Wordsworth

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Wordsworths The Prelude and Coleridges Poems

• ENGL 203
• Dr. Fike

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Business

• Quiz Please clear your desks.
• Maymester Response papers due.

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Todays Assignment

• Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, 188-96 and Book
  12, 223-25, lines 208-335 Coleridge, Biographia
  Literaria, Chapter XIV, 645-50 "Frost at
  Midnight" 273-75 "Kubla Khan" 254-57 The Rime
  of the Ancient Mariner 238-54.
• This is two days material in one assignment we
  will do what we can, and you can read the rest on
  your ownits all here in the slide show.

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Review

• We are tracking the following themes
• Imagination
• Nature
• Sacred vs. secular

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The Prelude As Epic

• What is an epic? 
• It is a poem in which there is one major action
  (e.g., Odysseuss homecoming, the Fall of Man).
  In WWs poem, the one action is the Growth of a
  Poets Mind (page 188).
• It is a poem including history (Ezra Pound).
  In WWs poem, we have his experience of the
  French Revolution (1789-1799), but mostly he
  focuses on common events from his personal
  experience. See page 217, note.
• It includes an invocation of the muse. WW
  invokes this gentle breeze (1.1). In many
  languages wind and spirit are the same word.
  This is an example of what M.H. Abrams (following
  Thomas Carlisle) calls natural supernaturalism,
  the substitution of something natural for
  something classical (the muse of epic poetry) or
  Christian (the Holy Spirit in Milton).

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Now Read Aloud Lines 1-30

• Parallel to TA escaped / From the vast
  city, he looks forward to his time in nature and
  finds that nature is enlivening his intellect
  (lines 19-20 Trances of thought and mountings
  of the mind / Come fast upon me).
• The earth is all before me. Can you identify
  the allusion here?

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Last 5 Lines of Miltons PL

• Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them
  soon
• The World was all before them, where to choose
• Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide
• They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
• Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

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What the Allusion Suggests

• A sense that WW is picking up where Milton left
  off.  Milton ended with the expulsion of Adam and
  Eve, and WW begins his epic squarely in the
  fallen world. The allusion reminds us that, in
  the fallen world, gains will be hard won.
• MiltonpathosWWjoy (line 15).
• Another important parallel  blank verse
  (Miltons verse form in PL).

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Introduction, page 188

• His theme is the tempering of imagination by
  nature, an educational process that leads to
  renovation, and to a balanced power of imagining
  that neither yields to a universe of decay nor
  seeks (as Blake did see page 40 cleansing the
  doors of perception) to burn through that
  universe.
• Remember Romantic poetry is about the
  dialectical relationship between the mind and
  nature.

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Correspondent Breeze

• For I, methought, while the sweet breath of
  heaven
• Was blowing on my body, felt within
• A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
• With quickening virtue, but is now become
• A tempest, a redundant energy,
• Vexing its own creation. (lines 33-38)
• What is he saying here?

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What the C.B. Means

• The outer breeze has its counterpart within the
  human mind.
• Breezenatureimaginationpsyche.
• BUT he is agitated. As a result, the inner
  breeze vexes his minds attempts to create
  poetry.
• In other words, he starts his great poem by
  complaining about the difficulty of getting
  started!

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More on Vexation lines 269ff.

• "Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all
  rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my
  nurse's song," etc.? 
• Nature did all this for me, and now I cant write
  about it?
• But he IS writing.

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Possible Topics for His Epic

• Line 109 the life / In common things
• Line 120 airy phantasies
• Line 129 some noble theme
• Line 222-23 A tale from my own heart
• Line 229-30 some philosophic song / Of Truth
  that cherishes our daily life

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The Stages Again

• Stage Zero Intimationssome kind of
  pre-existence.
• Stage One a five years child (line 288)
  physical response to nature.
• Stage Two not yet ten years old at line 307,
  the bird stealing episode, the stolen boat
  episode emotional response to nature (fear).
• Stage Three mellower years will bring a riper
  mind / And clearer insight (236-37).
• Stage Four No hint here of future decay.

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Key Concept Spots of Time

• There are in our existence spots of time,
• That with distinct pre-eminence retain
• A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
• By false opinion and contentious thought,
• Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
• In trivial occupations, and the round
• Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
• Are nourished and invisibly repaired
• A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
• That penetrates, enables us to mount,
• When high, more high, and lifts us up when
  fallen.
• (page 223, 12.208ff.)

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Examples

• First spot  going to a place where a guy was
  hanged in chains and having sexual feelings for a
  girl.
• Second spot  Christmas time, father's death
  "appeared / A chastisement" for his sexual
  feelings (310-11).
• POINT Such ordinary events are what really
  matters in a persons development. All of WWs
  common experiences contribute to his maturation.
  The Child is the father of the Man (from his
  poem My Heart Leaps Up, page 168).

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Child Mans Father

• How strange that all
• The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
• Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
• Within my mind, should eer have borne a part,
• And that a needful part, in making up
• The calm existence that is mine when I
• Am worthy of myself! (1.344-50)
• The Child is father of the man (My Heart Leaps
  Up, page 168)

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From Tennysons Ulysses

• I am a part of all that I have met.

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Group Activity

• Consider the stolen boat episode on pages 194-95,
  starting at line 358.  What happens, and what do
  you make of WW's reaction?
• What kind of imagery does WW employ here?  What
  is their psychological significance?

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Imagery in the Boat Episode

• Masculine
• The oars (374)
• The unswerving line he travels across the lake
  using phallic instruments to row a phallic
  course across a feminine lake.
• The craggy ridge (370).
• The huge peak, black and huge that Upreared
  its head (378-80), representing masculine
  authority.

• Feminine
• The boat
• The cave it is kept in
• The lake

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Freudian Stuff

• Freud holds that one has ambivalent emotions for
  an action or object (totem object) that is
  forbidden i.e., both fear and desire. He also
  holds that a boy has Oedipal desire for the mate
  of the father. Both of these ideas come together
  in the stolen boat episode.
• Because of guilt, the theft becomes a mere
  borrowingan act of compromise Freud says that
  we do things that resemble but fall short of the
  actual forbidden act (he takes the mans boat for
  a ride rather than stealing the boat outright,
  and both are acts of compromise for taking the
  mans woman). But the taboo against stealing has
  been broken, and Freud says that one is infected
  and becomes himself taboo, hence guilt (WWs bad
  dreams at line 400) and the development of the
  superego.

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The Upshot

• WW has tried out his own masculine authority, and
  he finds himself out of his depth.
• Consequently, he suffers guilt for many days, his
  dreams are troubled, and he represses into the
  unconscious the inappropriate sexuality that is
  the latent content of the episode.
• The result is the development of the superego
  (the morality principle).

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Episodes That Anticipate the Stolen Boat Episode

• The bird-stealing episode lines 317ff.
  Evidently this experience does not teach WW the
  proper lesson, so the lesson repeats with greater
  intensity in the boat episode.
• Nutting excised from The Prelude probably
  because it duplicates the Oedipal/sexual feeling
  of the boat episode.

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Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, pages 645-50

• There are two sorts of poems (645)
• Those from ordinary life (stolen boat episode).
• Those with supernatural subjects like Rime of the
  Ancient Mariner.
• Key concept  "willing suspension of
  disbeliefconstitutes poetic faith (645) this
  is especially important because Cols poems are
  supernatural.
• Three characteristics of a poem (647)
• Meter and/or rhyme.
• The immediate goal is pleasure (see the pleasure
  dome in KK).
• The ultimate goal is intellectual or moral truth.
  Cf. 648, top par.
•  The nature of the imagination (649)
• "synthetic and magical power"
• "balance or reconciliation of opposite or
  discordant qualities"
• primary and secondary imagination (next slide)

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BL, Chapter XIII

• "The imagination, then, I consider either as
  primary or secondary.  The Primary IMAGINATION I
  hold to be the living power and prime agent of
  all human perception, and as a repetition in the
  finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
  infinite I AM.  The secondary imagination I
  consider as an echo of the former, coexisting
  with the conscious will, yet still as identical
  with the primary in the kind of its agency, and
  differing only in degree and in the mode of its
  operation.  It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,
  in order to recreate or where this process is
  rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it
  struggles to idealize and to unify.  It is
  essentially vital, even as all objects (as
  objects) are essentially fixed and dead."

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From Dr. Fikes A Jungian Study of Shakespeare
The Visionary Mode

• The primary imagination, an act that is
  involuntary and usually unconscious, plays a key
  role in the cognitive process because it mediates
  not only between sensation and perception, but
  also between perception and thought (Rossky 58).
  Whereas the primary imagination actively
  perceives objects and frames concepts, the
  secondary imagination, which is voluntary and
  conscious, re-forms images and thoughts in a way
  that makes poetry.

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Chart

• Wordsworth
• What the eye and ear perceive mirror.
• What the eye and ear half create lamp.
• See TA, lines 106-07.

• Coleridge
• Primary imagination
• Secondary imagination
• See BL, XIII

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The Greater Romantic Lyric

• Milton
• Paradise
• Fall
• Paradise Regained
• Blake
• Innocence
• Experience
• Organized Innocence

• GRL like Frost at Midnight
• Here and now
• There and then (imagination)
• Here and now
• POINT Secularizing the pattern of sacred
  pattern.

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Other Characteristics of the GRL

• A specific speaker in a specific landscape.
• Interplay of the mind with that landscape.
• The poem ends where it begins.
• Three-part movement in, out, in here, there,
  here now, then (the past), now the minds
  detachment, involvement, and detachment with the
  external world.
• Although the poem returns to the first stage, the
  speaker is differenthas learned something.

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Outline of Frost at Midnight

• Stage one (lines 1-23)  Coleridge is sitting by
  the fire. His son, Hartley, is asleep. And The
  Frost performs its secret ministry (line 1).
  The stage is set for imaginative transport.
• Stage two (lines 24-43) The visionColeridge
  remembers his school days. And there is a vision
  within the vision he recalls how, in the past,
  he remembered (dreampt, line 27) a time further
  in the past. Memory within memory. More
  specifically, it is a memory about the
  anticipation of a stranger. Remembering his own
  childhood prepares him to think about his sons
  future.
• EndingStage Three (lines 44-end)  He begins to
  think about the stranger Hartley will become,
  the man Coleridge does not yet know. He predicts
  a rural future for Hartley (lines 54-57). Irony
  H was to become a kind of vagrant in WW country,
  who never fulfilled his potential. Col also
  predicts that H will become a poetthis too is
  accurate H was a minor poet in the WWian mode.
  POINT The poet is back where he started, but he
  is not the same. He now has hopes for his sons
  future.

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Frost and TA

• Frost, line 58-60 so shalt thou see and hear
  / The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of
  that eternal language
• TA, lines 105 the mighty world / Of eye, and
  ear,--both what they half create, / And what
  perceive
• In both poems, nature stirs the imagination in a
  constructive way through the agency of sight and
  hearing.
• POINT Frost was written a few months before
  TA, so Col may have influenced WW rather than
  the other way around.

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Last Verse Par. in Frost

• Here we return to the opening imagefrost.
• Frost and memory bind together unlike things
  (opposite or discordant qualities) and help
  create an imaginative unity.
• Frost, for example, creates a surface to receive
  and reflect the winter moona frequent symbol in
  Romantic literature for the imagination.
• Sunreasonmoonimagination.

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Key Points About Kubla Khan

• This is a poem about the secondary imagination
  and about poetry. It enacts the bringing
  together of opposite and discordant qualities.
• Sometimes the imagination is violent (as also in
  Blakes The Tyger).
• In the Romantic period, energy comes up from
  below (as it does in a volcano, a favorite image
  in Shelley).
• The poets act of creation is greater than
  Kublas because it reconciles opposite or
  discordant qualities in a superior way.

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Question

• What opposite and discordant qualities do you
  find in KK?

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Examples of Opposites That the Poem Brings
Together

• Creation vs. destruction
• Nature (outside) vs. art (garden, dome, song)
• Decree vs. measurelesslimits vs. no limits
• Containment vs. endlessness
• Going down vs. bursting forth (burst 20 sank
  28)
• Sunshine vs. caverns that are dark and cold A
  sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! (line
  36).
• Garden (sun) vs. outside (moon)
• Neoclassical garden with the dome vs. untamed
  nature outside
• Woman wailing for her demon lover vs. the damsel
  with a dulcimer madness vs. control

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Rimeprimary imaginationKKsecondary
  imagination.
• Important concepts
• Ballad and ballad stanza See HH.
• A Romantic quest poem features a solitary hero
  who meets with a supernatural female figure, is
  alienated from nature, and journeys to recover
  what is lost (sometimes union with the
  supernatural female).
• A Romantic wanderer is a person with the mark of
  Cain, a type of the Wandering Jew. Cols Ancient
  Mariner parallels but transcends these types he
  is something other and greater.

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Questions

• Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the albatross?
  See page 241, line 82. Consider Cols phrase in
  reference to Shakespeares Iago in
  Othellomotiveless malignity.
• What does killing the albatross signify?
• How is the A.M. redeemed? See line 286. What
  does he realize here? Cf. Blake Everything
  that lives is holy.
• What does the Ancient Mariners glittering eye
  suggest?
• Why is the church an appropriate setting? Why
  does the A.M. speak to a wedding guest?
• What is the moral of the poem? See esp. lines
  612-17. See The Eolian Harp on page 237, lines
  26-31.
• Why is the wedding guest sadder but wiser (last
  stanza)? See Ecclesiastes 118 for a possible
  connection For in much wisdom is much
  vexation, / and he who increases knowledge
  increases sorrow.
• END