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According to Latest Syllabus
Read For Sure Success
In University Examination
RATAN
TEXT BOOK
ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN POETRY
M.A.English
(Sem-II)
Dr. Gajendra Chaudhary
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Notes
UNIT 1 ROMANTIC PERIOD
UNIT 2 WILLIAM BLAKE: INTRODUCTION
UNIT 3 WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE
UNIT 4 WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
UNIT-5 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: INTRODUCTION
UNIT-6 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: TINTERN ABBEY
UNIT-7 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORALITY FROM
RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
UNIT 8 S. T. COLERIDGE: INTRODUCTION
UNIT-9 COLERIDGE: KUBLA KHAN
UNIT 10: COLERIDGE: THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
UNIT-11 JOHN KEATS: INTRODUCTION
UNIT-12 JOHN KEATS: ODES-I
UNIT-13 JOHN KEATS: ODES-II
UNIT-14 VICTORIAN AGE
UNIT-15 ROBERT BROWNING: LOVE POEMS
UNIT-16 ROBERT BROWNING: DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES
UNIT-17 ROBERT BROWNING: POETRY-I
UNIT- 18 ROBERT BROWNING: POETRY-II
UNIT-19 ALFRED LORD TENNYSON: INTRODUCTION
UNIT-20 LORD TENNYSON: POETRY-I
UNIT-21 LORD-TENNYSON: POETRY-II
Unit 1 Romantic Period

1.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1.3    PRE-ROMANTIC PERIOD
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.4    ROMANTIC PERIOD
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-II

1.5    SUMMARY

1.6    GLOSSARY

1.7    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.8    SUGGESTED READING

1.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.1    INTRODUCTION
Pope's school of poetry was facing increasing resistance towards the end of the Neo-classical era. This antagonism was highlighted by the writers' fascination with the romantic past and with nature. For a while, the new tendencies were restrained by Dr. Johnson's assertive personality, but as the century neared to an end, the changes became more noticeable. Four poets signalled the beginning of the second romantic period in English literature in the latter fraction of the 20th century, each in their unique style.
Cowper, Crabbe, Blake, and Burns were these poets.

1.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The objective of this unit is:

1.    To give the learners an insight into pre-romantic poetry.

2.    To familiarize the learners with the major poets and their works.

3.    To acquaint the learners with the women writers of the age.

1.3    PRE-ROMANTIC PERIOD
The Gothic novel, the novel of sensibility, and poetry from the eighteenth century are the main sources of the Romantic movement in early 19th-century English literature. This includes the preRomantic graveyard poets of the 1740s, whose dark reflections on death, symbolized by "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms," are characteristic of their works. In 18th century, a group of poets known as the Graveyard Poets delved into themes of mortality, reflecting on death with somber imagery such as “skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms.”Some Gothic poets are Thomas Gray (1716–71), "the best known product of this kind of sensibility" with his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751); William Cowper (1731–1800); Christopher Smart (1722–71); Thomas Chatterton (1752–70); Robert Blair (1699–1746), the author of The Grave (1743), and others" which celebrates the horror of death"; and Edward Young (1683–1765), whose The Complaint, or NightThoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742–45) is another "noted example of the graveyard genre". Other precursors of Romanticism are the poets James Thomson (1700–48) and James Macpherson (1736–96).
The latter part of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of the emotional novel, sometimes known as the "novel of sensibility". Sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensitivity are intellectual and emotional concepts that are honored. Sentimentalism, not to be confused with sensibility, was a literary and poetic movement that started as a response to the Augustan Age's rationalism. Novels with sentimental themes depended on evoking strong emotions in both readers and characters. The plot is set up to progress feelings rather than action, and scenes of anguish and tenderness are frequent occurrences. As a result, "fine feeling" is valued, and the characters are shown as examples of sensitive, sophisticated emotional impact. It was believed that the capacity to express emotions shaped social interactions and relationships, demonstrated character, and experience. English sentimental novels that are well-known include Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740).
The German authors Goethe, Schiller, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, as well as the French author and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), were foreign influences. Another significant influence is Edmund Burke's 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. Another factor contributing to the emergence of the Romantic movement was the shifting scenery brought about by the city's expansion and the rural population's decline. A backlash against industrialization and urbanization as well as a focus on the worth and beauty of nature resulted from the bad working conditions of laborers, the emergence of new class tensions, and environmental contamination.
Gothic fiction originated with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, which blended themes of romance and terror. The Byronic hero evolved from the dark, menacing gothic villain first portrayed by Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), her most well-known and significant work, is widely recognized as the prototypical Gothic book. Other well-known early works in the gothic and horror literary genres were William Beckford's Vathek (1786) and Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796). Gothic tales such as Richard Cumberland's "remarkable narrative" The Poisoner of Montremos (1791) were among the earliest English short stories.
The bordering countries were swiftly affected by the French Revolution (1789) when it broke out. The Revolution's impact after 1800 was important to the development of the Romantic Movement. Romanticism did not grow during the first phase because of the Revolutionary zeal. Men's brains were at odds with one another. Despite appealing to every aspect of human nature, the epic revolutionary drama failed to produce a psychological tone that could be characterized as cohesive. There were opponents of the revolution who were against it in principle already.
Burke disagreed with William Godwin's (1756–1836) support of revolutionary beliefs as the son of a dissident minister. He was a philosophical anarchist who thought that in a perfect society, government would vanish as a necessary evil, at most. Godwin's belief in the strength of morality and reason is admirable.
Edmund Burke was the first orator (1729–97). His political insight is based on realistic psychology and concrete perception. His arguments exhibit British Conservatism. His stance on the French Revolution was negative.
The two most exemplary pre-Romantic poets are Blake and Burns. The best illustration of the complicated relationship between the Scots and the English is provided by Robert Bums (1759– 1766). His poetry possesses the characteristics of "Superior Classicism," or classicism that is unaffected by ideologies or schools of thought. His poetry is closely connected to all aspects of human existence, yet it is primarily an art of the mind rather than the heart. The inner workings of Romanticism are evident: emotional outpouring, sensitivity, a deep appreciation of nature, an
abundance of creative fantasy, and a compassionate regard for the underprivileged and animals. He had a deep understanding of human dignity. His opinions were not independent.
Born in London, William Blake (1757–1827) was the son of an Irishman. His poetry exudes a mysterious surrender and complete truthfulness. His thoughts delve into the rationale of the Absolute, and he expressed them as a collection of odd, convoluted symbols. His poetry contains aspects of Romanticism. They are wonder, a contemplation of nature seen through new eyes, and anything     that     comes     from     an     imaginatively     permeated     sensibility.
Blake's philosophy is a comprehensive gospel of liberty. He is the spiritual revolt's prince. The two most well-known poems he wrote are Songs of Experience (1794) and Songs of Innocence (1789). His primary classification has been as a lyric poet. He is capable of self-revelation without reservation.
There was only mediocre poetry during the eighteenth century, and excellent prose predominated. Its poetry is grounded in logic and accuracy. Poetry was forbidden to include sentiment or nature. However, certain writers had specific traits that foreshadowed romantic poetry. The inclination was evident as early as 1726, when Pope was at the forefront of poetry. It was the year that Thomson's Winter was released. Even the Pope, in his final days, was aware of the impending shift in the classical lute. A group of young poets emerged who, following their own inner rhythm, stopped adhering to Pope's beliefs. Imagination and sentiment launched their assaults on the very heart of classicism.
These authors weren't deliberately opposing "official" poetry. They hadn't developed a doctrine or even made a negative assessment of the subject or style of the present poetic movement. The "bulldog of classicism," Dr. Johnson, continued to stand sentry at the entrance to the classical school of poetry, reprimanding anyone who shown any lack of discipline in both life and writing. The new spirit that invaded the poetry house altered the shape, structure, and thought-contents of the poems, but not their style or language. Literary historians have dubbed this shift a number of names, including "the pre-romantic awakening," "the poetry of sentiment," and "the dawn of naturalism." The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in 1764, is credited with founding Gothic fiction. The Byronic hero evolved from the dark, menacing gothic villain first portrayed by Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), her most well-known and significant work, is widely recognized as the prototypical Gothic book. Other well-known early works in the gothic and horror literary genres were William Beckford's Vathek (1786) and Matthew Lewis' The Monk (1796). Gothic tales such as Richard Cumberland's "remarkable narrative" “The Poisoner of Montremos” (1791) were among the earliest English short stories.
The most well-known poets of this period, Thomson, Cowper, Collins, and Gray, were peculiar dualists. Their conscious loyalty to the present placed them in line with their age, but their instinct and inner drive pulled them toward the future. Not that they avoided the artificial poetic language, rhetoric, and declamation that went by the name of poetry, nor that they did away with the glitter of classical imitation in form and substance, nor that they were above the present moralizing and didactic vein of poetry.
However, they substituted emotion for intelligence; they left the aristocrats' ballrooms, boudoirs, and parlors to confront nature. They looked for new pastimes, such as old English tales, Celtic or Welsh legends, Gothic art, reflecting on the ruins of the past, and so on. The elegy and lyric were revitalized. Though many of them restored Spenserian stanza and Miltonic blank verse, their primary form of writing was the heroic couplet.
James Thomson: from 1700 till 1748 nature piqued his curiosity greatly. His 'The Seasons' (1730) poetry stimulates curiosity about how nature works. The terrifying features of nature, like storms and floods, captivate him. He is called a graphic landscape poet. In "The Seasons," he discusses the relationship between humans and environment. The rich diversity and splendour of the natural world profoundly affect him, and his poetry is reminiscent of Wordsworth.
William Collins: 1721–1759 although he did not write much, what he did write is priceless. His principal contribution was his Odes (1747), which included those to evening and passion that will last as long as the language. His first publication was a modest volume of poems that included the Persian Ecologies (1742). Collins' poetry stands out for its exceptional inventiveness; he discovers that the environment arouses thoughts and feelings. Twilight is when he loves nature the most. Keats’ “To Autumn” is antecedent to his 'Ode to Evening'. His “Ode on Popular Superstitions” reveals romantic impulses such as a return to the past and anti-intellectualism. Coleridge finds Collins' utilization of folklore and superstitions to be impressive. Collins's favourite twilight scene is illustrated in many of his writing.
Thomas Grey: (1716–1771) the famous poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by him highlights nature, a subject that is beloved to romantic poets. It is possibly the only poet whose work has been more universally appreciated by readers of all types than "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." The inclination toward medieval literature and Scandinavian folklore is evident in Gray's correspondence. His letters prefigure the romantics' appreciation of landscapes and the natural world. He captures the various manifestations of nature in exquisite detail. Wordsworth's enduring depiction of nature was made possible by this kind of description.
He thinks that reading books will help with introspection during that time. It's the beautiful poems he likes. Cowper also promotes the manly rough line and criticizes Alexander Pope for being too smooth. Wordsworth later develops this concept. Cowper's humanitarianism, political liberalism, and accurate portrayal of the outside world foreshadowed the romantic generation.
Robert Burns was born with an unparalleled aptitude for song and a wonderfully spontaneous creativity. To think of him as an uneducated laborer is a mistake. The Cotter's Saturday Night is a spontaneous, Spenserian verse that praises rural living. Burne's collection of poetry, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was his only poetic creation. It was released in Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1786. Poems like “The Two Dogs”, “The Holy Fair”, “To a Mouse”, “To a Louse”, “Cotter's Saturday Night”, and “Scotch Drik” are included in this anthology. It includes about two hundred songs in addition to several epistles, epigrams, elegies, and other pieces. His poetry is emotionally passionate and personalized. His songs are straight translations of his own experiences.
Other lesser-known transitional poets include Robert Blair (The Grave in blank verse), William Shenstone (The Schoolmistress in Spenserian stanza), Christopher Smart (Song to David and Jubilate Agno), Mark Akenside (The Pleasures of the Imagination composed in blank verse), and Thomas Chatterton (The Rowley Poems).
These transitional poets anticipate changes in poetry through their love of nature, their tender feelings for the humble life and animal life, their democratic spirit and subjectivity, the resurgence of native ballads and folk songs, the resurgence of blank verse, and Spenserian sta. These poets are part of the Popian tradition in their didacticism, use of pompous phraseology, and heroic couplet.
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I
The Castle of Otranto, written by Edmund Burke in 1764. (True/False)

1.4    ROMANTIC PERIOD
Romanticism thrived in much of the Western world between 1800 and 1850, emerging from the German Counter-Enlightenment movement called Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress"). This movement opposed the Enlightenment’s focus on reason, instead emphasizing intuition and emotion as key to understanding and insight. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, played a crucial role in shaping Romantic ideals. Many early European Romantics
were influenced by the values of the French Revolution, incorporating these revolutionary principles into their work.
However, several factors led to the decline of Romanticism in the mid-19th century. The rise of Naturalism and Realism, along with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, shifted the focus of artistic and intellectual pursuits. Additionally, the political climate in Europe became more conservative, and the impacts of urbanization and industrialization on the working class became increasingly evident. By the time World War I began, Romanticism had been overtaken by new cultural, social, and political forces that often conflicted with the idealized visions promoted by the Romantics.
Romanticism itself was marked by a preference for medieval over classical themes, an emphasis on emotion, individualism, and a glorification of nature and the past. The movement was, in part, a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on scientific rationalism.
The movement's principles were most vividly expressed in literature, music, and visual arts. It also had a significant influence on education, chess, history, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.
Romanticism was defined by a preference for medieval themes over classical ones, prioritizing emotion, individualism, and the glorification of nature and the past. This artistic and intellectual movement arose in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which was rapidly transforming society, and the Enlightenment's focus on scientific rationalism. Romantics sought to emphasize the emotional and imaginative aspects of human experience, celebrating personal expression, the beauty of nature, and the mystical and the unknown, often turning away from the logic and order that had characterized earlier eras.
Romantics emphasized the value of folk art and traditional cultural customs, but they also supported radical politics, nonconformist conduct, and genuine spontaneity. Romanticism opposed the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment by reviving medievalism and by contrasting a highly critical perspective of the Industrial Revolution's recent social developments, especially urbanization, with a pastoral notion of a more "authentic" European past. Romanticism extolled the virtues of "heroic" people, particularly artists, who came to be seen as cultural leaders (Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the great Romantics, called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry").
Romanticism gave the artists' right to freely express their feelings and thoughts the utmost significance. Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter, was one of the romantics who felt that an artist's feelings should guide their formal choices. Friedrich even went so far as to say that "the artist's feeling is his law." Similar ideas were expressed by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who stated that poetry should start with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that the poet "recollect[s] in tranquility," allowing the poet to choose an appropriate and distinctive style for expressing such feelings.
The Romantics never questioned the ability of emotionally charged art to convey its essential ideas in appropriate, harmonic ways—that is, if the creator avoided drab traditions and overpowering antecedents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed that when naturally gifted people were, as it were, "left alone" to pursue their creative impulses, their imaginations naturally followed certain laws. These "natural laws" might allow for a great variety of formal approaches—possibly as many as there were people creating individually significant works of art. A common belief among Romantics was that creative brilliance was produced "ex nihilo," or "from nothing," without reference to pre-existing models. We call this concept "romantic originality" a lot. In his Lectures on Dramatic Interpretation, renowned Romantic translator August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most valuable quality of human nature is its tendency to diverge and diversify.
Romantic artists likewise strongly believed in the value and creative potential of nature. Romantics have mistrust for social norms and urban areas. They bemoaned the lack of attention paid to the link between humans and nature by Restoration and Enlightenment Era artists, who were primarily interested in illustrating and analyzing social interactions. Romantics often held that humans benefited from having a strong connection to nature, particularly those who isolated themselves from society to spend time in nature.
Romanticism identified recurring elements in literature that included the reverence for nature, the worship of "sensibility" with its focus on women and children, the evocation or criticism of the past, and the solitude of the artist or narrator. In addition, a number of romantic writers, including Charles Maturin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, drew inspiration for their works from human psychology and the paranormal. Satire was typically viewed by romanticism as something undeserving of serious consideration; this viewpoint is still prevalent today. In literature, realism succeeded the Romantic movement and the Enlightenment came before it.
The origins of Romanticism in English poetry can be traced to the mid-1800s, when individuals like Oxford University professor of poetry Thomas Warton and his brother Joseph Warton, the principal of
Winchester College, were active. Joseph insisted that the fundamental characteristics of a poet were creativity and inventiveness. The early growth of Romanticism was influenced by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, whose Ossian cycle of poems, published in 1762, became an international success and inspired both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Most people agree that Thomas Chatterton was the first Romantic poet to write in English. Both Chatterton and Macpherson engaged in some degree of fraud in their work, since what they presented as previously published works that they had found or assembled was, in reality, wholly original to them.
A significant forerunner of a particular strain of Romanticism was the Gothic fiction, which had its heyday with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole's contribution to the early renaissance of Gothic architecture was matched by his delight in horror and menace as well as exotic and gorgeous locales. Laurence Sterne (1759–1767) presented the English literary public with a fanciful interpretation of the anti-rational sentimental fiction in Tristram Shandy.
The physical terrain plays a significant role in this era's poetry. Wordsworth in particular and the Romantics as a whole are frequently referred to as "nature poets". But because these "nature poems" frequently reflect on "an emotional problem or personal crisis," they also raise more general issues.
The Lake Poets were a close-knit group of early Romantic writers that included William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Robert Southey (1774–1843), and Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859). Despite their significant contributions to the Romantic movement, Walter Scott (1771–1832) eventually became the era’s most prominent poet. His 1805 narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel earned him widespread acclaim, and two years later, his epic Marmion further solidified his reputation. Both of these works were set in Scotland’s distant past, reinforcing Romantic themes of history, myth, and nature.
One of the foundational texts of Romanticism in English literature is the 1798 Preface to Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth, often considered the movement’s manifesto. In it, Wordsworth articulates his vision of a new kind of poetry that rejects the artificial diction of 18th-century verse and instead emphasizes the "real language of men." He defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," underscoring the importance of emotional depth and introspection.
While Wordsworth wrote the majority of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge contributed one of the greatest works of English literature: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This tragic ballad tells the story of a sailor who experiences a series of supernatural events while sailing in the South Seas, most notably the
killing of an albatross, which serves as a powerful symbol of guilt and consequence. Coleridge is also renowned for other works, such as Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: An Ode, and Christabel. Additionally, his critical prose work Biographia Literaria is influential in both literary theory and philosophy. Coleridge also played a key role in introducing German idealist philosophy to Englishspeaking culture and was a significant critic of Shakespeare, whose work he helped reframe in the context of Romanticism.
Through Emerson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle had a Had a profound impact on American transcendentalism. Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Resolution and Independence, Michael, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, and the lengthy, autobiographical epic The Prelude are some of his most significant poetry. The Prelude was started in 1799 and released in 1850 after the author's death. It is remarkable that Wordsworth "inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects, and style by elevating humble and rustic life and the plain into the main subject and medium of poetry in general" and that, in the words of Coleridge, he awakens in the reader a "freshness of sensation" through his depiction of ordinary, familiar objects.
Robert Southey (1774–1843), another member of the "Lake Poets," served as Poet Laureate for thirty years, from 1813 until his death in 1843. However, his prominence has been overshadowed by his contemporaries, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is best known for his autobiographical work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), in which he vividly describes his experiences with laudanum and its impact on his life. Another important figure from this period was William Hazlitt (1778–1830), a close friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Today, Hazlitt is primarily celebrated for his literary criticism, particularly in Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (1817–1818).
John Keats (1795–1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and Lord Byron (1788–1824) represented the second generation of Romantic poets. Although Byron was perhaps the least "romantic" of the three, his work was heavily influenced by the satirical tradition of the 18th century. He preferred the "brilliant wit of Pope" over what he saw as the "wrong poetical system" of his Romantic contemporaries. Byron’s works, which often explored dramatic and brutal themes set in exotic and historical contexts, gained him immense fame and influence across Europe. Goethe referred to Byron as "unquestionably the greatest genius of our century," acknowledging his profound impact on literature.
The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), a mock-heroic epic detailing a young man's exploits in Europe, were inspired by a trip to Europe and also serve as a biting critique of London society. The poem is believed to have autobiographical aspects because part of the plot was
inspired by Byron's experiences traveling between 1809 and 1811. But even after Childe Harold and other works became popular, Byron was obliged to permanently leave England in 1816 and apply for asylum on the Continent due to a number of reasons, including his suspected incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Here he was during the "Year Without a Summer" with Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, together with his secretary John William Polidori, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Poetry like “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “To a Skylark”, “Music”, “When Soft Voices Die”, “The Cloud”, “The Masque of Anarchy”, and “Adonais”, an elegy composed following Keats's death, are among Shelley's most well-known works. Being identified as a radical agitator and thinker, Shelley's early declaration of atheism in the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism led to his expulsion from Oxford and established an early trend of marginalization and ostracism from the intellectual and political communities of his time. Similar to this, Shelley's 1821 article A Defence of Poetry presented a radical interpretation of poetry, holding that poets serve as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" since they are the ones who understand society's underlying structures the best out of all artists. Nonetheless, the most progressive intellectuals of the day were among his inner circle of admirers, notably William Godwin, the philosopher who would become his father-in-law. A work such as Queen Mab (1813) establishes Shelley "as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s."The following three or four generations of poets, including significant Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite writers like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Robert Browning, as well as later poets like W. B. Yeats, looked up to Shelley. The Masque of Anarchy (1819), a seminal poem by Shelley, advocates for peaceful protest and political engagement. It may be the earliest contemporary expression of the nonviolent protest philosophy. Shelley's poetry affected and encouraged Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent protest, and Gandhi frequently cited the poem in front of large crowds.
Even though John Keats shared the radical views of Byron and Shelley, "his best poetry is not political," but is renowned for its sensuous music and imagery, as well as a concern for the fleeting nature of things and material beauty. “Ode to Psyche”, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “ Ode on Melancholy”, “To Autumn”, and the incomplete Hyperion, a "philosophical" blank verse poem "conceived on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost," are some of his most well-known compositions. "Among the finest in English," Keats's letters are significant "for their explanation of his aesthetic concepts," which includes 'negative capability." Keats has always been considered a significant Romantic, and his reputation as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion".
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-II
In 1821 Keats wrote A Defence of Poetry. (True/False)

1.5    SUMMARY
England saw significant social, political, and literary transformation throughout the Romantic era. Romanticism in literature is concerned with the two pillars of support that are the imagination and feelings. As Pater puts it, it's "The addition of Strangeness in beauty," bringing the readers into a world of oddities and beauty. Thus, beauty and curiosity are the two main components of romanticism. Romanticism is "Literalism in Literature" since it also represents liberty and freedom.

1.6    GLOSSARY
Epitaphs: words that are written or said about a dead person, especially words written on a stone where he/she is buried
Tranquillity: a peaceful, calm state, without noise, violence, worry, etc
Aesthetic: concerned with beauty or art
Diction: the way and manner in which somebody pronounces words

1.7    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE

I.    False II. False


1.8    SUGGESTED READING
Hamilton, Paul (2016). The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blechman, Max (1999). Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books
Reynolds, Nicole. 2010. Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-century Britain. University of Michigan Press
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. 1992. The Emergence of Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosen, Charles. 1995. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

1.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS
Differences between Romanticism and Classicism?
List four basic tenets of Romanticism?
Write contribution of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley to Romanticism?
Unit 2 William Blake: Introduction

2.1    INTRODUCTION

2.    2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES


2.3    LIFE AND WORKS
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

2.4    SUMMARY

2.5    GLOSSARY

2.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

2.7    SUGGESTED READING

2.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

2.1    INTRODUCTION
William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker who, despite limited recognition during his lifetime, is now regarded as a central figure in Romantic-era poetry and visual arts. His "prophetic works" are celebrated for their reflective depth, as noted by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye. Critic Jonathan Jones even hailed Blake as "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." All through his life, Blake lived mostly in London, except for a three-year period in Felpham, where he created a diverse and symbolically rich body of work. He viewed the imagination as "the body of God" or the essence of human existence itself, reflecting his deep and visionary approach to both art and poetry.

2.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit you will learn about Blake’s life and works.

2.3    LIFE AND WORKS
William Blake (1757-1827) had an Irish descent from his father’s side and showed himself a dreamer and visionary even when very young, and was an aesthetic in his love of poetry and painting. As a writer he is most spontaneous and is guided purely by instinct more than by any prescribed code. In the indulgence of his intuition he even surpasses Wordsworth and his prophetic ardour and love of reform he reminds one of Shelley. His poetry baffles for sheer complexity and mystery, and the plethora of critical books devoted to his moral, religious and political doctrines testify to the profound importance of the topics that exercised his mind and to the power and suggestiveness of the symbolic treatment given by him to simple, ordinary, everyday themes. Secondly, in his case the separation of art from problems and beliefs would seem ridiculous. His primary concern was the understanding and evaluation of human experience, especially in certain crucial situations.
In Soho, London, on November 28, 1757, William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). Of the seven children, he was the third to die in infancy. James, Blake's father, was a hosier who had previously resided in London. He only stayed in school long enough to learn how to read and write before quitting at the age of ten. His mother Catherine Blake (née Wright) provided him with the rest of his education at home. William was baptized on December 11 in St. James's Church, Piccadilly, London, despite the Blakes' English descent. Blake was greatly influenced by the Bible at a young age and continued to draw inspiration from it throughout his life. Blake claimed that mystical religious experiences during his early years included "beholding God's face pressed against his his window, seeing angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel."
Blake began engraving reproductions, rather than drawing them himself, of the drawings of Greek antiquities that his father had bought for him. Blake was first introduced to classical forms through the works of Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Maarten van Heemskerck, which he found within these drawings. James and Catherine must have felt happy and wealthy for a while, judging by the quantity of prints and bound volumes they could buy for young William. William's parents were aware of his stubborn nature, so when he turned ten, they decided to enroll him in drawing lessons at Henry Pars' drawing school in the Strand rather than sending him to school. He read much on topics that he chose. During this period, Blake made explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms.
Works
Blake's collection of apprentice verse, Poetical Sketches (1783), his first printed work, primarily copies classical models. The poems express opposition to dictatorship, war, and the way King George III treated the American colonies. Songs of Innocence, his most well-known collection, was released in 1789, and Songs of Experience followed in 1794. Songs of Innocence is largely seen as a children's book by some readers, while other readers have noticed references to parody or criticism in the deceptively innocent and
plain lyrics. The format in which both Songs books were printed was illustrated, giving them a feel similar to illuminated manuscripts. Copper plates were used to print the text and pictures, and watercolors were applied by hand to each picture.
Blake was a nonconformist who was friends with Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, two of the most prominent radical intellectuals of his day. He argued that ideal shapes should be created from inner visions rather than from observations of nature, defying the traditions of eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and favoring imagination above reason in the development of both his poems and imagery. "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's," he claimed in one of his poems. His resistance to the English monarchy and to political and social tyranny in the eighteenth century is expressed in works like "The French Revolution" (1791), "America, a Prophecy" (1793), "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), and "Europe, a Prophecy" (1794).
The Book of Urizen (1794) deals with the topic of theological oppression. He parodied the works of Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, whose theories had once piqued his curiosity, and the repressive powers of both church and state in the literary masterpiece The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93).
Blake relocated to the seaside village of Felpham in 1800, where he was supported by William Hayley and lived and worked until 1803. To read classical literature in their original languages, he taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian. Blake gained deep spiritual insights in Felpham, which helped him to develop his mature work, the great visionary epics that he wrote and etched between roughly 1804 and 1820. There are no standard characters, rhymes, or meters in Milton (1804–08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; reworked around 1800), or Jerusalem (1804–20). They see a new and elevated form of innocence, where reason yields to the human soul.
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a parody based on Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg works. (True/False)

2.4    SUMMARY
Blake kept his artistic development on an introspective, imaginative path for the remainder of his life. Blake looked on mental excursions for his (mostly figural) topics, while prominent contemporaries like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable found their subjects in the countryside. (In actuality, he never left the country and lived his whole life in London, with the exception of a brief stint on the south coast of England, when he
worked at Felpham for the poet William Hayley from 1800 to 1803). Blake used other literature, especially Dante (Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car), in addition to the Bible and his own writings. He also discovered an apparently limitless supply of inspiration in his own creative mind (The Ghost of a Flea).

2.5    GLOSSARY
Beatrice- a symbolic figure developed from the person whom Dante first saw as a child and loved as an ideal of womanhood
Psalms- a sacred song, poem or prayer that praises God, especially one in the Bible
Monarchy- the system of government or rule by a king or queen

2.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I
True

2.7    SUGGESTED READING
Bindman, David. William Blake: His Art and Times. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1982.
Butlin, Martin. William Blake. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery, 1978.
Hamlyn, Robin, and Michael Phillips. William Blake. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

2.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1 .Write a brief note on Blake’s life.

2 . Draw up a list of Blake’s works.
Unit 3 William Blake: Songs of Innocence
STRUCTURE

3.1    INTRODUCTION

3.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

3.3    SONGS OF INNOCENCE
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

3.4    SUMMARY

3.5 GLOSSARY

3.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

3.7S UGGESTED READING

3.8 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

3.1    INTRODUCTION
In Blake's poetry, the universe is perceived through the eyes of a child—experienced through the senses, understood with the heart, and judged with innocence. This child symbolizes the most delicate and courageous intuitions within the human mind, much like the soul of a peasant in moments of profound yet simple exaltation. For Wordsworth, such moments are the very essence and foundation of poetry. In Blake's view, the child is not just a literal figure, but a symbol of potential within every human being, representing purity, imagination, and truth. Unlike Wordsworth, who famously stated that "the child is father of the man," Blake sees the child as a possibility or aspect of every individual. He makes a clear distinction between "childlike" (the positive qualities of childhood, such as innocence and creativity) and "childish" (the immature or inappropriate traits that one should outgrow as an adult).

3.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This unit focuses on the collection of poems titled Songs of innocence. This third unit on William Blake is devoted to a discussion and critical analysis of Blake’s poems included for special study. It is to
be noted that a thorough understanding of the themes of his verse is the basis for knowing him intimately as a poet in different aspects.

3.3    SONGS OF INNOCENCE
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are two primary collections that illustrate two opposing states of the human soul, echoing Blake's belief that “without contraries is no progression.” These two sections of a book, though separate, form part of a single unified design, each representing a different aspect of human experience. The first part, Songs of Innocence, presents an imaginative vision of a state of purity and untainted joy. The second part, Songs of Experience, reveals how life’s challenges, societal corruption, and adult struggles erode and destroy that innocence. The design of both parts is intricately tied to the symbol of childhood, which represents unspoiled innocence. As the child encounters the complexities and hardships of modern civilization and adult life, that innate purity begins to lose its original beauty, glory, and joy, suffering the weight of corruption and disillusionment.
Songs of Innocence constitutes an imaginative picture of the state of innocence as derived from sources such as the Bible, the pastoral tradition and the growing Romantic fascination with childhood, and supposed primitive condition of human perfection in innocence. Here all human desires are innocent-even discipline leads to happiness. Here profound moral ideas spring directly from the poet’s personal vision of the universe. Blake speaks of himself from a purely personal point of view. The introductory poem, piping down the Valleys Wild and subsequent poems have a childlike directness and sense of controlled joy in the human writing for children or playing at being a child. The pure passion and intensity of feeling reflected by the poems derives from the prophetic and visionary Blake. Many of these poems show a sense of order and harmony allied to spontaneity.
The Introduction may be looked upon as a brief essay on poetry and the poet’s mission in so far as it is a divine command to sing, the subject of innocent bliss by fitting words to melody and then to perpetuate the melody in writing with the aid of unstrained imagination so that “every child may joy hear”. The Echoing Green has an idyllic background reminiscent of Gold Smith Deserted Village although its nostalgic vitality is much more artfully artless. The description of the joy and contentment experienced by children at play is the best of artlessness. Lines.
“Such, such were the joys.
On the Echoing Green”
breathe a spirit of universal joy symbolizing childhood play and a sense of participation”.
The lamb stresses a feeling of kinship, of innocence between the child, the lamb, and Christ. The goodness of God’s endowment elicits spontaneous praise and symbolises the rightness of creation. A child, a lamb and God are all endowed with the essence of divinity :
“I am child, and thou a
lamb, we are called by His name”.
The lamb is other than God, who has himself become the Lamb, the child, and the son of God, Jesus Christ. The poem contains a beautiful idea that human conceits such as ownership, possession are all signs of our gross ignorance of the Supreme Truth that the only reality is God. The Tiger in Songs of Experience is a contrasted study of this poem which is distinguished by its forceful and supple rhythms of speech derived from the Bible and free metres. The shepherd is logical sequence to The Lamb. God Plays “the protective shepherd to His flock” i.e. His creation as much aim the ordinary shepherd tends his sheep, goals etc. A new-born infant, just two days old has no name, but he is the picture of innocence and bliss-imsullied joy and can rightly he christened as Joy. This is the theme of Infant joy. A contrasted and a contrary picture is expressed in Infant Sorrow in Songs of Experience. The Little Black Boy brings out the moral essence of Blake’s poetry. Inspired by the anti-slavery agitation, the theme cuts across racial prejudices, and the entire poem becomes an impassioned cry against the social ostricisation of the black-the negress-by the white. On another level the poem is deeply humanitarian in sentiment in the poet enlisting our apaspethies for the black-the aggrieved social under-dogs. The spiritual undertones of the theme are also powerful, and here Blake alludes to the underlying reality of God tor Divino, power- “the beams of love”- which welds all human hearts imo the band of love, and which points to the whiteness of soul in all bodies, whatever be their complexion. The man made racial differences, the poet believes, obscure real human nature which is essentially divine. The pastoral background and the narrator’s tender age lead to the theme force and passion.
Laughing Song strikes a note of directness and simplicity reminiscent of Elizabethan lyrics. It is also comparable with a Wordsworthian lyric of nature where nature is sounds with the feeling of joy which crams human nature. There is rhythmic unity between man and nature. And what is true of Laughing Song is confirmed by Spring. In spring season, human heart dances to the joyful tune of the season, and the spirit of perfect abandon seems to be abroad and at large.
While the obvious theme of A Cradle Song is a mother’s watching and crooning over her young one as he lies asleep in a cradle being rocked by her to the accomplishment full by its deeper meaning is that a child is the true image of the Father, the Almighty God, and in his face can be traced gleams of Divinity, Christ, the child of God manifests Himself through every infant in it.
“Sweet babe in thy face
Holy image I can trace.
Sweet babe, once like thee.
Thy Maker lay and wept for me.
The mother looks upon her child as a redeemer, like Christ”.
Nurse’s Song gives expression to the feeling of involuntary participation in the unbounded joy of uninhibited childhood as it temps and plays on fly green fields and hills and makes them echo with its shouts of joy. Or does the poem mean that the uninhibited happiness of a child is strong enough to infect even the hearts of the adults so as to wean them from their anguish and care to a free participation in the sports and games of the young ?
Holy Thursday only explicitly recounts the moral implied in ne Divine Image. In place of voicing mere moral platitudes. Blake here gives expression to a vision of the universe personally felt by him. The burden of the Church service on the Holy day is the significance of piety and love in the life of man. The Divine Image stresses the four-fold divine creed of brotherhood made up of Mercy, Peace, Pity and Love. As a counterpart to Holy Thursday the poem is a reiteration of the Creative and Spiritual power of God in man, of the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man. In believing that God does not exist apart from man. Bible seems to Humanise Divinity The thought had relevance in the age of nationalism such as Blake’s. A Dream has identical theme although the message is conveyed through a parable; the helplessness of a mother ant separated in the night from her children, and finally united to them by a glow-worm. It is the story of human beings straying from the path of divinity of which they are restored by a beneficent angel. The poem, thus, teaches the lesson of the omniscience and omnipresence’s of god. This story of loss and restoration is repeated in the two short companion pieces— The Little Boy Lost and its subsequent The Little Boy Found. God, the shepherd, out of kind consideration always comes to the rescue of the poor souls who come to grief in the developing gloom of ignorance. A poem of human life vis-a-vis God is On Another’s Sorrow whose theme is compassion, a feeling integral to man’s imaginative nature, a most delicate fiber of human sensibility- God is Divine essence who reveals Himself through his creatures, the inanan beings. Human pity is thus another name for Divine compassion.
The Chimney Sweeper is a class by itself. Inspired by deep humanitarian feelings it highlights the prevalent socio-economic exploitation and inequality which in the form of employing children of tender age in factories, mines and other industrial concerns in the wake of the industrial Revolution becomes an impassioned cry, against human injustice. Other contemporary poems on the same theme were The Cry of the children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a poem about a seam stress by Thomas Hood. Condemned to the drudgery of chimney-sweeping the children find all their dreams of a happy, joyful period of life dashed to the ground. The dull routine will crush their souls and utterly destroy their physical strength if it were not for their dreams then which present to them a vision in which the benign angel holds out a ‘promise
of a glorious and happy future’ when they would be rewarded with adequate recompense in the form of peace, playfulness, and joy for all their sincorp, conscientious work in the present. The poem, thus, turns out to be yet another variation on the theme of God, the Almighty Father; standing by the innocent children. Here is Blake the moralist speaking through art which triumphs by being artless. The poem was a special favorite of Charles Lamb who also wrote an essay entitled Chimney Sweepers on the same subject.
The companion book Songs of Experience is about the actual world of human experience, and suffering of mankind. More impassioned than the Songs of Innocence, they are born of a deep anguish, from a storm in the poet’s soul. Besides a visionary and a mystic, Blake was a psychologist and a realist and was aware of the natural cycle of things and, events. He knew that a period of life full of happiness and harmony is bound to be succeeded by one full of distress and discord much as light follows darkness or night follows day. It is a part of discretion and sanity to accept coexistence of the contrary states of existence, and instead of complaining against the dark aspects of life attempts reconciliation and a synthesis. The willing acceptance of this fact leads to a consummation of the human experience. In fact the glory of an part of experience is dependent upon and is magnified by the other. Translated into concrete terms it means that innocence wedled to experience and goodness to knowledge will have elegance and meaning. According to Blake - Unorganized Innocence : An Impossibility - Innocence dwell with wisdom but never with Ignorance. The true innocence is not that of the Songs of Innocence, but something which gains knowledge from the errors of experience and finds an expanding strength in the unfettered life of the creative soul.
Such a consummation, however, which beyond experience, does not result from mere goodwill or pious inspirations. Life of the imagination is possible only brought passion and power and energy. Blake, therefore, emphasizes the great latent force in man which are employing but nonetheless indispensable for the achievement of something worthwhile. According to him it is only through the release and exercise ofawful powers that his creative activity of the imagination is awakened and set in motion and experience gained and transformed. He looks for his symbols for these powers in violent and destructive things, and in their elemental force lies the redemption of mankind Christ is Blake’s symbol of the divine spirit which chafes at all restrictions, established order social code and custom. The word of Christ is instrumental in uniting innocence and experience in a wonderful harmony. The two groups of poems, thus, are complementary to each other and not antithetical as may appear on superficies view.
The “Introduction” to Songs of Experience is more complex and extremely fine example of Blake’s poetic method. In The Introduction and the succeeding Earth’s Answer Blake uses certain familiar themes, whose ordinary associations are called but unexpectedly modified, and they are set in relation but not an explicitly defined relation - to totally different and unfamiliar ideas.
“The introduction might seem at first glance a straight-forward treatment of the fall, with its reference to The Holy word
That walk’d among be ancient trees.
And fallen, fallen, fallen, light renew”!
Even here the word ‘ancient’ for the trees unexpectedly modifies the ordinary notion of Eden; it is taken up again in Earth’s Answer, when in denouncing the jealous, love-chaining God, Earth calls him the father if the ancient med. The ‘weeping’ is given an implication of helplessness by the next two stanzas of the “Introduction” in which The Holy word is shown as pleading with Earth, in effect from wooing her to come to him in the permitted period of darkness :
“Turn away no more;
Why will thou turn away?
Is given three till the break day.”
with this helplessness is contrasted the power of the Creator to reverse if he would, the darkness of the fall.
“And fallen, fallen, light renew!”
The effect is already to convey not only the usual sense of boundless loss and the grief of the Creator, but with an astringent mint of something questionable in the power of renewal not exercised. Moreover, the lapsed soul is not mass but ‘Earth’. In Earth’s Answer it becomes clear that Earth is feminine and is being wooed for her love, including her sexual love. The Holy Word has now become
“Selfish father of men !
Cruel, jealous, selfish fear !”
And the denunciation of his imprisoning, jealousy is combined with Blake’s hatred of the conventional restriction of sexual activity to darkness, with its implications of shame and secrecy:
“Can delight
Chaine’d in night,
Does spring hide its joy
Or the plowman in darkness plow?”
It must be added that the proper pleasure of the poem and its appreciation involves extended insight into the relatedness of themes that may at first seem to be merely juxtaposed.
In the Introduction Blake contemplates the inhumanity and injustice upon fallen man, but considers this apparently evil descent indispensable in the wheel of destiny. The soul must pass through the complete
cycle in order to emerge into a fuller, more active life of the Creative Imagination from the apparent complexities and horrors. The Bard in this poem calls upon Earth to proceed to its which includes the bitterness of experience in order that the physical world is superseded by the visionary age (Eden). In the largest context and the most forceful implication of the theme the poem suggests that the innocent cannot come by true vision unless they know and fully understand the distortions of experience, and also transcend them. Eastth’s Answer records initial despair and helplessness at the imprisonment of mankind in fear and jealousy by analytical reason, but calls for the release of men’s spirits from bond-age and repression. The release signifies awakening to a new world of enjoyment, indulgence-even indulgence in free love:
“Break this heavy chain
That free Love with bondage bound.”
Almost all the poems under Songs of Experience are a continuation, extension, and variation of the theme of poems under the preceding title. It would be more apt to another facet of the experience described in the first category.
Nurse’s Song sees as a waste of time and cruelly tells the children that their life is a strain, a hypocrisy spent in darkness and cold. It is a poignant contrast to the earlier which symbolized the carefree play of the imagination when it is not spoiled by senseless restrictions. Nevertheless the “winter and night” are very much of the offshoot of “Your spring and your day wasted in play”. Similarly Instant Sorrow counters Infant joy. The former registers an infant’s protest against the tyranny and oppression of life here represented by the cruelty of the father helped by the mother’s complicity. But through sheer helplessness and despair the infant learns to live with this experience, and yet he is all the richer and wiser for it. It is the inescapable lot of a child to face and suffer the new problems of adults life.
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I
William Blake’s Songs of innocence came out in:
A) 1776              B) 1789
C) 1787              D) 1800

3.4    SUMMARY
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake, first published in two phases. The initial copies were printed and illuminated by Blake himself in 1789. Five years later, he combined these poems with a set of new works into a
single volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Alongside his poetry, Blake was also a skilled painter. Before creating the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he produced works such as Oberon, Titania, and Puck Dancing with Fairies, demonstrating his talent for blending visual art with literary themes.

3.5    GLOSSARY
Soot:  a deep black powdery or flaky substance consisting largely of amorphous carbon, produced by
the incomplete burning of organic matter.
Mire : a stretch of swampy or boggy ground.
Beadle: A beadle, sometimes spelled “beadle”, is an official of a church or synagogue who may usher, keep order, make reports, and assist in religious functions; or a minor official who carries out various civil, educational, or ceremonial duties.

3.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE
B) 1789

3.7    SUGGESTED READING
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake

1.    J. Bronowski, A man without a Mask.

2.    S.F. Damon, William Blake : His philosophy and symbols.

3.    N. Ptye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.

4.    S. Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil: A critical Study of Blake’s Poetry.

5.    D. Saurat, Blake and Modem Thought.

6.    William Blake, Twentieth Century Views.

3.8    TERMINL QUESTIONS

1.    Explain the context of “Songs of Innocence”.

2.    Give the central idea of “Holy Thursday”.
Unit-4 William Blake: Songs of Experience
STRUCTURE

4.1    INTRODUCTION

4.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

4.3    SONGS OF EXPERIENCE


4.3.1    THE SICK ROSE

4.3.2    MY PRETTY ROSE TREE

4.3.3    THE GANIEN OF LOVE

4.3.4    THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER AND LONDON

4.3.5    BLAKE AND SYMBOLISM
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

4.4    SUMMARY

4.5    GLOSSARY

4.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE

4.7    SUGGESTED READING

4.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

4.1    INTRODUCTION
Songs of Experience is a poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The poems were published in 1794. Some of the poems, such as “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found”, were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence and were frequently moved between the two books.

4.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This unit focuses on the collection named Songs of Experience.
In continuation of the discussion in the preceding unit we will deal further with the poems of Blake, and then pass on to a general discussion of his poetry.

4.3    SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
Quite a few poems in Songs of Experience deal with the theme of human life, its desires, feelings etc. A Poison Tree is a simple poem on the theme of repression, the question of disguising true feelings. Here is the feeling of wrath, antagonism which if repressed will work as poison in the heart and mind and drive a person either mad or cynical. Frank and unrestrained expression, on the contrary, restores health both of mind and body. Talking symbolically the poet conveys in the last stanza of the poem that the evil fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was actually the fruit of restraint and repression: “My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”

4.3.1 The Sick Rose
The Sick rose is a slight variation on the same theme. Here is the story of the rose flower and the can-her-worm which eats into its very vitals and destroys it entirety. In the same manner, restraint and selfishness poison the very springs of level. The poem is built around a beautiful metaphor. Another poem, The Angel returns us to the theme of love denied which means joy denied. The character is an old woman, a spinster who out of maidenly coyness spurned offers of love and youth test her maidenly code of conduct be broken. This timidity, however, cost her dear and she is now left with bitter lamentations over departed youth and wasted life. A free indulgence in the life of love would certainly, have saved her life from being completely wrecked. The poem is reminiscent of the experiences of Elizabethan lovers, though here the lover appears symbolically in the guise of an Angel.

4.3.2 . My Pretty Rose Tree
My Pretty Rose Tree is also about missed opportunities in love. Symbolizing sexual indulgence in the rose tree the poem discusses the subject of love which hedges itself around with thorns out of foolish ignorance and disregard of the depth of feeling and thus keeps away happiness. In a mood of utter despair one is forced to live with thorns. In place of love is born jealousy and cynicism and in place of warmth cold calculation. The succeeding poem Ah! Sun-flower is more impressive and pregnant with deeper meaning, although it also employs a natural object-a sun-flower symbolically to convey its idea. It is the story of human aspiration, which finds its wings clipped so long as it is fettered to the realities of mundane earth. Like the sun-flower a man’s face is turned upwards to the sun and the clouds, and like the flower drooping with sunset the frustration of desire leads to a sense of despair from which he finds an outlet and release into a freer and a brighter world. The sun is symbolic of hope and joy and the earth represents a corrosive limiting agent, the material interests of life. But the metaphysical overtones of the theme are even more significant. Human bodies for limiting adjuncts are the aggregate of objects with which human beings identify themselves and thereby prove their finite nature, while in essence they are a part of the Supreme
Reality. The human soul-a part of the Divine, in its lowest stage of spiritual development unfortunately identifies itself with a number of lower things such as body, intellect or understanding, sensations, delightful feelings etc, so that it remains bandaged to earth. Yet there are constant endeavors by her to rid herself of this enslavement and enjoy astral flights.
The ideas of the poems are fused into it with the force and intensity of a passionate lyric cry and the tone throughout is inspirational.

4.3.3    The Ganien of love
The Ganien of love counters the sentiments of The Echoing Green (Songs of Innocence). Nature is no more a place of sport for children and its beautiful, green spots are encroached upon by mail and manmade structures such as “A Chapel.”
Its spirit of innocence is being violated by codified laws and social and religious inhibitions and taboos-by a number of do’s and dont’s. The religiosity of the chapel and the priest frowns on the young children and stifles the joys of divine impulse. In the state of experience Blake finds jealousy, cruelty, hypocrisy, crippling the natural play of the affections and turning joy into sorrow.
In the nature of things experience of adult’s life gives a new turn to the affection of childhood. The Church comes in for censure at Blake’s hands in The Little Vagabond, a poem which apparently deals all too flippantly with the subject of childlike-nay childish mention of God and the House of God.
Flippancy is the serious theme of Blake which is that legalism and unduly harsh religious code that has killed spontaneity and imaginative playfulness of children. To a child’s imagination an ale-house is as good a place for sport and merry-making as a Church, but the laws and regulations devised by the adults and other man- made organization have prejudiced children’s mind to the point of scaring them away from Church and God. What man, in his ignorance and selfishness, has made of institutions and organization is, thus, not half as tragic as what he has made of a child’s mind. God identifies Himself with a child and rejoices in his activities.

4.3.4    The Chimney - Sweeper and London
A group of two poems-The Chimney - Sweeper and London, deal with the socio-economic aspects of life and are deeply moralistic. The Chimney Sweeper is more or less a continuation of its name sake in Songs of Innocence, although it is much more caustic in its attack on the parents, God, the priest and the king for their callous indifference. The parents are sheer tyrants in their gross negligence of their little ones. Their absence at Church for the sake of worship assumes an ironic meaning when the little one is deserted at him in tears, lit competition with them, as it were, the Church and State, indulge in a policy of repression and in humanity. “God and His Priest and king”. make up a Heaven of our misery” has all the force of bitter irony
and paradox. Blake here appears in all his force. And passion conveying his message in images which are vivid for all their simplicity and familiarity. The other poem London is the harshest with the condemnation of a society that tolerated such class of people as Chimney Sweepers and harlots. The city of charter’d and street, charter’d Thames suffers from the blot of social evils. It seems that its very soul is corrupted within the deadening touch to “plagues” of various types-moral, intellectual and domestic. In his censure Blake is one with other social critics and reformers of his time such as Thomas Paine, Godwin, and even Rousseau. In a short poem charged with fire, fury and passion he accomplishes even more than what the great writers and pampbeleteers of the day succeded in doing. He lays bare, in almost suggestive manner, cruelty, hypocrisy poverty, misuse of the intellect, distrust die imagination, political and religious institutions and other associated evils of the day. A third poem entitled Holy Thursday also takes up the same theme, although here an ironical contrast is built up between affluence of England “rich and fruitful land” and the poverty, starvation and misery of its “many children.” The poem, a counterpart to its name sake in Songs of Innocence, is charged, with bitter reproach, pessimism, indignation, and denunciation, in addition to its mocking tone which ridicules the so-called richness of the land, and its sunshine and rain, which contribute to its property. It bring out the moral note in Blake’s poetry.
Blake’s courage of the intellectual and mental ailments which afflicated his countrymen is even more powerful than his criticism of social and religious evils, and in Song of Experience there are quite a few poems which deal with the subject of intellect. The most significance of these is To Tlrrah-a woman who represents “Natural Religion” i.e. the rationalistic pragmatic mind of the English tenement. This woman lures men to the delusion of mortal bodies by her hypocrisy and selfishness, whereas the true, real body of man is spintual. The poem is a brilliant, short essay on the theme of Reason and its place in the life of man. In the few lines of poem the poet analyses the nature and characteristics of reason which acts as a mental tyrant. Its offspring hypocrisy, selfishness, shame, pride, false sense of distinction bind a person down to individuality, narrow-mindedness, and all the worst sufferings of the world. It has distorted his vision, taught him wrong perspective of life and love of falsehood in place of truth. Worst of all probably it has convinced man of his mortality whereas the Death of Christ teaches him about his Divinity and immortality. Thus Reason-analytic Reasons, pragmatic, empirical outlook, according to Blake, has spelt ruin and disaster to human beings and their happiness, in terms of abstract philosophy and metaphysics we might interpret the
poem as a study in human ego and its manifestations in everyday life. The original sin ‘I am this body’ is the source of all evils in human life and the realisation of the truth of Christianity that the body is the cross; that ego is Jesus, the ‘son of man’ and that resurrection is the glorious real self, is real life all else is death. Therefore, in its general sense the poem warns us against the evils of ego-sense and its consequent indulgence, as well as absolute reliance upon Reasons which, at best, leads us into a blind alley of confusion. What is, therefore, called knowledge is of true knowledge; the knowledge got through the mind and the senses implies the distinction between subject and object, which is only illusory. True knowledge is God or the real self because it is self-luminous. This is the theme of the poem A Little Boy Lost which obviously is about a boy who is sacrificed by the priest in order to prevent the spread of the heresy that Divinity must first he comprehended by Mind or Reason before being accepted by intuition. The supreme Reality or Divinity however, is not an object of discursive or empirical knowledge all profound religious experiences are related to the region of the super-conscious, and it is from this feat all great seers and mystics derive knowledge. Such religious persecution as fee poem records is reminiscent of the medieval bigotry and is a blot on fee fair name of England. Blake here appears as a true liberal.
In The Human Abstract Blake talks of hypocrisy in detail and discusses how the hypocrites explain human behavoiur in terms of “Self interest,” almost in the copybook style of 18th century philosopher such as Hobbes. Hypocrisy is as grave a sin as cruelty since both spring from the same source viz refusal to obey the creative spirit of the imagination and obedience to fear and envy. The Tree of knowledge born of analytic intellect or reason “Human brain” yields the bitter fruit of decent which is further embittered by “Mystery” in the form of ceremonies and rituals being grafted to it. The fruit is of falsehood instead of truth, death in place of life.
A Divine Image provides an antithesis to this poem. Man, characterized by Cruetly, Jealousy, Terror, and Secrecy, in his fallen state is the divine image. In this stage of degradation he is the opposite of the four fold creed of brotherhood : Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love.
The poet assumes the role of a Bard; a wise person and calls upon young men in the Voice of the Ancient Bard to come and see the image of troth newly born in the early-morning. There will be no more fog of analytic reason disguising its face. Instead there will be the piercing rays of truth issuing from its clear, bright eyes. Ignorance of truth has so far been the cause of the down fan of man and his sorrow.
A minor poem that treats of the rationalistic mind as deductive of love is A Littler Girl Lost. It laments the passing away of the Golden Age when love was the natural religion of the soul and meant the union of two hearts or spirits. It meant a spiritual mingling between two persons. Now, however an element of inhibition has entered it with fee growing sophistications of life. Consequently it appears to be crime when tested with reference to the adults.
However, the most striking poem of Songs of experience and one truly representative of Blake as a poet in The Tiger, as poem of perfect beauty of form and melody, impregnated with profound symbolism of the theme stressed by Blake’s spelling of tiger as tyger.
At its simplest interpretation, the poem reflects on the idea that, in addition to peacefulness and gentleness, it conveys a fierce strength that is both terrifying in its destructive nature and awe-inspiring as a remarkable aspect of creation. It also seems to challenge the perception of a benevolent Creator. Recognizing that the tiger's ferocity and the lamb's gentleness symbolize contrasting aspects of the human mind is only a slight extension beyond the literal meaning. The theme is a common place and also a fact of supreme human importance. The focus of sharp psychological conflict in individual minds and of unending theological and philosophical
discussion. What this fine poem does is to let us contemplate the facts in their emotional intensity and conflict, and to share his complex attitude of awe, terror, admiration, near bafflement, and attempted acceptance or reconciliation of the Lamb and the tiger (of the forgiveness and punishment of Evil).
The critics extended interpretations sacrifice Blake’s combination of a very general, complex meaning with a vivid phrase-embodied symbol. To understand Blake as a poet rather than merely a teacher of parables, it is crucial to recognize that he conveys nature’s fierceness not just through the symbolic figure of a tiger but through the specific language used to describe it. For instance, the word burning carries significant ambiguity: while it may primarily refer to the tiger’s two burning eyes in the darkness (as suggested in the second stanza), it also transforms the entire tiger into a symbol of a burning quality— perhaps wrath, passion, or ardor. However, the word bright further modifies this idea, suggesting incandescence or white heat while also evoking light, glory, and radiance. Understanding how Blake’s symbolic language generates deep associations, strong emotions, and various interpretations is essential.
Similarly extended interpretation along a well-defined line of thought raises doubts and conflicting opinions. Take, for instance, the fifth stanza of the poem. The words evoke a wide range of subtle echoes and indirect allusions in the mind. Blake questions whether the Creator smiled in satisfaction at His creation, even though its ferocious strength was so striking that even the stars, once armed and formidable (their steely glitter suggesting spears), abandoned their might and wept. Critics have expanded on this idea extensively. Gardener, for instance, interprets the stars as symbols of material power that relinquish their instruments of conflict and embrace pity, transforming the Creator into the God of Innocence, who smiles upon the triumph of the Lamb. He further explains that the stanza about the Lamb is the only one in which not only the tiger—representing wrath and rebellion—is brought into harmony, but also the entire universe of stars and power. In this vision, the tiger lies down with the lamb. Wrestled goes further. He thinks the theme is the carnation of the stars symbolising ‘the hard cold realm of Reason and war, that held the earth before compassion came with Christ. At the end of his long commentary’, after the convincing suggestion that the tiger is nothingless indeed than the Divine speak, the fierce struggling individuality. He concludes, ‘And yet when we ask ourselves, is it good to be alive and bum with quenchless desire, with love half realised and with purpose even superfectly fulfilled’ the incarnate heart of Deity in ourselves responds, with the smile of daybreak, that the spirits which discern and divide and conted in labour and agony are but glimpses of the Great Light that shall unite and heal in strength and tenderness and joy.
But this criticism is untenable firstly because that imparts into the poem intellectual meanings that are two remotely and indirectly derived from the words, if they can claim to derive from them at all, and secondly that the parish-magazine equality of sentiment it expresses is totally foreign to the strength of the state of mind Blake makes us to share.
The vivid imagery in the poem speaks for itself, immediately creating a powerful and overwhelming sense of a formidable force lurking in the darkness, compelling us to confront profound questions about life. Just as The Lamb in Songs of Innocence raises inquiries about gentleness and purity, The Tyger in Songs of Experience poses even more unsettling questions. The lamb and the tiger symbolize two distinct states of the human soul: when innocence is shattered by experience, the tiger’s strength becomes necessary to restore balance in the world. While limited minds may appreciate the gentleness of the lamb, they often struggle to accept the fierce, untamed aspect of existence that the tiger represents.
After this detailed discussion of the poems prescribed, let us now turn to Blake’s symbolism.

4.3.5    Blake and Symbolism
The term symbolism originates from the Latin symbolous or symbolism, meaning a sign through which something is recognized or inferred. Symbols serve as representations that express the invisible using visible or sensory forms. For example, to a Christian, the cross symbolizes salvation due to its connection with Christ’s crucifixion. Similarly, the circle represents eternity to many, as it has neither a beginning nor an end, much like the concept of infinity. Symbols function as a way to recall spiritual ideas through associations of meaning. Blake lived in his own world of visions spiritual visions, which were unintelligible and inexplicable in the ordinary, everyday language of the mortals. He, therefore, had to get together visible symbols of invisible realities that he saw through his strange vision. Thus, through his concrete and understandable symbols Blake presents the Reality behind the appearance of Nature. The symbols employed by hint may be very simple (as in The Clod and the pebble, where the clod represents selflessness and the pebble selfishness).Often the symbols are obscure and enigmatic. Mostly the objects of nature such as the sun the moon, the stars, mountains, flowers etc. are imbued with spiritual meanings. On the whole his symbols kindle the imagination and arouse a curiosity for a world unknown. Blake also turns to the Bible for his symbols and he makes use of such familiar figures as The Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God, especially in the Songs of Innocence. In Songs of Experience the symbols are more abundant and complex and the poems are, thus, liable to more meanings than one (of The Tiger).But in both kinds of song Blake anticipates the poets of a hundred years hence who made their own symbols to express something almost inexpressible in the absence of adequate words for the unnamed powers of a supernatural world.
A symbol serves as a means of recalling the Divine Spirit (God) through the association of ideas, acting as a step toward the realization of the Absolute. For the spiritual seeker, this journey involves progressing from a lower stage to a higher one, with an ever-deepening awareness. In this process, both the soul and God are represented through different symbols, each carrying profound significance.
Commentators on Blake have consciously and unconsciously adopted very much the psycho-analytic method in interpreting further and further the possible implications of phrases, associations and symbols. They may use the traditional symbolic meaning attached to an idea or they may concentrate on Blake’s private symbolism. This method is carried to extreme lengths in the attempt to understand the long symbolic writings (the so-called prophetic books). In these books Blake’s communing with himself about problems of his own personality is on a vast literary scale. The personal issues with which he wrestled seemed to him to be also the salient problems of human life. They included questions of the proper place of intellectual control in the total economy of the personality. The place of impulse the relations between authority and
those it controls (and therefore between elders and children) the relations of the sexes the folly of moral generalities (one law for the lion and the ox) the poison of jealously, and the over wheeling importance of forgiveness.
The parallel between the prophetic books and Blake’s struggle to understand and harmonise features of his own personality is illustrated from the letters to Hayley of October 21, 1804, quoted by Sloss and Wallis and compared with passages of Jerusalem and The Four Zuas. Other passages in The Four Zoas and the opening pages of jerusalem refer to the same struggle with the “Spectre’ (by which Blake seems to have meant some-thing like dependence upon abstract, analytic reasoning). An early and unfinished symbolic book in Tiriel (composed 1789).
The causes of Blake’s relative failure in the prophetic books were multiple and can only he guessed at. The influence of Ossisa may have led him to rely too readily on the acceptability of an outlandish mythology. Boehme and Swedenborg suggested the possibility of new mystical and religious systems, and seemed to sanction extreme obscurity of utterance.
Above all stands the fact of Blake having had no adequate reading public like many who are unappreciated, he seems to have been divided between defiant justification of the obscurity of his work and the belief that people of unspoiled intelligence would find none. He wanted to be understood, but not at the cost of trimming down his meanings to the assimilative capacity of conventional minds. Blake represents a tremendous opportunity in English literature that was largely wasted owing to the reading public’s restricted capacities for response; and the combination of greatness and failure in his work is a reminder that a literature consists not of writers only but of their readers too.
And now a word about Blake’s handling of language, his extraordinary fine handling of language is a more distinctive feature of his poetry than either his vast mythopoeia, cosmologies or brief and clearsighted statements or basic psychological problems. His rhythms deserve special attention. In his best work they are at the same time forceful and supple, some based on ballad metres, some metrically free and influenced by the Bible, but all returning again and again to the rhythm of speech. Notice the style of folk rhyme (Double, double toil and trouble) in Blake’s poem about being dogged by his ‘Spectre’.
“He scents thy footsteps in the snow,
Where so ever thou dost go
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain,
When will thou return again?”
In the later stanzas of the poem is supple variety in what is deliberately repetitive and might have become mm + 10m
“Seven more loves weep night and day
Round the tombs where my loves lay,
And seven more loves attend each night,
Around my couch with torches bright,
My transgressions, great and small.”
In the short poems an outstanding quality is the immense compression of meaning, some times of a simple kind-as in the Marriage Hearse of London— and sometimes far more complex. A closely related feature of his writing, often a means of compression contrasting with the contemporary practice of his time, was the trust with which he launched himself into imagery and ideas that carried symbolic implications scarcely susceptible of reasoned exposition, and that gained their coherence and ordered effect through inexplicit associations and incompletely formulated reference:
“Never seek to tell thy love Love, that never told can be He took her with a sigh.”
Similarly, his lines to the God of the churches refer to the same characteristics;
“Why art thou silent and invisible.
Father of Jealousy?”
These lines have been interpreted differently by different critics. The fact of the matter, however, is that this poetry is obscure and its obscurity in T. S. Eliot’s words is due to die suppression of “links in the chain, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of Cryptogram”. “Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas,” he continues, “has nothing chaotic about it. There is logic of the imagination as well as logic of concepts”.
Blake can be seen suppressing expository links m a simple way in The Tiger. The exclamation now on its own as the end of a stanza-
“And when thy heart began to beat
what dread hand and what dread feet”
-was in the early draft the opening of a sentence that went on:
“Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep”
As Blake revised, the broken sentence seemed to convey the meaning far enough, besides preserving the full exclamatory force.
A more complex and extremely fine example of his method is provided by the “Introduction” to Songs of Experience and Earth’s Answer; which follows it.
All in all Blake’s handling of language is distinguished for skill and subtlety.
By way of summing up Blake we might remark that he anticipates Wordsworth and Coleridge in their simplicity of diction, and, communion with the earthly spirit; he anticipates Byron in his escape from conventional restraints and his democratic ideas; he anticipates Shelley in his urge of social reform and in his dream of a Millennium. He also anticipates Freud in his sex theories especially in modem times and his interchangeability of such terms as God and the Devil. Eminent modem interpreters such as W.M. Rosseti & W.B. Yeats have praised Blake’s greatness.
Blake was together a pictorial and a literary artist and his work is to be considered in conjunction with his illustrations. His drawings and poetry form an indivisible unit, each reinforcing and clarifying the other.
According to Carl Jung, the distinguished psychologist. Blake was an intuition introvert i.e. a man dominated by imagination and one construction an imaginative picture of reality from his own soul. He is never really talking about the outer world of the senses; all his mythology in an exclusive talk about the
violent forces warning within the individual human being. He made an unprecedented exploration of his own psyche (soul), and his process of self-analysis falls into three divisions:

(i)    First period (1789-93) when the conflict within his inner being was the duel between Inspiration and Reason.

(ii)    Secondly (1793-97) the conflict continues as the previous duel.

(iii)    Lastly (1797-1820) when the conflict broadens to become fourfold with four personified elementsInspiration, Reason, Limitation, and Senses-all warring with each other.
His profound probing of his own psyche, convince him of what kindred mystics proclaim- that the moral, governance of die universe is beyond good and evil. Thus, unlike Wordsworth, there is not much of an ethical element in Blake.
SELF-CHECK EXECISE-I
How many poems are there in “Songs of Experience’?

a. 12     b. 15
c.19      d. 13

4.5    SUMMARY
Songs of Experience is a poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The poems were published in 1794. Some of the poems, such as “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found”, were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence and were frequently moved between the two books.

4.6    GLOSSARY
Wand     :  a long, thin stick or rod
Hum      :  make a low, steady continuous sound like that of a bee.
Beguile    :  charm or enchant (someone), often in a deceptive way.

4.7    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK EXERCISE

A) 19

4.8    SUGGESTED READING
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake.
J. Bronowski, A man without a Mask.
S.F. Damon, William Blake : His philosophy and symbols.
N. Ptye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.

S. Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil: A critical Study of Blake’s Poetry.

D. Saurat, Blake and Modem Thought.
William Blake, Twentieth Century Views.

4.9 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Write a short note about symbolism in Blake’s poetry.

2.    Give the theme of “Chimney Sweeper”.
UNIT-5 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: INTRODUCTION
STRUCTURE

5.1    INTRODUCTION

5.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

5.3    ABOUT THE POET
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

5.4    SUMMARY

5.5    GLOSSARY

5.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

5.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

5.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

5.1    INTRODUCTION
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one of its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.

5.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about William Wordsworth’s life and works.

5.3    ABOUT THE POET
The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
Wordsworth’s Life (1770-1850)Wordsworth’s life may be divided into four periods:

(1)    His Childhood and Youth in the Cumberland Hills (1770–1787)
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, as the second son of John Wordsworth, an attorney. He spent much of his early years among the shepherds of his native countryside, and these formative surroundings had a profound impact on him. The simple, unsophisticated lives of the peasants, who embodied homely virtues, instilled in Wordsworth a deep faith in humanity and a reverence for life's fundamental elements. The natural world, with its hills, flowers, and stars, fascinated him.
Wordsworth’s mother passed away in 1778, and soon after, he was sent to the ancient Grammar School of Hawkshead. Five years later, his father also died, and the children were placed under the guardianship of two uncles. During his time at Hawkshead, in the picturesque Lake District, Wordsworth learned more from nature than from his books. His poem The Prelude expresses his early love for nature, revealing three key
insights: (i) Wordsworth found solace and never felt lonely in nature, (ii) he believed in the presence of a living spirit in nature, though unseen, and (iii) his connection to nature was deeply familiar and comforting.
The Second Period of Wordsworth’s Life: Uncertainty, Storm, and Stress (1787–1797)
The second phase of Wordsworth’s life, from 1787 to 1797, was marked by uncertainty, turbulence, and personal growth, including his time at Cambridge, travels abroad, and revolutionary experiences. After joining St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge in 1787, Wordsworth had already developed a passion for poetry. He composed Evening Walk in 1789, and The Prelude’s third book offers a realistic portrayal of his college life. Wordsworth earned his B.A. degree in 1791. During 1790 and 1791-92, he visited France, where he briefly became an ardent supporter of the French Revolution. However, the Revolution's excesses disillusioned him, and he lost his faith in immediate social change. During this turbulent period, Wordsworth found guidance in William Godwin, whose Political Justice (1793) provided a rational and clear perspective, helping Wordsworth regain some intellectual stability after his emotional idealism was shaken.
For two years since his return from France, Wordsworth had led a wandering life making no efforts to find for himself a provision. The death of a friend (Raisley Calvert) who left him a legacy of nine hundred pounds made him so independent that he settled himself with his sister Dorothy and devoted himself entirely to poetry. His friendship with Coleridge, which began in 1796 did much to stimulate his genius. In “The Prelude”, Wordsworth traces the recovery of his moral and polemical health to the influence, first of his sister and secondly of Coleridge. It was while these “three persons and one soul” were living close together in Somerset that the Lyrical Ballads were conceived and composed.
During the third period of his life (1797- 1808) Wordsworth produced his best work. Dorothy who had been his childhood companion, a devoted friend and confidant perhaps gave a largest share of inspiration which resulted in the Lyrical Ballads. Meeting with Coleridge also took place in the same year. Coleridge’s influence on Wordsworth was in the first place intellectual, and it showed to Wordsworth another road to travel than the Godwinian one. Coleridge’s soaring-fancies made an alliance with Wordsworth’s deep-rooted faith in Nature and in common experience. Coleridge has written in the chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria that, his share in the Lyrical Ballads was to illustrate the naturalness of the supernatural meanings, and the inner spirituality of actions and incidents which were most natural. The whole spirit of the Lyrical Ballads is reflected in two poems, “The Ancient Mariner” which is Coleridge’s masterpiece, and “Tintern Abbey” which expresses Wordsworth’s creed and which is one of the noblest poems in English. After the publication of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy set sail for Germany. On his return from Germany, he and his sister went to live in Grassere: in the lake district,
where his earliest impressions had been gathered, there they spent rest of their lives except for occasional tours to Scotland and to the continent.
In 1802, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. Though, it was a happy union, yet it was not a remarkable event in the imaginative life of the poet. No doubt she made herself a good wife and an interesting companion, but her influence cannot rank either with his sister Dorothy or with Coleridge. By this time Wordsworth finished “The Prelude”. It is the spiritual autobiography of the poet from the earliest childhood down to the date 1797 at which he took the resolution of devoting himself wholly to poetry. In 1802-3, Wordsworth’s political interest revived and he wrote a series of political sonnets. In this year, the peace of Amiens was concluded with France which was welcomed by liberal sympathizers; but disillusionment was soon to follow. It became clear that what had begun as a movement of liberation was ending in a personal despotism. Wordsworth attacked it from the stand point of the old guard of liberal idealist; It was during this period the “Ode to Duty”, and the immoral “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” were printed.
The Fourth period of Wordsworth’s life is a long period of his retirement in the Northern Lake Region where he was born, and where for half a century he lived so close to nature that her influence is reflected in all his poetry. This was a period in which Wordsworth’s life saw a decline in his poetic powers. By 1807, in fact, his best work was done. In 1805, the death of his brother John Wordsworth had affected his temperament deeply and he went back to religious orthodoxy. In 1815 was published the first collective edition of Wordsworth’s works. In 1822 the Ecclesiastical Sonnets and the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent were published. After 1835, Wordsworth published nothing new in poetry
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.    What is the subtitle of Wordsworth Prelude?

5.3    SUMMARY
In this unit we learnt about Wordsworth his life and his endeavors towards starting a new kind of poetic style based on nature and natural scenes around him.

5.4    GLOSSARY
Unsophisticated- lacking refined worldly knowledge or tastes.
Reverence- deep respect for someone or something.
Prelude- an action or event serving as an introduction to something more important.
Fervent- having or displaying a passionate intensity.
Polemical- expressing or constituting a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something.
Soaring- flying or rising high in the air.

5.5    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE
“Growth of a poet’s mind.”

5.6    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry by Jonathan Wordsworth.

5.7    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    What are the four periods in the life of William Wordsworth?
UNIT-6 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: TINTERN ABBEY
STRUCTURE

6.1    INTRODUCTION

6.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

6.3    TINTERN ABBEY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

6.4    SUMMARY

6.5    GLOSSARY

6.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

6.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

6.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

6.1    INTRODUCTION
"Tintern Abbey" was written in July 1798, five years after Wordsworth's initial visit to the banks of the
Wye in 1793. This visit occurred a year after his return from France, a period when his mind was in a state of
intellectual and emotional unrest. It was likely during this time that Wordsworth fully recognized the deep connection between natural beauty and his poetic inspiration, shaping the foundation of his philosophy.
The poem was included in Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, and is regarded as a profound reflective piece. It captures Wordsworth’s shifting moods over time, conveyed through blank verse that flows with a natural, assured rhythm. Written during a period of intense creative energy, it stands as a lyrical meditation on the theme of Nature.
"Tintern Abbey" presents Wordsworth’s complete philosophy of Nature, outlining different stages of development: the carefree and instinctive connection with Nature in childhood, the passionate and sensuous appreciation of youth, and finally, the "serene and blessed mood" of maturity, where one transcends physical existence to become a "living soul." In his younger years, Wordsworth’s love for Nature was impulsive and emotional, but through witnessing human suffering, his connection deepened into a spiritual understanding. He now perceives a divine presence in all aspects of Nature and views it as a mother, guardian, guide, and moral teacher. The poem concludes with an affectionate address to his sister Dorothy, urging her to nurture a deep and lasting bond with Nature.

6.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will go through the poem Tintern Abbey, its development of thought and its critical appreciation.

6.3    LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798
“FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain- springs With a soft inland murmur. — Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard- tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:— feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, is lightened:— that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of jobless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hang upon the beatings of my heart — How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me wassail in all. — I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Paint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense, For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue, and I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And soils through all things. Therefore am I still A lever of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead’ From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall ever prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance – If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence - wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say
With winner love - oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!”
[Date of composition: 1798. Source of text: William Wordsworth, 1888 edition of Complete Poetical

A.    Development of Thought:
"Tintern Abbey" can be analyzed in three distinct sections:

1.    Description of the Landscape (Lines 1–22)

2.    Development of the Poet’s View of Nature (Lines 23–113)

3.    Address to His Sister Dorothy (From Line 114 Onward)
The opening lines vividly portray the natural scenery revisited by the poet—the flowing waters from mountain springs, the towering cliffs, the small cottage plots, and the hedgerows. These lines highlight Wordsworth’s keen observation and deep sensitivity to Nature. Reading his descriptions feels akin to experiencing the landscape firsthand.
The second section explores the evolution of Wordsworth’s perception of Nature and its role in his life. He reflects on how the memory of this landscape has provided him with immense joy and has inspired kindness and compassion. Whenever he felt burdened by life’s struggles, recalling this natural beauty brought him solace. He sees Nature as a source of healing for a troubled mind.
Wordsworth then contrasts his youthful love for Nature with his mature understanding. As a child, his connection with Nature was passionate and physical, driven by sensory pleasure. However, through witnessing human suffering—what he calls "the still, sad music of humanity"—his appreciation of Nature has deepened into a spiritual connection. He now perceives a divine presence within Nature, embracing pantheism—the belief that a divine spirit permeates all aspects of the natural world. To him, Nature is not only a source of beauty but also a moral guide, a guardian, and the foundation of his spiritual and ethical being.
In the final section, Wordsworth expresses heartfelt admiration for his sister Dorothy, urging her to immerse herself in Nature’s influence. He believes that Nature refines, uplifts, and nurtures the human spirit, leading one from joy to joy. He reassures her that "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." He encourages her to embrace Nature’s elements—the breeze on her cheek, the moonlight on her brow—just as he has. As a devoted worshipper of Nature, he advises Dorothy to cultivate a deep connection with it, believing that these experiences will provide comfort during life’s hardships. Ultimately, he affirms his faith in Nature’s ability to educate and elevate the human soul.

B.    Critical Appreciation
“Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem. These poems contain Wordsworth’s faith and is a statement of his Nature philosophy in a highly lyrical verse.
The poem can be divided into three sections. First, Wordsworth provides a vivid description of the landscape he revisits, capturing the flowing waters from their mountain springs, the steep and towering cliffs, the green fields with unripe fruits, the hedge-rows, and the rising columns of smoke
among the trees. His keen observation brings the beauty of the natural world to life. In the second section, he reflects on the profound impact this scene has had on him. Whenever he felt burdened by the "fretful stir and fever of the world," recalling this landscape provided him with solace and joy. Wordsworth believes that Nature possesses a healing power that soothes troubled minds and restores inner peace. The third section is addressed to his sister Dorothy, where he contrasts his youthful and mature perspectives on Nature. As a child, his love for Nature was purely physical, based on sensory pleasure. However, having witnessed human suffering, he has become more reflective and now perceives a Divine Spirit within Nature, embracing a pantheistic belief. He emphasizes Nature’s moral influence, seeing it as a teacher, guide, and source of spiritual elevation. In the final stanza, he advises Dorothy to fully embrace Nature’s influence, as it has a purifying and uplifting effect on the human soul. The poem, written in a meditative tone, exudes a deep sense of calm and joy. Wordsworth emerges as a priest of Nature or a devoted worshipper of Nature, revealing the profound beauty of the natural world. With its reminiscent quality, the poem highlights how memories of Nature sustain and uplift the human spirit. This poem is full of Wordsworth’s beautiful and highly expressive phrases like “We see into the life of things the fever of the world”, “the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion”, “aching joys and dizzy raptures. “The still and sad music of humanity” “the shooting lights of the vivid eyes”, “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her”, etc. The blank verse of the- poem is majestic. The sublimity of the verse suits the loftiness of the theme. In the words of Bernard Groom: “Tintern Abbey remains a landmark in literature. The worldmusic alone would give it the highest distinction. Drawn from the depth of the poet’s experience, independent of any literary most, flowing spontaneously, and obedient to the demands of a passionate, it places its author among the few great masters of blank verse.”
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.    What is the second part of the poem “Tintern Abbey” about?

2.    How does poet look at nature?

6.4    SUMMARY
The poem Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, commonly referred to as Tintern Abbey, was written in 1798 by William Wordsworth, the father of Romanticism. It is regarded as one of his greatest poetic achievements and can be seen as a condensed spiritual autobiography. The poem explores the poet’s personal experiences and traces the evolution of his mind through different stages of life. The central theme revolves around Nature and its profound influence on him as a child, a young man, and a mature adult. Wordsworth expresses deep affection for Nature and its role in shaping his thoughts and emotions.
In the poem, he recalls his first visit to Tintern Abbey in 1793 and reflects on his second visit to the same place. Throughout, he conveys his unwavering faith in Nature, which he perceives as a manifestation of the divine. Initially, he experiences a sensuous delight in its beauty, but over time, his understanding deepens into a spiritual connection. The landscape of Tintern Abbey, with its towering cliffs, cottage plots, orchards, groves, and wooded areas, leaves a lasting impression on him. He finds joy in seeing the hedgerows, playful woods, pastoral farms, and green doors once again. The solitude of this place, along with the riverbanks and rolling waters from mountain springs, presents a breathtaking and serene view. The tranquil setting also reminds him of wandering dwellers and secluded hermits, further emphasizing the spiritual and reflective tone of the poem.

6.5    Glossary
Vivid- producing powerful feelings or strong, clear images in the mind.
Hedge- a fence or boundary formed by closely growing bushes or shrubs.
Appetite- a hunger or craving for something.
Ennobling- dignity; honor.
Elevating- raise or lift (something) to a higher position.
Intimacy- close familiarity or friendship.
Fretful- feeling or expressing distress or irritation.
Staggering- deeply shocking; astonishing.
Pantheistic- showing or holding a belief in many or all gods, or the belief that God exists in, and is the same as, all things, animals, and people within the universe.
Pedestal- the base or support on which a statue, obelisk or column is mounted.
Reminiscent- suggesting something by resemblance.
Raptures- a feeling of intense pleasure or joy.
Sublimity- something is very beautiful, noble, or excellent.

6.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

1.    The second part of the poem traces the growth of the poet’s mental and emotional attitude towards nature.

2.    He looks upon Nature as a healing influence on a troubled mind.

6.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry by Jonathan Wordsworth.

6.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Describe Wordsworth’s pantheism?
UNIT-7 ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
STRUCTURE

7.1    INTRODUCTION

7.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

7.3    ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

7.4    SUMMARY

7.5    GLOSSARY

7.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

7.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

7.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

7.1    INTRODUCTION
This Ode was composed in two parts, with sections written in 1803 and completed in 1806. The poem explores the theme of the soul’s immortality, a concept that is strongly felt in childhood but gradually fades as one grows older. According to Wordsworth, a child's sense of immortality arises from memories of a preexisting life in heaven before birth, which serves as the foundation of the poem. The poem’s extended title explicitly conveys this idea, suggesting that our understanding of the soul’s eternal nature is rooted in recollections of a heavenly existence. While the validity of Wordsworth’s theory is debated, the poem is widely considered a masterpiece of philosophical and metaphysical poetry.
The poem draws from Wordsworth’s personal experiences. As a child, he could not conceive that the human soul could die. He was certain that after death, he would go to heaven. With this firm belief, he often found it difficult to accept the external reality of the world around him. Many times, while walking to school, he would need to grasp a tree or a wall to pull himself out of his dreamy reverie and reconnect with reality. This reflects Plato’s idea, as he regarded the physical world of senses as unreal, merely an imitation of the true, unchanging world of forms.
The central idea of the poem is that the soul exists in heaven before coming into this world. Wordsworth's belief in a pre-existent state aligns with similar concepts found in many religions.

7.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will discuss the form of the ode and later analyze the poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”.

7.3    ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF
EARLY CHILDHOOD
“The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up")
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;— Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning, And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm: —
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind, And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art
A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: — Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

A.    Before discussing this Ode let us understand what an Ode is-
The Ode is a form of poetry. It is Greek in origin. It was first written by Pindar. The regular Greek Ode-or Pindaric Ode consists of three stanzas named strophe, anti-strophe, and epode this unit being repeated until the poem is complete. The pattern of the Pindaric Ode is very complex. Another Roman poet Horace, originated another variety of classical Ode. The Horatian Ode uses a particular stanza throughout and there is no intricacy in this form of Ode.
Although both the Pindaric and Horatian Odes have been written in English, yet most of the English writers of Odes have ignored the patterns of Pindar and Horace and their Odes show a complete liberty of line, rhyme and stanza. In fact, any poem expressing strong emotion and following unsystematic rhyme, rhythm and metre may be called an Ode. Under the control of gemus this kind of irregular Ode has resulted
in some of the finest poems in English. Wordsworth’s “Ode on the Intimation of Immorality” is an example of this kind of irregular Ode in which the poet follows an unsystematic rhyme, rhythm and stanza. The regular Odes in English, like Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty”, “Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” follow the same stanta throughout without any variation.
The ode may be employed for the expression of enthusiasm, of passion under control, of deep and highly imaginative reflection, praise, or sadness etc. An Ode has usually a single but dignified, theme and is therefore of a serious character. It is generally written in the form of address or apostrophe. For example, Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” or Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. Ode is a sub-division of the lyric so it is lyrical in essence. It may be personal in inspiration as “Ode to a Nightingale” or it may be purely impersonal like Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”.
“IMMORTALITY ODE”

B.    Summary of the poem:
This poem expresses the doctrine of reminiscence and the belief in the immortality of the soul. According to this idea, a child retains memories of the heavenly life he experienced before birth, which is why he is surrounded by a divine glow. When a child looks at Nature, he perceives it through a dream-like splendor, but as he matures, the influence of the world causes these memories to fade until they eventually disappear.
While a child remembers his pre-existence in heaven, an adult has no such recollection. This makes the child superior in a spiritual sense, elevating him to the status of a prophet, a seer, and a philosopher. However, even in adulthood, certain moments can bring glimpses or revelations of immortality. As one grows older, the radiant light once seen in Nature as a child diminishes, but maturity offers its own rewards. With age comes a deeper faith in life after death and a philosophical outlook shaped by an awareness of human suffering. This maturity allows for "soothing thoughts" that bring wisdom and understanding. In this reflective state, even the simplest flower can evoke emotions so profound that they transcend expression, surpassing even the ability to shed tears.

C.    Critical Appreciation:
Wordsworth composed this remarkable poem at the peak of his creative brilliance, during the golden decade between 1797 and 1807. He began writing it in the spring of 1802 and completed it two to four years later. However, the delay in its completion did not affect its unity. Structurally, the poem follows a simple yet grand design and takes the form of an irregular ode. The first four stanzas depict the poet’s spiritual crisis, expressing a sense of lost glory and questioning why it has faded. The middle section, covering stanzas five
to eight, explores the nature of this lost glory and introduces the doctrine of prenatal existence. The final three stanzas provide resolution, suggesting that despite the fading of divine splendor, life still holds meaning and value. The Ode can thus be divided into three parts: the first addressing the crisis, the second offering explanations, and the third providing consolation.
The poem is rooted in the metaphysical belief in the immortality of the soul, which Wordsworth associates with childhood memories. However, he does not claim this doctrine of reminiscence to be an absolute truth but rather presents it as an idea with a strong foundation in human experience. In the poem, he refers to the child as a “mighty prophet,” “super blest,” and “best philosopher.” While these descriptions may be justified in terms of the innocence and purity of childhood, they are less convincing when applied to the child’s supposed spiritual insight and prophetic abilities—a point of criticism even raised by Coleridge.
Wordsworth insightfully captures the psychology of childhood, portraying the child as an imitator who enacts various roles and replicates the actions and gestures of those around him. The poem also carries autobiographical elements, reflecting Wordsworth’s own experiences. As a child, he perceived a divine radiance in the natural world—meadows, groves, and streams all seemed bathed in a heavenly glow. Even then, he occasionally questioned the reality of this world. However, upon reaching maturity, he realizes that the dreamlike splendor he once saw in Nature has faded. Despite this loss, he finds solace in new sources of fulfillment. He chooses not to mourn the disappearance of childhood’s divine vision but instead embraces the compensations of maturity: (i) a deepened sympathy for human suffering, (ii) a stronger faith in life after death, and (iii) a sense of responsibility that has come with personal growth and experience.
Wordsworth’s great power of image making can be seen in this poem. He gives vivid pictures of the rainbow, the rose, the moon shining in a cloudless sky, the star-light falling on waters, children collecting fresh flowers, the babe leaping on his mother’s arms etc.
This ode clearly highlights the contrast between Wordsworth's love for Nature as a child and the deeper, more spiritual love he developed as an adult. As a child, his connection with Nature was rooted in its ability to provide him with pure, intoxicating joy, a kind of spontaneous delight in its beauty. However, as he grew older and experienced the complexities of life, including human suffering, his love for Nature evolved into something more profound. As an adult, his connection with Nature became meditative, sober, and reflective. He no longer sought only joy from it but began to see it as a source of solace and wisdom, contemplating its deeper significance in relation to human experience. This Ode is written in an exceptionally elevated tone, with its dignified metrical structure complemented by an equally grand use of language. Wordsworth considered the subject so significant that he approached it in a manner that was uncommon for him, adopting a more formal and exalted style to convey its depth
and importance. Wordsworth has used many rhythmic and effective phrases, for example “the glory and freshness of a dream”, “shades of the prison house”, “Our, birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”, “the light of common day”, “thoughts too deep for tears”. In facts the words used for expressing thoughts and emotions in this poem are very appropriate. The grandeur of language befits the grandeur of theme. There is perfect harmony between thought and expression. The poet has not made use of the artificial and stale language of eighteenth century.
No doubt the poem contains a metaphysical doctrine, but there is a deep and sincere personal emotion which imparts it a lyrical character. This poem is a happy blending of thought and exaction; of doctrine and poetry; of meditation and melody.
The poet has expressed a moral view in this poem. He refers to the human suffering which he has witnessed and the sympathy which he feels for his fellow human beings. The poem which began with a sense of loss and a feeling of grief ends with calm reflection and a sense of gain.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE- I
The life period of William Wordsworth is

1.    1770-1850

2.    1807 -1882

3.    1836 -1907

4.    1840 -1928

7.4    SUMMARY
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"—also referred to as "Ode," "Immortality Ode," or "Great Ode"—is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was written in two stages, with the first four stanzas composed in 1802 as part of a series of poems about childhood. The initial section was completed on March 27, 1802, and shared with Wordsworth’s close friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In response, Coleridge wrote his own poem, "Dejection: An Ode," in April of the same year. The fourth stanza of Wordsworth’s Ode ends with a question, which he was able to address in early 1804 by adding seven more stanzas. Initially published under the title "Ode" in 1807, the poem underwent revisions and was formally titled "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" in 1815, becoming the well-known version recognized today.

7.5    GLOSSARY
Ode:          An ode is a type of lyrical stanza. It is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying
and event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode.
Ballad:      The ballad is a poem that is typically arranged in quatrains with the rhyme scheme ABAB.
Ballads are usually narrative, which means they tell a story. Ballads began as folk songs and continue to be used today in modem music.
Rhyme:   A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, exactly the same sound) in the final
stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words.

7.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

A) 1770-1850

7.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry by Jonathan Wordsworth.

7.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Define Ode.

2.    Critically appreciate “Immorality Ode”.
***
Unit 8 S.T. COLERIDGE: INTRODUCTIONSTRUCTURE

8.1    INTRODUCTION

8.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

8.3    ABOUT THE POET
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

8.4    SUMMARY

8.5    GLOSSARY

8.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

8.7 REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

8.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

8.1    INTRODUCTION
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. As a founding member of the Lake Poets, he was closely associated with his friend William Wordsworth. In addition to his collaborations with Wordsworth, Coleridge also worked with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd, exchanging volumes and engaging in literary partnerships with them.

8.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit you will learn about Coleridge’s life and works.

8.3    ABOUT THE POET
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, alongside his close friend William Wordsworth, co-founded the Romantic Movement in England and was a key figure in the Lake Poets group. Coleridge collaborated and exchanged ideas with prominent figures like Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He is best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his influential prose work Biographia Literaria. Coleridge's literary criticism, particularly his insights on William Shakespeare, had a significant impact, and he played a crucial role in introducing German idealist philosophy to English-speaking audiences. Furthermore, Coleridge is credited with coining several well-
known terms and phrases, such as "suspension of disbelief." His work deeply influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and contributed to the development of American transcendentalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge possessed one of the most extraordinary intellects of his generation. In his mental explorations he touched nearly every shore of light. He pioneered the fields of metaphysics, politics, religion and profoundly influenced his epoch by great, original poetry. He was endowed with an acute susceptibility to sense- impressions, a tenacious memory and unique kind of detached and delicate visionaries. It was from a combination of these faculties under the stimulus of opium that the most strikingly original creation of his genius was produced.
Coleridge was a poet and philosopher by calling and, largely by circumstance, “a journalist, preacher, lecturer and playwright. His main work to transform the mechanistic psychology of the 18th century to initiates a reaction against it. He set out to explore the unconscious workings of the mind- “the terra incognita of our nature” for poetry. More than any other of the English Romantics, he brought about the revolution in literary thought that consists in regarding the imagination to the sovereign creative power, expressing the growth of a whole personality.
Early verse of Coleridge was nourished on dreams of love, revolutionary Zealand the abstractions of metaphysics and theology. The rarest magic of the wonder years 1797-1800 is to be found in the ‘Rime of the ‘Ancient Mariner: ‘Christabel,’ and ‘Kubla Khan’-- three poems sufficient in themselves to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. Many features of strangeness and wonder were drawn from the poet’s capacious memory, abundantly stocked with manner of miraculous things gathered from his omnivorous reading. Professor Lower has brilliantly demonstrated in The Road Xandu Coleridge’s fabulous coverage of scientific and pseudo-scientific lore and travel literature. He has shown also in his book how Coleridge’s memory tenaciously fastened upon numberless details, and how from the poets subconscious mind a thousand ideas and images welled up and how memory after memory was controlled and directed by the stimulating mind and active imagination supernaturalism to shape the poem.
Coleridge is fundamentally a poet of imagination, and his genius is most evident in his ability to render the supernatural with an air of reality. Discussing his choice of supernatural themes for Lyrical Ballads, he explained: "It was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith."
There is no doubt that Lyrical Ballads was a collaborative effort between Wordsworth and Coleridge, built upon their shared vision of poetry while recognizing their differing creative approaches. Coleridge focused
on supernatural and romantic themes, while Wordsworth sought to infuse the ordinary with a sense of wonder, using novelty to awaken the mind from the dullness of routine and reveal the extraordinary beauty of the world.
Although Coleridge was not the first poet to explore supernaturalism, his approach was distinct from that of the Gothic novelists of the 18th century—such as Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and William Beckford—who often depicted the supernatural in gruesome and terrifying ways. Instead, Coleridge refined the genre, evoking a sense of mystery rather than sheer horror. His mastery lay in skillfully blending the natural and supernatural, making the latter feel credible while symbolizing the deeper mysteries of life. He also excelled in creating the perfect atmosphere for his supernatural elements to unfold. Drawing inspiration from the Middle Ages—a treasure trove of legends—his works feature medieval elements such as ancient castles, feudal lords, superstition, and an aura of mystery and terror. Ultimately, Coleridge’s greatest contribution to English Romanticism was his imaginative revival of the eerie and enchanting spirit of the medieval world.
Coleridge's imaginative power reached its peak when he escaped from the harshness of reality into the mystical realm of dreams. It was from these dreams that he created some of his most famous works, including Kubla Khan, Christabel, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. F.L. Lucas, in his book The Decline and Fall of Romantic Ideal, quotes Coleridge as saying that he longed to live forever in a dream world, much like the Indian deity Vishnu, who sleeps on a lotus flower in the sea of milk and awakens only after a thousand years, only to fall back into slumber again. This dream-like faculty was indeed the source of Coleridge’s greatest strength as a poet, allowing him to craft deeply imaginative and mystical works. However, it could also be seen as a source of his personal weakness, for his reliance on the dream world often kept him detached from the practicalities of life, hindering him as a man.
Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Literature comments on the skill of writing of Coleridge in the following words: “A poet cannot write the poetry he wants to write but only the poetry that is within him. Within Coleridge there was a strange territory of memory and dreams, of strange birds, phantom ships, Arcticseas, caverns, the sound of unearthly instruments and of haunted figures, flitting across a scene where magic reigned in a world beyond the control of reason. Some have sought for a moral in “The Ancient Mariner’ and for such as must have been there props, Coleridge attached a lesson at the end of the narrative, but the poem itself is like Arabian Tale where all move in a weird and unexpected sequence. ‘Kubla Khan’ though sometimes judged as a fragment is best considered as a complete poem, and almost as a definition of Coleride’s poetry. It presents a number of sensuous images; the bright-gardens, the incense of bearing trees laden with sweet blossoms, the sunny spots of greenery, a woman waiting for her demon lover, the
dream of the Abyssinian maid playing on a dulcimer and singing a sweet song. References to distant lands and far-off strange places emphasize the romantic character of this poem. Xanadu, Alph, Mount Abora belong to the geography of romance and contribute to the romantic atmosphere.
‘Frost at Midnight’ is one of the finest short poems in the language. It is much loved and appreciated but it is doubtful whether it is considered as a perfect piece of art which it is. It clearly shows that meditative and reflective quality which marks so many of Coleridge’s poems. It contains a compact expression of Coleridge’s creed of Nature and shows the influence of Wordsworth in shaping Coleridge’s attitude to nature. Under Wordsworth’s influence Coleridge began to believe in the Divine Spirit behind the object of Nature as also in the moral significance and die educative value of nature exhibiting his pantheism in full splendor.
Another significant poem, Dejection: An Ode, serves as a poignant lament on the decline of Coleridge’s creative imagination. It expresses deep sorrow over his spiritual and moral deterioration. As a highly personal and autobiographical work, the ode reflects his mental state at the time and marks a profound shift in his life.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I
Who are Lake poets?

8.4    SUMMARY
Throughout his career as a poet, social critic, literary critic, psychologist, theologian, and other professions, Coleridge had a deep interest in clarifying a basic creative principle that is relevant to all living things, including humans. Coleridge saw imagination as the paradigm of this unifying power, as the mechanism that reconciles the dual human capacities of organizing and differentiating intellect about the material world and intuitive, non-rational understanding. In his own poetry and criticism, Coleridge made a valiant effort to reconcile a sharp perception of the particular and sensory with a feeling of the universal and ideal through this kind of reconciliation of opposites.

8.5    GLOSSARY
Splendor- very impressive beauty
Supernaturalism- the quality or state of being supernatural, or a belief in a supernatural power and order of existence. It can also refer to the belief in an otherworldly realm or reality that is often associated with religion
Transcendentalism- It can be understood in two key contexts:

1.    As an idealistic philosophical and social movement that emerged in New England around 1836 as a reaction against rationalism. Influenced by Romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it emphasized the belief that divinity exists within both nature and humanity. Transcendentalists also advocated for progressive ideals, including feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among its most influential figures.

2.    As a philosophical system developed by Immanuel Kant, which posits that understanding reality requires first examining the reasoning process that shapes human experience. This approach focuses on how the mind perceives and interprets the world rather than accepting reality as an objective truth.

8.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE
The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

8.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (1971),
Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1972)
Katharine Cooke, Coleridge (1979)
K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind In Coleridge’s Poetry (1981)

8.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS
Write a brief note on Coleridge and his works.
Unit-9 Coleridge: Kubla Khan
STRUCTURE

9.1    INTRODUCTION

9.2 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

9.3    KUBLA KHAN: TEXT AND SUMMARY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

9.4    SUMMARY

9.5    GLOSSARY

9.6    ANSWERS TO SEL F CHECK EXERCISE

9.7    SUGGESTED READING

9.8    TERMINALQUESTIONS

9.1    INTRODUCTION
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream in 1797, though it was not published until 1816. The poem has also appeared under the titles A Vision in a Dream and A Fragment. According to Coleridge’s preface, he composed it after experiencing an opium-induced dream inspired by his reading about Shangdu, the summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in China, established by Kublai Khan (Emperor Shizu of Yuan). Upon waking, he began transcribing the dream into poetry but was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock." As a result, the poem remained incomplete, falling short of its intended length of 200–300 lines.
Coleridge kept the poem private, sharing it only in personal readings with friends until 1816, when Lord Byron encouraged him to publish it. The poem’s style is notably different from his earlier works. The opening stanza describes Kublai Khan’s opulent pleasure dome, situated near a sacred river that originates from a powerful fountain. The second stanza shifts focus to the narrator’s response to the haunting song of an Abyssinian maid, whose melody captivates him but leaves him unable to act on its inspiration until he hears it again. The poem contrasts two forms of creative power—one that imposes itself upon nature and another that harmonizes with it. In the third and final stanza, the speaker recounts his vision of a woman playing a dulcimer. He suggests that if he could recreate her song, he would fill the pleasure dome with music, evoking a response from a hypothetical audience in a state of religious ecstasy.
Upon its publication, some of Coleridge’s contemporaries were skeptical of both the poem and his account of its creation. However, over time, Kubla Khan gained widespread recognition, and modern critics regard it as one of Coleridge’s three greatest poems, alongside The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Today, it is celebrated as a quintessential example of Romanticism in English poetry and frequently appears in literary anthologies. The original manuscript is permanently displayed at the British Library in London.

9.2    Learning Objectives
We will get acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan in this chapter.

9.3    Kubla Khan: SummaryA Vision in a Dream
This fragment is published at the request of a highly esteemed poet and, from the author's perspective, is presented more as a psychological curiosity than for any assumed poetic excellence.
In the summer of 1797, while in poor health, the author retreated to a secluded farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the borders of Exmoor in Somerset and Devonshire. Due to a mild illness, he was prescribed an anodyne, which led him to fall asleep while reading a passage from Purchas’s Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto, and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall."
For approximately three hours, Coleridge remained in a deep sleep, at least in terms of external senses. During this time, he was convinced that he had composed between two and three hundred lines—if such a process could even be called composition, as the images appeared to him as tangible realities, accompanied by perfectly corresponding words, all without any conscious effort. Upon awakening, he felt he could clearly recall the entire vision and immediately took up his pen to write down the verses that have been preserved.
However, at that moment, he was unexpectedly interrupted by a visitor—a person on business from Porlock—who detained him for over an hour. Upon returning to his writing, he was dismayed to find that, aside from a few scattered lines and images, the rest of the poem had faded from his memory. Much like ripples on the surface of a stream after a stone has been cast into it, the vision had vanished, leaving no way to fully restore what was lost.
The entire Kubla Khan is an edifice of a dream, an emanation from a dream-socked imagination on procession of poetic images coloured in rainbow tints.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
Such beautiful and enchanting images but beyond possible human imagination could only exist in a dream. It will not be wrong to describe ‘Kubla Khan’ as a masterpiece of another, and, 1 think, far higher order, though ‘masterpiece’ is probably too conscious a word to describe rightly so unconscious a poem. There is no valid reason to doubt Coleridge’s own account of its composition. It is true that most of us, if we write anything in dreams, write unpublished doggerel. But take a man with as peculiarly associative a mind as Coleridge’s, a man with an adequate training in poetic technique, and a man in whom the sub-conscious was so-much less for below the threshold of consciousness than with most of us; put this man under opium, and there is no reason why the outcome should not be ‘Kubla Khan’ the most perfect of all records of dreamexperience, with the coherent incoherence of a dream. One may or may not admit it; it is fanciful; it is intangible; it has no relation to life as ordinary men and women live it; but none who is not deaf to the music of poetry, and blind to the images of poetic fancy, can deny that in its own kind it is beyond criticism; storing in one ml all the sorceries of ‘Romanticism’, distilled by a process of which only Keats and Coleridge fully knew the secret.
The precision and clarity of the opening part are the first things to mark even in the order of landscape. In the centre is the pleasure-dome with its gardens on the river-bank: to one side is the river’s source in the charm to the other are the “caverns measureless to man” and the “sunless sea” into which the river falls Kubla in the centre can hear the “mingled measure” of the fountain of the source from one side, and of the dark caves from the other. The river winds across the whole land-scape. Nobody need keep this mere geographical consistency of the description prominently in mine as he reads though once established it remains clean and constant. It should be noted that within this main landscape too there is a pervasive order. The fertility of the plant is only made possible by the mysterious energy of the source. The dome has come into being by Kubla’s teeree the dome is stately, the gardens are girdled found with Walls and towers. The dome rises above an unthnal paradise, ten mile in diameter, including both luborale gardens and ancient forests. And these for things from which a fountain suddenly bursts part earthquake, part geyser. ‘Moment’ the underground river is forced up and runs five miles above ground until it reaches the caverns again and sinks with great tumult down to a ‘blejess ocean’ that is to enterable nothingness, ‘death’. Kubla Khan interpreted these sounds as the voices of ancestors warming him to be prepared for war. Therefore the succeeding has (12- 30) bring images for fear enchantment violent and uncontrollable energy, oblivion and death and loatadings of strife Kubla hears prophecies of war. The ancestral voices suggest that dark compulsion that binds the race to its habitual conflicts and is related by some psychologists to unconscious ancestor worship, to parental and preparental authority.
Kubla and we can visualize the following phenomena, intimately associated, the dome (with sunlight upon it), the dome’s shadow floating midway upon the waves of the seething, force-up river; the fountain geyser with its hurling rocks, just next to the dome: and the exposed icy caverns beneath, from which the fountain has momentarily removed the covering earth. The effect is apocalyptic, for what is revealed is a natural miracle.It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.
The river, now raised again, is scared. The chasm is holy and enchanted and is associated with waving moonlight. The river coups up as the fountain before it settles down again, and so the fountain is sacred too and the fragments of earth, flung up in it take on the orderly associations of the sacred; they are caverns rocks. The exposed caverns are icy; the dome is sunny what is exposed is holy, what was built for exposure is representative of a perfect pleasure, the dome being necessarily & perfect hemisphere.
The second half of the poem exemplifies one of the most characteristic features of dreams. In this section, the poet has a vision of an Abyssinian maid singing about Mount Abora. If the poet could revive this song in his imagination, he believes that he, too, could create the magical pleasure-dome, just as Kubla Khan did. He would then become, like Kubla, a figure of power, mystery, and enchantment. At its core, the poem is about poetic inspiration. Alph, the sacred river, is symbolic of the river of the Muses, representing the poetic imagination, which is under threat of conflict and extinction. If Coleridge could fully recapture the vision of the river and the paradise it flows through, he would be able to write the dream of poetry and become an inspired, magical poet.
A casual reader might initially see no logical connection between the first part of the poem, filled with vivid and suggestive imagery, and the second part, which introduces the vision of the damsel with the dulcimer. However, the critic Humphry House argues that the second part is a natural extension of the first. According to House, the second part represents the act of poetic creation and the ecstasy that comes with imaginative fulfillment. In the first part, the poet presents the vision of the dome and the river with all its details, while in the second part, he explores the creative power of poetry, which can manifest such a dome in the air. Overall, the poem is about the vast potential and possibilities of a poet's creative abilities.
“Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight would win me,
That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air.”
Thus we can conclude by saying that the poet starts with a pleasure dome with its earthly environment
and gradually moves on to human fears and struggles. This dome is transformed in the vision. The dome become a damsel singing on her dulcimer; and the music which has replaced the earlier dome gives place in its turn to the dome of poetry. The poet dreams of blissful words.
The poem transports us out of the world of everyday life into a world of enchantment: The caverns measureless to man, the deep romantic chasm, the intermittent burst of water from the fountain, the sunless sea they all create a world of spell-bound wonder, charm, and magic. The atmosphere of strangeness and mystery have effectively and skillfully been created in this immortal poem ‘Kubla Khan’.
Kubla Khan
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.                                           5
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree;.
And here were forests ancient as the bills,                         10
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedam cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon were haunted                   15
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain moment was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst                         20
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up moment the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion                    25
Through wood and date the sacred river ran,
Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And amid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!                              30
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
35
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play’d,                                40
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight would win me,
That with music loud and long,                                 45
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

50

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
Self Check Exercise-I
Coleridge is chiefly a poet of:

a.    Poor people

b.    Nature

c.    Love

d.    The Supernatural

9.4    GLOSSARY
Decree     : an official order that has the force of law Cavern: a large cave or chamber in a cave.
Sinuos     : having many curves and turns.

9.5    SUMMARY
“Kubla Khan” takes us through colorful descriptions to transport us to the magnificent country of Xanadu. It looks at the relationship between nature and humans. It's a really lovely poem that masterfully focuses on people and the natural world.

9.5    ANSWERS TO SELF CHECK EXERCISE

B)    Nature

9.6    SUGGESTED READING
Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (1971),
Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1972)
Katharine Cooke, Coleridge (1979)
K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (1981)

9.7    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Critically appreciate “Kubla Khan”.

2.    Describe the use of imagery in “Kubla Khan”.
Unit 10: Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
STRUCTURE

10.1    INTRODUCTION

10.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

10.3    THE RIME OF ANCIENT MARINER: SUMMARY

10.4    TEXT
SELF CHECK EXERCISE-I

10.    5 SUMMARY

10.6    GLOSSARY

10.7    ANSWERS TO SELF- CHECK EXERCISE

10.8    SUGGESTED READING

10.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

10.1    INTRODUCTION
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written between 1797 and 1798. It was first published in 1798 as part of Lyrical Ballads, marking a significant shift toward modern poetry and the emergence of British Romantic literature.
Some contemporary editions feature a revised version from 1817, which includes a marginal gloss.
Of all modern poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner comes closest to achieving the near-impossible task of writing a genuine ballad in the modern era. Originally conceived as a way to fund a trip, it has since become one of the most celebrated poems in literary history.
The origins of the poem are detailed in notes left by Wordsworth. He recounts that in 1797, he, Coleridge, and his sister Dorothy set out from Alfoxden to visit London and the Valley of Stones. With limited financial resources, they decided to cover the costs of their journey by writing a poem. While walking along the Quantock Hills toward Watchet, they planned The Ancient Mariner, which was supposedly inspired by a dream of Coleridge’s friend, Mr. Cruickshank. Though the majority of the story was Coleridge’s invention, Wordsworth contributed certain elements. He suggested that the Mariner should commit a crime—one that would bring upon him supernatural persecution and endless wandering.
Wordsworth had recently been reading Shelvocke’s Voyages, which described sailors frequently sighting albatrosses near Cape Horn, some with wingspans of twelve to thirteen feet. Inspired by this, Wordsworth proposed that the Mariner’s crime be the killing of an albatross, leading to his punishment by the spirits of the region. As the poem developed, it grew beyond its initial purpose and took on a life of its own.
Wordsworth later recalled that The Ancient Mariner was also inspired by a strange dream a friend of Coleridge had, in which he envisioned a ghostly ship crewed by skeletal figures. Originally intended for a periodical, the poem soon became apparent as an independent masterpiece. Wordsworth admitted to having little involvement in its actual composition, realizing that his style and Coleridge’s did not blend well.
In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge described his role in Lyrical Ballads, stating that his aim was to explore supernatural or romantic themes while ensuring they retained a semblance of truth drawn from human nature. His goal was to create a "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." With this in mind, he wrote The Ancient Mariner and had originally planned to compose The Dark Ladie and Christabel as well, believing they would better fulfill his artistic vision.
Published in seven parts, the poem was initially summarized in Lyrical Ballads (1800) with the following argument: A ship sails to the Equator but is driven by storms toward the South Pole. The Mariner, in defiance of the laws of hospitality, kills a seabird and is subjected to strange and terrible judgments. Eventually, he returns to his homeland, forever changed by his experiences.
Blending supernatural elements with deep psychological and moral themes, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner remains one of Coleridge’s most significant contributions to English Romanticism.

10.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This unit focuses on the poem “The Rime of Ancient Mariner”.

10.3    THE RIME OF ANCIENT MARINER: SUMMARY
The story of the poem is as follows :-
An ancient Mariner encounters three gallants on their way to a wedding feast and detains one of them. The wedding guest is held spellbound by the Mariner’s gaze and is compelled to listen to his tale. The Mariner recounts how his ship initially sailed southward with favorable winds and weather until it reached the equator. Though the wedding guest hears the sounds of the festivities, the Mariner continues his story.
The ship is caught in a storm and driven toward the South Pole, where it encounters a desolate land of ice and eerie sounds, devoid of any living creatures. Through the snow fog, a great sea bird—the Albatross— appears and is joyfully received as a harbinger of good fortune. The bird follows the ship as it journeys northward through fog and drifting ice. However, the Mariner inexplicably kills the Albatross, an act that initially horrifies his shipmates. But when the fog clears, they justify his deed and thus share in his guilt.
The ship continues its course, entering the Pacific Ocean and sailing northward until it reaches the equator. Suddenly, the wind ceases, and the ship is becalmed, marking the beginning of the Albatross’s vengeance. A spirit—one of the planet’s invisible forces, neither a departed soul nor an angel—pursues them. As the sailors suffer, they blame the Mariner entirely for their plight and symbolically hang the dead bird around his neck.
One day, the Mariner spots an approaching vessel in the distance. Thirst-stricken, he manages to call out, filling the crew with a brief sense of relief. However, their joy soon turns to horror as the ship appears to be nothing more than a skeletal wreck drifting without wind or tide. Its only passengers are spectral figures: Death and Life-in-Death, who gamble for the Mariner and his crew. Life-in-Death wins the Mariner, condemning him to a fate worse than death. As night falls, under the rising moon, all his shipmates perish one by one, while the Mariner remains to endure his torment.
At this point, the wedding guest grows fearful that he is speaking to a ghost. The Mariner reassures him that he is alive and continues his tale. He describes his suffering and his envy toward the sea creatures, who still live while his crew lies dead. The lifeless bodies curse him with their vacant stares. In his loneliness and despair, he gazes at the moon and stars. Under the moonlight, he sees the beauty of God’s creatures and, for
the first time, blesses them in his heart. This act of genuine love and appreciation breaks the spell, and, by divine grace, he is refreshed by rain.
Supernatural signs begin to manifest. He hears unearthly sounds and witnesses strange movements in the sky and sea. The spirits of his deceased crew momentarily reanimate their bodies, and the ship begins to move again, guided by a troop of angelic beings. However, the Mariner’s suffering is not yet over. The spirits from the South Pole, seeking justice, continue their pursuit. Two of these spirits discuss the Mariner’s long penance, and the Polar Spirit, satisfied, returns southward. As the Mariner falls into a trance, angelic forces propel the ship northward at an inhuman speed. When he awakens, his suffering resumes.
Finally, the curse is lifted as the Mariner reaches his homeland. The angelic spirits leave the bodies of the dead crew and ascend in their true, celestial forms. A hermit approaches the ship with a pilot and his boy, marveling at the ghostly sight before them. As they near, the ship suddenly sinks, but the Mariner is rescued in the pilot’s boat.
The Mariner’s experience mirrors that of a man emerging from a life of hardship and isolation, seeking refuge in God’s grace. The pilot’s boy is driven mad at the sight of the Mariner, emphasizing the depth of his suffering. The hermit, symbolizing divine wisdom, listens as the Mariner earnestly seeks absolution.
However, his penance does not end there—he is condemned to wander the earth, driven by an unrelenting agony, compelled to share his tale as a lesson to others. His burden, like the weight of guilt and suffering, can only be alleviated through storytelling. The Mariner’s final message is one of love and reverence for all of God’s creations, for only through this understanding can true redemption be found.
“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beat
He preyeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.”
These lines sum up the moral of the poem.
Regarding the moral aspect of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge commented in his Table Talk (May 31, 1830) that Mrs. Barbauld, a respected literary figure, once praised the poem but also pointed out two perceived flaws: its improbability and its lack of a clear moral. As for the probability, I owned that, “that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgements the poem, had too touch and that the only, or chief fault, If might say so, was the obtrusion of
the moral sentiment so openly of speech, from land to land. This is the actual supernatural, the Spiritual power in the poem, not allegorical not subjective. And this it is which after all give it its deepest strangeness. All the wonders are made truly-spiritual by it.”
The profound psychological insight of Coleridge makes a hundred delicate touches and subtle hints convincing to the reader. Note the masterly skill with which we are prepared for the spritual horror:
“Down dropt the breeze the sails dropt down,
The silence of the Sea :”
(Lines 107-110)
The nerves are wrought by the dreadful silence then comes the physical strain of the parched system:
“Water, Water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink”
(lines 119-122)
The stagnant waters, the intolerabic waiting for the calm to break and then, when mind and body were broken down, the appearance of the phantom ship. As the spectral horrors multiply, the poet reproduces for us with the imaginative fidgety of the great artist, those little pictures of Sun-rise and Sun-set and the quiet beauty of Moonlite night, that give additional power to the strange and fearful sights :
“The Suns rim dips, the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
(Lines 199-200)
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And a star or two beside”
(Lines 263-266)
Nowhere in English literature the benison of sleep, to the tired, racked spirit is suggested with shore moving power than in the lines.
“Oh sleep : it is a gentle thing,
That slid into my soul.” (Lines 292-296)
During sleep the spell is broken, and the long hoped-for thing comes to pass :
“And when I awoke it rained,
The pliqntas-magoria melt away; the elements at tune the weather to the welcome change, while the very boat shares in the peaceful aftermath:”
Coleridge argued that the moral of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is no more essential to the poem than it would be in a tale from The Arabian Nights, such as the story of the merchant who unknowingly blinds a genie’s son by tossing a date shell near a well and is then sentenced to death. In both cases, the focus is more on the narrative's effect on the reader rather than on presenting a direct moral lesson.
God is love, and there is no garrulity without love, and none which is not founded on the forgiveness of sins. Surely few men have ever loved mankind more than this large hearted creature. Compassion and love for animals secures in the heart compassion and love for man and God.
The Ancient Mariner is a revelation made by Coleridge of what he believed to be always the case in the spiritual world. That world is on the side of pity and love and men who violate these are punished by hardness of heart. They cannot pray, they cannot be wise, they cannot bless the living creatures of the land,
sea and sky. Nature to them is dead and if there be powers bound up with nature, there are their enemies till they change their hearts. And Coleridge imagined the lone-some Spirit of the South Pole who loved the Albatross, and his fellow-demons the invisible inhabitants of the element and the great Ocean that always look at the Moon and tire Sun and the moon, who act with the Polar Spirit, and Death, and life-in-Death the spiritual power which execute the sanctions of the law of pity.
To support this atmosphere in which the laws of the spiritual world take form as living beings, all the things of Nature mentioned in the poem are impersonated and have a life and will. The storm Blast which drives the ship southward is alive, the “Dark” itself comes like a giant with one stride over the sea. The water-snakes, the creatures of the calm, are full of happiness in their own beauty. The Ocean breathes and
moves and acts like one vast spirit. The Moon and the Stars ‘have their own being’ and Coleridge puts the thought into his commentary.
Yet to save the poem from becoming too allegorical Coleridge gives it a base psychological mystery which he loved. The Ancient Mariner himself has a spiritual power which enables him to know the man to who he must tell his tale, and who most listen to him. On this mission he wanders, with strange power.
“the sails made on
Singeth a quiet tune.”
(Line 367-372)
The wild story, with its medieval superstitions and irresponsible happenings is not only made actual and vital to our imagination by its faithful picture of nature, and its psychological insight, but by the simple humanity with which it is saturated “Inter-woven with the strange and the recondite” remarks a critic” are the primal emotions of love, bate, pain, remorse and hope”.
Thus the words, “He prayeth best...” are no mere moral tag at the case of a fine descriptive poem, but the summing up in a few lipes of the spirit with which the entire poem is charged, an intimate kinship with all “happy living things”.
Let us now turn to The Ancient Mariner as a feature poem of the supernatural. A Love of systacy was a dominant feature of romantic story-telling from Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe down to Sir Walter Scott. It had its earlier votaries into the dim recesses of medievalism with its wealth of superstition and stirrings adventures. But there is a marked difference between the super naturalism of Mrs. Radcliffe and Walpole and that of Coleridge. The earlier romances did not present delicate and suite picture of mystery even though in was genuine, they gave their mysteries a “local hd .. tion and a name”. Coleridge on the other hand invested it with indefiniteness which is at the source of the magic, and created the atmosphere by subtle suggestion not by crude description. The scenery of the Mariner is laid in the mysterious seas and imeval solitudes where have things to dream of, not to all or in the midst of the untraveled seas, or in the wep forests of romance. It is supernatural but of the indent, common, simple kind which belongs to all mankind, is universal. It is made up of the expectation of the possibility of marvel and horror, of mysterious sins and their forgiveness, and of the chance of meeting some forgotten spiritual life which, was before man came on earth. With wonderful but unconscious skill Coleridge, keeps this sea-poem, within the limits of subjective feeling, the supernatural in it is the translation into form of the unconscious emotions of the lonely Manner; but, all the time, in order to actualize the poem the scenery is kept extraordinary true to Nature.
Medievalism, its mysteries and its spells which constitute an indispensable element of the supernatural, is not employed by Coleridge as a mere stage property, but it is first eschewed by the poet and then distilled and presented as so many common-place things of everyday life. The Ancient Mariner is no less comprehensive
than imaginative in its comment. Every phase of landscape, sea-scope, and cloud-scope is touched upon, from the quiet scenery of an English woodland to the scenery of the tropics. Every phase of life at sea is touched with equal power and beauty, the ship flying before the freshening gale, the torrid fierceness of the stagnant waters, the freezing cold of the Arctic region, the horrors of the becalmed passage the blessedness of the welcome rain, the clear sky. The Storm cloud, the great sea fog. ‘The incarnate fury of the storm, the soothing peace of the temperate seas, the loneliness of the great ocean, and the welcome sight of familiar landmarks once again as the Mariner views the peaceful English Barbour.
Even when describing simple ordinary things, Coleridge throws over them the veil of strangeness and remoteness. His art is artless, so simple and spontaneous are its methods, he blends and harmonizes reality and imagination. By giving us occasional glimpses of the wedding feast to which the Mariner had been bidden, he writes a ballad within a ballad. How effective is the contrast between the innocent merriments of the bridal feast from which the wedding Guest has been detained and the tragic languish of the mysterious Mariners tale:
“The Sun came up upon the left,
The bright-eyed Mariner” (lines 25-40)
Further the whole poem is wrought with the colour and glamour of the middle Ages. From the quaint embroideries of the “merry minstrelsy” to the central pattern of the catholic idea of penance, everything is efical with the spirit of medieval is in, e.g. the fateful cross bow, the vesper bell, the starving hermit, the invocation to “Mary queen”. Yet there is not slavish attempt to reproduce another age. The voyage itself is not such a voyage, as mediaeval mariners were to make. Whatever use the poet may have made of Shelvocke-Voyages, with its story of a black albatross, the voyage is in essence created out of “Such stuff as dreams are made of. It is the ethereal and subtle fancy of a great poet, the baseless fabric of a vision.” We, do not know if the weird scenes that the Mariner describes are actual occurrences or mere phantas-magoria, the product of his lieated fancy. The poet leaves it splendidly vague, as it should be left. All we do realise is the spell of the story, the horrors of the lonely seafare, the dreadful effect on the Mariner of the ghostly sights and sounds. The Mariner himself gathers into his person the elements of romance, mesmeric haunting, mysterious and awe-inspiring in essence. His glittering eye, his skinny hand, his arresting voice, and the spiritual misery that drives him to speech into ease big tortured soul all intensity the weired effect of the tale.
Coleridge’s supernaturalism is, in short, distinguished for being refined, suggestive and psychological. He creates beauty out of horror and throws a veil of ‘naturalness’ and conviction (“Willing suspension of disbelief’) over things weired, mysterious and the other worldly. This he does, as pointed above, by tempering the entire atmosphere so remote and strange with occasional touches of ordinary, everyday things surrounding us. Secondly the marvellous sound and colour effects charging the astrictive captivate the mind and fascinate the reader more than scare him away. The poet exploits various stock-in-trade devices to produce music in verse, e.g, onomatopoeia:
“The ice ……………….
It cracked and growled cracked and
howled.” (Line 61 -62)
Colour effects:
“The water, like a witch’s oils
Burnt green and blue and white.
Within the shadow of ship” (Line 126-130)
“was a flash of golden fire (Lines 277-2gl) All in a hot and copper sky.
No higher than the Moon.” (Lines 111-114)
Alliteration:
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
the furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
into that silent sea.”      (Lines 103-106)
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
My soul in agony (Lines 232-235)
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
On me along it blew.” (Lines 460
463)
Despite his "skinny hand" and being "long and lank, and brown like the ribbed sea-sand," the Mariner holds the wedding guest spellbound with his "glittering eye," captivating him like a child listening to a tale. Unlike typical supernatural stories filled with ghosts and eerie beings meant to induce fear, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner does not seek to terrify. Instead, it draws the reader in, engaging the imagination and creating a mesmerizing, dream-like experience.
The poem leaves much to the imagination, revealing only fragments while concealing deeper mysteries. This element of ambiguity heightens curiosity, inviting readers to explore the unknown and delve into the realms of the supernatural. Additionally, by portraying the Mariner’s experience as a psychological journey, the story remains relatable, bringing the supernatural within the realm of human experience. The Mariner finds emotional relief by confessing his tale to another person, turning his burden into a shared human struggle.
At its core, the poem carries a moral message, emphasizing Christian values of love and reverence for all living beings. Unlike traditional ghost stories that exist solely to evoke fear, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner conveys a lesson that applies to human life. This unique blend of natural and supernatural elements makes the poem distinct, leading some to describe it as a work of natural supernaturalism—where the extraordinary emerges seamlessly from the ordinary.
And now we turn to the technical beauty of the poem, with its simple clarity and artless art, the two qualities which characterise The Ancient Mariner more than any of Coleridge’s earlier work. Among all the
beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to write “with his eye on the object” and to display any remarkable power of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In The Ancient Mariner his eyes seem never to wander from his object, and the scene repeatedly starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dancing demons on its deck; the setting sun seeing through its ribs, as if through a dungeon- grate”, the water snakes under the moon-beams, with the “elfish light” falling off them “in hoary flakes” when they roar; the dead crew who work the ship and “raise their limb-like lifeless tools” everything seems to have been actually seen, and we believe it all as the story of a truthful eye witness. The details of the voyage too, are all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were a series of extracts from the ship’s log.
Then again, in addition to this imagery and super word-pictures the execution is marvelously equal throughout, and it is a great thing to be said of so long a poem. The story never drags even for a moment; its felicities of diction are constant, and it is no-where marred by a single weak-line. The instantaneous descent of the tropical night could not have been described:
“The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark.”
The “cracks and growls” of the rending iceberg could not have been imagined with greater weirdness than that they sounded like noises in a sound.” How beautiful is the passage that follows upon the cessation of the spirit’s song:
“It ceased yet still the sails made on
Singeth a quite tune...” (267-372)
“Then after the ship has drifted over the harbour-bar;
And I with sobs did pray
O let me be awake, my God
Or let me sleep always” (lines 469-47%)
With consummate art we are left to imagine the physical traces ‘which the mariner’s long agony leaves behind it by a method far sporp treble than any direct description, i.e. the effect which the sight of him produces upon others :
“I moved my lips, the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit:
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the Pilot’s boy
The Devil knows how to row” (Lines 560-569)
The homely diction of mediaeval balladry is reproduced with a skill greater than even that of Scott.
“Day after day, day after.
We stuck ……………
Upon a painted ocean.” (Lines 115-118)
“The Sun came up upon the left.
Went down into the sea;” (Lines 25
28)
“I moved and could not feel my limbs
And was a blessed ghost” (Lines 305-308)
The post used all the resources of the old ballad metre; for instance the effective medieval rhymes combined with the trick of alliteration:
“The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,
We could not laugh or wail
And cried, A sail : A sail”:
“With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call:” (Lines 157-163) “The Seraph band each waved his hand,
It was a heavenly sight:” (Lines 492-493)
“The Seraph band each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart.” (Lines 496
497)
Lastly Coleridge gives-albeit with finer instinct an occasional archaism to preserve the medieval atmosphere : “Estsoons his hand drop the” “And, by the holy rood”. “And, now all is my own country”. “A certain shape, I wish”. Thus the poet imparts to the poem all the simple beauty of the old ballad without the extravagances. At the same time he blends its modem spirit with medievalism so as to convey a more moving magic to the reader today.
Coleridge, like Shelley, was master of poetic harmony. He sang, often as the winds go, and the clouds sail, and when he sang thus, he was one with the life of nature, and not with the life of man.
Whenever Coleridge rises into the exquisite melody in its perfection, he also rises into that “imaginative world of thought, half- supernatural” which pervades The Ancient Mariner: The music and the sphere of the poem are partly beyond the world of ours. The words form the poem in telling of the harmonies of air, and earth, and then of the forest brook, image also the sounds which delight and hurt not.
Before we close this discussion, a word about Coleridge’s use of Nature in this poem would not be out of place. In the Ancient Mariner there is passionate description of Nature, but the natural scenery is never alone. It is thrilled through and through, with that subtle wanderer, Coleridge. In it his imagination rises to its highest peak, and commands humanity and nature and the most delicate music of both. This is the world also of Kubla Khan. This is the world of those descriptions of sky and sea in storm and calm and mist, of the rising moon and the setting sun, of moonlight on the charmed sea, which are each complete wholes, true to nature, yet alive with being above Nature, and which imagination itself can never forget. They are chosen for their strangeness, and a certain spiritual mystery.
In this class of poem human feeling is strongly felt. For instance the extremity of fear was never better pictured:
“We listened and looked sideways up;
fear at my heart, as at a cup,
my lifeblood seemed to sip.” (Lines.203403)
Similarly, the joy of sleep cannot be more simply, yet intensely given:
“O Sleep; it is a gentle thing
That slid into my soul.” (Lines 292-296)
And loneliness, the solitude of man in sorrow has chosen the soul as its best expression the cry of this restless Mariner :
“O Wedding guest this soul hath been
Scare seemed then to be.” (Line 597
600)
Nor is the exquisite job of his return home less close to the heart of man.
In fact the extreme simplicity of the description in The Ancient Mariner heightens the effect of mystery which none can mistake.

10.4    TEXT: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, And Tam next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set: Meyst hear the merry din.
He holds him with his skinny hand, “There was a ship,” quoth he.
Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon! Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
He holds him with his glittering eye The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years’ child: The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner.
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top.
The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day, Mover the mast at noon
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner.
And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along.
With stopping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by.
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send, a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken –
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a sound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariner’s hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white moonshine.
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner, From the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ - With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

Part II
“The sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariners’ hollo!
And 1 had done a hellish thing, And it would work ‘em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay That made the breeze to blow!
Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist.
‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,
‘Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, stimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils Burnt green, and blue, and white. And some in dreams assured were Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot.
Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”

Part III
“There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye –
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, Twist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, Twist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.”
“With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
1 bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail!
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call: Gramercy! they for joy did grin, And ett at once their breath drew in, As they were drinking all.
See see (1 cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel!”
“The western wave was all a-flame, The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the sun.
And straight the sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven’s Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the sun, Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the sun Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman’s mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thick man’s blood with cold.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip -
Till climb above the eastern bar
The horned moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
One after one, by the star-dogged moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye.”
“Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one.
The souls did from their bodies fly,-They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul it passed me by, Like the whizz of my crossbow!”Part IV
I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand so brown. “Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropped not down.
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide-wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.”
“The marry men, so
beautiful! And they all dead did lie; And a thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay.

1    looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky, Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away.
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw dial curse, And yet I could not die.
The moving moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside -
Her beams be mocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt always A still and awful red.
Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare:A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.
The selfsame moment 1 could pray, And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank-Like lead into, the sea.”
Part-V
“Oh sleep! it is a gentle tiling,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from heaven, That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light -almost
I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed ghost.
And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come a near;
But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all up rose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up blew;
The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother’s son Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and 1 pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me.”
“I fear thee, ancient Manner!
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!
Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:
For when it dawned -they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their months, And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again, Now mixed, now one by one!
Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are, How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning!
And now ‘twas like all instruments,
New like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel’s song, That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of une,
That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.
Till noon we quietly sailed on,
Yet never a breeze did breathe; Slowly and smoothly went the ship, Moved onward from beneath.
Under the keel nine fathom deep, From the land of mist and snow, The spirit slid: and it was he That made the ship to go.
The sails at noon left .Off their tune, And the ship stood still also.
The sun, right up above the mast, Had fixed her to the ocean:
But in a minute she ‘gan stir, With a short uneasy motion – Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound:
It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a sound.
How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare;
But ere my living life returned,
I heard and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air.
‘Is it he?’ quoth one, ‘Is this the man? By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow.
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, ‘The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.”
Part VI“FirstVoice
But tell me, tell me! speak again, Thy soft response renewing – What makes that ship drive on so fast? What is the ocean doing?
Second Voice
Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the moon is cast –
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him.”
“First Voice
But why drives on that ship so fast, Without or wave or wind?
Second Voice
The air is cut away before, And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go, When the Mariner’s trance is abated.
“I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
‘Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the moon did glitter.
The peng, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray.
And now this spell was snapped: once more
I viewed the ocean green, And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen –
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me, Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea, In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek Like a meadow-gale of spring – It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze -On me atone it blew.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own country?
We drifted o’er the harbour-bar, And I with sobs did pray – O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep always.
The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the moon.
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.
And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colours came.
A little distance from the prow Those enmson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck – Oh, Christ! what saw I there!
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood.
This seraph-band, each waved his hand: It was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals to the land, Each one a lovely light;
This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart – No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart.
But soon 1 heard the dash of oars,
I heard the Pilot’s cheer;
My head was turned perforce away, And I saw a boat appear.
The Pilot and the Pilot’s boy, I heard them coming fast:
Deer Lord in heaven! it was a joy The dead men could not blast.

1 saw a third -I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns That he makes in the wood.
He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away
The Albatross’s blood.”
Part VII
“This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with mariners That come from a far country.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve-
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk, ‘Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?’
‘Strange, by my faith!’ the Hermit said – ‘And-they answered not our cheer!’ The planks looked warped! and see those sails, How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest-brook along;
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf s young.
‘Dear Lord! It hath a fiendish look –
(The Pilot made reply)
I am a feared’ - Push on, push on!
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship, And straight a sound was heard.
Under the water it rumbled on.
Still louder and more dread:
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot’s boat.
Open the whirl where sank the ship
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips -the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the Pilot’s boy, Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro.
‘Ha! ha!’ quoth he, ‘full plain I see’, The Devil knows how to row.
And now, all in my own country,
I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand.
O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!
The Hermit crossed his brow.
‘Say quick,’ quoth he ‘I bid thee say –
What manner of man art thou?’
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me bums.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door!
The wedding-guests are there:
But in the garden-bower the bride
And bride-maids singing are;
And hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ‘twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
‘Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!
To walk together to the kirk.
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone; and now the Wedding Guest Turned from the bridegroom’s door
He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wise man
He rose the morrow morn.”
Self Check Exercise-I
The Rime of Ancient Mariner is about

A)    a perilous adventure in the sea

B)    the accidental killing of an octopus

C)    the curse of a sea God

D)    the guilt and expiation of the Ancient Mariner

10.5    SUMMARY
After a protracted sea voyage, a sailor's experiences are told in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. A man traveling to a wedding gets stopped by the mariner, who then starts telling him a story. As the mariner's tale develops, the Wedding-Guest's response shifts from amusement to impatience to fear to fascination, as evidenced by the language style; Coleridge employs personification and repetition as narrative devices to evoke a sense of danger, the paranormal, or tranquility, depending on the mood in various sections of the poem.

10.6    GLOSSARY
Kirk     :  is a Scottish word meaning “church”, or more specifically the Church of Scotland.
Mast     :   tall upright post, spar, or other structure on a ship or boat, in sailing vessels generally
carrying a sail or sails.
Prow : the pointed front part of a ship; the bow Sheen: a soft lustre on a surface.
Aver     : state or assert to be the case.

10.7    ANSWERS TO SELF CHECK EXERCISE

D) the guilt and expiation of the Ancient Mariner

10.8    SUGGESTED READING
Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (1971),
Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1972)
Katharine Cooke, Coleridge (1979)
K.M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (1981)

10.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Decribe the theme of “The Rime of Ancient Mariner”.

2.    Describe “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a nature poem
Unit-11 John Keats: Introduction
STRUCTURE

11.1    INTRODUCTION

11.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

11.3    LIFE AND WORKS OF JOHN KEATS
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

11.4    SUMMARY

11.5    GLOSSARY

11.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

11.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

11.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

11.1    INTRODUCTION
In the early 19th century, a young poet emerged from London with a talent that would come to define the Romantic era. John Keats, born in 1795, may have lived a tragically short life, but his impact on English poetry was profound. With only three slim volumes and a few magazines to his name, Keats' poetic journey took him through a diverse range of forms and subjects, from sonnets to epic narratives. His unique blend of earnest energy, self-awareness, and occasional dry wit set him apart from his contemporaries. Despite succumbing to consumption at twenty-five, Keats left behind an oeuvre comprising fifty-four poems, continues to captivate readers to this day.

11.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about the biography and creations of John Keats.

11.3    LIFE AND WORKS OF JOHN KEATS
John Keats, born on October 31, 1795, in London, was the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats's four surviving children. Despite his brief life—he passed away at twenty-five—Keats achieved a remarkable poetic career, publishing fifty-four poems across three concise volumes and various periodicals. His work spanned diverse poetic forms, including sonnets, Spenserian romances, and Miltonic epics, each reimagined through his unique blend of fervent energy, mastery over conflicting perspectives, poetic self-awareness, and occasional dry, ironic humor.
John Keats was baptized in London in 1795. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he was apprenticed at fifteen to learn surgery. But he broke his indentures. After studying medicine in the hospitals in London and passing his medical examinations, he gave up the profession for poetry, Leigh Hunt introduced him to a literary circle where his germinating talents found hope and encouragement. In 1817 he published a little volume of verse, most of it crude and immature enough, but containing the magnificent sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which reveals one source of his inspiration. His imagination had turned to the old Greek world with instinctive sympathy; and he now chose as the subject for a long narrative poem the story of Endymion, the Latmain shepherd loved by the moon-goddess. Endymion was published in 1818. The exordium of the poem, the Hymn to Pan in the opening episode, and a myriad other lines and short passages, are worthy of Keats that was to be; but as a whole-Endymion is chaotic; and cloyed with ornament. None knew this better than Keats himself, as is indicated both by his letters and by the proudly humble preface in which he described the poem as a “feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished,” and hopes that “while it is dwindling, I may be plotting and fitting myself for verses fit to live.”
To what purpose he plotted, the wonderful volume published two years later in 1820, shows. It was entitled Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems: besides the pieces named, it contained the great odes, “On Melancholy,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Psyche,” and “To a Nightingale,” and the heroic fragment, “Hyperion.” The two years had done wonders in depending and strengthening his gift : he had learned the lessons of artistic calmness and severity, without sacrifice of the mellow sweetness native to him.
Before the 1820 volume was published, Keats was attacked by consumption, and had warning that another winter in England would prove fatal. In September of that year he sailed for Italy under the care of his faithful friend, Joseph Severn. Early in the spring of 1821 he passed away Rome, John Keats was interred in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, also known as the Non-Catholic Cemetery,q own request, the Words: “Here his one whose name was writ in water.” In a hope fuller time and in a mood of noble simplicity he had said; “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”
The essential quality of Keats as a poet is his sensitiveness to beauty, and the singleness of aim with which he seeks for “the principle of beauty in all things.” he worships beauty for beauty’s sage, with none of
the secondary moral intentions of Milton, Wordsworth, and Shelley, but with the- unreasoning rapture of a lover or a devotee. He tells of the “dizzy pam” which the sight of the Elgin marbles gave lum, of the “undescribable feud” which they brought round his heart. He opens his second volume with the memorable line, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”; and in his last volume, at the close of the ode “On a Grecian Urn.” he declares that tseauty is one with truth. In this taxi instance he attempts for once to rationalize his instinctive devotion; but it is an overmastering instinct, not as a philosphic conception, that we loved the worship of beauty everywhere operative in his work.
It is this passion for beauty, working through an aesthetic organism of extraordinary delicacy and power, which gives to Keats’ poetry its sensuous richness, and which makes it play magically upon all the senses of the reader. The pure glow of his colour remmds us of the Italian painter. Giorgione; and the music of his best verse has a wonderful mellowness and depth, as if blown softly through golden-trumpets. In the early poems the richness is indeed too great, the ornament excessive; put this is merely the eager lavishness of youth rejoicing in its abundance; and not yet dubbed “disciplined” by good taste. From the very first his poetry had extraordinary freshness, energy, and gusto. He revived old words, coined new ones, and put current ones to a new service, with a confidence and success unequalled by any other English poets except Chaucer, Shakespeare and perhaps Spenser.
The sense of form, which is so conspicuous in Keats’ later work, was a matter of growth with him Endymion is formless, a labyrinth of flowery paths which lead nowhere. But the great odes, especially the “Nightingale” and the “Grecian Urn,” and the later narrative poems, “The Eve of St Agnes” and “Lamia,” have a wonderful perfection of structure, a subordination of part to part in the building up of a beautiful whole, which is the sign of the master workman. This is particularly true of “The Eve of St, Agnes,” that latest and perhaps most perfect flowering of the old Spenserian tree. The story of Madeline’s dream on the haunted eye, of its magical fulfillment through young Porphyro’s coming, and of them flight from the castle, is set in a framework storm and cold, of dreary, penance, of spectral old age, of barbarous revelry and rude primeval passion, which by a series of subtle and thrilling contrasts heightens the warm and tender radiance of the central picture; than when the illusion of reality is at the height, the whole thing is thrown back into the dim and doubtful past by the words.
“And they are gone; aye, ages long
ago These lover fled away into the
storm.”
Keats’s strength, which we see in “The Eve of St. Agnes.” “Lamia,” and the odes, working in the service of perfect grace, tempted him in “Hyperion” to attack a theme of epic dimensions, the overthrow of the old Titan sun-deity Hyperion by the new sun gold Apollo. The subject turned out to be too extensive for for his undeveloped powers, and he threw it aside, on the ground that there were “too many Miltonic
inversions in it.” Payable the deeper reason was that he felt as yet unequal to the task of imposing form upon his stupendous matter, and his artistic sense would not-longer permit him to be content with formlessness. As the poem stands it is are superb fragment, an august portal to a temple which will never be built.
Allthough the body of Keats’s work is apparently unconcerned, with prosaic human interests, it is a serious mistake to think of him as indifferent to human affairs. His wonderful letters, with their spirited humor, their quick human sympathy and solicitude, their eager ponderings upon life and clear insight into many of its dark places, show a nature vitalized at every, point, and keenly alert to reality. In many of his later poetry especially the great odes, the poignant Human undertone suggests that if he had lived he might have turned more and more to themes of common human experience. Dying as he did at twenty-five, after only three or four seats of opportunity, he yet left behind him a body of poetry which is in its kind unexcelled.
Six of the great odes of Keats are prescribed for our detailed studies. John Keats: The Odes, edited by A.R. Weekes, contains useful material on the nature of odes in general. The word ode is a Greek one, meaning a “song.” Originally, this term was meant to specify and Greek poem of the type of a musical composition that could be sung to the accompaniment of the “lyric”. Hence, the term “lyric” verse. Thus, we may conveniently assume that infancy of the form concerned was nothing more than a lyric song of any type “from a dirge to drinking-song.” In 700 B.C. the Greek odes were written for solo musical performance. The internal structure concerned was always simple look two hundred years to take on certain elaborate pattern; Pindar, in 500. B.C., was the chief composer of this more fascinating type of odes.
The Greek tradition has gone into oblivion now. “The notion of the local accompaniment has been lost; Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity could not well be set to music, yet it is an ode while the much-sung lyrics of Bums are not odes. On the flip side, the name of ode is now applied to one type of lyric poem only. Thus the definition has both widened and narrowed. It may be re-stated as ‘a lyric poem of elaborate metrical structure, solemn in tone, and usually taking the form of an address’ very often to some abstraction or quality.
English odes are mainly of three categories: regular and Pindaric, regular and simple, and irregular. The Pindaric originally meant for a choir, is not adopted by Keats in the strictest sense of the term. Mostly, his is a form which is a mean between the second and the third types mentioned above. However, sometimes, as in “To Fancy,” it is of the first variety-regular and simple. “His most characteristic form consists of a group of stanzas of highly complex structure, but regular, or nearly regular, in their resemblance to one another.” It seems that Keats follows often the metrical involved rhyme-scheme, just as in the ode “To a Nightingale’ and “To Psyche.” “The stanzas of Spenser resemble each other exactly, and this characteristic is evident in “To a Nightingale.” In the other odes of Keats their metric a variations, front stanza-to stanza are noteworthy.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE- I

1.    Who introduced Keats to the literary circle?

2.    Whose work was an inspiration to John Keats?

11.4    SUMMARY
In this unit we learnt about John Keats his tragic life and literary achievements that too in a short span of time.

11.5    GLOSSARY
Germinating- come into existence and develop.
Exordium- the introductory section of an oration or discourse.
Chaotic- in a state of complete confusion and disorder.
Cloyed- disgust or sicken (someone) with an excess of sweetness, richness or sentiment.
Consumption- a wasting disease, especially pulmonary tuberculosis.
Conspicuous- clearly visible.
Penance- punishment inflicted on oneself as an outward expression of repentance for wrongdoing.
Stupendous- extremely impressive.
Prosaic- having or using the style or diction of prose as opposed to poetry;
Solicitude- anxious concern for someone.
Undertone- an underlying quality or feeling.

11.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

1.    Leigh Hunt

2.    “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

11.7    REFERENCE/SUGGESTED READING
The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vandler.
Baker, Jeffry. "Nightingale and Melachony" John Keats and Symbolism. St. Martin's Press Inc.,
1986. Print.
Bate, Walter Jackson. "Keats: Negative Capability" English Romantic Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 319-342. Print.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Introduction. English Romantic Poets. By Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 1-8. Print.
Bloom, Harold. "Keats: Romance Revised" English Romantic Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New
York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 350-363. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views John Keats. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Print.
Finney, Claude Lee. The Evolution of Keats's Poetry. New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1963. Print.

11.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    List important works of John Keats.

2.    Write a note on Keats’ life.
Unit-12 John Keats: Odes-I
STRUCTURE

12.1    INTRODUCTION

12.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

12.3    ODE TO PSYCHE: SUMMARY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

12.4    ODE TO NIGHTINGALE: SUMMARY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-II

12.5    ODE ON A GRECIAN URN: SUMMARY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-III

12.6    SUMMARY

12.7    GLOSSARY

12.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISES

12.9    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

12.10    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

12.1    INTRODUCTION
"Ode to Psyche" is an attempt by Keats to create a longer sonnet style that narrates a dramatic scene within the ode genre. Keats's early poems, which usually depict an escape into the pleasant worlds of one's imagination, significantly diverge from this poem. Keats illustrates the narrator's intention to resuscitate Psyche and reincarnate as Eros (love) by using the reader's imagination. Keats makes an attempt at this by committing a "untrodden region" of his consciousness to the goddess of neglect.
Keats encountered the Psyche tale in a few different places. John Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and Mary Tighe's Psyche, which Keats first read as a kid and revisited in 1818, were among his contemporary sources for the myth. Shortly before penning "Ode to Psyche," Keats wrote to his brother George to express his dissatisfaction with Tighe's work. Unsatisfied, he studied the earlier version of the Cupid and Psyche tale and turned to Apuleius's Golden Ass, translated by William Adlington in 1566. Keats responded to George after reading the piece and understanding that the tale was created with the decline of Roman mythology.
An English Romantic poet, he wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in May 1819. It was initially published anonymously in the Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819).
The poem is among the "Great Odes of 1819," along with "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence," and "Ode to Psyche." Keats introduced a fresh evolution of the ode form in this book because he felt that the forms hitherto used in poetry were inadequate for his goals. After reading two essays
by English writer and artist Benjamin Haydon, he was moved to create the poem. Keats saw the idealism and representation in the Elgin Marbles via his personal experience with them and his knowledge of previous literature in the same subject.

12.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will study “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written by John Keats. The remaining odes in syllabus will be dealt in the next unit.

12.3    ODE TO PSYCHE
“O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir'd
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!”
A. SUMMARY
The “Ode to Psyche” was written in the fourth week of April 1819. It is the first of Keats’s five spring odes of 1819. This ode formed a part of a letter written by Keats to George and Georgiana in April the same year. He confessed in that letter that the poem concerned was “the first and the only one.” with which he had taken “even moderate pains”. He had composed it “leisurely.” He hoped that it would “encourage” him to “Write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit.” In that letter he asserted : “You must recollect that Psyches was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the Augustan age and consequently, the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with -any of the ancient fervor and perhaps never thought of in the old religion. I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected.”
The legend concerned was told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass Which was translated by Adlington, an Elizabethan scholar. Aphrodite became jealous on noticing the exquisite beauty of Psyche, the daughter of a Greek king. Cupid was given a mean assignment—-his mother told him to inspire Psyche to fell in love with a fellow of base character. However, in the bargain, it was Cupid himself who fell in love with Psyche. Psyche was carried by him to picturesque valley where he visited her every night in total, darkness. Finally, in order to have a better look at him, the curious psyche in a lamp. Psyche was able to identify Gle God of love. Accidentally, A bead of hot oil from the lamp fell on the shoulder of Cupid who got up in anger and fled. Later on Psyche was trapped by Aphrodite’s power and was enslaved. She was treated without any mercy and was told to do some difficult jobs which she successfully completed with the help of birds and
ants. That warmed the cockles of the heart of Aphrodite who forgave Psyche and allowed her to be reunited to Cupid, As a bonus, she was temporalized! A.R. Weekes correctly points out that the legend, “typifies the purification of the human soul by passion and suffering.”
For some pictorial details in the ode, Keats drew on Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche (in Aglington’s, translation of The Golden Ass, as pointed out above) generously. His “peaceable and healthy spirit” is revealed in the happy mood of the poems thus the emphasis is laid at first on Psyche’s rention with Eros (strophe I) and later on the tranquil “region of my mind” (strophe 4). His “pains” over composition are reflected in his devising for the poem a loose Pindaric form- consisting of irregular verse-paragraphs with lines of varying length-based on his recent experiments with the. sonnet, Keats divides the poem into three verse-paragraphs in his letter and four, in 1820. Style and diction are as usual affected by Keat’s reading of the Elizabethans, but Million and Wordsworth influence the poem’s second and third strophes.
The “Ode to Psyche” can readily be divided into three sections or movements between which there are total differences that are more pronounced than in any of the odes that follow. This customary division must be qualified in one respect, for the poem is given a kind of circularity by its opening lines, which both prefigure and complete the irony of its conclusion. Thus the point at which the action begins is preceded by a brief apostrophe that raises a series of implicit questions that can be answered only through an understanding of the whole poem. Such questions are dispelled amid the wonder and amazement of the vision suddenly resisted the poet of the goddess and her lover, Cupid. What “Keats renders in the scene is the wonder of discovery-in one of its many versions-of the primal story, the primal myth. It is as if whole relationship between the two divinities, the mystery of their love, were in a moment revealed and rendered timeless, full of its infinite implications and possibilities for further discovery. The question of whether the vision is dreamed or actually seen ever intrudes upon his present sense of awe. For, in the mythopoeia mode of apprehension there is no division between past and present, sleep and walking, the image and its content,sensation and thought. What the scene distills is the wonder: of that kind of apprehension that constitutes the essence of myth, in which everything is given implicitly and at once, even if the poet may not at first recognize the identity of the goddess herself. For the loss of such understanding and the prospects for a poetry that would advance without the hope of recovering it are the ode’s major preoccupations.
The shift in tone between the first and second stanzas among the most remarkable in all the odes, comes as a modulation to rapt elegy for the past. Fundamentally, the change is from a mythopoeia conception of experience, that most genial, to art, to an historical one. For if myth seeks to gather up and universalize human experience in terms of the images it creates, history continually intervenes to unravel them by defining each acts. It scrutinizes as a particular and unique event, and the paradox of this antagonism is a major theme throughout the odes. Thus we proceeding the opening vision of the lovers, which seems, in its timelessness
and openness to contemplation, almost unrelated to the Cupid-Psyche myth conceived as an account or story, to an awareness of the completed legend, the events that in “I Stood Tip-toe” Keats had compressed to a few couplets :
“The silver lamp, the ravishment,—the
wonder The darkness-loneliness-the fearful
thunder
Their woes gone by, and both to heaven up down,
To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne.”
(147-50)
Yet the process of temporal or cultural elaboration as we find it represented in the ode is even more far-reaching, for not only has Psyche been deified and canonized but she has outlived the cult of her worshippers :
“O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre.
When holy were that haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.”
(36-39)
Not only have her wonder and mystery been formalized as ritual but the secrets of her rites have been all but lost; and the fact that she was “not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist” and therefore too late to be “worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour,” as Keats explained to George and Georgiana, only makes the irony of her involvement in history more complete. From the timeless domain of the first stanza, the realm of “Flora, and old Pan” with its rapt discovers and wide-eyed contemplations, we are transported to a world where mythology has been swallowed up by history. The delicately winged and breathing creature has withered to a mere historical abstraction.
The task, then, is the necessary one of cultivating the poetic garden, of re-exploring the Psyche story and the kinds of possibilities it offers from a new stand point, that of the modem age. The prospect the last stanza unfolds is hardly one of unqualified optimism. The wild and steeply rising mountains, reminiscent of some of the poet’s descriptions of northern scenery during his walking tour the preceding summer, from an ominously brooding background for the idyllic region of soft zephyrs and streams that enclose the “rosy” sanctuary,” a landscape where the creatures of classical mythology are happily repopulated only to be “lull’s to sleep,” Fancy, the gardener, cultivates a cerebral trellis where exotic buds in infinite profusion burst into thought “with pleasant pain.” The emphasis on thought, which grows throughout the stanza, remains to the last but the importance of the qualifying adjective “shadowy” is obvious. For what such kind of thinking can
finally “win” remains, at best problematical. The delights over which Psyche presides are undeniable and unceasing, for she represents the spirit of perpetual creativity and unconscious generation. Yet the kind of awareness she fosters is closest to what Keats habitually means by “speculation” the kind of “reasoning” that still “map be fine.” As patroness of “shadowy thought”, the goddess will at least be forever welcome to the poet, and there is even the hope that the early love of Cupid and Psyche can actually be reborn within the poet’s consciousness. The casement of the mind stands fully open to “let the warm Love in”, suggesting, as Harold Bloom has noted, the continual accessibility of the poetic imagination.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.    What does the poet wish to build for goddess Psyche?

12.4    ODE TO NIGHTINGALE
“MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness
pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had
drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
This not through envy of thy happy lot,                   5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”                 10

2.
“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,

15

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:”            20

3.
“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,            25
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.           30

4.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his parts,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,                    35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.” 40

5.
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;              45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eyes.”         50

6.
“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,                55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain
To thy high requiem become a sod.”                    60

7.
“Thou was’t not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien com;
The same that oil-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
70

8.
“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self. Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now tis buried deep In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?”
80
A. SUMMARY
“Ode to a Nightingale” "was penned in May 1819. It is probably the second of his spring odes. Miriam Allou opines that the “position of the poem in the sequence of Keat’s odes is conjectural, but the metrical evidence suggests that it follows to Ode to Psyche and precedes the other odes the regular tenline
stanza, consisting of one quatrain form a Shakespearean sonnet followed by the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet, is used again in the remaining ‘Spring’ oddest but without the shortened line which was a feature of the irregular strophes in the Ode to Psyche. A date at the beginning of May be suggested by the parallels in the second stanza with Keats’ letter to Fanny of 1 May 1919.” Charles Brown gives an interesting firsth account of the authentic origin of the poem “…… In the Spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest in my house. Keats felt a continual and tranquil joy in her song; and one morning he took a chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house. I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting
behind the books. On inquiry, I found these scraps, four to five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his Ode to Nightingale, a poem which has been the delight of everyone.” In this context, Mirtairi Allot remarks: “If Brown’s account of the four or five scraps of paper is accurate, the only known manuscript in Keats’s hand, which is on two sheets of writing paper, is a later draft, and its corrections and cancellations are those of a second stage of composition. It is at least as likely that Brown’s memory is at fault and that Keats’ holograph which has minor differences from the texts printed in Annals and 1820, is the first and only draft of the poem.”
The nightingale was regular and favourite subject for adoption by pre-Romantic and Romantic poets, but Keats’s style of treatment of the subject is quite individual. The poem traces the inception, nature and decline of the creative mood and expresses Keats’ attempt to understand his feelings about the contrast between the ideal and the real, and the close association of pain with pleasure. “Poems on ‘the nightingale probably familiar to him include Charlotte Smith’s To a Nightingale and On the Departure of the Nightingalein her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and Coleridge’s To the Nightingale (1796) and The Nightingale. A Conversation Poem (1798). The suggestion of Coleridge’s influence is strengthened by Keat’s recent encounter with him on Hampstead Heath (11 April 1819), as the ‘thousand things’ broached by Coleridge during their two-mile walk included ‘Nightingales, Poetry-on Poetical sensation.’ Keats’s thinking in the poem, especially in the two concluding stanzas, also points towards a recent re-reading of Wordsworth and Hazlitt. Style and diction show traces of these influences, but are chiefly notable for their condensation under the pressure of personal feeling of passages from Keat’s earlier work recalled by association in the process of composition.”
In the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Keats concentrates more narrowly on the poetic symbol. Each symbol provides the focus for a new and searching test of the nature of the creative process and now especially, to return to a central preoccupation, of the king of identity it can and cannot impart. For the task in both the odes is to create or preserve for the object each considers a higher or essential reality without destroying its quality and uniqueness as inexistent being or thing. The problem for Keats is that of the creative process itself. In the first case the task is to invest the nightingale with values that are permanent without losing the sense of its living reality for the present.
In the second instance the poet begins not with a living object but with a work of art created at a distant time and by a different artist—one working, perhaps, with expectations similar to his own—in the attempt to define its identity for his own generation. The “Urn” moves from the world of mythic oneness in the effort to engage the concerns of the present. The “Nightingale” works from a point in history, the standpoint of the speaker in his heartache and loneliness, in the effort to regain the word of timelessness and myth. The myth in question is not, of course, any single legend like that of Psyche with its different emphasis, but the archetypal myth of Plato’s realm where antinomies are resolved and values are perceived as one. The
thrust of the one ode is complementary and reciprocal to that of the other. As a record of intense imaginative experience a “voyage of conception,” each concludes in a form of recognition that is profoundly ironic.
Since its primary concern is for synthesis, that is, for the formation of the bird as an evolving symbol, “Nightingale” more directly confronts the problem of the creative process. The process begins gradually and through a sustained play of association the poem takes shape within that familiar, shadowy world of vague and confused sensation but in a mood troubled by discontent and longing. The bird, sinrdag in its case and immunity from pain, draws the poet into that act of imaginative identification that is the beginning of poetic activity. The mere voice in its simplicity becomes the focus about which a rich tram of associations starts slouty together. “Throat” suggests wine, and “vintage” leads on both to Flora, suggesting the primal world of “Flora and old Pan.” and “the country green,” the homely, familiar world of common place actuality. The longing for the “warm South” leads backwards to the Province of the medieval poets and then to classical antiquity and the fabulous Hippocrene that will permit the poet to “fade away” to join the bird within its forest haunts. Already the progression has begun to suggest a wealth of subtly different implication and at tire same time that kind of attenuation that is to overtake the whole poetic effort.
The urge for fantastical diversion that defies the consciousness and mortality of human limitation, the impulse fully expressed in “Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee,” is typically Keatsian. However, the process is far from an unthinking one. The third stanza openly confronts those “disagreeable” the imagination must somehow deal with-sickness, sorrow, age, and finally death. For it is, of course, the recollection of Tom’s last days that lends a special poignancy and also a kind of weakness to the stanza. The burden of such tragic knowledge steeps deadening and inescapable. In the face of it the poet car only “dissolve.” The poet is transported “on the viewless wings of Poesy.” The stanzas that immediately follow gain much of their extraordinary intensity from the conscious and willful exclusion of knowledge.
Thus the illusion of recovering the primal garden of external spring is only the more compelling for the unobtrusive hints of change that underlie it, the fading violets and coming musk rose, just as the beauty of the regions is the more seductive because it cannot be seen :
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense upon the boughs.
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree
wild.” (41-45)
The elimination of the primary visual suites intensifies the other; in Keats’s phrase, it leaves “so much room for Imagination.” The loss only gratifies the imagination- in its desire to enlarge the frilliness of
the season in a way that outruns the power of the senses, as the extraordinary effects of synasthesia partly suggest. In this region of half-lights and shadows the poet is for a time able to control the flow of associations that surround the bird so that the process of imaginative assimilation, whatever the hints of contradiction that subtly run counter to it, maintains unity and momentum. The process reaches its climax in the sixth stanza. For now the poet daringly returns to the idea of death, the chief among the besetting evils of the third stanza, to pursue its connotations further but m such a way as actually to reinforce the notion of the bird as an ideal of tranquility and permanence. For a moment death, conceived of as an eternal present the prolongation of the ecstatic moment, is reconciled with the other values love, beauty, enjoyment- that the bird expresses.
But for a moment only. The various, different connotations of death cannot be long suppressed, nor is the bird, in its evolution as poetic image, able to assimilate them as they now gradually re-emerge to consciousness. The poet is gradually forced to recognize the bird as something no longer natural but essential, as per early a work of art, a symbol, a value that exists in separation from the world of man:
“Thou must not born for death, immortal Bird !
No hungry generations tread thee down.”
(61-62)
Rather than uniting the earthly and the eternal, the bird now serves to emphasize the gap between them. The point is, however, that the bird, first as suggestive image than as symbol, cannot be isolated from the whole poetic process that creates it and inevitably out-runs it. For the process, taken as a kind of speculation, a form even of “thinking;” is one that exceeds any means the poet can set up. The controlled inter-play of associations that swells the bird into reality, that gives it value and identity. The same controlled interplay inexorably exposes it to an ever-widening circle of human experience, a kind of complexity the bird cannot subsume. The very process that creates the bird inevitably rejects as in adequate, just as any image poem, or thought is inadequate, to express, the complex sum of human real matter in the transformation it undergoes,the bird is thus the symbol of the poem’s achievement but also of termination.
The recognition is not instantaneous. To some degree it is latent from the very start in the way the imagination of the poet proceeds to operate on its materials. Nothing, in fact is more characteristic of the ode than the way in which the central realization is restrained almost voluptuously and only gradually permitted to in-filtrate awareness. The poet’s conviction of identification with the, bird, the illusion of his hold upon, its values as poetic image, is slowly dissipated. The voice he hears heard “by an infinity, of others”, by “emperor and n,” and will be heard again by future generation he will never know, it has heralded the opening of endless vistas into “fairy lands,” but it has also the biblical Ruth at a specific moment in time. Such diversity of experience exceeds the imagination’s capacity to distill and unify. The illusion of mythic oneness is dissolved in the awareness of change and human history as the voice of the bird recedes.
The experience is driven home by the closing lines and the questions they pose: “Wax it a vision, or a waking dream?
I led is that music: Do I walk or sleep”
(70-80)
For the questions only arise when the poem itself considered as a vital process of unfolding, has ended. They ensue from a standpoint outside it. The poet awakes to reflect on his experience, to contemplate as a vision or dream. But the very form of its questions and the distinctions they demand are ones to which poetry as a primal state of consciousness, has never needed to submit. The questions seek to reduce the life and potentiality of the verse, its continuity and infinite suggestiveness, to the value of a logical abstraction by forcing on it the methodology of “either/or”. Their very map-appropriateness, or irrelevance; serves to emphasize the change that gradually has taken place within the poet’s consciousness. They dramatize the replacement of one kind of comprehension by another that is more familiar, the kind of busy common sense.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-II

1.    When was “Ode to Nightingale written”?

12.5 ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

1.
“THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who const thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape         5
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What strugglelo escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”           10

2.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave         15
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”                 20

3.
“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!              25
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting, and forever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”             30

4.
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,                    35
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious mom? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.”                  40
5
“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!                          45
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shall remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” that is all
Yet know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
A. SUMMARY
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” was also supposed to have been written in May 1819. It probably follows the “Ode to a Nightingale” fairly closely since- it shares with that ode both a preoccupation with the difference between ideal and actual experience and a poetic structure based on the flight from everyday reality and a return to it, yet metrically is closer to the remaining stanza odes in its abandonment of the shorter eighth line found in the ‘Nightingale’ stanza. Its position in 1820 suggests that Keats may have intended it to provide an answer to the questions raised at the end of the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
A man is saying love nothings to an illustrated Grecian urn, an ancient Greek pot. He believes that the pot is wed to a man called "Quietness," but their union isn't legally recognized because they haven't had sex yet. In addition, he believes that "Slow Time" and "Silence" are adoptive parents to the urn.
The urn then reveals to us its occupation: it is a "historian," and it is far more skilled at narrating tales than the speaker could ever hope to be. The speaker examines the urn more closely and attempts to decipher the meaning behind the painted images. A narrative involving gods, humans, or both is shown on the urn. It appears that a group of males are pursuing attractive women across the woodland. People are pounding on drums and playing pipes. Everyone appears content. The speaker is confused about what is going on in this chaotic scene.
Not only is the urn a better storyteller than the poet, but the musicians in the illustration have sweeter melodies than the poet. The poet then tries to listen to the music played by the people in the image. That’s right: even though he can’t hear the music with his ears, he’s trying to listen to it with his "spirit." He looks at the illustration of a young guy who is playing a song under a tree. Because pictures don’t change, the man will be playing his song as long as the urn survives, and the tree will always be full and green.
Next, the speaker turns to one of the guys who is pursuing a maiden, and he gives him some advise: "Don't worry – at least you’ll always be in love with her, because you’re in a picture, and pictures don’t change. You’re never going to make out with that girl."
Next, the speaker turns to one of the guys who is pursuing a maiden, and he gives him some advise: "Don't worry – at least you’ll always be in love with her, because you’re in a picture, and pictures don’t change. You’re never going to make out with that girl."
The speaker muses on how content the trees must be because they will always have all of their leaves. In the realm of the urn, spring is eternal, and each song has a brand-new sound to it. Subsequently, he begins discussing love and uses the word "happy" numerous times. Because the couple on the urn will never stop longing for one another, he is envious of them. Really? Seeking your partner to hook up with you is, in his opinion, the best part of being in love--not the part that comes after. It's beginning to seem like the speaker needs to take a cold shower. The use of the word "panting" raises the possibility that the poem will become extremely graphic.
It was starting to get a little heated, but the speaker has now moved to another area of the urn. He is examining a picture of an animal offered as a sacrifice. This is all the cold shower he was in need of. A cow is being led for sacrifice by a priest. Spectators have travelled from a nearby town. The speaker imagines that the town has been abandoned in preparation for the sacrifice because it is a holy day. Because the town is a picture and photos don't change, it will always be vacant.
The speaker becomes somewhat frightened. Right now, he seems to be shouting at the urn. He used to be quite enthused about the prospect of living in the never-ending universe depicted in the images, but these days he's not so sure. It appears "cold" to him in some way. He considers how the urn will live on and continue to tell its story to upcoming generations even after he and everyone he knows pass away. The urn is humankind's buddy and teacher. Every generation is taught the same lesson, which is that beauty and truth are the same thing, and that understanding this is all we need to survive.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-III

1.    Whose translation did Keats read while learning about Greek’s literature and wrote a poem in praise of it, name the translator and the poem?

12.6    SUMMARY
In this unit we read and analyzed the poems, “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “Ode on the
Grecian Urn” which gave us a fair idea how Keats wrote his poetry in the next unit we will further look into his other odes.

12.7    GLOSSARY
Moderate- average in amount, intensity, quality, or degree.
Leisurely- acting or done at leisure; unhurried or relaxed.
Orthodox- holding established beliefs especially in religion
Heathen- a person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially one who is not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim) as regarded by those who do.
Picturesque – (of a place or building) visually attractive, especially in a quaint or charming way.
Cockles- It is a medium-sized clam-like shell, rounded and domed with radiating ridges.
Temporalized- to make something temporal in time, place something in time, or make something concerned with the present life.
Numbness- a loss of feeling in a part of the body
Dryad- (in folklore and Greek mythology) a nymph inhabiting a tree or wood.
Beechen- made of, consisting of, or resembling the wood or bark of a beech tree.
Draught- a single act of drinking or inhaling.
Weariness- extreme tiredness; fatigue.
Groan- make a deep inarticulate sound conveying pain, despair, pleasure, etc.
Perplexes- make (someone) feel completely baffled.
Retards- delay or hold back in terms of progress or development.
Verdurous- rich in verdure, freshly green
Boughs- a main branch of a tree.
Requiem- (especially in the Roman Catholic Church) a Mass for the repose of the souls of the dead.
Perilous- full of danger or risk.
unravish’d- not ravished, sexually assaulted, or violated; pure.
Ecstasy- an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement.
Melodies- a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity.
Grieve- feel intense sorrow.
Parching- causing dryness through intense heat.
Heifer- (in farming) a cow that has not borne a calf, or has borne only one calf.
Trodden- walk in a specified way.

12.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISES
ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.      An Alter (temple).
ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE- II

1.    May 1819
ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-III

1.    Chapman’s translation of Homer; On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.

12.9    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vandler.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012.
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Keats. Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Keats, John, Tony Church, and George Rylands. John Keats. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Wolfson, Susan J. Reading John Keats. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
White, Robert. John Keats: A Literary Life. Springer, 2010.
Ulmer, William A. John Keats: Reimagining History. Springer, 2017

12.10    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    In “Ode to Psyche”, what does Keats offer to build for Psyche?

2.    Define “negative capability” and which of his ode is an exemplary of it?
Unit-13 John Keats Odes-II
STRUCTURE

13.1    INTRODUCTION

13.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

13.3    ODE ON MELANCHOLY
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

13.4    ODE TO AUTUMN
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-II

13.5    ODE ON INDOLENCE
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-III

13.6    SUMMARY

13.7    GLOSSARY

13.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

13.9    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

13.10    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

13.1    INTRODUCTION
While all of Keats’ poetry has his signature spunk, many scholars argue that due to thematic similarities and psychological development among other things, his odes seem to form a group together. The odes do not exactly tell a story-there is no unifying “plot” and no recurring characters-and there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. However, anyone can read one of the odes
and see how well they stand on their own.
The great odes are by nature suited to the kind of close analysis that was the critical innovation of the New Criticism in England and America and has become the prevailing mode of critical exegesis today In recent years, these works have been progressively enriched through a series of insightful and illuminating analyses. It is fair to state that they have gained more from contemporary interpretations than the poet's other poetry. However, certain elements of the odes have been somewhat overlooked. This oversight arises because the New Criticism approach, which focuses on examining each poem independently within its own context, has been predominantly applied. Despite some notable exceptions, recent attempts to establish a basis for reading the odes as a group, for understanding the ways in which they interrelate with and qualify each other, have never been as successful as individual readings. Equally important has been the tendency to consider the odes in relative isolation from the poet’s other work and the course of his career. The methods and techniques of the New Criticism have never been as successful with the long poem as with the lyric, and interpretation of Keats’s narrative poetry has notably lagged behind the modem reappraisal of the odes. The result has been that the odes have come to seem to us today the centre of Keats’s achievement.
Ultimately, the odes have the maximum to tell us when they are taken not only together as a group but as as a key factor of Keats’s total achievement. The fact that the odes employ a strong measure of paradox and irony has hardly gone unobserved in modem criticism. The shift that takes place, for example, in the conception of death at the climax of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the more obvious turn upon the word “forlorn,” or the revelation of a wealth of quietly mocking implications in such words as “shape,” “attitude,” “brede,” “marble,” and “overwrought” at the outset of the final stanza of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”-these and a number of other device that we recognize as “ironic” have been examined by a host of critics to elucidate the parabola shape of these poems, the rising and falling movement of imaginative engagement and disengagement they embody.
The spirit of irony, in this lesson is derived from the recognition that those concerns and questions that matter most to us, however present and however tenthly we pursue them, are ones that cannot be brought to any final determination. Although it has antecedents at least as far back as Socrates, it is a spirit that finds- its fullest expression in Romantisim. It finds its purest expression in the great odes of Keats, for it arises through what is most central to the ironic sense- through the poets involvement with process, and more specifically the creative process.
Since one intention of this lesson is to bring the odes into closer relationship to each other; a preliminary indication of the pattern they collectively assume may prove useful even at the risk of some anticipation. In a nutshell, the “Ode to Psyche” can best be taken as a general introduction to the problem examined more specifically in the odes that follow it, for it is here that Keats broadens out from a sense of
his own dilemma to a consideration of the position of the modem poet generally in his relation to the conflicting forces of mythology and history and the relatively somber prospects for poetry that lie ahead in the “Ode to a Nightingale” lie tests the possibilities and limits of the creative imagination by confining his attention lo a single image in the effort to endow it with a fullness of identity and the permanence of art. In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” one already endowed with an enduring form, in the attempt to determine the meaning of identity such a work can possess for a later age or state of human development. The process for inquiry is collateral to that of the former ode but moves in the opposite direction. However, in the concluding stanza of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the central paradox is crystallized with an energy and succinctness that carry the art of Romantic irony to its extreme. In the “Ode on Melancholy ,” the most tangential of the series, he takes up subordinate aspect of the paradox by returning to his old fascination with “intensity” as the essence of poetical experience and its ability to dissolve the most basic oppositions in human feeling. Given its different perspective and, emphasis, each of the spring odes actively involves is in a process of imaginative intuition that leads to a cumulative recognition of what, within the terms of art and human experience, such a process can and cannot achieve.

13.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will study the remaining odes in the syllabus, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode on Indolence” by John Keats.

13.3    ODE ON MELANCHOLY
Ode on Melancholy

1.
“No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
5
Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
10

2.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
15
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
20

3.
She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while die bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
25
Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might;
And be among her cloudy trophies hung”.
30
A. ODE ON MELANCHOLY: SUMMARY
“Ode on Melancholy” was probably written in May 1819. The month is suggested by the references to spring and early summer in stanza and by the correspondences in the poem with ideas expressed in the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem is a characteristic Keatisian statement about the necessary relationship between joy and sorrow. True Melancholy is not to be found among thoughts of oblivion, death, and gloom (stanza 1); it descends suddenly and is linked with the perception of beauty and its transience (stanza 2); it is associated with beauty, joy, pleasure and delight, and is felt, only by those who can experience these intensely (stanza 3).
In "Ode on Melancholy," John Keats explores the complex relationship between joy and sorrow. In the first stanza, he advises against seeking oblivion through death or forgetfulness, symbolized by "Lethe," the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. He also cautions against suicide, referencing "nightshade, the ruby grape of Prosperpine," a poisonous plant associated with the underworld queen. Additionally, Keats warns against fixating on death-related symbols like the owl, death-moth, and beetle, as they may deepen one's despair. Instead, he suggests embracing beauty and love as antidotes to melancholy.
The speaker recommends focusing on uplifting sights such as the morning rose, the rainbow over the sea, or the gaze of a beloved to counteract sorrow. In the third stanza, Keats reflects on the intertwined nature of happiness and suffering, noting that joy is fleeting, beauty is transient, and even pleasure can turn to sorrow. He proposes that within the "temple of Delight" lies the "shrine of Sadness," indicating that experiencing true joy requires acknowledging its counterpart, melancholy. By embracing both joy and sorrow, one gains a deeper appreciation of life's complexities.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

1.    According to Keats melancholy is associated with?

13.4 ODE TO AUTUMN
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies”.

A. ODE TO AUTUMN: SUMMARY
In the first stanza of John Keats's "Ode to Autumn," the poet personifies the season as a close companion of the sun, collaborating to ripen various fruits and flowers. This stanza vividly portrays autumn as a time of abundance and fulfillment. Keats uses rich imagery to depict how the "maturing sun" aids in ripening apples, gourds, and hazelnuts, emphasizing the season's fertility.
The description of grapevines being "laden" with fruit and bees being "busy" collecting nectar further highlights autumn's role in nature's cycle. This portrayal contrasts with the traditional view of autumn as a melancholic time, instead celebrating it as a season of growth and prosperity.
The speaker addresses Autumn at the beginning of the stanza, asking her to view and analyse her work. "watchest" implies that Autumn actively engages in the harvest rather than only acting as a bystander. The speaker then describes the work and activity of harvest time. Workers are "reaping and singing" in the fields as they bring in the crop. The verb "singing" conveys a sense of celebration, delight, and the labour-intensive nature of the harvest. The next stanza describes the granaries, where the harvest is kept for the winter. The speaker talks about how the granaries are "bursting" with the abundance of the harvest and how the food stored for the winter will be made up of grains and fruits.
Starting the verse, the speaker describes how the autumnal season is like a "soft-dying day". The phrase "dying day" highlights life's cycles and the passage of time, whereas the adjective "soft" conveys a feeling of peace and gentleness. The speaker recounts the landscape at night, as the sun sets and the shadows become longer. Using the word "rippled" to describe the grain in the fields implies movement and texture. The phrase "drows'd" describes how relaxed and worn out the setting sun seems.
The final line lists several twilight sounds that one can hear in the countryside, such as redbreast robins "whistling" and swallows "twittering". It is implied by these sounds that autumn is a season for introspection and tranquility. The gentle fading of the day and the calming sounds of nature create a serene and restful mood, which is how this verse portrays Autumn as a season of tranquilly and tranquillity. A vibrant and all-encompassing picture of the season is painted through sensory elements, such as grain rippling and the robin's whistling.
SELF- CHECK EXERCISE-II
John Keats wrote many of what kind of poem?

a)    Epics

b)    Odes

c)    Sonnets
s) Elegies

13.5    ODE ON INDOLENCE
“‘They toil not, neither do they spin.’
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowèd necks, and joinèd hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp’d serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;
They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a mask?
Was it a silent deep-disguisèd plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower:
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?
A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d
And ached for wings, because I knew the three;
The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek, And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,—
I knew to be my demon Poesy.
They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:
O folly! What is Love? and where is it?
And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;
For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—
At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence;
O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,
That I may never know how change the moons, Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!
And once more came they by:—alas! wherefore?
My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;
My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er
With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:
The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,
Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;
The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine, Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;
O Shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!
Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.
So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;
For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!
Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store;
Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright, Into the clouds, and never more return!”.
A. SUMMARY
“You will judge of my 1819 temper,” wrote Keats to a friend in the summer of that year, “when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an Ode on Indolence.” In the same letter he says “I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; the form the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a philosopher than I was, consequently, a little less of a versifying petulant.” Keat’s letter makes it clear that on 19 March 1819, he was only in the exact mood of ‘On Indolence’ but could almost paraphrase the poem in prose : “This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless... In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and path no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any deftness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek Vase- a man and two women whom no one hut myself could distinguish in their disbursement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering ‘the Mind.” The very little indicates that this is an ode on languor expressing a mood of laziness and lethargy when the activities of life do not seem tube worthwhile. It can be compared to “Tennyson’s The Lotus Eaters and to Robert Bridge’s Indolence. While Keats affirms that neither love, nor ambition, nor poetry has charm enough to tempt him from a mood of exquisite indolence, he wishes to be left alone to dream way his idle hour.
In John Keats's "Ode on Indolence," the poet envisions himself reclining on a grassy lawn, halfasleep and enveloped in a tranquil stupor. In this languid state, three figures—Love, Ambition, and Poesy—materialize before him, reminiscent of images etched on a rotating urn. They move gracefully, one following the other, their serene appearances marked by "placid sandals" and flowing white robes. Each figure is distinct: Love is portrayed as a beautiful maiden; Ambition appears with a pale countenance and vigilant eyes; Poesy, whom the poet feels a deep connection to, is depicted as a spirited young woman. Initially, too immersed in his reverie to recognize them, Keats identifies them upon their third pass. Motivated by a sudden yearning, he wishes he could join them, feeling an intense desire to
follow, yet he remains rooted in his indolence:
“They faded, and forsooth ! I wanted wings.
Oh folly! what is Love ? And where is ill ?
And, fore that poor Ambition-it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit.
For Poesy ! No she has not a joy-
At least for me-so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings stooped in honeyed indolence”.
The temptation is, of course, to pursue the three shapes, to give them identity to bridge the gap between their abstractness and the world of human concern, to rediscover the old polarities for one more journey of imagination. The temptation now is in some ways even greater than before, for the figures personally the three commanding passions of the poet’s life. But he checks himself because he realised that his desire to follow them was foolish. Love is something that really does not exist. Ambition is a result of short lived excitement that man experiences in his little heart and Poesy may have its pleasures but none of them can put them in that mood of bliss which he experiences at the time of drowsy noons full of sweet languour.
In John Keats's "Ode on Indolence," the poet experiences a profound internal conflict between his yearning for creative expression and his inclination toward comfortable inaction. Initially, he is captivated by visions of three figures—Love, Ambition, and Poesy—who symbolize aspects of human endeavor and artistic inspiration. However, as they reappear, he recoils from their allure, preferring the tranquility of his current state. He expresses a desire to remain undisturbed, rejecting the pursuit of external validation through poetry. Ultimately, Keats chooses the solace of his dreams over the challenges that active engagement with these ideals would entail.
“Farewell! 1 yet have visions for the night
And for the day faint visions there in store.
Vanish ye Phantoms, from my idle sprite
Into the clouds, and more return”.
Nevertheless one suspects Keats had come to see the limits of a kind of experiences whose possibilities he had, in fact, virtually exhausted. The final stanza seems more, than a rejection of the opportunities of the passing moment, it contains overtones of a farewell, if only a temporary one, to a mode of poetical composition.
One of the critics has summed up the mood of the poet in the following words ; “This Ode represents one side of Keats’ gems its sensuous, dreamy, pleasure-loving element.” Keats owned to having an exquisite appreciation of the, beautiful, and here be declares himself willing to yield to it even at the expense of manly energy and resolve: It is a mood only, and a mood to which bodily weakness probably contributes something,
for Keats had not at that time the stock of venality natural to a man of three and twenty. Keats seems really to have given way to the passionate longing for rest which he here expresses.
The poem contains a number of pictures which are vividly depicted and, which bear witness to Keats’s gift of concrete imagery. A lovely picture of a cloudy morning when the air smells of coming rain is beautifully described in stanza five in the following lines :
“The mom was clouded, but no showers fell, Tho’s in her uds hung the sweet tears of May:”
The mood of indolence is successfully and effectively built up in the poem and is at times so infectious that even the reader seems desire to follow the three figures, but the very next moment he, ‘realizes the futility of the pursuit’ and returns to his original mood of “honied indolence.”
The poem was not included among the Odes published in 1820 and it has been suggested that the reason was that it contains many phrases reminiscent, of the other poems Beautiful as it is in places, if falls short of their level of workmanship; it is nobel verse but not Keats at his noblest.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE- III
The speaker compares his lazy soul to a ……… covered in ……..

a)    Forest/Snow

b)    Ice cream cone/Sprinkles

c)    Fields/Daisies

d)    Lawn/Flowers

13.6    SUMMARY
In this unit we read and understood the odes, “Ode on Melancholy” , “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode on Indolence” by John Keats. The "Ode on Melancholy" differs from the other odes mostly due to its style, but the "Ode to Psyche" is distinct mainly because to its shape. The speaker of "Melancholy," the sole ode not written in the first person, is heard warning or counselling those who are experiencing melancholy in the imperative mode; it is assumed that his counsel is based on his own difficult experiences. The three stanzas of "Melancholy" express a lot of the language used in the previous odes, including the Greek mythology of "Indolence" and "Urn," the gorgeous nature descriptions in "Psyche" and "Nightingale," the passion of "Nightingale," and the philosophy of "Urn." Nevertheless, "Melancholy" is more than just a collection of the earlier poems. Within it, the speaker finally explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of “Urn” and achieve
the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”

13.7    GLOSSARY
Tyrian- purple or crimson dye.
Aurorean- belonging to the dawn, or resembling it in brilliant hue.
Dryad-a tree nymph or tree spirit in Greek mythology.
Lethe (pronounced: lee-thee)-one of the five rivers in Hades, the underworld in Greek mythology. Serene-calm, peaceful, and untroubled; tranquil.
Muffled- (of a sound) not loud because of being obstructed in some way; muted.

13.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISES
ANSWER TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE- I

A. It is associated with beauty, joy, pleasure and delight, and is felt, only by those who can experience these intensely.
ANSWER TO SELF CHECK EXEERCISE-II
A. Odes
ANSWER TO SELF CHECK EXEERCISE-III
A. Lawn/Flowers

13.9    SUGGESTED READING
The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vandler.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012.
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Keats. Infobase Publishing, 2009.
Keats, John, Tony Church, and George Rylands. John Keats. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Wolfson, Susan J. Reading John Keats. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
White, Robert. John Keats: A Literary Life. Springer, 2010.
Ulmer, William A. John Keats: Reimagining History. Springer, 2017

13.10    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    In “Ode to Psyche”, what does Keats offer to build for Psyche?

2.    What devices does Keats use to describe the season in “To Autumn”?

3.    How does “Ode on Melancholy” reflect a paradox?

4.    Discuss the themes in “Ode to Indolence”.

5.    Describe the form of “Ode to Nightingale”.

6.    Comment on the use of diction in the “Odes of Keats”.
Unit-14 Victorian Age
STRUCTURE

14.1    INTRODUCTION

14.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

14.3    VICTORIAN AGE
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

14.3.1    SCIENCE
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

14.3.2    SOCIO-ECONOMIC SCENE
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-III

14.3.3    LITERARY SCENE
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-IV

14.4    SUMMARY

14.5    GLOSSARY

14.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

14.7    TERMINAL-QUESTIONS

14.8    SUGGESTED READING

14.1    INTRODUCTION
In this background lesson on the Victorian Age, general tendencies and characteristics of the Age will be discussed.
There has been a revival of interest in Victorian Age after world war II, and it was felt that the Victorians are very much our contemporaries, and their problems--political, religious, cultural and educational are very much our own. Macaulay, the great trumpeter of Victorian progress stressed the multidimensional nature-mechanical, scientific, medical etc. of this progress, yet, as L.H. Myers pointed out, a deep seated spiritual vulgarity lies at the heart of our civilization. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Wordsworth had directed attention to “a multitude of causes, unknown to former times” which were “acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion,” to reduce it to a state of almost “savage torpor”.
D.H. Lawrence, in his critique of 19th-century industrial society, lamented the pervasive "ugliness" imposed upon the working class. He argued that the affluent and industrial promoters condemned workers to a life surrounded by "meanness and formless" environments, encompassing "ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses." This ubiquity of ugliness, according to Lawrence, betrayed the human spirit's inherent need for beauty, suggesting that the human soul requires beauty even more than sustenance. This perspective aligns with critiques by contemporaries like Carlyle and Ruskin, who challenged the era's economic doctrines and their dehumanizing effects. Lawrence's portrayal of industrialization reflects a broader sentiment of diminished human dignity amid mechanization
However, it is a mistake to suppose that the 19th century stands only for one accepted set of beliefs and principles. Most of our modem revolutionary ideas (e.g. ‘On liberty’ by Mill) were know to them. But an age must have certain inner convictions by which it lives and which seem to make life worth-living. Without this, life becomes “a tale told by an idiot full or sound and fury signifying nothing”. The Victorians constantly used the words ‘spirit and’ spiritual in this way. By this they meant the capacity of the individual to grow, to become more and more perfect, to entertain and satisfy noble aspiration. In this way they reassured themselves that life was not in significant and futile but could correspond to man’s desires and could fill him with great emotion.
The Victorian age was also an era of great practical activity which is evident from the marvelous and epoch-making industrial and economic achievements of the period. It is a way therefore in the realization of the ideal, its adjustment to the actual that the spirit was supposed to fulfil itself. In 1829
Carylyle in Signs of the Times wrote: “Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single, epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical age: Men are Crown, mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand”.
But the spiritual adventures and experiments are the chief inspiration and material of the literature of the Victorian Age. Its writers were generally supported by the recognition of powers higher and greater than man, from whom the inspiration came; but the nature of this power of powers was variously and not always clearly conceived. For instance, Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold all believed in God in their own way and entertained their own mystical views of life and the universe.
What most impresses the student of 19th century literature is the apparent confidence of its writers in the future, however much they may agree in their disapproval of the present. The Romantic poets were all visionaries, and so were the Romantic writers of Victorian era indeed the humanist (liberal) must a confident that his vision can be realized are the world shaped according to his ideal or he would condemn himself as a mere dreamer.
It was precisely on this that the 19th century idealism same to grief. The Victorians started with a legacy of three centuries of tradition, a legacy which came to them from Bacon and Shakespeare (Swinburne’s “Glory to man in the highest...” express the Victorian conception).
This is the Renaissance idea of Shakespeare (Hamlet), and Shelley (Prometheus Unbound). This gave them a faith to live by. Got in the upshot the vision was not realized. The truth is that the outer world was changing too rapidly and becoming less and less adapted to the activities of the ‘spirit’. The individual’s “better nature” seemed unable to expand in the new civilization. Fresh ideas kept pouring in. The old sense of human grandeur and permanence could find nothing to nourish it and withered at the roots, (of Keats in Hyperion with Ruskin). The ideals of Wordsworth, Keats etc. were transmitted to their successors, but they were not successfully expressed. “Wandering between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born” (Matthew Arnold) gave expression to this sense of conflict. The expressions of Carlyle Ruskin and others were identical.
The problem now was : how to regain and recover the old confidence, the conviction that life was worth living. There are always at least two answers to this question : Men may either turn back to the past or they may immerse themselves in the present. From about 1830 to 1880 the Victorians unanimously sought help end inspiration in the past, and exhausted every artistic response and literary appeal to make their answer convincing (the Pre-Raphaelites, the influence of classics, especially in Arnold. Newman and the Oxford Movement) but their very anxiety and emphasis betrayed them suggesting as it did that they were really shouting to keep up their courage. So they hastened the change.
This change is heralded by John Stuart Mill (1806-73), who asserts the individual’s right to absolute
freedom of opinion and sentiment and of their expression including “the right to be wrong”. He assailed the belief of the former generation that the thinker must not be also wad to weaken the bonds of society. Educated people, be said must have no unexamined loyalties. This was welcomed by the younger generation, who thought that this would give them unlimited power to remake the human mind and to control the work outside it. However, they could not reach the limits of Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley in modem times. The truth was that culture has become so complicated that men’s opinions on most subjects were inevitably second hand. This “education by hearsay” has remained one of the great problems of civilization (Arnold’s essays on that ‘problem’ such “Culture and Anarchy”. “Sweetness and light” expose all this superficiality). Mill attempted to persuade men that the duty of thinking and judging for themselves was of the first importance. In the heyday of the great romantic writers there was no need to much persuasion. These philosophers (Kant. Goethe etc.), supported the conviction of the poets that the mind is no photographic place. Mind is conditioned not only by the past, but by the future also. Mind is an active creative thing they argued. (Compare Carlyle emphasis upon the mind and spirit of man. Look within seemed to way Carlyle.

14.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will discuss some major characteristics of the Victorian Age.

14.3    VICTORIAN AGE
Thus, the Victorians were not paralyzed by the wickedness and weaknesses of the world outside them because they believed themselves have discovered an inexhaustible source of strength, and goodness within. But if so man’s first aim should be to get to know this spirit within i.e. man must study oneself. So they began to study themselves. But when they did look seriously within they began to discover all kinds of things which were anything but lovely and noble. (D.H. Lawrence, Freud, Aldous Huxley are modem psychoanalysists who discovered the beyond within). Thus neither the world without nor the world within was found to provide adequate support for the philosophy of the Romantic Movement; it ended as a battled quest. The tradition lingered on in Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and other late Victorians as a sense of obligation to seek for such a faith rather than as a definite belief. But as the voice of the past grew more alien to the other world a sense of aimlessness took possession of man (Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” is the best illustration).
But if the writer is to fulfil himself he must have a central philosophy which is not only an intellectual conviction but an enthusiasm absorbing all his personality which unites him to the intellectual and moral strength of the great inspirits of the past and which creates faith in the future. This means that he must have a sense of value. It was this faith that the later Victorians lost. As they attempted to us the new knowledge
which kept pouring in to illuminate the old convictions, the light began to reveal unexpected cracks in the building.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-1

I) . which period does the Victorian Age in English literature correspond to?

a)    1558-1603

b)    1660-1700

c)    1837- 1901
d) 1914-1945

II) . Who is often referred to as the “Queen of the Victorian Age?

a)    Elizabeth I

b)    Mary I

c)    Victoria

d)    Anne




14.3.1    SCIENCE
At first science spooned fond support to the romantic belief in the life of the spirit. In the early 19th century the conception of Nature as a machine was disappearing before the new study of living nature and the organic theories which took growth and cooperation as their central ideas. The nature and the soul were manifestations of the same life (Wordsworth especially), there was nothing to prevent the faith that man while a kin to nature (Shelley, Meredith in all his later poetry) is himself a higher manifestation of creative life in unlimited powers of development. Did not science itself provide an evidence of design, and life and intelligence? Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1831-33) demonstrated that the causes active in changing the earth’s surface now are just the same as those which have always operated. This established free idea of continuity and development.
There is no break, only steady operation of cause and effect, and interaction between environment and the immediate effect was to bring science into conflict with fee story of creation in the Bible i.e. with the continuation of special creation and the clear separation of living from inorganic matter, of mind from matter. (Huxley’s essay of “Physical Basis of life”). But its ultimate effect was far more profound, “It altered the tone of one’s mind” wrote Darwin. He also advocated change of outlook and feelings. Two effects deserve special notice in this new scientific thought : (i) it proved far stronger than the old rationalism of Mill the elder Recardo, Bentham, Etc., which rested on intellect, reason and of which complete expression was in Godwin, because it appealed to the imagination and (ii) It was empirical through and through i.e. it went straight to the sense experience (“direct evidence of Huxley). Its method
was experiment, and for the rest it relied on logic i.e. on what can be directly inferred from this “direct evidence”.
Darwin (1809- 82) was the embodiment of the new scientific out-look. His imagination and human sympathies were as event as his power of classifying facts and organizing evidence for it. He did not attack religion but quietly shrugged his shoulders and said: Well, what am I to do in the light of all this evidence. What was this evidence? Darwin following the lines opened up by Lyell, turned to the study of life. And he found that the evidence pointed to a common, descent, of all species of living creatures, including man. This was not a new idea, but no one had previously found the same kind of principle of explanation of all the facts such as Newton had supplied to physical science in the law of gravitation. This is what Darwin supplied in biology.
He took the main idea from Malthus’ Theory of Population. Malthus argued that the means of subsistence food etc.) are limited: the population increases faster than the food supplies therefore only a limited number can survive; the rest must be killed off by starvation, plague war etc. Darwin, in the Origin of Species (1859) applied this theory to fee whole evolution of life. In each generation there are far more individuals than can survive there is, therefore, a sturgeon for existence, each individual inherits differences as well as common characteristics ; those survive whose differences (variations) are better suited for adaptation to environment survive who are best adapted to their surroundings, not the morally best. If circumstances change then the ability to adopt yourself is the criterion (Huxley found his hope in this argument Can we produce such environment? He argued that by means of science we could invent means of a better living and thus could achieve progress). Having established this general principle Darwin proceeded to apply it in detail to the various species, from man to worms.
The effect was devastating. Not only did the theory seem to disprove that man was a special creation and seemed to trace his descent through animal ancestors to the common origin of all living species (“putting man back in nature”-Huxley’s favorite phrase), but the principle of evolution revealed conditions which appeared irreconcilable with belief in God. Natural selection is too clumsy and too wasteful for an omnipotent intelligence. If we are to hold to a ballet in God, we seem driven to abandon either the belief in His goodness or the belief in His Omnipotence. So what is telling of religon?
Of course Darwin did not deny in gross; on the contrary, the evidence for evolution plainly reveals development. But the development was due to a combination of impersonal, mechanically- working causes and effects. Now it so happened that this theory exactly fitted the prevalent social and industrial tendencies : in fact Darwin adopted his theory from Malthus’s theory of Population. The appeal was to experience and what did social experience reveal? The mew industrial civilization had dentistry removed God from the scene. The political economists had firmly placed the Christian God outside their economy i.e. a tendency
towards individualism injected by the intellectualists like Mill, Bentham, Ricardo and others. Enlightened self-interest” was the law of social order and the condition of progress.
And now here were the biologists justifying them from the evidence of science in banishing benevolence and God. No doubt, Victorian era was an age of hoplite reform. But the profounder cricks unkindly out that the middle class triumphs of which they were so proud were won by self-aggrandizement, imperialism and the enslavement of the masses. Thus the welfare of the capital owning classes depended on the degradation of the majority, and only ignorance prevented this majority from realizing how much it had been deprived of and could regain. All this is relevant to the struggle of the various political parties in the nineteenth century and all the parliamentary reforms this gave rise to the Novel of purpose - the social Novels of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Bronte etc. in the mid century.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

III) . Who is the author of the book “Origin of Species”?

a)  Charles Dickens

b)  Charles Darwin

c)  Thomas Hardy

d)  Thomas Huxley

IV)    Who is known for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection during the Victorian era?

a)    Isaac Newton

b)    Gregor Mendel

c)    Charles Darwin

d)    Michael Faraday

14.3.2    Socio-Economic Scene
Carlyle and Dickens dominate the first half of Victoria’s reign and their work reflects the interaction of literature and society of the period. One chief concern of their work is the description and analysis of the ‘Condition of England’. Secondly, it is in examination of the prevailing economic doctrines concerning poverty, population, and the scope of public responsibility. Thirdly, it is an attempt to suggest more handsome and humanitarian doctrines -- a work in which they had the assistance of those who were influenced by the aspirations of the, earlier Romantics especially of Coleridge, and by the revived of religious feeling and speculation about a more Christian order of society.
The later Victorian period dealt with the question of education, the debate about the content of English culture and resistance to the standardizing effects of machines. After the second Reform Bill (1887) and the Trade Union Act (1871) which enfranchised the working classes in the towns, the workmen no
longer depended on humanitarian sentiments. They were now the masters. This led to the development of Socialist idealism. Ruskin wrote in Crown of Wild Olive (1866), “Rough work, honourable or not, of a Marx or Owen in labour theory of value,” the theory that “labour is the source of wealth”.
Philosophically the whole literature of the Victorian Ago was permeated with a two-fold current of thought ; (i) There were various forms of rationalism carrying on the characteristic and dominant thought of the 18th century - in particular the powerful school of the Utilitarian’s, disciples of Jeremy Bentham (or Hume?), phavicist positivists (French colouring) scientific evolutionists (Herbert Spencer, Darwin), the agonistic tendencies of the biological evolutionists in harmony with the skepticism and (ii) transcendentalism.
Theologically the Victorian era was distinguished by the coexistence of a powerful school of rationalism, the inheritor of the deistic spirit of the 18th century and the Catholic reaction which manifested itself in century and whose influence was not yet exhausted.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-III
V).What was the primary economic basis of the Victorian Era?

a)    Agriculture

b)    Industrialization

c)    Colonialism

d)    Trade

14.3.3    Literary Scene
Talking in brief of the literary scene of the Victorian Age we might remark generally that nearly all Victoriana “wrote copiously and had little regard for eighteenth-century ideals of terseness and epigrammatic point”. Both poets and prose-writers were aware of a taste for propaganda in its various forms, and this explains the bulk of Victorian writing. At one time the Victorian period was considered to be one of literary decline and disintegration, and its literature was condemned for its “sentimentality and sanctimoniousness”. Now however, it is acclaimed as a time of great achievement in literature, even as the greatest in English literary history.
The thoughtful reader is conscious of the weaknesses as well as the unusual achievements of the Victorian literature. The most conspicuous of its weaknesses is the absence of an “unquestionably major poet”, a towering figure to compare, for instance with Blake (“Songs of Experience”) Wordsworth (“The Prelude”), Crabbe (“Tales in Verse”), or Byron (“Vision of judgment”). Victorian poetry, by and large, depends for its effect on impressiveness of manner and tone, and expresses a melancholy which is, “endemic rather than personal”. Its tone and manner are often those of the public. Pessimism was strong
in early Victorian times and certainly influenced poetry. Victorian poetry was, derivative and its vague emotionalism and impressiveness passed for significant and profound experience. Notwithstanding its bulk and the very large amount of interesting miscellaneous reading-matter in the form of biography and autobiography, history, criticism, books of travel and books for children, and periodical Victorian literature-and especially poetry “Philistine” complacent and inimical exemplifies Oscar Wilde’s anti-Victorianism is in fact, only philistinism turned inside out; it retains the same primitive dualism.
It is impossible to separate completely those elements in the Victorian period known as Oxford Movement, Pre-Raphaelitism, the Ritually Movement, and the “Naughty” Nineties. They stand for something unsatisfactory about the inner life of the period (referred to in the beginning of this. note). Thomas Hardy, G.M. Hopkins, Emily Bronte and perhaps Christina Rossetti are the poets, who, consistently find their inspiration not in, ‘the spirit of the age’, but in the stress of personal experience. In W.B. Yeats we can follow the entire process of self extrication from Aestheticism and ‘Celtic Twilight’ and of making poetry out of strong convictions and real experience.
The Victorians tended to be overburdened with opinions and ideas - about revelation, evolution, determinism, nature, and, other large public themes. Mills Autobiography records one form of this mental imprisonment, and Clough’s early poetry records another.
The novelists were more free, mainly because their aims were more limited allowed a pragmatic approach. There was great demand for their work, for entertainment and edification. “The age demanded reassuring patriarchs and matriarchs and writers vied with preachers and statesman in” providing this reassurance;” “Women novelists, who had played a considerable” part in the evolution of the 18th century novel, now found more abundant opportunities. The novel, like Elizabethan drama served a popular need; in the base for influences which would make intelligible the harsh conditions of Victorian life. George Eliot wrote: “My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity and sympathy.”
It can be said that the status of the English language changed in the course of the nineteenth century. And this was a rather, unexpected result of Arnold’s age of expansion.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-IV

VI). which literary movement, often seen as a reaction to Victorian values, began to emerge towards the end of the Victorian era?

a)    Modernism

b)    Romanticism

c)    Realism

d)    Oxford movement

14.4    SUMMARY
The Victorian era (1837-1901), marked by Queen Victoria’s reign, was a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization, leading to significant social changes, including the rise of middle class and widespread poverty among the working class. Advances in science and technology, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, challenged traditional beliefs. The literary scene was dominated by novelists lie Charles dickens and poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who explored themes of social ,morality ,class struggles, and the human condition. The era also saw the emergence of Gothic fiction and the beginnings of modernist thought.

14.5    GLOSSARY
The Victorian Compromise: The period was a time of contradiction, often referred to as the Victorian Compromise. On the one hand there was the progress brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the rising wealth of the upper and middle classes and the expanding power of Britain and its empire; on the other hand there was the poverty, disease, deprivation and injustice faced by the working classes.
Darwinism: The theory of evolution by natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859 work “On the Origin of Species,” which challenged traditional religious views and had a profound impact on science and society.

14.6    ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK QUESTIONS

I)      1837-1901

II)     Victorian

III)    Charles Darwin

IV)    Charles Darwin

V)     industrialization

VI)    modernism

14.7    SUGGESTED READING
English Literature: Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English- Speaking World, by William J. Long

1.    J.H. Suckely The Victorian Temper; A study in Literary Culture.

2.    Oliver Elton A Survey of English Literature 1830-1860 (2 Volume).

3.    G.M. Chesterton : The Victorien Age in Literature.

4.    B. Willey : Nineteenth Century Studies.

5.    G.M. Young : Victorian England.
Note : Apart from these books, students are recommended to study specialized books of criticism on Victorian poetry:

1.    Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. XTO Chapters II, III, VI, V, VI, VII.

2.    Hugh Walker : The Literature of the Victorian Era.

3.    E.D.H. Johnson : The Allen vision of Victorian Poetry.

4.    O. Hugh : The List Romantics.

5.    F.R. Leavis : New Bearings in English Poetry.

6.    W.L. Cross: The Development of English Novel.

14.8 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Discuss the scientific attitude of the Victorian Age.

2.    Explain the social condition of Victorian Age.

3.    Discuss the literary features of the Victorian Age.
Unit-15 Robert Browning: Love Poems
STRUCTURE

15.1    INTRODUCTION

15.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

15.3    LOVE POEMS
SELF –CHECK EXERCISE-I

15.4    ANALYSIS

15.5    GLOSSARY

15.6    SUMMARY

15.7    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

15.8    SUGGESTED READING

15.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

15.1    INTRODUCTION
The English poet Robert Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues (dramatic readings done by only one character). By vividly portraying a central character against a social background, these poems explore complex human motives in a variety of historical periods.

15.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about Robert Browning’s poems prescribed in the syllabus in some detail.

15.3    LOVE POEMS
This first lesson on Robert Browning will be devoted to a discussion of the poems described for detailed study.
“Men & Women”, published in 1855 in two volumes, is a dedication to Elizabeth Barrett Browning for her “Sonnets from The Portuguese”, and contains fifty one poems. It is unquestionably the very flower of
his genius. There is not one of its poems which the World will let die willingly. In Mr. Symon’s words, “their distinguishing feature is the monologue brought to perfection. Such Monologues as “Andrea del Sarto,” or “The Epistle of Karshish” never have been, and probably never will be, surpassed on their own ground, alter their own orders.” The book is the best collection of Browning’s short poems and best illustrates the character and variety of his powers. It also represents a critical phase in his personal and literary career, in his literary fortunes it masks a turning point; before it he had failed both as a playwright and as a poet. “Sordello”. (1860), which was meant to be “more popular than “Paracelsus” (1835) was ignored or badly reviewed by the crillies’ “Sordello”. It was written as “a first step towards popularity for me.” The reviews and reception-of the volume by the critics were, however, mixed. The book is also the first important product of Browning love-affair reflecting it in a new understanding of the problem involved in real, as opposed to imagined, sexual relationships.
By far the largest number of the poems in the books are poems of love, and some of the best among them are “Evelyn Hope”, “Love Among the Ruins.” “A Lover’s Quarrel”, “A Woman’s last world”, “By the fireside”. “Any wife to any husband”, “Mosmerism”, “a Serenade of the Villa”, “Love in a Life”, “Life in a Love”, “The last Ride Together”, “One Word More”.
Robert Browning's poetic exploration of love is notably distinguished by his dramatic approach, delving into its complexities and darker facets. Despite his own fortunate romantic life, Browning was drawn to portray love's more tumultuous and intricate dimensions. This inclination is evident in his dramatic monologues, where speakers reveal their inner conflicts and desires, offering readers a window into the multifaceted nature of human relationships. For instance, in "Porphyria's Lover," Browning examines themes of obsession and possession, presenting a chilling perspective on romantic attachment.
“I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost.
Who died before the god of love was born”.
He treats of actual passion and he stays at whatever moment in its courage promises to distil its richest significance. He seems almost the first to realize that those moments are not necessarily those of the rapture of possession and enjoyment, or the fierce bitterness of rejection, but may be any one of the scores of episodes in the long chronicle. Hence, the novelty of the situations in his love poetry. And again he stands apart because romance and passion rarely came singly to him; his questioning examining intellect led him to segregate all the strands of the mood; to trace it back to its origin and to peer forward to its outcome, if he portrays failure as a “Christina” or, “The Lost Mistress” or “The Last Ride Together”, it is not an occasion “either for some times focus outburst of grief or for the airy persiflage of suckling; but rather for the manliness of temper which gathers strength out of defeat, weaves the experience into the fabric of character and imbues its resignation with new thought and resolve for other ventures.” The tragedies of love are for Brownian’s Women rather than for his men. The inconsistency of pictures is that dreaded by a wife after her husband’s death as in Two in the Champagne, or of one who is constantly endeavoring to seize the hem of the garment of fidelity but in vain as in “Any wife to any Husband”. No poet falls so rarely into the sentimentalism which Meredith describes as “Adding harmonies on the strings of sensualist”. Browning is not always the poet of love filtering of baffled. He can pipe as melodiously as any Elizabethan song in praise of beauty:
“Nay but you who do not love
her, Is she not pure gold, my
mistress?
Holds earth aught - speak truth — above her?
But cannot praise, I, love so much !”
He can find words too for the splendid glow of youthful passion in the opening of “In a Gondola” : “I send my heart up to thee, all my heart. In this my singing.
For the stars help me, and the sea bears part.
The every night is clinging
closer to Venice streets, to leave one space.
Above me, whence thy face
May light my joyous heart to then, its dwelling- place.”
But the triumphs of love are sung in poems of wifehood and motherhood. The heroine of “The inn Album” says;
“Womanliness means only motherhood.”
All love beings and ends there, - roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home’.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I
“The Last Ride Together” has been interpreted as an allegory of Browning’s relations with his muse (True/False).

15.4    ANALYSIS
Pompilla in ‘The Ring and the Book’, drawn as Swinhume says, “with piercing and overpowering tenderness”, is the masterpiece in Browning’s gallery of women characters. In such poems his own marriage enriched both his imagination and emotion. The story of Browning’s marriage in September, 1847 is an off told tale; the marvelous prelude to it is the theme of the “Correspondence of E.B.B. and R.B.”, one of the supreme love stories in literature. The tenacity of will displayed against the tyranny of Elizabeth Berrett’s father, a the clear sighted impulse and decisive action which swept her from an imprisoned and anemic inactivity to the open air and sky of Italy, and his strong faith in her especially for the manifold concerns of home and motherhood, were a thousand times justified in the unclouded felicity of a union in which intellect, and parenthood were equally powerful strands.
And now we pass on to a detailed examination of some of the poems in the list.
The exquisite poem “Love among the Ruins” is like a land space my Poussin in words it is melodious and something as befits the subject. It is a study of two young lovers among the rains of the imperial city against pastoral landscape. But from the wreck of the ages, and the scattered memorials of a forgotten metropolis, there came a golden-haired girl with eager eyes of love, and embrace which extinguishes sight and so, speech, so that whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin are not to be weighed against that moment we recognise that love is best. The alternate stanzas compare the past with the present, the pomp of a royal city with a piece of pastoral landscape and the glory, gold and shame and vanity of empire with the triumph of love :
“Oh, heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earths returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest.
Love is best!”
“A Lover’s Quarrel” studies paradoxically the warmth of love in winter in contract with the chill in spring caused by a hasty other word, while like a “shall from the devil’s bow” has divided two lovers who before were the entire world to each other. The lover, however, comforts himself with the assurance that though in summertime’s warmth heart cart dispense with heart, the first chills of winter and the first approach of the storms of life will drive the loved on to his arms :
“In the worst of a storm’s uproar

- I shall pull her through the door
I shall have her for ever more!”
“A Woman’s Last World” is an extension of almost the identical theme.
In Robert Browning's poem "By the Fire-Side," the speaker, reflecting on his anticipated old age, envisions spending autumn evenings immersed in scholarly pursuits, particularly studying Greek texts. He imagines being found by the fire, deeply engrossed in his studies, while the wind rustles outside. Despite his intellectual engagement, his thoughts frequently return to his youth and the woman he loves. He longs to revisit the past, reconstructing in his imagination the moments when he won her affection. This desire highlights the profound bond between them, suggesting that their union was destined and fulfilling.
The poem concludes with the speaker expressing his reluctance to face the challenges of life without her, emphasizing that their shared moments have provided him with unparalleled happiness and meaning.
However, it must not be thought that this moment of revelation in Browning’s own life occurred amid the scenes portrayed. These scenes (prescribed in the poem) are composed of memories partly of the chestnut woods about the Baths of Lucca in Tuscany, and partly of Alps about the Laises in Lombardy. The scene of Browning’s courtship was No. 50 Wimpole Street, in London.
The two companion pieces “Love in a Life” and “Life” in a Love” are beautiful people compositions on the theme of love as adventure. They are allegories, perhaps, of the pursuit of the unattainable, but apparently connected with the fantasies of unsatisfactory love which Browning had contrasted with his happy relationship with Elizabeth Browning.
“Love in a Life” is the glory of two lovers inhabiting the same house yet; ironically enough, the beloved eludes the lover. This whole house is haunted by the perfume of her presence, and he is always promising his heart that she shall soon be found, yet the day wanes with the fruitless quest, for, as he enters she goes, and twilight comes with.
“Such closests to search, such alcoves to importune.” Thus do our ideals ever evade us.
In a letter to Elizabeth, April 5, 1846, Browning wrote : “Oh how different it all might be! In this House of Life - where I go, you go - where I ascend, you run before. Now one might have a piece of Ba……and make it up into a lady and a Mistress. How different with us! if it were not, indeed what a mad folly would marriage be!” The house imagery echoes Browining’s reaction to the news the Elizabeth
Barrett had for the first time walked, instead of being carried, downstairs.
“Life in a Love” asserts a man’s invincible faith in his capacity to spend his whole life on the chance
that the woman, whose heart he pursues will one day cease to elude him. When the old hope is dashed to the ground a, new one springs up and Ses straight to the same mark. And what if he be foiled in his purpose here? How can life bp better expended than in devotion to one worthy ideal?
“One Word More”, “Lyric Love”, and “Prospice” can be placed side by side with “By the Fireside” in point of subject matter.
“One Word More”, written in the months just preceding the marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 address us to the intimacies of devotion and affection which existed between he two. It is a splendid tribute based on Browning’s fanciful interpretation of the minor artistic activities of Raphael and Dante. He imagines them by employing these secondary talent in ingenious efforts to converse, with their lovers in a language different from the emphatic speech in which they want to address their wider audience; for the career car of the world demands these stirident tones, and will not permit divergence from the role in which in most readily recognize its homes.
“Never cares the man put off, the prophet”. Browning lacking that versatility which made Dante poet and painter and Rateal painter and post, adopts a graceful subterfuge :
….. a semblance of resource avail us-
Lines! write the first time and the last time”
In of a poem in dramatic gaine, such as those in Men and Women, he writes one which glows with the undisguised warmth of personal emotion:
“This of verse alone, one life allows me,
Verse and nothing else have I to give you
Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrow?
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving :
I am mine and yours — the rest be all man’s”
Few poems express so much feeling with so much historical fusion and nostalgic imagery. The fragrant memory of these “larenowned brides of ancient song” mingles with the incense of the poet’s worship, whilst he invokes the mystenoul light of that unseen face of the moon to grace the secret ceremony. The two phases of the moon suggest to the poet the purpose of the meanest of God’s creatures who can boast of “two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show a women when he loves her”. His wife is his “moon of poets”.
“To my star” is considered to be a tribute to Mrs. Browning. To an observer a beautiful star may appear in iridescent colours unobserved by others: Just as by looking at a prism from a certain angle, we catch a play of rainbow tints which they might miss by adapting a different point of view. Where strangers see a world the singer obtains access to a should which opens to him all its glory, as the prism reveals the constituent colours which combine to make the cold white ray of light.
“Mesmerism” and “A Serenade at the Villa” can be taken together.
In “A Serenade the Villa”, a lover serenades his lady on a sultry summer night, and the burden of his song is that as he watches through the dark night at her villa so he vows to watch through life ever her path
and shield her from danger and serve her in secret devotion, as lie sings to her now while she sleeps. The lady dreamed of music but slept on, though “the earth bumod in her sleep in pain”. Earth has heard many serenades and many vows made only to be broken. The iron gate which ground its teeth to let the serenade passed seemed to be disputing the lover’s protestations: and one fears that if his mistress was like the earth, and “turned in sleep” too she would derive little satisfaction from his music.
“Mesmerism” is the description to an influence one mind upon another which in modern medical parlance would be termed fluid which escapes from the mesmeriser’s body, but by the fact that the subject
has been induced to form a fixed idea that he is being hypnotized. Braid asserts that the imagination of the subject is an indispensable element in the success of the experiment and that the most expert hypnotizer will expert himself in vain unless the subject is aware of what is passing and surrenders himself body and soul.
The incidents of the poem can be understood through the concept of "expectant attention." In the poem, during the quiet of the night, with only the peculiar sounds of darkness surrounding him, the mesmerizer desires that the woman, under the influence of his will, will make her way through the rain and mud to his house. Eventually, she arrives without speaking, acknowledging the powerful influence one mind can have on another. The mesmerizer prays that he may never misuse this power and hopes that, one day, God will hold him accountable for its use. The speaker’s intense focus is reflected in the structure of the poem, where a single sentence stretches from stanza 1 to stanza 2, emphasizing the depth of his concentration.
The poem is likely inspired by real events, such as the fact that in 1852, just three years after his wife’s death, Robert Browning’s father was successfully sued for breach of promise by Mrs. Von Muller.
In the poem, the dying wife expresses that the most painful aspect of death is not merely the separation from life but the inevitable fading of her husband's love for her, a love that would have endured if life had lasted longer. She fears that once she is gone, her presence—so vital to nurturing that love—will no longer be there to sustain it.
“Men’s love is of man’s life a thing apart:
Tis a woman’s whole existence.”
The great, pure love of a wife is often described as a reign of love, where a woman’s love is seen as more enduring and purer than that of a man. Few men, it is suggested, are truly worthy of receiving such profound devotion. Mr. Nettleship, commenting on this poem, states, "The real love of the man is never born until the love of the woman supplements it." This reflects the notion that a woman’s love is the foundation that helps a man realize his own capacity for love.
The poet's wife believes that, in her case, she would have no trouble remaining faithful to the memory of her husband after death. However, she anticipates that his love will not endure in the same way once she is no longer physically present. For him, her absence will diminish the value of his life. She imagines that, over time, his love for her will fade, though he may eventually return to her memory. Yet, this love will be altered, marked by a "seam," a change, as though it were re-minted, bearing a new image and inscription, and would no longer be as pure or untainted.
She envisions that he will eventually dissipate his emotional energy in the love of other women, rationalizing that these lighter loves will not erase the deep, enduring memory of his wife—the woman who remains his immortal bride. She compares this to a man who would rather adorn his walls with a painted image of a Venus by Titian than leave them bare and cold, suggesting that while the love for other women may satisfy his fleshly desires, it cannot diminish the eternal, spiritual love he once shared with his wife. The wife's belief is that no matter what, the soul’s true love will not be tainted by such transient passions.
“Evelyn Hope” is about the gentle and reticent passion of a main of middle-age for a dying girl of sixteen linked with a confidence that in some remote age of state his unspoken affection will find requital. The leaf is a simple token of his unshakable faith that “God creates the love to reward the love.”
Although Robert Browning often expresses the idea het present failure Implies future success this poem should hardly be seen as expressing “one of his deepest convictions”. It is a rather a dramatic monologue presenting non-satirically a possible human reaction to hopeless love. There is no need to accuse the speaker of necrophilia, “wish for a Hambert-Lolita kind of relation-ship” or murder. His worst crime is a failure to face facts.
The three short lyrics, “One way of love” and its sequel “another way of love” and “Two in the campagna” shed more light on Browning’s manifold treatment of love. The first two contrasting poems, like
“Women and Rosed” use traditional imagery, but end on a realistic rather than traditional note. “One way of love” is a song of unrequited love. The lover has strewn the month’s wealth of June roses on his lady’s path : she passes them without notice. For months he strived to learn the lute : she will not listen to his music. His whole life strives he was teamed to love and he has lost. Let roses lie let music’s wing be folded, he will not say how blast are they who wla her. It is certainly a noble, dignified way of accepting defeat in love!
In “Another way of love”, however, the roses of June are actually tiresome to whom they are offered. The woman in the first poem did not notice her roses, the main in this present poem confesses himself weary of their charms. His lady is satirical at his expense, and does not mind his going as she will be recompensed if June mind the bower which his hand has ruffled. June may also bestow her favours on a more appreciative or deserving recipient. She may also revenge herself by the lightening she aires to clear away insects arid other rose bower spoilers.
“Two in the Campagna” was probably written in May 1854, when the Brownings were in Rome, and spent “some exquisite hours on the Campagna (the plain surrounding Rome, dotted with the ruins of ancient Latin cities). The poem has been called purely dramatic, and also considered autobiographical expressing alienation from Elizabeth Barrett through loss of faith in her judgement about Napolean III, spiritualism, bringing up their son etc. It is best regarded a dramatic monologue suggested by, but not necessarily describing a mood experienced by her Browning.
To the reflective mind, this ghost of old Rome is deeply suggestive : it fills the mind with a sweet sadness, which readily awakens the longing for the infinite spoken of in the poem, the key me of which is undoubtedly found in the lines.
“One I discern
infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn”.
According to Pascal the “infinite void can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object - that is to say, only by God Himself”. The speaker in die poem says to the woman, “I would that you were all to me.” As pleasure, learning, wealth, have failed to satisfy the soul of man, so not even love, the holiest passion of the soul can satisfy the human heart, which can rest in God alone. Dr. Medineausays that “all finite loves are only human, wondering in a poor twilight” unknowing of their peace and power till they lie within the encompassing and globeling love of God”. The restful music, the anocyne for the pain of yearning hearts, comes from no earthborn love, however pure.
Last but not least, is “The Last Ride together”, though by many nineteenth century critics (e.g. Berdoe) “the noblest of all Robert Browning’s love poems.” More recently is has been interpreted as an allegory of his relations with his Muse. The word ride has been given a range of symbolic meanings, including,
the fulfilment of God’s purpose for man in the simple process of living’s, and even, incredibly, sexual intercourse.
The poem is unequalled for dramatic Intensity, for power for its exhibition of what Mr. Raleigh has aptly termed Browning’s “tremendous concentration of his power in excluding the objective world and its relations”. It is a poem of unrequited love in which there is nothing but die noblest resignation, a compliance with the decrees of fate, but with neither a shadow of disloyalty to the ideal, nor despair of the result of the dismissal to die lovers own soul development.. In spite of rejection the lover will cherish the ideal forever. On his test request being not in vain the lover feels deified:
“Who knows but the world may and tonight?’
It is a line which no poet but Browning over could have written. The force of the hour, the value of the quintessential moments as factors in the development in the soul: have never been set forth, even by Browning with such startling power.
The gives Browning occasion to propound his philosophy: juxtaposing the present and die past, imagination, endeavor and achievement he mentions some hard facts which are just poetic half-truths. But they magnificently reinforce his point. Finally, he consoles himself that if here he missed perfect bliss, still there is the life beyond, and it is better to have a bliss to die with described—
“Earth being so good, would heaven seem
best?”
And the climactic not is struck with words:
the instant made extremity. -
And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, forever ride?”
The momentary glory of the lover’s possession is intoxicating. His spiritual exultation is enduring.
The rhythmic beat of the verse is a fitting accompaniment to the movement; thought and mood of the poem.
(Note: The second part of this, study of the poems follows in the next lesson).

15.5    GLOSSARY
Dramatic Monologue : a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.
Allegory                : a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning,
typically a moral or political one.
Muse                   : a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative
artist.

15.6    SUMMARY
In this unit we learnt about Browning’s Love poems and analyzed main themes in detail.

15.7    TERMINAL QUESTIONS
What are the salient features of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues?
Comment on Robert Browning’s philosophy of love as expressed in his poems.
Define if Robert Browning is a poet of optimism.

15.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE
True

15.9    SUGGESTED READING
Armstrong, Isobel: Victorian Poetry: Poetry. Poetics, and Politics. Routledge. London, 1993.
Browning, Robert: Selected Poetry and Prose. Routledge, London, 1991.
Unit-16 Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologues
STRUCTURE

16.1    INTRODUCTION

16.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

16.3    BROWNING’S POEMS AS DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES
SELF –CHECK-EXERCISE-I

16.4    SUMMARY

16.5    GLOSSARY

16.6    QUESTIONS

16.7    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

16.8    SUGGESTED READING/REFERENCES

16.1    INTRODUCTION
A dramatic monologue is a type of poetry where a single character delivers a speech, typically in a specific situation, revealing their inner thoughts and emotions. According to M.H. Abrams, the dramatic monologue has three key features:

1.    The speaker is a distinct individual who is not the poet. This character delivers the entire speech in a specific situation, often during a crucial or pivotal moment in the narrative.

2.    The speaker addresses one or more listeners, although the audience (the readers) only learns about these listeners indirectly, through the clues embedded in the speaker’s words. The reactions and presence of the listeners are not directly shown but inferred from the speaker's discourse.

3.    The main goal of the poem is for the speaker’s speech to reveal their temperament, character, and personality. The way the speaker speaks is crafted by the poet to enhance the reader’s understanding of the speaker’s nature, making the poem more engaging through this psychological exploration.
In summary, the dramatic monologue allows for a deep exploration of a character’s inner life, making the speaker’s voice and situation the primary focus of the poem.

16.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about Robert Browning’s poems as examples of dramatic monologue.

16.3    BROWNING’S POEMS AS DRAMMATIC MONOLOGUES
In continuation of the previous units, let us examine other poems in “Men and Women” especially with reference to the question of dramatic monologue.
Robert Browning so excelled as a writer of dramatic monologues that it may filly be called a novelty of his invention. The dramatic monologue is distinguished from the soliloquy in which the speaker delivers his own thought uninterrupted by objections or the propositions of other persons. The dramatic monologue (for which the nineteenth century term was ‘monodrame’) has been recently defined as a single discourse by one whose presence is indicated by the poet but who is not be poet himself. The discourse normally describes feeling, thoughts and events with the speaking of the discourse (or the writing , when it takes the form of a letter); and there is often an audience of one or more people, whose reactions, comments, replies or objections are expressed or implied by the monologue speaker. Any story that the dramatic monologue has to tell is usually told indirectly through quasi-stage direction’s inserted into the text of the speech itself. Obviously the dramatic monologue gains over the soliloquy in that it allows the artist greater
room in which to work out his conceptions of character. The thoughts of a man in self-communion are apt to run in a certain circle, and assume monotony. The supposed second person of the dramatic monologue serves to draw out the speaker and to stimulate the imagination of the reader.
As a form, the dramatic monologue is extremely ancient. “Idyll” of Theocritus (third century B.C,), spoken by a girl practicing witchcraft to bring back her unfaithful lover, is an early example of the spoken variety and so is the “Heroides” of Ovid (43 B.C. to 18A.D.) written by mythological females to their lovers of the epistolary type. In English literature the form had been used by a large number of poets (including Tennyson - “St. Simon Stylites” 1833) before Browning perfected it. He took an individual line in avoiding traditional monologue situation (death betrayed woman, exiles etc.), and shifted the focus from melodrama and exploitation of emotion to ‘Psychological subtlety’.
He developed a brilliant technique for conveying, through natural speech, a whole range of oblige information about the speaker’s situation, environment, and audience, and above all about his character. Much of this character-revelation is made to appear in voluntary. The speaker maybe trying to defend or justify himself, to project an image of himself that will win his audience’s approval; but through his very words and allusions he unconsciously betrays what he is really like. This ingenious technique of apparently unconscious self-revelation by contradiction between a speaker’s intentions and the impression that he actually makes on the reader may be regarded as a sophisticated extension of dramatic irony.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I
What poetic form is Robert Browning most known for?

a.    Elegies

b.    Pastorals

c.    Epics

d.    Dramatic Monologue

16.4    SUMMARY
Browning chose to write dramatic monologues because he had too complex a personality to be satisfied with expressing any single view of life :
“I cannot chain my soul: it will not rest
In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere
it has strange impulse, tendency, desire,
Which no wise I account for nor explain.
But cannot stifle, being bound to trust
All feeling equally, to hear all tides”
(“Pauline”, LI 593 8)
The dramatic monologue may also have served Browning as a device for freeing his moral judgement from the rigid code of ethics under which he had been brought up; for he often used the form to defend apparently indefensible characters “Sordello” states this theory:
.   “ ask, moreover, when they prate
Of evil men past hope, ‘Don’t each contrive’
Despite the evil you abuse, to live?”
(Lines -786 ff)
Browning’s first attempt to express the conceal of truth, the subjective view of the world which justifies an evil man to himself was the early dramatic monologue spoken by murderer (Porphyria’s Lover 1836). The climax of moral aerobatics is reached in the two great monologues of the wife-murderer: Guido in ‘The Ring and the book’, and Bishop Blougram’s ‘Apology’. In all these case Browning, like Shakespeare in Shylock appears to condemn, even while doing, his utmost to defend. Thus, the form gave him scope to express his own ambivalence, “but talking out of both sides of his mouth simultaneously”.
Browning himself insisted that his poems were “always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of many imaginary persons, not mine”, and denied a letter to Ruskin that he ever consciously expressed himself through his characters. In fact he felt some difficulty in expressing himself directly. To Elizabeth Abe wrote : “you do, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak out, you -I only men and women speak - give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear, the pure white light, even it is in me ; but I am going to try These scenes and song scraps are such more and very escapes of my inner power, which live in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phases ………”
Browning's affinity for this form is particularly intriguing given his personal disposition toward privacy. He exhibited a profound reluctance to expose his inner self, a trait evident from his childhood. This reticence was so pronounced that, as a young boy, he would navigate his bedroom by the wall to avoid being seen through a partially open door while undressed. This "madi prudery" extended into his adult life, influencing his poetic expression.
“What would men have? Do they like grass of not
You find abundantly detestable”.
Lippi gave Browning a useful able for this bold assaulte on the Victorian attitude to sex.
And now a discussion of the dramatic monologues”.
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology” is an abdicable example of a dramatic monologue where Mr. Gigadibs, the critic of Bishop Blougrani, is the silent second person. There is no doubt that Browning based his character study upon Cardinal Wiseman, and he maintained, as Gaven Duffy reports, that his treatment of his model was generous. Though this cannot be easily admitted from any impartial standpoint, still we can see how the poet, with his “rest for all forms of activity, would be attracted by a figure of so many and brilliant gifts, literary, social, controversial and administrative” (Wisemen re established the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England in the teeth of much opposition in the year 1850). The urbanity of the Cardinal may be judged from the fact that he wrote a review (January 1856, “The Rambler”) acknowledging the brilliance of the poem and deploring only the subversive influence. It might be expected to exercise upon the Christian faith.
Gigadibs puts the case for the direct outspoken truth, the “grand simple life”,’ he calls it. The Bishop’s reply is on lines of common sense : we must conform to our present environment. If we have ideals that are unseaworthy they must be jettisoned. For the purpose of debate they agree upon abandoning dogma : then in three different lines of argument the Bishop shows the impossibility and the uselessness of this step : First (LI 173-212) entire unbelief is non-existent; emotions, intuitions, and memories may at any moment fret the
string we had resolved should never vibrate; Second (LI 221-270), we cannot put belief and unbelief upon an equal footing for belief implies activity, which is the principle of waking life, unbelief implies inactivity and steep. The man without faith labels, himself as bed-ridden; Third (Lines 270 340), once we admit the superiority of belief it is important to ergpasise it before the world. Hence he pronounces on the Roman Cathololic faith, and in reward receives dignity comfort, and success. Blougram meels the accusation that the attainment of rank and dignity can only be called success because his motives and standards are low. His replies ere other evasions or sophistries.
Firstly (Lines 340-361), he says in effect, if he is a man of low standards than he will at least make the best of his case in the way of comfort. Secondly, (Lines 362-430) he shows, how mistaken Giggadibs is in supposing that the dozen men of sense out of the million of the common held are likely to pronounce him forthwith either a foot or a knave. Having refined and discriminating judgements they will not pass there: dogmatic sentences ; they know there are a thousand alterative shades between fool and knave. Moreover, his acknowledged teaming and prominent Office set him above all contempt in, professing his belief. He becomes thereby one of those whose paradoxical characters exalt them to the “dangerous edge of things” where they challenge the notice of the universe.
Then there is a subtle turn in the argument by which Bleugram begins “to be the apologist, not for himself as an unbelieving Bishop, but for the recognition of some kind of faith. He invites Giggadibs to exemplify his ideal of the great man without faith. Shall it be Napoleon? If Napoleon were in truth without any belief and aim beyond his immediate activities, how inhuman and how paltry his achievements were. Shall it be Shakespeare? True, he could imagine a universe, yet he sought not imaginary towers and palaces, but the possession of “the trimmest house in stratford town”. “If this life’s all”, then Blougram who keeps his semi-royal state clearly wins the game. Taking it for granted then that some force of faith is essential, the Bishop adds a corollary that it must be enthusiastic. If we do not accept the enthusiasm of Author with its dynamic power, we fall upon the chill negations of Strauss, with the bare chance that they may not only be cold but wrong.
By another of the swift modulations which make the poem so actual, it develops into a sincere and eloquent defence of doubt. First (Lines 599- 646), he insists there is no other possible form of it. The more wish that Christianity should be true avails to exalt man from indifference to belief. Secondly (Lines 64767), an absolute faith is inconceivable, time and earth are designed by God to conceal himself last we should be struck blind with exposes of light. Faith needs to be perpetual stimulated by the menace of unbelief. A parenthesis follows (lines 676-92) showing that even in the middle. Ages of unquestioning faith, belief in future punishment and reward was not sufficient to ensure correct moral conduct. Thirdly (Lines 693-712), he resumes the apology for doubt, and demands impossibilities for faith to exercise itself upon. Fourthly (Lines 724-64), he replies to Giggadibs’ request to delete some of the grossed tenets in his profession. He
will not abandon a single miracle, recognizing that where one goes all must sooner or later follow. Here the apologist returns to his own case. In lines 781-806, he ridicules the premature preparation for the next world which sacrifices anyone of the amenities of the present. In lines 807-23 he attacks the inconsistency of Gigadibs to Gigadibs’ reply that he retrains in consideration of his fellowmen, the Bishop responds (Lines 824-970) with a pointed comparison of what each receives from his fellows : Gigadibs a guff enmity, a bare tolerance, Blougram obsequious reverence and social estimation.
It is necessary to call attention to the confidential after dinner atmosphere, the luxurious surrounding, the flavour of subtle talk which pervades the blank verse, invests its polemics with all the care and lucidity of prose, and the astonishing mental agility of the poem. This may be best seen in the clear expression of the successive reflections and retractions of the truth; The thread of sophistry and truth are so subtly interwoven that Mrs. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Byends, Mr. Facing both ways, and Christian himself might each appropriate a section of this astounding Apology The student might find another interest in determining how much of it is actual poetry.
“Blougram has been variously interested. , as a morally ambiguous figure ironically presented to suggest that religious faith to still possible in Victorian England, and can be justified even by a man who may be either a scoundrel or a saint. The thin facility of style and imagery may be intended to suggest the inadequate quality of his religious faith”. The philosophical scheme of the poem was possibly suggested by Emerson’s, Montaigue or the Skeptic in “Representative Men”.
In “An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”, Browning sets forth not as in “Blougram” and Calibert the ambigiuities of truth but truth itself in an unfamiliar and arresting light. It is mirrored in the mind of Karshish, the Arab Physician, by whose two prepossessions it is for a moment amicably distorted. For, first he is an Arab therefore, almost impervious to this conception of the incarnation, (it should be noted however, that the common element of too Arabic and the Christian belief, the unity of God makes the transition at the close more credible and natural). And secondly being a physician, he diagnoses the case in familiar terms and endeavors to range it, finally under a well-known category : it is a “case of mane sub induced by epilepsy. Through both these obstacles the light breaks though get is only a light reflected in the resurrected feature of, a Jewish artisan : its glow irradiates the traveler’s mind so that he is driven to the almost involuntary confession of his post-script.
The broad historical background is a lawless Judea in perpetual dread of the legions of Vespasian. The foreground is the village of Bethany beneath a rocky epur of Motint Olivet, the scene 35 years earlier of the miracle recorded in St. John Ch XI just preceding the events in which the Nazarene leech “perlehed in a tumult”. Here the two are confronted: Karshish alert, observant rather tolerant for has time of novel ideas, and Lazarus, physically refreshed, mentally an inhabitant of some other province of experience.
Apart from being a historical reconstruction of a contemporary attitude to the rise of Christianity, the poem is also a psychological study of conflict between desire and inability to believe in miracles, and a parable of the Victorian dilemma.
Inno poem - even of Browning’s is the distribution of detail so earning and so appropriate, nor, the cumulative effect both of picture and of thought so rich and so convincing.
The form of the radiate monologue is, however, nowhere, more brilliantly utilized than in “Andrea del Sarto”. The current and addles of speech, unchecked by any conventionalizing audience, expose to view memories aspirations, momentary impulses and actions, fears and desires, each reflecting some facet of underlying personality: With instinctive skill, too, the fresh and illuminating point of view chosen : Andrea is the infatuated husband, but for the poem he is ab unfortunate painter whose spiritless temperament is both cause and effect of his moral and artistic failures, Again, as the poem presents him, Anderea seeks no liberation from these fetters: the reader wishes it for him against the painter’s desire. The environment, too, gas beauty of twilight, and the sense of diminished vitality in the autumn evening in Florence harmonises with the wistful fatalistic disposition of the man. His ineffective soul is reflects in picture which, technically flawless though they may be, are yet devoid of the fiery untrained spirit which in his contemporaries broke through the bond of rules by the sheer force of inspiration. No passionate energy drives him to reach beyond the draughtsman’s skill which has always been easily with his group. This same listlessness permits him to stoop to mean theft from his patron, to countenance his wife’s open infidelities. And to proffer an insincere defense for filial delinquency. His moral and artistic debasement to the shallow minded wife, whose sole interest in his art is for its monetary gains, to whom his more presence is irksome, and whose influence in his life has been uniformly disastrous is absolute. Nevertheless the situation appears pathetic rather than contemptible, and stirs sympathy rather than revulsion. Why? It is, because we know that Andrea’s life is a long purgatory of remorse. Those aspirations from which he shrinks.
“Upto God, all three”,
are the measure of the anguish for which neither his apathy nor his infatuation is an effective opiates.
The genesis of the poem is curious. In response to Kenyon’s dart and for a copy of the painting. “Andrea del Sarlo’, Browning wrote the poem and sent it to him. The main outlines of the story are drawn, from Vasari’s Livers of the illustrious Painters, etc.
“Fra Lippo Lippi” (like “Andrea del Sarto”), is also derived from Vasari’s Lives of the Painters. Even there Brother Lippo Lippi figures as what Chaucer would have called “a fish that is waterless.” Browning makes him an irrepressible jesting scope-grace — tonsured Falstaff, with an opposite for the delights of the palate and, the senses, and an artist with that inborn leaning towards realism, which in such hearty natures turns to genial caricature. He is impatient of the distorting pressure of piety upon art, and equally of any
ideal beauty beyond that sensible to the eye, being convinced that this world, it grasp it with both hands, “means intensely and means good”. In the poem he is characteristically enough pouring out his beliefs, his escapades, and his ambitions, with a plentiful admixture of irreverence to the captain of the water who has apprehended him upon his equivocal night expedition.
Another brilliant dramatic monologue is “A Grartimarian’s Funeral”. The ‘greimmarian’ is Jacobus Milichius, a German humanist - physician of the early Renaissarice rather than the Italian as has often been suggested. That the scene of the poem does more closely resemble one of the castle- crownedhill-encircling cities of Southern Germany is matter for individual judgement.
In this poem a life’s accomplishment is measured by two different standards: accordingly as we take into account or ignore the life hereafter. The Grammariah, never doubting that “Man has forever” has been content to forego everything else in the painful pursuit of the minutia of Greek syntax. Born with the grace of Apollo, he has become shrunken, leaden eyed, subject to torturing disease and premature death, if a man’s life, like that of “dogs and apes”; has no endurance beyond death, then it is clear that this has been a paltry and grotesque existence. If, on the other hand, the lofty belief which he has inspired in these disciples is warranted, then this funeral procession becomes a pageant of victory. The cortege winding its way in the dawn steadily up the mountain-side until it achieves the summit with its unlimited panorama, becomes a symbol of a life spent in unrelaxing effort until it attains that infinite expansion of the designs and talents of men, which the scholar anticipates with such subline faith. Are we then to suppose that Browning singles out for special commendation a life devoted, with almost ludicrous heroism, to the scientific detail of philology? No more than we are to assume his approval of crime contemplated in “The Statue and the Bust”.
Not the quality of the ambition, but the energy and sincerely displayed in the pursuit is here, as there, the object, of judgment.
“Master Huguesat Saxe-Gotha” is about an organist in a church where they have just concluded the evening service. He determines to have a colloquy with the old dead composer Master Hugues as to the meaning of the compositions known as fugues for which he was celebrated. (A fugue is a short, complete melody which flies (hence the name) from one point to another, while the original part is continued in
counterpoint against it. The beginning of this art form dates from very primitive times. Probably Bach’s fugues are meant in the poem).
The imaginary composer’s name was doubtless chosen to rhyme with fugues. The great organist-T fugues composer J.S. Eaph (1685-1750) was born in Saxe - Weimar, adjoining Saxe - Gotha Robert Browning said he was thinking, however, not of the glorious Bachi But of one of the dry as-dust imitators who would elaborate (an uninteresting five-note phrase) for a dozen pages together. The speaker is not Browning, though he could play the organ, but a church organist who has just played the voluntary after-eveningservice. Browning said that he “had no allegorical intent in his head when he wrote the poem: that it was composed in an organ loft and was merely the expression of a fugue. The construction of which he understood because he had composed fugues himself it was an involved, labyrinth of entanglement lading to nothing — the only allegory in it was possible reflection of the labyrinth of human life. That was all But it may also symbolize the superiority of intuition to intellect in perceiving religious truth. The five-line stanza reflects the five voiced fugue, and the more fantastic rhymes, whittle supporting the humorous tone also represent the ingenuity displayed in fugue composition.
The second poem of music is “A Tocatta of Gaiuppi’s”. Baldass Gulluppi (-1706-85) was a celebrated Italian composer, who was the son of a barber with a taste for music. The Tecatta as a form of composition is not the measured, deliberate warring out of some central musical thought, as is the Sosiata or sound piece, where the trained ear can follow out the whole process to its delightful end orderly consummation, where the student marks the introduction and development of the subject, its extension through various forms, and its whole sequence of movement and meaning to its glorious rounding off and culmination spiritually noting each stage of the climbing structure and acknowledging its perfection with the inward silent verdict, “It is well”: The Tocatta, in its early and pure form, possessed no decided subject made such by repetition but bore rather the form of a capricious improvisation or “impromptu”. It was a very flowing movement in notes of equal length and a homogenous character. Galuppi produced a further advanced development of this particular form of musical composition with chords freely introduced and other important innovations. The main features of his operas are melodic eleganca and lively mid spirited, comic forms : but they are rather thin and weak, in their execution.
In the words of Mrs: Alexpnder Ireland “A Tocatta of Gallupi’s” touches on deep subjects with a more feather touch of light and capricious suggestiveness interwoven with the graver mood, with the heartsearching questionings of man a deep nature and my sterious spirit. The poem deals with two classes of human beings - the mere pleasure takers with their balls and masks (stanza iv) and the scientists (st. xill) with their research and their gologies. The Victorians belong to the former category against the other class ahmersed in the passion for knowledge. Yet even this class surely dissipates its energies and misses the true end of life if it has nothing higher to live for than “physics and geology”.
“Saul” also is about music. The foundation of the poem to the narrative in Samuel xvi, 14-23.
Possibly Browning’s choice of the subject-war, a consequence of his life-long admiration ode Christopher Smart’s “Sang to David’ (1783). It was also suggested by Smarts preface to his “Ode to Music” on saint Cecilia’s Day’s which mentioned ‘David’s playing to King Saul, what he was troubled with the evil spirit, as a fine subject for such an ode.’
The earlier adoptions of “Saul” define the themes of Devi’s music: at first pastoral and idyllic, then a poem in praise of strength and velour and the power to command men, then a song of the powers and statesangtship of Saul himself. All his Kenyon compared to “Hornets shield of Achilles thrown into typical
whirl and life.” But the king is scarcely..,tired from is over whelming lethargy. Then in section xvil, in the fashion a little reminiscent of Beethovpn’s Choral Symphony, David breaks into prophecy in place of sang. His own tremulous love for Saul gathers force and broadens into a torrent of a passionate reasoning in which he perceives the ‘infinite Care’ and divines, in a flash of vision, the figure and purpose of Christ. The thrill of the night and the awe of the dawn composes a marvallous epilogue in the closing Noc-tume.
The grandest and most beautiful of all Browning’s religious poems, “Saul” is a messianic oratorio in words. The influence of music in the ours of diseases has long been a subject of study by physicians.
“Clean” was possibly suggested Matthew Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’. Empedocles like Cleon, is a desplicit reference to the religious difficulties of Victorian intellectuals. It may be meant to show that even a pagan philosopher is driven by the human condition towards a kind of spirituality skin to Christianity, it possibly hints at Inadequacy of Positivism, the Religion of Humanity of a Comte which regarded humanly itself as the only supreme Being, and rejected the idea of a conscious after-life. But the poem can be read without special reference to religion or philosophy, simply as a psychological study of intellectual arrogance and blindness. Man is the only creature in whom here is failure, it is called advance that man should climb to a height which overlooks lower form of creation simply that, he may perish there. Our vast capabilities of joy, our craving souls, our struggles only serve to show us that mail is inadequate to joy, as the soul sees joys. “Man can, use but a man’s joy while he see God’s”.

16.5    GLOSSARY
Epistolary: a literary work in the form of letters. Grotesque: comically or repulsively ugly or distorted.

16.6    ANSWER TO SELF CHECK EXERCISE
(d)

16.7    SUGGESTED READING
Howe. Elisabeth A. The Dramatic Monologue. Twayne Publishers. New York. 1996.
Royals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography. Blackwell. Oxford, 1993.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Hogarth Press. London. 1973.

16.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    Write a critical note on Browning’s dramatic monologues

2.    Situate Robert Browning within his historical and literary context.
Unit-17 Robert Browning: Poetry-I
STRUCTURE

17.1    INTRODUCTION

17.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

17.3    ROBERT BROWNING’S POETIC STYLE SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

17.4    EVELYN HOPE
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

17.5    MY LAST DUCHESS
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-III

17.6    SUMMARY

17.7    GLOSSARY

17.8    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

17.9    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

17.10    TERMINAL -QUESTIONS

17.1    INTRODUCTION
Browning had established his career first as a poet and then as a playwright. His unique ideas added a lot to the literary world. His works won global recognition marked by allusive imagery, symbolic structures, dramatic monologue, a blend of dark humor and Irony. His early works: “Pauline” and Paracelsus” brought him to the center of criticism, and his later masterpieces earned him a reputable place among literary circles. He successfully used dramatic monologue techniques which enabled the readers to see an event using the character’s lenses. Moreover, he explored the beauty of the real-world using artistic techniques in his poems, “Fra hippo Lippi” and “Pictor Ignoyus”. The recurring themes in most of his poems are loss. love, the relationship between arts and mortality, politics, religion, and society.

17.2   LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about Robert Browning’s poetic style.

17.3

ROBERT BROWNING’S POETIC STYLE
First the form and style of his verse:
The one charge most frequently laid against Browning’s poetry is its obscurity? This alleged obscurity may be the result of sheer slovenliness on his part, as also his impatient, disinclination for revision of thus, agreeing to put up with the second best. According to Milford: Browning is one of the most careless of poets pouring himself torrentially over anything -syntax, scansion, euphony that stand in his way. Many of his lyrics are spoilt by heedless lazy obscurities of thought or expression; and his thought is not often profound. Or it may be a natural impediment of thought which made it hard for him to construct even an intelligible telegram or his inability to put himself in his reader’s position and discover how difficult he was being. For instance, about “Sordello”- - that monument of obscurity -he commented to a friend that he had written something clear at last.
But, perhaps ‘enigmatical’ better describes Browning’s style than the more customary epithet ‘obscure’. When Browning was introduced to the Chinese Ambassador as a fellow-poet he asked him in what kind of poetical composition he was most adept. The ambassador after, a moment’s consideration replied “the enigmatical. Browning acknowledged the kinship of heir gifts. That there is no obscurity of thought is finally demonstrated by Swinburne’s classic digression in the essay on George Chapman :
“He (Browning) is something too much the reverie of obscure; he is too brilliant for the ready reader of already miles to follow, with any certainty the track of an intelligence which with such incessant rapidity or even to realize with what under like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and light to end fro and backward and forward He never thinks but at full speed”.
Browning enabled persons who like puzzles to suppose that they liked poetry and persons afraid of real thinking “to fancy themselves in tell actual”. He was fond of putting ‘middles’ and even his love letters to Mrs. Browning were “whirls of incoherence” He was one of those writers who treat language not as a musical instrument needing delicacy no less than power in its handling, but “rather as an iron bar which they are to twist and tangle in exhibition of their powers as professional strongmen”. The unpleasant element of his style to rooted deeply into an unpleasant element of his personality. As Tennyson remarked, “He flourished about: and loved to brag about lack of breeding by lack of manners”. And this tendency was made worse by his love of the grotesque found also in other contemporary works of the age e.g. Pickwick Papers add Sartor Resartus.
In fact, the difficulties one encounters in Browning are mainly those of diction. Of these three things may be said : First, he sought his subjects in many remote regions, and his allusions drawn from many little-known sources so that one must lead, for instance. “Sordello” in clause proximity to a particularly minute encyclopedia. The harsh dissonance of this poem cut through the turgid harmonies of a decadent romanticism. In the words of a writer this poem, like Richard Wagner’s music “sent the critics scurrying through for
shelter with their hands clapped over their ears”. The allusions in Browning are biblical (“Rabbi Ben Ezra”), mythological or drawn from ancient history - especially Florer time history (“One Word More”) At places, they are the invention of his fancy (“Fra Randolph). Clans of Innsbruck in “My last Duchess” are names of fictitious artists. Browning is also fond of giving orphic titles to his operas e.g. “The Ring and the Book”, “Bells and Pomegranates” or trifles suggestive of Comparatively less known historical or artistic characters e.g. Pra Lidppo Lippi, Abt Vogter : Bishop Bletsgram. Caliban and Selbes, Galumppi, Saxo Gotha, Andrea def Sarto etc.
Secondly, Browning’s use of words is unique and peculiarity his own. Tennyson, it is said, tried to give to English the ventures of Italian: Browning seemed to rejoice in the inherent defects of English : he liked It to be English to a fault. As duff in remarks, “When you have said shaggy urban virile, (in Dante s classification) you have said all that needs to be said about Browning’s diction”. Again in T.S. Eliot’s words, “we may say that the duty of the poet, as a poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is his language, first to preserve and second to intend and improve”.
Browning reacted strongly against the practices of the Romantic poets of the nineteen century and he rejected what he considered their faulty use of worm-out poetic machinery especially that derived from classical mythology. His objection to it was, in brief. That it served only to “Push back reality” leaving the reader to “catch the sense at two removes”. That Browning, in fact, brought to his fresh and unconventional subject matter a - machinery equally modem and unhackneyed is not in dispute, but it is not always conceded that his diction was notably direct and contemporary; and not will is landing his fondness for congestion of monosyllables or consonants, he is one of the monsters of natural English verse.
According to Thomas Gray, “The language of the age is never the language of poetry”. The Victorian poets in general eschew any forms of language which suggested ordinary speech unless they were deliberately writing comic or light verse, which was extremely popular. Of the major Victorian poets Browning alone alternated to use consistently in serious verse the vocabulary and speech patterns of the ordinary middleclass English man Borrowed Groom observes avoid Browning’s diction his inner life was so robust that he delighted to rub shoulders with the outer world - the world of ideas and words, no less than the world of man and women. Hence his work reflects many aspects of the language of his line; it is a magazine of colloquial phases. “His of polloquint English for the impose lyric”. Substituted the street with the green blind for the laded garden of Watteau, and the “blu spirit of a lighted for the monotony of the evening star”. Mr. Groom concentrates on Browning’s singularities: “his verbal faults” archaisms and compound words.
Browing differs from grey by rejecting the idea of an elevated super English which alone is suitable for poetry but he also differs from Wordsworth science he refuses to limit his possible vocabulary to conform to any previously determined standards of poetic propriety. Thus he leaves himself free to choose any word he feels necessary for his poetic effects even though it would have been to mean for Gray or too entotic for
wordsworth. He claims for himself in other words the right of a man in ordinary conversation to use the most just word, whether it happens to be vulgar (e.g.) pullo-hauly or technical or) newly coined (e.g. collotypes) or old fashioned (e.g. quoth or requisition), familiar (e.g. dirt-cheap) or unfamiliar (e.g. accorded shoulder blades), prosaic fanciful (e.g. roajacynth). This freedom, by its nature, is not susceptible to statistical treatment as for example by Miss Milas’s analysis, of a thousand lines of Browning. Browning uses such strikingly ‘unpoetical’ nouns as shrub-house, window-pane, silk-winding, flesh bunch, weey, green line; flaphal, rocket-plan, rubbish, choose dry-not and many others. Yet the oneself conscious use of these words simply because they are the normal way of referring to the things they name is one the distinctive features of Browning’s total idam. Miss Miles’s laborious totaling up the common words constitutes to be really memorable elements of his vocabulary.
The forms Browning prefers are often conversational Mr. Groom draws attention to his fondness for compound adverbs of which the first element is the promotional prefix a - as in a drift. Far more important are his colloquial contractions not the clipped prepositions and articles, the contractions which represent the normal elisions of informal speech Quite especially there are many examples of this in the dramatic monologues : e.g. in ‘“Mr. Sludge,- ‘The Medium’ we find He’s this man for much’, To like to know,’ till try is answer you’, ‘I can’t pretend to mind your smiling’, and it don’t hurt much, and also you’ve you’r, it’s five, isn’t. But they are equally frequent where Browning is not creating a specific imaginary speaker; e.g. in “Apparent Failure” we find No Brilon’s to be Bauked, ‘Their sin’s alone’, You’ve gained and also the forms I’ll, it’s and can’t Similarly, Browning omits the relative in the accusative case, as is common in familiar conversation, but uncommon in verse, e.g. I hunt the house through, we inhabit together’ (‘Love in a lite’), or in ‘Apparent failure’, A screen of a glass were thankful for,” where the preposition at the end of the sentence would hardle be admitted in formal prose.
These colloquat licence are common everywhere in Browning except where he wishes to produce an effect of solemnly as, for example, when he is discussing his deepest intuitions about the nature of God and man in the “Epilogue to Dramatic Personal”. They are one of the more obvious ways in which Browning deliberately discards a rhetorical sentence structure in favour of a much less ceremonial and balanced way of putting his sentences together, full of loose qualifying phrases, (of “Christmas Eve’, “Two Poets of Croisic”. “The Lost Mistress”, “Old pictures in Florence”).
Another function of contemporary klom and speech patterns is to suggest the logically of a particular monologue. Thus Fra Lippo Lippi, in spite of a light scattering of Zooks. God wot and Florentine local colour, speaks recognizably in the language of 19th century London:I was a baby when my mother dies
The wind doubled me up and down I want’
(LL. 81-87)
“Sometime Lippo’s accents are close to those of Sludge:
Welt, Sir, I found in time, ou may be sure, ‘I was not for nothing - the good bollypd, Lord they’d have taught me Latin in pure waste!” (LL. 102-105)
The swift, slangy, diction apply suggests the Lippo as a man of his time but also, I think, helps the order to see that what Lippo has to say about the business of the artist is true of the 19th century is well as of the Quattro cento.
Browning’s ability to write verse in current English is put to many other uses : it is particularly effective as a touchstone of the heroic attitude. A good example is “Prince Hohenslite Schwargan.”
In many of Browning's works, he consistently recalls the imaginary listener in his monologues, which is evident in his numerous poems that explore conversations or half-conversations between men and women discussing their relationships. Poems such as "A Woman's Last Word," "Love Among the Ruins," "A Lover's Quarrel," "By the Fireside," "Two in the Campagna," "James Lee's Wife," "Youth and Art," "A Serenade of the Villa," "The Last Ride Together," "St. Martin's Summer," and several lyrics in Asolando all feature such dialogues. One of his most poignant poems, "Any Wife to Any Husband," is written in an archaic style, particularly using the second-person singular. A comparison of the first three and the last three lines of stanza XIX reveals a characteristic feature of Browning’s love poetry—he strives to capture the genuine speaking voice, allowing emotions of passionate love or sorrow over lost love to be tested against the real world’s language. This helps to avoid pretentiousness or the hollow, conventionalized expressions of love that are often seen in more superficial poetry. An example of this can be seen in the conclusion of "By the Fireside," where the speaker describes his love and longing for the woman he shares his life with, reinforcing the deep emotional connection and reality of the situation.
“………. to watch you sink by the fireside now
Yonder, my heart knows how!
So, earth has gained by one men the more,
One day, as I said before”.
The failing rhythm is as important here as syntax in giving the feeling of quiet conversation at close quarters.
For further examples of Browning’s deliberate use of the full range of the language including, that
is, colloquialism and not literary kiloms we may refer to the obvious man of the world stangy diction of “A Likeness” or to the careful detail and quiet matter of lack compassion of “Apparent Failure” or to “Confession”.
Browning wrote in this way when he was supplying words dramatically appropriate to an imaginary character. But even when he is not creating a dramatic situation he very often speaks in the language of, say, his letters, (of poems from “Asolando” such as ‘Development’ and ‘inapprehensiveness’, Writing of this kind owes, nothing to the conventional diction of poetry indeed it is not poetry at all but merely “crippled prose”. The obvious contrast is with Tennyson (“idylls of the Hearth” “Enoch-Arden”) whose distinctly elevated diction effects a crucial difference in tone, a difference analogous to that between the novel and the novel and the novelette. Normally, when Browning chooses the ordinary word he gives the impression that what he is saying is too important for him to treat in ‘poetic’ language. Occasionally this abjuring of the poetic results in pathos, but more often operates with wonderful precision. Compare “Pippa Passes”.
“Sebald, as we lay,
Rising and falling only with our pants....
The poem “How it Strikes a Contemporary” aptly illustrates the subtlety and delicacy of the effects Browning was able to achieve by these means. It is notable no less for its cleanliness of language than for the idea it gives of the poet’s function in the world. The diction of the poem is controlled by the well-known passage from “King Lear”
“(we’ll) take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s, spies”.
This passage is celebrated for its simplicity and directness. The deliberately unpoetic language of the poems emphasizes the fact that the poet is a man wist lives among men, looking the world “full in the face end ties him down to the world of stucco cabbage an sadishes, lemons, coffee and bold-print posters.” Similarly, the imagery is kept in a low key The idiom in willah is Writes rather than the incidents he selects is what established so memorably in the poem Browning’s conception of the Poet as Hero is of a person unorganized, unrewarded, living in a city and sharing in its life, ‘trying a martyr’s temper between the chinks, “doing the king’s work all the dim day long”
Thus the total idiom of Browning’s best poetry is based on “Conversation between educated equals”.
In a very interesting essay — Browning and the Grotesque’ Style”, Isabel Aanstrong looks at Browning’s diction from a completely different angle. For description of the style is admirable rightly emphasising the essential element of theatricality. Browning is deliberately drowning attention to his own linguistic despair: language has become a posture, a self-consciously exaggerated manner”. The element of grotesque, strictly defined in Browning’s diction, is not great, and, where it is found the excessive energy which it generates and which is its most “annoying characteristic is often justilable on dramatic grounds.
“Master hugues of Saxe- Gotha” is grotesque in many obvious ways - it is about an organist alone at dusk in the organ-loft of a great midlevel church, playing, a fugue of Gothic complexity : one of the main images in die ciaborately curved church roof; at another point the speaker imagines that he can see the dead composer’s made up of musical symbols - yet the language. Browning uses is grotesque (in Mrs. Amv strong’s sense) in Stanzas XI1-XVI11 where Browning tries to create the verbal equivalent of a fugue. The last stanza ties the whole edifice of speculation firmly down to earth in a burst of simple energetic verse.
It will be observed that Browning’s use of a vocabulary and syntax which might equally well be encountered in a novel or a newspaper does much to diminish the sharp distinction between poetry and the rest of literature which was such a prominent feature of 19th century letters. Browning’s poetry, however, was different from that of his contemporaries, and this is noticeable in no other manner than in his determination to use, as the staple of his poetry the common language of Victorian England, plain Queen’s English.
Though it would be grave error to suppose that drowning entirely eschewed grace, sweetness and melodic variety to challenge attention by oddities and novelties, yet his diction and rhythm have the quality of aggressive, pungent, singularity oftener than that of exquisite beauty, it is worth noting that a apprenticed himself to poetry by a careful study of Johnson’s dictionary. As for his rhythm, possibly like Donne he was a purposeful iconoclast. Browning sometimes breaks in harshly upon the sweet rhythmical cadences, it is easy modulations, the unmusically perpetual tunefulness of much lyric verse from Spencer to Swinburne. Like Donne, though with less obvious disdain, he moks and astonishes rather than gratlies contemporary taste, having a special fondness for prosaic rhythms among those of poetry. His grotesque rhymes are perhaps part of the same defiance of convention, Sometimes they are barbaric outgrowths; they are almost intolerable in “A Grammarian’s Funeral;” sometimes they are the product of more enthusiasm of skill like the medieval gargoyle. The classic instances are in “the Pied Piper of Hamelin”. Sometimes as in “Rabbi Ben Erza” the poet deliberately inverts spelling for the sake of rhyming e.g. involve, soul things.
Browning’s obscurity may, in fact, result from sheer indolence on the part of the readers to accustom themselves to him; in his case both extensive and intensive study of poems is a prerequisite of clear understanding. His poetic style can be best applauded if we appellate the fact that his language is an intense element in his total intention.
To sum up we may remark that Browning’s interests were vast and varied. He enlivens reader’s interest, carries them with him, and this despite his being careless, uncritical, and sometimes lacking in taste. His distinction ties, in the words of PM. Jones, in raising “Colloquiatism to lyrical intensity. The very lines seem-to fight or fence or ride. They jostle and hustle each other in just the way a crowd moves and forms and reforms, the words and the meanings packed tight, a story in two or three stanzas or many characters and stories pushing and edging each other in one poem.” F.L. Lucas has brilliantly summed up his style:”
His poetry seems to me like the dry bed of an alpine torrent down which a flood of vast, untamed energy has roared and loamed itself away, leaving a desolation of dead and bleaching stones; yet with here and there a narrow channel where a rush of waters still spis and dances, bright and living, towards its eternal goal”.
And to conclude it may be noted that the initial reaction of dislike to his verse on grounds of obscenity is now giving way to a proper appraisal of it - possibly due to the quality of verse by T.S. Eliot.
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

I)     In which year Robert Browning born?
a) 1811 b) 1812    c)1822 d) 1813

II)     Which of the following best describes the writing style of Robert Browning?

a)    Simple and straightforward

b)    Elaborate and ornate

c)    Experimental and avant-garde

d)    Satirical and humorous

17.4    EVELYN HOPETEXT
“Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her-book-shelf, this her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long ‘rays thro’ the hinge’s chink.
Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,
Till God’s hand beckoned unawares,
And the sweet white brow is all of her.
Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true, The good stars met in your horoscope, Made you of spirit, fire and dew— And just because I was thrice as old And our paths in the world diverged so wide, Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?
No, indeed! for God a novels great to grant, as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Thro’ worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much, to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.
But the time will come, at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth in the years long still, That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, And your mouth of your own geranium’s red— And what would you do with me, in fine, In the new life come in the old one’s stead.
I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men, Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul’s full scope, Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair’s young gold.
So hush,-I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand”.
A). SUMMARY/EXPLAINATION
The lover denies the evanescence of human love. He implies that in some future time the love will reappear and be rewarded. Browning’s optimism lays hold sometimes of the present, sometimes of the future, for the fulfillment of its hope. Especially strong is his “sense of the continuity of life.” “There shall never be one lost good,” he makes Abt Vogler say. The charm of this poem is more, perhaps, in its tenderness of tone and purity of atmosphere than in its doctrine of optimism.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

I) . who is the speaker in the poem “Evelyn Hope”?

a)    Evelyn Hope

b)    A Stranger

c)    Evelyn’s lover

d)    Evelyn’s father

II) . what does the speaker place in Evelyn’s hand at the end of the poem?

a)    A flower

b)    A letter

c)    A piece of her hair

d)    A leaf

17.5    My Last Duchess
“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said.
‘Fra Pandolf’ by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not Her husband’s presence only, called that spot Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps” “Fra Pandolf chanced to say, ‘Her mantle laps Over my lady’s wrist too much,’ or ‘Paint Must never hope to reproduce the faint Half-flush that dies along her throat.’” “Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough For calling up that spot of joy. She had A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech, Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!”.
Summary
This poem is inspired by historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century. The Duke serves as the speaker and recounts how he is entertaining an emissary sent to discuss his upcoming marriage to the daughter of a powerful family, following the recent death of his wife. As he leads the visitor through his palace, they stop before a portrait of his late Duchess, who is depicted as a beautiful young woman. The Duke reflects on the sessions where the portrait was painted and reminisces about his late wife. However, his thoughts soon turn to anger as he criticizes her behavior, claiming that she flirted with everyone and failed to appreciate his prestigious family name. As his monologue unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the Duke is responsible for the Duchess's early death—he admits that when her actions grew too much for him, he "gave commands," and "all smiles stopped together." After revealing this dark truth, the Duke quickly shifts his focus back to the purpose of the visit—arranging another marriage, this time to a young girl. As the Duke and the emissary continue their walk, he points out other paintings in his collection, seemingly unaffected by the horrific tale he just shared.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE:-II

iii) . Who painted the portrait of the Duchess?

a)    Fra Lippo Lippi

b)    Andrea del Sarto

c)    Fra Pandolf

d)    Leonardo da Vinci

iv) . The poem “My Last Duchess” is an example of what type of literary form?

a)    Sonnet

b)    Lyric

c)    Dramatic monologue

d)    Epic

v) . What is the Duke arranging in “My Last Duchess”?

a.    The Duchess’s funeral

b.    The painting of the Duchess s portrait

c.    A new marriage for himself

d) . The sale of his art collection

17.6    SUMMARY
In this unit we learnt about Browning’s poetic style we also read his two poems Evelyn Hope and My Last Duchess.

17.7    GLOSSARY
Fra          : a prefixed title given to an Italian monk or friar
Munificence : extremely liberal and generous of spirit
Penury     :  extreme poverty; destitution
Sepulture   :  burial; interment
Mourning     : grieving; bereavement
Unrequited Love: strong romantic feelings for another person who doesn’t feel the same
Duchess       : Duke’s wife

17.8    ANSWERS TO SELF CHECK EXERCISE

i.    b        ii. c       iii a iv. c v. c

17.9    REFERENCE/SUGGESTED READING
Howe. Elisabeth A. The Dramatic Monologue. Twayne Publishers. New York. 1996.
Royals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: A critical Biography. Blackwell. Oxford, 1993.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Hogarth Press. London. 1973.

17.9 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1)    Why is Browning so interested in the Renaissance? Consider Browning as a love poet.
Unit- 18 Robert Browning: Poetry-II
STRUCTURE

18.1    INTRODUCTION

18.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

18.3    THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

18.4    RABBI BEN EZRA
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

18.5    SUMMARY

18.6    GLOSSARY

18.7    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

18.8    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING

18.9    TERMINAL -QUESTIONS

18.1    INTRODUCTION
Robert Browning’s poems “The Last Ride Together” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra” are powerful expressions of human emotions ad philosophical reflections on life. Both poems are dramatic monologues, a form Browning mastered to explore deep psychological and spiritual themes. Together, these poems showcase Browning’s ability to intertwine personal emotion with broader philosophical questions, inviting readers to reflect on love, life, and the passage of time.

18.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

•    In this unit we will understand and analyze the themes of unrequited love, acceptance, and the concept of finding solace on moments of loss.

•    This unit will also examine the poem’s philosophical perspective on aging, life’s purpose, and the value of wisdom gained through life’s experiences.

18.3    THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER
“I SAID—Then, dearest, since 'tis so,
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all, my life seem'd meant for, fails,
Since this was written and needs must be—
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave,—I claim
Only a memory of the same,
—And this beside, if you will not blame;
Your leave for one more last ride with me.
My mistress bent that brow of hers, Those deep dark eyes where pride demurs When pity would be softening through, Fix'd me a breathing-while or two
With life or death in the balance: right!
The blood replenish'd me again;
My last thought was at least not vain:
I and my mistress, side by side Shall be together, breathe and ride, So, one day more am I deified.
Who knows but the world may end to-night?
Hush! if you saw some western cloud
All billowy-bosom'd, over-bow'd
By many benedictions—sun's
And moon's and evening-star's at once—
And so, you, looking and loving best, Conscious grew, your passion drew Cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too, Down on you, near and yet more near, Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!— Thus leant she and linger'd—joy and fear!
Thus lay she a moment on my breast.
Then we began to ride. My soul
Smooth'd itself out, a long-cramp'd scroll Freshening and fluttering in the wind. Past hopes already lay behind.
What need to strive with a life awry?
Had I said that, had I done this, So might I gain, so might I miss.
Might she have loved me? just as well
She might have hated, who can tell! Where had I been now if the worst befell?
And here we are riding, she and I.
Fail I alone, in words and deeds?
Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
We rode; it seem'd my spirit flew, Saw other regions, cities new,
As the world rush'd by on either side.
I thought,—All labour, yet no less Bear up beneath their unsuccess. Look at the end of work, contrast The petty done, the undone vast, This present of theirs with the hopeful past!
I hoped she would love me; here we ride.
What hand and brain went ever pair'd? What heart alike conceived and dared? What act proved all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen?
We ride and I see her bosom heave.
There 's many a crown for who can reach. Ten lines, a statesman's life in each!
The flag stuck on a heap of bones, A soldier's doing! what atones?
They scratch his name on the Abbey-stones. My riding is better, by their leave.
What does it all mean, poet? Well, Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell What we felt only; you express'd You hold things beautiful the best,
And pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 'Tis something, nay 'tis much: but then, Have you yourself what 's best for men?
Are you—poor, sick, old ere your time— Nearer one whit your own sublime
Than we who never have turn'd a rhyme?
Sing, riding 's a joy! For me, I ride.
And you, great sculptor—so, you gave
A score of years to Art, her slave, And that 's your Venus, whence we turn To yonder girl that fords the burn!
You acquiesce, and shall I repine?
What, man of music, you grown gray With notes and nothing else to say, Is this your sole praise from a friend, 'Greatly his opera's strains intend, But in music we know how fashions end!'
I gave my youth: but we ride, in fine.
Who knows what 's fit for us? Had fate Proposed bliss here should sublimate My being—had I sign'd the bond— Still one must lead some life beyond,
Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried.
This foot once planted on the goal, This glory-garland round my soul, Could I descry such? Try and test!
I sink back shuddering from the quest.
Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride.
And yet—she has not spoke so long!
What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturn'd Whither life's flower is first discern'd,
We, fix'd so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,—
And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride?”.
A) SUMMARY
“The Last Ride Together” by Robert Browning is a dramatic monologue that captures the reflections of a rejected lover who asks his beloved for one final ride together. As they embark on this last journey, the speaker contemplates the nature of love, success, and failure. Despite the pain of unrequited love, he finds solace In the shared moment, considering it a triumph over the many missed opportunities in life. He contrasts his experience with others who have sought fulfillment in different pursuits, ultimately concluding that this brief, intimate ride with his beloved is a form of victory in itself. The poem ends on a note of acceptance, with the speaker cherishing the fleeting joy of the present moment rather than dwelling on the loss.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

i) . What does the speaker request from his beloved in the poem?

a)    Another chance at love

b)    One last ride together

c)    To forget him

d)    To marry him

II)    Which literary device is predominantly used in “ The Last Ride Together”?

a)    Metaphor

b)    Irony

c)    Simile

d)    Alliteration

18. 4 Rabbi Ben Ezra
“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''
Not that, amassing flowers,
Youth sighed "Which rose make ours,
Which lily leave and then as best recall?"
Not that, admiring stars,
It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars;
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!"
Not for such hopes and fears
Annulling youth's brief years,
Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!
Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.
Poor vaunt of life indeed,
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast:
Such feasting ended, then
As sure an end to men;
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?
Rejoice we are allied
To That which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.
What is he but a brute
Whose flesh has soul to suit,
Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play?
To man, propose this test—
Thy body at its best,
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?
Yet gifts should prove their use:
I own the Past profuse
Of power each side, perfection every turn:
Eyes, ears took in their dole,
Brain treasured up the whole;
Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?"
Not once beat "Praise be Thine!
I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too:
Perfect I call Thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man!
Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!"
For pleasant is this flesh;
Our soul, in its rose-mesh
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest;
Would we some prize might hold
To match those manifold
Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best!
Let us not always say,
"Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul
Therefore I summon age
To grant youth's heritage,
Life's struggle having so far reached its term:
Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.
And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new:
Fearless and unperplexed,
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue.
Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.
For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey:
A whisper from the west
Shoots—"Add this to the rest,
Take it and try its worth: here dies another day."
So, still within this life,
Though lifted o'er its strife,
Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last,
This rage was right i' the main,
That acquiescence vain:
The Future I may face now I have proved the Past."
For more is not reserved
To man, with soul just nerved
To act to-morrow what he learns to-day:
Here, work enough to watch
The Master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play.
As it was better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made:
So, better, age, exempt
From strife, should know, than tempt
Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid!
Enough now, if the Right
And Good and Infinite
Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own
With knowledge absolute,
Subject to no dispute
From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone.
Be there, for once and all,
Severed great minds from small,
Announced to each his station in the Past!
Was I, the world arraigned,
Were they, my soul disdained,
Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!
Now, who shall arbitrate?
Ten men love what I hate,
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten, who in ears and eyes
Match me: we all surmise,
They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe?
Not on the vulgar mass
Called "work," must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
Ay, note that Potter's wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—
Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!"
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
What though the earlier grooves,
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Skull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?
But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I,—to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!”.
B) SUMMARY
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning is a philosophical poem that explores the meaning and value of life through the perspective of an aged Rabbi. The poem celebrates the wisdom that comes with age and encourages a positive view of life’s later stages. Browning, through the Rabbi’s voice, argues that life should be seen s a complete journey, where youth is just a preparatory phase, and old age brings the fulfillment of one’s true purpose. The poem reflects on idea that life is a divine plan, with every experience- whether joy or sorrow-contributing to spiritual growth. Browning emphasizes the importance of faith, patience, and trust in the divine, encouraging readers to embrace both the struggles and triumphs of life, knowing that everything ultimately serves a higher purpose.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

III) . In “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” how does the speaker view old age?

a)    As a time of despair

b)    As a punishment

c)    As the best part of life

d)    As a burden

IV) . Who is the central figure in the poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra”?

a)    A prophet

b)    A young lover

c)    An old Jewish scholar

d)    A philosopher king

18.5 SUMMARY
In this unit we read two of Browning’s poems Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “The Last Ride Together”.
18.6 GLOSSARY
| Beloved | : Dearly loved; dear to the heart |
|---|---|
| Eternal | : Infinite ; Existing to all times |
| Contentment | : Happiness; a state of being satisfied |
| Adieu | : A farewell; goodbye |
| Musing | : Reflective or contemplative thought; daydreaming |


18.7 ANSWERS TO SELF –CHECK-EXERCISE
| 18.7 | I) One Last Ride-Together |
|---|---|
| 18.8 | II) Metaphor |
| 18.9 | III) As the best part of life |
| 18.10 | IV) An old Jewish Scholar |


18.8 REFERENCES/ SUGGESTED READING
Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald (eds.) Robert Browning: The Critical Heritage. (Routledge.
1995).
Woolford, John and Karlin, Daniel. Robert Browning. (Longman. 1996).

18.8 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1)    Analyze the theme of aging in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”. How does Browning portray the relationship between youth and old age in the poem?

2)    Analyze the use of imagery and symbolism in “The Last Ride Together”. How do these literary devices enhance the poem’s themes?
Unit 19 Lord Tennyson: Introduction
STRUCTURE

19.1    INTRODUCTION

19.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

19.3    TENNYSON’S LIFE AND WORKS
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I
19.4SUMMARY

19.5    GLOSSARY

19.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

19.7    SUGGESTED READING

19.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

19.1    INTRODUCTION
Tennyson began his poetic journey at a young age. By the age of twelve, he had written a six-thousand-line epic, drawing inspiration from Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1827, he published Poems by Two Brothers, a small volume that, despite its title, included poems by three of the Tennyson brothers, with Alfred likely contributing nearly half of the works. That same year, Tennyson entered Trinity College at Cambridge University, where his university years were marked by intellectual and political unrest. He became a member of a group called the Apostles, where he participated in debates on pressing issues concerning church and state. Tennyson also expressed support for the rebels in Spain during this time.
Those who encountered Tennyson during his student years were struck by his impressive physical presence and the literary talents he displayed at such a young age. However, in 1831, after the death of his father, Tennyson left Cambridge without completing his degree.

19.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this unit we will learn about Tennyson and the features of his poetry.

19.3    TENNYSON’S LIFE AND WORKS
In this first unit we introduce you to the poet.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) commonly calls up a picture of the grand old man who had the magnificent presence of a heroic bard. He was the uniquely famous Poet Laureate who becomes a national institution, the uncrowned king of England and of poetry in the Victorian age.
Alfred’s father George, Tennyson was a disinherited and embittered son whose temperament, situation and alcoholic consolation led to fits of insane violence which at times made the sensitive, young Alfred to long for death. Tennyson had a religious background and a temperamental strain of meysticism but was also all his life an eager student of science who felt its increasing pressure and biblical criticism. His first elaborate statement was the poem originally entitled ‘Supposed confessions of a Second Rate Sensitive Mind not to Unity with itself’. The question was brought home to him with crushing force by the sudden, untimely death (September’ 1833) of his beloved friend and the brightest star in the galaxy of the
Cambridge “Apostles), Arthur Hallam.
The extinction of a young life of goodness and promise raised the religious, ethical and metaphysical problem; as there a purpose a reality, “behind the flux of life? Is the world a divine order or isit a meaningless chaos under the sway of blind nature?” With two centuries of scientific skepticism it was difficult for young Tennyson to write in a tone of positive affirmation: he was, therefore, torn between faith and doubt. The lyric “Break, Break, Break” Written after, Hallam’s death was one of his early uttetences. “The Two Voices” is a moving presentation of the alternatives, it is a dialogue between himself, and his soul upon the merits of suicide; and in “Ulysses” the poet is seeking to rise above his grief and face life with resolution. Even “In Memoriam” did not end his questionings which appeared in his posthumous volume of 1892.
Hallam’s death seemed to shatter Tennyson’ whole life and he weighed to die and possibly hereditary factor predisposed him to melancholia. Poems written-before the desperate loneliness he was always prone to feel the craving for oblivion to which it constantly led. The brutal attack by the reviews of his poems of 1833 hurt Tennyson deeply and he lapsed into the ten years ‘silence’ as a writer. The thwarting of his intense passion for Rosa Bearing in 1834 and the suspension of his marriage with Emily, Sellwood till 1850 with whom he was engaged in 1838 further added the his mental frustrating.
These few biographical details point to certain sources of the melancholy which finds expression in one after another of Tennyson’s poems. In the two voices he ‘confronts the case for escaping the weariness, the fever and the fact of life by suicide.’
In addition to personal and family troubles and religious problems Tennyson early, encountered another question; what is the role and function of the poet in the modem world. The great poet’s of the preceding generation, the romantic poets had asserted - the supremacy of the poetic imagination end intuition even in the face of the industrial revolution, the whole-sale application of science and the mechanized civilization. But with the rapid advance of scientific knowledge and achievement in the age of Tennyson the spirit of poetry and myth entered to the desiccating spirit of science and civilization. In Tennyson while we find celebration of the cloistered imagination in the fashion of Coleridge and Hesperides, as the theme of isolation as in “Marina” of fascination for a life of un heroic lassitude as in “The Lotus Eaters”, we get also a first a position of the worlds of seclusion and actuality as in “The lady of Shalott” aesthetic detachment contrasted with higher claims’ of social responsibility as in “The Palace of Art”.
In later Tennyson (1842) poems the claims of responsibility won, his early poems were radically revised and greatly improved and the new poems had less of pretty fancy and more of ethical and social seriousness. Tennyson was by far the most popular poet of the Victorian, a poet of superb achievement the most representative poet of his age. He was in the words of Queen Elizabath I “more English in touch with
the general movement of thought of the age in which he lived in politics, in science, in religion, and representative of it no less in his doubts than in his affirmations.” He was fond of domestic themes. In face he was practical in his interests unlike Browning his contemporary, who was more continental; he was patriotic he distrusted excess. He was able to speak for the great, new middle class which had just come into prominence and was acclaimed during his life time as the national, poet, in a save in which no English poet has ever been since Shakespeare.
Tennyson’s poetry gives expression to the feelings and tendencies of his generation such as “Moderation in politic refined culture religious liberation chequered by doubt, a lively interest in the advance of scientific discovery coupled with alarm lest it might lead us astray, attachment to ancient institutions, larger views of the duty of the State towards ‘Its people, and increasing sympathy’ with poverty and distress all salient features of the national character in the direction of political ideals the ‘imperial conception-realizing the British Empire’s unity in multiplicity was proclaimed in his verse.’ The revival and spread of profound Veneration for the throne, as the common centre and head of a scattered dominion was another outcome of the same idea promoted by the Laureate’s stately verse. The future historian can safely draw inferences from his verse as to the intellectual and political tendencies of the nineteenth century.
Tennyson’s youth coincided with great changes in the temper of the times: the thunderous echoes of long war against France had died away, the reform bill (1832) had become law and the era of space in Europe and comfortable prosperity in England in the middle of the nineteenth century had just set in. All this is reflected in his poetry: the wild and stormy element has disappeared, his impressions of the earth, sea and sky are mainly peaceful, melancholy, mysterious; he is looking on the happy autumn fields or listening in fancy to the ripple of the brooks or the Splash of a quiet sea. Length of life, maturity of experience, abundant treasure and domestic happiness were other factors which imparted charms of balance self-restraint and exquisite finish to the best of Tennyson’s poetry.
Tennyson was far from being a dogmatic Christian religious doubt, as was to be expected in the age of Darwin, Lyndall and Herbert Spencer, was very much a part of the intellectual climate of the time and Tennyson was as sensitive to it as any man. All his life he followed like Shelley the progress of scientific thought and research with passionate interest and deep understanding, welcoming its achievements as much as he dreaded the possible misuse of them. With him, however, as perhaps with all profoundly imaginative men, tile advance of science into the physical world did not diminish but deepened the mystery of life. Like most poets, Tennyson was essentially religious, he had the faith of the mystic that reason in spite of all her triumphs if taken as in sole guide to truth might lead to Hill. “In Memoriam” sum up all his doubt, all his ultimate belief. In it he expresses his sense of the blind waste and inexorable cruelty of nature red in tooth and claw with ravin, and of the littleness of the individual life in the vast, impersonal scheme of the universe,
yet the scientists of the Victorian age who read it bailed Tennyson as one of themselves despite the religious mysticism and Christian dunking of the poem.
After his period of pure romance Tennyson wrote much which bore directly upon contemporary events and problems. During his long life he witnessed changes in English life brought about by the industrial Revolution; he saw the rise of a powerful new riddle class, men who ‘made fortunes from cotton mills and coalmines to challenge the supremacy of the old landed aristocracy; he saw the coming of the, railway, steamships and the telegraph along with the swift advance of physical science the Darwinian theory of Evolution and rationalist criticism of the Bible.
To all these things he was alive and sensitive. Intellectually he was in sympathy with speculative thought in the same way as he approved, in theory, of the progress of democratic ideals; but emotionally he was conservative. Devoted to his Country, he clung with passion to the old traditional virtues of loyalty, patriotism, service and faith and was haunted by the fear that the new scientific materialism might, lead to the supersession of the virtues by a skeptical and self-regarding cynicism. The expression of this fear was more and more to occupy his poetry as he grew older.
Tennyson spoke for the English conscience of the Victorian age. His poetry held the minor to the age in all its moods and tendencies, “In Memoriam” ‘(1850) was welcomed- by the Victoriana is an assuring reconciliation of science and religion. “The Palace of Art” is an open parable of aesthetic detachment in an age of stark materialism; “The Princess’ (1847) a brilliant tour de force deals with the spiritual equality of men and women; the theme of “Maud” (1865) his little “Hamlet” was anything but remote or romantic; it was almost violently contemporary, alive to social evils, Tennyson had nothing but scorn for the worship of money and the growing materialism of the age: …… who but a fool would have faith in the tradesman’s ware or his word?
The “Idyll of the King” symbolize ‘the essential mobility of the ideals of patriotism and domestic honour (Maud).The tendency to return to the divine and heroic myths of ancient Greece or the Medieval Age begun by Keats was continued by Tennyson who, however, anglicized-nay Victorianised the ancient themes and folklore. The concrete and sculptured figures of the sallque legend or fable in “Ocnone”, Ulysses and “Tilhones” were endowed with warmth and fresh oslour by their becoming “the impersonations of the impulses and affections of modern life- love unrequited, Isilude, restlessness, the roaming spirit, the adventure spirit, the ennui of old age, philosophic or serently.”
‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” “(Ulysses”) was a typical Victorian sentiment in an age of solence and ceaseless activity. In reaction to life feveitsh restlessness of the age of Action is the craving of human heart for peace, rest and leisure.
“Surely, surely, slumber is more sweeter than foil. The Lotus Caters”
The Arthurian legend of “Morte’d Arthur” appealed to Tennyson not so much for its romance but for its allegorical uses and the sermon on the abuses of the times that could be preached through its medium.
“The old order changeth yielding place to now” was a characteristic feature of Tennyson’s age of evolution, scientific endeavored how discoveries.
Tennyson was moody and morbid throughout his life. A shadow of despondency and gloom, a sense of the Incompleteness and failure of life, darkened his meditations on the condition and prospects of the human race, and his later poems show how he long, retained his cloudy outlook upon the world Sadness” and his dramatic monologues dwell more and more on the unhappiness of mankind especially the day monologues.
But besides his brooding over subjects of human misery sorrow suicide and death he was an optimist in religion, holding a firm belief in the divine wisdom and goodness as summed up in “In Memoriam”. Also, unlike many poets he was a happened in marriage, children and friends.
Tennyson, like Wordsworth, was a lover of nature in all its beauty and solitude, in all its fomte, and knew it with a scientist’s exactitude. As a child he would often walk, all night, hardly conscious of his body, and rapt in the mystery of darkness and starred sky. Water he always loved, his poetry is full of it. And there was the sea, the delight of his boyhood as of his old age “Crossing the Bar” written in his eighty-first year is, unique for the beautiful fidelity and truth of its sea-images.
Notable for his descriptive power born of exquisite and faithful observation of nature Tennyson, in keeping with the scientific temper of his age, viewed, Nature as a destructive agent of the Evolutionary process “red is tooth and claw (in Memoriam). This gave rise to doubt for a while about the ultimate designs of god and Nature”, Age god and Nature them at strife? There is, however, no pantheistle strain in his attitude to nature.
In tracing Tennyson’s poetic development one is conscious, in reading his best and most characteristic verse-especially his early verse - that unlike his great predecessors his poetry was not so much that of a man as of a mood. His object was to fashion some small thing which would be beautiful. But lie soon realized that he must soon leave the ‘Lordly pressure House’ (as he says in the “Palace of Art”) for from that isolation and withdrawal he feared corruption would come. Beauty alone was not enough, divorced from her sister’s Goodness and Knowledge; and “He that shuts love out in turn shall be shutout from love, and on her threshold lie flowing in outer darkness”.He was thus impelled to extend the scope of his poetry to include themes of common life. The poet must also be a man amongst men. A friend accounted of the popularity of his poetry by saying that it was the most ‘human’ ever written. “He remained inalienably himself, and the true business of his poetry was to express that self through its varying moods.”
Tennyson was much more than a mere polished mirror of Victorian England; he was in there in a
great artist, very often, a great poet. Tennyson was endowed with pure, lyrical gift which he possessed in an eminent degree and it is by virtue of “the speech, the secret and indefinable beauty of words and tune-as sense of all great poetry - that Tennyson, more than his message, ranks amongst the great English poets, sweh as Spenser, Shakespeare, Burns, Shelly and Swinburne. Most evident in his early work, right through to the end is present a magical utterance haunting sometimes in e.g. In “Break, Break, Break” “Tears, idle Tears” or “Come Down, O Maid”. He kept up this lyrical gift right up to the time of Sun-set and evening star. Less constant than in his youth and middle years; the old music, “Sometimes in graver harmonies” remained upon his Lips up to the end: “Crossing the Box” was his swan-song in this respect.
A consummate artist Tennyson brought to the making of his verse a trained and accurate eye, and a very fine ear ‘for verbal music. The society and variety of his tunes were only equalled by Shelley. He was an extremely careful and conscientious artist and knew the nature of the file in patiently polishing and improving his verse in order to attain greatest perfection. Tennyson is un-surpassed in the choice, deployment, and manipulation of his material forms, and in his “metrical virtuosity.” He is also distinguished for the mastery and vanity of his rhythms. He is a master of harmonies produced by the judicious use of alliteration and onomatopoeia. In “Maud” he enforces the sense of alone by its sound.
“The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divides the shuddering night.”
And out he walked when the wind like a broken wording waited”
Tennyson is also distinguished for his naturalness and simplicity of diction in his pastoral poems in which the language is purely poetical to the exclusion of dialect or rustic talk. His blank verse (“The Idylls”) is exquisitely contrived: “subtly varied in movement it is at once mellow and light like a black bird’s’ song.” After Milton’s and Shelley’s, Tennyson’s blank verse is the “most accomplished and musical in the English language. At suits his monologues best with its march, flowing toward with its sonorous rhythm. Tennyson is endowed with the gift of description. Cut off by both science and religion from Wordsworthian “mysticism”, and a much better observer than Words worth he declined the nature that his acute senses and human emotions gave him Even in his saddest lyrics he makes “the too much loved earth- more lovely, and even his beautiful lyrics of love do not well up from the depths of his being.”
Tennyson is also supreme in his pictorial power the art of filling up a picture with profusion of accurate detail, the rare power of giving atmosphere to a poem suggesting the correspondence and interaction between the mind and its surroundings, between the situation and the subjective feelings. According to Bagehot Tennyson’s poetic style is associated with the ornate, although he is a master of many styles.
Tennyson was the Virgil of the 19th century: “Thou majestic in thy sadness at die doubtful doom of human kind” he had a deep strain of Virgilian mood. Many of his finest lyrics such as “Tears, idle Tears” are variations on the simple universal theme of mortality and the remembrance of things past such lyrical poems range from the early “Song:
A spirit haunts the years last hour” to poems written fifty years later. Finally we may sum up Tennyson, as a poet, in the words of Douglas Bush “in the essential nature of his idealism and his disillusioned melancholy, his pervading sense of irreparable loss, he is very much our contemporary, the poet of an age of anxiety”.
SELF- CHECK-EXERCISE-I
Which university did Tennyson attend as an undergraduate’?

a.    Oxford

b.    Cambridge

c.    Harvard

d.    Yale

19.4    SUMMARY
Thus,we can say that he was a highly respected poet of his period and the most widely read of all English poets. The quality of his work varied greatly, and much that he wrote is of little interest today, for he included in his poetry themes and subjects that were of intense interest only to the Victorian. Tennyson’s thought was often shallow and dealt with matters of fleeting significance, but his technical skill and prosody were unsurpassed.
19.4 GLOSSARY
| Chancel | : the front part of a church including the altar, separated from the congregation |
|---|---|
| Charnels | : places where bones are buried |
| Copse | : a group of trees |
| Garrulous | : wordy, talkative |
| Goad | : something that provokes action |
| Grange | : farmhouse |


Inosculated : joined, united

19.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

a. Cambridge

19.7    REFERENCES/ SUGGESTED READING
T ennyson and the Princess: Reflections of an Aye By John Killham The Athlone Press. 1958.
Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson by Richard E. Brantley University Press of Florida, 1994.

19.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1.    In what ways can Tennyson be considered a poet of the past?

2.    What are the characteristics of Tennyson’s poetry
UNIT-20 LORD TENNYSON POETRY-I
STRUCTURE

20.1    INTRODUCTION

20.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

20.3    THE LADY OF SHALOTT
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

20.4    SUMMARY

20.5    GLOSSARY

20.6    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

20.7    SUGGESTED READING/ REFERENCES

20.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

20.1    INTRODUCTION
First: Tennyson is essentially the artist. No other in his age studied the art of poetry so content or with such singleness of purpose; and Swinburne rivals him in melody and the perfect finish of his verse.
Second: like all the great writers of age he is empathetically a teacher, often a leader. In the preceding age as the French Revolution, law lessens was more or less common, and individuality was the rule in literature.
Third: Tennyson’s theme, so characteristic of his age, is the reign of order - of law in the spiritual world, working out the perfect man. ‘In Memoriam’. ‘Idylls of the King’. ‘The Princess’, here are three widely different poems; yet the theme of each, so far as poetry is kind of spiritual philosophy and weighs its words before it utters them, is the order

20.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The present unit undertakes a detailed discussion of poem prescribed in the syllabus.

20.3    THE LADY OF SHALOTT
And now Tennyson’s poems First “The Lady of Shalott”.
“The Lady of Shalott” appeared in the 1833 volume of Tennyson’s poems along with “The Miller’s Daughter “Ocnone”. “The Mary Queen” and” The Lotus-Eaters”. And what was hinted and tried in 1830 comes to super consummation in 1833 with “The Lady of Shalott. The poem deals with the Arthurian legend glad thus for shadows the life-long interest of its author in the Round Table which culminated in “The Idylls of the king”.
In its revised form “The Lady of Shalott” is a perfect blending of eight and sound and is concerned with the problem of artistic isolate. As usual with Tennyson, the scene is set before the protagonist is introduced: Shalott characteristically is an island Paradise that Tennyson also uses in “The Lotus-Eaters and
The Hesperides and Other Poems as a symbol of haven for the poetic imagination. The outside world is dull, consisting of great fields of barley and rye, but in Shalott there are only lilies, symbols of the purity of the poetic mind. Along the banks of the shier, itself a symbol of life, there is almost motionless existence: Already in the land there is an awareness of the Lady but the people know her only by her song they do not see her as a person, they know her only as an artist. In fact, the reapers who, because they toil, are characterized as weary, emphasize the un-reality of the Artist as a person calling her “the fairy Lady of Shalott.
Part II explains that the Lady is forbidden under pain of a course to look down from her isolated tower on to Cane lot, which apparently represents reality. She known not the nature of the course. She knows not even its source (“she has heard a whisper say”): yet she accepts cheerfully her isolation having little care for the world or anything else other than her work. Hers is the pursuit of what a critic has called the romantic image; a timeless and deathless image insulated from social-infect all human concerns having as its solo and its own being, “She weaveth steadily” because her only desire is for the perfection of the image.
She knows the real word only by reflections in the mirror at which she looks, and what she sees is shadows. Her art, therefore, is not the mirror held up to nature, rather it is the shadow of a shadow. This seems to be the poetic theory of Tennyson himself. Life is to be used as bit the vaguest referred for communication, in practice Tennyson had written, as in the “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”, ‘poetry of dream, poetry which yields its core of meaning ‘only at greater and greater removes from reality.’
A strong contrast is indicated between the life of external reality and the existence in Shalott. The inhabitants of the outside world lead passionate; active, colourful lives; but the Lady is content to remain simply as a spectator. She knows of love, religion, nature, the court and knightly adventures, as symbolised in the third stanza of part II; but she herself is uncommitted (“she hath no loyal knight and true”). Her art is, she feels, adequate compensation for that which she is missing in life. But suddenly she realises when she sees reflected a funeral and a wedding in her mirror that she is divorced from the life cycle, and limed by thereal world, she begins to tire of her isolation: “I am half sick of shadows.”
But her assertion is qualified “half sick.” This is because she has so long lived as a sensually absorbed spirit that she is incapable of making an unqualified/emphatic assertion about the nature of external reality or of her own existence.
She expresses herself entirely through song, and when she makes a statement of fact (as in her opening line), it inevitably requires some level of ambiguity. Removed from the realm of facts, she doesn’t fully comprehend her connection to it. Her style reflects what could be described as the late Romantic stance— a type of expression similar to the one found in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale (“I have been half in love with easeful death”) and in the works of other late Romantic poets, where bold assertions are made in the
face of an external reality.
Having begun to tire of her situation; she then seen Sir Lancelot, who represents life in all its manifold and most attractive aspects. The images relating to him are those of youth, vigour, fertility, passion, chivalry, romance; the verbs used in connection with him are those of action, all of which are antithetical to the Lady’s existence. Only when he appears on the scene the scene of course reflected in the mirror is there any action concerned with Shalott: “a boarded meteor trailing light/Moves over still Shalott,” a symbolic action foreshadowing the Lady’s movement. In spite of his attractiveness, however, she has been able to resist the temptation to submit to life. But when he sings “Tirra Lirra” and she realises that song is possible in the outside world the call of the world becomes irresistible and she leaves her web looks down on come lot, and as foretold, the curse takes effect the web disappears and the mirror, cracks: heart is test as well as the means by which she was able to live and create. She now becomes aware of the consequences of her action.
Prior to her action the outside world had been described in terms of gay, passionate colours- red, crimson golden, silvery, blue. Now when she tries to partake of that life, the gay colours disappear, and nature takes on a different aspect.
“In the stony east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning.
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining.
Over toward Camelot”.
Life is not what she had expected it to be. When seen through reflection and when heightened by art the world had been beautiful because it had been an ideal world. When seen in reality, the world is nothing like what she thought it would be. Art had improved on nature. She desires an identity with this life of which she is now a part but which she does not comprehend in order to b e recognised an artist, so Known here -to fore, she writes her name on the boat. Knowing not what she does or what she must do, “Like some bold seen in a trance” looks with uncomprehending eyes to Camelot and starts hear journey. Wrapped in a snowy white robe which symbolies her shroud and her innocence of the worlds she floats down the river singing her last song, symbolic of her death as artist. She undergoes an awful transformation; her song changes to a mournful carol, for she cannot sing of that, which she does not know, and before she reaches the “first house by the water is in Camelot she dies: “singing in her song she died”. Even before actual contact with reality, comes her demise, the loss of artistic isolation in itself results in death. In the words of E.A. Francis “Not only does the weaver-singer die outside the protective towers of artistic isolation, she, forms her death in doing so, making a visual representation of her meaning - By the time she reaches lot she is
an artifact of herself, a visual icon of the song that can-be heard. All that remains of the voice and its history is the colourful representation the singer has made’ - A” fairy” or romance-voice of the beginning of the poem-she becomes a “Seer” or prophet as she moves, here words and their meaning in accessible to those who hear her from the river bank, “The Lady of Shalott” is, among other things, about the nature and limits of artistic representation.
“The Lady of Shalott” is an allegory and Tennyson himself hinted at its allegorical nature: “The new-born love for something, for someone in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities,”. Hallam, Tennyson also wrote in the Memoir that the poem is a moral tale of “the inadequacy of an isolated existence” and the dangers to which an isolated individual exposes himself in the world of reality. The real moral of the poem seems to be that the self- absorbed spirit- no matter how much it desires to enter into the life of other men-may be unable to face reality and thus be destroyed by the attempt.
We could trace an analogy between the Lady of Shalott and the poet: Tennyson, was happy in his isolation and realised the dangers attendant upon leaving it, but he was help made to feel the necessity of mixing with the world, and so was weighing the possibilities of what the consequences would be if he attempted to reorient his art.
The Lady of Shalott is enigmatic form but its conclusion is template and predetermined. It is in this respect, a fated and a suicidal poem. The self- imposed poverty of its rhyme words (“lie”, “ry”, “sky”, “by”-Ll. 1-4), their diminution in number from four to three (“go” “below”- 1.6-8), to two (“Camelot”, “Shalott”-LI. 509) the quick descent of each stanza to the stability of the refrain - all these features are designed to secure the conclusiveness of the outcome. The separation of the private and public worlds in the first three stanzas of the poem leading to their destructive coming ling in Part-IV points to the suicidal completion of the poem’s design. All the energy of Tennyson’s parable is directed toward its own termination. The Lady’s cry “The course is come upon me” (1.116) echoes the shriek of Blake’s.
The poet if sensation, Tennyson is not merely narrating a story of unrequited love in “the Lady of Shalott” but gives a general representation of the process of dying into nature, of trying to acquire a stable human from He was engaged in a life-long search, like the Lady of Shalott, to make his world human, to find a resolution to his’ uncertainties oncoming the function of a poet. And this he found in “The Princess” written in 1847 in which he was moved to belief in the poet as a spokesman to humanity at large and his age from a belief in the poet who sings only for the joy and beauty of song.
“The Lady of Shalott” can also be looked upon as a poem of the age, of after rather than sheer reflection which ultimately proves fatal.
The poem can in fact be experience by each reader at his own level of experience or at several
levels. It is “like a stone thrown, into a pond “crossing over-going circles of meaning to go out from the “centre,” “There is more in the poem than “skills lovely -pageantry” truth can and does see herself in the fairy miner before it cracks.
“I am half sick of shadows”, said the Lady of Shalott so all sit before their mirror, so all see life in its “silver foiled deception” rolling by: so all grow weary of shadows and so favor all, when eyes are turned from the shadow to that which fast it, the minor is split so that none will ever look in its fraudulent face again. “The Lady of Shalott” has everything that die most experience poet could have learnt - “rhyme that flowers from the lino a bud from a rose bush, a scansion that is as sweet as bells and never cloys, and a sense all the time of beauty powering in like light through a stained glass window.”
The Lady of Shalott is a brilliant example of Tennyson’s poetic renderings of natural phenomena, of his pictorial artistry Patient and sensitive observation is supplemented by his supreme skill in the handling of words by what Walt Whitman called his “finest verbalism”. In the use of rich, deliberate, and incantatory language (as in “The Lady of Shalott”) as also in the recreation of medieval dream-world Tennyson followed the tradition of John Keats and other nineteenth century and painters.
“The Lady of Shalott” is in short a symphony of auditory arid visual effects and ranks with the greatest ballads in literature such as “The Ancient Mariner” and “Charistabel”.
The Lady of Shalott

Part I
“On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
The yellow-leaved waterlily
The green-sheathed daffodilly
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens shiver.
The sunbeam showers break and quiver
In the stream that runneth ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
Underneath the bearded barley, The reaper, reaping late and early, Hears her ever chanting cheerly, Like an angel, singing clearly, O'er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy, Beneath the moon, the reaper weary Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy, Lady of Shalott.'
The little isle is all inrail'd
With a rose-fence, and overtrail'd With roses: by the marge unhail'd The shallop flitteth silken sail'd, Skimming down to Camelot.
A pearl garland winds her head: She leaneth on a velvet bed, Full royally apparelled,
The Lady of Shalott.

Part II
No time hath she to sport and play: A charmed web she weaves alway. A curse is on her, if she stay Her weaving, either night or day, To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be;
Therefore she weaveth steadily, Therefore no other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
She lives with little joy or fear.
Over the water, running near, The sheepbell tinkles in her ear.
Before her hangs a mirror clear,
Reflecting tower'd Camelot.
And as the mazy web she whirls, She sees the surly village churls, And the red cloaks of market girls
Pass onward from Shalott.
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd lad, Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,
Goes by to tower'd Camelot:
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, came from Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead Came two young lovers lately wed;
'I am half sick of shadows,' said
The Lady of Shalott”.

Part III
“A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, And flam'd upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott.
The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down from Camelot:
And from his blazon'd baldric slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armour rung, Beside remote Shalott.
All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn'd like one burning flame together, As he rode down from Camelot.
As often thro' the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over green Shalott.
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow'd
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down from Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flash'd into the crystal mirror, 'Tirra lirra, tirra lirra:'
Sang Sir Lancelot.
She left the web, she left the loom
She made three paces thro' the room
She saw the water-flower bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott”.

Part IV
“In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower'd Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote, The Lady of Shalott.
A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight, All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew (her zone in sight Clasp'd with one blinding diamond bright)
Her wide eyes fix'd on Camelot, Though the squally east-wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly
Lady of Shalott.
With a steady stony glance—
Like some bold seer in a trance, Beholding all his own mischance, Mute, with a glassy countenance—
She look'd down to Camelot.
It was the closing of the day:
She loos'd the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
As when to sailors while they roam, By creeks and outfalls far from home, Rising and dropping with the foam, From dying swans wild warblings come,
Blown shoreward; so to Camelot
Still as the boathead wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her chanting her deathsong,
The Lady of Shalott.
A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy, She chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her eyes were darken'd wholly, And her smooth face sharpen'd slowly,
Turn'd to tower'd Camelot:
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
Under tower and balcony,
By garden wall and gallery,
A pale, pale corpse she floated by,
Deadcold, between the houses high,
Dead into tower'd Camelot.
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
To the planked wharfage came:
Below the stern they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest,
The wellfed wits at Camelot.
'The web was woven curiously,
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not,—this is I,
The Lady of Shalott.”

20.4    SUMMARY
Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott is a narrative poem that intertwines vivid imagery with a haunting atmosphere to delve into themes of isolation, artistic expression, and the tension between reality and illusion. Crafted in a lyrical ballad form, the poem employs a consistent rhythm and rhyme scheme, contributing to its musicality. Through detailed visual imagery, symbolism, and the repeated refrain “The Lady of Shalott,” Tennyson underscores the protagonist’s tragic destiny and the irresistible pull of the outside world, which ultimately leads to her downfall. The poem showcases Tennyson’s skillful manipulation of mood and atmosphere, using both language and structure to deepen its emotional impact..
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

I)      What does the Lady of Shalott spend her time doing?

a)    Weaving a magical tapestry

b)    Reading books of ancient lore

c)    Singing songs of sorrow

d)    Painting pictures of Camelot

II)     How does the Lady of Shalott view the outside world?

a)    Through a mirror

b)    Through a window

c)    Through a telescope

d)    Through her dreams

20.5    GLOSSARY
Shalott : A fictional island where the lad of Shalott resides isolated in her tower.
Camelot : The legendary castle and court associated with king Arthur, representing the world outside the Lady’s tower.
Artistry : weaving; web
Longing : Desire; love
Brazen Greaves :  Armor worn by knights

20.6    ANSWERS TO SELF CHECK-EXERCISE

I)    weaving a magical tapestry

II)    Through a mirror

20.7    REFERENCES/SUGGESTED READING
Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858 by John Olin Eidson. The
University of Georgia Press, 1943.
Classical Echoes in Tennyson by Wilfred P. Mustard. The Macmillan Company, 1904.

20.8    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1)    What does the curse symbolize, and why does it take effect when she looks directly at Camelot/

2)    What does the Lady of Shalott’s journey and ultimate fate suggest about the role of women in Victorian society?
UNIT-21 LORD TENNYSON: POETRY-II
STRUCTURE

21.1    INTRODUCTION

21.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

21.3    THE LOTUS EATERS
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

21.4    ULYSSES
SELF-CHECK EXERCISE-I

21.5    SUMMARY

21.6    GLOSSARY

21.7    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE

21.8    SUGGESTED READINGS

21.9 TERMINAL QUESTIONS

21.1    INTRODUCTION
Alfred Lord Tennyson, One of the foremost celebrated poets of the Victorian era, masterfully explores themes of heroism, escapism, and the human condition in his poems “The Lotus-Eaters” and “Ulysses.” Both poems draw from Homeric legends but diverge significantly in their portrayal of the protagonists’ inner worlds and responses to life’s challenges. Together, these poems offer a profound exploration of the human experience, balancing the opposing forces of rest and action, escape and engagement, ultimately questioning what it means to live a fulfilling life.

21.2    LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this final unit we will explore the contrasting themes of escapism and the pursuit of purpose in “The LotusEaters” and “Ulysses,” that how Tennyson uses these themes to reflect human desires and struggles.

21.3    THE LOTUS EATERS
“The Lotus Eaters”, along with other poems such as “The Lady of Shalott”, “Mariana in the South”, “the Palace of Arts.” etc., belonged to the second volume (1832/33) of poems by Tennyson on different themes, romantic, domestic and descriptive.
“The Lotus Eaters” was ‘written of the stage of poetic development when Tennyson was puzzled by the question as to the role and function of the poet in the modem world. Was a poet to celebrate the “cloistered imagination” and was, poetry to dual with the theme of Isolation and aesthetic detachment or was it to be the nouns her of men’s real life, the leader and teacher of humanity, and fulfil the higher claims of social responsibility? Tennyson write poems dealing with both sides of the of the question. “The Lady of Shalott” through a miniature romance shows a weaver of dreams drawn from seclusion into the world of actuality; Ulysses leaving civic duties are social responsibilities to his son, rouses himself to heroic enterprise; the lotos-eaters weary of action and hardship embrace unheroic lassikade.
It is important to note that the mental conflict experienced by Tennyson and his contemporaries was reflective of the Victorian era, a time characterized by conflict and compromise. Tennyson’s 1842 volume, which featured new poems, also included revised and significantly enhanced versions of earlier works, such as “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Lotus Eaters.” These poems balanced imaginative poetic elements with a deeper focus on ethical and social concerns, illustrating the changing dynamics of the period.
A reworking of “The Sea-Fairies”(1830)”, “The Lotus Eaters” is more of a dramatic poem it is of course, based on the ninth book of “Odyssey by Homer. Homer however, took no interest in describing the acedia of lotus land, for the incident is but rarely mentioned, instead the delighted in relating the adventures of the great Ulysses, Tennyson, on the other had took, what was but a brief mention in Homer and, omitting almost entirely the restless here, characteristically described the lethargic joys of those who had eaten the lotus.
The scene of the poem is characteristically the Island of Shalott, the Island-Paradise. The poem opens with Ulysses urging his men forward promising that the waves will soon bring then to shore. On that same afternoon they come to a land which is a kingdom where languor reigns. Here the very landscape reflects the apathy of the inhabitants: There is neither sharp sunlight nor a clear noon, only the haze of seemingly, perpetual afternoon: the air itself is languid and the stream, not full but slender and slow, seems to pause in its half from the cliff. In other words nature reflects the condition of those that eat the lotus. There are many streams but all flow outward to the sea from the inner land the suggestion being, that the departing water indicates flowing out of vitality from the land of the louts-eaters.
In lotus-land things never change but always seem the same. It is the perfect world where all is as one would have it: To those who eat the each anted flower there is no longer any heed to concern oneself with reality; one wants-only to dream and forget the cares of the world beyond. All desire for action is obliterated absence of energy becomes perfection. And so the men seduced by the offers of the flower and the fruit and the magic lotus and determine never more to roam.
The poet this has built up the atmosphere of dreamy langour pervading the land of the lotus with repeated use of expressions such as “weary” “languid air didi mean” “pause” silent pinackes” “linger’d” “dark faces-pale against that rosy flame”, “mildeyed melancholy” “For away did seem to mourn and save” thin voice as “voices frosh the grave” deep asleep “yellow-and” which all are suggestive of ennui and disinterestedness.
THE CHORIC SONG
Then follows the Choric Song, which the mariners follow to its source unlike Hauno (“The Hesperides”) who hears the strange song of the Hesperidean maidens while navigating the African coast. In both the poems the land is an island, represented as a haven of refuge for the poetic imagination which must be reached by eneans of the sea.
The Choric Song is dramatic in conception, and it makes brilliant use of contrasts: for example for every stanza that is descriptive there is a following stanza that is rhetorical in which then men question and nationalize their situation. One is led to suspect that Tennyson is here aiming at dramatic objectification of his own problem, of artistic isolation. In the odd- numbered sections the mariners are lyrical about the delights of the Island. Paradise; while in the even stanzas-their thoughts for the moment projected beyond the enchanted Isle-they- speak of “heaviest and “distress” of death and war and evil. The Choric Song is not a pure lyric, it stresses the relevance of rational, imagination and reaffirms “the assertive, unstilled desires
of the human heart. The even-number sections celebrate”. As they sing the stanzas of their song begin to grow longer and longer - from eleven lines in the first section to twenty nine in the last - thereby implying the true effects of the lotus, which allows them to forget the world and drowsily sing of their release from reality.
The central images of the poem are also contrasting the images of land and sea are contrasted in the first strophe and are carried throughout to the last section, and they are associated, with colours. The land is always described in terms rosy yellow the colour of the lotus, and the sea is described by dark blue. Furthermore, the adjectives nouns and verbs used in connection with land are those of stillness.
“In the hollow, Lotus-land to the and lie recined” while the words referring to the sea are those of turbulent motion:
“Surge was seething”, “gushing of the wave”, surrounded by sweet music and cool mosses, among the delights of sound and sight the men sing, why should we the “roof and crown of things” forever toil and find so little rest, while all other things of nature have rest and while our inner spirit tells us that calm in the only joy? Death we know is the end of life, so why labour all our life away? What we do today matters not, because tomorrow it will be part of the past. All we want is.
“To lend out hearts and spirits wholly.
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy”
The tone of melancholy preemies “The Lotus Eaters” tor their joy is not in living but in abnegation of life they sing not of verbal gladness but of autumn at sadness:
“Lol sweeten’d with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night All its allotted
length of days.
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and falls, no toll, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.”
This is the natural state they yearn for, desiring “long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.” Much like the Lady of Shalott, they have become inward-focused souls, aware that any attempt to re-enter the external world will bring suffering. As a result, they decide to stay in the lotus-land, relinquishing their will to act without hesitation. “We have had enough of action,” they sing, pledging “to live and lie reclined on the hills with the gods, indifferent to mankind.”
The Epicurean gods, which were probably suggested to Tennyson by the third book of Lucretius, were
introduced into the poem in the revision of 1842 in his review of the 1842 volume, James Speeding wrote that the introduction of the gods added “touches of deeper significance” and instead of a sense of “Sensual ease and luxuries repose, with which it originally ended: a higher strain is substituted which is meant apparently to show the effect of lotus-eating upon the religious feelings” (Memoirl). In other words Tennyson sought by the revision of section VIII to indicate that abandonment to sense perception contributes to the decay of man’s moral and religious nature.
However, Tennyson has not fully succeeded in his in this respect. As in “The Palace of Art” the whole force of the poem works against the didactic intention: by far the greater part is dedicated to the delights of sensuous indulgence and the moral, such as it comes only in the last section of the poem we do
not see the harmful effects of lotus-eating on the mariners because we do not see in the beginning of the poem that they believed in some other kind of gods: there has been so far as the reader can tell, no change. The introduction of the Epicurean deities shows only how the effect of the lotus has been to remove the men’s minds from the mundane world of care to the repose of the gods. Since in the world or reality one cannot know this carelessness and this repose, the state of the gods serves as a metaphor for the condition, of those who hate eaten the enchanted flower. In the previous sections of the poem men have asked why they should toil. Now their reflection on the condition of the gods gives then their answer: freedom from labour and care is the divine law; it is the gift that Hera offers to Paris in “Denonc” as the only way to happiness.
The Epicurean gods of “The Lotus-Eaters” appear also in “Youth” part IInd. This frequent use of the figure of gods leads to the suspicion that the figures like the phantasms, formed part of Tennyson’s storehouse of symbols and that he was attempting to set them up as meaningless images, whatever be the meaning. The beginning of “The Lotus-Eaters” introduces the voice of negation which (as in “The Two Voices”) presents the argument that he is nothing, and because he is miserable, it would be better to die, find the rest from weariness that death brings.
The “Lotus - Eaters” best demonstrates Tennyson ability to refine sensations through thought. Ulysses men decide to escape into a charge less World from the formant of “ever climbing up the climbing save”. But the lotos-land is non paradise. The mariners will have to return to their oars and the sea in order that their ambition comes full circle it is one of the marvels of the poem in the way the chorus, no less than the introductory-part, foreshadows the mariners’ return sea even as it celebrates their life on land. The poem presents a paradox of how the mariners are temperamentally unsalted ‘to a life of ease: if the habitants of lotus-land are incapable of action they could not be roused to sing their hymn. Their analytic intelligence -intellectual power - is constantly at worked. Secondly their indictment of the gods “Gods together, careless of mankind” as also their oath of renunciation is a parody of the traditional religious yearning for divine union. Thus what begins as a prayer of praise and thanks-giving for the pleasure of mankind ends as a denunciation of man’s “endless anguish”. The illusion of the mariners union with the gods because the certainty of separator and the simile finally opposes the cruel indifference of the gods to the struggles of all mankind and not just of the lotus- eaters.
“The Lotus-Eaters” is not a trick poem that saves its best thought for the end”. It is in the words of Rober Frost “a series of revelations, as much for the poet as the for the reader.”
The sea voyage was a common Metaphor in Tennyson for spiritual adventure; it was used, to name only a few poems in “Recollection, of the Arabian Nights”, “The Hesperides”, “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Lotus Eaters”. The boat which the characters board is called a shallo.
As in “The Lady of Shalott”, The poet’s in-ward listening ear ought the “Very music for his mood”
in “The Lotus-Eaters” although the latter is a poem of “ampler-harmonies” in which “the luxury of dreaming is stirred by a touch or two from the wings of thought”, but only lightly, and the dream is not broken. In no other poem is Tennyson’s “impudent artistry of verbal music” more triumphant:
“Music that gentler on the spirit lies
Then tried eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies ...”
In which by his cunning liquids and falling Chythms he makes the very thing he speaks of, or, again,
“Through every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow lotus - dust is blown............... ”
Where the thing itself takes from “in the softly-swirling movement of the lines, and the sound of them is as sweet as the noiseless noise of summer,” which Dorothy Wordsworth heard on the Westmorland hills. Tennyson worked at his poetic effects with the absorbed patience end loving care of a medieval painter compounding his colours.
“The Lotus-Eaters” is a superb achievement in the art of blending harmoniously subject and style.
TEXT
The Lotus-Eaters
First published in 1833, but when republished in 1842 the alterations in the way of excision, alteration and addition were very extensive. The text of 1842 is practically the final text. This charming poem is founded on ‘Odyssey’, ix., 82 seq.’
“On the tenth day we set foot on the land of the lotos-eaters who eat a flowery food. So we stepped ashore and drew water... When we had tasted meat and drink I sent forth certain of my company to go and make search what manner of men they were who here live upon the earth by bread... Then straightway they went and mixed with the men of the lotos-eaters, and so it was that the lotos-eaters devised not death for our fellows but gave them of the lotos to taste. Now whosoever of them did eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos had no more wish to bring tidings nor to come back, but there he chose to abide with the lotos-eating men ever feeding on the lotos and forgetful of his homeward way. Therefore I led them back to the ships weeping and sore against their will... lest happy any should eat of the lotos and be forgetful of returning.”
(Lang and Butcher’s translation.)
But in the details of his poem Tennyson has laid many other poets under contribution, notably Moschus, ‘Idyll’, v.; Bion, ‘Idyll’, v.; Spenser, ‘Faerie Queen’, II. vi. (description of the ‘Idle Lake’), and Thomson’s ‘Castle of indolence’.
“"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."”
“In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.
The charmed sunset linger'd low adown In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale Was seen far inland, and the yellow down Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem'd the same! And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but who so did receive of them, And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
They sat them down upon the yellow sand, Between the sun and moon upon the shore; And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.” “Then some one said, "We will return no more"; And all at once they sang, "Our island home Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."”
CHORIC SONG
I
“There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.”
II
“Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings, "There is no joy but calm!"
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?”
III
“Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.”
IV
“Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.”
V
“How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other's whisper'd speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy Heap'd over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!”
VI
“Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change: For surely now our household hearths are cold, Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,
Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.”
VII
“But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelid still,
Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—
To hear the dewy echoes calling
From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine—
To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling
Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,
Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.”
VIII
“The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more”.
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-I

I)    What mythological story is “The Lotus-Eaters” based on?

a)    The story of Hercules

b)    The story of Odysseus

c)    The story of Perseus

d)    The story of Theseus

II)    Which of the following best describes the tone of the poem?

a)    Optimistic and uplifting

b)    Calm and peaceful

c)    Dark and foreboding

d)    Joyful and celebratory

III)    The sailors who eat the lotus plant

a)    never want to go home

b)    want to return home immediately

c.    want to keep journeying forever

d)    want to die

21.4 ULYSSES
“Ulysses” is included in Tennyson’s 1842 volume of poems, drawing inspiration from the great narratives of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad, which serve as unsurpassed models for the poem. However, the idea of Ulysses' Western voyage, although briefly referenced in The Odyssey (xi, 119-137), is not strictly Homeric. Tennyson’s "romantic" interpretation is largely based on the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, which adds an interesting layer when considering the emotional origins and themes of the poem. Additionally, it’s clear that Tennyson had Hamlet’s soliloquy (iv. 32-66) in mind, as there are thematic similarities that connect the two works.
The dramatic monologue carries further there solution and determination that mark the end of “Locksley Hall”. Tennyson himself gave the interpretation of the poem as a “striving” poem 216 which was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and gave my feelings about the need of giving forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply then anything in “In Memoriam.” It was written at a time when “I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said; is life worth anything?” (Memoir. 1) And certainly this questioning might be expected to inform the poem. Again on comparing “Ulysses” with in Memoriam” he remarked “there is more about myself in ‘Ulysses” and that despite sense of loss “life must be fought out to the end”.
The first part of the poem introduces Ulysses, the aging warrior who represents the heroic spirit, one that thrived in the primitive world. His youth was spent in twenty years of war and travel, justifying his decision to abandon his wife, Penelope, his son, Telemachus, and his countrymen. The opening is dramatic, with Ulysses portrayed as restless, suffering from a “chafing and clipped impatience.” Despite his age, he still has a yearning for life and refuses to live as an “Idle king,” enforcing “Unequal laws” on a “savage race” who “know not me” and from whom he feels estranged. He refuses to settle into complacency and instead vows to drink life to the fullest. His desire for action echoes the sentiment in Locksley Hall, where the speaker declares, “I myself must mix with action, lest I with her by despair.” However, Ulysses soon comes to the realization that he is, after all, an old man, and his longing for adventure may no longer hold the same vigor. He desires to experience everything, seemingly for the sheer joy of the experience itself, yet his awareness of his age and limitations begins to surface.
“All experience is an arch wherethro’
gleans that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move”.
And he knows, though he will not admit it, that living life to the fullest is no longer possible. He is an old man who, despite all his past deeds, cannot escape the inevitable decay of age. His spirit, now gray, longs for action, but he is aware, even if unconsciously, that he cannot continue to shine in the same way as he once did. His is the meaning of this “gray spirit”—a man still yearning, yet bound by the limitations of time and age.
.“To follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought”. The simile “like a sinking star” suggests his own condition and what it is that he is looking for: his is the yeaning to know at, to go beyond the limits of mortality; his is the desire for death.
The second part (Lines 33-43), with an equally dramatic opening, is apparently addressed to an audience, although we cannot be sure who the audience is. We can almost see the gesture by
which he points to his son, Telemachus and we cannot fail to catch the note of condescension. Telemachus is the opposite of his father; he works by reason and law, admonishing his rugged people to live by self-reverence, self knowledge, self- control. And Telemachus is not attractive. Ulysses refers to him as “blameless” and “decent”, as one who will not fail in offices of tenderness” and will pay.
“Meet adoration to my house hold gods when I am gone”. He will lead a proper life, doing all that is expected of him, but, Ulysses implies, he will and can do no more, he is almost completely colourless possessed of none of die heroic emotions of his father. “He works his work, I mine” says Ulysses but his way is certainly not that of the father.
The final part of the poem opens dramatically as Ulysses addresses his mariners. He speaks with a tone reminiscent of the Byronic wanderers in Tennyson’s earlier works. "There gloom the dark, broad seas," he tells his old companions, acknowledging that the journey ahead is one to be feared—it is a voyage into the unknown. This symbolic sea-voyage represents a quest for new experiences, the voyage of death, which is the only possible journey left for old men. Using the Tennysonian technique of memory, Ulysses recalls the happier days of his past but realizes that they can only be relived in memory, for "You and I are old." He acknowledges that for them, night is coming, and the darkness is inevitable:
“The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.”
Better to seek the newer world of death than to remain stagnant here in a kind of death-in-life. My purpose, he says unequivocally is.
“To sail beyond the sunset, and the paths of all the Western starts, until I die”.
There can now be no doubt that it is death which he seeks, we find here not only the metaphor of sunset used for instance in “Crossing the Bar” as the close of life but also the symbol of the Western Stars. According to Robert G. Strong, the West, for Tennyson, is “a place of twilight, of rest, of warmth and secrecy”, “and furthermore, that “Tennyson connects the West with images of the sea, of growth, and paradoxically, of death.”
This is to be a voyage, says Ulysses, to both the old and the new perliops they shall see the Happy Isles and also find again the great Achilles, the brave warrior, with whom they can be reunited in death.
Since, as Tennyson tells us, "Ulysses" was written shortly after the death of Hallam, we can draw a parallel between Achilles and the poet’s late friend, as Ulysses’ search for death mirrors Tennyson’s
longing for reunion with Hallam, whose death caused Tennyson to deeply question the value of life. However, there is uncertainty in the speaker’s hope of finding Hallam—just as there is no certainty for Ulysses in finding Achilles. This uncertainty is reflected in Tennyson’s common use of phrases like "may be" to qualify his assertions in many of his early poems. The possibility of life after death remains only a hope. Nonetheless, the speaker resolves to undertake the voyage, though he acknowledges a sense of diminished physical strength. He declares:
“We are not now that strength which in old days moved heaven and earth; that which we are.”
Thus, Ulysses chooses the voyage not out of physical strength but with the strength of will, embracing the journey despite the inevitability of decline.
“To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. The utterance echoes the sentiment that has inspired Ulysses throughout his life and will lead him in future.
Ulysses is presented in line with the epic heroes in Homer, as a man of firm determination whose roving heart and freedom-loving spirit feels cribbed and claimed with the private life which he gives a fair trial on return from his adventures. He is the primeval type of the indefatigable rover for whom.
“All experience is an arch where thro’
gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades Forever and forever when I more”.
Ancient myth, medieval epic, popular ballads retain and hand down the figures of such men as they were stamped on the imagination of the times.
As point of minor criticism it may be noticed that in taking Ithaca instead of Circe’s island, as in Homeric Ulysses, as the place of departure of Ulysses on this final voyage. Tennyson may have forgotten that before Homer’s hero landed in Ithaca, a solitary man, every one of his companions with whom he left Troy had perished by sea or land during the long wandering. But fidelity to the original tradition is of no account in a poem that is independent, of time and place. Tennyson may have felt that he was touching a chord in the heart of the restless Englishman-especially of his Age-who is seldom content with delsure ease after many years of working and wandering abroad. Whether they are chiefs of a pretty Greek island or citizens of a vast empire whose frontiers are constantly advancing for them.
“All experience is an arch whereto”
“Tennyson’s poem gives us the persistent character blended with and accorded to modem feelings”. How sculptured figures of the antique legend of fable in Ulysses and Tilhonus become the impersonations and spokesmen of the impulses and affections of modem life fasslude, resgessness, me roaming spirit, the ennui of old ago.
It is interesting to view “Ulysses” as a poem evincing feelings that are ambiguous or paradoxical. According to Christopher Ricks “Ulysses is old, he stands upon the shores of life. The poem conveys a dragging sense of inertia of ennui, strangely matched with the vocabulary of adventure and enterprise ...”
“The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world’”.
The rhythm and diction (long, slow) are “narcotically oppressive”. Ulysses yearns to believe that his life is not, just a past, that it still has a future. But that, this is a yearning, not a confident assurance, is stressed by avoidance of the use of future tense except at two points “I will drink/life to the less”; and “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down. Elsewhere there are ambiguous equivalents such as may be to follow for the future: Even the last line is mere “To strive, to seeks, to find, and not to yield” while its spirit is emphatic determination. The same critic finds Telemachus passage “This is my son ... faulty wooden rather than dramatically revealing”. And finally the critic tends fault with the close of Tennyson’s poem which he says is “up on the brink of disaster, Ulysses future may be read but it is desperately brief unlike the close of the canto of Dante’s inferno which follows hard upon Ulysses speech to his mariners.”
To conclude, we may remark that notwithstanding the different readings of the poem, “Ulysses” triumphs as a great poem of the classical myth seen through the prism of the poet’s age refracting variegated colours it is unequalled in the beauty of its blank verse marked by the even flow. Here the lines are “Swift or slow, rise to correspond with the dramatic movement showing that the poet has extended and perfected his metrical Resources” (Lyell).
TEXT:
“Ulysses”
“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield .”
SELF-CHECK-EXERCISE-II

IV)    The poem “Ulysses” was written by Tennyson after the death of :

a)    His wife

b)    His friend Arthur Henry Hallam

c)    His father

d)    His brother

V)     Tennyson’s Ulysses” is based on a character from which ancient epic?

e)    The Illiad

f)    The Aeneid

g)    The Odyssey

h)    Beowulf

21.5    SUMMARY
To sum up, the poem captures the dreamy and intoxicating effects of the lotus. The narrative is presented from the perspective of one of Odysseus’s sailors, who describes the island’s allure and the languid, carefree life that the lotus provides. The sailors are tempted to stay and abandon their quest for home, finding the island’s peace and forgetfulness irresistible. The poem contrasts the compelling allure of the lotus with the sailors’ sense of duty and their ultimate desire to return to their home and purpose. It reflects themes of escapism, the tension between duty and pleasure, and the seductive nature of forgetting one’s responsibilities. The poem explores the allure of escaping one’s struggles and responsibilities through a seductive, druglike substance, while also highlighting the tension between desire and duty.
By reading this we came to conclusion that “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a dramatic monologue that captures restlessness of the aging hero Ulysses as he reflects on his past adventures and expresses a longing for more. The poem explores themes of heroism, aging, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge and experience. Ulysses begins by expressing dissatisfaction with his idle life as king of Ithaca, feeling that his domestic duties and the stagnation of old age do not suit his adventures spirit. He compares his current life to a rusty sword, longing to shine through action. He yearns to return to the open seas, seeking new adventures and challenges despite his advanced age. The poem concludes with Ulysses’ determination to set sail once again, accompanied by his loyal mariners. He refuses to succumb to the limitations of age, famously declaring,” To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,”
In summary, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is a powerful exploration of the human spirit’s unyielding desire for purpose and adventure, even in the face of aging and the inevitability of death.

21.6    GLOSSARY
Barren     : providing no shelter or sustenance hoard: save up as for future use
Lees       : the sediment from fermentation of an alcoholic beverage
Vex        : disturb, especially by minor irritations

21.7    ANSWERS TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISE
an

I)      The story of Odysseus

II)     Calm and peaceful

III)    Never want to go home

IV)    His friend Arthur Henry Hallam

V)    The Odysses’

21.8    REFERNCES/ SUGGESTED READING
John Olin Eidson. Tennyson in America: His Reputation and Influence from 1827 to 1858 The University of Georgia Press, 1943.
Wilfred P. Mustard. Classical Echoes in Tennyson. The Macmillan Company, 1904.

21.9    TERMINAL QUESTIONS

1)    What is Ulysses searching for in “Ulysses”?

2)    How does Tennyson portray women in his poetry?

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