The Romantic Period 17851830

1
The Romantic Period(1785-1830)
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2
The Romantic Period

• 1789-1815
• Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in
  France
• 1793 England joins the alliance against
  France
• 1793-94 The Reign of Terror under Robespierre
• 1804 Napoleon crowned emperor
• 1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo
• 1807
• British slave trade outlawed(????????)

3
The Romantic Period

• 1811-20
• The Regency-George, Prince of Wales, act as
  regent for George ?, who has been declared
  incurably insane
• 1819 Peterloo Massacre
• 1820 Accession of George ?

4
The Romantic Period

• For much of the twentieth century, scholars
  singled out sixth poets-
• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
• Percy Shelley, Keats, and Blake-
• and constructed notions of unified Romanticism
  on the basis of their works.

5
Revolution and Reaction

• We use" Romantic period" to refer to the span
  between the year 1785, the midpoint of the decade
  in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake, Burns,
  and Smith published their first poems, and 1830,
  by which time the major writers of the preceding
  century were either dead or no longer productive.

6
Revolution and Reaction

• England experienced the ordeal of change from
  primarily agricultural society to a modern
  industrial nation. And this change occurred in a
  context of revolution- first American and then
  more radical French-and of war ,of economic
  cycles of inflation and depression ,and of the
  constant threat to the social structure from
  imported revolutionary ideologies to which the
  ruling classes responded by the repression of
  traditional liberties.

7
The French Revolution

• The early period of the French Revolution, marked
  by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
  storming of the Bastille, evoked enthusiastic
  support from English liberals and radicals alike.
• Jacobin extremists?September Massacres,1792
• ? Robespierre ?Napoleon
• The new French Republics invasion of the
  Rhineland and the Netherlands, which brought
  England into the war against France.

8
The industrial Revolution

• The shift in manufacturing resulted from the
  invention of power-driven machinery to replace
  hand labor.
• Enclosing open field was socially destructive,
  breaking up villages, creating a landless class
  who either migrated to the industrial towns or
  remained as farm laborers, subsisting on
  starvation wages and the little they could obtain
  from parish charity.
• Two nations-capital(rich)?labor(poor)

9
The industrial Revolution

• The theorylet alone
• ?the government should maintain a policy
• of strict noninterference and leave people to
  pursue, unfettered, their private interests.
• Peterloo Massacre
• A huge but orderly assembly at St. Peters
• Fields, Manchester, was charged by
  saber-wielding troops, who killed nine and
  severely injured hundreds more.

10
Conceptions of proper femininity

• As in earlier English history, women in the
  Romantic period were provided only limited
  schooling, were subjected to a rigid code of
  sexual behavior, and were bereft of legal rights.
  In this period women began to deluged by books,
  sermons, and magzine articles that insisted
  vehemently on the physical and mental differences
  between the sexes and instructed women that,
  because of these differences, they should accept
  that their roles in life.

11
Conceptions of proper femininity

• Bluestockings-educated women-remained targets of
  masculine scorn. This became the first era in
  literary history in which women writers began to
  compete with men in their numbers, sales, and
  literary reputations.
• Wollstonecraft

12
The spirit of the age

• Writers working in the period 1785-1830 did not
  think of themselves as Romantic.
• Lake SchoolWordsworth, Coleridge,
• Robert Southey
• Cockney SchoolLeigh Hunt, William
• Hazlitt,Keats
• Satanic SchoolPercy Shelley, Byron

13
The spirit of the age

• Many writers felt that there was something
  distinctive about their time-not a shared
  doctrine or literary quality, but pervasive
  intellectual and imaginative climate, which some
  of them called the spirit of the age.

14
The spirit of the age

• The imagination of many Romantic-period
• writers was preoccupied with revolution, and
  from that fact and idea they derived the
  framework that enabled them to think of
  themselves as inhabiting a distinctive period in
  history.

15
The spirit of the age

• The deep familiarity that many Englishmen and
  women had with the prophetic writings of the
  Bible contributed from the start to their
  readiness to attribute a tremendous significance
  to the political transformations set in motion
  in1789.

16
The spirit of the age

• Another method that writers of the period took
  when they sought to salvage the millennial hopes
  that had been dashed by the bloodshed of the
  Terror involved granting a crucial role to the
  creative imagination.
• Some writers rethought apocalyptic
  trans-formation so that it no longer depended on
  the political action of collective humanity but
  depended instead on the individual consciousness.

17
Poetic theory and poetic practice

• Wordsworth undertook to justify poems by means of
  a critical statement of poetic principles, which
  fist appeared in the original Lyrical Ballads and
  then as an extended Preface to the second edition
  in 1800, still the third edition of 1802.
• He set himself in opposition to the literary
  ancient regime, those writers of the 18 century
  who had imposed on poetry artificial convention
  that distorted its free and natural expression.
• Wordsworths Preface deserves its reputation as a
  turning point in literary history, for Wordsworth
  gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a
  coherent theory, and made them the rational for
  his own achievements.

18
The concept of the poet and the poem

• British philosophers had devoted energy to
  demonstrating that human nature must be
  everywhere the same.
• Wordsworth registered in the Preface that a poem
  not in outer nature but in the psychology of the
  individual poet, and specified that the essential
  materials of a poem were the inner feelings of
  the author.

19
Spontaneity and the impulses of feeling

• Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the
  overflow but as the spontaneous overflow of
  feelings.
• Percy Shelly suggested that A great statue or
  picture grows under the power of the artist as a
  child in the mothers womb.

20
Romantic nature poetry

• The revolution in style he proposed in the
  Preface was meant in to undo the harmful effects
  of urbanization. Because he kept his distance
  from city life, and because natural scenes so
  often provide the occasions for the writing.
• Romantic poetry for present-day readers has
  become almost synonymous with nature poetry.
• Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape
  with human life, passion, and expressiveness.
  Many poets respond to the outer universe as a
  vital entity that participates in the feelings of
  the observer pathetic exchange between nature and
  humanity.

21
The glorification of the ordinary

• Burns had with great success represented the
  rural scenes and rural pleasures of his natal
  Soil, and aim to be the rhythms of his regional
  dialect.
• Hazlitt and Wordsworth turned for the subjects of
  serious poems not only to humble country folk but
  to the disgraced, outcast and delinquent.

22
The supernatural, the romance, and psychological
extremes

• Materials like these supernatural were grouped
  under the rubric romance, which some time after
  the fact give the Romantic period its name.
• There were writers who resisted poetic
  engagements with fantasized landscapes and
  strange passions. They give accounts of their sex
  as the delusions of romantic love, which continue
  the Enlightenment program and promote the
  rational regulation of emotion.

23
Individualism and alienation

• Byrons poetry that attracted notice and censure
  was its insistence on his or his heros
  self-sufficiency.
• In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had
  already characterized his poetic experimentation
  as an exercise in artistic self-sufficiency.
• Many writers choice to portray poetry as a
  product of solitude and poets as loners might be
  understood as a means of reinforcing the
  individuality of their vision.

24
Writing in the marketplace and the courts

• For many commentators the most revolutionary
  aspect of the age was the spread of literacy and
  the dramatic expansion of the potential audience
  for literature.
• By the end of the period, printing presses were
  driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of
  paper had been mechanized.

25
Writing in the marketplace and the courts

• By the end of the period, printing presses were
  driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of
  paper had been mechanized.
• Books had become a big business, and a few
  writers became celebrities.
• This was the case for the best-selling Byron,
  particularly, whose enthusiastic public could by
  the 1830s purchase dinner services imprinted with
  illustrations from his life and works.

26
Other Literary Forms
27
Prose

• The Romantic period is an age of poetry, centered
  on works of imagination, nonfiction prose forms
  ---essay, reviews, political pamphlets---
  flourished during the epoch.
• In eighteenth-century England, prose,
  particularly in the urbane, accessible style ,
  had been valued as the medium of sociable
  exchange that could integrate different points of
  view and unify the public space known as the
  republic of letters.

28

• The uncertainties about republic of letters are
  never far from the surface in the masterpieces of
  Romantic prose---a category that ranges from the
  pamphleteering.
• This was the critic, who was empowered to tell
  all the others what to read.
• A new professionalized breed of book reviewer
  claimed a degree of cultural authority to which
  eighteenth-century critics had never aspired.

29

• The continuing tension in the relations between
  criticism and literature and doubt about whether
  critical prose can be literature---whether it can
  have artistic value as well as social
  utility---are legacies from the Romantic era.
• Lamb and De Quincey developed a style that
  harkened back to writers who flourished before
  the republic of letters and who had more
  idiosyncratic eccentricities than
  eighteenth-century decorum would have allowed.

30

• One consequence of the essayists cultivation of
  intimate and preference for the impressionistic
  over the systematic is that, when we track the
  history of prose to the 1820s, we see it end up
  in a place very different from the one it
  occupies at the start of the Romantic period.
  Participants in the Revolution controversy of the
  1790s had claimed to speak for all England. By
  the close of the period the achievement of the
  familiar essay was to have bought the medium of
  prose within the category of the literary.

31
Drama

• England throughout this period had a vibrant
  theatrical culture. But there were always many
  restrictions limiting what could be staged in
  England and many calls for reform.
• The link between drama and disorder was one
  reason that new dramas had to meet the approval
  of a censor before they could be performed.

32

• Another restriction was that only the theaters
  royal had the legal right to produce legitimate
  drama, leaving the other stages limited to
  entertainments---pantomimes and melodramas
  mainly--- in which dialog was by regulation
  always combined with music.
• Some of the poets plays were composed to be read
  rather than performedcloset drama. The most
  capable dramatist among the poets was Percy
  Shelley. His tragedy The Cenci , the story of a
  monstrous father who rapes his daughter and is
  murdered by her.

33
The Novel

• Novels at the start of the Romantic period were
  immensely popular but---as far as critics and
  some of the forms half-ashamed practitioners
  were concerned---not quite respectable. Loose in
  structure, they seem to require fewer skills than
  other literacy genre.
• It attracted an undue proportion of readers who
  were women, and who, by consuming its escapist
  stories of romantic love, risked developing false
  ideas of life. It likewise attracted too many
  writers who were women.

34

• In 1814, Reviews of Scotts Waverley series of
  historical renaissance--- a new style of novel.
• The last decade of the eighteenth century saw
  bold experiments with novels form and subject
  matter---new ways of linking fiction with
  philosophy and history.
• Another innovation in novel-writing took shape,
  as a recovery of what was old. Writers whom we
  mow describe as the Gothic novelists revisited
  the romance, the genre identified as the
  primitive forerunner of the modern novel, looking
  to a medieval.

35

• Possibly this new world was meant to supply
  Romantic-period readers with an escape route from
  the present and form what Godwin called things
  as they are. The Gothic novelist conjure up are
  conceived of in fanciful, freewheeling ways.
• The ascendancy of the novel in the early
  nineteenth century is in many ways a function of
  fiction writers new self-consciousness about
  their relation to works of history.

36

• The only novelist before Scott whom the
  influential Edinburgh Review too seriously,
  Edgeworth builds into her nation tales. Scott
  and Edgeworth establish the master theme of the
  early-nineteenth-century novelthe question of
  how the individual consciousness intermeshes with
  large social structure, of how far character is
  the product of history and how far it is not.
• Jane Austens brilliance as a satirist of the
  English leisure class often prompts literary
  historians to compare her works to witty
  Restoration and eighteenth-century comedies . As
  with other Romantics, Austen s topic in
  revolution- revolutions of the mind.

37
William Wordsworth
38

• William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in
  West Cumberland. When his mother died, the
  eight-year-old boy was sent to school at
  Hawkshead. William and his three brothers board
  in the cottage of Ann Tyson. William spent his
  free days and occasionally half the night in
  the sports and rambles described in the first two
  books of The Prelude. He also found time to read
  voraciously in the books owned by his young
  headmaster, William Taylor, who encouraged him in
  his inclination to poetry.

39

• John Wordsworth, the poets father, died suddenly
  when William was thirteen. Wordsworth was
  nevertheless able in 1787 to enter St. Johns
  college, Cambridge University, where four years
  later he took his degree without distinction.

40

• During his year in France, Wordsworth became a
  fervent supporter of the French Revolution---and
  he fell in love with Annette Vallon. They planned
  to marry despite their differences in religion
  and political inclinations. But after their
  daughter, Caroline, was born, lack of money force
  Wordsworth to return to England. The outbreak of
  war made it possible for him to rejoin Annette
  and Caroline.

41

• In 1795 he settle in a rent-free house at
  Racedown, Dorsetshire, with his beloved soster,
  Dorothy. At that time Wordsworth met Samuel
  Taylor Coleridge.
• Coleridge hailed Wordsworth unreservedly as
  the best poet of the age. So close was their
  Association that we find the same phrases
  occurring in poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

42

• The government convinced that Wordsworth and
  Coleridge were political plotters, not poets, and
  Wordsworth lost their lease. The short
  collaboration resulted in one of the most
  important books of the era, Lyrical Ballads, with
  a Few Other Poems, published in 1798.

43

• The book closed with Wordsworths great
  descriptive and meditative poem in blank verse,
  Tintern Abbey. This poem inaugurated what
  modern critics calls Wordsworth s myth of
  naturehis presentation of growth of his mind
  to maturity, a process unfolding through the
  interaction between the inner world of the mind
  and the shaping forced of external Nature.

44

• Late in 1799 William and Dorothy moved back to
  their native lakes. In 1802,after an amicable
  settlement with Annette Vallon, married Mary
  Hutchinson. His life after that time had many
  sorrowsthe drowning of his brother, Johnthe
  death in 1812 of two of his and Marys five
  childrena growing rift with Coleridge.
• But Wordsworth became increasingly prosperous and
  famous. By 1843 he was poet laureate of Great
  Britain. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty.

45
William Wordsworths works
46
We Are Seven
47
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48
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49
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50
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51
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52
What is a Poet?

• A man, it is true, endued with more lively
  sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who
  has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a
  more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be
  common among mankind a man pleased with his own
  passions and volitions, and who rejoices more
  than other men in the spirit of life that is in
  him.

53
What is a Poet?

• Whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose
  even the greatest poet to possess, there cannot
  be a doubt but that the language which it will
  suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth,
  fall far short of that which is uttered by men in
  real life, under the actual pressure of those
  passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus
  produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.

54
What is a Poet?

• The poet writes under one restriction only,
  namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate
  pleasure to a human being possessed of that
  information which may be expected from him.

55
What is a Poet?

• There is no object standing between the poet and
  the image of things between this, and the
  biographer and historian there are a thousand.

56
What is a Poet?

• What then does the poet? He considers man and the
  objects that surround him as acting and re-acting
  upon each other, so as to produce an infinite
  complexity of pain and pleasure he considers man
  in his own nature and in his ordinary life as
  contemplating this with a certain quantity of
  immediate knowledge, with certain convictions,
  intuitions, and deductions which by habit become
  of the nature of intuitions he considers him as
  looking upon this complex scene of ideas and
  sensations, and finding every where objects that
  immediately excite in him sympathies which, from
  the necessities of this nature, are accompanied
  by an overbalance of environment.

57
What is a Poet?

• Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge
  ----it is as immortal as the heart of man.

58
What is a Poet?

• The poet is chiefly distinguished from other men
  by a greater promptness to think and feel without
  immediate external excitement, and a greater
  power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as
  are produced in him in that manner.

59
William Wordsworth

• ODE INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY
• ???????/(???)

60
Annotation(??)

• Title
• Intimations ???
• Immortality (??)??,???

61
? ?(Foreword)

• ?????Wordsowrth?????(pre-existence)?????????????
  ???????????????????????????,???????,??????????????
  ????????,????????????,?????????????????

62

• ????????,???????(direct acquaintance)???????
  (eternal Ideas)???????????????,??????????????????
  ??Wordsworth????????????
• Wordsworth????????????????????????????????????????
  ????????????,???????????????,????????????(the
  vision splendid)?,???????????????

63

• Wordsworth????????????????????????????????????????
  ????????Vaughan?Vaughan?The Retreat???,???????????
  ??????????????????????

64
????(Thematic Development)

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  ?????????????????????????????????????,????????????
  ??????,??????????,????????????????????????,???????
  ????????,???????,?????????????????????????????????
  ,?????????,???????,???????

65
?? (Genre)

• Ode?????,?,??,????????,???,?????????,???????,?????
  ??????????Ode????????????,?Pindar(522442B.C.)????
  ???????????????? (triadic)strophe(?turn??????????)
  ,antistrophe

66

• Ode????????(exalted),??(intense),??????
  (emotional)???????????????????????????,Ode????????
  ????,????????Pindaric?????,????????????????(stanza
  )???

67

• Wordsworth???Ode,???????,????,?????????????,??????
  ??Pindaric ode???

68
Pre-note

• This poem says that Wordsworth is no longer
  experiencing nature in the same ecstatic way that
  he experienced it as a child. Although his
  experience of nature in the ecstatic sense was
  quite peculiar to him (at least as concerned),
  the head-note to this poem would have us believe
  that it is a common experience.

69
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."

70
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71

• 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.

72

• ?????????????,??????????

73

• 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.

74

• ?????????????????,??????????????????????????????
  ??????????????

75

• 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?"

76
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  ??????

77

• 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.

78
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79

• In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that the
  pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the
  man forget the "glories" whence he came.

80

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81

• 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.

82
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• 1.six-years' Darling ???????Coleridge??Hartley
• 2.newly-learned art ??????
• 3.fit his tongue adapt his tongue,???
• 4.cons studies learns, ?

83

• 5.humorous stage ???????,?????????"humorous
  stage"????????????Samuel Daniel?????????Daniel??,h
  umorous??capricious (fanciful?????)???????????????
  ?????
• 6. palsied Age ?????,????

84

• 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."

85
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  ??????????????
• Semblance outward appearance??
• Eye among the blind ???????????????,?????????????
• read'st the eternal deep ???????
• Seer blest ????????????????blestblessed

86

• a Master o'er a Slave ??????????????
• to be put by ??
• Thy being's height ??????
• provoke/The years provoke ?????provoke the
  years??????
• inevitable yoke ???????
• earthly freight ??????

87

• 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.

88
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89

• 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."

90
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  ?????????,???????????,?????????

91

• 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."

92
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  ???????????????????????????????????????

93
Form

• Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, as it is often
  called, is written in eleven variable ode stanzas
  with variable rhyme schemes, in iambic lines with
  anything from two to five stressed syllables. The
  rhymes occasionally alternate lines, occasionally
  fall in couplets, and occasionally occur within a
  single line (as in "But yet I know, where'er I
  go" in the second stanza).

94
Commentary

• If "Tintern Abbey" is Wordsworth's first great
  statement about the action of childhood memories
  of nature upon the adult mind, the "Intimations
  of Immortality" ode is his mature masterpiece on
  the subject.

95

• The poem, whose full title is "Ode Intimations
  of Immortality from Recollections of Early
  Childhood," makes explicit Wordsworth's belief
  that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier,
  purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and
  then forgotten in the process of growing up. (In
  the fifth stanza, he writes, "Our birth is but a
  sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire
  forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, /But
  trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God,
  who is our home....")

96

• While one might disagree with the poem's
  metaphysical hypotheses, there is no arguing with
  the genius of language at work in this Ode.
• Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker's mind
  at odds with the atmosphere of joyous nature all
  around him, a rare move by a poet whose
  consciousness is so habitually in unity with
  nature.

97

• Understanding that his grief stems from his
  inability to experience the May morning as he
  would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to
  enter willfully into a state of cheerfulness but
  he is able to find real happiness only when he
  realizes that "the philosophic mind" has given
  him the ability to understand nature in deeper,
  more human terms--as a source of metaphor and
  guidance for human life.

98

• This is very much the same pattern as "Tintern
  Abbey"'s, but whereas in the earlier poem
  Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to
  the "music of humanity" only briefly, in the
  later poem he explicitly proposes that this music
  is the remedy for his mature grief.

99

• The structure of the Immortality Ode is also
  unique in Wordsworth's work unlike his
  characteristically fluid, naturally spoken
  monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting,
  ?????songlike cadence with frequent shifts in
  rhyme scheme and rhythm.
• Further, rather than progressively exploring a
  single idea from start to finish, the Ode jumps
  from idea to idea, always sticking close to the
  central scene, but frequently making surprising
  moves, as when the speaker begins to address the
  "Mighty Prophet" in the eighth stanza--only to
  reveal midway through his address that the mighty
  prophet is a six-year-old boy.

100

• Wordsworth's linguistic strategies are
  extraordinarily sophisticated and complex in this
  Ode, as the poem's use of metaphor and image
  shifts from the register of lost childhood to the
  register of the philosophic mind.
• When the speaker is grieving, the main tactic of
  the poem is to offer joyous, pastoral nature
  images, frequently personified--the lambs dancing
  as to the tabor, the moon looking about her in
  the sky.

101

• But when the poet attains the philosophic mind
  and his fullest realization about memory and
  imagination, he begins to employ far more subtle
  descriptions of nature that, rather than jauntily
  imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply
  draw human characteristics out of their natural
  presences, referring back to human qualities from
  earlier in the poem.

102

• So, in the final stanza, the brooks "fret" down
  their channels, just as the child's mother
  "fretted" him with kisses earlier in the poem
  they trip lightly just as the speaker "tripped
  lightly" as a child the Day is new-born,
  innocent, and bright, just as a child would be
  the clouds "gather round the setting sun" and
  "take a sober coloring," just as mourners at a
  funeral (recalling the child's playing with some
  fragment from "a mourning or a funeral" earlier
  in the poem) might gather soberly around a grave.

103

• The effect is to illustrate how, in the process
  of imaginative creativity possible to the mature
  mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in
  nature and vice-versa. (Recall the "music of
  humanity" in "Tintern Abbey.") A flower can
  summon thoughts too deep for tears because a
  flower can embody the shape of human life, and it
  is the mind of maturity combined with the memory
  of childhood that enables the poet to make that
  vital and moving connection.

104
??(Structure)

• ??Jack Stillinger????????????????????????,????????
  ???,??????????????????,??????????????????????Lione
  l Trilling????

105

• ???????(???)?????????(optical
  phenomenon),??????????????????????,????????
• Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is
  it now, the glory and the dream?
• ??????????????????

106

• ???????(???)??????,????????,?????????,????????????
  ????????????????????????,??????????????,??????????
  ???? (supernatural),????????(naturalistic)????????
  ??????????????????,???????????,???????????????????
  ????????????,??????????????????????

107
??(Rhetorical Devices)

• ????????????????,??????????????????????,Wordsworth
  ????????????
• 1.????(Dignified diction)???????Ye???????,?????Th
  ou, Thy???child??
• 2.??(Apostrophe)??,?,?,?????????Ye blessed
  Creatures(37)Oh, evil day(43)Thou best
  philosopher(112)Thou Eye among the blind(113)Ye
  Birds(170)Ye Fountains???(189)??????,????????????
  ??????

108

• 3.??(Personification)??????,?Earth, Echoes,
  Winds, beasts?,??????,????????????4.??(Exclamator
  y expressions)???????????exclamations,?O
  joy!(129)exclamatory phrases,?Mighty
  Prophet!Seer blest!(114) ?exclamatory sentences
• 5.??(Repetition)??????????,????????
  (developments of emotion)??I feel- -I feel if
  all.(41)I hear, I hear, with joy I
  hear!(50)Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a
  joyous song!(168)?

109

• 6.??(Rhetorical question)??Whither is fled the
  visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and
  the dream?(56-57)???????????????,????????????

110

• ??,??????(imagery),?????????,????????,????????,???
  ????,????????(dignified and sublime)?

111
??(Imagery)

• ??????????????(1)???(light vs. darkness)(2)???(li
  fe vs. death)(3)?????(per-existence vs. present
  existence)(4)?????(childhood vs.
  adulthood)????????????????,?????????????,?????????
  ?????????????????????,???????,?????,??????????????
  ????,???????,??????????

112
I. ???(Light vs. Darkness)

• Lights
• celestical lightglorydaysunshinesplendidS
  eer blestradiancebright
• Darkness
• nightsleepsullenshades of the
  prison-houseblindthe darkness of the grave
• shadowy

113

• ????????,"celestial light"?????,??????,???????????
  ??"Seer blest"????????,??????????????,?"shades of
  the prison-house"??????,????????????????????"Blind
  "???????????????,???????????

114
II. ???(Life vs. Death)

• Life
• Immortality (title glorious birth)
• human lifeeternal mindthat immortal seaa
  new born Day
• Death
• funeralthe darkness of the grave
• mortal naturethrough death man's mortality

115

• ????????,????????????????,???????????????????,???
  ???????,??,??????????????????????????,??,?????????
  ????

116
III. ?????(Pre-existence vs. Present Existence)

• Pre-existence
• celestial light
• glory and the freshness of a dreamtrailing
  clouds of glory
• heaven
• imperial palace
• heaven-bornimmortal sea
• Present Existencesleep, forgetting
• prison-housecommon dayyearsbring the
  inevitable yoke earthly freightnoisy years
• Though inland far we be

117

• ????????,????????????????????????????????????,????
  ???????????????????????,??"sleep""forgetting."????
  ??????,???????,???"prison-house"?"inland."

118
IV.?????(Childhood vs. Adulthood)

• Childhood
• Early Childhood(title)The
  Child(epigraph)Child of Joythe babeour
  infancynewborn blisses
• A six-years DarlingThe little Actor
• Adulthood
• father of the Man(epigraph) Inmate
  Manpalsied Agethe years to bring the inevitable
  yoke

119

• ???????????,????,?????????Wordsworth ?
  epigraph??????????"The child is father of the
  Man."????????????????????,?Joy, blesses,
  ?Darling????,???????,????????????,?palsied?yoke??

120
Ode to Duty
121

• In want of comfort, he turned to duty.
  Wordsworths Ode to Duty (1805), produced at the
  turning-point of his career, is full of
  importance and significance.
• It throws a light both on the years that went
  before and on those that were to follow.
• It also reveals an aspect of the poets nature
  not usually apparent.

122

• It is common to speak of him as one of the
  teachers of duty, and to refer to this ode (or to
  its title) as a proof.
• Now, he distinctly resigns himself to the control
  of duty because, at his time of life, a man can
  do no better.
• He abjures with regret the faith that, till then,
  had been his and in which duty had no place, the
  dear belief that joy and love can guide man to
  all goodor, rather, he does not renounce it, but
  still mutters a hope that better days may come
  when, joy and love reigning supreme, duty can be
  dispensed with.

123

• As for himself, he would still cling to the same
  creed if he preserved spirit enough to bear the
  shocks of change and enjoy his unchartered
  freedom.
• He retires into the arms of duty as a weary
  warrior of old might end his days in the quiet
  shelter of a monastery.
• He still feels an uncertain convert Thee I now
  would serve more strictly, if I may. The stern
  lawgiver, at first sight, inspires him with more
  fear than love.

124

• He only reconciles himself with the awful Power
  when he has realised that duty wears a smile on
  her face, that she is beautiful, that, after all,
  she may be identical with love and joy
•     Flowers laugh before thee on their
  beds,  (45)     
• And fragrance in thy footing
  treads        
• Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
• And the most ancient Heavens through thee
  are fresh and strong.
• a noble stanza, the loftiest of a poem
  signalised by the almost plaintive appeal that is
  heard throughout and by the longing, lingering
  look cast behind.

125

• The Ode to Duty seems to have been written just
  before the death of his brother John.
• He expressly says that he is still untried, and
  moved by no disturbance of soul. When the trial
  came that darkened the world for him, Wordsworth
  made it his chief task to struggle against grief.
  
• He resolutely bade farewell to the heart that
  lives alone, housed in a dream.

126

• He welcomed fortitude and patient cheer. He
  called his former creed an illusion.
• His themes now, more exclusively than before,
  will be the sorrows and tragedies of life.
• But he must find blessed consolations in
  distress. He must tell of melancholy Fear
  subdued by Faith. The consequence is that his
  exploration of human woes will, henceforth, be
  guarded and cautious.
• He now lacks the bold spirit of youth that can
  haunt the worst infected places without giving a
  thought to the danger of contagion.
• He is the depressed visitor of the sick, who
  must needs beware, and be provided with
  preservatives.

127

• He could no longer offer such harrowing pictures
  of misery as those to be found in his Ruined
  Cottage or even (in spite of the abrupt
  conclusion) in his admirable Michael (1800). His
  diminished vitality makes it necessary for him to
  ward off dejection.

128
"London, 1802"
129
Summary

• The speaker addresses the soul of the dead
  poet John Milton, saying that he should be alive
  at this moment in history, for England needs him.
  England, the speaker says, is stagnant??? and
  selfish, and Milton could raise her up again. The
  speaker says that Milton could give England
  "manners, virtue, freedom, power," for his soul
  was like a star, his voice had a sound as pure as
  the sea, and he moved through the world with
  "cheerful godliness??," laying upon himself the
  "lowest duties."

130
Form

• This poem is one of the many excellent
  sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s.
  Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions
  written in iambic pentameter. There are several
  varieties of sonnets "The world is too much with
  us" takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet,
  modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian
  poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan
  sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the
  first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the
  final six lines).

131

• The Petrarchan sonnet can take a number of
  variable rhyme schemes in this case, the octave
  (which typically proposes a question or an idea),
  follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the
  sestet (which typically answers the question or
  comments upon the idea) follows a rhyme scheme of
  BCCDBD.

132
Commentary

• The speaker of this poem, which takes the form of
  a dramatic outburst, literally cries out to the
  soul of John Milton in anger and frustration.
  (The poem begins with the cry "Milton!") In the
  octave, the speaker articulates his wish that
  Milton would return to earth, and lists the vices
  ruining the current era.
• Every venerable institution--the altar
  (representing religion), the sword (representing
  the military), the pen (representing literature),
  and the fireside (representing the home)--has
  lost touch with "inward happiness," which the
  speaker identifies as a specifically English
  birthright, just as Milton is a specifically
  English poet. (This is one of Wordsworth's few
  explicitly nationalistic verses--shades, perhaps,
  of the conservatism that took hold in his old
  age.)

133

• In the sestet, the speaker describes Milton's
  character, explaining why he thinks Milton would
  be well suited to correct England's current
  waywardness.
• His soul was as bright as a star, and stood
  apart from the crowd he did not need the
  approval or company of others in order to live
  his life as he pleased.
• His voice was as powerful and influential as the
  sea itself, and though he possessed a kind of
  moral perfection, he never ceased to act humbly.
• These virtues are precisely what Wordsworth saw
  as lacking in the English men and women of his
  day.

134

• It is important to remember that for all its
  emphasis on feeling and passion, Wordsworth's
  poetry is equally concerned with goodness and
  morality.
• Unlike later Romantic rebels and sensualists,
  Wordsworth was concerned that his ideas
  communicate natural morality to his readers, and
  he did not oppose his philosophy to society.
• Wordsworth's ideal vision of life was such that
  he believed anyone could participate in it, and
  that everyone would be happier for doing so.
• The angry moral sonnets of 1802 come from this
  ethical impulse, and indicate how frustrating it
  was for Wordsworth to see his poems exerting more
  aesthetic influence than social or psychological
  influence.

135
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136
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