19th Century British Poetry

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.