Readers assembled once more to recite from poets of the Romantic period. It is always an exciting session since the Romantic poets have an unshakeable hold on the imagination of readers, two centuries on. A slight admixture of a Metaphysical poet (Donne) or a Victorian poet (Rossetti) did not mar the total effect.
As on other occasions we celebrated the birthday of a reader which fell during the month – KumKum – and showered blessings on her. Cake and sandwiches followed. Joe recited a haiku for her, penned in 2015 by the American poet, Thomas Duddy, who resides in Fort Kochi:
August is abloom
on day double one, renewing
our dear double Kum
Beloved Keats was read over and over and yet his delights were ‘never cloying’, not even Endymion with its over-luxuriance:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness
Wordsworth’s ever-popular poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, about daffodils continues to entrance readers –
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance
Such moments of happiness leave the readers glad for each other's enjoyment in the company of these poets –
Present: Geetha, Pamela, Zakia, Thommo, Saras, Joe, KumKum, Shoba, Arundhaty, Devika
Virtually Present: Gopa
The next session will be on Sep 20, 2019 to read from the novel, Devil's Advocate, by Morris West.
1. Geetha/Pamela/Zakia
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
The Eve of St. Agnes
Geetha gave a quick introduction to Keats life
https://www.biography.com/writer/john-keats
which in outline is known to every student of English poetry. He lost his father early and his mother made missteps in remarrying, losing her scant fortune. John Keats was left in the care of his maternal grandmother. His period of schooling in John Clarke’s Enfield Academy was the saving factor in his growing up. He took to reading avidly. Later he studied to be a surgeon’s assistant but in spite of being zealous the career did not prosper. He came to know Leigh Hunt, the fighter for liberty and it was through him he got to know poets such as Shelley and Wordsworth.
In 1817 he published a volume called Poems. And in the following year in April 1818 he bought out the 4,000 line poem Endymion. Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review, two leading literary journals, wrote in adverse criticism of his verse. His hope for a poetry career took a beating, but his spirit survived. Keats is associated with the idea of Negative Capability. Keats thought that “the greatest writers (particularly Shakespeare) pursued a vision of artistic beauty even when it led them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty.” One could surpass any limit of one’s creative capacity, and perceive and think beyond it. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
Keats undertook walking tours of England and also took time to nurse his brother, Tom, who was ill with TB. It was in the summer of 1818 he got to know and fall in love with Fanny Brawne. Though he lavished letters and poems on her, e.g. Bright Star, she was never more than merely fond of him and ultimately married another man.
Keats’ crowning works are thought to be his six Odes (Melancholy, Grecian Urn, and four others). They were composed in quick succession and mostly when he lived at Wentworth Place in Hampstead which is now a Museum in his honour.
The ode To Autumn begins in this sensuous fashion:
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;
But he also wrote 64 sonnets in his short life, some in the style of Petrarch, and some after the Shakespearean model.
Keats had many privations in his life - having to nurse his brother Tom (from whom he must have contracted the TB that killed him also), the need to support his brother George when he asked for help, and his own indifferent health. He published three volumes of poetry during his life which sold barely 200 copies.
In 1819 he contracted TB and declined in health. After his last volume of poetry he went to Italy with his devoted friend, the painter, Joseph Severn, in order to recuperate in a drier climate as suggested by his doctor. Soon after, he died in Rome in a house by the Spanish Steps that is still preserved in his honour. He died on Feb 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, where later Shelley and Severn were also buried. Consult our reading of Romantic Poets in 2017 for further details.
St. Agnes was a Christian martyr killed in 304 CE when she refused to sacrifice to a god she did not believe in. The feast falls on Jan 20. The suggestion to write on the theme of of the feast of St. Agnes Eve (Jan 20) when virgins keep awake and prayerful, and go to sleep dreaming of who might be their husband, was provided by Isabella Jones. She was a woman of substance with taste who lived in a comfortable, nay, luxurious home in London. Keats may have had a vaguely romantic relationship with her; it’s not clear, though he writes to his brother George in Oct 1818, “I have no libidinous thought about her.” Perhaps he just warmed to her. In the biography by Walter Jackson Bate a date is assigned to the composition of the The Eve of St. Agnes. Keats walked on Jan 23, 1819 with a companion to Bedhampton and stayed there in the house of a friend. His biographer, Bate, says “Here during the next nine or ten days, Keats wrote the The Eve of St. Agnes, averaging about thirty-five to forty lines a day.”
It is written in a form used before by Keat but once, namely, the Spenserian stanza. It was used by Spenser in writing The Faerie Queene and consists of eight iambic pentameters followed by an alexandrine (line with six iambic feet), having the rhyming scheme ababbcbcc. There is a narrative unity in each stanza and a free flow of narrative from one to the next. An incomparable richness of words and images characterise The Eve of St. Agnes from start to finish. At the heart of it lies a seduction. Although Porphyro is tender at first to think of the innocent trust reposed by Madeline in the the legend of St. Agnes Eve, that does not prevent him from snatching full gratification of his carnal urge. Keats weaves a contest between the bitter chill and the interior warmth of the maiden’s body. There is an interplay of the erotic and the religious also, and it forms the sort of heady brew from which readers cannot turn away once the poem begins.
Porphyro has a plan: Angela the old crone or nurse should take him secretly to Madeline's chamber, and hide him in a closet. He will then sing and awaken Madeline, and she will see the future husband of whom she has been dreaming.
The poem was shared by Geetha, Zakia and Pamela in a hushed reading. Joe mentioned this poem being set in his school (St. Xavier’s, Calcutta) for Senior Cambridge; an informal vote was taken among the boys for the most alluring passage. The overwhelming majority voted for this:
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
2. Thommo
John Clare (1793 – 1864)
John Clare (July 1793 - May 1864) The note below is largely taken from this Wikipedia entry.
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside, and sadness at its disruption. His poetry underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century: he is now often seen as one of the major 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.”
He became an agricultural labourer while still a child and held many odd jobs. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may have been the main factor behind his five-foot stature; it may have also contributed to his poor physical health in later life. The story is that while working in the fields he came across a young boy who was reading a book of poems. He asked the boy to show it to him and after reading a bit decided to buy a copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons for himself and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents’ eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems was published. “There was no limit to the applause bestowed upon Clare, unanimous in their admiration of a poetical genius coming before them in the humble garb of a farm labourer.”
Clare was born during the Napoleonic Wars and perhaps that had some influence on his work. People walking alone in the woods were looked upon with suspicion. An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare acquired an income of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home.
Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours; between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he only felt more alienated there.
Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. On the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest. Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.
His maintenance at the asylum was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam, “but at the ordinary rate for poor people.” He remained there for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am. He died on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph's churchyard, where he had expressed wishes to be buried.
3. Saras
John Donne (c. 1572 – 1631)
The Anniversary, The Indifferent
Much of the facts of Donne’s life are taken from the biography.com entry.
Donne belongs to the school of Metaphysical Poets. The first two editions of John Donne's poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. Witty argument and passion, combine with an ability to render states of the mind dramatically in his poetry. They therefore yield music and poetic meaning. Donne wrote songs too and wrote prose.
John Donne was born into a Catholic family, at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in England was strong. His father was a prosperous London merchant and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the grand-niece of Thomas More — Henry VIII’s Chancellor, later beheaded, thus becoming a martyr and a Catholic saint. Religion played a great role in Donne’s life.
Mention was made of fore-edge books, which enabled hidden paintings on the edge of pages of books. Some use was made t hide relies persuasion in those times of anti-Catholicism. Fore-edge painting books hold secrets on the tips of their pages. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned. When the book is closed, you don’t see the image because it is hidden by the gilding. This artistic literary tradition dates back as far as the 10th century. Thommo has a cousin who is a great collector of fore-edge painted books. The practice of this art is now vanishing, but here is a rapid illustration of how it’s done.
Donne entered Oxford University at age 11 and later the University of Cambridge, but never received degrees, because he was a Catholic. At age 20, Donne began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn and seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. During the 1590s, he spent much of his inheritance on women, books and travel. He wrote most of his love lyrics and erotic poems during this time. His first books of poems, Satires and Songs and Sonnets, were highly prized among a small group of admirers.
At age 25, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England. He held his position with Egerton for several years and it's likely that around this period Donne converted to Anglicanism.
John Donne became a Member of Parliament in 1601. That same year, he married 16-year-old Anne More, the niece of Sir Egerton, without asking for her hand in marriage. Both Lord Egerton and Anne’s father, George More, strongly disapproved of the marriage, and, as punishment, More did not provide a dowry. Lord Egerton fired Donne and had him imprisoned for a short time. The eight years following Donne’s release would be a struggle for the married couple until Anne’s father finally paid her dowry.
In 1610, John Donne renounced his Catholic faith, writing a polemic. He proposed the argument that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their religious loyalty to the pope. This won him the king’s favour and patronage from the House of Lords. In 1615, Donne was ordained soon thereafter was appointed Royal Chaplain.
Donne begat children more or less every year for 16 years. In 1617, John Donne’s wife, exhausted from continued parturition, died shortly after giving birth to their 12th child. Thommo remarked there was no TV in those days to keep men and women occupied in the evenings out of bed!
The time for writing love poems was now over, and Donne devoted his energies to more religious subjects. In 1621, Donne became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. During a period of severe illness, he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” published in 1624. This work contains the immortal lines “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
His elaborate metaphors, religious symbolism and flair for dramatic speech soon established him as a great preacher. Here is a sentence from his last sermon on the matter of Death:
Donne’s work fell out of favour for a time, but was revived in the 20th century by high-profile admirers such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats.
In the first poem, The Anniversary, the glory of constant love which goes to the grave undying is praised:
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
He tells his beloved:
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
In the second poem, The Indifferent, Donne turns from constancy to cold apathy, from loving a single person to an undiscriminating scatter-shot love:
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Joe knew a researcher (the late Paul F. Parakkal) at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. He once told Joe that the male of the species among primates is non-monogamous chiefly. Only about 3 per cent of mammal species display monogamy and it has been a puzzle as to why it evolved in the human ape gradually over time, but not in other primate species.
4. Joe
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
On The Grasshopper And Cricket, Endymion (excerpt)
In the two sonnets by Keats and Leigh Hunt that Joe read, the account of what happened comes from Charles Cowden Clarke’s book Recollections of Writers (1878) (another link to the text is here) which was jointly written with his wife, Mary. Pages 120-157 concern John Keats. Cowden Clarke played a significant role in the life of Keats. Keats was educated in the school run by Clarke’s father. Being eight years older, Cowden Clarke acted as a sort of elder mentor to Keats and was fond of him at school. He says of Keats, he had “a brisk, winning face, and was a favourite with all, particularly my mother.” Keats’s father kept a livery stable for horses. Apart from John Keats being determined and industrious in his undertakings, no sign of his future flowering as a poet appeared early. He won prizes at school by dint of hard work. While others were at play he would be doing Latin and French translations. His memory was good and he read widely, exhausting the school library. In the school library he got to read the paper published by Leigh Hunt called The Examiner, from which he derived his love of liberty.
He had a pugnacious spirit which surfaced particularly when he witnessed others being bullied.
Keats was apprenticed at age 14 to a doctor, Thomas Hammond, and besides learning to work as his assistant, he got enough free time to read and translate the Aeneid of Virgil. Cowden Clarke would meet him several times during the month and they would read, exchange views, and talk. He remembers reading the Epithalamion of Spenser to Keats and how Keats would often recite passages from that long poem written in medieval English. So too Keats relished Spenser’s Faerie Queene for its startling images such as ‘sea-shouldering whales.’ Passages of Shakespeare would move him to tears sometimes, Cowden Clarke writes.
Later they were in London once and visited Leigh Hunt who was imprisoned for libel against the Prince Regent. That was when Keats showed Cowden Clarke a sonnet titled Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison in which occurs the description
…. shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit, been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Keats’ first published poem was a sonnet which appeared in The Examiner in 1816
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Cowden Clarke mentions that a beautiful edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer was lent to him and one evening he and Keats were reading it, and he recited aloud a mind-blowing passage on the shipwreck of Ulysses, which put Keats in awe. Next day on coming to breakfast Cowden Clarke saw lying scribbled in Keats’ hand the famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, (Petrarchan rhyme scheme) which begins:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
…
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
One day Cowden Clarke took Keats along to visit Leigh Hunt in his cottage in Hampsted Heath in N. London. A bed was made for Keats on a sofa and lying there he composed many poems, such as Sleep and Poetry where he has captivating images of life:
Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in the summer air;
In the evening after conversing on the habits of the grasshopper, Cowden Clarke narrates that Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing then, there, and to time, a sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket. It took 10 or 15 minutes for Keats to come up with his version:
ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's, — he takes the lead
In summer luxury, — he has never done
With his delights, for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never;
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence; from the stove there thrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
Dec. 30, 1816. JOHN KEATS.
Leigh Hunt, ever generous, said of the first line, “Such a prosperous opening!” And when he came to lines 10-11,
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence —
he broke out in applause, “Ah! that's perfect! Bravo Keats!” Many poets have this gift of rapid composition. We know WS had it.
Here is the companion piece of Leigh Hunt:
To the Grasshopper and the Cricket
By James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859)
GREEN little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that ’s heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class 5
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong
One to the fields, the other to the hearth, 10
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,—
In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.
Now to the second poem, the opening of Endymion which for lack of time Joe read even more briefly than he had intended. It is in 4 parts, each 1,000 lines long. Endymion was a shepherd in Greek mythology. The poem is a sort of Arcadian fantasy. In Book 1 Endymion wakes from sleep and confides his dreams in his sister, Poena. In Book 2 he ventures into the underworld in search of his love. Book 3 reveals his undying love and his confession to the Moon. In Book 4 he falls in love with an Indian girl and rides to Olympus with her and forsakes his eternal love of Cynthia for this girl. But she, in the end, turns out to be Cynthia!
from Endymion
BY JOHN KEATS
A Poetic Romance
(excerpt)
BOOK I
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
A footnote to this poem. The critics panned it and Keats felt their heat, but it did not cow him although this was among his earliest attempts. Shelley in his famous poem of lament for Keats, Adonais, begins thus
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
Then Shelley heaps opprobrium on these critics in Stanza 36, and says Keats had to drink the poison they wrote:
Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
In the next stanza Shelley labels a critic thus:
Thou noteless blot on a remember'd name!
Cowden Clarke ends his recollections of John Keats with these poignant words:
“His whole course of life, to its very last act, was one routine of unselfishness and of consideration for others' feelings. The approaches of death having come on, he said to his untiring nurse-friend, — ‘Severn — I — lift me up. I am dying. I shall die easy; don't be frightened; be firm, and thank God it has come.’
Now burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beams from the abode where the Eternal are.”
The last will and testament of John Keats was written in iambic pentameter:
5. KumKum/Shoba
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Fancy
The poem asks the reader to let Fancy roam, describing what delights await in a litany of beautiful scenes sketched to allure. Keats is using the mind’s inward eye in such lines as these
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray
KumKum noted that Keats’ philosophy is on display – which in this case is an exhortation to delight in what unrestrained Fancy can contribute to a person’s happiness, even when physical proximity to Nature is denied.
He uses curious words like ingle for fireplace, and shoon for shoes (just to rhyme with ‘Noon’ in the next line). One may contrast the scenes described by Keats with those described by blind Milton; Keats is fresh and particular and painterly in conjuring scenes, while Milton is indistinct and deals in abstraction one level above the particulars of a nature scene. One hears Milton’s poetry, one sees the poetry of nature through the eye of Keats. Would you agree?
The second half of the poem was read by Shoba.
6. Shoba
William Blake (1757 – 1827)
The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake’s renown is as much as a painter and engraver, as for being a poet of an almost mystical quality. We have all read in middle school the lines from The Tyger from the volume Songs of Experience:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
As a boy Blake had visions, seeing angels in trees. Such visions were a feature throughout his life. He was against orthodoxies of every kind, from religion to painting and print-making. As a result he innovated in all these fields. He had an inborn sense of justice and could be angered by cruelty
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
One of the poems which entranced our reader Hemjit is this brief one
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
Blake was a Londoner. He was educated by his mother at home, who used to sing to him. He trained to be an engraver and print-maker, and used those skills to great advantage, even illustrating his poems with engravings. He remained poor, although his work brought him some money. He was not an easy man to get on with because he had many quirks and got into arguments.
William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher at the Church of St Mary in Battersea in 1782. She was not literate, but Blake gave her instruction and taught her the skills of engraving. She was his steadfast helper in life. Alexander Gilchrist, who wrote Blake's biography in 1863 was aware of her decisive work, writing: “The poet and his wife did everything in making the book – writing, designing, printing, engraving – everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.”
Blake’s first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published in 1783. He frequented the shop of a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson, and met many leading lights there, such as Wordsworth.
In his engraving Blakes used the method of ‘relief etching.’ It involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name)
There’s a coming London exhibition at the Tate Gallery with over 300 original works, including his watercolours, paintings and prints; this is the largest show of Blake’s work for almost 20 years and will run from Sep 11, 2019 to Feb 2020. Catherine Blake’s unacknowledged contribution to the artist’s work is celebrated in the new show.
When Blake died he was buried in a pauper’s grave in Bunhill Fields. Much later a marker has been erected to honour him. Modern poets like T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats have rated Blake’s poetry highly. Eliot writes;
“When the strangeness [of Blake’s poetry] is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Aeschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare – and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry.”
Yeats has a long essay on Blake, where he writes –
“…when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely when one reads the Songs of Innocence, or the lyrics he wished to call The Ideas of Good and Evil, but when one reads those Prophetic Works in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols.”
Blake was working on a series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy. Eventually, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.”
Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died.
7. Arundhaty
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
Lines Written in Early Spring
and
Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Winter: My Secret
Arundhaty confessed she was not a reader of poetry in her adult life. It is to KRG he owes the fact that she now reads poetry. She thanked everyone for the encouragement and asked for their indulgence, as she is a beginner.
William Wordsworth was the presiding genius of the Romantic movement. He was born in 1770 and was perhaps the oldest surviving poet of the period. It was his collaboration with Coleridge on the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that gave rise to the founding philosophy of the Romantic movement and gave rise to some of its best-known poems, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) and Lines written above Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth).
In the preface to the second edition, Wordsworth set out four points for a manifesto of future of poetry as follows:
1. Ordinary life is the best subject for poetry
2. Everyday language is best suited for poetry
3. Expression of feeling is more important than action or plot
4. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion” that “takes its origin from emotion, recollected in tranquility.” William Wordsworth
Indeed, the term emotion recollected in tranquillity was used for a long time to define poetry.
Wordsworth’s mother died when he was young. He was well-educated at a grammar school (Hawkshead) and went on to Cambridge, graduating in 1791.
Wordsworth visited France once in 1790, and witnessed the French Revolution, which he supported. He fell in love there with a woman, Annette Vallon, and on a second trip, he left her her pregnant. But the fighting caused Wordsworth to return to England. In 1802, when hostilities tapered off for a while Wordsworth went back to see Vallon and their daughter, Caroline. Returning to England without them, he wed Mary Hutchinson, who gave birth to the first of their five children in 1803.
He benefited from a legacy in 1795 that enabled him to live with his sister, Dorothy, who played a minor part in his poetical evolution, besides keeping house for him. About this time he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they collaborated in producing the collection, Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
Wordsworth worked on other poems like Lucy, a poem of unrequited love:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
Wordsworth was also still writing poetry, including the famous I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Ode: Intimations of Immortality. These pieces were published in another collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Growing to seniority the poet grew less radical, and more conservative. When past his prime in 1843 he became poet laureate of England and held the post until his death at age 80 in 1850.
Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a painter. Rossetti's first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William Michael and his friends.
Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics. Her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Rossetti's best-known work, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, appeared in 1866 followed by Sing-Song, a collection of verse for children, in 1872 (with illustrations by Arthur Hughes).
By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. While the illness restricted her social life, she continued to write poems. Among her later works are A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as Seek and Find (1879), Called To Be Saints (1881) and The Face of the Deep (1892). In 1891, Rossetti developed cancer, which led to her death on December 29, 1894. Rossetti's brother, William Michael, edited her collected works in 1904, but the Complete Poems were not published before 1979.
Christina Rossetti has been compared to Emily Dickinson but the similarity is more in the choice of spiritual topics than in the poetic approach. Rossetti worked within the forms established in her Victorian times.
(The above brief account of her life is taken from the poets.org website. A more detailed account may be found at the Poetry Foundation)
8. Devika
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
We are Seven and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The poem Devika read, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, is one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems and demonstrates his inspiration from Nature. We are Seven is included in the collection, Lyrical Ballads.
Devika mentioned she had chosen two poems of Wordsworth, only to be told by Joe that these two had been recited by Kavita in May 2012, The Daffodils (or I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) and The Solitary Reaper. Both are poems well-known to children in India from school. There’s a fairly complete account of the first poem at that May 2012 blog post above. Devika decided to change the second choice to the tender poem, We are Seven. About the collaboration with Coleridge, Devika said Coleridge would talk about and around a prospective poem, and Wordsworth would write it down. Not Kubla Khan, and not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however. Coleridge concedes some ideas, and even lines, may have arrived from Wordsworth in the latter poem. Wordsworth had the habit of ‘improving’ his poems, and publication would be delayed. Many poets indulge in this even re-writing their poems in later editions. The Daffodils came fifth in a poll of favourite poems by BBC (The Nation's Favourite Poems by Griff Rhys Jones, BBC Books, 1996). Rudyard Kipling's If... was voted number one. If was recited at KRG in July 2008 by Penny Shepherd, a guest.
In the second poem We are Seven the child insists that though two of her siblings are dead and only five alive, they really remain seven even now. She plays a short distance from the graves of the two who are dead, but considers them as part of the family even in death. It is a philosophical point the child is making, the great continuum of life and death, of our forbears and ourselves, thought Joe; but in the child’s own insistent matter-of-fact way. The same point is made by teachers of many religions, e.g. here is a Jewish rabbi, saying “The hardest human task is transforming the impermanent physical connection with those we love to the spiritual connection that is everlasting.”
William Wordsworth Biography provided by Devika
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major Romantic poet, based in the Lake District, England. His greatest work was The Prelude – dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Prelude is a spiritual autobiography based on Wordsworth’s travels through Europe and his observations of life. His poetry also takes inspiration from the beauty of nature, especially his native Lake District.
Early life
Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, in north-west England. His father, John Wordsworth, introduced the young William to the great poetry of Milton and Shakespeare. As a child, he developed a great love of nature, spending many hours walking in the hills of the Lake District. He also became very close to his sister, Dorothy, who would later become a poet in her own right.
In 1778, William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire; this separated him from his beloved sister for nearly nine years. In 1787, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in this year that he had his first published work, a sonnet, in the European Magazine. While still a student at Cambridge, in 1790, he travelled to revolutionary France. He also fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon; together they had a daughter, Anne Caroline, without marrying.
France
After graduating from Cambridge, Wordsworth returned to France, where his daughter was born in 1792. However, despite expressing a desire to marry, Wordsworth left France singly, leaving his partner and daughter behind. At the time, there was growing political tension between France and Great Britain. Also, Wordsworth became increasingly estranged from the French Revolution; in the Reign of Terror, he saw the revolutionary principles betrayed. Wordsworth was unable to return to France until 1802 when the political situation improved. Wordsworth later sought to maintain his financial obligations to his daughter, but also kept this daughter hidden from the public gaze.
Friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
After graduating, Wordsworth was fortunate to receive a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert to pursue a career in literature. He was able to publish his first collection of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year he was also to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. They became close friends and collaborated on poems and poetic ideas. They later published a joint work – Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth’s greatest work The Prelude was initially titled To Coleridge.
This period was important for Wordsworth and also to the direction of English poetry. With Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth helped create a much more spontaneous and emotional poetry in the early nineteenth century. It sought to depict the beauty of nature and join it to the depth of human emotion within the poet.
In 1802, after returning from a brief visit to see his daughter, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple, and she became close to Mary as well as her brother. William and Mary had five children, although three died early.
In 1807, he published another important volume of poetry Poems, in Two Volumes, this included famous poems such as; I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, My Heart Leaps Up, and Ode: Intimations of Immortality.
In 1813, he received a sinecure, being appointed as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland; this annual income of £400 gave him greater financial security and enabled him to devote himself to poetry. In 1813, he family also moved into Rydal Mount, Grasmere, a picturesque location, which inspired his later poetry.
Poet Laureate
By the 1820s, the critical acclaim for Wordsworth was growing, though ironically critics note that, from this period, his poetry began losing some of its vigour and emotional intensity. His poetry was perhaps a reflection of his own ideas. The 1790s had been a period of emotional turmoil and faith in the revolutionary ideal. Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment with the French Revolution had made him more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University and a civil pension of £300 a year from the government. In 1843, he was persuaded to become the nation’s Poet Laureate, despite saying he wouldn’t write any official poetry as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who never wrote poetry for royal occasions during his tenure.
Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He was buried in St Oswald’s church Grasmere. After his death, his widow Mary published his autobiographical Poem to Coleridge under the title The Prelude.
9. Gopa:
John Donne (c. 1572 – 1631)
The Sun Rising
and
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793 – 1835)
A Domestic Scene
Donne chides the sun:
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Love should have priority and love is not influenced by the repeating diurnal course of the sun. Picture lovers being disturbed by the sun’s beams on their bed. The rays have the power to blind him and dissipate the vision of his lover. The poet finally invites the sun to revolve around them
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
The poem by Felicia Hemans, A Domestic Scene, has the sun shining on the patriarch of the family and his daughters gazing on him in silent wonder and admiration, as if he were the domestic substitute for the Redeemer. It is an exaggerated image of God in the home in the person of the father, a bit overwrought, don’t you think? One can understand why generations to come lost poetic sympathy with Felicia Hemans.
The poetry of Felicia Hemans was read and admired by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Scott, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Queen Victoria, among others. She sold more books of poetry during the Romantic era than anyone except Lord Byron and Walter Scott.
Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Liverpool on 25 September 1793 – the product of a cosmopolitan marriage between George Browne, an Irish merchant, and Felicity Dorothea (née Wagner), the daughter of an Italian diplomat. Felicia was the fifth of seven children and was a precocious child with a great memory and a gift for languages. At an early age she could speak English, Italian and French and she later learnt Latin, German, Spanish and Portuguese. She also had a musical ear and had a talent for drawing.
In 1808, when she was just 14, she published her first volume, titled simply Poems.
The publication was made possible by the financial assistance of a family friend, but it still had a healthy list of 978 subscribers including William Roscoe (who also wrote the Preface). The verse was of variable quality, although remarkable for so young a poet.
1808 also saw the publication of Valour and Patriotism, inspired by her brothers’ service in the Peninsular War. It was a powerful condemnation of Napoleon and a rallying call for freedom and liberty in the face of tyranny:
Too long have Tyranny and Power combin'd,
To sway, with iron sceptre, o'er mankind;
Long has Oppression worn th' imperial robe,
And rapine's sword has wasted half the globe!
Felicia also met Captain Alfred Hemans, a friend of her brother’s on leave from the Spanish campaign. He found her bewitching and she professed her love to him, but they didn’t see each other again until 1811, when he made a formal proposal. He was not rich and was very much older than Felicia, so he was told to cool his ardour for a year. But their love did not diminish and they were married at St Asaph Cathedral on 30 July 1812. The marriage was certainly a productive one with the birth of five boys - Arthur, George, Claude, Henry and Charles – between 1813 and 1818.
Felicia Hemans began to gain a reputation as a poet in 1817. She sent a poem to Walter Scott that had been inspired by reading the Waverley novels and he had it published in the Edinburgh Annual Register. She also had successive volumes of poems published by John Murray, including The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), Modern Greece (1817) and Translations from Camoëns and other Poets (1818, together with original verse).
At this point the Hemans marriage (six years and five boys) was effectively over. We do not know the precise details, but Captain Hemans departed for Italy and never returned. Felicia’s writing career went from strength to strength, as she realised the earning potential of her skills as a writer.
In 1819 she published Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse, which incorporated earlier verse with new material and quickly went through three editions. In the same year she also won a £50 prize for her poem, Wallace's invocation to Bruce: a poem, which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine. This was followed in 1820 with The Sceptic.
In 1821 Hemans won another prize (50 guineas), awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best poem on Dartmoor. This was followed with a new collection of verse, Welsh Melodies.
Her venture into drama was less successful, but tells much about the reputation and contacts that she had made. She moved to the town of Rhyllon to live in a tall brick house. Her sister describes this as the happiest period of Felicia’s life – with the boys spending much of the time outdoors.
She appeared increasingly in the periodical press. In 1825, she published The Forest Sanctuary, a collection of poems, generally regarded as one of her finest volumes of poetry. Three English editions, one German edition and two American editions, were published.
Professor Andrews Norton of Harvard Divinity School championed her work in America and even offered her the editorship of a magazine. She became a much anthologised writer in literary annuals and gift books published in America.
The death of her mother in January 1827 was a heavy blow, causing a profound grief from which she never fully recovered. In the following year she moved from Wales back to Wavertree in Liverpool, and her two eldest boys went to Italy to live with their father.
1828 saw the publication of Records of Women, which was her last great volume of verse. In 1829, an enlarged edition of The Forest Sanctuary was published, including new lyrics such as Casabianca, which had first appeared in a periodical in 1826, but came to be memorised by thousands of school children both in England and America for the next hundred years (and in India):
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck,
Shone round him o’er the dead.
Hemans was restless in Liverpool and started a series of travels to Scotland and the Lake District, where she met with Scott and Wordsworth.
In 1831 she moved to Dublin to be close to her brother George. She continued to write, although she was now an invalid. Songs of the Affections (1830), National Lyrics, and Songs for Music (1834) and Scenes and Hymns of Life, with other religious poems (1834) were her last three collections of verse and were of an increasingly religious nature. Her frail state was brought to the attention of Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who sent her a cheque for £100 to ease her condition, and promised a clerkship for her youngest son.
Felicia Hemans contracted scarlet fever in 1834, which further weakened her condition, and she died aged 41 in Dublin on 16 May 1835 from a respiratory infection that turned to ague. She was buried at St Anne’s Church in Dublin. Her sons were now 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 and all were well set in life. Wordsworth subsequently described her as “that holy Spirit, sweet as the Spring.”
In expansionist America and in imperialist Britain she was seen as one of the great advocates of duty and patriotism and she inspired a new generation of women writers, as well as poets such as Tennyson. Her fame continued throughout the Victorian period and her works stayed in print until just after the First World War, with a major edition of her works appearing in 1920.
Her decline started with a generational shift because the the public no longer had a stomach for didacticism and sentimentality. Works such as Casabianca were ruthlessly parodied in music halls and in the playground. For example, amongst the least bawdy versions of the famous opening lines was this:
The boy stood on the burning deck,
His feet all covered in blisters,
The flames reached up and burned his pants,
And now he wears his sister's.
These comic versions were still in mass circulation in the 1930s and 1940s. Another Hemans poem that was parodied was The Homes of England, which began:
The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land.
In this case the parodist was Noël Coward, who wrote:
The stately homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand.
The rebirth of interest in Hemans’ work began in the 1980s and 1990s. Hemans is a major writer whose work deserves to be re-examined. We hope that the publication of sources will provide fresh impetus to new scholarly investigation.
The Eve of St. Agnes
BY JOHN KEATS
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor;
But no—already had his deathbell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.
That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;
And so it chanc'd, for many a door was wide,
From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
Star'd, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.
At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting faerily
The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,
And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there,
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey'd middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:
The music, yearning like a God in pain,
She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,
Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train
Pass by—she heeded not at all: in vain
Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,
And back retir'd; not cool'd by high disdain,
But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:
She sigh'd for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.
She danc'd along with vague, regardless eyes,
Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:
The hallow'd hour was near at hand: she sighs
Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort
Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;
'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
Hoodwink'd with faery fancy; all amort,
Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,
And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn.
So, purposing each moment to retire,
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,
Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores
All saints to give him sight of Madeline,
But for one moment in the tedious hours,
That he might gaze and worship all unseen;
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been.
He ventures in: let no buzz'd whisper tell:
All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords
Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel:
For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes,
Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords,
Whose very dogs would execrations howl
Against his lineage: not one breast affords
Him any mercy, in that mansion foul,
Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul.
Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,
Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand,
To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame,
Behind a broad half-pillar, far beyond
The sound of merriment and chorus bland:
He startled her; but soon she knew his face,
And grasp'd his fingers in her palsied hand,
Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!
"Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand;
He had a fever late, and in the fit
He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:
Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit
More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit!
Flit like a ghost away."—"Ah, Gossip dear,
We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit,
And tell me how"—"Good Saints! not here, not here;
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."
He follow'd through a lowly arched way,
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,
And as she mutter'd "Well-a—well-a-day!"
He found him in a little moonlight room,
Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
"Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
"O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."
"St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve—
Yet men will murder upon holy days:
Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve,
And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays,
To venture so: it fills me with amaze
To see thee, Porphyro!—St. Agnes' Eve!
God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays
This very night: good angels her deceive!
But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve."
Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,
While Porphyro upon her face doth look,
Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone
Who keepeth clos'd a wond'rous riddle-book,
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.
But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told
His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook
Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold,
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot: then doth he propose
A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:
"A cruel man and impious thou art:
Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
Alone with her good angels, far apart
From wicked men like thee. Go, go!—I deem
Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem."
"I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
If one of her soft ringlets I displace,
Or look with ruffian passion in her face:
Good Angela, believe me by these tears;
Or I will, even in a moment's space,
Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears,
And beard them, though they be more fang'd than wolves and bears."
"Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
Were never miss'd."—Thus plaining, doth she bring
A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;
So woful, and of such deep sorrowing,
That Angela gives promise she will do
Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.
Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,
Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide
Him in a closet, of such privacy
That he might see her beauty unespy'd,
And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,
While legion'd faeries pac'd the coverlet,
And pale enchantment held her sleepy-ey'd.
Never on such a night have lovers met,
Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.
"It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame:
"All cates and dainties shall be stored there
Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame
Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,
For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare
On such a catering trust my dizzy head.
Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer
The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,
Or may I never leave my grave among the dead."
So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear.
The lover's endless minutes slowly pass'd;
The dame return'd, and whisper'd in his ear
To follow her; with aged eyes aghast
From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,
Through many a dusky gallery, they gain
The maiden's chamber, silken, hush'd, and chaste;
Where Porphyro took covert, pleas'd amain.
His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.
Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,
Old Angela was feeling for the stair,
When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,
Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:
With silver taper's light, and pious care,
She turn'd, and down the aged gossip led
To a safe level matting. Now prepare,
Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;
She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz'd upon her empty dress,
And listen'd to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath'd himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush'd carpet, silent, stept,
And 'tween the curtains peep'd, where, lo!—how fast she slept.
Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:—
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
"And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."
Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains:—'twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
It seem'd he never, never could redeem
From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes;
So mus'd awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies.
Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,—
Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be,
He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy":
Close to her ear touching the melody;—
Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan:
He ceas'd—she panted quick—and suddenly
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.
Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly.
"Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go."
Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose
Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:
"This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
"No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.—
Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine,
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;—
A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famish'd pilgrim,—sav'd by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.
"Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;—
The bloated wassaillers will never heed:—
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,—
Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears—
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.—
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flaggon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:—
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;—
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
2. Thommo:
Autumn by John Clare
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
Meet Me in the Green Glen
By John Clare
Love, meet me in the green glen,
Beside the tall elm-tree,
Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen;
There come with me.
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me at the sunset
Down in the green glen,
Where we’ve often met
By hawthorn-tree and foxes’ den,
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me in the green glen,
By sweetbriar bushes there;
Meet me by your own sen,
Where the wild thyme blossoms fair.
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me by the sweetbriar,
By the mole-hill swelling there;
When the west glows like a fire
God’s crimson bed is there.
Meet me in the green glen.
3. Saras: two poems of John Donne
The Anniversary
By John Donne
All Kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas, as well as other Princes, we
(Who Prince enough in one another be)
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
(All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove
This, or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.
And then we shall be throughly blessed;
But we no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be;
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
The Indifferent
By John Donne
I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Will no other vice content you?
Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?
Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others?
Or doth a fear that men are true torment you?
O we are not, be not you so;
Let me, and do you, twenty know.
Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.
Must I, who came to travail thorough you,
Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?
Venus heard me sigh this song,
And by love's sweetest part, variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more.
She went, examined, and returned ere long,
And said, Alas! some two or three
Poor heretics in love there be,
Which think to ’stablish dangerous constancy.
But I have told them, Since you will be true,
You shall be true to them who are false to you.
4. Hemjit:
Love’s Philosophy by P.B. Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle-
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea; -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
5. KumKum/Shoba:
Fancy
By John Keats
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer's joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter's night;
When the soundless earth is muffled,
And the caked snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy's heavy shoon;
When the Night doth meet the Noon
In a dark conspiracy
To banish Even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw'd,
Fancy, high-commission'd:—send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment, hark!
'Tis the early April lark,
Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw.
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum'd lillies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;
Shaded hyacinth, alway
Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf, and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its celled sleep;
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird's wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering,
While the autumn breezes sing.
Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Every thing is spoilt by use:
Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gaz'd at? Where's the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where's the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:
Dulcet-ey'd as Ceres' daughter,
Ere the God of Torment taught her
How to frown and how to chide;
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe's, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held the goblet sweet
And Jove grew languid.—Break the mesh
Of the Fancy's silken leash;
Quickly break her prison-string
And such joys as these she'll bring.—
Let the winged Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
6. Shoba: Excerpt from Fancy by John Keats (with Kumkum, see above),
The Clod and the Pebble
By William Blake
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
7. Gopa:
The Sun Rising
By John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
A Domestic Scene
by Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Twas early day — and sunlight stream'd
Soft through a quiet room,
That hush'd, but not forsaken, seem'd —
Still, but with nought but gloom;
For there, secure in happy age,
Whose hope is from above,
A father communed with the page
Of Heaven's recorded love.
Pure fell the beam, and meekly bright
On his gray holy hair,
And touch'd the book with tenderest light
As if its shrine were there;
But oh! that patriarch's aspect shone
With something lovelier far —
A radiance all the spirits own,
Caught not from the sun or star.
Some word of life e'en then had met
His calm benignant eye;
Some ancient promise breathing yet
Of immortality;
Some heart's deep language where the glow
Of quenchless faith survives;
For every feature said "I know
That my Redeemer lives."
And silent stood his children by,
Hushing their very breath
Before this solemn sanctity
Of thoughts o'ersweeping death;
Silent — yet did not each young breast,
With love and rev'rence melt?
Oh! blest be those fair girls — and blest
That home where God is felt!
8. Devika: Two poems of Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
We are Seven
We are Seven
——— A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
“And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
9. Joe: Two sonnets by John Keats and Leigh Hunt To the Grasshopper and the Cricket. And the first stanza of Endymion
On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
To the Grasshopper and the Cricket — by Leigh Hunt
Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:
Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.
Endymion
By John Keats
A Poetic Romance
(excerpt from BOOK I)
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
10. Arundhaty:
Lines Written in Early Spring
By William Wordsworth
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Winter: My Secret
by Christina Rossetti
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I;
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there’s none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today’s a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.
Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
Pamela was felicitated for her award from the Women's Economic Forum
Closeup of the Asiatic lilies after Pamela put them in vases
As on other occasions we celebrated the birthday of a reader which fell during the month – KumKum – and showered blessings on her. Cake and sandwiches followed. Joe recited a haiku for her, penned in 2015 by the American poet, Thomas Duddy, who resides in Fort Kochi:
August is abloom
on day double one, renewing
our dear double Kum
Joe reciting the haiku (courtesy Geetha)
Beloved Keats was read over and over and yet his delights were ‘never cloying’, not even Endymion with its over-luxuriance:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness
Endymion – manuscript by Keats
Wordsworth’s ever-popular poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, about daffodils continues to entrance readers –
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance
Such moments of happiness leave the readers glad for each other's enjoyment in the company of these poets –
Seated - Pamela, KumKum; Standing - Zakia, Saras, Shoba, Devika, Arundhaty, Geetha, Thommo, Joe
KRG Romantic Poets Session Aug 27, 2019 – Full Account and Record
Present: Geetha, Pamela, Zakia, Thommo, Saras, Joe, KumKum, Shoba, Arundhaty, Devika
Virtually Present: Gopa
The next session will be on Sep 20, 2019 to read from the novel, Devil's Advocate, by Morris West.
1. Geetha/Pamela/Zakia
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
John Keats, posthumous portrait by William Hilton
Geetha gave a quick introduction to Keats life
https://www.biography.com/writer/john-keats
which in outline is known to every student of English poetry. He lost his father early and his mother made missteps in remarrying, losing her scant fortune. John Keats was left in the care of his maternal grandmother. His period of schooling in John Clarke’s Enfield Academy was the saving factor in his growing up. He took to reading avidly. Later he studied to be a surgeon’s assistant but in spite of being zealous the career did not prosper. He came to know Leigh Hunt, the fighter for liberty and it was through him he got to know poets such as Shelley and Wordsworth.
In 1817 he published a volume called Poems. And in the following year in April 1818 he bought out the 4,000 line poem Endymion. Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review, two leading literary journals, wrote in adverse criticism of his verse. His hope for a poetry career took a beating, but his spirit survived. Keats is associated with the idea of Negative Capability. Keats thought that “the greatest writers (particularly Shakespeare) pursued a vision of artistic beauty even when it led them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty.” One could surpass any limit of one’s creative capacity, and perceive and think beyond it. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
Keats undertook walking tours of England and also took time to nurse his brother, Tom, who was ill with TB. It was in the summer of 1818 he got to know and fall in love with Fanny Brawne. Though he lavished letters and poems on her, e.g. Bright Star, she was never more than merely fond of him and ultimately married another man.
Keats’ crowning works are thought to be his six Odes (Melancholy, Grecian Urn, and four others). They were composed in quick succession and mostly when he lived at Wentworth Place in Hampstead which is now a Museum in his honour.
Keats House, now a Museum
The ode To Autumn begins in this sensuous fashion:
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;
But he also wrote 64 sonnets in his short life, some in the style of Petrarch, and some after the Shakespearean model.
Keats had many privations in his life - having to nurse his brother Tom (from whom he must have contracted the TB that killed him also), the need to support his brother George when he asked for help, and his own indifferent health. He published three volumes of poetry during his life which sold barely 200 copies.
In 1819 he contracted TB and declined in health. After his last volume of poetry he went to Italy with his devoted friend, the painter, Joseph Severn, in order to recuperate in a drier climate as suggested by his doctor. Soon after, he died in Rome in a house by the Spanish Steps that is still preserved in his honour. He died on Feb 23, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, where later Shelley and Severn were also buried. Consult our reading of Romantic Poets in 2017 for further details.
St. Agnes was a Christian martyr killed in 304 CE when she refused to sacrifice to a god she did not believe in. The feast falls on Jan 20. The suggestion to write on the theme of of the feast of St. Agnes Eve (Jan 20) when virgins keep awake and prayerful, and go to sleep dreaming of who might be their husband, was provided by Isabella Jones. She was a woman of substance with taste who lived in a comfortable, nay, luxurious home in London. Keats may have had a vaguely romantic relationship with her; it’s not clear, though he writes to his brother George in Oct 1818, “I have no libidinous thought about her.” Perhaps he just warmed to her. In the biography by Walter Jackson Bate a date is assigned to the composition of the The Eve of St. Agnes. Keats walked on Jan 23, 1819 with a companion to Bedhampton and stayed there in the house of a friend. His biographer, Bate, says “Here during the next nine or ten days, Keats wrote the The Eve of St. Agnes, averaging about thirty-five to forty lines a day.”
It is written in a form used before by Keat but once, namely, the Spenserian stanza. It was used by Spenser in writing The Faerie Queene and consists of eight iambic pentameters followed by an alexandrine (line with six iambic feet), having the rhyming scheme ababbcbcc. There is a narrative unity in each stanza and a free flow of narrative from one to the next. An incomparable richness of words and images characterise The Eve of St. Agnes from start to finish. At the heart of it lies a seduction. Although Porphyro is tender at first to think of the innocent trust reposed by Madeline in the the legend of St. Agnes Eve, that does not prevent him from snatching full gratification of his carnal urge. Keats weaves a contest between the bitter chill and the interior warmth of the maiden’s body. There is an interplay of the erotic and the religious also, and it forms the sort of heady brew from which readers cannot turn away once the poem begins.
Porphyro has a plan: Angela the old crone or nurse should take him secretly to Madeline's chamber, and hide him in a closet. He will then sing and awaken Madeline, and she will see the future husband of whom she has been dreaming.
Saras, Zakia, Pamela
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
2. Thommo
John Clare (1793 – 1864)
John Clare by William Hilton, oil on canvas, 1820
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside, and sadness at its disruption. His poetry underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century: he is now often seen as one of the major 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.”
He became an agricultural labourer while still a child and held many odd jobs. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may have been the main factor behind his five-foot stature; it may have also contributed to his poor physical health in later life. The story is that while working in the fields he came across a young boy who was reading a book of poems. He asked the boy to show it to him and after reading a bit decided to buy a copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons for himself and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents’ eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems was published. “There was no limit to the applause bestowed upon Clare, unanimous in their admiration of a poetical genius coming before them in the humble garb of a farm labourer.”
Clare was born during the Napoleonic Wars and perhaps that had some influence on his work. People walking alone in the woods were looked upon with suspicion. An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare acquired an income of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home.
Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours; between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he only felt more alienated there.
Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. On the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest. Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.
His maintenance at the asylum was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam, “but at the ordinary rate for poor people.” He remained there for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am. He died on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph's churchyard, where he had expressed wishes to be buried.
3. Saras
John Donne (c. 1572 – 1631)
John Donne painted by Isaac Oliver
The Anniversary, The Indifferent
Much of the facts of Donne’s life are taken from the biography.com entry.
Donne belongs to the school of Metaphysical Poets. The first two editions of John Donne's poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. Witty argument and passion, combine with an ability to render states of the mind dramatically in his poetry. They therefore yield music and poetic meaning. Donne wrote songs too and wrote prose.
John Donne was born into a Catholic family, at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in England was strong. His father was a prosperous London merchant and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the grand-niece of Thomas More — Henry VIII’s Chancellor, later beheaded, thus becoming a martyr and a Catholic saint. Religion played a great role in Donne’s life.
Mention was made of fore-edge books, which enabled hidden paintings on the edge of pages of books. Some use was made t hide relies persuasion in those times of anti-Catholicism. Fore-edge painting books hold secrets on the tips of their pages. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned. When the book is closed, you don’t see the image because it is hidden by the gilding. This artistic literary tradition dates back as far as the 10th century. Thommo has a cousin who is a great collector of fore-edge painted books. The practice of this art is now vanishing, but here is a rapid illustration of how it’s done.
Donne entered Oxford University at age 11 and later the University of Cambridge, but never received degrees, because he was a Catholic. At age 20, Donne began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn and seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. During the 1590s, he spent much of his inheritance on women, books and travel. He wrote most of his love lyrics and erotic poems during this time. His first books of poems, Satires and Songs and Sonnets, were highly prized among a small group of admirers.
At age 25, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England. He held his position with Egerton for several years and it's likely that around this period Donne converted to Anglicanism.
John Donne became a Member of Parliament in 1601. That same year, he married 16-year-old Anne More, the niece of Sir Egerton, without asking for her hand in marriage. Both Lord Egerton and Anne’s father, George More, strongly disapproved of the marriage, and, as punishment, More did not provide a dowry. Lord Egerton fired Donne and had him imprisoned for a short time. The eight years following Donne’s release would be a struggle for the married couple until Anne’s father finally paid her dowry.
In 1610, John Donne renounced his Catholic faith, writing a polemic. He proposed the argument that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their religious loyalty to the pope. This won him the king’s favour and patronage from the House of Lords. In 1615, Donne was ordained soon thereafter was appointed Royal Chaplain.
Donne begat children more or less every year for 16 years. In 1617, John Donne’s wife, exhausted from continued parturition, died shortly after giving birth to their 12th child. Thommo remarked there was no TV in those days to keep men and women occupied in the evenings out of bed!
The time for writing love poems was now over, and Donne devoted his energies to more religious subjects. In 1621, Donne became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. During a period of severe illness, he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” published in 1624. This work contains the immortal lines “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
His elaborate metaphors, religious symbolism and flair for dramatic speech soon established him as a great preacher. Here is a sentence from his last sermon on the matter of Death:
… this exitus mortis, the issues of death, is liberatio in morte, a deliverance in death; not that God will deliver us from dying, but that he will have a care of us in the hour of death, of what kind soever our passage be.
Donne’s work fell out of favour for a time, but was revived in the 20th century by high-profile admirers such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats.
Saras reading
In the first poem, The Anniversary, the glory of constant love which goes to the grave undying is praised:
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
He tells his beloved:
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
In the second poem, The Indifferent, Donne turns from constancy to cold apathy, from loving a single person to an undiscriminating scatter-shot love:
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Joe knew a researcher (the late Paul F. Parakkal) at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. He once told Joe that the male of the species among primates is non-monogamous chiefly. Only about 3 per cent of mammal species display monogamy and it has been a puzzle as to why it evolved in the human ape gradually over time, but not in other primate species.
4. Joe
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
On The Grasshopper And Cricket, Endymion (excerpt)
In the two sonnets by Keats and Leigh Hunt that Joe read, the account of what happened comes from Charles Cowden Clarke’s book Recollections of Writers (1878) (another link to the text is here) which was jointly written with his wife, Mary. Pages 120-157 concern John Keats. Cowden Clarke played a significant role in the life of Keats. Keats was educated in the school run by Clarke’s father. Being eight years older, Cowden Clarke acted as a sort of elder mentor to Keats and was fond of him at school. He says of Keats, he had “a brisk, winning face, and was a favourite with all, particularly my mother.” Keats’s father kept a livery stable for horses. Apart from John Keats being determined and industrious in his undertakings, no sign of his future flowering as a poet appeared early. He won prizes at school by dint of hard work. While others were at play he would be doing Latin and French translations. His memory was good and he read widely, exhausting the school library. In the school library he got to read the paper published by Leigh Hunt called The Examiner, from which he derived his love of liberty.
He had a pugnacious spirit which surfaced particularly when he witnessed others being bullied.
Keats was apprenticed at age 14 to a doctor, Thomas Hammond, and besides learning to work as his assistant, he got enough free time to read and translate the Aeneid of Virgil. Cowden Clarke would meet him several times during the month and they would read, exchange views, and talk. He remembers reading the Epithalamion of Spenser to Keats and how Keats would often recite passages from that long poem written in medieval English. So too Keats relished Spenser’s Faerie Queene for its startling images such as ‘sea-shouldering whales.’ Passages of Shakespeare would move him to tears sometimes, Cowden Clarke writes.
Geetha, Shoba, Pamela, Saras
Later they were in London once and visited Leigh Hunt who was imprisoned for libel against the Prince Regent. That was when Keats showed Cowden Clarke a sonnet titled Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison in which occurs the description
…. shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit, been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Keats’ first published poem was a sonnet which appeared in The Examiner in 1816
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Cowden Clarke mentions that a beautiful edition of Chapman’s translation of Homer was lent to him and one evening he and Keats were reading it, and he recited aloud a mind-blowing passage on the shipwreck of Ulysses, which put Keats in awe. Next day on coming to breakfast Cowden Clarke saw lying scribbled in Keats’ hand the famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, (Petrarchan rhyme scheme) which begins:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
…
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
One day Cowden Clarke took Keats along to visit Leigh Hunt in his cottage in Hampsted Heath in N. London. A bed was made for Keats on a sofa and lying there he composed many poems, such as Sleep and Poetry where he has captivating images of life:
Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in the summer air;
The Grasshopper is a diurnal insect, the Cricket nocturnal
ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's, — he takes the lead
In summer luxury, — he has never done
With his delights, for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never;
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence; from the stove there thrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
Dec. 30, 1816. JOHN KEATS.
Leigh Hunt, ever generous, said of the first line, “Such a prosperous opening!” And when he came to lines 10-11,
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence —
he broke out in applause, “Ah! that's perfect! Bravo Keats!” Many poets have this gift of rapid composition. We know WS had it.
Here is the companion piece of Leigh Hunt:
To the Grasshopper and the Cricket
By James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859)
GREEN little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that ’s heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class 5
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong
One to the fields, the other to the hearth, 10
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,—
In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.
Now to the second poem, the opening of Endymion which for lack of time Joe read even more briefly than he had intended. It is in 4 parts, each 1,000 lines long. Endymion was a shepherd in Greek mythology. The poem is a sort of Arcadian fantasy. In Book 1 Endymion wakes from sleep and confides his dreams in his sister, Poena. In Book 2 he ventures into the underworld in search of his love. Book 3 reveals his undying love and his confession to the Moon. In Book 4 he falls in love with an Indian girl and rides to Olympus with her and forsakes his eternal love of Cynthia for this girl. But she, in the end, turns out to be Cynthia!
Joe reading Keats
from Endymion
BY JOHN KEATS
A Poetic Romance
(excerpt)
BOOK I
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
A footnote to this poem. The critics panned it and Keats felt their heat, but it did not cow him although this was among his earliest attempts. Shelley in his famous poem of lament for Keats, Adonais, begins thus
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
Then Shelley heaps opprobrium on these critics in Stanza 36, and says Keats had to drink the poison they wrote:
Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?
In the next stanza Shelley labels a critic thus:
Thou noteless blot on a remember'd name!
Cowden Clarke ends his recollections of John Keats with these poignant words:
“His whole course of life, to its very last act, was one routine of unselfishness and of consideration for others' feelings. The approaches of death having come on, he said to his untiring nurse-friend, — ‘Severn — I — lift me up. I am dying. I shall die easy; don't be frightened; be firm, and thank God it has come.’
Now burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beams from the abode where the Eternal are.”
The last will and testament of John Keats was written in iambic pentameter:
My chest of books divide among my friends
5. KumKum/Shoba
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Fancy
The poem asks the reader to let Fancy roam, describing what delights await in a litany of beautiful scenes sketched to allure. Keats is using the mind’s inward eye in such lines as these
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray
KumKum noted that Keats’ philosophy is on display – which in this case is an exhortation to delight in what unrestrained Fancy can contribute to a person’s happiness, even when physical proximity to Nature is denied.
He uses curious words like ingle for fireplace, and shoon for shoes (just to rhyme with ‘Noon’ in the next line). One may contrast the scenes described by Keats with those described by blind Milton; Keats is fresh and particular and painterly in conjuring scenes, while Milton is indistinct and deals in abstraction one level above the particulars of a nature scene. One hears Milton’s poetry, one sees the poetry of nature through the eye of Keats. Would you agree?
The second half of the poem was read by Shoba.
6. Shoba
William Blake (1757 – 1827)
William Blake - possibly a self portrait
William Blake’s renown is as much as a painter and engraver, as for being a poet of an almost mystical quality. We have all read in middle school the lines from The Tyger from the volume Songs of Experience:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The tiger is a gewgaw but the words are powerful. Poor Blake had never seen a real tiger ... but his verbal imagination is splendid
As a boy Blake had visions, seeing angels in trees. Such visions were a feature throughout his life. He was against orthodoxies of every kind, from religion to painting and print-making. As a result he innovated in all these fields. He had an inborn sense of justice and could be angered by cruelty
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
One of the poems which entranced our reader Hemjit is this brief one
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
Blake was a Londoner. He was educated by his mother at home, who used to sing to him. He trained to be an engraver and print-maker, and used those skills to great advantage, even illustrating his poems with engravings. He remained poor, although his work brought him some money. He was not an easy man to get on with because he had many quirks and got into arguments.
William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher at the Church of St Mary in Battersea in 1782. She was not literate, but Blake gave her instruction and taught her the skills of engraving. She was his steadfast helper in life. Alexander Gilchrist, who wrote Blake's biography in 1863 was aware of her decisive work, writing: “The poet and his wife did everything in making the book – writing, designing, printing, engraving – everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.”
Blake’s first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published in 1783. He frequented the shop of a radical publisher, Joseph Johnson, and met many leading lights there, such as Wordsworth.
In his engraving Blakes used the method of ‘relief etching.’ It involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the name)
Blake depicts Isaac Newton in this 1795 painting
There’s a coming London exhibition at the Tate Gallery with over 300 original works, including his watercolours, paintings and prints; this is the largest show of Blake’s work for almost 20 years and will run from Sep 11, 2019 to Feb 2020. Catherine Blake’s unacknowledged contribution to the artist’s work is celebrated in the new show.
When Blake died he was buried in a pauper’s grave in Bunhill Fields. Much later a marker has been erected to honour him. Modern poets like T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats have rated Blake’s poetry highly. Eliot writes;
“When the strangeness [of Blake’s poetry] is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Aeschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare – and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry.”
Yeats has a long essay on Blake, where he writes –
“…when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely when one reads the Songs of Innocence, or the lyrics he wished to call The Ideas of Good and Evil, but when one reads those Prophetic Works in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols.”
Blake was working on a series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy. Eventually, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, “Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.”
Catherine Blake drawn by her husband in 1805
Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died.
7. Arundhaty
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
William Wordsworth
Lines Written in Early Spring
and
Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Winter: My Secret
Arundhaty confessed she was not a reader of poetry in her adult life. It is to KRG he owes the fact that she now reads poetry. She thanked everyone for the encouragement and asked for their indulgence, as she is a beginner.
William Wordsworth was the presiding genius of the Romantic movement. He was born in 1770 and was perhaps the oldest surviving poet of the period. It was his collaboration with Coleridge on the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that gave rise to the founding philosophy of the Romantic movement and gave rise to some of its best-known poems, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge) and Lines written above Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth).
In the preface to the second edition, Wordsworth set out four points for a manifesto of future of poetry as follows:
1. Ordinary life is the best subject for poetry
2. Everyday language is best suited for poetry
3. Expression of feeling is more important than action or plot
4. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion” that “takes its origin from emotion, recollected in tranquility.” William Wordsworth
Indeed, the term emotion recollected in tranquillity was used for a long time to define poetry.
Wordsworth’s mother died when he was young. He was well-educated at a grammar school (Hawkshead) and went on to Cambridge, graduating in 1791.
Wordsworth visited France once in 1790, and witnessed the French Revolution, which he supported. He fell in love there with a woman, Annette Vallon, and on a second trip, he left her her pregnant. But the fighting caused Wordsworth to return to England. In 1802, when hostilities tapered off for a while Wordsworth went back to see Vallon and their daughter, Caroline. Returning to England without them, he wed Mary Hutchinson, who gave birth to the first of their five children in 1803.
He benefited from a legacy in 1795 that enabled him to live with his sister, Dorothy, who played a minor part in his poetical evolution, besides keeping house for him. About this time he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they collaborated in producing the collection, Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
Wordsworth worked on other poems like Lucy, a poem of unrequited love:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
Wordsworth was also still writing poetry, including the famous I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Ode: Intimations of Immortality. These pieces were published in another collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Growing to seniority the poet grew less radical, and more conservative. When past his prime in 1843 he became poet laureate of England and held the post until his death at age 80 in 1850.
Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a painter. Rossetti's first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William Michael and his friends.
Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics. Her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Rossetti's best-known work, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, appeared in 1866 followed by Sing-Song, a collection of verse for children, in 1872 (with illustrations by Arthur Hughes).
By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. While the illness restricted her social life, she continued to write poems. Among her later works are A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as Seek and Find (1879), Called To Be Saints (1881) and The Face of the Deep (1892). In 1891, Rossetti developed cancer, which led to her death on December 29, 1894. Rossetti's brother, William Michael, edited her collected works in 1904, but the Complete Poems were not published before 1979.
Christina Rossetti has been compared to Emily Dickinson but the similarity is more in the choice of spiritual topics than in the poetic approach. Rossetti worked within the forms established in her Victorian times.
(The above brief account of her life is taken from the poets.org website. A more detailed account may be found at the Poetry Foundation)
8. Devika
Devika reading
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
We are Seven and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The poem Devika read, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, is one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems and demonstrates his inspiration from Nature. We are Seven is included in the collection, Lyrical Ballads.
Devika mentioned she had chosen two poems of Wordsworth, only to be told by Joe that these two had been recited by Kavita in May 2012, The Daffodils (or I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) and The Solitary Reaper. Both are poems well-known to children in India from school. There’s a fairly complete account of the first poem at that May 2012 blog post above. Devika decided to change the second choice to the tender poem, We are Seven. About the collaboration with Coleridge, Devika said Coleridge would talk about and around a prospective poem, and Wordsworth would write it down. Not Kubla Khan, and not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however. Coleridge concedes some ideas, and even lines, may have arrived from Wordsworth in the latter poem. Wordsworth had the habit of ‘improving’ his poems, and publication would be delayed. Many poets indulge in this even re-writing their poems in later editions. The Daffodils came fifth in a poll of favourite poems by BBC (The Nation's Favourite Poems by Griff Rhys Jones, BBC Books, 1996). Rudyard Kipling's If... was voted number one. If was recited at KRG in July 2008 by Penny Shepherd, a guest.
In the second poem We are Seven the child insists that though two of her siblings are dead and only five alive, they really remain seven even now. She plays a short distance from the graves of the two who are dead, but considers them as part of the family even in death. It is a philosophical point the child is making, the great continuum of life and death, of our forbears and ourselves, thought Joe; but in the child’s own insistent matter-of-fact way. The same point is made by teachers of many religions, e.g. here is a Jewish rabbi, saying “The hardest human task is transforming the impermanent physical connection with those we love to the spiritual connection that is everlasting.”
William Wordsworth Biography provided by Devika
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major Romantic poet, based in the Lake District, England. His greatest work was The Prelude – dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Prelude is a spiritual autobiography based on Wordsworth’s travels through Europe and his observations of life. His poetry also takes inspiration from the beauty of nature, especially his native Lake District.
Early life
Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, in north-west England. His father, John Wordsworth, introduced the young William to the great poetry of Milton and Shakespeare. As a child, he developed a great love of nature, spending many hours walking in the hills of the Lake District. He also became very close to his sister, Dorothy, who would later become a poet in her own right.
In 1778, William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire; this separated him from his beloved sister for nearly nine years. In 1787, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in this year that he had his first published work, a sonnet, in the European Magazine. While still a student at Cambridge, in 1790, he travelled to revolutionary France. He also fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon; together they had a daughter, Anne Caroline, without marrying.
France
After graduating from Cambridge, Wordsworth returned to France, where his daughter was born in 1792. However, despite expressing a desire to marry, Wordsworth left France singly, leaving his partner and daughter behind. At the time, there was growing political tension between France and Great Britain. Also, Wordsworth became increasingly estranged from the French Revolution; in the Reign of Terror, he saw the revolutionary principles betrayed. Wordsworth was unable to return to France until 1802 when the political situation improved. Wordsworth later sought to maintain his financial obligations to his daughter, but also kept this daughter hidden from the public gaze.
Friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
After graduating, Wordsworth was fortunate to receive a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert to pursue a career in literature. He was able to publish his first collection of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year he was also to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. They became close friends and collaborated on poems and poetic ideas. They later published a joint work – Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth’s greatest work The Prelude was initially titled To Coleridge.
This period was important for Wordsworth and also to the direction of English poetry. With Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth helped create a much more spontaneous and emotional poetry in the early nineteenth century. It sought to depict the beauty of nature and join it to the depth of human emotion within the poet.
In 1802, after returning from a brief visit to see his daughter, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple, and she became close to Mary as well as her brother. William and Mary had five children, although three died early.
In 1807, he published another important volume of poetry Poems, in Two Volumes, this included famous poems such as; I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, My Heart Leaps Up, and Ode: Intimations of Immortality.
In 1813, he received a sinecure, being appointed as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland; this annual income of £400 gave him greater financial security and enabled him to devote himself to poetry. In 1813, he family also moved into Rydal Mount, Grasmere, a picturesque location, which inspired his later poetry.
Poet Laureate
By the 1820s, the critical acclaim for Wordsworth was growing, though ironically critics note that, from this period, his poetry began losing some of its vigour and emotional intensity. His poetry was perhaps a reflection of his own ideas. The 1790s had been a period of emotional turmoil and faith in the revolutionary ideal. Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment with the French Revolution had made him more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University and a civil pension of £300 a year from the government. In 1843, he was persuaded to become the nation’s Poet Laureate, despite saying he wouldn’t write any official poetry as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who never wrote poetry for royal occasions during his tenure.
Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He was buried in St Oswald’s church Grasmere. After his death, his widow Mary published his autobiographical Poem to Coleridge under the title The Prelude.
9. Gopa:
John Donne (c. 1572 – 1631)
The Sun Rising
and
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793 – 1835)
A Domestic Scene
Donne chides the sun:
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Love should have priority and love is not influenced by the repeating diurnal course of the sun. Picture lovers being disturbed by the sun’s beams on their bed. The rays have the power to blind him and dissipate the vision of his lover. The poet finally invites the sun to revolve around them
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Felicia Hemans from the National Portrait Gallery
The poem by Felicia Hemans, A Domestic Scene, has the sun shining on the patriarch of the family and his daughters gazing on him in silent wonder and admiration, as if he were the domestic substitute for the Redeemer. It is an exaggerated image of God in the home in the person of the father, a bit overwrought, don’t you think? One can understand why generations to come lost poetic sympathy with Felicia Hemans.
The poetry of Felicia Hemans was read and admired by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Scott, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Queen Victoria, among others. She sold more books of poetry during the Romantic era than anyone except Lord Byron and Walter Scott.
Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Liverpool on 25 September 1793 – the product of a cosmopolitan marriage between George Browne, an Irish merchant, and Felicity Dorothea (née Wagner), the daughter of an Italian diplomat. Felicia was the fifth of seven children and was a precocious child with a great memory and a gift for languages. At an early age she could speak English, Italian and French and she later learnt Latin, German, Spanish and Portuguese. She also had a musical ear and had a talent for drawing.
In 1808, when she was just 14, she published her first volume, titled simply Poems.
The publication was made possible by the financial assistance of a family friend, but it still had a healthy list of 978 subscribers including William Roscoe (who also wrote the Preface). The verse was of variable quality, although remarkable for so young a poet.
1808 also saw the publication of Valour and Patriotism, inspired by her brothers’ service in the Peninsular War. It was a powerful condemnation of Napoleon and a rallying call for freedom and liberty in the face of tyranny:
Too long have Tyranny and Power combin'd,
To sway, with iron sceptre, o'er mankind;
Long has Oppression worn th' imperial robe,
And rapine's sword has wasted half the globe!
Felicia also met Captain Alfred Hemans, a friend of her brother’s on leave from the Spanish campaign. He found her bewitching and she professed her love to him, but they didn’t see each other again until 1811, when he made a formal proposal. He was not rich and was very much older than Felicia, so he was told to cool his ardour for a year. But their love did not diminish and they were married at St Asaph Cathedral on 30 July 1812. The marriage was certainly a productive one with the birth of five boys - Arthur, George, Claude, Henry and Charles – between 1813 and 1818.
Felicia Hemans began to gain a reputation as a poet in 1817. She sent a poem to Walter Scott that had been inspired by reading the Waverley novels and he had it published in the Edinburgh Annual Register. She also had successive volumes of poems published by John Murray, including The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), Modern Greece (1817) and Translations from Camoëns and other Poets (1818, together with original verse).
At this point the Hemans marriage (six years and five boys) was effectively over. We do not know the precise details, but Captain Hemans departed for Italy and never returned. Felicia’s writing career went from strength to strength, as she realised the earning potential of her skills as a writer.
In 1819 she published Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse, which incorporated earlier verse with new material and quickly went through three editions. In the same year she also won a £50 prize for her poem, Wallace's invocation to Bruce: a poem, which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine. This was followed in 1820 with The Sceptic.
In 1821 Hemans won another prize (50 guineas), awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best poem on Dartmoor. This was followed with a new collection of verse, Welsh Melodies.
Her venture into drama was less successful, but tells much about the reputation and contacts that she had made. She moved to the town of Rhyllon to live in a tall brick house. Her sister describes this as the happiest period of Felicia’s life – with the boys spending much of the time outdoors.
She appeared increasingly in the periodical press. In 1825, she published The Forest Sanctuary, a collection of poems, generally regarded as one of her finest volumes of poetry. Three English editions, one German edition and two American editions, were published.
Professor Andrews Norton of Harvard Divinity School championed her work in America and even offered her the editorship of a magazine. She became a much anthologised writer in literary annuals and gift books published in America.
The death of her mother in January 1827 was a heavy blow, causing a profound grief from which she never fully recovered. In the following year she moved from Wales back to Wavertree in Liverpool, and her two eldest boys went to Italy to live with their father.
1828 saw the publication of Records of Women, which was her last great volume of verse. In 1829, an enlarged edition of The Forest Sanctuary was published, including new lyrics such as Casabianca, which had first appeared in a periodical in 1826, but came to be memorised by thousands of school children both in England and America for the next hundred years (and in India):
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck,
Shone round him o’er the dead.
Hemans was restless in Liverpool and started a series of travels to Scotland and the Lake District, where she met with Scott and Wordsworth.
In 1831 she moved to Dublin to be close to her brother George. She continued to write, although she was now an invalid. Songs of the Affections (1830), National Lyrics, and Songs for Music (1834) and Scenes and Hymns of Life, with other religious poems (1834) were her last three collections of verse and were of an increasingly religious nature. Her frail state was brought to the attention of Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who sent her a cheque for £100 to ease her condition, and promised a clerkship for her youngest son.
Felicia Hemans contracted scarlet fever in 1834, which further weakened her condition, and she died aged 41 in Dublin on 16 May 1835 from a respiratory infection that turned to ague. She was buried at St Anne’s Church in Dublin. Her sons were now 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 and all were well set in life. Wordsworth subsequently described her as “that holy Spirit, sweet as the Spring.”
In expansionist America and in imperialist Britain she was seen as one of the great advocates of duty and patriotism and she inspired a new generation of women writers, as well as poets such as Tennyson. Her fame continued throughout the Victorian period and her works stayed in print until just after the First World War, with a major edition of her works appearing in 1920.
Her decline started with a generational shift because the the public no longer had a stomach for didacticism and sentimentality. Works such as Casabianca were ruthlessly parodied in music halls and in the playground. For example, amongst the least bawdy versions of the famous opening lines was this:
The boy stood on the burning deck,
His feet all covered in blisters,
The flames reached up and burned his pants,
And now he wears his sister's.
These comic versions were still in mass circulation in the 1930s and 1940s. Another Hemans poem that was parodied was The Homes of England, which began:
The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land.
In this case the parodist was Noël Coward, who wrote:
The stately homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand.
The rebirth of interest in Hemans’ work began in the 1980s and 1990s. Hemans is a major writer whose work deserves to be re-examined. We hope that the publication of sources will provide fresh impetus to new scholarly investigation.
The Poems
1. Geetha/Pamela/Zakia: To recite excerpts from The Eve of St.Agnes by John KeatsThe Eve of St. Agnes
BY JOHN KEATS
St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor;
But no—already had his deathbell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh penance on St. Agnes' Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his soul's reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners' sake to grieve.
That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;
And so it chanc'd, for many a door was wide,
From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
Star'd, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.
At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting faerily
The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,
And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there,
Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,
On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare.
They told her how, upon St. Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey'd middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:
The music, yearning like a God in pain,
She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,
Fix'd on the floor, saw many a sweeping train
Pass by—she heeded not at all: in vain
Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,
And back retir'd; not cool'd by high disdain,
But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:
She sigh'd for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.
She danc'd along with vague, regardless eyes,
Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:
The hallow'd hour was near at hand: she sighs
Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort
Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;
'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
Hoodwink'd with faery fancy; all amort,
Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,
And all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn.
So, purposing each moment to retire,
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,
Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores
All saints to give him sight of Madeline,
But for one moment in the tedious hours,
That he might gaze and worship all unseen;
Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been.
He ventures in: let no buzz'd whisper tell:
All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords
Will storm his heart, Love's fev'rous citadel:
For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes,
Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords,
Whose very dogs would execrations howl
Against his lineage: not one breast affords
Him any mercy, in that mansion foul,
Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul.
Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,
Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand,
To where he stood, hid from the torch's flame,
Behind a broad half-pillar, far beyond
The sound of merriment and chorus bland:
He startled her; but soon she knew his face,
And grasp'd his fingers in her palsied hand,
Saying, "Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!
"Get hence! get hence! there's dwarfish Hildebrand;
He had a fever late, and in the fit
He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:
Then there's that old Lord Maurice, not a whit
More tame for his gray hairs—Alas me! flit!
Flit like a ghost away."—"Ah, Gossip dear,
We're safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit,
And tell me how"—"Good Saints! not here, not here;
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."
He follow'd through a lowly arched way,
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,
And as she mutter'd "Well-a—well-a-day!"
He found him in a little moonlight room,
Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
"Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
"O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."
"St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes' Eve—
Yet men will murder upon holy days:
Thou must hold water in a witch's sieve,
And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays,
To venture so: it fills me with amaze
To see thee, Porphyro!—St. Agnes' Eve!
God's help! my lady fair the conjuror plays
This very night: good angels her deceive!
But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve."
Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,
While Porphyro upon her face doth look,
Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone
Who keepeth clos'd a wond'rous riddle-book,
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.
But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told
His lady's purpose; and he scarce could brook
Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold,
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot: then doth he propose
A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:
"A cruel man and impious thou art:
Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
Alone with her good angels, far apart
From wicked men like thee. Go, go!—I deem
Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem."
"I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
If one of her soft ringlets I displace,
Or look with ruffian passion in her face:
Good Angela, believe me by these tears;
Or I will, even in a moment's space,
Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen's ears,
And beard them, though they be more fang'd than wolves and bears."
"Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
Were never miss'd."—Thus plaining, doth she bring
A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;
So woful, and of such deep sorrowing,
That Angela gives promise she will do
Whatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.
Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,
Even to Madeline's chamber, and there hide
Him in a closet, of such privacy
That he might see her beauty unespy'd,
And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,
While legion'd faeries pac'd the coverlet,
And pale enchantment held her sleepy-ey'd.
Never on such a night have lovers met,
Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.
"It shall be as thou wishest," said the Dame:
"All cates and dainties shall be stored there
Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame
Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,
For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare
On such a catering trust my dizzy head.
Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer
The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,
Or may I never leave my grave among the dead."
So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear.
The lover's endless minutes slowly pass'd;
The dame return'd, and whisper'd in his ear
To follow her; with aged eyes aghast
From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,
Through many a dusky gallery, they gain
The maiden's chamber, silken, hush'd, and chaste;
Where Porphyro took covert, pleas'd amain.
His poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.
Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,
Old Angela was feeling for the stair,
When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,
Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:
With silver taper's light, and pious care,
She turn'd, and down the aged gossip led
To a safe level matting. Now prepare,
Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;
She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.
Stol'n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz'd upon her empty dress,
And listen'd to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath'd himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush'd carpet, silent, stept,
And 'tween the curtains peep'd, where, lo!—how fast she slept.
Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish'd, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:—
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
"And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."
Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains:—'twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:
The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;
Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:
It seem'd he never, never could redeem
From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes;
So mus'd awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies.
Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,—
Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be,
He play'd an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy":
Close to her ear touching the melody;—
Wherewith disturb'd, she utter'd a soft moan:
He ceas'd—she panted quick—and suddenly
Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:
Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.
Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expell'd
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly.
"Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go."
Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose
Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:
"This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
"No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.—
Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine,
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;—
A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famish'd pilgrim,—sav'd by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.
"Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;—
The bloated wassaillers will never heed:—
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,—
Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears—
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.—
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flaggon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:—
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;—
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
2. Thommo:
Autumn by John Clare
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
Meet Me in the Green Glen
By John Clare
Love, meet me in the green glen,
Beside the tall elm-tree,
Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen;
There come with me.
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me at the sunset
Down in the green glen,
Where we’ve often met
By hawthorn-tree and foxes’ den,
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me in the green glen,
By sweetbriar bushes there;
Meet me by your own sen,
Where the wild thyme blossoms fair.
Meet me in the green glen.
Meet me by the sweetbriar,
By the mole-hill swelling there;
When the west glows like a fire
God’s crimson bed is there.
Meet me in the green glen.
3. Saras: two poems of John Donne
The Anniversary
By John Donne
All Kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas, as well as other Princes, we
(Who Prince enough in one another be)
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
(All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove
This, or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.
And then we shall be throughly blessed;
But we no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be;
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.
The Indifferent
By John Donne
I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you, and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Will no other vice content you?
Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?
Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others?
Or doth a fear that men are true torment you?
O we are not, be not you so;
Let me, and do you, twenty know.
Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.
Must I, who came to travail thorough you,
Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?
Venus heard me sigh this song,
And by love's sweetest part, variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more.
She went, examined, and returned ere long,
And said, Alas! some two or three
Poor heretics in love there be,
Which think to ’stablish dangerous constancy.
But I have told them, Since you will be true,
You shall be true to them who are false to you.
4. Hemjit:
Love’s Philosophy by P.B. Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle-
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea; -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
5. KumKum/Shoba:
Fancy
By John Keats
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer's joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter's night;
When the soundless earth is muffled,
And the caked snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy's heavy shoon;
When the Night doth meet the Noon
In a dark conspiracy
To banish Even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw'd,
Fancy, high-commission'd:—send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment, hark!
'Tis the early April lark,
Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw.
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum'd lillies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;
Shaded hyacinth, alway
Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf, and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its celled sleep;
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird's wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering,
While the autumn breezes sing.
Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Every thing is spoilt by use:
Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gaz'd at? Where's the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where's the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:
Dulcet-ey'd as Ceres' daughter,
Ere the God of Torment taught her
How to frown and how to chide;
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe's, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held the goblet sweet
And Jove grew languid.—Break the mesh
Of the Fancy's silken leash;
Quickly break her prison-string
And such joys as these she'll bring.—
Let the winged Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
6. Shoba: Excerpt from Fancy by John Keats (with Kumkum, see above),
The Clod and the Pebble
By William Blake
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
7. Gopa:
The Sun Rising
By John Donne
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
A Domestic Scene
by Felicia Dorothea Hemans
'Twas early day — and sunlight stream'd
Soft through a quiet room,
That hush'd, but not forsaken, seem'd —
Still, but with nought but gloom;
For there, secure in happy age,
Whose hope is from above,
A father communed with the page
Of Heaven's recorded love.
Pure fell the beam, and meekly bright
On his gray holy hair,
And touch'd the book with tenderest light
As if its shrine were there;
But oh! that patriarch's aspect shone
With something lovelier far —
A radiance all the spirits own,
Caught not from the sun or star.
Some word of life e'en then had met
His calm benignant eye;
Some ancient promise breathing yet
Of immortality;
Some heart's deep language where the glow
Of quenchless faith survives;
For every feature said "I know
That my Redeemer lives."
And silent stood his children by,
Hushing their very breath
Before this solemn sanctity
Of thoughts o'ersweeping death;
Silent — yet did not each young breast,
With love and rev'rence melt?
Oh! blest be those fair girls — and blest
That home where God is felt!
8. Devika: Two poems of Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
We are Seven
We are Seven
——— A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
“And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
9. Joe: Two sonnets by John Keats and Leigh Hunt To the Grasshopper and the Cricket. And the first stanza of Endymion
On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
To the Grasshopper and the Cricket — by Leigh Hunt
Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:
Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.
Endymion
By John Keats
A Poetic Romance
(excerpt from BOOK I)
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
10. Arundhaty:
Lines Written in Early Spring
By William Wordsworth
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Winter: My Secret
by Christina Rossetti
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I;
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there’s none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today’s a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.
Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
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