Four of the major Romantic Poets were on exhibit at this session: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Women poets of the romantic era were included – Mary Robinson and Felicia Heymans, and one who belongs to the Victorian age of poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. William Cullen Bryant was the only poet from outside Britain.
Collage of Romantic Poets – Byron, Hemans, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Robinson
The poems were all new and captivating. Keats marvelled at Byron:
Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
Byron lamented the separation from his wife Milbanke, and especially from their daughter Ada. She was to become famous in her own right as the world’s first programmer – of an autonomous computing machine called the Difference Engine invented by Charles Babbage. Byron writes to Milbanke:
When her little hands shall press thee,
When her lip to thine is pressed,
Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee,
Think of him thy love had blessed!
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Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook (the original volume)
Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook published in 1963
Shelley likewise is writing to his first wife Harriet from whom he soon separated. But before the break he wrote several poems filled with romantic sentiments in his Esdaile Notebook of 56 poems which remained unpublished until 1964. This one to Harriet tugs at the heartstrings:
For a heart as pure and a mind as free
As ever gave lover, to thee I give,
And all that I ask in return from thee
Is to love like me and with me to live.
Wordsworth came alive with his sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, which emphasises humankind’s lack of attention to things that matter, instead being preoccupied with
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Modern time wasting on mobile phones
This provoked thought among the readers on similar but not identical activities in which moderns fritter away their time, ignoring Nature – ‘we are out of tune,’ Wordsworth says. Joe was engaged to write a modernised version of Wordsworth’s sonnet referring to our Amazon buying, and our fixation on mobile phone screens. Which he has done and included in the blog below.
Setting aside the childhood poem Casabianca which everyone must have learned in middle school, Saras chose Felicia Hemans’ poem The Spanish Chapel. A mother who has lost a child is commiserating her in a chapel’s cemetery:
The soft lip's breath was fled,
And the bright ringlets hung so still—
The lovely child was dead!
It is a tender moment when the mother is descried nearby, yielding
An angel thus to Heaven!"
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From Hemans we veered to the marvellous poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had the good fortune, though, disabled, to find a kindred spirit in another great poet, Robert Browning. The sonnets she wrote for him must rank as love poetry that will live forever. Fortunate are those young lovers even today who have read Sonnets from the Portuguese, in each other’s company.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
