sensuous or aesthetic
appeal. Finally his love for Nature acquired a spiritual and intellectual character,
and he realized Nature’s role as a teacher and educator.
In the Immortality Ode he tells us that as a boy his love for Nature was a
thoughtless passion but that when he grew up, the objects of Nature took a sober
colouring from his eyes and gave rise to profound thoughts in his mind because he
had witnessed the sufferings of humanity:
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Spiritual Meaning in Natural Objects
Compton Rickett rightly observes that Wordsworth is far less concerned with the
sensuous manifestations than with the spiritual significance that he finds
underlying these manifestations. To him the primrose and the daffodil are symbols
to him of Nature’s message to man. A sunrise for him is not a pageant of colour; it
is a moment of spiritual consecration:
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bound unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit.
To combine his spiritual ecstasy with a poetic presentment of Nature is the cons-
tant aim of Wordsworth. It is the source of some of his greatest pieces, grand
rhapsodies such as Tintern Abbey.
Nature Descriptions
Wordsworth is sensitive to every subtle change in the world about him. He can give
delicate and subtle expression to the sheer sensuous delight of the world of
Nature. He can feel the elemental joy of Spring:
It was an April morning, fresh and clear
The rivulet, delighting in its strength,
Ran with a young man’s speed, and yet the voice
Of waters which the river had supplied
Was softened down into a vernal tone.
He can take an equally keen pleasure in the tranquil lake:
The calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure
A brief study of his pictures of Nature reveals his peculiar power in actualising
sound and its converse, silence.
Being the poet of the ear and of the eye, he is exquisitely felicitious. No other poet
could have written:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Unlike most descriptive poets who are satisfied if they achieve a static pictorial
effect, Wordsworth can direct his eye and ear and touch to conveying a sense of
the energy and movement behind the workings of the natural world. “Goings on”
was a favourite word he applied to Nature. But he is not interested in mere Nature
description.
Wordsworth records his own feelings with reference to the objects which stimulate
him and call forth the description. His unique apprehension of Nature was deter-
mined by his peculiar sense-endowment. His eye was at once far-reaching and
penetrating. He looked through the visible scene to what he calls its “ideal truth”.
He pored over objects till he fastened their images on his brain and brooded on
these in memory till they acquired the liveliness of dreams. He had a keen ear too
for all natural sounds, the calls of beasts and birds, and the sounds of winds and
waters; and he composed thousands of lines wandering by the side of a stream. But
he was not richly endowed in the less intellectual senses of touch, taste and
temperature.
Conclusion:
Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature can be clearly differentiated from that of
the other great poets of Nature. He did not prefer the wild and stormy aspects of
Nature like Byron, or the shifting and changeful aspects of Nature and the scenery
of the sea and sky like Shelley, or the purely sensuous in Nature like Keats. It was
his special characteristic to concern himself, not with the strange and
remote aspects of the earth, and sky, but Nature in her ordinary, familiar, everyday
moods. He did not recognize the ugly side of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ as
Tennyson did. Wordsworth stressed upon the moral influence of Nature and the
need of man’s spiritual discourse with her.
Q. William Wordsworth's as a Romantic poet
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William Wordsworth's poetry exhibits Romantic characteristics and for his
treatment towards romantic elements, he stands supreme and he can be termed
a Romantic poet on a number of reasons. The Romantic Movement of the early
nineteenth century was a revolt against the classical tradition of the eighteenth
century; but it was also marked by certain positive trends. Wordsworth was, of
course, a pioneer of the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century. With the
publication of Lyrical Ballads, the new trends become more or less established.
However, the reasons for why Wordsworth can be called a Romantic poet are given
below:
Imagination: Where the eighteenth century poets used to put emphasis much on
‘wit’, the romantic poets used to put emphasis on ‘imagination’. Wordsworth uses
imagination so that the common things could be made to look strange and
beautiful through the play of imagination. In his famous “Intimation Ode", it seems
to his as to the child "the earth, and every common sight" seemed "apparelled in
celestial light". Here he says,
"There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light"
Moreover, in this poem, we find a sequence of picture through his use of imagery.
Through his imagination he says,
"The Rainbow come and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare"
Similarly, in the poem, “Tintern Abbey”, the poet sees the river, the stream, steep
and lofty cliffs through his imaginative eyes. He was enthusiastically charmed at the
joyful sound of the rolling river. Here he says,
"Once again
Do I behold those steep and lofty cliffs
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect
The landscape with quiet of the sky".
In this poem, the poet seems that the nature has a healing power. Even the
recollection of nature soothes the poet's troubled heart. The poet can feel the
existance of nature through imagination even when he is away from her. He says,
"In lonely rooms and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensation sweet".
Nature: Wordsworth is especially regarded as a poet of nature. In most of the
poems of Wordsworth nature is constructed as both a healing entity and a teacher
or moral guardian. Nature is considered in his poems as a living personality. He is a
true worshiper of nature: nature's devotee or high priest. The critic Cazamian says,
"to Wordsworth, nature appears is a formative influence superior to any other, the
educator of senses or mind alike, the shower in our hearts of the deep laden seeds
of our feelings and beliefs". He dwells with great satisfaction, on the prospects of
spending his time in groves and valleys and on the banks of streams that will lull
him to rest with their soft murmur.
For Wordsworth, nature is a healer and he ascribes healing properties to Nature in
“Tintern Abbey” . This is a fairly obvious conclusion drawn from his reference to
"tranquil restoration" that his memory of the Wye offered him “in lonely rooms
and mid the din/Of towns and cities"
It is also evident in his admonition to Dorothy that she let her
"Memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh !then
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief.
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!”
Wordsworth says nature "never did betray the heart that loved her".
Subjectivity: Subjectivity is the key note of Romantic poetry. He expresses his
personal thoughts, feelings through his poems. In “Ode: Intimation of Immortality”
the poet expresses his own/personal feelings. Here he says that he can't see the
celestial light anymore which he used to see in his childhood. He says,
"It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By might or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see on more."
Nature becomes all in all to the poet. The sounding cataract haunted him like a
passion. Nature was his beloved. He loved only the sensuous beauty of nature. He
has also a philosophy of nature.
Pantheism and mysticism: Pantheism and mysticism are almost interrelated factors
in the Nature poetry of the Romantic period. Wordsworth conceives of a spiritual
power running through all natural objects- the " presence that disturbs me with the
low of elevated thoughts" whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, the rolling
ocean. the living air, the blue sky, and the mind of man (“Tintern Abbey”)
Humanism: The romantic poets had sincere love for man or rather the spirit of
man. Wordsworth had a superabundant enthusiasm for humanity. He was deeply
interested in the simple village folk and the peasant who live in contact with
nature. Wordsworth showed admiration for the ideals that inspired the French
Revolution. Emphasis in individual freedom is another semantic characteristic.
Wordsworth laments for the loss of power, freedom and virtue of human soul.
Lyricism: Wordsworth is famous for simple fiction, bereft of artificialities and falsity
of emotion. His "Lyrical Ballads" signifies his contention that poetry is the "history
or science of feelings"
In the “Ode: Intimation of Immortality”, we see his lyricism. He writes,
"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own:
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even, with something of a Mother's mind,
And, on unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Innate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came."
In the concluding part, it can be said that Wordsworth was a protagonist in the
Romantic Movement which was at once a revolt and a revival. He shows the
positive aspects of Romanticism with its emphasis on imagination, feeling,
emotion, human dignity and significance of Nature.
Q. William Wordsworth's Pantheism
Definition: Pantheism is a doctrine of religious philosophy widely used by a group
of poets and literary figures who think that God is everywhere in natural.
Pantheism is the view that the Universe (Nature) and God are identical. Pantheists
thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word
derives from the Ancient Greek: pan meaning ‘all’ and theos meaning ‘God’. As
such, pantheism denotes the idea that ‘God’ is best seen as a process of relating to
the Universe.
we have got the ideas of pantheism as: God pervades every living thing; Natural
objects are the Vision of God, and: Soul of every natural object is God of all. But the
holy Quran declares: “Whatever is in the heavens and on earth, declares the Praises
and Glory of Allah: for He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise” (61:1). From the verse
it can be understood that natural elements declare the praises and Glory of God,
they themselves do not represent God. Though Goethe’s remark that God pervades
every living thing in nature is objectionable from Islamic perspective, his very
statement: “divine power is spread everywhere and eternal love is active
everywhere” supports the above verse.
Pantheism in Wordsworth
The greatest contribution of Wordsworth to the poetry on nature is his use of
unqualified Pantheism—‘making nature itself divine’. “If to follow the traditional
poetic habit of imaginatively giving life to all experience, and of imaginatively
unifying all experience, is to be a pantheist, then Wordsworth was a pantheist”
(Durrant 1979: 16). He believes God shines through all the objects of nature,
investing them with a celestial light. He finds Him in the shining of the stars; he
marks Him in the flowering of the fields. This immanence of God in nature gives
him mystic visions. Nature is no longer a mere vegetation; subject to the law of
growth and decay; not a collection of objects to be described but a manifestation of
God. Wordsworth came to believe that beneath the matter of universe there was a
soul, a living principle, acting, even thinking. It may be living, at least, speaking to
him, communicating itself to him: And I have felt a presence
that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something
far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the
round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion
and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls
through all things [Tintern Abbey, 95-102 (1798)].
The chief faith of Wordsworth, namely, his pantheism, is lyrically expressed in this
poem. Here the poet ‘most directly expresses the sense of a unifying spirit within
all things’ (Durrant 1979: 6). Thus Wordsworth identified ‘God and Nature as one’
(Coles 1991: 45). In The White Doe the idea is called ‘natural lord’: Gone are they,
bravely, though misled, /With a dear Father at their head!/ The sons obey a natural
lord (Danby 1979: 133). In lines 6-8 of “It is a beauteous evening”, the speaker
begins to address someone who turns out to be a young girl. He tells her to listen
that ‘the mighty Being is awake’ and making a ‘sound like thunder’ that lasts
forever. The speaker then tells the child (actually his daughter, Caroline) who is
walking beside him that even though she isn't affected by the solemn ideas he has
when he comes face to face with nature, she is not any less divine. In fact, she ‘liest
in Abraham's bosom all year’, because God is with her even when she is not aware
of Him: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;/ And worship’st at the
Temple’s inner shrine/ God being with thee when we know it not (Lines 9-14).
Wordsworth foreshadows Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power when he states
that ‘there is an active principle alive in all things’ which seeks to move beyond
itself: All beings have their properties which spread/ Beyond themselves, a power
by which they make/ Some other being conscious of their life (O’ Dwyer 2008). In
the woodcock episode of Book I, for example, the boy has stolen someone else's
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bird. In the context of solitude, darkness, and guilt, the effect is chastening, for the
boy senses that, in breaching his own ethics, he has also offended that life beyond
himself: "and when the deed was done/I heard among the solitary hills/Low
breathings coming after me, and sounds/ Of undistinguishable motion" (Prelude
321-24). So, from the above discussion we find that Wordsworth thinks of the
unifying force of Nature as God and God in nature appears in different names like
spirit, life beyond physical world, a mighty/powerful Being, a living principle, an
undistinguishable motion, and natural lord, etc.
Q. William Wordsworth As the poet of MAN.
“There have been greater poets than Wordsworth but none more original”, says A.
C. Bradley. Wordsworth’s chief originality is, of course, to be sought in his poetry of
Nature. It must not be supposed, however, that Wordsworth was interested only in
Nature and not in man at all. Man, in Wordsworth’s conception, is not to be seen
apart from Nature, but is the very “life of her life”. Indeed, Wordsworth’s love of
Nature led him to the love of man. Scarcely a poem of his is solely concerned with
nature-description. His poetry is expressive of the formative, restorative,
reassuring, moral and spiritual influence of Nature on the mind and personality of
Man. Nature, of course, may dominate, but “the still sad music of humanity” is
never ignored.
Wordsworth’s passion for Nature is well-known and it is also known that his
attitude to Nature underwent a progressive evolution— from ‘the coarser
pleasures’ of the boyish days to an unreflecting passion untouched by intellectual
interests or associations to the transitory stage of human-heartedness ac-
companied by a lasting and more significant stage of spiritual and mystical
interpretation of Nature.
Nature, according to Wordsworth is a living entity. Unlike other poets of
Nature, he believes that Nature is endowed with life and consciousness and has the
capacity of thinking, feeling and willing. The entire Nature is permeated by the
feelings of joy and happiness, harmony and peace and there are no strifes, no cares
and worries, no jealousy and hatred to disturb the peace and harmony, reigning in
the heart of Nature:
Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing
From earth to man, from man to earth—
It is the hour of feeling.
Wordsworth’s approach to Nature is that of a mystic. He believed that God
pervades the entire universe and all the varied phenomena are the outward
manifestations of the same Eternal Reality. This belief of his has been termed as
Pantheism and it was the last stage in the progressive evolution of his approach to
Nature. Warwick James says, “At this stage the foundation of Wordsworth’s entire
existence was his mode of seeing God in Nature and Nature in God.” In Tintern
Abbey, Wordsworth realises the ‘presence of the Eternal spirit’:
Those dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air.
And the blue sky and in the mind of man.
It is tine that Wordsworth was a lover of Nature but he was also a lover of
Man, though his love of man developed at a later stage in his poetic career. It was
the French Revolution that made Wordsworth a poet of Man. Wordsworth lost his
faith in the French Revolution as a political creed, but its effect remained intact on
his mind. The Revolution humanised his soul and built him into a poet of Man. The
singer of the beauties of Nature became the singer of the majesty of common
humanity.
It is the humble and rustic life that is invested with glory and grandeur in his
poetry. The city proletariat lay beyond his ken; it was not for him to sing the fierce
confederate storm Of sorrow barricaded evermore
Within the walls of cities But rather To hear humanity in woods and groves
Pipe solitary anguish
because the life of such people is not screened by conventions of society. It
is their simplicity that brings out the hidden beauty of their characters—calm,
independence, fortitude, mutual affection and self-sacrifice. They have a noble
character because they live in close and constant company of Nature.
Nature constantly communicates its elevating thoughts to man. When the
soul of man is in tune with the spirit of Nature, it receives impressions of virtue and
wisdom that exercise an ennobling influence on human nature. Nature is “the best
and truest of all teachers”.
Away from Nature city life deadens human perceptions. The Sonnet on
Westminster Bridge underlines the same idea. The scene of London in the early
hours of the morning impresses the poet and heightens his sensibilities because at
the moment London is dressed in Nature and
silent, hare.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
When man becomes indifferent to Nature and her elevating influences
then, according to Wordsworth, the miseries and misfortunes of mankind arise. He
laments the loss of man’s contact with Nature when he writes:
The World is too much with us: late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours :
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
We are out of rune with Nature. But when the individual mind and external
nature are in harmony, it is natural that there is a communion between Nature and
Man. Nature has the power to console mankind. It is when man’s mind is in
harmony with the natural objects that a sudden flash of revelation comes upon him
and he becomes aware of the unifying spirit behind everything. In Tintern
Abbey,Wordsworth tells us how the best part of human life is shown to be the
result of natural influences. Nature’s healing power was a rapturous experience for
Wordsworth and he conveys it in Tintern Abbey; the recollection of the scenes seen
five years ago soothes him in tormented moments:
…in lonely rooms, and ‘mid I he din of towns and cities
And he owes to them not only ‘sensations sweet’ but another gift also that
is more sublime. It is:
that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery.
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of this unintelligible world,
Is lightened
In these moments of illumination, he has an insight into the life of things
and finds that all is wrapped in a state of joy and harmony.
It is easy to associate Wordsworth only with the “joy” and “happiness” of
human destiny. But, in fact, he was fully conscious of the “cloud of human destiny”
and presents it in his poems. In Tintern Abbey, he speaks of the “still sad music of
humanity” which colours the mature mind and makes Nature all the more
significant. In the Immortality Ode again we read of the “soothing thoughts that
spring out of human suffering”. Indeed, it is suffering that leads to the philosophic
mind which finds meaning even in the “meanest flower that blows”. Thus, to
conclude in the words of Herbert Read, “Man and Nature, mind and the external
world, are geared together and in unison complete the motive principle of the
universe. They act and react upon each other, ‘so as to produce an infinite
complexity of pain and pleasure.” The functioning of this interlocked universe of
mind and Nature is for Wordsworth the highest theme of poetry.
Q. William Wordsworth Mysticism.
William Wordsworth is an eminent mystic poet of the Romantic Age with an
amazingly subtle mind and a deviant capacity for expressing personal beliefs and
thoughts. Wordsworth was a true mystic. His mystical experiences are principally
revealed in the context of his treatment of nature. Wordsworth never confined his
verse within the vivid portrayal of the sights, sounds, odors, and movements of
various elements of nature. He aimed at attaining something higher and divine and
leaving behind a record of his mystical experiences in nature and human life in his
poetry. So his poetry is not simply an artistic encapsulation of lovely and tranquil
aspects of nature but also a comprehensive account of his mystical experiences.
Wordsworth’s mysticism is remarkable for its meditative mood
and pantheistic conception of nature. It is moulded by the belief that nature is a
living being and the dwelling place of god. Nature is the means through which a
man can come into contact with god. Wordsworth maintains that a divine spirit
pervades through all the objects of nature. As a true pantheist he also says that all
is God and God is all. Many of his poems can be studied with this contextual
consideration. This perception is particularly reverberated in Tintern Abbey, where
he says with great devotion:
“...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something for more deeply infused,
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:”
He finds the existence of god even in the mind of man. Wordsworth upholds
that there is a pre-arranged harmony between the mind of man and the spirit in
nature, which enables man to form a relationship or communication with nature.
The relationship is materialised when the mind of man forms a kinship with the
thoughts of nature. And it is this cordial and intellectual junction between man and
nature that helped to shape his belief that nature has the power to teach and
educate human beings. Man accomplishes perfection and practical knowledge
through the education he receives from nature. He believes that the person who
doesn’t receive education from nature is worthless and his life is unsuccessful. The
poet considers nature as a bountiful source of knowledge. He also believes that
nature is the nurse and the protector of the mankind. Nature’s benignity considers
only the welfare of human beings. In his words, nature is:
“The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul.
Of all my moral being.”
In Wordsworthian belief, nature is capable of alleviating the tormented
mind of man. The beautiful and frolicsome aspects of nature are an infinite source
for healing power. The material life sometimes become so stark and painful that
human beings loose the aspiration for living. When life becomes such unbearable
then the sweet and affectionate contact with nature can easily drive away the
cloud of cynicism from the mind of the viewer of nature. The noise and disturbance
of the town or city life may make human life intolerable but even the recollections
of nature in some lonely room can eliminate the burden of desolation, anxiety and
suffocation:
“But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensation sweet.
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart;
And passing even into the purer mind
With tranquil restoration...”
Wordsworth, like a true mystic, sees life in all objects of nature.
According to him, every flower and cloud, every stream and hill, the stars and the
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birds that live in the midst of nature, has each their own life.
Wordsworth honours even the simplest and the most ordinary objects of nature
and human life. For him nothing is mean or low, since everything that is present in
the universe is touched by divine life.
To conclude we ought to say that Wordsworth never looked at nature like the way
we do. With great devotion and enthusiasm, he sought to read the profoundest
meaning of human life in nature. In the way of doing so he forged himself as a great
poet of nature with a true mystical vision.
Q. Wordsworth as Poet of Nature with Special Reference to
Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth is highly acclaimed as a poet of nature. Tintern Abbey is one of his
representative poems revealing a more deeply philosophical and unified expression
of his thoughts about nature. In fact, the poem is Wordsworth’s own testimony to
the change of his attitude to nature. He has given a highly emotional description of
the effects of the outer world upon his own inner self, reflecting the different
stages of the growth of his attitude to nature.
Tintern Abbey is a record of the evolution of the poet’s own outlook and attitude to
nature since he first visited the bank of the River Wye during a tour. Wordsworth
creates not merely a word- picture of a remembered scene, but a mythic paradise,
in the poem. For Wordsworth, Paradise is the world that can be completely unified
and harmonized by the mind, and harmony on the scene. As he looked again at the
‘steep woods and lofty cliffs’ of the river, he saw the image of himself as he was in
his boyhood. The recount of the world as experienced by the young poet reveals
the acceptance of disorder, violence and even fear. The cottages orchards etc. are
supplanted by the “Sounding contract, the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep
and gloomy wood.” All these suggest the terror of the world, the awfulness of the
unknown and the mysterious. As a boy, his love for nature was an animalistic, pure,
healthy gladness for open spaces. It was simply a healthy boy’s delight in outdoor
life. In his boyhood, he enjoyed nature only through the senses; the sounding
cataract haunted him like a passion, and his hungry soul fed itself on the beautiful
colors and lovely forms of the mountains and the woods. All this stage, his love for
nature had no philosophical or intellectual basis.
However, when he became more mature, his attitude to nature started undergoing
a great change. In his youth, his love for nature was characterized by, “dizzy
raptures” and aching joys replacing the earlier, “coarser pleasures”, the love of
nature at this stage is purely sensuous, though deep and absorbing. The colors and
shapes of mountains and woods were an appetite for him. In youth, he was
fascinated by the physical beauty of nature, the sensuous charm of nature, but as
he was growing more and more into maturity, nature invoked in him the
consciousness of “. . . still sad music of humanity” which he developed with a
philosophical mind, looking at nature not with the painter’s eyes, but as an
interpreter, trying to get the hidden meaning of nature. The sunset clouds no
longer appeal to him as a phenomenon of changing colors, but as a symbol of the
rise and fall of the nations and empires. At this stage, Wordsworth’s love for nature
becomes spiritual as well as intellectual.
At this stage, Wordsworth’s love for nature becomes spiritual as well as
intellectual. To him, the water of the brook, as well as the murmur of the water,
suggests agonized cry of the suffering human. The experience of the misery of the
world makes him noble, more gentle and serious. His love of nature kills his heart
with love of humanity. He still appreciates the external beauty of nature but the
inner beauty appeals to him more. He discovers in nature the existence of a living,
all-embracing spirit that exists in the objects of nature, including the mind of men.
This concept of divine spirit existing in nature is called pantheism. However, he still
loves the objects of nature that appeal to his senses. He firmly believes that his
purest thoughts are stimulated by nature, acting as the nurse, the guide, the
guardian of his heart and the soul of all his moral being. Wordsworth maintains
that nature never betrays the heart that loves her; nature leads as from joy to joy,
feeling our mind’s wild greatness and beauty.
In Tintern Abbey, he recalls his feelings of joys on re-visiting a scene of
nature. He has gained “sweet sensations” from these objects of nature during the
hour of wariness and frustrations. He considers nature as healing influence on
trouble minds, emphasizing the moral function of nature. Regarding nature as a
great moral teacher, he advocates that there is a spiritual intercourse between men
and Nature.
Celebrated critic Myers has rightly described Tintern Abbey as “the
consecrated formulary of Wordsworthian faith.” For the poem formulates the main
aspects of Wordsworth’s nature cried in superb poetic diction, Tintern Abbey is an
epitome of Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature and man.
Q. Tintern Abbey by Wordsworth
Introduction
This poem appeared in the Lyrical Ballads published in 1798. Wordsworth
writes: “No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for
me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye,
and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four
or five days with my sister. The visit to Tintern called forth memories of a previous
visit in the summer of 1793 and led Wordsworth to review the change which had
affected his attitude to Nature in the interval. Apart from its personal interest, the
poem possesses a special historical value as the first clear statement of the
emotional change in poetry of which the Romantic Movement was the climax.
Tintern Abbey is a great reflective poem. Wordsworth first restates his
moral doctrine: The memory of this beautiful scene has not only been calming and
restorative, but has aroused almost unnoticed sensations of pleasure. Wordsworth
does not explain or defend this doctrine; he merely states it as an experience, in
verse of such serene loveliness that it carries with it its own guarantee of
authenticity.
In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth reaches his best style, unadorned but rising
to sustained heights of eloquence and grandeur. He opens with quiet description,
but he is no longer limited to the language of “low and rustic life”.
The poem may be regarded as an essay in verse, and one of the finest
achievements of a “feeling intellect”. It expounds some of the leading views of
Nature which Wordsworth had developed with Coleridge and which were to form
the basis of much of his most important work.
Critical Appreciation
The poem is a statement of Wordsworth’s complete philosophy of Nature.
The Memory of the beautiful scene of Nature round Tintern Abbey has been
affording relief to the poet in moments of trouble and distress.
The opening lines give us a vivid description of the scene visited by the
poet—the waters rolling from their mountain springs; the steep and lofty rocks; the
dark sycamore; the plots of cottage ground; the orchard with its unripe fruits; the
hedge-rows; etc. These lines show Wordsworth’s minute and close observation of
Nature. He was extra-ordinarily sensitive to the sights of Nature and his pictures of
Nature are a record of his observation.
The second part of the poem traces the growth of the poet’s mental and
emotional attitude to Nature. The memory of the scene, he says, has been a source
of great joy to him and has acted on him as a stimulus to kind and sympathetic
deeds. The beauteous shapes of Nature have also served to put him in that blessed
mood in which one begins to understand the mystery of life. Whenever the poet
felt oppressed by fretful stir and fever of the world, he felt relief by thinking of this
scene of Nature. Thus Wordsworth looks upon Nature as a healing influence on a
troubled mind.
Then he contrasts his attitude to Nature as a boy with his attitude to Nature
as a man. As a boy, his love for Nature was purely sensuous and physical. The”
objects of Nature were then an appetite, and they haunted him like a passion. They
appealed only to his senses, and his love for them was thoughtless. But now his
love for Nature is spiritual. He has now witnessed the sufferings of mankind (“the
still, sad music of humanity’) and that experience has made him thoughtful. He has
now discovered in all Nature the existence of Divine Spirit “whose dwelling is the
light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in
the mind of man.” This is Wordsworth’s pantheism (the belief that a Divine Spirit
pervades all objects of Mature). He goes on to refer to the moral and educative
influence of Nature. Nature, he says, is a great moral teacher. Nature is the nurse,
the guide, the guardian of his heart, and the soul of all his moral being.
In the last part of the poem, he pays a glowing tribute to his sister Dorothy.
His feeling of love for Nature is combined with a. feeling of tenderness for Dorothy.
“Nature”, he says, “never did betray the heart that loved her.” He advises Dorothy
to submit herself completely to natural influences because Nature has a purifying,
ennobling and elevating effect on man and leads him from joy to joy. He asks her to
let the breeze blow freely against her cheek and the moon shine freely on her
brow. He calls himself a worshipper of Nature and urges Dorothy to develop an
intimacy with Nature because the sweet – memories of this intimacy with Nature
will be a comfort to her in the misfortunes and troubles of life. Wordsworth here
again expresses his belief in the education of man by Nature,
It is a great poem, of a flawless and noble beauty. It is also one of
Wordsworth’s most personal pieces written from the inmost stuff of his mind and
heart. It sums up all that Nature, man and his own development meant for him in
the light of his ripe thinking. In other words, the poem contains Wordsworth’s faith
and is valuable chiefly as a statement of his Nature-philosophy in highly lyrical
verse.
The opening lines show Wordsworth’s pictorial or descriptive quality. We
are given a vivid description of the scene visited by the poet—the waters—the
waters rolling from their mountain springs; the steep and lofty cliffs; the green
trees with their unripe fruits; the hedge-rows; the column of smoke rising from
amongst the trees.
The second part of the poem contains the Nature-philosophy of
Wordsworth. The memory of this scene of Nature has been a source of great joy to
him. Whenever the poet was oppressed by the “fretful stir and fever of the world”,
he felt relief by thinking of this scene of Nature. Thus Wordsworth looks upon
Nature as a healing influence on troubled minds.
Then he contrasts his attitude to Nature as a boy with his attitude to Nature
as a man. As a boy, his love for Nature was purely sensuous and physical. But now
his love for Nature is spiritual. He has now witnessed the sufferings of mankind
(“the still, sad music of humanity”) and that experience has made him thoughtful.
He perceives in all Nature the existence of a Divine Spirit and expresses his
pantheistic belief. And he goes on to dwell upon the moral influence of Nature,
Nature as a great moral teacher. Nature is the nurse, the guide, the guardian of his
heart, and soul of all his moral being.
In the last part, the feeling of love for Nature is combined with a feeling of
tenderness for his sister Dorothy. He advises her to submit herself completely to
natural influences because Nature has a purifying ennobling, and elevating effect
on man and leads him from joy to joy. He believes in (he education of man by
Nature and thus establishes a close inter-relation between Nature and man.
Wordsworth appears here, in his own words, as a “Worshipper of Nature”,
or Nature’s priest. He has stated his view of Nature in highly poetic lines charged
with the deepest sincerity. The poem is written in a meditative mood and is full of
perfectly calm and tranquil joy, and as we go through it we are greatly moved by its
21
sentiments. We begin to see greater ‘beauty in Nature, more grandeur, more
majesty, and a profound significance. It is a poem that turns our lazy indifference
towards Nature into a vital feeling of admiration and awe.
The backward-looking character of the poem is also apparent. Wordsworth
dwells upon his memories of this natural scene and reveals how these memories
sustained him. He also recollects his boyish passion for Nature and all his glad
animal movements. Much of Words worth’s poetry possesses this reminiscent or
backward-looking character.
The poem is marked by Wordsworth’s gift of making beautiful and highly
expressive phrases. Some of the phrases and lines of this poem have become so
famous that they are often quoted. “We see into the life of things”; “Fretful stir
unprofitable”; the fever of the world”; “the sounding cataract haunted me like a
passion”; “aching joys and dizzy raptures”; “the still, sad music of humanity”; “the
shooting lights of thy wild eyes”; “Nature never did betray the heart that loved
her”—these are some of the best known phrases and lines in the poem.
“The music of the poem is also noteworthy. The sublimity of verse suits the
loftiness of theme. The blank verse of the poem is majestic and we see here an
instance of Wordsworth’s grand style.
Q. The Prelude by Wordsworth Summary & Critical Analysis
The Prelude is in fact the first long autobiographical poem written in a drawn out
process of self- exploration. Wordsworth worked his way towards modern
psychological understanding of his own nature and more broadly of human nature.
There, he places poetry at the center of human experience. This introspective
account of his own development was completed in 1805 and, after substantial
revision, published posthumously in 1850. Many critics rank it as Wordsworth’s
greatest work. The Prelude begins with an account of the poet’s childhood in the
English Lake Country.
He first gives a record of that innocent life out of which his poetry grew; then he
goes on to explore how the mind develops. He reveals a strange world, and the
deeper we dive into it, the stronger it becomes. Like the short poem, besides
touching upon many other things, this long poem traces the development of the
poet’s attitudes to nature, his poetic genius, and his understanding of fellow-beings
and the spirit of the universe; he moves from the typical childhood animal
pleasures, through adolescent, sensual passion for the wild and gloomy, to the
adult awareness of the relation of our perception of the natural world, and finally
to our sense of the human and moral world. Wordsworth basically tries to
recapture and record the full and intense life lived through the senses as a child and
as a youth. The child or the first stage is characterized by a vague understanding of
the influence of the nature’s moral influence because the child is indulged in mere
bodily pleasures; the adolescent phase is marked with dizzy raptures; he speaks of
youthful love of freedom and liberty, which he enjoyed in rambles through the
woods and on the mountain paths where he did not feel fettered by the claims of
the society and schoolwork. But those pleasures soon ended naturally after the
youth began to understand human suffering so that, back in the nature, he began
to make ‘spiritual interpretation of Nature as a living entity, by following whose
ways he could get rid of the eternal problems of human misery. At one phase of his
youth, Wordsworth became strongly attracted to the cause of the French
Revolution, feeling that he was tied emotionally and spiritually to the popular
struggle against the monarchy. But the destructiveness of the revolution and the
popular indifference to the real causes and the real heroes, and the corrupted
nature of the leading revolutionaries, disillusioned him, and he returned home
spiritually broken, feeling that the innocent blood has poisoned the real causes of
liberty. At that phase of life, he turned to the nature, finding there not only the
solace but also the law and order lacking in the human society. Wordsworth
opposed the mechanical reasoning of the materialistic sciences and the logical
philosophy as too superficial to probe into the sciences and the logical philosophy
as too superficial to probe into the meaning and experience of life and nature.
Wordsworth has said, “To every natural form…. I gave a moral life”. His theory has
been called one of natural pantheism for this reason.
The Prelude is an autobiographical poem but it is not only the poet’s personal
confessions; it is an account of the growth of a poet’s mind. In it he tells the story
of his inner life from the earliest childhood up to 1798. But the events do not
always follow each of the chronological or even logical order, for the poem is
shaped by a kind of internal logic of the growth of mind rather than by the
sequence of eternal events. The development is roughly chronological but even as
the poem has progressed well into adulthood, at significant points, reference is
made back to his childhood contrasting later attitudes, or illustrating important
aspects of his theme. The poet’s faith is however based on intuition, and not on
reasoning, to understand or analyze life or nature. But his mysticism is not an
escape from common experience, with the help of some kind of fancy, but a
probing deep into common things and experience. His poetry has in fact been
called ‘the highest poetry of the lowest and prosaic things”. According to
Wordsworth’s The Prelude, nature had two basic formative influences on the
poet’s mind: one was of inspiration with its beauty and joy, and the other one was
that of fear and awe-inspiring influences that disciplined his mind since early in life.
The Prelude presents a unique and original understanding of min, life, creativity
and such other things in its examination and linking of the factors both important
and trivial, which go to make up a complex human personality. The poet indeed has
an amazing gift for grasping the significance of the apparently insignificant, and
seeing all things as part of a meaningful whole. He tries to show us what he and his
poetry are made of, and they are made not only of great events and emotions of
marriage and passion, and the French revolution, but of small things that a less
observant or creative mind would have forgotten: of boating expeditions, of a
chance meeting with old sailors, or dreams, of the noise of the wind in the
mountains, of the sight of the ash trees outside his bedroom window.
It is interesting to note that while The Prelude is a poem rooted in the past, a
culmination of many traditions of thought and culture, it is at the same time that
the first great modern poem. In it Wordsworth is essentially concerned with human
nature, with aspects of consciousness and being that are still relevant to our
modern interest and predicaments. The Prelude presents the poet in the quest for
his identity. It shows that Wordsworth is trying to seek a point of stability within
himself. It is an attempt to establish a principle of continuity and equilibrium within
change. He said, “The vacancy between me (present) and those days which yet
have such self presence in my mind is so great that sometimes when I think of them
I see two consciousnesses, the consciousness of myself and that of some other
being in me”. This theme has indeed obsessed the modern imagination, replacing
the quest of Everyman or Bunyan’s Pilgrim. In so far as The Prelude is concerned
with the growth of a poet’s mind, it anticipates all these modern works, which
might be lumped together under the common title of “A Portrait of an Artist t as a
Young man.”
The Prelude is a modern poem in another sense; it is a self-reflective poem. By this
we mean a poem that has a part of its subject the writing of the poem itself. The
Prelude is a poem that incorporates the discovery of its ‘ars poetica’. It’s surely the
true ancestor of all those subsequent works of art that coil back upon themselves.
Both the beginning and the end of the double, quest, the voyage of self-exploration
and the effort to articulate the experience are perhaps those spots of time included
the earliest moments of moral and spiritual awareness and they are usually
associated with intensely felt responses to the nature even when he was a child.
Q. The Intimation-Ode Textual Analysis
William Wordsworth has said that, “nothing was more difficult for me in childhood
than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being” (552,
Wordsworth). In Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood” the idea of immortality is not discussed in mortal
terms, but in spiritual. What the child perceives intuitively, the infiniteness of the
soul, the adult may only perceive through mature contemplation and thought.
“Intimations of Immortality” is a philosophic exploration of the soul’s place in
nature and in the universe.
In the beginning of the poem, immorality is linked with a closeness to God, of
which the child possesses. The poem begins with Wordsworth lamenting the loss of
divine light, of his thoughtless exuberance when experiencing nature in youth. In
the first stanza he writes, that: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and
stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/ Apparelled in
celestial light,/ The glory and the freshness of a dream./ It is not now as it hath
been of yore:–/Turn wheresoe’er I may,/ By night or day,/ The things which I have
seen I now can see no more” (553, Wordsworth). When he was young, “every
common sight” seemed to him to be ethereal, and now “in night or day” he feels
“That there hath past away a glory from the earth” (553, Wordsworth). The child
once felt close to God through nature, but he has lost that “visionary gleam”, his
relationship with nature, and his relationship with God as a result of maturation.
Wordsworth believes that when we are born into this world we bring with us a
shred of our spiritual reality, a glimmer of a hope for immortality, of light, but this
is lost as we descend further away from God into adulthood. He writes, “Our birth
is but a sleep and a forgetting;/The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star/ [with]
trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home” (554,
Wordsworth). He then compares maturation and the realization of mortality to a
prison: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!/ Shades of the prison-house begin to
close/ Upon the growing boy” (555, Wordsworth). The “shades of the prison-
house” are indicative of darkness, of death, but as long as the boy “beholds the
light, and wence it flows,/ He sees it in his joy!” (555, Wordsworth). It is not the
ignorance to our mortality that allows for that youthful, thoughtless joy, it is the
immortality perceived by the youth. As the boy travels “farther from the east”,
towards the west with the setting sun, and matures he is forced to confront his
own mortality and the dream of immortality “fade[s] into the light of common day”
(555, Wordsworth).
In the ninth stanza Wordsworth exclaims his appreciation for his youthful
admiration of nature, and there is a shift from lamenting the loss of the youthful
joy brought forth by nature, to being empowered by it. He says, “O Joy! that in our
embers/ Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers, what was so
fugitive! “(556, Wordsworth). He considers “the simple creed/ Of Childhood” and
writes: “Not for these I raise/ The song of thanks and praise;/ But for those
obstinate questionings/ Of sense and outward things/ Fallings from us, vanishings;/
High instincts before which our mortal Nature/ Did tremble like a guilty Thing
surprised:/ But for those first affections,/Those shadowy recollections,/ Which, be
they what they may,/Are yet the fountain light of all our day,/And yet a master
light of all our seeing” (556-7, Wordsworth). Wordsworth celebrates his youthful
years and declares “those shadowy recollections” of his to be a necessary memory,
which he will hold dear. But the “thoughtless youth” only comprises a portion of
the soul that Wordsworth believes to be so infinite. Immortality means something
different to the child than the adult. Immortality, the infiniteness of the soul, is an
idea that the child beholds inherently. “The experiences of Wordsworth’s
childhood serve not as intimations of immortality, or as intimations of infinity, but
as psychological illusions which the poet outgrows” (863, Rayson). For the
“visionary gleam” that once was supplied by nature to poet, no longer is.
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In the tenth stanza Wordsworth celebrates the “philosophic mind” that can only be
born from maturation. He states, “What though the radiance which was once so
bring/ Be now for ever taken from my sight,/…We will grieve not, rather find/
Strength in what remains behind;/…In the faith that looks through death,/ In years
that bring the philosophic mind” (557, Wordsworth). The immorality Wordsworth
discusses is not “the theological term which signifies endlessness of life, but the
infiniteness of the human consciousness” (862, Rayson). Both the child and the
adult arrive at the realization of the soul’s immortality, although for the child it is
realized intuitively, and for the adult it is realized through introspection and mature
thought.
In the end, Wordsworth is grateful for the loss of his child-like zeal in nature, for he
believes he has been given “abundant recompense” for the loss of it—he has
gained a “philosophic mind”. He writes that although “The innocent brightness of a
new-born Day,/ Is lovely yet”, he must give “Thanks to the human heart by which
we live”, because it is it’s very mortality that gives way to the immortality of the
soul (557-8, Wordsworth).
Q. Critical appreciation of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality by
William Wordsworth
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” is one of
the greatest and noblest English poems. Wordsworth began it at the height of his
genius. The poem was started in the spring of 1802 and by summer the first four
stanzas seem to have been completed and the main design coined. It was finished
in 1806 at the town. The delays in the composition have made no difference to its
unity. The First four stanzas tell of his spiritual crisis of a glory passing from the
earth and end by asking why this has happened. The middle stanzas examine the
nature of this glory and explain it by a theory of reminiscence from a pre-natal
existence. Then the last stanzas show that, though the vision has perished, life has
still a meaning and a value. The three parts of the Ode deals with a crisis, an
explanation speaks of what is most important and most original in his Poetry.
The poem seems to have been influenced by Pythagoras, Slate, and Vaughan. They
believe in a life before birth, which on the basis of this poem was first mentioned in
the west by Pythagoras. The poet doubts and questions about the reality of the
world of senses have their origin in the Philosophy of Plato. The idealization of
childhood may be traced back to Vaughan who in his poem. “The Retreat,” says
that the child sees divine glory in nature. This poem contains a metaphysical
doctrine i.e. the theory that the memories of our childhood inform us of a life
before birth and therefore of the immortality of the soul. The truth of the doctrine
cannot be verified by us from our experiences. Thus the poem lacks that universal
appeal which is necessary for its enjoyment by the average reader. Wordsworth
himself does not assert the doctrine of reminiscences to be true. He looks hold of it
as having “sufficient foundation in humanity” and therefore worthy of being used
by a poet.
The idealization of the child though defeasible of the ground of purity and
innocence of childhood, it is not justified on the ground of its spirituality or
prophetic quality. To address the child as a mighty prophet, “Seer Blest” “best
philosopher” is too much. This poem is also autobiographical and reminiscent of
the poet’s past life. The radiance and glory of Nature which he declares, as having
seen in his childhood, was a part of his own personal experience, which he also felt
the unreality of the outward object to which he refers in the Ninth Stanza, we have
his own statement in support of this.
Wordsworth has very vividly described the psychology of the child. The child is an
imitator, an actor who copies and performs every action and gesture that he sees:
“The little actor cons another part,
Feeling from time to time his human stage
With all the persons, down to palsied age,
That life brings with her in her equipage,
As if his whole vocation
Where and less imitation.”
The descriptions of nature pictures are also beautiful. This poem brings out the
difference between his love for nature as a child and his love for nature as a man.
As a child, he had a passion for nature, an appetite, but as a man has a love for
nature was meditative and reflective and even the most ordinary objects of nature
gave rise to deep and profound thoughts in him. Having witnessed human
suffering, he looked at nature thoughtfully- “The clouds that gather around the
selling sun
“The clouds that gather round the selling sun
Do take a sober colouring from an age.
That hath kept watch over man’s mortality.”
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
A moral view has been expressed in the ode. The poet refers to human sufferings
which he has witnessed and the sympathy which he feels for his fellow human
beings. The last stanza reveals the reflective mood of the poet. No one can remain
untouched by the restful and soothing effect of the music at the close.
Wordsworth’s fictional gift or image-making power may also be noticed in this
poem. He gives vivid pictures of the rainbow, the rose, the moon shining in a
cloudless sky, the star, light falling on water, the children collecting fresh flowers,
the baby leaping on his mother’s arm etc.
The poet has used such rhythmic and effective phrases in the Ode like “The glory
and the freshness of a dream,” “Shades of the prison house,” “the height of
common day,” “thoughts of deep for tears” etc. As a matter of fact, the words used
to express thoughts and emotions in this poem are very appropriate. The grandness
of language befits the grandness of the theme. There is thus a perfect harmony
between thought and expression, “words, thought and music are woven into a
perfect whole”.
This poem is an irregular ‘ode’ because it is marked by lack of uniformity in meter
and in the length of its stanza. This is to say it is not written in the same meter
throughout and that all of its stanzas do not consist of the same numbers of lines. It
is written mainly in the iambic meter. Some lines, however, are in anapaestic and
trochaic.
The lyrical element is also found in this poem. In the first four stanzas, the poet
expresses his sense of loss and the last two stanzas refer to the compensations
which make him happy and intensely emotional and possess a singing quality. Thus
the ode becomes a happy blending of thought and emotion of doctrine and poetry
and of meditation and melody. The author’s gift for lyrical and for metaphysical
verse become perfect and are for once united. Notice the melody, emotion,
sincerity, and simplicity of the following line:-
“It is not now as it path been of yore
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
According to some critics, the poem also suffers from some defects.
 The poem dwells too long on the idea of pre-existence. This fact marks the unity of
thought.
 The poem is out of harmony, with the spirit of a true nature.
 There is a sudden transition in thought after the first four stanzas of the poem. The
reason is obvious because the first four stanzas were written in 1802 where the last
seven in 1806 etc.
Whether we agree or not with the philosophical views expressed by the poet in this
poem, we have to admit that this ode is his supreme lyrical achievement. His
personal feelings find a natural inspired and spontaneous expression in this ode.
According to Saintsbury, “This poem is not in every smallest detail yet as a wholly
perfect and immortal. It could not have been written letter.”
Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of
nature seemed dreamlike to him, “apparelled in celestial light,” and that that time
is past; “the things I have seen I can see no more.” In the second stanza, he says
that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely; the moon looks
around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful.
Nonetheless the speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.
In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in
springtime and watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a
thought of grief; but the sound of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains,
and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. He declares that his grief will
no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. He exhorts a
shepherd boy to shout and play around him. In the fourth stanza, he addresses
nature’s creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful festival. He
says that it would be wrong to feel sad on such a beautiful May morning, while
children play and laugh among the flowers. Nevertheless, a tree and a field that he
looks upon make him think of “something that is gone,” and a pansy at his feet
does the same. He asks what has happened to “the visionary gleam”: “Where is it
now, the glory and the dream?”
In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely “a sleep and a
forgetting”—that human beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they
enter the earth. “Heaven,” he says, “lies about us in our infancy!” As children, we
still retain some memory of that place, which causes our experience of the earth to
be suffused with its magic—but as the baby passes through boyhood and young
adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. In the sixth stanza, the
speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the
“glories” whence he came.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life,
and the love his mother and father feel for him. He sees the boy playing with some
imitated fragment of adult life, “some little plan or chart,” imitating “a wedding or
a festival” or “a mourning or a funeral.” The speaker imagines that all human life is
a similar imitation. In the eighth stanza, the speaker addresses the child as though
he were a mighty prophet of a lost truth, and rhetorically asks him why, when he
has access to the glories of his origins, and to the pure experience of nature, he still
hurries toward an adult life of custom and “earthly freight.”
In the ninth stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his
memories of childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of
instinct, innocence , and exploration. In the tenth stanza, bolstered by this joy, he
urges the birds to sing, and urges all creatures to participate in “the gladness of the
May.” He says that though he has lost some part of the glory of nature and of
experience, he will take solace in “primal sympathy,” in memory, and in the fact
that the years bring a mature consciousness—“a philosophic mind.” In the final
stanza, the speaker says that this mind—which stems from a consciousness of
mortality, as opposed to the child’s feeling of immortality—enables him to love
nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature’s objects can stir him to
thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can raise in him
“thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Q. Coleridge as visionary/ Representative of the Romantic Poetry
If not the greatest, Coleridge is at least the most representative of all
English romantic poets. He represents in his work almost all the triumphs and perils
of the romantic spirit. He is the “most complete representative” of the English
romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century as he captures, unlike any other
romantic poet, almost all the salient traits of romanticism. A teeming imagination,
love of the Middle Ages, supernaturalism, humanitarianism, love of nature,
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metrical artistry, and a peculiar agony and melancholy-all these romantic features
find ample expression in his work.
His really good poetry does not extent beyond twenty pages, but in them breathes
the romantic spirit in all its fullness. He wrote very little, but whatever he wrote
well should be engraved in letters of gold and bound in titles of silver. The least
prolific of the English romantic poets, he was the most representative of all.
According to Bowra, Coleridge’s poems “of all English Romantic masterpieces are
the most unusual and the most Romantic.” Says Vaughan: “Of all that is the purest
and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry is the most finished, the
supreme embodiment.” No doubt, there are a few (but very few) elements in the
romantic spirit which appear in his work rather faintly yet considered as a whole his
works are the most exquisite products and representatives of the spirit of the age.
Well does Saintsbury call him “the high priest of Romanticism.”
Coleridge’s Imagination:
The Romantic Movement can be correctly interpreted as the revolt of
imagination against reason, intellect, and prosaic realism. The romantics believed,
as Bowra puts it, that the creative imagination should be closely connected with a
peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things. Their effort was, in
Samuel C. Chew’s words, “to live constantly in the world of the imagination above
and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world.” For them the creations of
imagination were “forms more real than living men.” The part that imagination
plays in the poetry of Coleridge is too obvious to need any elaboration. The writer
ofKubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, and Christabel answered well his own
description of the ideal poet:
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Shelley himself would have been envious of such a romantic poet!
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about Coleridge: “He has more of the poetic eye in fine
frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed.” Swinburne compared him to those “footless
birds of paradise” which spend all their lives in perpetual flight and subsist only on
falling dew.
While in his creative work Coleridge worked with his teeming but
delicate imagination tempered by an unerring artistic sense, in his criticism he
made a strong plea for the imaginative freedom of the poet. In his Biographia
Literaria he gave an authoritative definition of the nature and function of
imagination. In putting a special stress on imagination as against dry rationalism,
Coleridge emerged as a true representative of the Romantic Movement in England.
Love of the Far:
The poet who lives constantly in a world of pure imagination naturally
becomes amorous of the far, both in point of time and space. He seeks an escape
from the humdrum realities of familiar experience and from the limitations of “that
shadow-show called reality.” Coleridge, too, more than most romantic poets, loves
to treat of the unreal or the unusual. The unreal (which is generally the highly
imaginative, or the supernatural) is what is never experienced, and the unusual is
that which is not often experienced. According to a critic, the most characteristic
feature of romantic poetry is, its description or suggestion of the unreal-“the light
that never was on sea or land.” It will be admitted that in such descriptions and
suggestions Coleridge particularly excels. How extraordinary and extraordinarily
well-wrought the picture of Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” is !
It was a miracle of strange device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
How unusual the scenes at the Pole and the Equator are in The Ancient
Mariner!This is the picture of the Pole:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noise in a swound!
And this of a terrific tempest:
Like waters shot from some high crag
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
In Kubla Khan Coleridge makes mention of an Abyssinian maid and
Mount Abora, etc. Thus Coleridge is a very representative romantic poet in that he
loves the remote, the strange, and the mysterious, rather than the immediate, the
commonplace, and the probable. A critic observes in this connexion: “His peculiar
quality as a poet lay in his power of visualising scenes of which neither he nor
another had actual experience”.” As such, Coleridge’s poetry fits well Pater’s
interpretation of romanticism as the “addition of strangeness to beauty” and
Theodore Watts Dution’s interpretation of the same as the “Renascence of
Wonder.”
Supernaturalism:
The love of the unreal and the remote takes Coleridge too often in the
faery realm of the supernatural. He too often sings of the
Magic casement opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
His contribution to the “Renascence of Wonder” is the most
substantial of all the English romantic poets. In his company we visit the enchanted
palace of Kubla Khan, the vampire-haunted castle of Christabel, and the demon-
infested seas of The Ancient Mariner. His supernatural, however, is not the crude
“Gothicism” of some of his predecessors, which was nothing more than the product
of a ghoulish fancy. His treatment of the supernatural is all his own-delicate,
refined, suggestive, and psychologically convincing. Wordsworth sought to save
nature from the crudity and insipidity of Crabbe by touching reality with
imagination; Coleridge redeemed romance from the crudity of Gothic
sensationalists by linking it with reality. Whereas Wordsworth tried to
“supernaturalise” naturalism. Coleridge endeavoured quite admirably to
“naturalise” supernaturalism. Such lines as the following are unmatched in the
whole range of English literature for their richly “romantic” connotations:
A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
Truly does a critic say about these lines that they are magic pure and
simple; the rest is poetry. The romantic poets like Scott and Keats also dealt with
the supernatural, but the supernatural is according to a critic, “the main region of
his [Coleridge’s] song.” Moreover, his delicate, psychological, and artistic treatment
also distinguishes him from other romantic poets. His aim was always to produce
“that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic
faith.” In The Ancient Mariner he achieved this aim quite creditably by focusing the
attention of the reader on the shifting states of the mariner’s psyche, rather than
any supernatural claptrap of the Gothic kind. The theme in Christabelis of the same
nature as in The Ancient Mariner, but it is handled with more artistry. Here the
touches of the supernatural are more subtle and less explicit. The indirectness with
which these touches are made to work their cumulative effect may be contrasted
with the directness of the method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like
theme – the transformation of a serpent into a woman (in Lamia).
Medievalism:
Coleridge’s love of the remote, the mysterious, the strange, and the
supernatural induced in him an interest in the Middle Ages. The romantic poet, as
we have already said, is impatient of the real and the earth-bound. He is very often
dissatisfied with the present set-up of things. Shellej7, Keats, and Scott are notably
so. The romantic poet either sings of the glorious past or projects his imagination
into the womb of futurity to raise a shape that answers his own desire. Thus Keats
sings of the glory that was Greece, Scott endeavours to recapture the splendour of
the Middle Ages, and Shelley sings of the golden age to come. Indeed the romantic
poets
look before and after
And pine for what is not.
Thus to some romantics the Middle Ages provide a comfortable
spiritual home-remote and vague and mysterious. They glorify their splendour and
chivalry but forget their dirt, disease, ignorance, and social repression. They escape
not only from the real world but also from the real Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages do not provide a spiritual home for Coleridge as they
do for Scott. He values them not because of themselves but because of the
excellent setting they provide for his supernatural poems. He keeps the medieval
atmosphere quite vague and, unlike Keats, does not come down to the description
of details. He recreates not indeed the body but the authentic spirit of the Middle
Ages.
Anti-intellectualism and Love of Nature:
Coleridge, like most other romantics, was influenced by the
Rousseauistic creed embodied hi the slogan “Return to Nature.” He was also
appreciably influenced by Wordsworth, the high priest of nature. Early eighteenth-
century poetry had been “drawing-room poetry” having little to do with the sights
and sounds of nature. Wordsworth and Coleridge demolished this age-old prejudice
and brought nature to the fore. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge had a keen eye and a
clear ear for the sights and sounds of nature. He brought to his study of nature that
minuteness of analysis which is surpassed in English literature only by Keats. As
Vaughan points out, “Coleridge had the faculty of minute and subtle observation,
which he may have learned, in the first instance from Wordsworth but which he
fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth himself nor perhaps
any other ‘worshipper of Nature’, Keats excepted, ever quite attained. This faculty,
however, did not bar the way to an equal mastery of broad, general effects.”
In his early poems, such as Frost at Midnight. Coleridge shared
Wordsworth’s attitude to nature. He regarded nature as a sentient spirit and
believed in its moral and educative influence on man. But later he modified this
attitude and came to believe that we interpret the moods of nature according to
our own moods (the “pathetic fallacy” of Ruskin). Nature, he came to hold, has no
intrinsic moods or life of her own. She only gives us back what we give her in the
first instance.
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Our is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
Humanitarianism:
Like Wordsworth, again, Coleridge came under the influence of the
French Revolution. Like him he went wild over the fall of the Bastille, which
signalised for him the ushering in of a new era of emancipation from all political
tyranny and the establishment of social justice. However, the Reign of Terror and
the emergence of Napoleon after the political phase of the Revolution filled both
Wordsworth and Coleridge with despair and disillusionment and brought them
reeling into the fold of Toryism. Whereas Wordsworth sought refuge and
consolation in nature, Coleridge went to abstruse philosophy. Nevertheless, the
note of the love of humanity sounds as clearly in Coleridge’s poetry as it does in
Wordsworth’s. In this humanitariamsm and enthusiasm (though temporary) for the
spirit of the French Revolution Coleridge is a pretty representative poet of the
romantic age.
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His Metrical Art:
In his rejection of the heroic couplet also Coleridge represents the body
of the romantic poets all of whom reverted to the verse measures before Dryden as
also invented some of their own. The Ancient Mariner is couched in ballad stanzas.
InChristabelhe felt he had used an entirely “new principle” of prosody. The metre
in this poem, according to him, “is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may
seem so from its being founded on a new principle : namely, that of counting in
each line the accents, not the syllables.” What is true of Christabel is also true
of Kubla Khan. The “principle” was definitely not new. However, Coleridge’s
masterful employment of it is very striking.
Mention must also be made of Coleridge’s skill at creating exquisite
music. “He”, says a critic, “is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and
Byron never almost.” He has been rightly called an “epicure in sound.” Symons says
: “Coleridge shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any other English poet
except Milton…Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird, Blake, like a child or an angel, but
Coleridge certainly writes music.” Romantic poetry has an edge over neoclassical
poetry in its creation of variegated musical effects. It did not content itself with the
singsong of the heroic couplet. Thus Coleridge is here, too, a representative
romantic poet.
The Defects of Romanticism:
Coleridge represents not only all the excellent features of romanticism,
but also its perils, which are chiefly three. First, he runs the constant danger of
losing contact with life and reality and getting lost in the pretty-pretty world of his
own making. Thus his poetry does not always remain a serious “criticism of life.”
Secondly, eschewing all tradition, he, like Wordsworth, saw a decline in his poetic
faculty after he had written his masterpieces. The romantic poet depends entirely
on his own inspiration-which is notoriously untrustworthy. When that goes, he
cannot borrow strength from the established tradition which he has disowned. This
happened with Coleridge. Thirdly, he often incurs the charge of vagueness. He is
too fond of colour and sweet sound and sometimes sacrifices sense to them. Words
likedulcimer, honey-dew, and Abyssinian maidhave musical or exotic sounds, but
their real meaning is not so pleasant.
Q. Supernatural in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is characterized by the supernatural. The
word comes from the Latin super meaning above and naturo meaning nature. The
etymology of the word, however, helps us in no way to understand the connotation
of the word in literature. Contrasted with the natural, the supernatural is
apprehended as opposed to comprehended. In fact a thing is apprehended when
we can know its existence without understanding it. The natural, we can know and
understand because it is material, physical- but the supernatural is beyond the
grasp of the physical senses- it is imaterial, spiritual. The natural acts in accordance
with physical laws, and departures from these laws are physically impossible, but
they are not absolutely impossible for the natural, being created, depends upon the
power and the will of its creator. The Creator of the physical universe is above
nature and is spiritual and imaterial. We know he exists; but, being beyond the
grasp of our senses we can only apprehend him and not comprehend him. Our
notion of his being, then since we are so deeply rooted in the physical can only be
measured with material images, which we provided with our imaginations and our
dreams. The supernatural, then, is a superior force, both spiritual and divine, that
has power over the physical universe to change the nature of created things, either
in themselves or in their modes of action, and either directly through himself or
indirectly through angels or demons or departed spirits. Coleridge is thoroughly
romantic in this conception of the supernatural. He creates a new and exotic
beauty from the images stored in his imagination. It "lives and breathes before the
eyes" and yet it is fantastic, improbable, even impossible. One important factor in
understanding the exotic and fantastic nature of the supernatural in his poems is to
realize the The Ancient Mariner and Christabel were indirectly influenced by his
opium dreams and Kubla Khan was the direct result of an opium dream- proof of
this is found in both his Biographia Literaria and Letters written to his wife and
friends throughout his opium days. The fact that The Ancient Mariner and
Christabel were influenced by his opium dreams does not eliminate the possibility
that they were the result of a plan, however- Coleridge himself in his Biographia
Literaria assures us that they were- "It was agreed that my endeavors should be
directed to persons and characters supernatural." In addition the account of his
walk with Wordsworth and Dorothy as well as the argument that precedes the
poem provide the external evidence that the Ancient Mariner deals with the
supernatural. Spectral persecutions, tutelary spirits and dead men navigating a ship
are to be the main elements. In fact the spectral persecution by the tutelary spirits
which we find to be at first daemonic and later angelic is most evident throughout
the Ancient Mariner. The Christabel, Coleridge called "nothing more than a
common Fairy Tale." In fact the poem itself is exotic, deals with enchantment and
evil spirits "masking in human forms." Geraldine is weird, unreal, unworldly- she
provides the evil influence in the poem- Christabel's mother, who watches from
beyond the grave provides the good influence- Geraldine is present throughout the
poem, we see her, and through her actions, realize what she is. Christabel's mother
is only alluded to; yet, we feel her presence. Unfortunately like Kubla Khan,
Christabel is a mere fragment. Had he finished it I cannot but feel that Christabel's
mother would have held a more prominent part in the conclusion. Kubla Khan is a
dream picture or a rather a part of a dream picture for it was never finished- the
background with its supernatural atmosphere of "caverns, measureless to men"
"sunless sea" "woman wailing for her demon lover," and "dancing rocks,"
foreshadows great possibilities. Unfortunately because of the fact that it was never
finished, we can only guess, if even that, what might have resulted had not that
man from Porlock broken in upon Coleridge's translation into words of this dream
picture. Of his three supernatural poems, the Ancient Mariner is his sole poetic
literary masterpiece. Coleridge was not a great poet, but he was nevertheless an
interesting one- his great merit lies in the utter facility with which he combined the
concrete with the abstract, the neutral with the supernatural, in his complete grip
of the concrete and facile manipulation of impossibilities. There, he provided both
the elements of belief and interest that makes the success of such poems. It is the
simplicity and effect woven in the mingling of the concrete with the abstract. That
helps us in receiving these abnormal impressions as facts, and in our accepting
these lines as facts. Coleridge has verily accomplished his poetic creed.
Q. Justify the statement „The Rime of the Ancient Mariner‟ is a
ballad.
Ans. A ballad is a long song or poem which tells a story in simple language.
‗Rime‘ is a story written in verse. ‗Rime‘ is the alternative spelling of ‗rhyme‘.
The poem opens abruptly in the manner of a ballad. Without any wasteful
prescription , our attention is immediately drawn to the central figure of the story,
the Mariner. ‗Ancient‘ conveys the two-fold sense of ‗old‘ and ‗of old time‘. An
atmosphere of ‗bygone days‘ permeates the whole poem.
Two of the most striking features of the mariner‘s appearance, He uses the
atmosphere of dreams to accustom us to his special world, and then he proceeds to
create freely within his chosen limits:
The ancient mariner shows many qualities of a dream. It moves in abrupt stages,
each of which has its own single, dominating character. Its visual impressions are
remarkably brilliant and absorbing. Its emotional impacts change rapidly, but
always come with an unusual force as if the poet were haunted and obsessed by
them. The mariner himself, with his glittering eye , grey beard and skinny hand
seems to have descended from a world haunted by phantoms and specters,
whereas supernatural happenings, because of the psychological truth inherent in
them. Look to be quite natural. ‗The Rime of the Ancient Mariner‘ was planned by
Wordsworth and Coleridge on the afternoon of the 20th November, 1797, when
they were walking in the Quantocks. Coleridge really knows how to draw one‘s
attention in the beginning of the story.
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 Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the best
representatives of the English ballad tradition. A ballad is not just a kind of song
that people slow-dance to with the lights dimmed. No, in poetry terms, it's a kind
of poem that tells some kind of narrative or story, often a lengthy one. Coleridge
borrows the form of this poem from old, popular English ballads like "Sir Patrick
Spens." Most stanzas have fourlines, called a "quatrain," and a rhyme scheme that
goes ABCB, so the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. Of course, not all
of the stanzas have exactly four lines: Coleridge isn't willing to sacrifice meaning for
form. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner does feel like a lyric at times. But really, it's
a story.
Q. Summary of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has
returned from a long sea voyage. Three men are on the way to a wedding
celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door (we'll
call him the Wedding Guest). Using his hypnotic eyes to hold the attention of the
Wedding Guest, he starts telling a story about a disastrous journey he took. The
Wedding Guest really wants to go party, but he can't pry himself away from this
grizzled old mariner. The Mariner begins his story. They left port, and the ship
sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then they get
caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field. An albatross shows up to steer them through
the fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner decides to shoot it. Oops.
Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it gets really hot. They run out of water,
and everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be haunted by a bad spirit,
and weird stuff starts appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the ocean. The
Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the dead albatross around his neck to remind
him of his error.
Everyone is literally dying of thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a
distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is too dry, so he sucks some of his
own blood to moisten his lips. He's like, "A ship! We're saved." Sadly, the ship is a
ghost ship piloted by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have to be the last
people you'd want to meet on a journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies. The
wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually,
I was the only one who didn't die." He continues his story: he's on a boat with a lot
of dead bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy things. Worse, these slimy
things are nasty water snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by unconsciously
blessing the hideous snakes, and the albatross drops off his neck into the ocean.
The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm
strikes up in the distance, and all the dead sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship.
The sailors don't actually come back to life. Instead, angels fill their bodies, and
another supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push the boat. The Mariner
faints and hears two voices talking about how he killed the albatross and still has
more penance to do. These two mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.
After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back in port again. The Mariner sees
angels standing next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a rescue boat shows
up to take him back to shore. The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the hermit" is
on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud
noise, and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat picks up the Mariner.
When they get on shore, the Mariner is desperate to tell his story to the hermit. He
feels a terrible pain until the story had been told.
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In fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same painful need to tell his story,
which is why he stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion. Wrapping up, the
Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and
love other people and things. Then the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest no
longer wants to enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the next day, as
the famous last lines go, "a sadder and a wiser man."
Q. Summary of Kubla Khan by Coleridge.
Ans The unnamed speaker of the poem tells of how a man named Kubla Khan
traveled to the land of Xanadu. In Xanadu, Kubla found a fascinating pleasuredome
that was ―a miracle of rare device‖ because the dome was made of caves of ice
and located in a sunny area. The speaker describes the contrasting composition of
Xanadu. While there are gardens blossoming with incense-bearing trees and
―sunny spots of greenery,‖ across the ―deep romantic chasm‖ in Xanadu there
are ―caverns measureless to man‖ and a fountain from which ―huge fragments
vaulted like rebounding hail.‖ Amid this hostile atmosphere of Nature, Kubla also
hears ―ancestral voices prophesying war.‖ However, Kubla finds relief from this
tumultuous atmosphere through his discovery of the miraculous sunny pleasure-
dome made of ice.
In the last stanza of the poem, the narrator longs to revive a song about Mount
Abora that he once heard a woman play on a dulcimer. The speaker believes that
the song would transport him to a dream world in which he could ―build that
dome in air‖ and in which he can drink ―the milk of Paradise.‖
Analysis
A recurring motif throughout Coleridge‘s poetry is the power of dreams and of the
imagination, such as in ―Frost at Midnight,‖ ―Dejection: An Ode,‖ and
―Christabel‖ In ―Discovery and the Domestic Affections in Coleridge and Shelley,‖
Michelle Levy explains that Coleridge‘s ―fascination with the unknown reflects a
larger cultural obsession of the Romantic period‖ (694).
Perhaps the most fantastical world created by Coleridge lies in ―Kubla Khan.‖ The
legendary story behind the poem is that Coleridge wrote the poem following an
opium-influenced dream. In this particular poem, Coleridge seems to explore the
depths of dreams and creates landscapes that could not exist in reality. The
―sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice‖ exemplifies the extreme fantasy of the
world in which Kubla Khan lives.
Similar to several of Coleridge‘s other poems, the speaker‘s admiration of the
wonders of nature is present in ―Kubla Khan.‖ Yet what is striking and somewhat
different about the portrayal of nature in this particular poem is the depiction of
the dangerous and threatening aspects of nature. For example, consider the
following passage:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e‘er beneath a waning moon was
haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher‘s flail:
And ‗mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river (lines 12-24)
In ―Secret(ing) Conversations: Coleridge and Wordsworth,‖ Bruce Lawder
highlights the significance of Coleridge‘s use of a feminine rhyme scheme in the
above stanza, in which the last two syllables of the lines rhyme (such as
―seething‖ and ―breathing‖). Lawder notes that ―the male force of the ‗sacred
river‘ literally interrupts, and puts an end to, the seven successive feminine endings
that begin the second verse paragraph‖ (80). This juxtaposition of female forces
versus male forces parallels the juxtaposition of Coleridge‘s typical pleasant
descriptions of nature versus this poem‘s unpleasant descriptions. In most of
Coleridge‘s works, nature represents a nurturing presence. However, in ―Kubla
Khan,‖ nature is characterized by a rough, dangerous terrain that can only be
tamed by a male explorer such as Kubla Khan.
The last stanza of the poem was added later, and is not a direct product of
Coleridge's opium-dream. In it the speaker longs to re-create the pleasured-dome
of Kubla Khan "in air," perhaps either in poetry, or in a way surpassing the
miraculous work of Kubla Khan himself. The speaker's identity melds with that of
Kubla Khan, as he envisions himself being spoken of by everyone around, warning
one another to "Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!" Kubla
Khan/the speaker becomes a figure of superstition, around whom those who would
remain safe should "Weave a circle[...] thrice" to ward off his power. Coleridge
conflates the near-mythic figure of Kubla Khan manipulating the natural world
physically, with the figure of the poet manipulating the world "in air" through the
power of his words. In either case, the creative figure becomes a source of awe,
wonder, and terror combined.
Q. Critically Appreciate “Kubla Khan” Coleridge
1. One of the Best Poems of Coleridge
"Kubla Khan" is one of those three poems which have kept the name of
Coleridge in the forefront of the greatest English poets -- the other two being "The
Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel", and all of the three having been written in 1797
and 1798 dealing with "persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.".
All these three poems were composed when intimate friendship existed between
Coleridge and Wordsworth. "Kubla Khan" is considered one of the most famous
examples of Romanticism in English poetry. A copy of the manuscript is a
permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London.
2. The Origin of the Poem
One night in 1797, Coleridge was not feeling all that great. To dull the pain, he
took a dose of laudanum. Soon he fell asleep and had a strange dream about Kubla
Khan, because before falling asleep, he had been reading a story from "Purchas'
Pilgrims" in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace. Coleridge
dreamt that he was writing a poem in his sleep, and when he woke up after two
hours, he sat down to record the poem. He meant to write two to three hundred
lines, but he was interrupted by a tailor from Porlock, who had come to see him on
business. When he came back to the poem, he had forgotten the rest. The 54 lines
he did manage to scribble out turned into one of the most famous and enduring
poems in English literary history.
3. Title of the Poem
The main title of the poem is just plain "Kubla Khan". It is a pretty great name.
Kubla Khan was the fifth Khangan of the Mongol Empire, reigning from 1260 to
1294. He founded the Yuan Dynasty in China in 1271. He was the fourth son of Tolui
and a grandson of Genghis Khan. Thus the title sets a tone for the poem. It
transports us to another place and time before we even get started. However,
there is another piece. The full title is: "Kubla Khan: Or A Vision in a Dream: A
Fragment". "A Vision is a Dream" signifies that the poem is an edifice of a charmed
sleep. This is "A Fragment" because Coleridge intended to write two to three
hundred lines but could only write 54 due to the interruption of a person.
4. Themes of the Poem
The major themes of the poem are; creative power of imagination, man and the
natural world, and time. The power of imagination is the ultimate creative power.
In the last part of the poem, the imagination of Coleridge constructs "pleasure-
dome in air". The interaction between man and nature is also a major theme for
Coleridge. It is painted all over "Kubla Khan", as we go from the dome to the river,
and then from the garden to the sea. Sometimes he has focused on human
characters, sometimes on natural forces. Finally, different understandings of time is
a major theme of the poem. Is Coleridge recalling the Kubla Khan of the past, or
someone who transcends our linear notion of time?
5. Poetic Structure of the Poem
"Kubla Khan" is a fifty-four line lyric. It has two parts and four stanzas. It is
written in iambic tetrameter and pentameter. Iambic just means that the poem is
made up of lots of two-syllable units, in which the stress is placed on the second
syllable. It has an alternating rhyme scheme in each stanza. Stanza one has a rhyme
scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, stanza two has a rhyme scheme of
ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJ, stanza three has a rhyme scheme of ABABCC, and stanza
four has a rhyme scheme of ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG. In short, the poem has a
disorganized structure and different in structure from other poems composed by
Coleridge.
6. Symbolism in the Poem
The pleasure-dome, the river Alph, mighty fountain, mazy motion, tumult,
ancestral voices and mingled measure are the major symbols in the poem. The
pleasure-dome symbolizes immortality and majesty. The river Alph is a symbol of
life and force. The ceaseless turmoil of the earth, the fountain forced out with half
intermittent burst, the fragments rebounding like hail and the dancing rocks
represent agony and power. The mazy motion suggests uncertain and blind
progress of the human soul and the complexities of human life. The tumult is
associated with war. The ancestral voices stand for that dark compulsion that binds
the race to its habitual conflicts. The mingled measure suggests the blend of
fundamental opposites, creation and destruction.
7. The Supernatural in the Poem
Supernatural elements are peppered throughout the poem. The sacred river, the
caverns measureless to man, the sunless sea, the deep romantic chasm, the woman
wailing for her demon lover, the half-intermittent burst of water from the mighty
fountain, the ancestral voices prophesying war, the shadow of the dome floating
midway on the waves and the Abyssinian maid -- they all create a world of magic,
wonder and enchantment. The frenzy in which the poet is in the last part of the
poem also contributes to its supernatural vein.
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
8. Imagery in the Poem
The whole poem is a succession of visual, auditory, thermal, kinesthetic and
gustatory images. Visual imagery include; the pleasure dome, the sacred river, the
measureless caverns, the deep romantic chasm, the woman wailing for her demon
lover, the Abyssinian maid, and the poet himself. The prophecies of war, the song
of Abyssinian maid and the warning of the people listening the story of the poet are
auditory images. Sun and ice are thermal images. Kinesthetic images include;
fragments tossing like hail, chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail, the floating
shadow of dome on the waves, and the magic circles drawn by people around the
poet. Feeding on honey-dew and drinking the milk of paradise are examples of
gustatory images.
9. The Romantic Elements in the Poem
Imagination, supernaturalism, sensuousness, exploration of nature and magical
spell are the major romantic elements in "Kubla Khan". The entire poem is based
on a vision Coleridge had during an opium trance. The woman wailing for her
demon lover and the ancestral voices prophesying war; are obviously supernatural
occurrences. The bright gardens, the incense bearing trees, the sunny spots of
greenery, the half intermittent burst of the mighty fountain and the rocks vaulting
like rebounding hail - are highly sensuous images and explore nature. The poet's
eyes and his floating hair are connected with magic. In short, like a true romantic
poem, it is a product of pure fancy, a work of sheer imagination and is, therefore, a
wholly romantic composition.
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10. Sounds in the Poem
The poem is a perfect piece of music. It has all kinds of sounds, movements and
tones. When the river is crashing through the caves, we imagine the pounding of
kettledrums. The word "rebounding" in "Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding
hail" has a hollow, open sound. Then, when we travel through the gardens, we hear
the soft sounds of the woodwinds. The scary, flashing-eyed figure that appears at
the end reminds us of the horns, sharp and brassy and starling. The words
"Beware! Beware!" are blurted out, quick and loud, like the sound of a trumpet
blaring out a warning. Thus the poem is a journey of sounds. It tries to use the
effects of language as if they were different parts of an orchestra.
Q. Coleridge’s Treatment of Supernatural in “The Ancient
Mariner”
When Coleridge and Wordsworth published “Lyrical Ballads” which laid the
foundation stone of Romantic poetry Coleridge states that it was his aim to select
remote; uncommon or supernatural incidents in such a manner as to make them
appear real. This particular aim of Coleridge is manifested in the “Ancient Mariner”
which is based on supernatural elements. But the total effect of the Poem is
realistic and Coleridge believed that “The Willing suspension of disbelief”, Coleridge
means that the reader suspends his analytical power and he is profaned to accept
whatever is told in the narrative. The Ancient Mariner contrasts several improbable
incidents but it is not a fantasy of disconnected events but a coherent story which
appears credible to the reader.
The Mariner killed Albatross without giving us any specific reason and after the
killing of the bird, a number of fantastic events followed one after another to
suggest the serious nature of the Mariner’s crime. The sudden appearance of the
mysterious skeleton ship, the specter- woman and her death mate and the
appearance of life in death are taken from the supernatural world in order to
produce a sense of horror connected with the Mariner’s psychology. But these
supernatural phenomena are so skillfully blended with the natural events that the
whole thing appears to be real. The images of horror are introduced to indicate the
psychological condition and suffering of the Mariner. The realistic aspect of the
story is presented by the presentation of the Mariner’s psychological condition.
Coleridge produces a sense of horror not by the direct description but by employing
suggestive symbols to portray the psychological condition of the Mariner. The
figure of Specter- woman and her death mate are eternal agents that are
connected with the Mariner’s mind. The appearance of life in death conveys a
sense of horror and its subsequent effect would freeze a man’s blood. The image of
the skeleton ship with death and life in death is taken from the supernatural world
to show the effect of the crime on the Mariner’s mind. Another horror situation
that produced in the poem is the death of two hundred sailors who dropped down
dead one by one cursing the Mariner for his hideous crime.
Coleridge aimed at making the supernatural conversing and human. He wanted in
his poem a human interest with a touch of reality. Coleridge exercises imagination
realism in this poem. However unnatural the events may be, they are made of the
natural elements and for this reason, they appear to be credible. Once we have
entered into this imaginary world, we do not feel that it is beyond our
comprehension but respond to it with the intensity and actual emotion. Besides the
realistic treatments of the setting in the background of the natural landscape,
Coleridge’s footage of characters appeals to our emotion. What touches us about
them is the pain and suffering. Their agonies are universalized with basic human
emotion. We feel that what happens to them, might in similar circumstances,
happen to anyone and we readily respond to the misery and helpless plight of the
persons involved in guilt and suffering.
Coleridge expects us to suppose that the situations are real and this is easy when
situations belong to ordinary experiences but when the supernatural takes control
Coleridge uses all his skill to achieve a realistic effect within the supernatural frame
done. The paradox nature of the Mariner’s voyage from England to the South
Pacific, from the known to unknown, from the familiar to the strange world keeps
the reader spellbound. The reader is willing to accept everything that is happening
in the strange world without questioning its validity. By the magic power of his art,
Coleridge retains the reader’s interest till the last page.
The Ancient Mariner is much more than a fairy tale. The entire story of the
Mariner’s crime, his suffering and punishment are presented through the
supernatural agents. Coleridge has used supernatural symbols to show the
magnitude of the Mariner’s crime and his subsequent punishment. In conclusion, it
can be said that “The Ancient Mariner” is a great poem in which Coleridge has
achieved his desired effect with the harmonious blending of the natural and the
supernatural.
Q. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a Tale of Crime and
Punishment
The Ancient Mariner is Coleridge’s masterpiece in which the story is presented in
the supernatural atmosphere but it appears to be real and convincing. The Ancient
Mariner is essentially a story of crime and punishment. The poem is divided into
seven sections and each section describes a new stage in the development of the
story. The first stanza tells us about the crime. Coleridge makes the shooting of the
bird Albatross significant in two ways. First, he does not specifically mention why
the Mariner kills the Albatross. The Mariner may have killed the bird in a mood of
anger or it may be an act of near frivolity. Whatever be the cause it shows the
essential irrationally of the crime which may be due to the perversity of will.
Secondly, this is a crime against nature, against the saved relationship between the
guest and the host. By killing the bird which was hailed in God’s name, the Mariner
breaks the sacred code of life. In this action of the Mariner, we see the magnitude
of his crime against humanity at the ordered system of the world.
In the second section, the Mariner begins to suffer the punishment for what he has
done and Coleridge vividly describes the Mariner’s helpless condition in a hopeless
world. The ship does not move and the sailors are tormenting by thirst while the
only moving things around the Mariner are the slimy creatures on the sea and the
death fire which dances at night. The immediate results of the crime are portrayed
in the image of a universe dying of thirst and constantly visited by dreadful
phantoms.
The third section shows how the guilty soul becomes conscious of what it has done.
It suffers terrible isolation in a lonely world. The Mariner first begins to realize the
consequences of his action when he sees the phantom ship which decides his
doom.
“The night-near life in death was she who thicks man’s blood with old”. The night in
which the Mariner’s companions die one by one symbolizes the darkness in the
soul when it suddenly finds itself alone and robbed of familiar ties. Mariner’s
companions fall down dead one by one cursing him for his crime.
In the fourth section the Mariner’s loneliness is described with greater intensity.
The guilty soul is cut off not nearly from human interaction but from the consoling
friendship of Nature. The Mariner is indeed in a precarious ‘plight’, he is alone on
the ship surrounded by the dead bodies of his ship mate. Coleridge gives a vivid
account of the Mariner’s helplessness and utter loneliness in the following lines,
Alone, Alone all, all alone
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My Soul is agony
This is the authentic description of a soul which is not only cut-off from familiar
surrounding’s but also from the human community. The Albatross which hanks in
the Mariner’s neck symbolizes his crime. Then begins the process of Mariner’s
moral revival. When the Mariner quite unconsciously blesses the water snakes he
begins to re-establish relations with the world of God’s creation.
In the fifth section, the process of the soul’s revival continues. The ship begins to
move and the heavenly spirits wave the Mariner. The Mariner hears a heavenly
music in the air and is comforted by it. Before he is fully restored he must establish
relation both with Man and God and he begins to do so. When the Mariner hears
the heavenly music he is on his way to attain salvation.
Q. Coleridge’s Use of Symbolism in the Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
The greatness of a poet chiefly lies in his use of symbolism and imagery. Romantic
poets have used different symbols to convey their attitude to life and nature, for
they believe in a transcendental reality, an ideal world beyond the world of reality.
Coleridge deals with the supernatural aspects of life as well as nature and to do so
he has made extensive use of symbolism in his poems.
An analysis of his celebrated poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” reveals that
he has made the whole poem a symbol of life itself.The poet through his use of
various symbols has produced the presence of two worlds: the conventional
everyday world and the mysterious world beyond that which is more real to him. In
the opening lines, Coleridge has introduced the entirely different personalities, the
wedding guest as a symbol of the conventional everyday world and the mysterious
transcendental world. The Sea-Lord Albatross symbolizes some moral values:
hospitality and gratitude. It also becomes a symbol of life itself in the Mariner’s
lifeless world. The act of killing involving the crime of the Mariner symbolizes man’s
violation of moral values. The poet’s deliberate silence about the motive of the
crime symbolizes the essential irrationality of the human mind.
However, the use of the supernatural reveals the greatest symbol of the mystery of
life and the unseen powers controlling human destiny. Coleridge has used a
number of supernatural elements which are rationally inexplicable, e.g. the seraph
band, the specter ship with the ‘Life in Death’ woman, the unknown spirits
following them etc. All these happenings suggest the eternal mystery of life,
symbolizing the puggling aspects of life which contribute to the transcendental
world of Coleridge. Other objects of nature like the sun and the moon are used as
powerful symbols in the poem. The sun symbolizes the rational world which is
benevolent in the beginning of the voyage but later becomes malicious after the
commitment of the crime. The moon symbolizes the divine spirit which remains
indifferent to the Mariner’s ordeal’ keeping to her own course throughout the
voyage. The whole dualism of the poem: the sun and the moon, the powers of
water and air, the act of killing and that of blessing, the state of solitude and that of
‘goodly company’, the nightmare and the awakening, the drowning and the
resurfacing symbolizes some kind of redemption of reconciliation. The two voices,
whose conversation the Mariner hears subconsciously, symbolizes the spiritual and
psychological part of the Mariner’s mind. Since he is not essentially evil-minded, he
is conscious of his crime and the need for repentance. He hears subconsciously:
“The man hath penance done/ and penance more will do”.
It is to be noted that Coleridge’s continuous use of contrasts of bright and somber,
colors of silence and noise of joy and sorrow of light and darkness etc. symbolizes
his own view of light which is a mixture of the opposite. With the employment of
all these symbols, the poet has given a new meaning to the archetype pattern of
the main fall and his repentance, leading to partial redemption.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a highly symbolic poem, written in the form
of a ballad, dealing with certain psychological states of a sailor, his sun, and
redemption. However, the poem involves a paradox, for the wedding ceremony
symbolizes the beginning of a new life of the two united souls, but the Mariner has
reached the end of his life when nothing remains for him except the past memories
of sorrow, sin, and repentance. If the Mariner’s voyage is regarded as a symbolic
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journey of life, we note that he also started it happily like the newly married
couple. The storm at sea drew the ship to the land of mist. Here ‘mist’ symbolizes
moral confusion from which the Mariner and other sailor were suffering. Some
critics have described the bird itself as Christ. So the killing of the bird by the
Mariner represents the sin of crucifixion, enabling the bird to embrace the death of
a martyr, though his act of killing, the Mariner has become a sinner, inviting the
inevitable sufferings of life.
Thus, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is essentially a symbolic poem and
Coleridge craftsmanship and dealing with different symbols reveals his poetic
genius at its best.
Q. Theme of Regeneration in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”
Percy Bysshe Shelley is a great romantic poet and idealist who believed in the
happy future of mankind in which love, justice, and charity would prevail. He is also
a revolutionary poet as he believed in social changes and moral reformation of
mankind. “Ode to the West Wind” is a great poem which embodies some of his
main ideas about man’s moral progress through the spirit of change from the old to
the newer order. The west wind symbolizes destruction and preservation as it
destroys the old leaves and preserves the new seeds. To Shelley’s mind, it appears
as the destroyer of the old order and the preserver of the new. The west wind,
therefore, becomes a symbol of change which destroys but at the same time
creates. The poem is also a symbol of the reflective personality of the poet himself.
As a boy, Shelley possessed the same impetuous quality like the wind itself; he is
tameless, swift, uncontrolled and free. The west wind is regarded as a symbol
which will bring about the golden age of mankind.
P. B. Shelley was a revolutionary poet and he was dissatisfied with the existing
order of things. He hated political tyranny and the orthodox Christianity. He also
hated wickedness, corruption, and evil which made human life very miserable and
unhappy. He wanted to liberate mankind from the chain of political, religious, and
intellectual slavery. This attitude is clearly reflected in the poem. The west wind is
depicted as a symbol of those forces which will sweep away old order of life, old
institutions and old. In the last stage, the west wind symbolizes the forces that will
become perfect and when beauty and love will govern the universe. Shelley
expresses the hope that his dead thoughts will quicken a new birth and will,
therefore, bring about a revolutionary change in the social, political, and religious
structure of human society.
Shelley personifies the west wind and gives it an independent status. The forces of
nature are so powerful and the poet imagines that they become real creating the
feeling of wonder. In this poem, Shelley describes natural phenomena in terms of
human life. The poem is majestic because of its universal character but it also
strikes a personal note. The fourth stanza is personal and autobiographical and the
poet finds an affinity between himself and the west wind. He appeals to the west
wind to come in order to help and lift him like a leaf. He says,
“Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud,
A fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowned
One too like thee: tameless and swift and proud”
This stanza shows poet’s awareness of the misery and suffering of human life. He
wishes that he should be lifted like a leaf to scatter his thoughts about liberty and
freedom for the welfare of mankind. In the fifth stanza, the poet becomes one with
the west wind and he appeals to it to scatter his revolutionary ideas which will
bring a new period in human history. Shelley believed in moral regeneration of
mankind and it is through this moral revolutionary that a new society can be
established where a man can live in peace and happiness. Shelley makes a
prophecy about the coming of the golden age for mankind in the concluding line of
the poem, when he says, “If winter comes can spring be far behind?” In the last
stanza of the poem, we find a clear expression of Shelley’s idealism, his belief in
the perfectibility of human nature and his belief in the golden age of mankind.
Now, have a look at the summary of the article below.
Q. Shelley: A Poet Of Love
Shelley is primarily a poet of love, as Keats is of beauty. The story of his life is, in
fact, a story of love. But it has to be remembered that Shelley as a love poet is a
complex phenomenon. For him love, is not the name of one particular feeling or
thing. It is tinged with many colours. It is sexual love, Platonic love, cosmic energy
and love of humanity. Shelley devoted his brief life to the pursuit of love. Yearning
for perfect Love, Beauty and Liberty is keynote of Shelley's poetry. He considers
love a regenerating power, which is closely bound up with his conception of human
perfectibility.
Shelley's attitude of love was greatly influence by the teachings of Plato. According
to Plato, beauty has such as enormous power over men because they have
previously beheld it in a heaven and since, sight is the keenest of bodily senses.
Shelley looked upon love that is, by no means, a simple phenomenon. In his essay,
'A Defense of Poetry', he has defended this concept as:
"This is the bond and connection and the sanction that connects not only man with
man, but with everything, which exists in man."
Shelley's concept of ideal love finds it best expression in "Epipsychidion". No poet
felt deeply the dynamic influence of love in moulding human destiny; none realized
utterly the triviality of life devoid of love; yet Shelley's women are merely lovely
wraiths that greet us to the strains of delicious music.
"See where she stands! A mortal shape induced
With love and life and light and deity,"
From love as sexual passion, Shelley proceeds to look at love as Plato looked at it.
Here his concept of love is mainly Platonic, though the view of Godwin on free love
also had a profound influence on him. In "Phaedrus", Plato observes that Love and
Beauty are nothing concrete but abstract and ideal. Thus love is regarded as a kind
of madness.
Plato further held that every object of Nature is governed by love and are forever
trying to unite them with the spirit of divine love diffused through the universe.
Shelley's conception of Platonic idealism finds its vent in the following verses.
"Nothing in world is single;
All things by a law divine;
In one spirit meet and mingle,
Why not I with thine?"
Shelley devoted his whole life not to the pursuit of physical but to the ideal Love
and Beauty which he yeaned for all his life. In this respect, he has beautifully
described in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":
"Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon"
Love to Plato is also an aspiration towards the good and the beautiful. In
"Prometheus Unbound", Shelley comes very close to the thinking of Plato.
Prometheus exercised the freedom of the pursuit of good. And Demogorgan's
statement that Love is free is the only most philosophic statement. Only Love is
exempt. Only love is free. Thus, love in Prometheus represents the more general
Platonic notion, the notion of all things good and beautiful:
"How glorious art though Earth! And if thou be
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I could fall down and worship that and thee."
In his later years Shelley seems to have been moving away from the way of
Affirmation towards of Rejection, towards the Rejection of the Image of Woman.
He never lost his basic faith, but he laid more stress that before on the
transcendent of that which he sought. His desire is:
"The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion of something afar,
From the sphere of our sorrow."
Like Plato Shelley believes that Love is the source of the greatest benefits for both
the lover and the beloved since they encouraged each other in the practice of
virtue. Love implants the sense of honour and dishonour and therefore impels to all
noble deeds.
This is how Shelley looked at love. Though his concept of love is severely criticized
by so many critics who contend that though intellectually mature, Shelley remained
perhaps in some ways emotionally adolescent. His whole approach to love is not
only unhealthy but his ideals, his visions, are only whims conceived in his own
mind. But we should not forget that Shelley has his won philosophy of love, which
was, to him, something higher and nobler than a mere sexual feeling, for him it was
a perfection of all that is good and noble in the world.
Q. Shelley's Love For Nature
Love for Nature is one of the prerequisites of all the Romantics and Shelley is no
exception. Love for Nature is one of the key-notes of his poetry. His poetry abounds
in Nature imagery. 'On Love' reflects colourful Nature imagery and glorification of
Nature. He shows fruition and fulfillment in his poems. Other poems e.g. 'A Dream
of the Unknown', 'Ode to the Westwind', 'The Cloud', 'To Skylark', 'To the Moon',
etc. are remarkable poems of Nature in which we find a profusion of Nature.
Like Wordsworth, Shelley believes that Nature exercises a healing influence on
man's personality. He finds solace and comfort in Nature and feels its soothing
influence on his heart.
Shelley, in his poetry, appears as a pantheist too. In fact, his attitude towards
Nature is analogous to that of Wordsworth, whao, greatly influenced Shelly.
However, as against Wordsworth, who linked the spirit in Nature with God, Shelley,
on the other hand, linked it and identified it with love, for he was an atheist and a
skeptic. He believes that this spirit 'wields the world with never wearied love'.
"Adonais" reflects the most striking examples of Shelley's pantheism. At an
occasion, he thinks that Keats 'is made one with Nature' for the power, moving in
Nature. Nature's spirit is eternal. 'The one remains, many change and pass'. He
agrees that there is some intelligence controlling Nature. In fact, he fuses the
platonic philosophy of love with pantheism. He finds Nature alive, capable of
feeling and thinking like a human organism. Wordsworth equates it with God,
Shelley with love.
Shelley loved the indefinite and the changeful in Nature. He presents the changing
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and indefinite moods of Nature e.g. clouds, wind, lightening etc. 'Ode to the
Westwind' reflects this particular trend of Shelley, wherein, he shows the West
Wind driving the dead leaves, scattering the living seeds, awakening the
Mediterranean and making the sea-plants feel its force. His poetry lacks pictorial
definiteness and, often, his Nature description is clothed in mist. As compared with
Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. he is the least pictorial. It is partly due to the abstract
imagery and partly, owing to swift succession of similes which blur the picture. Yet,
sometimes, his image is definitely concrete. The picture of the blue Mediterranean,
lulled to sleep by his crystalline streams and awakened by Westwind is virtually
remarkable and substantial.
Despite his pantheistic attitude, Shelley conceives every object of Nature as
possessing a distinct individuality of its own, too, though he believes that the spirit
of love unites the whole universe, including Nature, yet he treats all the natural
objects as distinguishable entities. The sun, the moon, the stars, the rainbow – all
have been treated as separate beings. This capacity of individualizing the separate
forces for Nature is termed as Shelley's myth making power which is best
illustrated in "Ode to the Westwind". He gives the West Wind, the ocean an
independent life and personalities. He presents the Mediterranean sleeping and
then being awakened by the West Wind, just like a human body.
The ancient Greek gave human attributes to the natural objects whom they
personified. Shelley, too, personifies them, but he retains their true characteristics.
He personifies the West wind ad the Mediterranean, but both remains wind and
ocean. They have not been endowed with human qualities. He has almost scientific
attitude towards the objects of Nature. Whatever he says is scientifically true. The
Westwind virtually drives the dead leaves and scatters the seeds to be grown in
this wind; the sea plants undoubtedly feel the destructive effects of the strong
Westwind. Likewise, clouds do bring rain, dew-drops, snow, lightening, thunder
etc. He observes the natural phenomenon with a scientific eye, though the
description remains highly imaginative.
Time and again, Shelley's Nature description has a touch of optimism having all the
sufferings, tortures, miseries of the world. In "Ode to the Westwind", he hopes for
the best and is confident that "If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?" His
nature treatment is multidimensional; scientific, philosophic, intellectual, mythical
and of course human. He is a marvelous poet of Nature.
Q. Shelley as a Revolutionary Poet
“For the Romantic poet, the idea of revolution has a special interest, and a special
affinity. For Romanticism seeks to effect in poetry what revolution aspires to
achieve in politics: innovation, transformantion, defamiliarisation" (Divid Duff,p.
26) Revolution is a dominant spirit in almost all the romantic poets. Percy Bysshe
Shelley, a Romantic poet, is also called rebel for his idea of revolution in his poetry.
As The French Revolution dominated all politics in those years, unlike Wordsworth
or Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned the ideals of the revolution, though he was
appalled by the dictatorship of Napoleon. Shelley only experienced the revolution
at second hand through the books of various writers and was influenced by
Rousseau, William Godwin etc. When he looked back, all he could see was the
flame of revolution still flickering in spite of the terror, was and disease. His long
poem, The Revolt of Islam, written at the height of his powers, is clear on one
matter above all else- that the ideas of progress, which inspired the revolution, will
triumph once again.
In the "Ode to The West Wind" Shelley is seen as a rebel and he wants revolution.
He desires a social change and the West Wind is to his symbol of change. This
poem, written in iambic pentameter, begins with three stanzas describing the
wind's effects upon earth, air and ocean. The last two stanzas are Shelley speaking
directly to the wind, asking for its power, to life him like a leaf, or a cloud and make
him his companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and
spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas.
In the first stanza of this poem, Shelley says that the West Wind drives away the
last sign of life in trees and also helps to rejuvenate the world by allowing the seeds
to grow in the spring. In this way the West Wind acts as a destroyer and preserver.
Shelley says, “Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere;/ Destroyer and preserver;
hear, oh, hear!" Actually the West Wind acts as a driving force for change and
rejuvenation in the human and natural world. And it is the symbol of revolution.
Shelley begins his poem by addressing the Wild West Wind. He quickly introduces
the theme of death and compares the dead leaves to ghosts. The imagery of
"Pestilence-stricken multitudes" makes the reader aware that Shelley is addressing
more than a pile of leaves. His claustrophobic mood becomes evident when he
talks of the wintry bed and 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"
Although the West Wind symbolizes his own personality and in the middle of the
poem he seems somehow pessimistic when he says, "Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a
cloud!/ I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!", at the end of the poem he is seen
very much optimistic when he say that his revolutionary ideas must bring a change
and the new order will be established.
The wind blows through the jungle and produces music out to the dead leaves.
Shelley requests it to create music out of his heart and to inspire him to write great
poetry, which may create a revolution in the hearts of men . He wants the Wind to
scatter his revolutionary message in the world, just as it scatters cries and sparks
from a burning fire. His thoughts may not be as fiery as they once were, but they
still have the power to inspire men. He tells the Wind to take message to sleeping
world, that if winter comes, spring cannot be far behind. After bed days come good
days. Here he says, " If winter comes , can spring be far behind?"
We also find Shelley’s revolutionary zeal in ode “To A Skylark”. According to
Shelley, the bird, Skylark, that pours spontaneous melody from heaven and sours
higher and higher can never be a bird. It is for the poet, a joyful spirit that begins its
upward flight at sunrise and becomes invisible at evening like the stars of the sky
that become invisible in day light. Moreover, it is compared with the beans of the
moon whose presence is rather felt than seen. It's a heavenly bird and by singing it
spreads its influence through the world.
In the opening stanza, the bind is seen as a "blithe spirit" that "pourest thy full
heart/ In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." The words "Pourest thy full
heart" mean that the bird pours out its heart in song and with "In profuse strains of
unpremeditated art", Shelley refers to the spontaneous flow of music which comes
from the Skylark. There is nothing artificial in its music, it overflows profusely from
its heart. And Shelley says as a spirit of revolution it spreads it revolutionary
message as the moon spreads its beam. He says,
"All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when might is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains our her beams, and Heaven is overflowed."
As in the beginning of the poem, the poet says the bird is a heavenly bird and it is a
joyful spirit, its life is not sorrowful like that of human being. The life of human
being is full of sorrow, suffering and it is rare to find ecstasy without pain. Our
happiness is often mapped by memories of part affections and sorrows, and the
painful uncertainly of what is to come in the future. Man is a creature that looks
"before and after". He is subject to weariness and satiety, so that he can never
enjoy happiness perennially. But the Skylark knows on satiety. It is the very
embodiment of perennial delight, ever fresh and full of west and unwearied in its
enjoyment of happiness. Human life, on the other hand, is subject to recurrent
spells of frustration and pain. As he say,
“We look before and after,
And shoe for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught:
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
So the poet wants to experience half the gaiety of the bird and them he would sing
wit such excellent poetic ecstasy via the people of the world listen to him. He says,
"Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then-as I am listening now."
In the concluding part it can be said that Shelley is a true revolutionary poet whose
message bears the ideas of revolution.
Q. Critical appreciation of the poem ‘Ode to the West Wind
The poem ‘’Ode to the West Wind’’ was written in the autumn of 1819, in the
beautiful Cascine Gardens outside Florence and was published with ‘‘Prometheus
Unbound’’ in 1820. The poet is himself in a mood of despondency and misery and
says that he falls upon the thorns of life and is bleeding. He is seeking reawakening
also through the poem and wants the wind to carry his dead thoughts and ideas
like it has taken the leaves and wants fresh ideas to take birth. This is possible only
if he first gets rid of stale ideas and thoughts and learns to replace them with new
ones. In that sense even the poet is feeling a sort of intellectual deaths and is
desirous of being given a new lease of life. “This poem was conceived and chiefly
written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that
tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once wild and animating, was
collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I
foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that
magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.”
Nothing can surpass Shelley’s poetic description of himself in ‘Adonais’, as a ‘frail
form’, ‘a phantom among men’, ‘companionless’ as ‘the last cloud of an expiring
storm’-
“The weight of the superincumbent hour,
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower;
A breaking billow;”
The life of Shelley lays worlds apart from that of Byron. His treatment of Harriet
apart, his private life was not vicious, but on the contrary in many respects
exemplary. As far as the ideas, which he sang, were capable of application to life,
he applied them in his own conduct. He preached the equality of man and he
proved that he was willing to practice it. He was generous and benevolent to a
fault.
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Shelley holds a unique place in English literature by virtue of his power of making
myths out of the objects and forces of Nature. Clutton-Brock has discussed in detail
Shelley’s myth-making power as revealed in the Ode to the West Wind: “It has
been said that Shelley was a myth-maker. His myths were not to him mere caprices
of fancy. They expressed by the only means which human language provides for the
expression of such things, that sense which he possessed, of a more intense real.ity
29
in nature than is felt by other men. To most of us, the forces of nature have little
meanings. But for Shelley, these forces had as much reality as human beings. Have
for most of us, and he found the same kind of intense significance in their
manifestations of beauty that we find in the beauty of human belongs or of great
works of art. The nature of this significance, he could not explain; but he could
express it with enormous power in his art, and with a precision of statement which
seems miraculous where the nature of the subject matter is considered… to
Shelley, the West Wind was still a wind, and the cloud a cloud, however intense a
reality they might have for him. …we are not wrought upon to feel anything human
in the wind’s power; but if we are susceptible to Shelley’ magic, we are filled with a
new sense of the life and significance and reality of nature.”
Shelley started writing very early, but his first major work came in 1811. This was
Queen Mab, along poem. It is a revolutionary poem, but there is much confusion in
the development of the story. The next great poem ‘Alastor’ came in 1815. In the
same year he produced Mount Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. These
poems expressed the poet’s idealism. In the latter of the two poems, the poet
expresses his feeling of the presence of a spirit in nature. In 1818-19, came the
great drama, Prometheus Unbound. This is a major poem. As a drama it is not much
of a success, but both in theme and in its individual songs it achieves greatness. In
1819, came another great play, The Cenci. This play portrays absolute evil as
Prometheus Unbound portrays absolute goodness. This was followed by ‘The Witch
of Atlas ‘and ‘Epipsychidion’. In the same year published ‘Adonais’, a lament on the
death of the poet Keats. In the last year of his life (1822) Shelley wrote Hellas.
Shelley left an unfinished poem, Triumph of Life. In addition to these long poems,
Shelley wrote a large number of lyrics. The most well-known of these are ‘Ode to
the West WinD’, ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘The Cloud’. It is in these lyrics that we often
find Shelley at his best. ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is a great achievement-a poem in
which great thought is combined with great art. Most of his lyrics are love poems.
Many of them express the poet’s deep joy in life as well as his deep sorrow.
Shelley sets up a humanity glorified through love; he worships in the sanctuary left
vacant by “the great absence of God” (His youthful atheism lacked warmth and in
the end he turned to a type of pantheism). Love, as exemplified in his personal life,
is a passionate kind of sensuality which becomes his simple moral code with no
duty, blame, or obligation attached. The reign of love when no authority was
necessary was his millennium. Most of Shelley’s poems are sad in tone and as such
he is regarded as “the singer of endless sorrows”, but this is not true of all his
poems. Whenever he writes of the future of mankind, he turns ecstatically
optimistic.
“A wave to pant beneath thy power,and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou,O uncontrollable!-“
Shelley believed in a soul of the Universe, a Spirit in which all things live and move
and have their being. His most passionate desire was for the mystical fusion of his
own personality with his spirit. Spontaneity and fluidity are the proof of his wealth
of imagination. There is no effect of laborious artistry about Shelley’s style at any
time. According to Bradley,” The language is poetical through and through, not, as
sometimes with Wordsworth, only half-poetical, and yet it seems to drop from
Shelley’s lips. It is not wrought and kneaded; it flows.”
In ‘Ode to West Wind’, the poet begins his invocation in a buoyant mood. He looks
upon the Wind as the destroyer of the present order and usherer of a new one. In
the course of the poem, Shelley’s pessimism reaches its peak. He suddenly
remembers his own plight:
“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”
The subsequent thought of the future at once turns his melancholy into ecstatic
rapture and he ends the poem with one of the most optimistic and memorable
prophecies about the future of mankind. The ecstasy arises out of his ardent belief
in the imminent regeneration of mankind and the end of all evils. He hopes that all
forms of tyranny and oppression will be replaced, in the millennium to come, by all-
round happiness. The joyous rapture is born of an intense feeling of optimism:
“Be thou,Spirit fierce,
My spirit!be thou me,impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;”
Most of Shelley’s poetry is symbolic. Shelley makes use of symbolism by means of
his normal use of images including the personified forces of life and nature. He
looks upon the West Wind as a personified force of nature and finds in it various
symbolic meanings to suit the purpose of the poem. The West Wind drives the last
signs of life from the trees and also scatters the seeds which will come to life in
spring. In this way the Wind appears to the poet as a destroyer of the old order and
a preserver of the new, i.e., a symbol of change. The Wind also symbolizes Shelley’s
own personality. When he was a boy he was one like the Wind: “tameless, and
swift, and proud.” He still possesses these qualities but they lie suppressed under
“a heavy weight of hours.”
“Ideals are like stars. We never reach them but, like mariners on the sea, we chart
our course by them.”
Shelley’s sky-lyrics-‘’Ode to the West Wind’’, ‘’The Cloud’’ and ‘’To A Skylark’’-have
all been interpreted as having symbolic significance. The West Wind drives away
the old, pale; hectic-red leaves and scatters fresh seeds over the ground. Shelley
thus looks upon the Wind as a destroyer of the old order and the usherer of a new
one i.e., as a symbol of the forces that will end all evil and bring about the golden
millennium in which there will be nothing but peace and happiness for mankind. In
the poem The Cloud, the brief life of a Cloud has also been constructed by such
critics as a symbol of the immortality of the soul. However, there is no doubt that
his concept of the Skylark is entirely symbolic. Shelley’s Skylark, is not just a bird
but an embodiment of this ideal, the poet can hear its song but the bird ever
remains invisible. The skylark, by its very nature, also symbolizes Shelley’s own
poetic spirit.
“Poetry is like a perfume which on evaporation leaves in our soul essence of
beauty.”
Among the Romantic poets, Shelley is marveled for his inimitable abstract ideas,
but he is less of an artist .He was aiming not at the poetry of art, but at the poetry
of rapture. Keats advised him to be “more an artist” and to “load every rift with
ore”, but Shelley was aiming at a different effect from that of Keats’s richly
decorated and highly finished poetry. The poem” Ode to the West Wind” is
universally accepted as one of the best poems in English Literature. The poem is
remarkable for its theme, range of thought, spontaneity, poetic beauty, lyrical
quality, and quick movement similar to that of the wind itself. This poem along
with the “The Cloud” and “The Skylark”, mark an abiding monument to Shelley’s
passion for the sky. Shelley himself writes:
“I take great delight in watching the change in the atmosphere.”
The west wind wakes the Mediterranean up from its summer dreams and even
manages to shake up the otherwise quite calm Atlantic Ocean. For its path the
ocean starts to create cracks and the might of the west wind is so great that even
the moss and flowers under the sea begin to tremble with fear. Thus, the west
wind acquires the quality of being fearful and creating terror. The clouds are carried
by the wind to a tomb and are locked there. During this season, the strong wind
does not let the clouds gather easily since it blows them away. Shelley imagines
that the wind gathers the clouds in a sepulcher till they have enough strength to
burst forth and bring rain. Again the idea of destroyer and preserver is implicit. The
clouds are destroyed and without rain the earth becomes barren but then clouds
burst bringing rain which brings earth back to life. There is greenery everywhere
and earth is rejuvenated.
“The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.”
Shelley calls the west wind the ‘dirge of the dying year’ and in these words is
hidden the idea of rebirth. The west wind once again brings winter and December
but the end of the year implies the birth of a new one since December is followed
by January and the new year with new hopes and resolutions. The poet is himself in
a mood of despondency and misery and says that he falls upon the thorns of life
and is bleeding. He is seeking reawakening also through the poem and wants the
wind to carry his dead thoughts and ideas like it has taken the leaves and wants
fresh ideas to take birth. This is possible only if he first gets rid of stale ideas and
thoughts and learns to replace them with new ones. In that sense even the poet is
feeling a sort of intellectual deaths and is desirous of being given a new lease of
life.
”Wild Spirit,which art moving everywhere-
Destroyer and Preserver-hear,O hear!”
Shelley’s idea of the Islands of Delight as expressed in ‘Lines Written among the
Euganean Hills’, is merely a product of an unfounded optimism and has no logical
bearing. Shelley’s faith is no doubt genuine and intense, but it comes from his
abstract visions, not from sound logical reasoning. He is ever haunted by the
Eternal Mind. He constantly endeavours to look beyond the evil of life and chases
the invisible and impalpable. He gives various names to this unattainable thing. In
his Hymn To Intellectual Beauty, he describes it as the spirit of Beauty pervading
the universe. He speaks of it as an “unseen power” that rarely visits human hearts
as an ‘awful loveliness’ that can free this world from tyranny and oppression. Thus,
a profound note of yearning for the unattainable is another feature of Shelley’s
poetry. According to Cazamian,”The tone of Shelley’s poetry is that of a keen
aspiration, in which mystical desire, with its anguished pangs and spiritual raptures,
transcends the joys and sufferings of ordinary mankind.”
Shelley is pessimistic about the present but optimistic about the future. He believes
that regeneration always follows destruction and that a new and utopian order is
certain to come when the present degenerate system is ended. His optimism about
the imminent dawn of a golden age is genuine and firm and his prophecy of that
millennium underlies most of his poems. In Ode to West Wind also this prophetic
note is present and present with the greatest intensity of expression.
“And, by the incarnation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!”
Shelley had a deep interest in ancient Greeks. His enthusiasm for the wisdom of the
Greek philosophers is implicit in many of his poems. This gives Shelley a sharper
appreciation of natural forms and the theory that artists and poets must try to
remove the worldly cover from objects and expose the underlying ideal prototype.
Platonism appeals to him most because the guiding power behind the ideal forms
serves him in lieu of a religion. In ‘Adonais’, Shelley’s Platonism has found the most
elaborate expression.
Like the other Romantic poets, Shelley too was an ardent lover of Nature. Like
Wordsworth, Shelley conceives of Nature as one spirit, the Supreme Power working
through all things “The one spirit’s plastic distress/ Sweeps through the dull dense
world.” Again he personifies each object of nature as an individual life, a part of
that Supreme Power, Nature. He celebrates nature in most of his poems as his main
theme such as ‘’The Cloud’’, ‘’To a Skylark’’, and ‘’To the Moon’’. ‘’Ode to the West
Wind’’, ‘’A Dream of the Unknown’’. The tone of pessimism set in the beginning
with ‘dead’,’ghosts’,’corpse in grave’ reaches its climax with ‘ I fall upon the thorns
of life, I bleed’. In the last stanzas the poet moves from the natural to the human
misery and the mention of the hearth combines the two because hearth is seen as
the centre of the earth where the natural world and the human one merge. The
poet is seeking transcendence into the sublime as did Wordsworth in Tintern
Abbey. The affinity of temper between them prompts the poet to appeal to the
Wind to save him from his present plight. At this hour of distress the poet can look
upon the Wind as a competent savior, a symbol of aid and relief. Finally, the West
Wind is treated by the poet as representing the forces that can help bring about the
golden millennium, when the miseries and agonies of mankind will be replaced by
30
all round happiness.
“The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness.”
Shelley shows no sense of history and cannot put forth the cause and remedies of
the evils he finds in human society. He has an intense belief that regeneration of
mankind is imminent but cannot tell us why and how it is coming. His West Wind is
a symbol of the forces that will bring about this regeneration: it is nothing more. He
has never told us what these forces symbolized by the wind are in reality. Shelley
belongs to the younger generation of Romantic poets. Like the other two poets of
his generation, he died young. His poetry divided itself into two distinct moods. In
one he is the violent reformer seeking to overthrow the present institutions’ in
order to bring about the Golden Age.
“Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst:-O hear!”
Sometimes Shelley becomes pantheistic in his concept of nature when he seems to
believe that every aspect of nature is a manifestation of only one and invisible soul
or spirit and that after the end of the earthly existence, everything is reunited with
that one soul.
“…that sustaining love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea.”
Shelley’s lyrics are surpassingly musical and sweet. Swinburne was ecstatic in his
tribute to this aspect of Shelley’s lyricism. Shelley out sang all poets on record, but
some two or three throughout all time; his depths and heights of inner and outer
music are as diverse as nature’s and not sooner exhaustible. He was alone the
perfect singing God; his thoughts words and deeds all sang together. Arnold, one of
the worst critics of Shelley, admired his music and remarked: “the right sphere of
Shelley’s genius was the sphere of music.” Shelley’s careful handling of diction
fitting into the sense of his lines enhances the musical quality keeping with the
swift, of his lyrics. The rhythm of Ode to the West Wind is thus exactly in gusty
march of the wind itself: “O wild West Wind, thou breathe of Autumn’s being.”
Shelley never allows morbidity to overcome the enjoyment in his lyrics. Self-pity is
no doubt his favorite theme, but in his lyrics, he presents this self-pity, not as
something to be feared, but as an essential part of life. Shelley’s readers are never
depressed because they are constantly reminded that sufferings lie only in the
present and that in future all sufferings will be replaced by pure happiness. His
despondency is soon replaced by an ecstatic rapture of joy when he comes to think
of the future happiness of mankind, of the millennium to come:
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Shelley calls the west wind a destroyer and a preserver at the same time. It is a
destroyer because it makes the trees shed their leaves making them bare. The west
wind is called a preserver since it carries the seeds to places where they lie in
hibernation during the winter and when the sister of west wind, the east wind
blows in spring time, they start to germinate and blossom into many different
colored flowers. Winter is often seen as death since plants die and many animals
hide themselves for the season. The earth looks barren and appears lifeless but
spring is a time of rejuvenation, flowers blossom and insects and animals begin to
start life again. The poet gives the credit of carrying the seeds to a safer place in
winter to the west wind. This way it becomes the destroyer and the preserver.
“(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in the air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill-
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere-
Destroyer and Preserver –hear,O hear!”
This co-existence of pessimism and optimism-the swift replacement of one by the
other-is a major attractive feature of Shelley’s lyric poetry. This poem is considered
to be one of the finest lyrics in English poetry because of its sentiments and the
perfect technical construction. The poet touches on the four elements- earth, sky,
weather and fire and the transition from the wind to himself is very smooth one
and does not feel enforced. It is a complex poem because of the number of similes
and they do not appear to be enforced or excessive in any way. The movement of
the wind from earth to sky and water is observed minutely by the poet keeping
scientific facts in mind. The symbolism of destroyer and preserver is carried
through the poem; first with the wind driving the dead leaves away to make place
for new ones, secondly with the mention of pumice isle which was built with the
lava from a volcano. Volcano is both a destroyer and a preserver since while it
erupts it pours forth fire but once it subsides it leaves behind valuable minerals and
fertile material. Finally, the poet’s own thoughts are dead leaves to be driven away
so that new ones can take their place. The theme of rebirth is thus an integral part
of the poem.
“A deep resolute mind rises above all difficulties”
The poet then describes how the wind carries loose clouds on its stream and
spreads them from horizon to the height of the skies. The wind is the funeral song
of the passing year because soon after autumn comes winter when the year ends
and a new one begins. Winter is often seen as death since plants die and many
animals hide themselves for the season. The earth looks barren and appears lifeless
but spring is a time of rejuvenation, flowers blossom and insects and animals begin
to start life again. The poet gives the credit of carrying the seeds to a safer place in
winter to the west wind. This way it becomes the destroyer and the preserver.
“Each like a corpse, within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth,”
In his treatment of nature, he describes the things in nature as they are and never
colours it. It is true, he gives them human life through his personifications, but he
does it unintentionally for he felt they are living beings capable of doing the work
of human beings. His mythopoeia power had made him the best romanticist of his
age. In Ode to the West Wind, he personifies Nature as the Destroyer and the
Preserver, and in ‘‘The Cloud’’, the cloud is a possessor of mighty powers.
“Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightening!”
Shelley holds a unique place in English literature by virtue of his power of making
myths out of the objects and forces of Nature. Beauty, to Shelley, is an ideal in itself
and a microcosm of the beauty of Nature and he calls it ‘Intellectual Beauty’. He
celebrates Beauty as a mysterious power. In the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, he
says that when Intellectual Beauty departs, this world becomes a “dim vast vale of
tears, vacant and desolate” and if human heart is its temple, then man would
become immortal and omnipotent:
“Man were immortal and omnipotent
Did’st thou, unknown and awful as thou art
Keep with thy glorious train firm state
Within his heart.”
The West Wind is the breath of Autumn. Dead leaves, black, yellow and red in
colour, fly before the wind, as the ghosts fly before a magician. The West Wind
scatters the flying seeds. The seeds lie under the ground and when Spring comes,
they grow into flowers of different colours and fragrance. The West Wind destroys
dead leaves and preserves useful seeds.
“Make me thy lyre, ev’n as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!”
The spirit of the west wind is described as ‘uncontrollable’. The west wind is
unstoppable and it affects everything that falls in its path. It affects the earth, the
water in the oceans and the clouds of the sky. It is responsible for carrying them
and locking them up in a sepulcher till they burst forth in fury of rain and hail. The
poet thinks that the west wind has a free spirit and wanders as and where it
pleases. He admires it for its freedom and wishes the wind would carry him along
like a leaf or a cloud. Shelley then sums up the spirit of the west wind as ‘tameless,
swift and proud.’ It cannot be kept in check so it is ‘tameless’, the speed of the west
wind is formidable and it is proud because it would not listen to any one. Finally,
the poet refers the west wind as ‘Spirit fierce’ and ‘impetuous one’ that acts on the
impulse of the moment.
“The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean,know
Thy voice,and suddenly grow gray with fear
And tremble and despoil themselves: -------- O hear!”
The Wind blows through the jungle and produces music out of the dead leaves.
Shelley requests it to create music out of his heart and to inspire him to write great
poetry, which may create a revolution in the hearts of men. He wants the Wind to
scatter his revolutionary message in the world, just as it scatters ashes and sparks
from a burning fire. His thoughts may not be as fiery as they once were, but they
still have the power to inspire men. He tells the Wind to take the message to the
sleeping world that if winter comes, spring cannot be far behind. In optimistic note
he declares that bad days are followed by good days.
“Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers,”
Idealism is a part and parcel of Shelley’s temperament. He is a rebel, like Byron,
against the age –old customs, traditions, conventions and institutions, sanctioned
only by practice and not by reason. Unlike Byron, but, he is not only a rebel but also
a reformer. He wants to reconstitute society in keeping with his ideals of good,
truth and beauty. According to Compton- Rickett, “To renovate the world, to bring
about utopia, is his constant aim, and for this reason we may regard Shelley as
emphatically the poet of eager, sensitive youth; not the animal youth of Byron, but
the spiritual youth of the visionary and reformer.”
Poetry is the expression of the poet’s mind. This is absolutely true of Shelley’s
poetry. A study of Shelley’s poetry is the easiest and shortest way to his mind and
personality. The fourth Stanza of Ode to the West Wind is entirely personal and
autobiographical. An analogy with the West Wind helps the poet describe his own
spirit:”tameless, and swift, and proud.” The poet narrates the change, he has
undergone in the course of his life. He was full of energy, enthusiasm and speed in
his boyhood, but the agonies and bitterness of life-“A heavy weight of hours”-has
repressed his qualities and has put him in an unbearable state. The expression of
his sufferings “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”is intensely genuine, heart-
rending, and possibly the most spontaneous of Shelley’s emotional outbursts
through his poems.
The calm Mediterranean was sleeping. The music of the glassy waves lulled the
ocean to sleep. It was dreaming of towers and palaces reflected in its water. The
West Wind creates furrows on the smooth waters of the Atlantic Ocean. At the
bottom of the Atlantic grow plants and vegetation. These plants are dry, without
sap though they live in water. When the West Wind blows in autumn, the plants on
the land wither; the plants at the bottom of the ocean also fade and die.
“Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,”
Shelley is describing the approach of the terrible West Wind. In the regions of the
sky. Shelley’s emotional ecstasy fires his brain to that kind of superb conception
which made the ancient Greeks fill the earth, the air sand the water with gods and
goddesses who were but personifications of the forces of nature.
“Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine,
food and medicine to the soul.”
The cloud form on the horizon, gather up in the sky and then darken the space. The
31
sky is at first blue, but it assumes a dark appearance on the approach of the torture, the Earth summons Spirits who live in the “dim caves of human thought”.
vaporous clouds. From the distant and dim horizon to the highest point in the sky, These Spirits comfort Prometheus and tell him that hope and love still survive and
the whole visible space is filled by the movements of the air. The clouds are up and struggle to claim dominion in the hearts and minds of mankind. Prometheus takes
spread themselves. The scattered and disorderly clouds look like the locks of the this consolation to heart and concludes that all hope is vain except love. This
mighty West Wind personified, as seen approaching through the sky; these locks prompts Panthea to leave Prometheus and go to Asia in her exile.
resemble the dishevelled and erect hair on the heads of intoxicated and frenzied
female worshippers of the wine-god who used to dance madly about.
“The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed ummary of Prometheus Unbound Act I
Scarce seem’d a vision,-“
These lines are very touching and highly characteristic of Shelley. Shelley was a
Prometheus Unbound is a four-act lyrical drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first
rebel and a revolutionary. He had a restless temperament which was even at war
published in 1820.[1] It is concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological
with something. In the West Wind, Shelley finds a kindred spirit. Looking at it, he is
figure Prometheus, who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity, for which he is
reminded of his youth when he too was free and uncontrollable. At that time, he
subjected to eternal punishment and suffering at the hands of Zeus. It is inspired by
did not think it an impossibility to vie with the West Wind in its speed, but the
the classical Prometheia, a trilogy of plays attributed to Aeschylus. Shelley's play
worries and mysteries of this life have proved too much for him and have made
concerns Prometheus' release from captivity, but unlike Aeschylus' version, there is
him tame and weak. He had lost his old vigour and force, and he appeals to the
no reconciliation between Prometheus and Jupiter (Zeus). Instead, Jupiter is
West Wind to lend him some strength and lift his dejected spirit as it lifts a cloud,
abandoned by his supportive elements and falls from power, which allows
wave or a leaf. He was very much oppressed by the hardships of the world and he
Prometheus to be released.
wants somebody to support him through his struggle for existence in this world. He
Shelley's play is a closet drama, meaning it was not intended to be produced on the
was indeed tameless and wild like the West Wind at one time, but now he is bowed
stage. In the tradition of Romantic poetry, Shelley wrote for the imagination,
down by the worries and care, and calls for help.Next, Shelley describes the
intending his play's stage to reside in the imaginations of his readers. However, the
agitated surface of the ocean cuts a thousand deep passages on itself for the march play is filled with suspense, mystery and other dramatic effects that make it, in
of the terrific wind; while the rush and tumult on the surface reach the vegetable
theory, performable
world at the bottom of the ocean, the leaves, the flowers, the sapless forests there
Satanic hero[
tremble with fear and are shaken loose pell-mell at the awful roar of the mighty
Shelley compares his Romantic hero Prometheus to Milton's Satan from Paradise
wind.
Lost.
Desmond king-Hele remarks: “The verse technique and structure of the Ode to
The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and
West Wind could scarcely be improved: it is the most fully orchesterd of Shelley‘s
Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in
poems, and consequently the most difficult to read aloud. The ever fluctuating
addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent
tempo and he artfully random pauses in the long lines reflect the lawless surging of
force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition,
the wind and its uneasy silences. This device is not overworked: the wonder is that
envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of
Shelley could use it at all when grappling with the problems of the terza rima and
Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the
operating within a rigid structural framework. In conformity with this framework,
mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and
which seemed to be in the Style of Calderon, the first three Stanzas are designed to
to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those
show the wind’s power in three spheres of Nature, in preparation for the prayer to
who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders
the Wind, as pseudo-god, in Stanzas 4 and 5.
something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection
The keynote of the first three Stanzas is balanced. Their settings, land, sky and sea,
of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to
give equal emphasis to the three states of matter, solid, gaseous and liquid. Each of
the best and noblest ends.[58]
the four seasons has its appointed place, and there is a full range of colours- red,
In other words, while Milton's Satan embodies a spirit of rebellion, and, as Maud
yellow, blue, grey and black explicitly, white and green implicitly. Turmoil is
Bodkin claims, "The theme of his heroic struggle and endurance against hopeless
balanced against calm, life against death, detail against generalization, cold against
odds wakens in poet and reader a sense of his own state as against the odds of
calm, life against death, detail against generalization, cold against warmth, plain
his destiny".[59] However, Satan's character is flawed because his aims are not
against hill, and so on. The varied evidence of Stanzas1-3 is assembled in support of
humanistic. Satan is like Prometheus in his struggle against the universe, but Satan
the narrow, one-track theme in the last two stanzas: the plan is sound, but in
loses his heroic aspect after being turned into a serpent who desires only revenge
points of detail it falls short of perfection. For Shelley harps on his prayer rather too
and becomes an enemy to mankind.[59] But Bodkin, unlike Shelley, believes that
long. His defeatism becomes a trifle depressing, unless when reading the poem we
humans would view Prometheus and Satan together in a negative way:
happen to be in the same mood as he was…the note of self-pity is overplayed in the
We must similarly recognize that within our actual experience the factors we
last two Stanzas; and this must be counted a blemish in what is otherwise a nearly
distinguish are more massively intangible, more mutually incompatible and more
faultless poem.”
insistent than they can appear as translated into reflective speech. Take, for
example, the sense of sin imaginatively revived as we respond to Milton's
Q. Summary of Prometheus Unbound Act I presentation of Satan, or to the condemnation, suggested by Aeschylus' drama, of
The poem begins in media res with Prometheus chained to a precipice in the Indian the rebellion of Prometheus in effecting the 'progress' of man. What in our analysis
Caucasus. Shelley gives no explicit reason for this change in scenery from we might express as the thought that progress is evil or sinful, would, in the mind
Aeschylus’ setting in Scythia (the European Caucasus). However, contemporary of Aeschylus, Abercromer comments, 'more likely be a shadowy relic of loyalty to
anthropology placed the origin of human life in central Asia, and it is possible to the tribe' – a vague fear of anything that might weaken social solidarity. Not in the
understand this placement of Prometheus in India as an attempt to transform the mind of Aeschylus only but in the mind of the reader of to-day.[59]
Greek myth into a more universal human myth (Curran 1975: 479). Attending If we do sympathise with Prometheus or Satan, we view Jupiter and God as
Prometheus are two Oceanides: Ione and Panthea. They are the sisters of Asia who omnipotent and unchallengeable beings that rely on their might to stay in power.
throughout the poem is associated with Aphrodite/Venus and called Love by Furthermore, Æschylus's Jupiter is a representation of Destiny, and it is a force that
Prometheus. She is Prometheus’ wife, but was exiled to the Vale of Cashmere by is constantly at odds with the individual's free will.[60] In Milton, God is able to
Jupiter when Prometheus was bound. As the drama begins, Prometheus explains easily overthrow Satan. Although both divine beings represent something that is
that he has been bound and tortured for three thousand years because he defied opposed to the human will, both represent something inside of the human mind
Jupiter’s rule and gave mankind gifts they had been denied by Jupiter. He explains that seeks to limit uncontrolled free will: reason and conscience. However,
how day after day Jupiter’s “winged hound” eats his heart and he is denied any Shelley's version of Jupiter is unable to overwhelm the will of Prometheus, and
sleep or rest. By day he is scorched and parched and by night he is frozen, glaciers Shelley gives the power of reason and conscience to his God: the Unseen Power of
spear him with ice and earthquakes cause his flesh to tear apart. Toward the end of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
his soliloquy, Prometheus claims that he no longer hates, but instead pities Jupiter, The character Demogorgon represents, according to Bodkin, the Unconscious. It is
and wishes to “recall” the curse he placed on Jupiter when he was bound. He "the unknown force within the soul that, after extreme conflict and utter surrender
cannot remember the curse himself, and therefore asks the Earth and the elements of the conscious will, by virtue of the imaginative, creative element drawn down
to repeat the curse for him. No one dares repeat Prometheus’ curse out of fear for into the depths, can arise and shake the whole accustomed attitude of a man,
Jupiter’s retribution, but the Earth tells Prometheus that he can command a changing its established tensions and oppressions."[62] The Demogorgon is the
shadow from the world “beneath the grave” to say the dread words. Prometheus opposite of Jupiter who, "within the myth, is felt as such a tension, a tyranny
calls upon the Phantasm of Jupiter to repeat the curse. After hearing the curse established in the far past by the spirit of a man upon himself and his world, a
repeated, Prometheus laments and claims that he no longer wishes any living thing tyranny that, till it can be overthrown, holds him straightened and tormented,
to suffer pain. Mercury then enters the stage leading a score of Furies who Jupiter disunited from his own creative energies."[62]
has sent to wreak new tortures upon Prometheus. Before releasing the Furies,
Mercury tries to convince Prometheus to end his suffering and give in to Jupiter.
Prometheus remains steadfast in his defiance, and the Furies are released. Instead
of the physical torture Prometheus has been enduring, the Furies have been sent to
inflict psychological torture. They show him visions of mankind’s futile attempts to
better themselves and how even historical events that were initiated with the best
intentions easily become corrupted and end up unleashing new evils upon
mankind. This is demonstrated in particular by two events: the corruption of the
teachings of Jesus Christ, which created an oppressive institution of churches, and
the failure of the French Revolution. After the Furies have administered their

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