The Romantic Poets session is always interesting since it deals with poets who inaugurated new ways of writing about nature and the human response to beauty. Four of the Big Six were represented – Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley – in addition to three women, one Italian poet and one Irish poet of the romantic period.
It was significant that Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William, who overshadowed his sister’s contributions to his poetry and eclipsed her poetry as well, was given her voice in this session.
And Emily Brontë, sister of Charlotte, whose novel Jane Eyre we read last month, appeared in a sensitive poem recounting a night long vigil watching the stars, a worthy accompaniment to van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.
Van Gogh – Starry Night
Thomas Moore, the Irish poet of the Romantic period, is even better known as a composer of music with his multivolume work A Selection of Irish Melodies. A reader recited a poem of his and discussed his important works such as A Minstrel Boy and Lalla Rookh. Another reader wanted to present him also, but was prevented by lack of an Internet connection.
Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was excerpted in a long piece by Geetha. He Was the poet labelled “Bad, Mad, and Dangerous to know“ by one of his admirers, Lady Caroline Lamb. The poem gave Byron instant fame as it sold very well before he left on his fatal expedition to win the independence of Greece from Ottoman rule. Statues of his have sprung up in Greece, and streets and schools are named after him in a grateful country:
Statue of Lord Byron in Athens
A rather tragic tale by William Wordsworth recounting the pastoral story of a farmer (Michael) who lost his land was read in excerpts; it served to remind us of what is lost by ordinary people tilling the land when urbanisation overtakes a country.
There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones!
And with that faint memorial, the tale
Ends.
One of our readers wished to illustrate how well the current Large Language Models perform by putting forward its translation of the romantic poem L’Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi; but readers uniformly declared their preference for a human translation that rendered the poem into sonnet form in English. Chalk one up for mere mortals! But we must regret not knowing the identity of the mysterious ‘Z.G.’ attributed as the author of this translation of the famous Italian poem about infinity, solitude and the sublime – although it appeared as far back as 1910 in the Oxford Book of Italian Verse.
Arundhaty
Dorothy Wordsworth (born 1771) is remembered today as the sister of the poet who started the Romantic movement, William Wordsworth. They were five siblings, orphaned early, and Dorothy was separated from the rest by being farmed out to a relative. For 9 years from the age of seven she was alienated from her siblings and they were reunited only in 1787. She formed a close bond with her brother William that lasted the length of their lives. They lived together even after William was married. They took to going on long walks and this formed a habit wherever they lived. Coleridge was introduced to her and he noticed that she was a close observer of nature: "Her information various—her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature,“ he wrote to his publisher. The trio hit it off.
In 1797 the Wordsworth moved close to where Coleridge lived. Lyrical Ballads the essential underpinning of the Romantic movement was written by the two poets with collaboration from Dorothy. Poems from their walks like Tintern Abbey, figure in that collection. Dorothy is mentioned in the final section of Tintern Abbey:
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy wrote journals, some of which are lost but the journal she wrote on a trip with Coleridge and William to Germany in 1798 survives as the Hamburgh Journal. In 1799, Dorothy and William settled in Dove Cottage, located in Grasmere in England’s Lake District, where they resided until May 1808. Dorothy's Grasmere Journal, first published in 1897 provides a glimpse of their lives. Their long walks are described and there are accounts of other literary figures like as Coleridge, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, and Robert Southey.
Dove Cottage – the idyllic, Wordsworth Grasmere cottage in the Lake District became William Wordsworth's home during his greatest years as a poet
In 1802 after William married Mary Hutchinson they resided together in Grasmere and Dorothy helped raise the children from William’s marriage. In 1813 they moved to Rydal Mount, a lovely dwelling and resided there for the rest of Dorothy’s life. She climbed mountains, and went on a trip to the Alps, all recounted in her further journals.
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Wordsworth's House at Rydal Mount
Dorothy wrote her Rydal Journals from1824 to 1835. In 1829, Dorothy fell seriously ill, and battled a degenerative illness. She continued writing. Dorothy was cared for by William and Mary, and the staff of their house. After William's death in April 1850, Dorothy's health continued to decline; she passed away on January 25, 1855. She is buried with her brother in the local churchyard.
From the Grasmere Journal it becomes evident how vital was her eye and her observation to the compositions of her brother William. Here is an except from it, dated April 15, 1802:
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.”
From Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, 15 April I802 – daffodils so beautiful they grew among mossy stones ... tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed …
The words echo what William wrote in his poem about daffodils in his poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. It was not his observation but hers that found poetic utterance. “Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry,” was how Virginia Woolf would put it later.
Ref:
The poem Arundhaty read, Address to a Child During a Boisterous Winter Evening, is a conversation between the speaker Dorothy herself and a young child named Edward, focusing on the comforts and wonders of their indoor space during a stormy winter night, according to Romantic readings on the Wordsworth family. The poem highlights the warmth and security of their home, contrasting it with the harsh weather outside, where Edward is invited to imagine the "wild winds" and the "snowy waste". The highlight is the personification and description of the wind:
He tosses about in every bare tree,
As, if you look up, you plainly may see;
But how he will come, and whither he goes,
There’s never a scholar in England knows.
The unpredictability and playfulness of the wind is constantly described.
Sometimes he’ll hide in the cave of a rock,
Then whistle as shrill as the buzzard cock;
— Yet seek him, and what shall you find in the place?
Nothing but silence and empty space;
Devika
Devika took up a poem by Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852), an Irish poet and composer and singer of songs. He is known even more for his Irish Melodies than for his poems. They appear in a joint collection in The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore – of which the entire text can be found at the Project Gutenberg site (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8187/pg8187.html). Moore was widely regarded as Ireland's ‘national bard.’ In these melodies, Moore set to old Irish tunes verses that spoke to a nationalist narrative of Irish dispossession and loss. With his romantic work Lalla Rookh (1817), in which these same themes are explored in an elaborate orientalist allegory, Moore achieved wider critical recognition. Moore became one of the leading exemplars of European romanticism. Lalla Rookh earned him what was till then the highest price paid by an English publisher for a poem (£3,000). The poem played an instrumental role in making Kashmir (called Cashmere in the poem) a household name in the English-speaking world.
Thomas Moore, Irish Poet and song lyricist after Thomas Lawrence
Thomas Moore was born to Anastasia Codd and John Moore in Dublin, He had two younger sisters, Kate and Ellen. Moore showed an early interest in music and performance, staging musical plays with his friends and entertaining hopes of becoming an actor. In Dublin he attended Samuel Whyte's co-educational English grammar school, where he was schooled in Latin and Greek and became fluent in French and Italian. By age fourteen he had had one of his poems published in a new literary magazine called the Anthologia Hibernica (‘Irish Anthology’).
In 1795, Moore was among the first Catholics admitted to Trinity College Dublin, preparing, as his mother had hoped, for a career in law. Moore had not taken the United Irish oath and he played no part in the republican rebellion of 1798.
In 1819, while in Venice, Byron entrusted Moore by sending him the manuscript, which covered his life up to 1816, with the understanding that it would not be published during Byron's lifetime but could be published after his death. Byron later sent Moore additional material to include, bringing the total length to at least 120,000 words. But Moore and the publisher John Murray burned them, presumably to protect Byron. What a loss! Moore later brought out the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), in which he included a life of the poet.
Devika chose the ballad The Lake of the Dismal Swamp by Thomas Moore that depicts a man searching for his lost lover. The poem tells the story of a young man who, after the death of his beloved, believes she is still alive and has retreated to the Dismal Swamp. He ventures into the dangerous swamp in search of her, ultimately perishing there.
In the late 1840s (as the catastrophe of the Great Famine overtook Ireland), Moore's powers began to fail. He was reduced ultimately to senility, which came on suddenly in December 1849. Moore died on 25 February 1852, in his seventy-third year, having outlived his wife, his five children and most of his friends and companions.
He was buried in Bromham churchyard within view of his cottage home, and beside his daughter Anastasia (who had died aged 17), near Devizes in Wiltshire. His epitaph at his St. Nicholas churchyard grave is inscribed with his own verse:
Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee,
The cold chain of silence had hung o'er thee long,
When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee,
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom and song!
Poem Analyis
The ballad The Lake of the Dismal Swamp explores themes of love, loss, and the power of belief, set against the backdrop of the mysterious Dismal Swamp. It tells the story of a man who refuses to accept the death of his beloved and searches for her in the swamp, convinced she is still alive and living on the lake.
The Dismal Swamp, with its dark and forbidding atmosphere, serves as both a physical and metaphorical landscape. It is a place of mystery, danger, and also, in the lover's mind, a place of refuge and reunion. The poem incorporates folklore and legend, with the lover believing his beloved is paddling a "white canoe" on the lake, guided by "fire-fly lamp". This supernatural touch adds to the poem's romantic and melancholic tone.
The central theme is the enduring power of love, even in the face of death. The lover's refusal to accept his loss, and his unwavering belief in their reunion, highlight the depth of his love.
The poem aligns with the Romantic movement's focus on emotion, nature, and the individual's experience, particularly in the face of grief. The somber tone and focus on the sublime aspects of nature are characteristic of Romantic poetry.
The poem follows a ballad structure, with a consistent ABAAB rhyme scheme in each stanza. This structure contributes to the poem's lyrical quality and helps to tell the story in a clear and engaging way. The poem uses alliteration, for example in the line "Long and loving our life shall be," to enhance the musicality and memorability of the verse.
Their love in life was doomed from the poem’s beginning, but in final two stanzas they are reunited through death in their love: The poem’s ending is haunting:
But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp,
This lover and maid so true
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp
To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe!
(Biography sourced mainly from the wiki site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moore)
Geetha
She read stanzas 178 to 186 of Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (CHP) is about a world-weary man who travels around Europe, looking for something to distract him from his melancholy. Childe is a precursor title to one who would become a Knight. The narrative poem is written in Spenserian stanzas of eight iambic pentameters, followed by single alexandrine (6 iambs), rhymed ABAB BCBCC.
CHP is a long narrative poem where the protagonist, Childe Harold, is a character heavily influenced by Byron's own experiences and personality. Harold's travels and reflections mirror Byron's own journeys and disillusionment, making the character a reflection, or even a projection, of the poet himself. Writing in 1818, in his prefatory dedication of the Canto 4 to John Hobhouse, Lord Byron says that CHP “in its complete, or at least concluded state, a poetical work which is the longest, the most thoughtful and comprehensive of my compositions,…”
Harold's disillusionment with life and his desire to escape to foreign lands echo Byron's own feelings of alienation and his decision to leave England. Both find themselves alienated from their surroundings and seeking something more, whether through travel or through the contemplation of nature.
Byron was the ideal of the romantic poet
Byron’s long poem was published in four cantos over a period of six years from 1812 to 1818. Cantos 1 & 2 were published in 1812 and made Byron a popular poet, the 500 copies printed being sold in 3 days, and ten more editions were published over the next three years. The poem's popularity and its depiction of the Byronic hero had a profound impact on European Romanticism. It influenced not only literature but also other art forms, solidifying Byron's legacy and contributing to the cult of the wandering, melancholic hero.
Cantos 3 & 4 were published in 1816 and 1818 respectively. Byron left England in 1816, never to return. Hence Cato 4 was written in Italy. The whole is about 17,000 words long; but Geetha read the 693 words of Stanzas 178 to 186 of the concluding part of Canto 4.
Stanza 178 begins with the assertion –
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
The poet is contemplating the immensity of Nature and the relative inconsequence of humans. This finds expression in Psalm 8:4 in the Bible which expresses the awe and humility a person feels when confronted by the vastness of the universe and God's creation, contrasted with the seemingly small and insignificant nature of humanity:
When I consider thy heavens, the moon and the stars, what is man, O Lord, that thou art mindful of him?
This section of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is at the very end of the poem, after Lord Byron, in the guise of Childe Harold, has traveled throughout the ancient world.
He has just visited several cities in Italy, considered the lives of fellow poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, and the lives of the great leaders of the world. The fourth canto ends with stanzas 179-186, in which the poet addresses the ocean. Nature is symbolic of the freedom and sublimity to which humans can aspire. Understanding comes from visiting civilisations around the world; not to be overwhelmed by the exposure but to seek to learn. The traveller will be changed and can then face the world internally strengthened.
He adverts to the ancient civilisations of Assyria, Greece, Rome, and Carthage,
their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: — not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play —
The ocean, he notes by contrast, remains unchangeable: Childe Harold reflects the poet’s own delight while swimming in the ocean, so joyfully expressed in Stanza 184:
And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubble, onward: from a boy
I wanton’d with thy breakers — they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshing sea
Made them a terror — ’twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
In the penultimate stanza 185 the Childe Harold is closing out his life experiences, realising his task is done, his song is finally coming to an end:
… I am not now
That which I have been — and my visions flit
Less palpably before me — and the glow
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.
The final stanza is the leave-taking by Childe Harold. Wearing sandals as appropriate to a pilgrim he bids farewell and hopes his wanderings, his experiences, and his reflections will have an impact on other pilgrim wanderers to come hereafter.
A critic notes “the poem is about the meaning of freedom in all its forms—personal, political, poetic.” Later in life Byron who always fought for the underdog, took up Greece’s fight against Ottoman oppression and it was in the midst of that he lost his life in Missolonghi, Greece at the head of a ragtag band of soldiers in 1824. The immediate cause was probably sepsis from bloodletting for a fever he caught. For the Greeks he became a national hero, deeply mourned.
It may be recalled that in Aug 2020 at the Romantic Poets session Joe read from Canto 3 of CHP, excerpting the stanzas where the poet remembers his daughter Ada in the midst of the enthralling scenery as he sails along the Rhine river in Germany and Belgium and sees the castles and the craggy hills along the banks.
Joe
The first question posed by this poem by Emily Brontë Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun is who is the ‘you’ in the very first stanza?
… why …
Have you departed, every one,
It returns as ‘your’ in several stanzas after that and ends in a resounding ‘you’ as the very last word.
The answer on a closer reading is: the stars of the night sky, not any lover whom the poet is imagining with closed eyes as she lies on her pillow. It is a romantic poem all right, but not a narrow one focussed on a single person, but on the wondrous lit-up creations we discern in the night sky. Celestial illumination is no longer a reality for us in urban areas, but step out into the countryside and the stars can’t fail to impress even a casual onlooker. And Emily was no casual observer. She drank it all in and made that world come alive in her soul and imagination. For her the contrast between the cool, illuminated night sky, and the burning, brilliant daytime, could not have been more severe. One burns, the other glows at night. The daylight has banished her cherished sight and she cries out:
O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;
O Night and Stars return!
We are swept up by her ardent desire for the pointillist night sky and feel completely one with her. The rapture of her poem has done that to us as we read. She was alive to something gentle that illuminated her soul. Are we?
A Short Life of Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to merchant's daughter Maria Branwell and Irish curate Patrick Brontë in Thornton, Yorkshire, in northern England.
Her mother died when she was three, leaving the children in the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, and aside from brief intervals at school, she was mostly taught at home by her father, Patrick Brontë, who was the curate of Haworth. She was very close to her siblings, especially her younger sister Anne, and together they wrote little books and journals depicting imaginary worlds. She is described by her sister Charlotte as very shy, but also strong-willed and nonconforming, with a keen love of nature and animals. Some biographers believe that she may have had a form of autism.
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Emily Brontë painted by her brother Patrick Branwell
Haworth was a small community with an unusually high early mortality rate on account of unsanitary conditions. This had a serious impact on the health of Emily and her siblings, Anne and Charlotte.
Patrick Brontë was emotionally distant and imposed a number of tough rules on the household. He was prone to violent rages also. The siblings created tiny books for the soldiers to "read", some of which are on display at the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and, in December 1827 they produced a novel, Glass Town.
At 17, Emily joined the Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte taught. The girls' wanted to open a small school of their own. However, Emily left after only a few months. Charlotte ascribed this to Emily's extreme homesickness and resistance to the routine and discipline.
In 1842, when she was 24, Emily accompanied Charlotte to the Heger Pensionnat, a girls' boarding school in Brussels, where they hoped to improve their French and German before opening their own school. In her role as a student teacher, Emily earned her board and tuition by teaching music to the younger girls. Emily was not happy in Brussels; however, Constantin Heger, who was in charge of the academy, thought highly of Emily, and wrote:
“She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.”
By this time, Emily had become a competent pianist and teacher, and it was suggested that she might stay on to teach music. However, the sudden illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, forced their return to Haworth. In 1844, on Charlotte's return, the sisters attempted to open a school at the Parsonage, but the venture failed when they proved unable to attract students to the remote area.
In 1846, the sisters' poems were published in one volume as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The Brontë sisters adopted pseudonyms for publication, preserving their initials: Charlotte was "Currer Bell", Emily was "Ellis Bell" and Anne was "Acton Bell". Charlotte contributed 19 poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed 21. Only two copies of the book sold, but they were not discouraged. A reviewer praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, singling out those 21 poems as the best in the book: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.”
Emily Brontë's contributions to the joint volume represented only a fraction of the nearly two hundred poems collected by C. W. Hatfield in his edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (1941).
Starzyk calls attention to the "beautiful lyrics" of A Day Dream, where the "sustained dialogue of the mind with itself is masterfully executed as the despondent narrator converses with the joyous spirit of nature." Davies considers To Imagination as "that classic, rational and balanced defence of imagination as an alternative faculty to reason." Barker believes that The Prisoner, originally a Gondal poem, is "rightly one of Emily's most famous, as it includes the powerful and intensely emotional description of the captive's vision." C. Day Lewis finds that the effect of the rhythm in Remembrance is "extremely powerful, extremely appropriate" and that "it is the slowest rhythm I know in English poetry, and the most sombre." Roper concludes simply that "the selection that Emily made for 1846 includes some of her best poems."
Emily's last poem, much anthologised, and perhaps the most commented upon, was No Coward Soul Is Mine, written in January 1846. Tom Winnifrith calls it a "fitting culmination of Emily's poetic work," admiring the fineness of its "pantheistic vision"; Starzyk finds that the contradiction in the poem "represents a profound insight into the nature of the universe and man's attempt at finding permanence therein." This creation of a minister's daughter is indeed astonishing for its blunt rejection of orthodox religion –
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's heart, unutterably vain
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
-- coupled with its embrace of a truer and more sustaining omnipresence of God:
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.
…
Novelist Charlotte Brontë was devastated when her sister Emily died from tuberculosis on December 19, 1848, aged 30, in Haworth, Yorkshire, barely 6 miles from where she was born.
Kavita
Kavita read Let Me Go by Christina Rossetti
Poet Bio
Christina Rossetti was an English writer who wrote romantic , religious and children’s poems. She was born in 1830 in London, to Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and a political exile from Vasto, Abruzzo, Italy, and Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician John William Polidori. She had two brothers and a sister: Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers. Christina, the youngest, and a lively child, dictated her first story to her mother before she had learnt to write.
Christina Rossetti – Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Rossetti was educated at home by her mother and father through religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels. Rossetti delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.The influence of the work of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch and other Italian writers filled their home and influenced Rossetti's later writing.
In the 1840s, Rossetti's family faced financial troubles from a deterioration in her father's physical and mental health. In 1843, he was diagnosed with persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis, and started losing his sight. He gave up his teaching post at King's College. He also suffered from depression. Rossetti's mother began teaching to support the family. When Christina was 14, she suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother and her sister became absorbed in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life.
In her late teens, Rossetti became engaged to the painter James Collinson, the first of three suitors. He, like her brothers Dante and William, was a founding member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The engagement ended in 1850 when he reverted to Catholicism. She later became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. A third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she likewise refused.
Rossetti appears as the model for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings.
From 1842 onward Rossetti began writing down and dating her poem. Her first two poems published were Death's Chill Between and Heart's Chill Between, in the Athenaeum magazine in 1848. Rossetti's first commercially printed collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co. in 1862, when she was 31. Dante Gabriel Rossetti became his sister's collaborator and Goblin Market was widely praised by critics, who placed her as the foremost female poet of the day .She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas.
Rossetti kept a wide circle of friends and correspondents. She continued to write and publish for the rest of her life, mainly devotional work and children's poetry. In the years just before her death, she wrote The Face of the Deep (1892), a book of devotional prose. She died in December 1894, aged 60 years.
Let Me Go by Christina Rossetti
In the poem Let Me Go Christina Rossetti expresses the sentiment of accepting a loved one’s death and letting them go peacefully. She sets the stage and states her plea for her own obsequies in the very first stanza:
When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?
It is the sad rituals and the gloom she wants to avert, when the reality is that she is being ‘set free’ by death, at least the truest part of her, her everlasting soul. She speaks from a perspective of near-death to her dear ones to be in sorrow for only a little while and then live their life with joyful memories.
She doesn’t see death as something to be feared, but a grace to be accepted at the end of her earthly loving and knowing people – as the beginning of a new experience of true freedom. Its refrain “Miss me, but let me go”gets repeated in a soothing but insistent way. Repetition is a consistent strategy in poems that wish to get a message across.
The 32 lines are divided into stanzas of 4 lines rhymed ABCB. It uses alliteration in lines such as
Sing no sad songs for me
Her life was often filled with illness and grief. She suffered from Graves’ disease and breast cancer; such physical struggles must have moulded her thoughts on death and eternity.
Let Me Go has been read at some of the most famous memorials and continues as a source of comfort for the mourners, by pointing out the impermanence of life and the eternity of love.
(The bio is partly based on the wiki site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti)
KumKum
An extensive life of Keats has been sketched in the 2017 session of Romantic Poets; readers who are interested may refer to to that session.
The poem In Drear Nighted December was written in December 1817. It is easy to mistake this poem by John Keats for being about a Christmas tree, a familiar image. The line about the tree being “too happy” resonates with the sense of its inevitable decline. The repeated “happy” strikes one as a warning – too much happiness invites trouble, Keats understood.
But midway through the first stanza, the tree vanishes, replaced by a brook – and then, a boy and girl in love. The poem’s clarity and originality is noteworthy. Its inventive diction – like “thawings”, “bubblings”, “forgetting”, “fretting” – and the tight triads of end-rhyme give it a folk-song quality. Keats condenses the description, as in the “sleety whistle” of the wind or the “frozen thawings” of branches unable to bud.
Keats poem – ‘With a sweet forgetting, / They stay their crystal fretting’ … Photograph by Martin Argles
The brook responds serenely to change. Even Apollo’s “summer look” leaves only a “sweet forgetting” in its ripples. Apollo's "summer look" here refers to the radiant, life-giving presence of the sun and warmth associated with the summer season, personified by the Greek god Apollo.
With “petting”, Keats evokes not affection but childish sulking – a reaction the brook resists. In contrast, stanza three turns to human pain. Keats asks if anyone has ever not writhed from fleeting joy. The unusual phrasing – “writh’d not of” – suggests deeper anguish, like an illness we might “die of”.
These lines
The feel of not to feel it,
Where there is none to heal it
capture emotional numbness: memory collides with the void of present loss. The tree and brook were “too happy” because they contrast with the desolate lovers. The poem’s final insight – that such sensations haven’t yet been “said in rhyme” suggests Keats is on to something unique, not said before. It’s an unpretentious poem contributing to the store of human responses to Nature.
John Keats
(The commentary above on the poem is modified from Carol Rumens’ note on https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/02/poem-of-the-week-in-drear-nighted-december-by-john-keats)
Shoba & Priya
Michael by William Wordsworth (excerpts)
Shoba: Lines 1-19, 40–52, 61–77
Priya: Lines 406–425, 450–484
Shoba read the first part where Michael is introduced and we learn about his love for the land. KumKum said she was very pleased he (Wordsworth) was her age, 80 plus – and still vigorous. But his outdoors capability is admirable.
Priya will read further sections and then come to the conclusion of the poem.
The Romantics came after the Augustan period. Augustan poetry was so tight, like it was couplets and iambics and it had so many rules to follow. When you read the poetry of the Romantic period, by contrast, you're excited by the freedom that it allows.
William Wordsworth – Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library
Wordsworth, of course, was the leader, the person who brought in Romantic Poetry, who really made it what it was. His poetic ideas were expressed in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the seminal volume co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They turned away from the structured verse of the preceding Augustan age, an era when metre, rhyme, and themes were rigidly prescribed.
Michael is an experimental poem through which Wordsworth sought to demonstrate the strength of his new poetics. The traditional conception of pastoral poetry was an idealised celebration of the bucolic life of shepherds. Wordsworth delivers the pastoral in simple realistic terms, instead.
Michael belongs to the genre of pastoral poems. Pastoral poems often celebrate the beauty and simplicity of the natural world, particularly the English countryside. In addition to the detailed descriptions of nature, these poems are distinguished by their focus on the lives of ordinary people, and their exploration of the emotional and spiritual connections between humans and the agricultural world they live in. His new poetics are exemplified here. It is all in blank verse.It was about a certain kind of blank verse, a certain kind of imagery also. Nature is really celebrated in pastoral poetry, which is a theme of the romantic movement. In Michael, the cottage – situated on rising ground with a wide view, and bearing the lofty name ‘The Evening Star’ – becomes a symbol; it elevates Michael from a simple Shepard to a to a symbolic figure.
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
You have enjambment, the poetic thought running on from line to line, with is so common now. It just flows from one line to the next line and then stops.
There is another pastoral poem called The Brothers and another called The Ruined Cottage by the same poet.
In Michael, the shepherd lays the unhewn stones of the corner of the sheepfold. That is central, to what inspires him and becomes the theme. It's a very beautiful kind of a scenery, like that in the Ruined Cottage. A dilapidated, roofless hut, cottage, and just four walls and the poet goes there to visit. The Brothers is another pastoral poem where a mariner returns to his village, and meets the priest. He brings the external modern world while here it is the traditional world. The central symbol of the sheepfold – an image of shelter and protection – carries several meanings: it represents the covenant between father and son, a bond of love, an anchor, and also a shield. Its unfinished state at the end of the poem, suggests how fragile is human life and the hope for a better future.
An important theme is urban versus rural, modern versus traditional. In the poem Tintern Abbey, also there is this same contrast.
Priya said it was thanks to Shobha that after reading Michael she went to hear it on YouTube.
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
Michael, is a long poem in blank verse with William Wordsworth assuming the role of our narrator and guide. He leads us steadily on, atop high weathered rocks until a tragic scene strikes where the poet relates the tale of the eponymous shepherd Michael and his only son Luke with intense love and wisdom.
In the YouTube recitation
there is beautiful music of woodwinds and strings as the poem begins. The spoken verse is very well done. This is a third person narrative of the verse with beautiful scenes.
Priya then read the end of the poem. The poem is very long, 490 lines. So, probably as his sister's diary indicates, he was going every now and then to visit that place and listen to the background story, about this Michael and his wife Isabel and their son, Luke. Michael has inherited this land and they live on this beautiful property, a beautiful, simple life. They are in the cottage and she's spinning.
When their son Luke turns 18 Michael comes to know that his nephew has lost a lot of money. As an uncle, he has to help his nephew. Part of his land, which he inherited from his forefathers, must be mortgaged to help his nephew.
Michael the Shepherd
The land is thus taken away. Then, of course, the couple is very sad. They think that now Luke can go to the city, work, earn, and then return with money enough to buy back the land. With so much hope on Luke, they send him. There's a farewell. The parents are alone now. But city life turns Luke into a wastrel. He doesn't earn and save. The parents are very unhappy. Luke comes back, but he's totally unhelpful. And before Luke leaves again, they make him lay a few stones for the sheepfold, hoping it can be completed when he returns. That never happens. The unhewn stones remain there as a marker of dashed hopes. Michael dies a sad man, and so too his wife.
When the poet sees those stones, he can imagine the beautiful valley and the river there, and this place, the completed sheepfold, beautiful meadow and the sound of the bagpipes. It is a wistful, sad story. Sad, but very beautiful.
The oak tree is referred to as the ‘Clipping Tree’ because it serves as the location where the shepherds shear (or "clip") their sheep. Michael is a symbol of the oak tree which will remain. It's a deep story, narrated in simple language. The theme of this is clearly that industrialisation comes at great cost – both for the humans subjected to the environment of industrialised urban areas, and for those left behind on the farms. The crossroads between modernity and rural life starts here.
Readers thanked Shobha for selecting the poem.
Thomo
Thomo read the poem Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi
Life of Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s greatest nineteenth-century poet, was born in Recanati, in the March of Ancona, on June 29, 1798, the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi and Adelaide Antici. His father, a man of letters, possessed a vast library of 20,000 volumes where young Giacomo educated himself. The father was a conservative scholar, but he gambled a lot and he lost a lot of his money. His family was of nobility but was strained for financial resources by the father’s profligacy. The beauty of Recanati’s landscape, with the Adriatic in the distance, nurtured Giacomo’s poetic sensitivity.
Giacomo Leopardi Portrait
Gifted with extraordinary intellect, he mastered modern languages—English, French, German, and Spanish—as well as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He voraciously studied classical texts, philosophy and science in his father's library, translating Homer and composing tragedies by the age of 14.
But he was so immersed in his work that he developed a lot of medical issues leading to his severe physical decline, and spinal deformity; they say it could have been Pott's disease. Relentless study damaged his health; by his early twenties, his body was frail, his back bent, and his eyesight failing. He stood only 4 feet 8 inches tall and was nearly blind by the end of his life. Melancholy dominated his mind, and he grew to hate the monotony of Recanati. In 1819, despairing of confinement, he even drafted a letter to his father announcing plans to flee, though he never sent it.
He was infatuated with his married cousin Gertrude Cassie and maintained a journal, Diario de Amore, inspired by her, which recorded his feelings and observations surrounding his unrequited love for her. This experience also inspired his elegy Il Primo Amore (The First Love).
But if it’s true that affection is so sweet.
Why must it come bearing such pain and sorrow?
…
Born as I was to this life only to weep,
When you, Love, launched on me then your first assault.
…
That flame lives still, and lives that same affection –
And breathes still in my thoughts that lovely image.
Nor found I other joys save in whats holy –
On another occasion, the death of a coachman's daughter, Teresa Fattorini, inspired the elegy, A Silvia:
Silvia, do you remember
the moments, in your mortal life,
when beauty still shone
in your sidelong, laughing eyes,
He never married. Towards the end, he lived with a friend who looked after him.
By his teens he was publishing translations and essays, and at twenty wrote the Ode to Italy and On the Monument of Dante. In 1821 came the Ode to Angelo Mai, though Mai later betrayed his trust by claiming Leopardi’s scholarly emendations as his own.
In November 1822, his parents allowed him to try Rome’s milder climate. But the city’s frivolity repelled him, and though he met distinguished figures like historian Barthold Niebuhr, he rejected offers of advancement that required entering the priesthood. By May 1823, he was back in Recanati, disillusioned.
Giacomo Leopardi – Sempre Caro Mi Fu Quest' Ermo Colle
(Always dear to me was this lonely hill)
His first Canti, published in Bologna in 1824, revealed his mature genius. In 1825, the publisher Stella invited him to Milan to edit Cicero’s works; he later moved to Bologna, which he preferred to other cities. Poor health and unrequited love deepened his gloom, and he returned to Recanati in late 1826, barely able to travel.
In 1827, he moved to Florence, where he published his celebrated Operette Morali, considered a model of Italian prose. Seeking milder weather, he wintered in Pisa, which delighted him, though his fragile health kept him from sustained study. The death of a brother in 1828 drove him back to Recanati, where he wrote the poignant Ricordanze.
In 1830, he returned to Florence, never again to see his family. There he issued a new edition of the Canti and met Antonio Ranieri, who became his closest friend and later, his biographer. In 1831, after an unexplained romantic disappointment, he went briefly to Rome, where his despair deepened, before returning to Florence. Ill health drove him in 1833 to Naples with Ranieri.
Naples’ natural beauty appealed to him, and in these years he wrote the Paralipomeni, philosophical aphorisms, and his greatest work, La Ginestra, a defiant meditation on human fragility and nature’s indifference. By 1836, he seemed to regain some health, but this was short-lived. The cholera epidemic of 1837 filled him with dread. He longed to return to Recanati, but on June 14, 1837, at Capodimonte near Naples, he died suddenly at age 38.
His friend Ranieri saved his body from a mass cholera grave, securing burial for it in the Church of San Vitale on the road to Pozzuoli. Leopardi was short, slight, and pale, with a bent frame, high forehead, blue eyes, and a gentle smile – a fragile figure whose physical weakness contrasted with the immense strength of his intellect and poetic voice.
(The above life is abbreviated from a Gutenberg text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53020/pg53020.txt)
Here are some excerpts from Leopardi’s poem Ricordanze (Memories) where is he is recalling memories from his youth in Recanati – the full poem is 178 lines long:
How many strange imaginings of yore
Your aspect and the stars that near you shine,
Created in my thoughts when 'twas my wont,
In silence wrapped, on verdant sward reclining,
To pass the hours of evening, gazing long
Upon the sky and list'ning to the sound
…
What sweetest dreams inspired me at the view
Of that far-distant sea, those azure mountains,
…
The cherished time of youth escapes, more dear
Than fame or laurels, dearer than the pure
Radiance of day and vital breath
Giacomo Leopardi statue in his hometown Recanati
Thomo bravely read the poem L’Infinito in the original Italian.
Then he provided a translation provided by the AI app, DeepSeek:
The Infinite
Always dear to me was this lonely hill,
and this hedgerow, that hides from view
so much of the farthest horizon.
But sitting here, gazing—I conjure boundless
spaces beyond, unearthly silences,
and deepest quiet, where the heart
almost grows afraid. And as the wind
rustles through these leaves, I match
that infinite silence to this voice:
and there comes to mind eternity,
the dead seasons, the living now,
and its sound. So in this immensity
my thought drowns: and shipwreck
is sweet to me in this sea.
Pretty good.
Lastly Thomo read the Sonnet version translated by Z.G which is given at the wiki location cited above for the poem..
The readers uniformly preferred the Sonnet version because it is more poetic. Thomo was surprised that Deep Seek could generate fairly good stuff. It gives an answer to any question within 20 seconds, he said!
Zakia
Written at Cwm Ellan 1811 by P.B. Shelley
Shelley was born in Sussex in August 1792, the son of an influential lawyer, Timothy Shelley, who in 1815 became a baronet, an inheritable title. Young Shelley saw himself as a revolutionary, an idealist at odds with the establishment; he was called ‘mad Shelley’ by his schoolmates.
When he was still at Oxford University he got engaged to Harriet Grove in October 1810. She was a relative of his uncle who owned Cwm Elan, a large mansion in the Ellan Valley. Shelley’s writings against religious belief, at the University got him expelled from Oxford after only six months. Their engagement was brief, therefore.
The future poet then went to London, where he met another Harriet, Ms Harriet Westbrook, daughter of an inn-keeper. In July 1811, when Shelley was almost 19, he was invited by his uncle to stay at Cwm Ellan. He chose to walk to mid-Wales all the way from the family estate in Sussex. Whilst in Wales he was greatly impressed by the wild and romantic surroundings.
"Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, and valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment. …This country is highly romantic; here are rocks of uncommon height and picturesque waterfalls. I am more astonished at the grandeur of the scenery than I expected. ...I am not wholly uninfluenced by its magic on my lonely walks."
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1782 - 1822) at the age of twelve – artist unknown
He loved to sail in the rapid mountain streams in a short wooden boat and would run along the bank, using a pole to direct his craft, and keep it from shipwreck on the rocks.
Shelley received a letter from Harriet Westbrook while at Cwm Elan, in August 1811, that prompted him to rush back to London to see her. The young couple, aged just 19 and 16, eloped and married in Edinburgh. They went to Dublin for a while, where Shelley distributed revolutionary pamphlets, then returned in April 1812. His fondness for Cwm Elan led the couple to a search for a house in Wales,
Harriet wrote in a letter on their return from Ireland:
"Strange as it may appear, we have been all through North Wales to find a house, but not one presented itself..."
Despite their wide-ranging search, it is curious that they should set their heart on the manor house of Nantgwyllt, only about a mile and a half from Grove’s house. The newly married couple moved into the large house, but their hopes of acquiring the property would fail. They were impressed by the beauty of the property of 200 acres.
Shelley wrote in a letter:
"The house is not yet our own, although we reside here, but will be so in the course of a month. ...This house is large, it will contain seven bedrooms. ...We are now embosomed in the solitude of mountains, woods and rivers - silent, solitary, and old: far from any town; six miles from Rhayader, which is the nearest. A ghost haunts this house, which has frequently been seen by the servants."
He was keen to secure the property, that he found "so eligible an opportunity for settling in a cheap, retired, romantic spot will scarcely occur again".
In June 1812 their hopes of acquiring the house Nantgwyllt collapsed. With the ending of their hopes at Nantgwyllt they went to stay for a few days at Cwm Ellan, then left, never to return. It is clear that they were very happy together at the house which they had hoped to make their home but sadly only for a very short time in the spring and early summer of 1812. Shelley was to abandon his young wife after just two years to live with Mary Godwin. Harriet, desperately unhappy and alone, drowned herself in the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, London, in 1816.
A cwm in Wales
A commentary in the Esdaile Notebook records that Cwm Ellan was near Rhayader in southern Wales, the site of the 10,000-acre estate of Shelley's cousin Thomas Grove. Shelley was at Cwm Ellan on two occasions, in the summer of 1811, without Harriet, and in the spring of 1812, with Harriet. This poem was written on the first of these visits. In it he describes, for instance, an aversion to daylight and a love for night expressed thus:
For day with me, was time of woe
When even tears refused to flow.
It echoes a similar longing in the poem (chosen by Joe above) by Emily Brontë for the dark splendour of the night:
All through the night, your glorious eyes
Were gazing down in mine,
…
Why did the morning rise to break
So great, so pure a spell,
And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek
Where your cool radiance fell?
Something of both the mood and the natural background of Written at Cwm Ellan appears in a comment in a letter by Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener from Cwm Ellan on July 26, 1811:
“Nature is here marked with the most impressive character of loveliness and grandeur, once I was tremulously alive to tones and scenes . . . the habit of analysing feelings I fear does not agree with this . . . Rocks, piled on each other to an immense height, and clouds intersecting them, in other places waterfalls midst the umbrage of a thousand shadowy trees form the principal features of the scenery. I am not wholly uninfluenced by its magic in my lonely walks, but I long for a thunderstorm — ”
The above account is taken from a history of Shelley’s visit to Cwm Ellan:
Read this account for more on Shelley’s life and the Esdaile Notebook (containing Shelley’s youthful poems) from which Zakia chose to read Written at Cwm Ellan.
The Poems
Arundhaty
Address to A Child During A Boisterous Winter Evening by Dorothy Wordsworth
What way does the wind come? What way does he go?
He rides over the water, and over the snow,
Through wood, and through vale; and o’er rocky height,
Which the goat cannot climb, takes his sounding flight;
He tosses about in every bare tree,
As, if you look up, you plainly may see;
But how he will come, and whither he goes,
There’s never a scholar in England knows.
He will suddenly stop in a cunning nook,
And ring a sharp ’larum; but, if you should look,
There’s nothing to see but a cushion of snow,
Round as a pillow, and whiter than milk,
And softer than if it were covered with silk.
Sometimes he’ll hide in the cave of a rock,
Then whistle as shrill as the buzzard cock;
— Yet seek him, and what shall you find in the place?
Nothing but silence and empty space;
Save, in a corner, a heap of dry leaves,
That he’s left, for a bed, to beggars or thieves!
As soon as ’tis daylight tomorrow, with me
You shall go to the orchard, and then you will see
That he has been there, and made a great rout,
And cracked the branches, and strewn them about;
Heaven grant that he spare but that one upright twig
That looked up at the sky so proud and big
All last summer, as well you know,
Studded with apples, a beautiful show!
Hark! over the roof he makes a pause,
And growls as if he would fix his claws
Right in the slates, and with a huge rattle
Drive them down, like men in a battle:
– But let him range round; he does us no harm,
We build up the fire, we’re snug and warm;
Untouched by his breath see the candle shines bright,
And burns with a clear and steady light.
Books have we to read, but that half-stifled knell,
Alas! ’tis the sound of the eight o’clock bell.
— Come, now we’ll to bed! and when we are there
He may work his own will, and what shall we care?
He may knock at the door — we’ll not let him in;
May drive at the windows — we’ll laugh at his din;
Let him seek his own home wherever it be;
Here’s a cozie warm house for Edward and me.
Devika
A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp by Thomas Moore
Written at Norfolk, in Virginia
“They made her a grave, too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
“And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footstep of death is near.”
Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds—
His path was rugged and sore,
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds,
Through many a fen where the serpent feeds,
And man never trod before.
And when on the earth he sunk to sleep,
If slumber his eyelids knew,
He lay where the deadly vine doth weep
Its venomous tear and nightly steep
The flesh with blistering dew!
And near him the she-wolf stirr’d the brake,
And the copper-snake breath’d in his ear,
Till he starting cried, from his dream awake,
“Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake,
And the white canoe of my dear?”
He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright
Quick over its surface play’d—
“Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!”
And the dim shore echoed for many a night
The name of the death-cold maid.
Till he hollow’d a boat of the birchen bark,
Which carried him off from shore;
Far, far he follow’d the meteor spark,
The wind was high and the clouds were dark,
And the boat return’d no more.
But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp,
This lover and maid so true
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp
To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe!
Geetha Stanzas 178 to 186 of Canto 4 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
CLXXVIII
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
CLXXIX
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control
Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
CLXXX
His steps are not upon thy paths, -- thy fields
Are not a spoil for him, -- thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
Anddashestt him again to earth: -- there let him lay.
CLXXXI
The armaments which thunder -- strike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.
CLXXXII
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee --
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: -- not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play --
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow --
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.
CLXXXIII
Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed -- in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime,
Dark -- heaving; -- boundless, endless, and sublime --
The image of eternity -- the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
CLXXXIV
And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubble, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers -- they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshing sea
Made them a terror -- 'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane -- as I do here.
CLXXXV
My task is done -- my song hath ceased -- my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit
The spell should break of this protracted dream,
The torch shall be extinguish'd which hath lit
My midnight lamp -- and what is writ, is writ, --
Would it were worthier! but I am not now
That which I have been -- and my visions flit
Less palpably before me -- and the glow
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.
CLXXXVI
Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been --
A sound which makes us linger; -- yet -- farewell!
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon, and scallop-shell;
Farewell! with him alone may rest the pain,
If such there were -- with you, the mortal of his strain!
Joe Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun by Emily Brontë
Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun
Restored my earth to joy
Have you departed, every one,
And left a desert sky?
All through the night, your glorious eyes
Were gazing down in mine,
And with a full heart's thankful sighs
I blessed that watch divine!
I was at peace, and drank your beams
As they were life to me
And revelled in my changeful dreams
Like petrel on the sea.
Thought followed thought—star followed star
Through boundless regions on,
While one sweet influence, near and far,
Thrilled through and proved us one.
Why did the morning rise to break
So great, so pure a spell,
And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek
Where your cool radiance fell?
Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight,
His fierce beams struck my brow;
The soul of Nature sprang elate,
But mine sank sad and low!
My lids closed down—yet through their veil
I saw him blazing still;
And bathe in gold the misty dale,
And flash upon the hill.
I turned me to the pillow then
To call back Night, and see
Your worlds of solemn light, again
Throb with my heart and me!
It would not do—the pillow glowed
And glowed both roof and floor,
And birds sang loudly in the wood,
And fresh winds shook the door.
The curtains waved, the wakened flies
Were murmuring round my room,
Imprisoned there, till I should rise
And give them leave to roam.
O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;
O Night and Stars return!
And hide me from the hostile light
That does not warm, but burn—
That drains the blood of suffering men;
Drinks tears, instead of dew:
Let me sleep through his blinding reign,
And only wake with you!
Kavita
Let Me Go by Christina Rosetti
When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?
Miss me a little, but not for long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that once we shared
Miss me, but let me go.
For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone.
It's all part of the master plan
A step on the road to home.
When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.
When I am dead my dearest
Sing no sad songs for me
Plant thou no roses at my head
Nor shady cypress tree
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet
And if thou wilt remember
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not fear the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
KumKum
In Drear Nighted December by John Keats.
In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity —
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would ’twere with so many
A gentle girl and boy —
But were there ever any
Writh’d not of passing joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
Where there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
Priya
Michael by William Wordsworth (partial excerpt)
Lines 406–425
Lay now the corner-stone,
As I requested; and hereafter, Luke,
When thou art gone away, should evil men
Be thy companions, think of me, my Son,
And of this moment; hither turn thy thoughts,
And God will strengthen thee: amid all fear
And all temptation, Luke, I pray that thou
May'st bear in mind the life thy Fathers lived,
Who, being innocent, did for that cause
Bestir them in good deeds. Now, fare thee well--
When thou return'st, thou in this place wilt see
A work which is not here: a covenant
'Twill be between us; but, whatever fate
Befall thee, I shall love thee to the last,
And bear thy memory with me to the grave."
The Shepherd ended here; and Luke stooped down,
And, as his Father had requested, laid
The first stone of the Sheep-fold. At the sight
The old Man's grief broke from him; to his heart
He pressed his Son, he kissed him and wept;
And to the house together they returned.
Lines 450–484
There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart:
I have conversed with more than one who well
Remember the old Man, and what he was
Years after he had heard this heavy news.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength. Among the rocks
He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,
And listened to the wind; and, as before,
Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,
And for the land, his small inheritance.
And to that hollow dell from time to time
Did he repair, to build the Fold of which
His flock had need. 'Tis not forgotten yet
The pity which was then in every heart
For the old Man--and 'tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.
There, by the Sheep-fold, sometimes was he seen
Sitting alone, or with his faithful Dog,
Then old, beside him, lying at his feet.
The length of full seven years, from time to time,
He at the building of this Sheep-fold wrought,
And left the work unfinished when he died.
Three years, or little more, did Isabel
Survive her Husband: at her death the estate
Was sold, and went into a stranger's hand.
The Cottage which was named The Evening Star
Is gone--the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood:--yet the oak is left
That grew beside their door; and the remains
Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen
Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyl
Shoba
Michael by William Wordsworth (partial excerpt)
Lines 1-19
If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
Appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones!
And to that simple object appertains
A story-
Lines 40–52, 61–77
Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name;
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence had he learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes,
When others heeded not, he heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
…
So lived he till his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; hills, which with vigorous step
He had so often climbed; which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which, like a book, preserved the memory
Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts
The certainty of honourable gain;
Those fields, those hills--what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself .
Thomo L’infinito by Giacomo Leopardi
The Infinite
This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to flounder in this sea is sweet to me.
Sonnet Translation of L'infinito
I’ve always loved this solitary hill,
I’ve always loved this hedge that hides from me
So much of what my earthly eyes can see.
For as I sit and gaze, all calm and still,
I conjure up my thoughts; my mind I fill
With distances that stretch out boundlessly
And silences that somehow cannot be
Heard by my heart, which feels a sudden chill.
It seems these rustling leaves, this silence vast
Blend into one. Eternity draws nigh.
The present sounds and seasons, those long past
Become one sea of endless lives and deaths.
My thought is drowned, and yet it does not die:
It plunges into sweet, refreshing depths.
(translated by Z.G., with the title "Boundless Depths")
Zakia
Written at Cwm Ellan by P.B. Shelley
1811
When the peasant hies him home, and the day planet reposes
Pillowed on the azure peaks that bound the western sight,
When each mountain flower its modest petal tremulously closes
And sombre shrouded twilight comes to lead her sister Night,
Vestal dark! how dear to me are then thy dews of lightness
That bathe my brow so withering scorched beneath the daybeam's brightness.
More dear to me, tho' day be robed in vest of dazzling whiteness,
Is one folding of the garment dusk that wraps thy form, O Night!
With thee I still delight to sit where dizzy Danger slumbers.
Where 'mid the rocks the fitful blast hath wak'd its wildest
Till beneath the yellow moonbeam decay the dying numbers
And silence, even in fancy's throne, hath seized again the sway.
Again she must resign it, hark! for wildest cadence pouring
Far, far amid the viewless glen beneath the Elian roaring
Mid tongued woods, and shapeless rocks with moonlight summits soaring
It mingles its magic murmuring with the blast that floats away.
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