Romantic Poets Session – Aug 27, 2021

Ten Famous Poets of the Romantic Movement

The great age of Romantic Poetry was from the middle of  the eighteenth until the early nineteenth century. The big six who exemplified the age were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Blake. 

This was the period when the lofty poetic diction of the Augustan Age was largely replaced by straightforward language. A major influence was the program set forward in the Lyrical Ballads authored jointly by WilliamWordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We could summarise the great Romantic qualities as an enduring sense of wonder, a great love of beauty, marked melancholia, and a keen sensibility, with the rich splendour of Imagination enfolding poetic expression. The theme of themes was Nature.

Nature offered not only beauty, but solace in its contemplation and an invitation to the poet to find significance even it its trifling manifestations. Many poets discovered a religious meaning too in Nature.

Love of liberty and hatred of tyranny flows in the poetry of the Romantic poets. They cherished individual freedom as a condition of romanticism. Their voices  championed the cause of liberty domestically and in other lands.

Running through their themes is a philosophical notion that the poet should live plainly, associate with people, and constantly keep in mind the high moral purpose of their writings.

The expressions of human love are varied. In Keats, love is a sensuous, earthly passion and his expressions invoke an ardour missing in such poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge and Wordsworth are more for spiritual bliss.

Intense subjectivity and melancholy, are characteristics of romanticism, and no poet in the Romantic era escapes it. Though Wordsworth’s definition of poetry is often quoted (“emotion recollected in tranquility“), it hardly qualifies the poetry you find in much of Keats‘ love sonnets, for example, To Fanny:

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! 

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest 

Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine, 

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,

Love and death are closely associated in the minds of the Romantic poets.

Perhaps after Nature the chief source of inspiration for the Romantic poets was their belief in the creative powers of the Imagination. Some like Blake founded whole imaginative universes, peopled by personages of mythical names. Others like Coleridge could enter dream-like states of bliss and describe their fancies in such alluring language that readers would be mesmerised and suspend their own reality so as to partake in what the poet had on offer, which was far more brilliant. Keats‘ imagination was no less sumptuous and inspiring, as may be seen in such a lovely poem as Ode on a Grecian Urn. But even in a lesser poem, On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour you can hear the note:

Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,

And half-discover’d wings, and glances keen.

The while let music wander round my ears,

And as it reaches each delicious ending,

Let me write down a line of glorious tone,

Some poets of the same era writing in other countries are also gathered under the same umbrella, e.g. Edgar Allan Poe and Pushkin.  There are also a number of other poets in England and Scotland considered to be in this category, including women poets. For this wider collection one may read the Wiki entry on Romantic poetry. The British Library has an essay by Stephanie Forward on the key ideas and influences of The Romantics. There is a more varied collection of essays on Romanticism from the British Library.

Priya – Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795 – Portrait by Pieter van Dyke

Priya – Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is one of the founders of the Romantic Movement. He was well-known as a poet, and equally as a critic, theologian and a psychologist. He read widely and had a great intellect. Coleridge suffered from periods of anxiety and depression; perhaps he was bipolar, to use a modern term. He had a bout of rheumatic fever in youth and this led to ill-health later on.

He was born in 1872, and died in 1834, and thus spans the entire period of the Romantic movement. His father was a vicar, and he was the youngest. He was fascinated by fantasy tales, and the Arabian Nights was his favourite. After this father died, the family shifted from the village to urban London. He went to Cambridge. The family fell on hard times. Coleridge then joined the cavalry. His brother brought him back, knowing he could do far better in intellectual pursuits. In Germany he read the philosopher Kant. He met Robert Southey, the poet. They came up with ‘Pantisocracy’, advocating a government by all, but the idea did not spread. He and Southey married sisters called Fricker under Southey’s insistence but the marriage was unhappy and Coleridge  divorced, after four children were born. He was restless and became dependent on opium.

He met Wordsworth; it was a long and influential friendship with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. He took up residence a short distance away from their house and they met frequently. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry called Lyrical Ballads, which is a significant marker for the English romantic age and contained many poems of note, besides enunciating a theory of poetry. The two poets collaborated on verse too. Apart from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge composed the exotic poem Kubla Khan, written, the poet said, from the inspiration of an opium dream.

After having fallen out with Sara Fricker whom he married he had an infatuation with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth ultimately married. Priya said W was carrying on with both the Hutchinson sisters (really!) and that was how Wordsworth and Coleridge fell apart. United by ballads, and then separated by bad aim in romance, they became distant. He wrote an Ode about Sara Hutchinson. He travelled to Malta and Italy, and became assistant to the Governor. His writing became calmer. After reading a piece on the epistle of First Letter of St Peter, he wrote an essay On the Constitution of the Church and State. In 1824 he became fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He got recognition and had some financial success. In 1817 he completed his major prose work Biographia Literaria, composed of literary criticism.

Toward the end of his life his dependence on laudanum (a solution of opium in brandy) grew. He died of a heart condition, or perhaps a lung ailment related to his use of laudanum.

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief

That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.

(Romeo and Juliet Act 2, scene 2, lines 2–6)

Arundhaty

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the first half)

The poet is recollecting a scene of solitude when he is caring for his infant son. It begins very promisingly with the words:

The frost performs its secret ministry

and continues

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, 

Have left me to that solitude, which suits 

Abstruser musings: save that at my side 

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 

'Tis calm indeed! 

In his watchful study he falls into a reverie:

... I dreamt 

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, 

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang 

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

 In this nostalgic mood he dozes off and next morning he recalls the faces he saw in his sleep.

Priya

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the second half)

Coleridge is tenderly addressing his infant sun

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart 

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 

He imagines that just as he has wandered far from the realms of his childhood, so will his son perhaps live elsewhere

... I was reared 

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 

He thinks, God, 'the Great Universal Teacher' will mould his son's spirit and all seasons will be sweet to him. The ending lines are quite evocative of the scene of the frost thawing from the eaves:

the secret ministry of frost 

Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 

Originally Coleridge had added six more lines but later cut them out.

Devika

Lord Ullin’s Daughter by Thomas Campbell

Devika was in Hyderabad and her brother-in-law asked about what she was reciting and suggested this poem. She became interested on reading it, but Thomas Campbell's name does not fall into the repertory of Romantic poets although his life neatly spans that era. He published a poem titled Pleasures of Hope, only a few months after the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The quotation often used 

Distance lends enchantment to the view

is from the first stanza of that poem. Pleasures of Hope has much interest for it covers a great number of topics, including India. Campbell in heroic couplets (rhyming iambic pentameters)  hopes for relief:

To pour redress on India's injured realm,

The oppressor to dethrone, the proud to whelm;

To chase destruction from her plunder'd shore

With arts and arms that triumph'd once before,

The tenth Avatar comes! at Heav'n's command

Shall Seriswattee wave her hallowed wand!

And Camdeo bright, and Ganesa sublime,

Shall bless with joy their own propitious clime!

Come, Heav'nly Powers! primeval peace restore!

Love! — Mercy! — Wisdom! — rule for evermore!

Love of liberty, opposition to tyranny, and rich descriptions of Nature are some of the traits of the Romantics that come through in this poem. 

Short Bio of Thomas Campbell provided by Devika

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was a bestselling Scottish poet and author active during the Romantic period. Campbell was also known for his interests in philanthropy and education, and renowned as a prominent public figure, serving three years as rector of the University of Glasgow.

The youngest of eleven siblings, Thomas Campbell was born on 27 July 1777, to Alexander Campbell (1710-1801) and Margaret (1736-1812; née Campbell), in High Street, Glasgow. Both his parents came from middle-class merchant families, who had gone into business together and married to cement their ties. By the time of Campbell’s birth, his father’s business importing tobacco had floundered on account of the American War of Independence.

Campbell, who was educated at the Glasgow High School and University of Glasgow, won prizes for classics and for verse-writing. He spent the holidays as a tutor in the western Highlands. His poem Glenara and the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter owe their origin to a visit to Mull. In May 1797 he went to Edinburgh to attend lectures on law. He supported himself by private teaching and by writing, for which he was helped by Dr Robert Anderson, the editor of the British Poets.

Among Romantic-era literary lecturers, Thomas Campbell had the distinction of having his own poetry treated by his primary competitors, Thelwall, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Coleridge and Hazlitt attacked him in gendered critiques as the representative of a spurious popular poetry that pandered to the public, particularly women, and to periodical critics, thereby forfeiting lasting fame. 

As a literary lecturer Campbell had the qualities that had made him an overnight success as a poet. Acculturated in Enlightenment Scotland, Campbell adhered to literary tradition and came to specialize in classical literature. He read aloud from polished scripts and presented himself appealingly in an effort to render his literary lessons accessible. He was willing to enter into a mutually beneficial exchange with auditors, especially the women whose patronage could advance his professional and social ambitions. He also viewed education as a viable means of reform in a counter-revolutionary era and launched a successful public campaign for a university in London.

For centuries, London had remained one of the few European capitals without a university. There were some institutes of higher learning: Gresham College founded by Thomas Gresham in 1597, funded professors who held public lectures in London, but took no students nor awarded degrees. While Scotland counted four major universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrew’s), England had to make do with two (Oxford, Cambridge). 

The project for establishing a proper university in London was mooted by Thomas Campbell. His argument was that a university in London would be a great convenience to students in the metropolis, saving the hefty boarding expenses charged by Oxford and Cambridge, and making a university education affordable to middle class London families. University of London, now called University College London (UCL), was formally founded on February 11th, 1826 under the name of London University. It was a non-denominational school with no religious tests. Dissenters, Jews, and all others were accepted too.

Campbell married his second cousin Matilda in 1803 and settled in London. His wife died in 1828. Of his two sons, one died in infancy and the other became insane. His own health suffered, and he gradually withdrew from public life. He died at Boulogne in 1844 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

References:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Campbell-British-poet

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198833147.001.0001/oso-9780198833147-chapter-4

https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=721

https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/schools/ucl.htm

Devika found Lord Ullin's Daughter to be a very romantic Scottish poem. It describes how a Scottish chief and his beloved flee from her angry father. It has a sad ending. If she was caught the angry father would kill her and her lover. There is no good option, and she decides to take a chance and elope. They come to grief and drown when a storm sinks the boat for their crossing.

The opening stanza is very familiar and reminded Devika, Arundhaty, Pamela and Priya of the time when they read it in high school:

A Chieftain to the Highlands bound,

Cries, ‘Boatman, do not tarry;

And I’ll give thee a silver pound

To row us o’er the ferry.’

The boatman is chivalrous and says

... I’m ready:

It is not for your silver bright,

But for your winsome lady.

Priya noted that Romanticism in poetry has a lot to do with Imagination and Nature; narrative poetry, even it it has an amorous theme, does not count as Romantic poetry.

To take this further, coming back to what Devika said about Lord Ullin’s Daughter  being ‘a very romantic Scottish poem’ there is a distinction that needs to be made. Romantic with a capital ‘R’ relates to the characteristics of a movement or style during the late 18th and 19th centuries in Europe marked by an emphasis on feeling, individuality, and passion, typically preferring straightforward language, picturesqueness, and naturalness; rather than the Classical forms and order, and the lofty poetic diction of the previous Augustan Age dating from about 1690 to 1744. To repeat, the great Romantic qualities ushered in by the Romantics were the sense of wonder, a great love of beauty, marked melancholia, and a keen sensibility, with the emphasis on imagination and fancy. The most popular Romantic theme was Nature.

We tend to associate romantic with a lower case ‘r’ with feelings of love and tenderness and tending to affection, or being amorous and loving. This distinction is important for KRG’s yearly sessions.

Geeta

To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis) – Often inconspicuous on the ground, it is easy to see when in its distinctive song flight

Skylark Bird Call – its well-known song has been the subject of emotional outpourings by British poets for centuries; click on the link to hear the pleasant trilling.

Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy – painting by Joseph Severn, 1845

Bio of Shelley from Poetry Foundation

Shelley’s life, lasted only a little longer than that of Keats, yet left a magnificent body of Romantic works before his drowning in a boat accident in the Bay of Spezia in Italy at age 29. It is appropriate that the two poets are commemorated together in the Keats-Shelley house in Rome. They are buried not far from each other in the English cemetery there.

Field Place, the family home near Horsham, Sussex. Shelley was born in the upper room of the right wing

He was born in 1792 as the elder son, among one brother and four sisters. Percy’s grandfather was a nobleman and a considerable estate was to be be left to him and he would sit in Parliament because of that connection. Shelley was beloved and admired by his family. He was playful and imaginative in childhood, making up games to play, and keeping his siblings amazed at his stories.

Shelley was bullied in school, but recalled the science lectures of a master and cultivated a strong interest in electricity, astronomy, and chemistry. Shelley spent six years at Eton starting in 1804 at age 12. His early literary endeavours counted for more than all his formal studies. Here too he was bullied (English schools remain notorious for the practice). Shelley’s access to the library of a kind and liberal physician, Dr. Lind, enabled him to pursue his wide range of reading in philosophy and literature and other arts. 

Shelley began writing poems while at Eton; a few were published in 1810. His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810). When Shelley went up to Oxford in 1810 he was already a writer with a craft, and an omnivorous reader, but held heretical and atheistical ideas. His friendship with fellow students animated their minds with ceaseless discussions on everything from philosophy and literature to politics and religion. 

Shelley remained at Oxford for less than a year. The university was so intolerant of opinions that a pamphlet  Shelley wrote titled The Necessity of Atheism (1811) was considered a matter serious enough to rusticate him. The essay was on the nature of belief; Shelley argued that belief should arise from three sources: the senses, reason, or testimony (and not from religious authority). Nevertheless, the Oxford authorities acted swiftly and decisively, expelling both Shelley and a friend who supported him in March 1811. Early in life Shelley demonstrated his idealism by his willingness to sacrifice comfort and security rather than compromise his rational principles. His father more or less disowned him.

Shelley chanced on two women who claimed his attention.  He went on to marry one of them, Harriet Westbrook. The marriage was premature, with insufficient cause, as it turned out but some good poems resulted. They were married on August 28 or 29, 1811. Shelley met Robert Southey, whose work he had admired. But Shelley found him a bore and a reactionary who tried to moderate Shelley’s own radicalism. Shelley took a shy at political activism when he went to Ireland and urged Catholic emancipation.

Shelley and his wife Harriet, and her sister Eliza settled briefly in Wales, where Shelley continued to write radical pamphlets. Shelley learned the hard way how scant was the freedom of the press then in England. During this early period of his life, Shelley had quietly been composing poems in a notebook, which fell into the hands of the Esdaile family after Shelley’s death and which was not published until this century, as The Esdaile Notebook (1964). It contains fifty six or so early poems of Shelley in manuscript form.

The Esdaile Notebook:  a volume of early poems, edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron, was published in 1964

The discovery of The Esdaile Notebook  gives readers a glimpse of Shelley’s early teenage poems. They already demonstrate the variety that characterises him as a poet: poems treating his feelings for Harriet, poems of despair and isolation, some public, political, and social poems treating the themes of liberty, the Irish cause, the plight of the poor, and the futility of war; and his hatred of monarchies and religious hypocrisy. A sampling from The Esdaile Notebook follows:

To Harriett

(Cook’s Hotel 1814)

Thy look of love has power to calm 

The stormiest passion of my Soul; 

Thy gentle words are drops of balm

In life's too bitter bowl.

No grief is mine but that alone

These choicest blessings I have known.

[photo of this page from the notebook]

To Ianthe 

Sept 1813

I love thee, Baby! for thine own sweet sake; 

Those azure eyes, that faintly dimpled cheek, 

Thy tender frame so eloquently weak.

Love in the sternest heart of hate might wake;

…

More dear art thou, O fair and fragile blossom, 

Dearest, when most thy tender traits express

The image of thy Mother's loveliness. —

[Ianthe, born in 1813 was the child of Shelley and Harriet]

In London in 1812-13 Shelley made new friends among liberal and literary circles, besides renewing his earlier acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, the radical London publisher and writer who was to be Shelley’s lifelong defender. In October 1812 Shelley finally met William Godwin, whose daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, was to be his future wife, and a distinguished author in her own right, Mary Shelley. But Godwin also became a financial burden to Shelley.

Shelley’s major literary project Queen Mab, was published in May-June of 1813. Queen Mab is a political epic in which the fairy queen Mab takes the spirit of Ianthe. The poem reiterates many of the themes of Shelley’s political pamphlets. Shelley added copious prose notes to the end of the poem. 

Shelley as a frequent visitor to the Godwin household, met the three young women living there: Mary Godwin, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay. Inevitably all three would fall in love with Shelley – but Shelley, requited Mary only. Mary was the equal of Shelley in mind and talent, and the tragedy was that Shelley married Harriet before he met Mary. Mary’s father Godwin bitterly opposed the relationship, and Harriet became estranged and was heartbroken. Shelley and Mary, accompanied by Jane Clairmont, eloped on the night of July 27, 1814, first to Calais, then to Paris, and on to Switzerland, knowing William Godwin would oppose them. 

Shelley was in trouble financially when he returned to London. His finances and health improved in 1815, and Shelley began to explore his poetic gifts, developing the symbolic style of his mature poetry. Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, (1816) were Shelley’s initiation into the Romantic idiom of poetry pioneered by Wordsworth. It used symbols, visionary elements, and mythic sources (the Narcissus-Echo myth in particular), and marked a real advance over Shelley’s earlier efforts in writing poetry.

The year 1816 proved exciting for the clan of Shelley, Mary and Claire Clairmont. In January, Mary gave birth to a son, named William, after her father. In the spring Claire threw herself at Lord Byron, recently separated from Lady Byron, and became his mistress. In May she persuaded Shelley and Mary to alter their plans for a trip to Italy and go to Lake Geneva instead, where she knew Byron was headed. Byron and Shelley found great stimulation in each other's company and Mary started on her own famous career of writing about Frankenstein’s monster.  

Shelley, inspired by the natural scenery, wrote two of his great poems, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni. Though Shelley admired the new kind of poetry ushered in by Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was equally convinced by 1815 that both the older poets had sold out to conservatism in their seniority. 

After their return to England, Shelley and Mary were faced with a suicide that must have shaken the poet: that of Harriet, Shelley’s wife. Shelley married Mary on December 30, 1816 and had to contest custody of Shelley and Harriet’s children, Ianthe and Charles. The Shelleys left for Italy and the poet was never to return to England.

Shelley republished a previous poem as The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve Cantos. It provided a forum for him to once again condemn oppression, religious fraud, war, tyrants, and their consequences.

The Shelleys and their children, William and Clara, along with Claire Clermont (Mary Shelley’s half-sister and Byron’s paramour) and Allegra (illegitimate daughter of Byron and Claire Clermont), set out for Italy in March 1818. For Shelley’s poetic development the change proved fruitful, for he was to write some of his best poetry under the sparkling Italian skies. All the while they were negotiating entangled domestic relations.

Julian and Maddalo is Shelley’s poetic version of his relationship with Byron. Julian (Shelley) is the face of optimism, while Maddalo (Byron) takes the pessimistic view. 

Shelley wrote rapturous descriptions of his travels in Italy in his letters but the death of their son, William, in June 1819 clouded his joy. During this 1818-1819 period Shelley wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley could not accept that Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist who told the story of the myth, had left the champion of mankind for in eternal bondage. The choice of Prometheus as his hero is in keeping with his rebellion and giving fire to humans against the gods’ wishes. For Shelley Prometheus represented the highest potential of humankind.

In the same volume as Prometheus Unbound, were published some of Shelley’s finest extended lyrics, including Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, To a Skylark, and Ode to Liberty. Writing in terza rima to suggest the force and pace of the wind, Shelley asks the wind to drive him as it drives the leaves, the clouds, and the waves.  Terza rima is uncommon in English and hard to pull off on account of the relative scarcity of rhymes in English as against Italian.

Shelley began work on another drama, The Cenci (1819). This time instead of using mythology and classical literature as his source material, he used the true Renaissance story of the macabre Cenci family, the villainous count and his virtuous daughter, Beatrice. 

Shelley’s responded to a massacre of civilians protesting called the Manchester Massacre by writing several political poems, including The Masque of Anarchy (1819), the sonnet England in 1819, and Song to the Men of England. They were all deemed too dangerous to publish during Shelley’s lifetime. 

Shelley wrote two satires also, Peter Bell the Third and Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant.

Shelley was impelled to write his famous essay, A Defence of Poetry, after reading an article alleging that poetry was in decline. The essay is a veritable storehouse of quotations:

A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Shelley argues that the social and moral benefits of poetry are real. Poetry can help moral progress keep pace with scientific and material progress, and poets can indirectly influence social consciousness for the better.

Upon hearing Keats was ill, Shelley warmly invited him to Italy as his guest, but Keats died in Rome on February 3, 1821. Shelley quickly set about writing a moving and mournful elegy on the young poet, Adonais.

In May 1822 the Shelleys left Pisa. Shelley with his boating mentor and future biographer, Edward Trelawny, thought to spend the summer sailing their new boat Don Juan, in the Gulf of Spezia. 

Gulf of Spezia – site of Shelley's drowning

After getting the Hunts settled in, Shelley and a visitor, Williams, set sail in the Don Juan for the return trip to Lerici on July 8, but a squall struck and overturned the boat. Shelley drowned and his body was recovered days later. One of the identifying objects on Shelley’s body was an open copy of Keats’s 1820 volume of poems. Shelley was cremated on the beach itself (as a consequence of Italy’s quarantine laws) in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny. 

Mary Shelley edited the Posthumous Poems (1824) and a collected edition of Poetical Works with her own explanatory notes (1839). She published a novel, The Last Man (1826), with a Shelleyan protagonist. Hunt continued to be a stout defender of Shelley’s works and reputation. Percy Florence Shelley, the only surviving son of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, eventually inherited the Shelley estate and married Jane St. John, an admirer of both the Shelleys; she did all she could to preserve and enshrine Shelley’s reputation.

Shelley’s reputation after his death was shaped by the same extremes of worship and denunciation that he and his writings had elicited during his life. The Victorians, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, Walter Bagehot, and Ralph Waldo Emerson denigrated Shelley. Matthew Arnold issued a mordant statement on Shelley: “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” 

But the list of those who admired him or were influenced by him is longer and perhaps even more distinguished: Robert Browning, who in his early poem Pauline (1833) paid tribute to Shelley as the “Sun-treader”; Alfred Tennyson, who along with other “Cambridge Apostles” argued the merits of Shelley versus Byron with Oxford debaters; William Butler Yeats, whose poetry reveals the influence of Shelley’s visionary poetics and his symbol making; H.S. Salt and Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling (Karl Marx’s daughter), all of whom claimed Shelley as a prototypical Marxist; and Bernard Shaw, who admired Shelley’s radicalism and emulated his vegetarianism.

Shelley adulation reached its zenith in 1886 with the formation of the Shelley Society. In the early 20th century, however, Shelley’s literary reputation plunged with the advent of the “new criticism.” T.S. Eliot  thought that when theories and politics intervene to express themselves in poetry, the poetry could be left behind by a reader in disagreement with the theory. On the other hand, Keats, Eliot thought, did not theorise and was more likely to be enjoyed. But later critics have found in Shelley’s writings a fountainhead of social, political, and philosophical concerns; and subtleties in his use of myth and language, including his skill in translating Greek, Italian, Spanish, and German literature. 

Shelley’s name is forever linked with those of Byron and Keats, and has come to symbolise the free and soaring spirit of humankind. Even in the popular imagination, he is associated with the idea that one should not content oneself with the mundane but aspire to ever-loftier ideals and higher goals for ourselves and for society.

After Geeta read To a Skylark, the lines that remained clinging to memory were:

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The opening apostrophe is unforgettable:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

The similes pour forth in a rush of exaltation from Shelley's pen:

Like a Poet hidden

Like a high-born maiden

Like a glow-worm golden

Like a rose embower'd

The poet wonders ...

how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

And if you listen to the trilling of the skylark again at the sound link embedded above, you indeed realise the presence of an ethereal music, which Shelley declares is 

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

In the last stanza the poet becomes the student:

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

KumKum mentioned that a professor of English from St Teresa's College, Betty Kuriyan, did join us once to recite this poem, though Joe has not recorded the fact. Prof Kuriyan did not need to look at the printed page but remembered it mostly. Devika, whom she taught, called her an excellent teacher. KumKum wanted KRG’s wishes to be conveyed to her.

On looking back at the Jun 15, 2017 Romantic Poets Session, you will see KumKum has misremembered; Prof Kuriyan took up Ode to the West Wind by Shelley.

Thommo – 5 poems of Walter Savage Landor

Bio of the Poet

Walter Savage Landor poet (1775–1864)

Walter Savage Landor was a classicist. He wrote much of his poetry in Latin in the classical humanist tradition. 

Landor's miniaturism in his epigrams, idyls, and dramatic scenes, put their emphasis on physical pleasure and noble attitudes. Take this, for instance:

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear :

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.

The poet Robert Pinsky has written on how well-crafted and condensed Landor’s epigrams are by taking the example of this gem:

On love, on grief, on every human thing, 

Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

Some of the poems Thommo chose are in the same vein. This was a classical tradition Landor shared with contemporaries such as Byron and Shelley.

 Landor’s prose was masterful and he became well known, especially with the series of Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829) between literary and political personalities from all periods of European history. Ezra Pound was a great advocate of Landor; Pound maintained that Landor was the most important English writer between Pope and Browning.



Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, the eldest son of Walter Landor, a physician who inherited a large estate in Staffordshire, and his second wife, Elizabeth Savage, heiress to a more modest Warwickshire fortune. In 1783 he went to Rugby School, where his facility for Latin translation and composition stood out. He was proud of this distinction. Samuel Parr, a Latin scholar, fostered Landor's classicism. Landor was removed from school at the age of 15 for being unruly. He joined Trinity College, Oxford, in 1792, but lasted only two years before being rusticated for an act of rowdyism. He was living up to his mother's name, Savage, said Thommo. He went to live in London, where he devoted himself to the private study of French, Italian, and Greek. His father left him a sum of £150 a year, enough to live on, but not to indulge in luxuries.

His first publication, The Poems of Walter Savage Landor (1795) had satires and other  imitations. It failed as did most of his poetic volumes. But with one piece titled, Apology for Poetry, he started an engagement with political literature that was to be a lifelong passion. 



He went to Swansea and lived with Nancy Jones, a local girl with whom he had had an affair in 1793. They had a child who died, and soon Nancy herself died from TB. At Swansea in 1796 he met Rose Aylmer, whose tragic early death was to occasion one of his best-known epigrams (see below). Landor had formed an affection for her. Rose Aylmer accompanied her aunt in 1799 to Calcutta, where her uncle was judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal. That was where in 1800 she died of cholera at age 20. 




In autumn 1796, he began his first major work Gebir (1798), a heroic poem in seven books. Landor’s reading of Milton showed that blank verse was superior to the classical hexameter in conveying weight and dignity. Shelley as a student was fascinated by the poem, so too was Wordsworth. 



Landor projected another long heroic poem  calledThe Phoceans, about the disruption and restoration of civilisation. The volume met with rejection from the reviewers, and Landor did not pursue this vision of a post-revolutionary society.

Landor lost his revolutionary ardor when he actually witnessed Napoleon assuming the title First Consul for life, and the tame submission by French citizens to a new despotism. He like others in the Romantic mould, then began expressing the principles of love of freedom, and hatred of tyranny.



In the spring of 1802 he met and fell in love with Jane Sophia Swift, the "Ianthe" of his poems. She remained Landor's grand passion, and her path recrossed his at Florence in 1829, and at Bath in 1839 and 1849-1850, before she died at Versailles in 1851. An exquisite collection of epigrams issued from his pen (including some in Latin), Simonidea (1806), named after the Greek elegist Simonides. These lyrics, mostly devoted to Nancy Jones and Ianthe, hark back in simplicity of theme and form to the Greek Anthology. Though it was noted in the reviews, Simonidea did not sell well.



In 1805 his father died, and Landor inherited estates at Rugeley, Staffordshire, and soon even more wealth came his way on the death of his mother in 1829. At Bristol in 1808 that he finally met Southey, who was to become a life-long friend and literary ally. 

Landor's first poetic drama, Count Julian: A Tragedy (1812), was influenced by an adventure he had in Spain. It tells the story of a Christian general of the Goths. He had difficulty in getting it published: Landor acknowledged it lacked action and development.



Back in Bath he met and married in 1811 Julia Thuillier, a girl of about 17 years. He decided to settle down but the marriage eventually failed, after generating four children. Landor's attempts to manage the estate proved disastrous. His literary and political interests were obviously more congenial to him, as he completed the first significant collection of his Latin verse, Idyllia Nova Quinque, eventually published in 1815. Harassed by lawsuits and debts, Landor was forced to leave England in May 1814 and determined to live in France. The Welsh estate was taken over and managed by his family, who resolved his debts and allotted him and his wife a moderate income (doubled after his mother's death).



Landor's Italian period extended some twenty years, from 1815 to 1835. Greatly impressed at this time by the poetry of Wordsworth that Southey sent him, he made a translation (unfortunately lost) of Wordsworth's critical essays into Italian, and in 1820 he and Wordsworth began their correspondence. 


His Latin poetry was published at Pisa in 1820 in Idyllia Heroica Decem. Landor's lifelong intervention in the revolutionary uprisings became more open, beginning at Naples in 1819. He sent off pamphlets and orations. Landor supported Catholic emancipation and electoral reform and rejected the reaction brought on by the victory at Waterloo.



Landor moved to Florence in 1821. There he began the sustained writing of the Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, which were to attract wider attention than his verse ever achieved. They appeared in 1824.

 For two years, beginning in summer 1827, the family lived at the Villa Castiglione just outside Florence. The family resettled at the Villa Gherardesca in the town of Fiesole, a few kilometres uphill from Florence. In the ensuing six years he composed less, as his chief enthusiasm now was collecting paintings of 14th- and 15th-century Italians. 


Poetry subsided, prose increased. In 1833 he was visited by the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was struck by his formal courtesy. His marriage broke down completely in 1835. Landor made over his income to his family, keeping for himself only a subsistence allowance. He left wife and children in Fiesole, and returned to England. 

He settled in Bath, where he remained for more than 20 years, writing continuously.

In 1837 the fruit of his study of Italian literature was published as The Pentameron, a series of five day-long interviews between Boccaccio and Petrarch, dwelling largely on criticisms of Dante, the Decameron, and the poetry of Virgil and Horace. He then produced a historical trilogy – the first two parts of which, Andrea of Hungary, and Giovanna of Naples, were published in 1839, and the last, Fra Rupert, in 1840. 



His longevity enabled him to straddle distinct literary periods, so that he was able to make admiring acquaintances in the new literary generation, among whom were Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. In 1840 he met Tennyson and became friendly with the 28-year-old Charles Dickens, who was to caricature him in Bleak House (1852-1853), as Lawrence Boythorn, a character of violent warm-heartedness and tremendous superlatives.


In 1846 Landor collected his English output in The Works of Walter Savage Landor, which was a considerable success. Poemata et Inscriptiones, in 1847, gathered nearly all his previously published works in Latin, adding new pieces. Landor then translated his ten Latin Idyllia and collected them with the group of poems on Greek themes he had called the Hellenics in the Works of 1846. The volume so compiled was entitled The Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor. Enlarged and completed in 1847, it contained the verse most admired by Swinburne. 


1847 to 1853 was a period of extraordinary activity for Landor, as he contributed about 100 prose pieces and more than 70 poems to the periodicals. His literary productivity became apparent in 1853 when he brought out a miscellaneous volume of selected pieces written since the Works of 1846, The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, including Conversations, letters, a pamphlet, dramatic scenes, and an assortment of poems. 

In the same year he published a collection of the Conversations between classical speakers, Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans, dedicated to Dickens.

Landor, though now an old man, did not lose his gift for supple and simple expression. Dry Sticks (1858) contained all the poetry written since The Last Fruit off an Old Tree and also included recently discovered old verses as well as some amorously addressed to a girl he became fond of. 


He left for Italy again and in Fiesole quarrelled with his family, left the villa, and was kindly helped by the Brownings, to eventually rent a house in Florence. His last book, Heroic Idyls (1863), which was published in his 88th year, includes a remarkable variety of verse. He died in Florence at the age of eighty-nine and was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery.

Some of the poems Thommo read come from his so-called Epigrams. This one sounds like an epitaph, but it was titled On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: 

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: 

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; 

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

Since Landor was a difficult character, who sought out conflict from his earliest years in Rugby and Oxford, the first line contradicts his very nature ('I strove with none').

Rose Aylmer who played a brief role in his life was mentioned by Joe in our reading of Satyajit Ray's Adventures of Feluda which we read in 2016, thanks to the Feluda fandom of our reader, Preeti Nambiar. Rose Aylmer  is buried in Calcutta and these verses of WLS are inscribed on her tomb:

Ah, what avails the sceptred race,

Ah, what the form divine!

What every virtue, every grace!

Rose Aylmer, all were thine!

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and sighs

I consecrate to thee.

Photographs of the cemetery, of Rose Aylmer's tomb and miscellany from Calcuttan history may be found at this link.

Gopa

William Cullen Bryant, ca. 1876

William Cullen Bryant - brief bio

William Cullen Bryant was born near Cummington, Massachusetts, on November 3, 1794. He was the second son of doctor and state legislator Peter Bryant and his wife Sarah Snell, whose ancestors were passengers on the Mayflower.

At thirteen, Bryant wrote The Embargo, a satirical poem calling for the resignation of President Thomas Jefferson, and published in pamphlet form in 1808. At sixteen, Bryant enrolled in Williams College with the intention of transferring to Yale. During his time at Williams, Bryant wrote Thanatopsis, which was later published in the September, 1817 issue of The North American Review.

Bryant was unable to go to Yale, and studied law privately. He was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one and spent nearly ten years practicing in Massachusetts. During this time, he married Frances Fairchild, and they were united for nearly fifty years.

In 1821, he was asked to speak at Harvard’s commencement (convocation), and wrote what was to become his first published book of verse. The poems were later published with additions in two volumes in 1862.

In 1829, Bryant and his wife moved to New York City, where he became an editor of the New York Review, now known as the New York Review of Books. Later he became editor of the New York Evening Post, a position he held until his death. Bryant used the newspaper as a platform to call for the abolition of slavery, and was also an advocate for Abraham Lincoln, delivering a speech at Cooper Union, which lifted Lincoln to the nomination, and then the presidency. 

Bryant is considered an American nature poet and journalist, with ties to the Hudson River School of art. He wrote poems, essays, and articles that championed the rights of workers and immigrants. He is the author of several books, including The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (I. S. Platt, 1844), and The Fountain and Other Poems (Wiley and Putnam, 1842). He died on June 12, 1878, in New York City.

Bryant’s influence helped establish magnificent New York civic institutions such as Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Medical College. In 1884, New York City renamed a park as Bryant Park in his honour and erected a statue. 

Bryant along with Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. are considered to be among the first American poets, called ‘fireside poets’, whose popularity rivalled that of British poets.

[ This bio is sourced from poets.org]

Thanatopsis, the poem Gopa recited, was written as an encouragement for humankind. The word 'thanatos,' means 'death,' and 'opsis,' means 'view,' so 'Thanatopsis' actually means 'a view of death.' The poem is an optimistic view of death.

Death is ordained by Nature and experienced by everyone, and should therefore be embraced rather than feared. 

Thanatopsis is written in blank verse, that is to say, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The rhythm is flowing like a wave, alternating accented with unaccented syllables thus: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. Read a typical line with this rhythm:

To him who in the love of Nature holds

The poem is divided into three main sections. The first section introduces the idea that Nature has answers for life's musings. Nature takes over and begins speaking. She tells you that one day you will die, like everyone else who has ever lived:

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up


Thine individual being, shalt thou go


To mix for ever with the elements....

In the second section, Nature describes death and all the reasons why one shouldn't fear it. Everyone who goes before is persists and shares in your rest, and it doesn't matter how rich or poor, great or small, people were in life; they'll all be six feet under, just like you! The poem ends by telling us to think of death as a happy, dream-filled sleep:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join   

The innumerable caravan, which moves   

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take   

His chamber in the silent halls of death,   

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,   

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed   

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,   

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch   

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Devika liked this concluding verse. Priya, in answer to a query, said it was a very romantic poem. May poets in the Romantic canon have written about death, just as they have written about Nature. As death rejuvenates Nature, they saw death as a phase, common to all living beings.

Joe

William Blake – Excerpts from Milton (The Wine-Press of Los and The Birds and the Flowers)

Milton – Book the First, engraving of the initial verses

The immediate impetus to read from Blake was our previous novel, The Horse's Mouth, which is replete with the poems of William Blake. At one point Gulley Jimson in one of his schemes to alleviate poverty decides to sell tickets to buy Blake’s house in London and hang originals on the walls. He's convincing a ships's captain:

“Blake,” said the captain, “is that Admiral Blake?” 

“No, William Blake, the great Blake.” 

“Never heard of him.” 

“Greatest Englishman who ever lived.” 

“Was he? What did he do?” 

“Poet and painter, but never had a chance. Didn’t know how to boost himself.” 

“Don’t like all this boost.” 

“Quite right. Blake didn’t either. This memorial is for justice, that’s all. We’re selling five thousand founders’ shares at half a crown down with three installments at six months.”

William Blake – ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’

There is an interesting entry in the British Library featuring the original illustrations that accompanied William Blake's poem, Milton. The first one is a figure that blends Blake and Milton:

Blake was born on November 28, 1757. We know William Blake as an Artist and Poet; engraving was his specialty which he learned young as an apprentice, and the incorporated into his poetic practice, illuminating  the text of his poems by hand, and also painting mythic figures to illustrate his ideas. 

He did not make a decent living and was on the edge of poverty most of his life, his genius undiscovered and unrewarded. His eccentricities were no more than what any artist is entitled to. He had visions, real ones, that bowled him over. He married an illiterate woman, Catherine, whom he educated and loved, and who loved him dearly. The two things he valued in art were Imagination and Freedom. He hated to merely imitate but was ready to learn a craft. He invented a whole mythology of characters to support his poetry and if you wish to delve into it you need to appreciate what each represents.

The artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827) was moved, provoked and inspired by the poetry of John Milton, especially Paradise Lost (1667). In the poem Milton, Blake conveys his intensely personal and sometimes bizarre responses to the dead writer and his work. He blends visionary language and vivid, muscular etchings to create an illuminated ‘Poem in 2 Books’. This was part of a group of Blake’s works known as the ‘Prophetic Books’, and evolved out of an earlier manuscript poem known as The Four Zoas.

In the poem, Milton embarks on an ‘immortal journey’ of self-discovery and renewal. His aim is to rescue Albion – an ancient name for Britain – using the power of the imagination. Blake’s own body seems to become infused with Milton’s spirit, which enters through his left foot. Together, they then ‘walk forward thro’ Eternity’. Blake also interweaves aspects of his own life into the plot, including the time he spent in the village of Felpham in Sussex (1800–04), where he worked for the writer William Hayley and started to prepare this poem.

The preface to Blake’s Milton includes a lyric poem beginning ‘And did those feet in ancient time.’ This was set to music by Charles Hubert Parry in 1916, and became known as ‘Jerusalem’ – now one of the best-loved English hymns. Blake seems to have been inspired by the legend that the young Jesus visited England with his great-uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Blake asks if we can imagine building a new ‘Jerusalem’ – a kind of second Heaven – to replace the industrial landscape of ‘dark Satanic Mills’ in England.

[The above is partly taken from the notes on the British Library collection of Blake’s engravings of the poem Milton]

Joe read a portion of the excerpt from Milton about The Birds and the Flowers. Like all the Romantic poets, Blake cannot resist the outpourings of the lark:

Mounting upon the wings of light into the great Expanse,

Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly Shell;

His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather

On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence Divine

All Nature listens silent to him, and the awful Sun

Stands still upon the mountain looking on this little Bird

With eyes of soft humility and wonder, love and awe.

Kavita

The Stars Are Mansions Built by Nature's Hand by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth – A short bio

Wordsworth was probably the most influential of all the English Romantic poets, and was recognised at once as speaking with a new poetic voice that rejuvenated English literature. Moreover, his “religion” of nature provided the Romantics and their spiritual successors with one of their major abiding themes. 

The poet’s boyhood in the rugged and picturesque Lake District of northwestern England instilled this love of nature in him, and left him quiet, brooding and introspective. His foreign travels began in 1790, when he undertook a walking tour with a friend through parts of France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany; soon thereafter he spent another year in France, observing the revolutionary nation at close hand. 

In 1795 a legacy left to him and his sister Dorothy, freed them of their legal guardians, and they moved to Dorset, where they met Coleridge; in 1797 and 1798 the like-minded trio lived together in Somerset. In 1798 the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published. Wordsworth and Coleridge both contributed to the epoch-making volume, remaining great friends until 1810. After the threesome visited Germany in 1798-9, they all went back to the Lake District, where Wordsworth resided for the rest of his long life, becoming a civil servant (county revenue collector) in 1813. He never stopped writing poetry, and was named poet laureate in 1843, but by general consensus his finest work was completed by 1806.

The stately Tintern Abbey, exemplified his philosophical bent and his matchless use of blank verse, flexible and rich. Wordsworth wrote five poems concerning a mysterious, possibly imaginary woman, Lucy. Here is one of them:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

…

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her Grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

Among the splendid 1802 sonnets he wrote, five may have been the greatest written in English since Milton; The Solitary Reaper; She was a Phantom of delight;  and the very popular poem about daffodils, I wandered lonely as a cloud, perhaps the best-known of his nature poems. The Ode: Intimations of Immortality, some think was his greatest single effort. 

Wordsworth clearly succeeded in what his friend Coleridge described as his goal: to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day ... directing [the mind] to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”

[This note on Wordsworth is taken from the Dover Edition volume, English Romantic  Poetry, An Anthology]

In the sonnet read by Kavita the poet thinks of the stars as places where

... the spirits of the blest

Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest;

...

A habitation marvellously planned,

For life to occupy in love and rest;

This conceit is not carried forward and the rest of the sonnet seems to peter out as the poet gets distracted by the Spring ‘song of birds, and insects murmuring’ and ‘bud, leaf, blade, and flower.’

KumKum

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats

John Keats Bio (1795—1821) 

John Keats by Joseph Severn, (1821-1823) National Portrait Gallery, London

No other English poet developed as rapidly as Keats, all of whose memorable work was written in the few short years between 1815 and 1820 — cut off prematurely by the tuberculosis from which both his mother and his younger brother had died. Of humble social status, the son of a London livery-stable manager, Keats became enamoured of Greek mythology and other studies at school, but, was orphaned, and compelled to find a trade. 

He apprenticed himself to a surgeon at the age of 15; and later studied at Guy’s Hospital in London. By the age of 18 he was already trying his hand at poetry, and two years later wrote the first uniquely Keatsian poem, this sonnet for today's reading, On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Although his finances were always precarious, he devoted himself totally to poetry, under the influence of the writer Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to a number of other literary luminaries. 

In 1817 Keats wrote the long poem in heroic couplets Endymion; in 1818 Isabella, a narrative in ottava rima (an Italian stanza form that Byron had made popular in Beppo and Don Juan). The year 1819 was pivotal, not only for the beginning of the poet’s romance with Fanny Brawne, but also for his amazing list of achievements: the Miltonic blank-verse epic fragment Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes (a narrative in Spenserian stanzas), the ballad-like La Belle Dame sans Merci, the narrative in heroic couplets Lamia, and most of the great sonnets. Above all these towered the great odes (Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, To Autumn and Ode on Melancholy), in which he fashioned unique stanzas and reached perfection of poetic diction and musicality. 

In 1820, on his way to Rome in quest of a better climate — his own tuberculosis had manifested itself — Keats completed the sonnet Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art. He died in Rome in 1821. 

Keats also wrote in a vein of humour and light-heartedness, exemplified by poems such as To Mrs. Reynolds’s Cat and To J. H. Reynolds Esq,.

Besides the long poems mentioned above, for a full appreciation of Keats, one should read in addition his letters, where he discusses his literary goals and criteria as well as many personal concerns.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer – Intro by KumKum

Keats read the 1616 Folio edition of Chapman's Homer with his teacher and friend Charles Cowden Clark.  They read it through the night, enchanted, and then Keats returned to his home on Dean Street in London at 6 AM. Clarke notes:

When I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles by ten o’clock.’

Keats’ first draft of ‘On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer’, October 1816 – manuscript courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University

Cowden Clark was mightily impressed. Leigh Hunt, the editor of The Examiner, approved of it. It was he who had loaned the copy of Chapman's Homer which the two friends read. 

With a minor change in the 7th line, the poem was published in The Examiner in 1816. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer is considered one of his best poems. The sonnet is written in the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet style. The rhyme scheme for the octet is ABBAABBA, and the sestet goes CDDECE. 

Keats expresses his feeling of wonder and awe after he had read Chapman's translation of Homer. He says he had already read many poems from different countries, and he had heard about ‘deep-browed Homer’s’ fame and about his vast repertoire. But until he read Chapman's wonderful translation he had no clue to how excellent Homer's compositions were. 

Keats compares his sublime feelings with that of an astronomer who discovers a new planet. Here he alludes to the 1781 event of discovery of the planet Uranus by astronomer William Herschel. It was the first planet found with the aid of a telescope.

Keats also compares his sublime joy of reading Chapman's translation with that of Cortez's discovery of the Pacific Ocean from the hills of Darien. It is believed that Cortez saw the Pacific Ocean when he reached the marshy swamp land of Panama known as Darien Province by ship. The first recorded sighting of the Pacific Ocean by a European was by Balboa, but it was Cortez who popularised it. 

This marshy, hilly land of Darien Province is also known as Daren Gap, or 'the missing link' between the two Americas.

Cowden Clarke noted which passage it was whose translation most impressed Keats. Ulysses, tempest-tossed and shipwrecked, is staggering towards land in the fifth book of the Odyssey: 

Then forth he came, his both knees falt’ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak’d his heart through; all his veins

His toils had rack’d t’ a labouring woman’s pains.

Dead-weary was he.

[V. 608-14]  

If one reads it out loud as the two friends did, you can hear the sound that excited them. The rhythmic stresses of the iambic pentameter pulses with life, running on breathlessly from one line to the next. They had at hand Alexander Pope's translation to compare with. For Chapman's

The sea had soak’d his heart through

Pope had translated:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran

Clarke notes in his Recollections of Writers that such dynamism thrilled Keats into “one of his delighted stares.”

Joe remarked as a postscript that if you take the number of words and lines Keats wrote and divide it by the number of hours he spent, you'll get a very high quotient. He composed faster than anyone. As KumKum said this sonnet was composed very fast after an all-nighter of reading. Take the sonnet On The Grasshopper and the Cricket (which Joe read once before) – Keats composed it in friendly competition with Leigh Hunt. That was done in 15 minutes, and begins

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'

You can realise Keats' speed and industry when you look at his output and his short working life of five years or so. It's not just quantity; it's the quality of what he wrote. While they talk of all the Romantic poets and the six big guns – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats – Joe said, Keats is right up there at the top of the list, as far as he is concerned.

Pamela

Ode to Psyche by John Keats

In mythology Psyche is the Greek goddess of the soul. She was born a mortal woman, with beauty that rivalled that of Aphrodite. Aphrodite's temples became deserted because people started worshiping Psyche; the goddess was outraged. As a punishment, she sent her son, Eros, to make Psyche fall in love with a vile and hideous beast. However, Eros fell in love when he saw her and decided to spare her his mother's wrath. Ultimately Eros saved Psyche's life and took her to Mount Olympus where the gods live. Psyche was made the goddess of the soul. Psyche and Eros had a daughter, Hedone, goddess of physical joy.

The poet notes that Psyche, though ‘loveliest vision of all Olympus’, has no temple, no music

Nor altar heap'd with flowers;

Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

                Upon the midnight hours;

Unfazed, the poet wishes to be an acolyte to Psyche:

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

                Upon the midnight hours;

The poet proposes with his thoughts to weave a flag (fane) that will celebrate Psyche:

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

         In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

         Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

The next quatrain sheds delight from the romantic imagination:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees

         Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

         The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;

It is mere thought with which the poet will enclose Psyche, but

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

         That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

         To let the warm Love in!

– now we have read all the odes of Keats.

Saras

To a mouse by Robert Burns

Short Bio of Robert Burns 

Robert Burns statue, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh – commemorating the poem ‘To a Mouse’

The Scottish poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. Hi best work is written in the Scots dialect. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement.

Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) Auld Lang Syne is often sung on New Year’s Eve around the world. Other famous poems and songs of Burns  include A Red, Red Rose, To a Louse, To a Mouse, and Tam o' Shanter.

Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759, to a tenant farmer in Alloway, Ayrshire not far from Glasgow. His father recognised that Robert was bright and managed an education for him and his brother Gilbert, and encouraged his interest in literature and poetry.

While admired by the upper classes Robert Burns was still the people's poet; his work was often written in his own Ayrshire dialect and based on his experiences as a farmer. On 31 July 1786 John Wilson published the volume of works by Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect. It contained much of his best writing, many of which had been written at Mossgiel farm, where his parents were tenant farmers. The success of the work was immediate, and soon he was known across the country.

His poetry allowed him to make some influential connections. He managed to secure a job as an exciseman that let him support his family adequately. His health began to give way prematurely and he became dispirited. Burns became ill and died, probably of rheumatic fever in 1796 at the age of only 37.

Between the ages of 24 and 29 when he was at his most prolific, Burns produced most of his best poetry and songs. Most people worldwide will know at least one of his works, Auld Lang Syne.

The poem To a Mouse was written when he turned over a sod and destroyed a field mouse's nest with his ploughshare. This was the poem that contained the lines...

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

The famous American writer, John Steinbeck, used this as the title of his work Of Mice and Men and many more lines from Robert Burns' work have become part of everyday speech. Bob Dylan said Burns's 1794 song A Red, Red Rose as the lyric that had the biggest influence on his song writing. It has the unforgettable lines:

O my Luve is like a red, red rose 

   That’s newly sprung in June; 

O my Luve is like the melody 

   That’s sweetly played in tune. 

J. D. Salinger used protagonist Holden Caulfield's misinterpretation of Burns' poem Comin' Through the Rye as his title in his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. 

Much of Robert Burns's poetry, like Tam O' Shanter, was written to depict  his own situations and experiences with a dose of humour. He alienated some acquaintances by freely expressing sympathy with the French and American Revolutions, which advocated democratic reform and votes for all men (though not for women). He wrote his world famous song A Man's a Man for A' That: 

What though on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;

A Man’s a Man for a’ that:

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

Is king o’ men for a’ that.

The egalitarian thoughts in the poem were based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, one of the chief political thinkers of the American Revolution. Strange to say Burns’ poetry caught fire in Russia too when translated, and became a source of inspiration for the ordinary, oppressed Russian people. In Soviet Russia, he was elevated as the archetypal poet of the people.

Burns birthplace cottage in the village of Alloway near Ayrshire, 40 miles southeast of Glasgow, has been converted into museum proudly dedicated to Scotland’s national poet. 

Robert Burns – To a Mouse 1785, statue in the museum grounds

In Aug 2011 KumKum and Joe had a chance after meeting Maria, the mother of their Scottish son-in-law, in Glasgow to do a little sightseeing. A knowledgeable friend of hers, John, drove us to Alloway, and showed us the museum. As a devotee of Burns, he took us to the nearby tiny church (‘Alloway's auld haunted kirk’) where begins the strange bewitching journey of Tam, the farmer. 

Burns – Alloway Kirk

Robert Burns's poem Tam O'Shanter, recounts the story of Tam who encounters a coven of witches. A beautiful witch, Nannie, wears a revealing 'cutty sark' or short dress, and angrily pursues the spying Tam. He manages to narrowly escape but not before Nannie has ripped the tail with fire from Tam’s poor horse, Maggie, just as he crosses the river Doon.  Our friend John completed the poem after the short walk to the bridge over the river.

Burns – The late medieval bridge over the River Doon, the Brig o’Doon, sits near Alloway

Saras read the poem To a Mouse with great spirit, recreating farmer Burns turning up a mouse while ploughing his field (‘coulter’ is the iron cutter of a ploughshare):

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

In the last stanza the poet envies the mouse for not recalling past woes or having fears for the future, living only in the present:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

          On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

          I guess an’ fear!

 

Talitha exclaimed how well Saras read the poem! He could have saved the mouse and its nest instead of writing the poem, said Talitha, at which all laughed. The bio was provided by Saras, sourced from the Wikipedia Burns article, with a few additions by Joe.

Shoba

The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire

We go across the channel to France for our next poet, Charles Baudelaire. A term Joe used is applicable to him: Poètes maudits (‘accursed poets’), i.e., poets who live beyond the pale of society and will always be cursed by the powerful people of the world. Baudelaire came into an inheritance and wasted it, said Shoba. He translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet and writer considered among the Romantic poets, into French. Baudelaire lived only a little after the Romantic period.

A little bit about the poem. The wingspan of a fully grown albatross is the longest of any bird—up to 11 feet! It is able to glide effortlessly on the currents of upward moving air because of its huge wingspan. In the poem the albatross is shot and the very wings that gave such elegant flight in the air, weigh it down and it cannot walk:

 ... helpless on such unaccustomed floors, 

They piteously droop their huge white wings 

And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.

...

But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds, 

The great wings of the giant baulk his gait.

Shoba said poets and geniuses are never given their due. They don't earn money, and fame, if at all, comes much later. Talitha protested that Shoba should have read the poem in its original French. Shoba provided a French recitation later which you can hear by clicking on the link. The rhymes and sounds of Baudelaire’s original text will not be lost to readers.

Joe noted that the Albatross has an older association with Romantic poetry via The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. 

It is an ancient Mariner, 

And he stoppeth one of three. 

'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, 

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

...

The ice was here, the ice was there, 

The ice was all around: 

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, 

Like noises in a swound! 

At length did cross an Albatross, 

Thorough the fog it came; 

As if it had been a Christian soul, 

We hailed it in God's name. 

...

'God save thee, ancient Mariner! 

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— 

Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow 

I shot the ALBATROSS

Short Bio of Charles Baudelaire (taken from Britannica)

Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil). This collection of 126 poems is perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. 

Baudelaire was the only child of François Baudelaire and his much younger second wife, Caroline Defayis, whom he married in 1819. A painter and poet of modest talent, he introduced his son to art, or what the younger Baudelaire would later call his greatest, most consuming, and earliest of passions, “the cult of images.” His father died in February 1827 in Paris, and for 18 months thereafter Baudelaire lived in poverty, closely attached to his mother. 

His mother remarried and his stepfather sent him for education to the Collège Royal, Lyons, in 1832. On the family’s return to Paris in 1836, Baudelaire transferred to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Baudelaire showed promise as a student and began to write his earliest poems, but to his school masters he seemed an example of precocious depravity, adopting what they called “affectations unsuited to his age.” He also developed a tendency to moods of intense melancholy, and he became aware that he was solitary by nature. He began leading a “free life” in the Latin Quarter. He contracted venereal disease (which would eventually kill him) from a prostitute, Sarah, who is remembered only because he wrote poems about her.

His stepfather sent him away on a voyage to India in June 1841 to cure him of his maladies, but Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius and, after a few weeks there and in Réunion, returned to France in February 1842. The voyage, however, deepened and enriched his imagination. His encounter with the tropics would endow his writing with an abundance of exotic images and nostalgic reverie.

Baudelaire came into his inheritance in April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to dissipate it, living the lifestyle of a dandified man of letters. He experimented with hashish and opium. Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval who dominated his life for the next 20 years as mistress and finance-in-charge. Jeanne inspired Baudelaire’s most anguished and sensual love poetry, such as La Chevelure (“The Head of Hair”).

Baudelaire went through his money so that in 1844 his family had to impose an arrangement that made of him a legal minor. The modest annual allowance henceforth granted him was insufficient to clear his debts, and the resulting state of permanently straitened finances led him to still greater emotional and financial dependence on his mother, and also exacerbated his growing hatred toward his stepfather. 

Baudelaire, returning from the South Seas in 1842, was determined to become a poet. From then until 1846 he composed the bulk of the poems that make up the first edition (1857) of Les Fleurs du mal. He announced future collections, the stated goal of which was to “represent the agitations and melancholies of modern youth.” But it never appeared in book form. He established himself as an art critic with his reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846. In January 1847 Baudelaire published a novella entitled La Fanfarlo.

Baudelaire took part in the working-class uprising of June 1848, but ended his active interest in politics, to focus on his writing.

In 1847 Baudelaire discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Finding great similarities of thought and temperament to his own, he set out to translate Poe’s works; this gave him regular occupation and income for the rest of his life. 

From the mid-1850s Baudelaire would regard himself as a Roman Catholic. Although with an obsession original sin and the Devil, he did not enter into the fullness of Christianity – lacking faith in God’s forgiveness and love.

Between 1852 and 1854 Baudelaire addressed a number of poems to Apollonie Sabatier, a high-class courtesan, and muse, and in 1854 he had a brief liaison with the actress Marie Daubrun. When the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published in June 1857, 13 of its poems were immediately arraigned for offences to religion or public morality. Six poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity, and he had to pay a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs.  In the preface Baudelaire writes: “In this dreadful book I have put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (disguised), all my hatred. It is true I shall write the contrary, I shall swear by the great gods that it is a work fo pure art.”

At its base as Baudelaire's motivating philosophy is the idea of Correspondence set out in the poem of that name:

Correspondances (Correspondences)

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

...

Nature is a temple in which living pillars

Sometimes give voice to confused words;

Man passes there through forests of symbols

Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance

In a deep and tenebrous unity,

Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,

Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

The universe has a mystical unity; no part of it can be altered without altering the rest. From this concept comes the idea of the unity of the arts, and also of the sensations (synaesthesia).  Evidently for Baudelaire the sensuous trappings of a woman held as much charm as she herself: 

La femme est sans doute une  lumière, un regard, une invitation a la bonheur, une parole quelquefois, mais elle est surtout une harmonie générale, ... 

Woman is without a doubt a light, a glance, an invitation to happiness, a word sometimes; but above all she is a general harmony, ...   

 

His definition of Beauty is well-known: 

C'est quelque chose d'ardent et de triste, quelque chose d'un peu vague, laissant carrière a la conjecture ... Le mystère, le regret sont aussi caractères de Beau.

 It is something passionate and sad, something a little vague, leaving room for conjecture. Mystery and regret are also characteristics of the Beautiful. 

A prose poem of his gives a taste of his immersive approach to poetry:

Enivrez-vous

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous. 

…

You must always be drunk. Everything is there; it is the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time breaking your shoulders and bowing you to the ground, you must get drunk without stopping.

But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, after your fashion. But get drunk.

You can indeed suffer from inebriation upon reading the swaying rhythms of some of his poetry:

Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne,

Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne,

O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne,

Et t'aime d'autant plus, belle, que tu me fuis,

Et que tu me parais, ornement de mes nuits,

Plus ironiquement accumuler les lieues

Qui séparent mes bras des immensités bleues.

Je m'avance à l'attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts,

Comme après un cadavre un chœur de vermisseaux,

Et je chéris, ô bête implacable et cruelle,

Jusqu'à cette froideur par où tu m'es plus belle!

...

I ADORE you as much as the vault of night, 

O vessel of sorrow, O tall, silent woman, 

And I love you the more, my beauty, the more you flee me,

And seem, O ornament of my nights, to pile up ironically the leagues 

That separate my arms from the blue spaces.

I advance to the attack and I climb to the assault 

Like a band of worms on a corpse, 

And I hold dear, O mercilessly cruel beast!,

Even that coldness through which you appear more beautiful to me!

The failure of Les Fleurs du mal, from which he had expected so much, was a bitter blow to Baudelaire, and the remaining years of his life were darkened by a growing sense of failure, disillusionment, and despair. At the same time, he composed two of his most provocative essays in art criticism, the Salon de 1859 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne (“The Painter of Modern Life”). Baudelaire published important critical essays on Théophile Gautier (1859), Richard Wagner (1861), Victor Hugo and other contemporary poets (1862), and Delacroix (1863), all of which would be collected after his death in L’Art romantique (1869). 

In 1861 Baudelaire made an unsuccessful attempt to gain election to the French Academy. Baudelaire then concentrated on writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of which was published in La Presse in 1862. In April 1864 he left Paris for Brussels in the hope of persuading a Belgian publisher to publish his complete works. He was stricken with paralysis and aphasia there, from which he would never recover. Baudelaire died at age 46 in a Paris nursing home to which he was confined for the last year of his life.

He did not remain unknown and unmourned for long. The future leaders of the Symbolist movement who attended his funeral were already describing themselves as his followers, and by the 20th century he was widely recognized as one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century.

Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose was published posthumously in 1869 and was later, as intended by the author, entitled Le Spleen de Paris (translated as The Parisian Prowler). 

As both poet and critic, Baudelaire stands in relation to French and European poetry as Gustave Flaubert and Édouard Manet do to fiction and painting, respectively: namely, as a crucial link between Romanticism and modernism and as a supreme example, in both his life and his work, of what it means to be a modern artist. He is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought, and his influence on modern poetry has been immense.

Joe got his own education in French poetry from The Penguin Book of French Verse, 3: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Anthony Hartley, 1957. This wonderful bilingual collection contains some of the seminal verse of the period, and may be borrowed free for an hour at a time on archive.org at the website linked above. 

Geetha

To -- -- --. Ulalume: A Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) – short bio

Edgar Allan Poe 

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe's father and mother were both professional actors, who died before the poet was three years old. He was raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia by John and Frances Allan. John Allan was wealthy  and sent Poe to the best boarding schools, and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. But his gambling debts forced his father to withdraw him from the university. 

Poe’s relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he moved to Boston and enlisted in the US Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume was noticed. After his Army service, Poe was admitted to the US Military Academy, but he could not continue for lack of financial support. 

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the poem, The Raven. After Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for Philadelphia to procure an editing job. He stopped in Baltimore en route. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of ‘acute congestion of the brain.’ 

Poe's work had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the ‘architect’ of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner of the ‘art for art's sake’ movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. The poet Charles Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature. His poem Annabel Lee is unforgettably beautiful. Here is a taste of it; read the whole poem – it will move you to tears and you will feel the true pulse of poetry.

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

…

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in heaven above,

   Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

Geetha gave an introduction to the poem Ulalume as follows. On a lonely, gloomy October night, near Auber Lake and Weir Forest, the narrator wanders through the woods. His heart is roiling restlessly Toward dawn he notices a bright star that points out a path, but his soul is terrified. He ignores the fear. The path leads him to a tomb, and his soul, Psyche, discloses that the tomb belongs to his beloved, Ulalume. He realises that he buried Ulalume exactly one year ago,.

Ulalume begins by establishing an imagery of decay in the leaves and the sky. The poet continues with a dream-like connection between the physical and the mental environments, as the narrator wanders simultaneously through his mind and through the forest. The season is Halloween when death and spirits hold primacy.

Poe wrote the poem when his wife Virginia Clemm died. The sombre mood of the poem reflects this. The beloved Ulalume stands at the work's centre, outweighing even the half-real, half-dream existence of the narrator and his soul. The lulling ‘l’ sound has a poetic effect.

Throughout the poem, the narrator refers to his psyche, which has understanding beyond that of his conscious mind. The obsession in his soul with the loss of his beloved Ulalume is evident. Interestingly, the narrator refers to his psyche as a woman. The soul of Ulalume perhaps wants the narrator to end his brooding over her death and escape his anguish.

Ulalume is composed in dactyls (one accented syllable followed by two unaccented), and anapaests, which reverse the pattern. The poem varies the rhyme and and there is much repetition to provide the beat and lay down the emphasis. Poe repeats much of the description of setting in the first stanza in the third and last verses, giving the poem a circular form that parallels his metaphorical voyage of a year and return to Ulalume's grave.

(The summary above is partly dependent on gradesaver.com, a study guide)

The alliteration and repetition in the opening lines create a fine mood of yearning and melancholy:

It was night in the lonesome October 

      Of my most immemorial year; 

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

      In the misty mid region of Weir— 

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

 This ability to orchestrate consonants continues right up to the end: 

      From the limbo of lunary souls— 

This sinfully scintillant planet 

      From the Hell of the planetary souls?

Joe was moved to applause by the warm voice of Geetha traversing the poem, and was full of admiration for the sparkle in these lines and how Poe manages to milk the liquid out of the words with the repeated 'l' sound

At the end of our path a liquescent 

      And nebulous lustre was born, 

Out of which a miraculous crescent 

      Arose with a duplicate horn—

These are words that will live forever – they resound in your mind. Everyone agreed the mood created of sombreness and mystery is a trademark of Poe – KumKum, Shoba, Arundhaty appreciated the poem in unison. Geetha said she enjoyed reciting the poem. 

Notice that Poe seems to have an affinity for the ‘l’ sound for it recurs in Annabel Lee also, in the title and succeeding lines.

Talitha

The World Is Too Much With Us  by William Wordsworth 

William Wordsworth portrait at Wordsworth House in Cumbria

Talitha provided this account of the life of William Wordsworth (1770–1850). 

The poet of nature, as William Wordsworth is best known, served as Great Britain’s poet laureate from 1843 until his death. His Lyrical Ballads (published in 1798), co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Movement in English literature.

Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, England. He came from a family of landowners, and from his earliest days he loved the simple country life and beauty of the region in which he lived. He attended Cambridge University, where he was an average student, and graduated in 1791.

Wordsworth’s life was peaceful and uneventful. He traveled to the Continent, however, and on his second visit became interested in the French Revolution. He decided to join the fighters for freedom. His family disapproved and stopped sending him money. The lack of funds brought him back to England late in 1792. For three years he lived aimlessly, without any plans for a profession. When he received a legacy from a friend, he took a cottage in Dorset with his sister Dorothy and decided to devote his life to poetry. There he met Coleridge. Talitha bought an illustrated copy of the Daffodils poem from Dove Cottage many years ago.

Dove Cottage in the Lake District where Wordsworth stayed with his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808

In 1797 Wordsworth moved to Alfoxden in Somerset. There he and Coleridge continued a friendship that was to influence English poetry for generations. The two poets talked, walked, and worked together. In 1798 they published their famous collection, titled Lyrical Ballads. All but four of the poems were written by Wordsworth. Coleridge’s great poetic contribution was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey… is an outstanding poem from the collection.

Dorothy Wordsworth – badass hiker and 18th century diarist. The description of daffodils in her journal formed the seed for Wordsworth’s poem

Wordsworth wrote a preface to the second edition of this book, which stated the two writers’ philosophy of poetry. It startled the literary world. Wordsworth said said: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” He also said that poets should describe simple scenes in everyday words. Poets should be true to nature, and use the Imagination to create an atmosphere.

Many were not convinced by Wordsworth’s ideas, nor were they impressed by his poems, but he kept on writing for the rest of his long life. Most of his finest work was done by 1807.

For the last 50 years of his life Wordsworth lived in the Lake District in the north of England, first in Grasmere. In 1802 he married his cousin Mary Hutchinson. The family moved to Rydal Mount, near Ambleside, in 1813. Gradually the poet won public favour, and critics finally made peace with his ideas. The title of poet laureate was conferred on him in 1843. He died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850.

In his long poem The Prelude Wordsworth relates the story of his mental growth. He tells how his boyish love of nature’s beauty grew into a recognition of the kinship between nature and humankind. He expressed his love of nature in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality when he wrote, 

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Wordsworth is not a dramatic poet, but in his best nature poems, in some of his sonnets, and several of his peasant poems he transforms the commonplace into stirring poetry. Matthew Arnold wrote, “Wordsworth’s poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered us in Nature, the joy offered us in the simple affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.”

Wordsworth’s published works include An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (1793), Lyrical Ballads (1798), Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), The Excursion (1814), The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), and The Prelude (1850). Some of his best poems are The Solitary Reaper, Michael, Tintern Abbey, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils), Ode: Intimations of Immortality, some of the Lucy poems, Westminster Bridge, The World Is Too Much with Us, and To Milton.

Talitha then read The World Is Too Much With Us. Proteus was a minor sea god, called the shape-shifter, and Triton is Poseidon. ‘Wreathed horn’ signifies the horn is curled. Shoba said even in those times they thought –

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

How much more so now! 

‘The craft of this sonnet is pretty good,’ said Talitha. It is a meditative sonnet written in the Italian (Petrarchan) rhyme scheme. Wordsworth didn’t follow the Elizabethan (Shakespearian) form. Arunodoy Bhattacharyya in his book The Sonnet and the Major English Romantic Poets makes a tally showing very few Romantic era sonnets have employed the Elizabethan form:

Coleridge 6 out of 48;

Wordsworth 1 out of 620;

Keats 16 out of 67;

Shelley 0 out of 18;

Byron 0 out of 5.

Nearly half of the total sonnet production of that era is in pure Italian form.

Arundhaty said she does not know much about the form and structure of sonnets. Where does one get to learn about it, she asked? Priya said to ask Joe. Could owe book a class with Talitha, but she said there are many books. Joe opined that the sonnet is a lovely little form which lays out a structure for the aspiring poet. It has to be in iambic pentameter with the rhythm going 

da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

alternating unaccented with accented syllables. A rhyme scheme is also laid out whichever form you chose, Elizabethan, Italian, or some variant. It is not hard to compose holding a theme in your mind, because you know how it must travel and where it has to end. But it is hard to compose a good one! 

Talitha added the idea of the volta, where an octet of eight lines, is followed by a volta or turn in the direction of thought, and then a sestet of six lines. The thought underlying the sonnet is as important as the meter and rhyme scheme, if it is to be satisfying, said Talitha. This is the common structure of the Italian sonnet. 

But the Elizabethan form often follows the form of 3 quatrains, followed by a couplet. There is a twist in the tail of the Elizabethan form which ends in a rhyming couplet., that terminates like a ghazal.

Zakia

To A Snowdrop by William Wordsworth 

Priya said Zakia was wearing snowdrops in her ears. Wordsworth praises the snowdrop, a flower that heralds spring. In spite of other brighter flowers  like jonquils the poet promises

Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,

Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,

And pensive monitor of fleeting years !

 

Snowdrop flower – it's not spring without snowdrops

This sonnet also is not in the Elizabethan form ...

Poems Recited

Arundhaty

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(First half)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795

The Frost performs its secret ministry, 

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry 

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. 

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, 

Have left me to that solitude, which suits 

Abstruser musings: save that at my side 

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs 

And vexes meditation with its strange 

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, 

With all the numberless goings-on of life, 

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame 

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; 

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, 

Making it a companionable form, 

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 

By its own moods interprets, every where 

Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 

And makes a toy of Thought. 

                      But O! how oft, 

How oft, at school, with most believing mind, 

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, 

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft 

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt 

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, 

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang 

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 

Most like articulate sounds of things to come! 

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, 

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! 

And so I brooded all the following morn, 

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye 

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: 

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched 

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, 

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face, 

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, 

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! 

Devika

Thomas Campbell, Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence c. 1810

Lord Ullin’s Daughter by Thomas Campbell

A Chieftain to the Highlands bound,

Cries, ‘Boatman, do not tarry;

And I’ll give thee a silver pound

To row us o’er the ferry.’

‘Now who be ye would cross Lochgyle,

This dark and stormy water?’

‘Oh! I’m the chief of Ulva’s isle,

And this Lord Ullin’s daughter.

‘And fast before her father’s men

Three days we’ve fled together,

For should he find us in the glen,

My blood would stain the heather.

‘His horsemen hard behind us ride;

Should they our steps discover,

Then who will cheer my bonny bride

When they have slain her lover?’

Outspoke the hardy Highland wight:

‘I’ll go, my chief – I’m ready:

It is not for your silver bright,

But for your winsome lady.

‘And by my word, the bonny bird

In danger shall not tarry:

So, though the waves are raging white,

I’ll row you o’er the ferry.’

By this the storm grew loud apace,

The water-wraith was shrieking;

And in the scowl of heaven each face

Grew dark as they were speaking.

But still, as wilder blew the wind,

And as the night grew drearer,

Adown the glen rode armed men-

Their trampling sounded nearer.

‘Oh! Haste thee, haste!’ the lady cries,

‘Though tempests round us gather;

I’ll meet the raging of the skies,

But not an angry father.’

The boat has left a stormy land,

A stormy sea before her-

When oh! Too strong for human hand,

The tempest gathered o’er her.

And still they rowed amidst the roar

Of waters fast prevailing;

Lord Ullin reach’d that fatal shore-

His wrath was chang’d to wailing.

For sore dismay’d, through storm and shade,

His child he did discover;

One lovely hand she stretch’d for aid,

And one was round her lover.

‘Come back! Come back!’ he cried in grief,

‘Across this stormy water;

And I’ll forgive your Highland chief,

My daughter!- oh, my daughter!’

‘Twas vain: the loud waves lash’d the shore,

Return or aid preventing;

The waters wild went o’er his child,

And he was left lamenting.

Geeta

To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of Heaven,

In the broad day-light

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear

Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,

Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aëreal hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower'd

In its own green leaves,

By warm winds deflower'd,

Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,

Rain-awaken'd flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Match'd with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Geetha

To -- -- --. Ulalume: A Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe

The skies they were ashen and sober; 

      The leaves they were crispéd and sere— 

      The leaves they were withering and sere; 

It was night in the lonesome October 

      Of my most immemorial year; 

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

      In the misty mid region of Weir— 

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 

Here once, through an alley Titanic, 

      Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— 

      Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. 

These were days when my heart was volcanic 

      As the scoriac rivers that roll— 

      As the lavas that restlessly roll 

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek 

      In the ultimate climes of the pole— 

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek 

      In the realms of the boreal pole. 

Our talk had been serious and sober, 

      But our thoughts they were palsied and sere— 

      Our memories were treacherous and sere— 

For we knew not the month was October, 

      And we marked not the night of the year— 

      (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) 

We noted not the dim lake of Auber— 

      (Though once we had journeyed down here)— 

We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, 

      Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 

And now, as the night was senescent 

      And star-dials pointed to morn— 

      As the star-dials hinted of morn— 

At the end of our path a liquescent 

      And nebulous lustre was born, 

Out of which a miraculous crescent 

      Arose with a duplicate horn— 

Astarte's bediamonded crescent 

      Distinct with its duplicate horn. 

And I said—"She is warmer than Dian: 

      She rolls through an ether of sighs— 

      She revels in a region of sighs: 

She has seen that the tears are not dry on 

      These cheeks, where the worm never dies, 

And has come past the stars of the Lion 

      To point us the path to the skies— 

      To the Lethean peace of the skies— 

Come up, in despite of the Lion, 

      To shine on us with her bright eyes— 

Come up through the lair of the Lion, 

      With love in her luminous eyes." 

But Psyche, uplifting her finger, 

      Said—"Sadly this star I mistrust— 

      Her pallor I strangely mistrust:— 

Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger! 

      Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must." 

In terror she spoke, letting sink her 

      Wings till they trailed in the dust— 

In agony sobbed, letting sink her 

      Plumes till they trailed in the dust— 

      Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. 

I replied—"This is nothing but dreaming: 

      Let us on by this tremulous light! 

      Let us bathe in this crystalline light! 

Its Sybilic splendor is beaming 

      With Hope and in Beauty to-night:— 

      See!—it flickers up the sky through the night! 

Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming, 

      And be sure it will lead us aright— 

We safely may trust to a gleaming 

      That cannot but guide us aright, 

      Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night." 

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, 

      And tempted her out of her gloom— 

      And conquered her scruples and gloom: 

And we passed to the end of the vista, 

      But were stopped by the door of a tomb— 

      By the door of a legended tomb; 

And I said—"What is written, sweet sister, 

      On the door of this legended tomb?" 

      She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume— 

      'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!" 

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober 

      As the leaves that were crispèd and sere— 

      As the leaves that were withering and sere, 

And I cried—"It was surely October 

      On this very night of last year 

      That I journeyed—I journeyed down here— 

      That I brought a dread burden down here— 

      On this night of all nights in the year, 

      Oh, what demon has tempted me here? 

Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber— 

      This misty mid region of Weir— 

Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber— 

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 

Said we, then—the two, then—"Ah, can it 

      Have been that the woodlandish ghouls— 

      The pitiful, the merciful ghouls— 

To bar up our way and to ban it 

      From the secret that lies in these wolds— 

      From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds— 

Had drawn up the spectre of a planet 

      From the limbo of lunary souls— 

This sinfully scintillant planet 

      From the Hell of the planetary souls?" 

Gopa 

Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant

     To him who in the love of Nature holds   

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks   

A various language; for his gayer hours   

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile   

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides   

Into his darker musings, with a mild   

And healing sympathy, that steals away   

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts   

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight   

Over thy spirit, and sad images   

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,   

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,   

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—   

Go forth, under the open sky, and list   

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around— 

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— 

Comes a still voice— 

                                       Yet a few days, and thee   

The all-beholding sun shall see no more   

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,   

Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,   

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist   

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim   

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, 

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up   

Thine individual being, shalt thou go   

To mix for ever with the elements,   

To be a brother to the insensible rock   

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain   

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak   

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.   

     Yet not to thine eternal resting-place   

Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish   

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down   

With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,   

The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,   

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,   

All in one mighty sepulchre.   The hills   

Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales   

Stretching in pensive quietness between;   

The venerable woods—rivers that move   

In majesty, and the complaining brooks   

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,   

Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—   

Are but the solemn decorations all   

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,   

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,   

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,   

Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread   

The globe are but a handful to the tribes   

That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings   

Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,   

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods   

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,   

Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:   

And millions in those solitudes, since first   

The flight of years began, have laid them down   

In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone. 

So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw   

In silence from the living, and no friend   

Take note of thy departure? All that breathe   

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh 

When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care   

Plod on, and each one as before will chase   

His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave   

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come 

And make their bed with thee. As the long train   

Of ages glide away, the sons of men,   

The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes   

In the full strength of years, matron and maid,   

The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—   

Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,   

By those, who in their turn shall follow them.   

     So live, that when thy summons comes to join   

The innumerable caravan, which moves   

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take   

His chamber in the silent halls of death,   

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,   

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed   

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,   

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch   

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Joe 

William Blake – Excerpts from Milton

1. The Wine-Press of Los

This Wine-press is call’d War on Earth: it is the Printing-Press

Of Los; and here he lays his words in order above the mortal brain,

As cogs are form’d in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel.

 

Timbrels and violins sport round the Wine-presses; the little Seed,

The sportive Root, the Earth-worm, the Gold-beetle, the wise Emmet

Dance round the Wine-presses of Luvah; the Centipede is there,

The Ground-spider with many eyes; the Mole clothèd in velvet,

The ambitious Spider in his sullen web, the lucky Golden-spinner,

The Earwig arm’d, the tender Maggot, emblem of immortality,

The Flea, Louse, Bug, the Tape-worm; all the Armies of Disease,

Visible or invisible to the slothful, Vegetating Man;

The slow Slug, the Grasshopper, that sings and laughs and drinks—

Winter comes: he folds his slender bones without a murmur.

 

The cruel Scorpion is there, the Gnat, Wasp, Hornet, and the Honey-bee,

The Toad and venomous Newt, the Serpent cloth’d in gems and gold:

They throw off their gorgeous raiment: they rejoice with loud jubilee,

Around the Wine-presses of Luvah, naked and drunk with wine.

2. The Birds and the Flowers

THOU hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring:

The Lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn

Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving corn-field, loud

He leads the Choir of Day—trill! trill! trill! trill!

Mounting upon the wings of light into the great Expanse,

Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly Shell;

His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather

On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence Divine

All Nature listens silent to him, and the awful Sun

Stands still upon the mountain looking on this little Bird

With eyes of soft humility and wonder, love and awe.

Then loud from their green covert all the Birds begin their song:

The Thrush, the Linnet and the Goldfinch, Robin and the Wren

Awake the Sun from his sweet revery upon the mountain:

The Nightingale again essays his song, and thro’ the day

And thro’ the night warbles luxuriant; every Bird of song

Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.

This is a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.

Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours;

…

First, ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,

Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the Wild Thyme

And Meadow-sweet, downy and soft, waving among the reeds,

Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they wake

The Honeysuckle sleeping on the oak; the flaunting beauty

Revels along upon the wind; the White-thorn, lovely May,

Opens her many lovely eyes; listening the Rose still sleeps—

None dare to wake her; soon she bursts her crimson-curtain’d bed

And comes forth in the majesty of beauty. Every Flower,

The Pink, the Jessamine, the Wallflower, the Carnation,

The Jonquil, the mild Lily opes her heavens; every Tree

And Flower and Herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance,

Yet all in order sweet and lovely. Men are sick with love!

Such is a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.

Kavita

The Stars Are Mansions Built by Nature's Hand by William Wordsworth

The stars are mansions built by Nature's hand,

And, haply, there the spirits of the blest

Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest;

Huge Ocean shows, within his yellow strand,

A habitation marvellously planned,

For life to occupy in love and rest;

All that we see--is dome, or vault, or nest,

Or fortress, reared at Nature's sage command.

Glad thought for every season! but the Spring

Gave it while cares were weighing on my heart,

'Mid song of birds, and insects murmuring;

And while the youthful year's prolific art--

Of bud, leaf, blade, and flower--was fashioning

Abodes where self-disturbance hath no part.

KumKum

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats

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. 

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; 

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; 

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Pamela

Ode to Psyche by John Keats

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

         By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

         Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

         The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?

I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,

         And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,

Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side

         In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof

         Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran

                A brooklet, scarce espied:

Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

         Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;

         Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;

         Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,

As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

And ready still past kisses to outnumber

         At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

                The winged boy I knew;

But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?

                His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far

         Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!

Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,

         Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,

                Nor altar heap'd with flowers;

Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

                Upon the midnight hours;

No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

         From chain-swung censer teeming;

No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

         Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

         Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

         Holy the air, the water, and the fire;

Yet even in these days so far retir'd

         From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

         Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

                Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

         From swinged censer teeming;

Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

         Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

         In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

         Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees

         Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

         The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

   With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

         With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,

         Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

         That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

         To let the warm Love in!

Priya

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Second half)

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, 

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, 

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies 

And momentary pauses of the thought! 

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart 

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 

And in far other scenes! For I was reared 

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, 

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear 

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 

Of that eternal language, which thy God 

Utters, who from eternity doth teach 

Himself in all, and all things in himself. 

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould 

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 

Whether the summer clothe the general earth 

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch 

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 

Heard only in the trances of the blast, 

Or if the secret ministry of frost 

Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Saras

To a mouse by Robert Burns

(On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.)

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen-icker in a thrave

          ’S a sma’ request:

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

          An’ never miss ’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

          O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

          Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary Winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

          Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

          Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

          But house or hald,

To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,

          An’ cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

          On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

          I guess an’ fear!

Shoba

The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire

L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage

Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,

Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,

Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,

Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,

Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches

Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!

Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!

L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,

L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées

Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;

Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,

Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

The Albatross

Sometimes for sport the men of loafing crews 

Snare the great albatrosses of the deep, 

The indolent companions of their cruise 

As through the bitter vastitudes they sweep.

Scarce have they fished aboard these airy kings 

When helpless on such unaccustomed floors, 

They piteously droop their huge white wings 

And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.

How comical, how ugly, and how meek 

Appears this soarer of celestial snows! 

One, with his pipe, teases the golden beak, 

One, limping, mocks the cripple as he goes.

The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds, 

Despising archers, rides the storm elate. 

But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds, 

The great wings of the giant baulk his gait.

— translation by Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

Thommo

Walter Savage Landor

1. Shakespeare And Milton

THE TONGUE of England, that which myriads 

Have spoken and will speak, were paralyz’d 

Hereafter, but two mighty men stand forth 

Above the flight of ages, two alone; 

One crying out, 

All nations spoke through me. 

The other: 

True; and through this trumpet burst God’s word; the fall of Angels, and the doom 

First of immortal, then of mortal, Man. 

Glory! be glory! not to me, to God.

2. Twenty Years Hence

Twenty years hence my eyes may grow 

If not quite dim, yet rather so, 

Still yours from others they shall know 

Twenty years hence. 

Twenty years hence though it may hap 

That I be called to take a nap 

In a cool cell where thunderclap 

Was never heard, 

There breathe but o'er my arch of grass 

A not too sadly sighed Alas, 

And I shall catch, ere you can pass, 

That winged word.

3. What News

Here, ever since you went abroad, 

If there be change, no change I see, 

I only walk our wonted road, 

The road is only walkt by me. 

Yes; I forgot; a change there is; 

Was it of that you bade me tell? 

I catch at times, at times I miss 

The sight, the tone, I know so well. 

Only two months since you stood here! 

Two shortest months! then tell me why 

Voices are harsher than they were, 

And tears are longer ere they dry.

4. I Strove with None

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: 

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: 

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; 

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

5. On Living Too Long

IS it not better at an early hour 

In its calm cell to rest the weary head, 

While birds are singing and while blooms the bower, 

Than sit the fire out and go starv’d to bed?

Talitha

The World Is Too Much With Us  by William Wordsworth (Composed on Westminster Bridge)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Zakia

To A Snowdrop by William Wordsworth 

Lone Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they

But hardier far, once more I see thee bend

Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,

Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,

Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay

The rising sun, and on the plains descend;

Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend

Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May

Shall soon behold this border thickly set

With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing

On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;

Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,

Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,

And pensive monitor of fleeting years!