19th Century British Poetry

Read "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Exercise 1:

Paraphrase each of the four sections of this poem.

Exercise 2:

This poem is considered a "ballad". Explain what is a ballad and why this poem is a ballad.

Exercise 3:

A refrain is a repetition of words, phrases or lines at regular intervals. When refrains follow a stanza they are called terminal refrains. When refrains are within stanzas they are called internal refrains. When a refrain changes a little with each repetition it is called an incremental refrain.

What is the refrain in the poem "The Lady of Shalott"? Where is it and what type(s) is it?

Exercise 4:

Listen to Loreena McKennitt's musical adaptation of "The Lady of Shalott". Which stanzas did McKennitt leave out and which stanzas did she use? Do you think that McKennit chose most appropriate stanzas or would you have included or excluded other stanzas?

Exercise 5:

Consider the "curse" of the Lady. What do you think was this curse? What triggered it to come into effect?

Exercise 6:

Identify the "liminal spaces" in this poem, and explain why you think they are liminal.

Exercise 7:

Discuss the similarities between the Lady's Castle and Plato's Cave.



Exercise 8:

It is possible that the Lady of Shallot is an allegorical figure. What do you think the Lady symbolizes? Keeping your answer in mind, what do you think the poem is about?

Exercise 1:

Paraphrase Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade". Then, summarize your paraphrase into one or two sentences, focusing on the topic, theme and tone of the poem.

Assignment:

As a group assignment, write an analytical paragraph of Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade".

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire (England). He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Arthur Henry Hallam, whom he later immortalized in In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson began to write when a child, largely to escape the oppressiveness of his homelife, made miserable by his father’s drinking and violence. He published some of his best-known poems, such as “Mariana” and “The Kraken,” when he was only twenty; in “Mariana,” he displays his early, and enduring, gift for suing objects and landscapes to convey states of mind and particular emotions. Between 1833, the date of Hallam’s death, and 1843, when Tennyson received an annual government pension to support his writing, he was especially hard-hit by the melancholia that would plague him all his life and so dominate his poetry. In the wake of Hallam’s death, Tennyson’s work assumed a decidedly darker note. He expressed his grief abstrusely in such poems as “Ullyses” and “Break, Break, Break” and directly in In Memoriam, a series of 131 quatrain stanzas written in iambic tetrameter, which Tennyson began within days of Hallam’s death and continued to write over a period of seventeen years. With the publication of In Memoriam, he finally attained the public recognition long denied him and earned syfficient money to marry Emily Sellwood after a ten-year on-again off-again courtship. He remained immensely popular until his death. His last major work was Idylls of the King, a project that occupied him for nearly fifty years; the first four idylls were published in 1859, and the complete cycle of twelve in 1885. In the work, which popularized the then obscure Arthurian legend, Tennyson upholds medieval ideals, such as community, heroism, and courtly love, and compares the decay of the Round Table to the moral decline of his own society.

Sound is a very important aspect of poetry. Probably one of the most important sound-features of poetry is rhyme (words that sound similar). For a more detailed discussion of rhyme, refer to Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition, p. 1410-1412.

There are various ways to describe rhyme:

• Perfect Rhyme, Imperfect Rhyme and Eye Rhyme

Perfect Rhyme is also known as exact rhyme, full rhyme or true rhyme. In perfect rhyme the rhyming words have sounds that correspond exactly, for instance: "red" and "bread"; "man" and "fan"; "feather" and "weather". Note that "red" and "bread" are not spelled the same; however, their rhyming sounds correspond exactly. Therefore "red" and "bread" is an example of perfect rhyme.

With Imperfect Rhyme the rhyming sounds are not exact, for instance: bone & moon; starry & barley; gone & thin. There are various types of imperfect rhyme, for instance off-rhyme. In off-rhyme the vowel sound and/or concluding consonant is changed; an example is "room" and "storm" or "gone" and "alone". Another type of imperfect rhyme is vowel rhyme. In vowel rhyme, only the vowels rhyme, e.g. "green" and "leaves" or "climb" and "eyes". Pararhyme is another type of imperfect rhyme. With pararhyme the vowel sounds are different, but the consonants are the same; for instance, "trod" and "trade".

Another phenomenon, known as Eye Rhyme, isn't really rhyme. With eye rhyme words merely look similar (in spelling), but actually sound very different. Examples of eye rhyme would be "prove" and "love" or "daughter" and "laughter". Note that these examples might also be example of parahyme.

• End Rhyme and Internal Rhyme

When words at the end of lines rhyme, it is known as End Rhyme. Both words should be at the end of the lines for it to be end rhyme. When words in the middle of a verse line rhymes with any other word(s), it is known as Internal Rhyme.

• Masculine and Feminine Rhyme

When single syllable words rhyme, it is known as masculine rhyme. Rhyming words with more than one syllable, where the stress falls on the last syllable, is also known as masculine rhyme. Examples of masculine rhyming words are: horse; divorce; remorse.

Feminine rhyme refers to rhyming words that are more than one syllable long, and where the stress does NOT fall on the last syllable. Examples of feminine rhyming words are: "turtle" and "fertile"; "intellectual" and "factual".

Exercise 1:

Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" has one overarching metaphor. Identify this metaphor and describe the main theme of this poem.

Exercise 2:

How many personae / voices are there in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias"? Identify them. Which persona do you think is the most important? Explain your answer.

Exercise 3:

There are several "narrative layers" in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias". Describe these narrative layers. What do you think was Shelley's purpose with so many narrative layers?

Exercise 4:

Do an analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mutability". What do you think is the main message of this poem? Summarise the main theme of "Mutability" in one sentence.

Exercise 5:

Look at the following poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley: "England 1819", "Ode to the West Wind", "To a Skylark", "Ozymandias" and "Mutability".

Identify the forms that Shelley uses in each of these poems. If the form is a sonnet, identify the type of sonnet it is and take note of the closed forms (e.g. quatrains, octaves, sestets, and couplets) within it.

Exercise 6:

Compare the sonnets "To Wordsworth" and "Ozymandias" and the first stanza of "The Cloud". Are all of these sonnets traditional sonnets (i.e. English, Italian or Spenserian)?

Poetry lines are often grouped together. Such a group of lines are often referred to as a "verse" or a "stanza". Sometimes stanzas have very specific attributes, such as a fixed number of lines and a fixed meter. When the poem's stanzas have specific recognizable attributes, they are called closed forms. Closed forms with very specific and fixed, like the Japanese Haiku, are called fixed forms. Poems with stanzas that have no clear form are called open forms.

• Closed Forms

There are various examples of Closed Forms. Following are some of the closed forms that you may come across in this course: Blank verse, the couplet, the tercet, the quatrain, the, the Rhyme royal and the Sonnet.

Refer to the textbook (Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition) p. 1413-1415 for explanations of these forms.

• Fixed Forms
  

A fixed form is a type of closed form which is very specific in its form, for instance the amount of lines, the combination of closed forms, the meter and even the rhyme may all be "fixed". Examples of fixed forms are the haiku, the Limerick (a single stanza with five lines with often the last word in the first and second line repeating). The fixed form that you will most encounter in this course is the Sonnet.

There are three types of sonnets: The Italian Sonnet (also known as a Petrachan Sonnet), the Shakespearean Sonnet (also known as an English Sonnet, or Elizabethan Sonnet), and lastly the Spenserian Sonnet. Refer to the textbook (Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition) p. 1415-1417 for explanations of these sonnets. Note how each sonnet is combined of a different combination of closed forms. For example the Shakespearean Sonnet contains three quatrains and ends with a rhyming couplet.

• Open Forms
  

Open Form usually do not have a specific rhyme scheme or clearly identifiable meter. Althought the poet my use rhyme and meter in the poem, there doesn't seem to be a fixed pattern. Open form is sometimes also referred to as "Irregular form" or "Free Verse".

Refer to the textbook (Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition) p. 1419-1422 for a discussion on open forms.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born near Horsham, Sussex, to a well-to-do, conservative family. In 1810 he went to University College, Oxford, but was expelled in his first year for refusing to recant an atheistic pamphlet he had published with a classmate. He married a young schoolgirl the following year. In 1813 he moved to London, where he worked for a number of social causes and came under the influence of the radical social philosopher William Godwin. Shelley fell in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (author or the novel Frankenstein), and eloped to Europe with her. Byron joined them in Switzerland in 1816 and followed them to Italy in 1818. Shelley was drowned when his small boat was caught in a squall on the Gulf of Spezia. Lord Byron eulogized him as “without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew.” The superlative opinion of friends did not reflect public opinion at large, however. Due to his radical social, political, and philosophical ideas and his unorthodox lifestyle, Shelley had few admirers in his lifetime. An avid student of Hume and Plato, he was deeply influenced by skeptical empiricism and idealism; he distrusted all claims to certainty – he never confessed a religious or philosophical creed – but held fast to his faith in the redeeming powers of love and the imagination. It is the latter that especially informs his poetry. In the influential essay “A Defence of Poetry,” he asserts: “A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” His formal achievement was great: he worked in elaborate, elegant stanza forms, many of his own invention, and displayed a complex tone of voice, which ranged from passionate to dignified and urbane.

From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Exercise 1:

Analyze the following poems by John Keats:

• To Homer
• On the Sonnet
• La Belle Dame sans Merci

Exercise 2:

Identify and discuss the archetypes in Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci".

Exercise 3:

Perform scansion on Keat's "La Belle Dame sans Merci". Do all the lines have the same metrical feet? How do they differ? What do you think is the significance of this?

Exercise 4:

The form of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad. What is a ballad? How does it differ from a typical epic poem? How does it differ from a typical lyrical poem?

Exercise 5:

What might "La Belle Dame sans Merci" be about? For instance, the poem might be about the enslavement to sexual fantasy. Read the poem again and see if you can discover an alternative interpretation.

Exercise 6:

Read the poem "To Autumn" by John Keats and mark all the examples of alliteration and assonance.

Exercise 7:

Compare and contrast William Blake's "To the Evening Star" and John Keats's "Bright Star".

Alliteration and assonance refer to the repetition of similar sounds and is therefor a form of rhyme.

Alliteration concern the recurrence of consonant sounds, for instance the [s] and [m] sounds in Keats's poem "To Autumn": "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun". Assonance refer to the recurrence of vowel sounds, for example the [i:] and [ou] sounds, from the same poem: "Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; / Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep".

Alliteration and assonance focus the reader's attention on the words where it occurs. In modern poetry, therefore, poets usually keep alliteration and assonance for special occasions, so they can point out relationships between words or ideas or bring attention to something.

John Keats was born in London, the son of a livery stableman and his wife. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, and on completion of his apprenticeship did further training at Guy’s Hospital, London. Having qualified, Keats abandoned medicine for poetry. In 1818 he fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but was prevented from marrying her by financial difficulties. In 1819, his annus mirabilis, he produced all of his great odes, a number of fine sonnets, and several other masterpieces. The following year, he developed tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and beloved younger brother, Tom. Hoping to prolong his life, he traveled to Italy, but died in Rome the following spring. At the time of his death he had published only fifty-four poems, and his reputation as a great poet was by no means secure. In his poetry he struggled to make sense of a world riddled with “misery, heartache and pain, sickness and oppression.” Rather than take solace in religious or philosophical creeds, as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, he strove to develop “negative capacity,” the ability to exist in a condition of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason.” He looked to sensation, passion, and imagination to guide him: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth,” he wrote to a friend. Despite the brevity of his life and writing career, Keats mastered a number of difficult forms, producing complex variations of the ode and the Petrachan and Shakespearian sonnets.

Exercise 1:

Discuss the irony in Lord Byron's "Stanzas: When a Man Hath No Freedom to Fight for at Home".

Exercise 2:

It what ways do "Stanzas: When a Man Hath No Freedom to Fight for At Home" reflect Lord Byron's own life? Would you consider this poem biographical? Motivate your answer.

Exercise 3:

Perform scansion on Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib". What do you think is the purpose of the meter used in this poem?

Exercise 4:

Read 2 Kings, chapters 18 and 19, from the Bible (English / Korean). Why do you think Lord Byron based a poem ("The Destruction of Sennacherib") on this passage from the Bible?.

Class Assignment:

In groups of 3-6 members, do an explication of each stance in "The Destruction of Sennacherib." Discuss what you think was Lord Byron's purpose with this poem? Submit your group's assignment.

Extra Credit Assignment:

For extra credit, write an explication for Lord Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving". This is NOT a group work assignment.

George Gordon Byron was born near Aberdeen, Scotland, to dissolute aristocratic parents who had fallen on hard times. Their difficulties were alleviated when Byron inherited his title at age of ten. Upon graduation from Trinity College, Cambridge, he embarked on a two-year tour of Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and Asia-Minor, during which he gathered much of the material for his most important poems. He became a celebrity overnight in 1812 with the publication of his first collection of poems, but notoriety supplanted fame when Byron’s affair with his half-sister, whom he had met as an adult, became public knowledge. His marriage collapsed and he was forced to leave England in 1816. He followed the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Geneva and Italy, then went on to Greece where he organized a contingent of soldiers to fight for independence from the Turks. After he fell sick in the woods during a training exercise and died, he was mourned as a national hero throughout Greece. His work was widely known in Europe and was immensely influential on the major European writers of his day. Perhaps his most significant contribution to literature was the development of the Byronic hero, a doomed but impassioned wanderer, often driven by guilt and alienated from his society, but superior to it. Byron’s work was deeply rooted in the literary tradition; he turned to the past for models, drawing heavily on the Cavalier tradition of paying elaborate compliments to ladies, the satiric tradition of launching witty criticism of modern civilizations, and the narrative tradition. In Don Juan, his masterpiece, he uses the narrator to attack such institutions as the government, the church, and marriage; criticize such vices as hypocrisy, greed, and lust; and subtly extol such virtues as courage, loyalty, and candor. Although many critics considered the poem a wanton celebration of the misadventures of profligate, Byron himself called it “the most moral or poems.” His formal achievement was great. He worked with apparent facility in established meters, such as blank verse, terza-rima, and ottava-rima, and elaborate forms such as the ode and the Spenserian stanza. From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

The following are some of the major themes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

• The Natural World (The Physical) vs. The Spiritual World (Metaphysical)
• Nature vs. Man / Artifact
  
• Liminality (Liminal Space)
• Religion
• Imprisonment
• Retribution
• Narration (Storytelling)
  

Exercises:

Exercise 1:

Summarize each part and identify the main themes in each part.

Exercise 2:

What Christian and/or Biblical references are present in this poem. Look, for instance, for symbols referring to baptism, crucifixion, and original sin.

Exercise 3:

How does "nature" change after the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross? Look at symbolism, metaphor, and rhyme scheme to support your answer.

Exercise 4:

What types of imagery are present in this poem? Which senses do you think is emphasized in this poem? Why?

Exercise 5:

Find examples of "imprisonment" in the poem. Discuss how these instances contribute to greater themes of imprisonment, like imprisonment to fate or sin.

The YouTube-videos below are of the experimental 1977 film by Larry Jordan based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The narrator is Orson Welles.

In literature, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance. In poetry a motif can be an image, idea, a statement, or any other poetic device that is reoccurs. Motifs often contribute to the major themes of a work.

Exercise:

While reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," identify the major motifs in this ballad. Also identify the major themes. How do the motifs correlate to the themes?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, a rural village in Devon, and raised in London. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, but fell into a dissolute lifestyle. He fled to London and served in the Light Dragoons until his brothers secured his release some months later. In 1795 he met Wordsworth, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most revolutionary collections of poetry in the history of English literature. From the age of thirty, Coleridge largely gave up poetry for philosophy and criticism. He is credited with introducing the works of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Friedrich von Schelling to England. At the height of his powers, he became addicted to opium, which had been prescribed to relieve agonizing physical pains that Wordsworth said were so unbearable they drove Coleridge to “throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground.” He spent his last years in the care of a clergyman, writing and attempting to be reconciled with estranged family and friends. In an age dominated by skepticism and empiricism, Coleridge held fast to his belief in the powers of the imagination, which he believed capable of leading humanity to Truth – not through appeals to reason, but to the senses. Like Wordsworth, he strove to express “natural thoughts with natural diction” and to use simple syntax. His accessible style reached its culmination in his meditative, blank-verse “Conversational poems,” which influenced writers as diverse as Matthews Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Coleridge worked in both established forms, such as the ode, and fluid forms of his own making. He eschewed the use of conventional “mechanic” or “pre-ordained” forms that did not arise “out of the properties of the material” but were imposed from without, as when “to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish to retain when hardened,” for “organic” form, which arises “out of the properties of the material” and “shapes as it develops itself from within.” If Wordsworth determined the content of a century or more English poetry, Coleridge determined its shape. His theories on “organic form” provided a basis for the development of a freer poetic, and may have been the progenitor of many twentieth-century experiments in free verse.

From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the north of England’s Lake District, and was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A walking tour of Europe in his early twenties brought him into contact with the first throes of the French Revolution, whose ideals he supported until the onset of the Terror. Upon his return to England, he settled with his sister, Dorothy, in the Lake District, where, apart from some few brief travels, he remained for the rest of his life. In 1795 he met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most important works in the history of English literature, both for its innovative poetry and for Wordsworth’s preface to its second edition (1800). In his later years Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative, and many former devotees accused him of apostasy, but his poetry remained both popular and influential – so influential and so formative of modern ideas about poetry that the scope of his achievement is easily overlooked. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth attacks the poetic diction and elaborate figures of speech characteristic of eighteenth-century poetry, asserting that he had “taken as much pains to avoid it as others take to produce it,” and advocating the “language really used by men.” He rejected the notion of a poetic hierarchy ranking epic and tragedy over the subjective mode of lyric; declared “incidents and situations from common life” as fit subjects for art; and substituted sincerity for studied artifice. The accessibility of Wordsworth’s poetry and his “democratizing” theory should not divert attention from his painstaking and complex technique. Many of his poems are written in strict and elaborate forms, or blank verse; their effect might be one of spontaneity, but it results from careful construction. Wordsworth ascribed to art the duty of cultivating emotional and moral response in an increasingly desensitized age, one more interested in titillation than meditation.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Edition.

Reread William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree” again, then:

1. write a paraphrase of the poem,
2. perform scansion on the poem,
   
3. and identify the meter of the poem.

Reread William Blake's poem "The Tyger", then answer the questions on "Understanding and Evaluating Poetry" on the handout that will be provided in class.

Following are the paraphrases that you came up with in class:
 
The narrator is telling a rose that it is sick. The narrator says that an invisible flying worm which flies in the night during a noisy storm discovered the rose’s bed of “crimson joy” and his “dark secret love” is killing the rose.


The narrator is saying that she moved around between fields and tasted “all the summer’s pride”, until she saw “the prince of love” who flew in the sunlight. The prince of love showed her flowers (lilies and “blushing” roses) for her hair and head and he took her to his garden where “golden pleasures” grow. Her wings got wet because of the “sweet” dew in May. Phoebus “fir’d” her voice anger. The prince of love caught her in his net of silk and imprisoned her in his cage of gold. He likes to sit and listen to her sing. He then jokes and fools around with her, pulls out her wing of gold, and ridicules her loss of freedom.


The narrator says that he walks around in the “charter’d” streets close by the “charter’d” Thames River and notices signs of weakness and sadness in the faces of the people that he meets. The narrator hears the crying of men, scared children, voices, and laws. In these cries he hears “mind-forg’d” fetters. The narrator hears how the cry of the chimney-cleaners is shocking the “blackning Church.” The unlucky soldier’s sigh flows in blood down the walls of the Palace. The narrator hears most clearly the harsh swearing of the young prostitute at the crying new-born baby.

The decided that the italicized sentences in the “London” paraphrase may still need some work.

Rhythm

Poetry often have a clearly identifiable rhythm. This rhythm is caused by some syllables that have a "heavy stress" and other syllables that have a "light stress". Heavy stressed and light stressed syllables are also known as simply "stressed" or "unstressed" syllables.

Meter

"If a poem's rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular -- that is, approximately equal -- units, we call it meter (from the Greek word for measure)." Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition. p. 1404.

Metrical Feet

The lines in poetry are grouped into "metrical feet". Each foot usually consists of two or three syllables. A poem's line's can be described according to how many metrical feet it has. For instance, a line with four feet is called a tetrameter.

1 = monometer
2 = dimeter
3 = trimemeter
4 = tetrameter
5 = pentameter
6 = hexameter
7 = heptameter
8 = octameter

Two-Syllable Feet

• Iamb (adv. iambic)

An iamb has contains a light stress followed by a heavy stress. The iamb is the most common foot in English poetry because it is closest to natural speech.

Because the stress is at the end of the foot, iambic rhythm is considered "rising". [Rising meter]

• Trochee (adv. trochaic)
  

The trochee consists of a heavy accent (stressed syllable) followed by an unstressed syllable. Most English words are trochaic. Two-syllable words that start with a prefix (e.g. because, sublime) are usually NOT trochaic.

Since the final syllable in trochee is unstressed, it is considered "falling". [Falling Meter]

• Spondee (adv. spondaic)

A spondee has two stressed syllables per foot.

• Pyrrhic (adv. pyrrhic)

A pyrrhic has two unstressed syllables per foot.

Three-Syllable Feet

• Anapest (adv. anapestic)

The anapest has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. It causes rising meter.

• Dactyl (adv. dactylic)

The dactyl has one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. It causes falling meter.

Scansion

Scansion is the act of scanning or determining the meter in a poem by marking the stressed and unstressed syllables using the accent and breve symbols, indicating metrical feet and marking caesurae (pauses).

For more on scansion, including definitions, follow the following link.

• Read the poem closely – more than once.
• Go through it line by line. Don’t skip lines or sentences or any key details. In your own words, what does each line say?
• Write your paraphrase as ordinary prose. Don’t worry about line and stanza breaks.
• Describe the literal meaning of the poem. Don’t worry about any deeper meanings.
• After you have described what literally happens in the poem, go over you paraphrase and see if you have captured the overall significance of the poem along with the details.

Kennedy, X. J. and Gioia, D. 2007. An Introduction to Poetry. 12th Edition. Pearson-Longman.

Exercises:

Write paraphrases for all the poems by William Blake that we have discussed so far. "The Sick Rose", "The Lamb", "The Tiger", "A Poison Tree", "Song" and "London".

Poets often make use of allusions; that is, they make reference to another text (art, myth, story, etc.). In recent years literary theorists opted for the term “intertextuality” to refer to references between different texts.


William Blake’s poem “Song” has many intertextual references to Greek mythology. Some of these references are obvious, like naming the god Phoebus (i.e. Apollo, who is the sun-god and also the god of poetic inspiration). Other references are not as obvious, but can be inferred. For instance “the prince of love” is probably a reference to Eros (or Cupid). This seems to be an appropriate assumption as “the prince of love” can “glide” (i.e. fly); after all, Cupid does have wings.

Exercise:

Read the poems “Song”, “The Lamb”, “The Tyger” and “A Poison Tree” and try to identify different examples of allusions or intertextual references.

What do you think a “intratextual reference” is? Can you find an example from one of these poems?

"The Lamb"

Two readings of "The Lamb":





A musical interpretation (choir) of "The Lamb":





"The Tyger"
Two readings of the "The Tiger":





A musical interpretation (acoustic) of "The Tyger":



A short film by Guilherme Marcondes based on "The Tyger":



A short lecture on the symbolism in "The Tyger":



The Lamb & The Tyger

A combined musical interpretation of "The Lamb" and "The Tyger":

Write a paragraph in which you discuss the symbolism in William Blake's "The Sick Rose".

• Is the poem about England that is corrupted by politicians (the "worm")?
• Is the poem about a prostitute that is infected with a sexual transmitted disease?
• Is the poem about a virgin, that lost her virginity, maybe through rape?
• Do you have another interpretation?

Motivate your answer.

Imagery

Imagery refers to anything in the poem that you can imagine. The most common form of imagery in poetry is (1) visual imagery. Images related to sound is called (2) auditory imagery; those related to touch is called (3) tactile imagery; referring to smells, (4) olfactory imagery; and imagery to do with taste or with the gastric system is called (5) gustatory imagery. Imagery concerning movement, i.e. (6) kinesthetic imagery, is sometimes also identified.

When you notice imagery, ask yourself: What is the purpose of the imagery? Is it merely to describe something, or does it reveal a mood or attitude? Do the imagery act symbolically?

Symbolism

A symbol is something that stands for, or represents, something else. For example, the flag below stands for, or symbolizes, the Republic of Korea.

Often, symbolism is "undefined". In other words, the symbol could refer to more than one thing.

There are two other ways in which something can stand for something else. They are called simile and metaphor.

If I say the sun is like an orange, then an orange becomes a symbol for the sun. They are similar in color and in form (spherical). When I use terms such as "like", "as", "than", "resembles", we call it simile.

"The sun is like an orange", is an example of a simile. When I omit such words of reference, and merely say X = Y, it is a metaphor. For example, "The sun is an orange" is a metaphor.

Simile and metaphor are usually considered "defined". We are certain what it represents.

Apostrophe

Apostrophe is a way of speaking to someone or something which one do not ordinarily speak to. For example, if I speak to my chair, or speak to Elvis Presley, it is called apostrophe.

Personification

When a thing, animal or something abstract (e.g. Truth), is made human, it is called personification. In "To the Evening Star", William Blake refers to "every flower that shuts its sweet eyes". Flowers do not have eyes -- this is an example of personification.

William Blake was born in London. He attended art schools, including the Royal Academy school, and at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to an engraver. In 1800 he secured a patron at Gelpham, but found the arrangement stultifying. Determined to follow his “Divine Visions,” he returned to London. He published numerous collections of poetry illustrated with his own fantastic etchings until the 1820s, when he devoted himself exclusively to pictorial art. His early work reveals his dissatisfaction with the prevailing literary styles of his day; he took as his models the Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century poets, the Ossianic poems, and the work of Collins, Chatterton, and other eighteenth-century poets working outside the prevailing contemporary literary conventions. He discarded the heroic couplet for lines ending in near and partial rhyme, and employed novel rhythms and bold figures of speech that conveyed a multiplicity of meanings. Between 1795 and 1820, Blake developed a complex mythology to explain human history and suffering and came to see himself as a visionary, prophet figure, or Bard. His writings in this vein center around the biblical stories of the Fall, the Redemption, and the reestablishment of Eden, but Blake gave these materials his own spin. In his mythos, the Fall is seen as a psychic disintegration that results from the “original sin” of Selfhood, and the Redemption and return to Eden as a reinstitution of psychic wholeness, a “Resurrection of Unity.” His schema centers around a “Universal Man” who incorporates God rather than around a transcendent Being distinct from humanity.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Encyclopaedia Britannica

You should be able to describe the "Romantic Era", and give a definition of "Romanticism".

To understand the English poetry of the 19th Century, you need to understand the Romantic Era. Specifically, you need to understand how the Romantic Era protested against its predecessor, Neo-Classicism.

Look at the YouTube-video below. Take special note of the list of differences between Classicism and Romanticism.




Write a paragraph in which you define "Romanticism" in your own words.

There are basically three types or forms of poetry; i.e. Lyrical Poetry, Narrative Poetry and Dramatic Poetry.

Lyrical Poetry

"Lyric", derives from the word "lyre" which is a type of stringed instrument. It therefore refers to music. Lyrical Poetry used to be sung. They tend to be relatively short and often convey the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker.

William Wordsworth's poem, "Daffodils", is an example of a Lyrical Poem. In the YouTube-video below, a rapper performs an adapted version of Wordsworth's "Daffodils".



Narrative Poetry

You should know two types of narrative poetry; the first is the epic. An epic is a type of story. Epic Poetry are basically "storrytelling poems". They tend to be quite long, often several hundred lines and are often divided into several sections.

Another type of narrative poetry is the ballad. A ballad also tells a story, but is similar to Lyrical Poetry, in that it also used to be sung. Lord Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot" is an example of a ballad. In the YouTube-video below, Loreena McKennit performs this poem in a Celtic style.



Dramatic Poetry

Dramatic Poetry is poetry that includes drama, i.e. it is theatrical. This means that it can be performed like a play. Sometimes there are many "characters" that are in dialogue. If only one "character" is speaking, it is called a monologue.

Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" is an example of Dramatic Poetry. In the YouTube-video, Vincent Price recites "The Raven". Note the dramatized style.

For the exam you need to be able to give a good definition of "poetry" / "poem".

You can build your definition off of the one below from TheFreeDictionary.Com:

Poem: A verbal composition designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid and imaginative way, characterized by the use of language chosen for its sound and suggestive power and by the use of literary techniques such as meter, metaphor, and rhyme.

In this blog I will list some (not all) notes from our class on 19th Century Romantic Poetry, such as main points and definitions.

The poets we will discuss are: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Alfred Tennyson.

Our source book is The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition. Also make sure that you have a good dictionary that shows the etymology of the words (the origin of the words). You will also need a notepad for making notes in class.