19th Century British Poetry

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".

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.