Category: Romantics

Essential Terms for Poetry

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hi all,

Here’s a quick post noting how to identify rhythmic meter and a few poetic structures.

Rhythm, Feet and Metre

Rhythm — Pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line

Feet — Units of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.

Metre — Amount of repeated feet in a line

Heteronym — Words that change meaning depending on where the stress is placed.

Two Syllable Rhythms: Iambic, Trochaic, Spondaic, Pyrrhic

Iambic —

  •  ti tum x / = 1 foot
  • Unstressed + stressed (rising metre)
  • Skipping beating, soothing, opening syllables, mimics natural speech

Trochaic —

  • Tum ti / x = 1 foot
  • Stressed + unstressed (falling metre)
  • Abrupt metre, dynamic, opening syllable

Spondaic —

  • Tum tum / / = 1 foot
  • Stressed + stressed (irregular metre)
  • Emphasis, fills metric gaps

Pyhrric —

  • Ti ti x x = 1 foot
  • Unstressed + unstressed (irregular metre)
  • Softening, fills metric gaps

Metre

1 foot = 1 metre = monometer

2 feet = 2 metres = dimeter

3 feet = 3 metres = trimeter

4 feet = 4 metres = tetrameter

5 feet = 5 metres = pentameter

6 feet = 6 metres = heptameter

7 feet = 7 metres = septameter

8 feet = 8 metres = octameter

Catalexis: Incompleteness usually in the last foot of a line in metrical verse; lacking a syllable at the end ( tum ti/ tum ti/ tum ti/ tum ti/ tum)

Poetic Structures

Blank verse. Blank verse is poetry written with a precise meter—almost always iambic pentameter—that does not rhyme.

Free verse. Free verse poetry is poetry that lacks a consistent rhyme scheme, metrical pattern, or musical form.

Epics. An epic poem is a lengthy, narrative work of poetry. These long poems typically detail extraordinary feats and adventures of characters from a distant past.

Narrative poetry. Similar to an epic, a narrative poem tells a story. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” exemplify this form

Pastoral poetry. A pastoral poem is one that concerns the natural world, rural life, and landscapes. These poems have persevered from Ancient Greece (in the poetry of Hesiod) to Ancient Rome (Virgil) to the present day (Gary Snyder).

Sonnet. A sonnet is a 14-line poem, typically (but not exclusively) concerning the topic of love. Sonnets contain internal rhymes within their 14 lines; the exact rhyme scheme depends on the style of a sonnet.

Petrarchan Sonnets have 14 lines, divided into 2 subgroups: an octave and a sestet. The octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA. The sestet follows one of two rhyme schemes—either CDE CDE scheme (more common) or CDC CDC..

Shakespearean sonnets have 14 lines divided into 4 subgroups: 3 quatrains and a couplet. Each line is typically ten syllables, phrased in iambic pentameter. A Shakespearean sonnet employs the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

A Spenserian sonnet is a variation on the Shakespearean sonnet, with a more challenging rhyme scheme: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE

“Miltonic” sonnets are an evolution of the Shakespearean sonnet. They often examined an internal struggle or conflict rather than themes of the material world, and sometimes they would stretch beyond traditional limits on rhyme or length.

Elegies. An elegy is a poem that reflects upon death or loss. Traditionally, it contains themes of mourning, loss, and reflection. However, it can also explore themes of redemption and consolation.

Ode. Much like an elegy, an ode is a tribute to its subject, although the subject need not be dead—or even sentient, as in John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

An ode poem is traditionally divided into three sections, or stanzas:

  1. The strophe. In a Greek ode, the strophe usually consists of two or more lines repeated as a unit. In modern usage, the term strophe can refer to any group of verses that form a distinct unit within a poem
  2. The antistrophe. The second section of an ode is structured the same way as the strophe, but typically offers a thematic counterbalance.
  3. The epode. This section or stanza typically has a distinct meter and length from the strophe and antistrophe and serves to summarize or conclude the ideas of the ode.

Pindaric ode consists of a strophe, an antistrophe that is melodically harmonious, and an epode. Pindaric poems are also characterized by irregular line lengths and rhyme schemes.

Horatian ode consists of two- or four-line stanzas that share the same meter, rhyme scheme, and length. Unlike the more formal Pindaric ode, the Horatian ode traditionally explores intimate scenes of daily life.

Irregular ode. Irregular odes follow neither the Pindaric form nor the Horatian form. Irregular odes typically include rhyme, as well as irregular verse structure and stanza patterns.

Limerick. A limerick is a five-line poem that consists of a single stanza, an AABBA rhyme scheme, and whose subject is a short, pithy tale or description.

Lyric poetry. Lyric poetry refers to the broad category of poetry that concerns feelings and emotion. This distinguishes it from two other poetic categories: epic and dramatic.

Ballad. A ballad (or ballade) is a form of narrative verse that can be either poetic or musical. It typically follows a pattern of rhymed quatrains.

Villanelle. A nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with a highly specified internal rhyme scheme. Originally a variation on a pastoral, the villanelle has evolved to describe obsessions and other intense subject matters,

Byronic Poetry

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello all,

I was looking through my files and found the following files on Byron’s poems ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’ and ‘On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Years.’ Unfortunately, I don’t have an electronic copy of my notes on Skull Cup so I’m afraid, dear readers, that you’ll just have to be content with the two. I hope that they come in useful!

on-this-day-i-complete-my-thirty-sixth-yearDownload
so-well-go-no-more-a-rovingDownload

Wordsworth Annotations

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello all,

In similar thread to my last post, I’m just leaving here some files on Wordsworth’s poetry. Considering that, in the A-level exam, it’s necessary to compare first-generation and second-generation romanticism, it’s important to have a good understanding of Wordsworth as his poetry is particularly adaptable to some of the themes that Shelley and Keats later develop, such as man’s relationship to nature, imagination, and the role of the poet. Wordsworth isn’t just a poet of nature, rather his poems have a great range for comparison.

ode-1Download
early-springDownload
tintern-abbeyDownload

I’ll probably re-upload my notes on the Immortality Ode at a later point as they’re rather sparse at the moment, so make sure to come back for the updated file. This type of content that’s more an offloading of notes will probably be the norm as we progress closer to the exam season.

Still, I hope you’ll find the above useful.

– Tara

Keats Annotations

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello all,

I previously uploaded my annotations for Shelley and below you’ll find links to a set of annotations for each Keats poem in the specification. Unfortunately, my notes for ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are on the OneDrive – now made inaccessible by the recent cyber-attack on the school – so you’ll just have to wait for those, I’m afraid.

on-the-seaDownload
ode-to-a-grecian-urnDownload
ode-on-melancholyDownload

Essential Guide to John Keats

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello everyone,

This week I thought I’d share a breakdown of the ways in which you might approach Keats’s poetry including some essential context on his life, identity, and poetic concepts.

Biography

Keats suffered the death of his father when he was only eight that was then followed by his mother’s disastrous second marriage who then died a year later. He then became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. From his apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he was further exposed to every kind of suffering. His life was trailed by frequent reminders of human mortality that gave the poet a keen sense of mutability – the notion that nothing will last forever.

His education at the Enfield School, under headmaster John Clarke, formed his love of literature with a politics of the liberal intelligentsia, based on dissenting academies that laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.” Unlike Byron or Shelley, his second-generation equivalents, he was not university educated. He still shared their sympathies for the refuge that might be found in poetry. For Keats, literature was a career to be endured, fought for, and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle might offer to humankind in insight and beauty. The pugnacity of one who fought for such a path certainly might be seen in his fighting for entry into literary circles. He and his associates, Leigh Hunt and William Hunt, were given the defamatory name ‘The Cockney School,’ by the Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 (note that this was prior to his publication of his sonnet, On the Sea). This dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and “low diction.”

How Might You Approach Keats’ Poetry?

Some themes of his writings include the nature of poetry and the poet, the opposition between the eternal transcendent moment and the transience inherent to the human condition, and contemporary readings emphasise a politicised, historicised poet, whose work is marked by polarities, irreconcilable oppositions, and above all, doubt. He is often seen as confronting, yet ineluctably failing to reconcile contradictory impulses and desires and being torn apart in this pursuit.

He is considered skeptical of transcendent yearnings, of romantic escapism, and insistent on the need to accept the natural world. There are two main lines of thought considered in such a reading of Keats.

Some critics draw an evolution in his poetic style, tracing a line of development that can be characterized by three key stages.

  1. Aesthetic idealism characterized by an overwhelming awareness of the impermanence, despair, and loss within the human condition and a desire to reach essential, eternal truths through the visionary imagination. Beauty is the sensuous, material embodiment of such transcendent truth – an unknown world seen beyond the world of experience. This is commonly identified with such early work as Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)
  2. Scepticism about the powers of the imagination. We might observe this in his odes of 1819 (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode to Psyche.”) where he considers his early aesthetic ideas with nostalgia, but also doubts born of maturation.
  3. Reconciliation with the human condition, with process and change. He has moved onwards from his yearning for beaty and truth, rather agony is caused by ignorance instead of the inevitability of loss in the human condition. The poet now seeks knowledge. We can associate this stage with his later poems, like the ‘Fall of Hyperion’ wherein the poet’s knowledge of human anguish enables him as physician to the world / contrast this with Shelley’s “The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.”

Instead of a sequential reading following Keats’s progression of thought, others have argued that his career reveals a constant dialectic – that is a discourse of differing points of view about a subject to establish truth. As such, we can identify a few vacillations between polarities, such as:

  • A belief in the imagination and an awareness of its falseness
  • A longing for escapist world of romance and idealism against a skepticism of such self-deceiving idealism
  • Desire for amoral detachment and the desire for a clear, concrete moral position
  • Opening to all sensations and a desire for fixed knowledge
  • Yearning for unchanging truth and beauty and an acceptance of the impermanence of human mortality

Keatsian Concepts

Keats’s thought is speculative, marked by a self-awareness of the creative tensions within it. Unlike Wordsworth, he never preaches or insists upon any singular dogma. When writing a romantics essay, it might be interesting to discuss the progression from the didacticism of the first-generation, where Wordsworth’s poetic persona is quite authoritative, to the dialect of possibilities of the second.

Negative Capability: Keats emphasizes that the artist must remain aloof from a single perspective on life, because the very act of painting life’s intensity is to reveal its fiercely dual nature and the precariousness of all attempts to fix or rationalize it: “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Imagination and Transcendence:

In a letter of 22 November 1817 in which Keats responds to Benjamin Bailey’s doubts about the effects of the imagination.

“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea in all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

Keats suggests that there is some essential, unchanging beauty and truth that can only be tapped into through the imagination. The imagination provides a link between the real and the ideal – through this portal, we may transcend our ‘mortal bars’- the chains of human mortality – to have a transcendent vision of an immortal existence. The transcendent experience that Keats observes is not necessarily positive but often debilitating and his poems reveal the movement from vision to loss, from rapture to disillusionment. In the maturation of his Keats’ treatment of imagination, he realises that the transcendent vision, when it fades, makes human life only more unbearable by emphasising the despair and misery inherent to the human condition. Imaginative vision may be, through all, a cheat or tragic evasion of the real world. The real is not changed, simply evaded.

Camelion Poet:

The Keatsian concept of the ‘Camelion poet’ is based on the assumption that poetry should emerge from disinterested, amoral, selfless contemplation of a poet absent from his work. This is in opposition to the poet of ‘Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ that forces his philosophy on the reader in didactic imposition. This involves using his imagination to modify and create and allows the self to obtrude upon the poetry.

In his letters, he describes his feelings on the subject: “For the sake of a few imaginative or domestic passages […] are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.’

Nature

By 1815, Keats was increasingly excited by the new modern poetry of Wordsworth for its naturalism and direct appeal to the secular imagination – in his poetry, he finds imaginative refuge in the natural world. However, unlike Coleridge or Keats, he did not find a moral philosophy within nature nor did he evoke the powers of nature as an alternative to the city – this may have been in part due to his early medical training. Keats tends to see nature as something specifically cultivated and arranged for display.

Poetic Style

The following is a series of ideas and descriptions of Keats’s poetic style and sentiments of the second-generation.

  • The pejorative, “Cockney School” foregrounded the offense that the lower-class might enter the literary establishment. Keats was personally accused of “low diction” for rhyming “thorns/fawns” in “Sleep and Poetry” and other rhymes which suggested a working-class speech (link Wordsworth’s invocation of a verse based on the ordinary language “really used by men?”).
  • Keats wrote that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” / Compare with Wordsworth’s quotation “poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” 
  • Highly sensual – tastes, smells, sounds and feelings are the basis of condensed images of his poetry; see the auditory effects in ‘On the Sea.

Imagination

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hi all,

For this week’s post, I’ve typed up an old essay (introduction and first paragraph rather) on the role of the imagination in Shelley’s poetry. Although not a full essay, it was awarded 29/30 for its perceptive analysis and excellent context.

In his poems, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘The Question,’ Shelley presents imagination as the realisation of the actions and passions of one’s internal being. Whilst Shelley recognises nature’s power as a unique sublime entity, much in the same manner as the first-generation Romantics, he rejects a Wordsworthian understanding that humanity and nature are complementary elements of a whole, that man is a part of nature and that refuge can only be sought from this unity. Rather, for Shelley, where nature wields dual forces of both destruction and beauty, man will find no reassurance in this response. Instead, by rejection of the self-justifying idealism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley’s poetry embodies the very era of his upbringing, following on from the revolutions, in its significant contradictions and tensions in regard to the ardent optimism of the first generation that would eventually wane with the arrival of the 19th century. Shelley, in his poetry, emphasises that only imagination – the source of all artistic desires – can enable creation.

Shelley interrogates the sublime response of the individual to his natural environment when exposed to an interchange of both destructive and renewing forces. In ‘The Question,’ he alludes to metaphysical forces at work in the gothic imagery of the “starry river,” “oak that overhung the edge” and “moonlight beams” – a supernatural state that almost centers on a pantheistic display of nature. Here, the reader becomes conscious of the sheer impermanency of this world in stanza 4 by alluding to the sublime with the syndetic listing in tandem with the long drawn-out syllables of the /ee/ sound around the “dazzled eye” conveying astonishment and confoundment at the peace that can be found in this “moonlight scene.” This natural macrocosm holds a sense of sublime authority over Shelley’s imagination, although he is struck by the spiritual power of it, there is also something distinctly unattainable about this realm. Even within its structure, as a loose adaptation of Canto 28 of Dante’s Purgatorio attributes a quasi-divine quality to the terrors invoked by the sublime. However, extending this reading to Shelley’s explorations of atheism, the religious response would appear almost irrelevant and meaningless in face of the “secret strength of things,” rather he suggests a mere nothingness and existential void that might “overhang the edge” of human life. In this, Shelley reflects upon the Romantic dialect of beauty and first first marked out by Edmund Burke in the “Origins of our Ideas on the Sublime” which proposed that the effects and terror were more effective beauty. Indeed, this reaction becomes most evident in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” with apostrophe to the “West Wind” of antithetical ideals that appeal to both the violence and creation of nature’s passage in scattering his voice over the course of the universe in hope that he might bring about revolutionary change, typical of the Romantic notion of the Romantic poet. As consequence, there would be no need for conflict that was produced in overthrowing power structures, as in the French Revolution and Haitian Revolution. Further in the poem, the refrains become increasingly anxious, more desperate, even calling into question whether humans can fundamentally communicate with nature, implicit in the parallel structures of the conditionals (such as “If I were a dead leaf” and “If I were a cloud,”) that underlines his urgency. This uncertainty is strengthened by the restraint of the metrical regularity of the iambic pentameter by the sudden strictness of form where previously this lyricism had created a sense of Shelley’s desire to be harmonious with nature as a poet. Still, in the final line, there is a remnant of optimism with the rhetorical question, “O wind, if winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” that might allude to the increasing conservatism of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their old age. Shelley may be using this seasonal change to signal a turn in Romantic thought from the first-generation of Romantics that in their retreat into nature, fantasy, and the subjective life had evaded any direct social engagement. Shelley calls upon his readers to accept the challenge of transcendence by observing the natural world and from this, derive social change from poetic truth in order to create the social and political transition that the Romantics so coveted.

Shelley Annotations

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello all,

Below I’ve attached a set of annotations on Shelley’s poems in addition to some general context that might be useful to employ in essays and supplement your notes.

shelleyDownload

UPDATE: I’ve converted the above file into a PDF to make it easier to read. I recognise that the annotations are quite small and messy so you’ll just have to do your best to zoom into the file.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Context

flynnta16Leave a comment

Hello all,

This will be a quick post detailing some essential contextual points that you can use in your romantics essays to improve your AO3 marks.

Radicalism

  • Much like Blake, Shelley saw injustice as linked in being inseparable from oppressive systems that had to be uprooted: “Let the axe/strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall.’
  • Ardent concern for social improvement (see interest in Irish liberation) — “A passion for reforming the world.”
  • Attacked tyranny and power, something that would recur within his works like Prometheus Unbound. Related political issues included aristocracy, militarism, labour, poverty, money, and law. He had an acute sense of the inequalities promoted by a system based on financial competition.
  • In the notes to his poem Queen Mab, he attacks wealth as “A power usurped by the few, to compel the many to labour for their benefit.” He denounced merchants and bankers as “A set of pelting wretches.”
  • However, he does not entirely attribute blame to the social system. Like Blake, he saw a dialectical relationship between individual psychology and society. Individualism and ignorant selfishness, “at once/ The cause adn effect of tyranny” would perpetuate the very conditions within which the individual suffers.
  • This is backed up with his identification of human labour as the source of all wealth — thinking in line with the analysis offered by Karl Marx only a year later!
  • Shelley intrudes a reminder of how alienated from natural liberty and equality human beings have been and continue to be, warning the reader that idealism should not be separated from a keen awareness of social injustice and the obstacles to progress.

Natural World

  • Shelley speculates on the relationship between the individual mind and external perceptions, exploration of the mind as a channel itself for hidden ‘influencings.’ This speculation anticipates the modern view of the mind as an irrational entity over which the individual has no control and as interconnected with the surrounding environemn in ‘unremitting interchange.”
  • Sublime awe embodies the Romantic dialect of beauty and fear first marked out by Edmund Burke in his his essay, ‘A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful” which proposed that the effects of teror and fear were more powerful than simple beauty.
  • In reply to Wordsworth’s religion of nature, Shelley expresses a radical scepticism, extending explorations of atheism and invoking an uncertainty about existence that can be detected in ambiguous expressions. He interrogates the grim and wilderness of nature, senses their power but feels no contact or reassurance.
  • For Shelley, the sublime response derives from a sense of ‘sights’ and ‘sounds’ in the extreme elemental landscape. The religious response seems almost irrelevant and meaningless in the face of “secret Strength of things,” suggesting there is a mere nothingness and existential void.

Second-Generation Romanticism

  • Shelley was born in 1792, the year in which the French revolution entered the phase of terror that led the first-generation Romantics, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, to retreat into self-justifying idealism. They turned to nature, fantasy, mythology, the subjective life, visionary importance of the poet; the consequences of this evasion of direct social engagement were a sense of guilt, betrayal and self-accusation.
  • Shelley’s generation felt betrayed by the increasing conservatism of the great poets that they had admired in youth, particularly Wordsworth. Both Byron and Shelley wrote savage satirical critiques of him, Shelley in his parody Peter Bell the Third.
  • Shelley’s early life coincided with a period of repression during which the English government did its best to stamp out radicalism, suppressing popular dissent, and legislating laws which left writers in fear of prosecution for treason.
  • The age of his upbringing was thus one of significant contradictions and tensions with regard to the ardent optimism of the first generation that would eventually wane.

Religion

  • Shelley opened his campaign to promote radical thought with an opening epigram from Enlightenment rationalist Voltaire’s assault on Christianity, ‘Crush that infamous thing,’ a dictum adopted by revolutionary French Jacobins of the 1790s.
  • In March 1811, he published his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, a rationalistic exposé of organised religion in radical tradition of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, advocating for outright atheism.
  • Whilst critical of orthodox or established religions, Shelley nevertheless had a vivid sense of the living cosmos, and this was informed by his scientific interests. Some see him as the most ethereal of the romantic poets, but he is also the most elemental and material.
  • His works are saturated with his enthusiasm for science, ancient and modern — closely allied to his commitment to social change. His views are inseparable from his sense of geological evolution and upheaval. For example, Prometheus Unbound expresses ideas of of social revolution through his favourite imagery of volcanic eruption. This adds intellectual precision to his imagery.

Personal Life

  • He eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook and they went off to Ireland “to forward as much as we can the Catholic emancipation.” He was certain he could liberate the Irish from their colonial subjection to England.
  • Vegetarian
  • Suicide of the abandoned Harriet Westbrook in 1815.
  • During his second marriage, Shelley was continually attracted to other women and his relationship with Mary was increasingly dislocated by the early deaths of their children.

Gender and Sexuality

  • He had a keen understanding, in a similar thread to Blake, that like oppression, freedom is indivisible.
  • His repeated attempts of living a utopian communal lifestyle frequently broke down in upset.
  • Shelley believed in the interconnectedness of oppressions, social, personal, sexual and psychological. In the same though as Rousseau and Tom Paine, Shelley believed evil to be a product of social inequality, rather than original sin.
  • Attacked prostitution, “Even love is sold.” He also criticised marriage as ownership, conjugal rights as slavery, and advocates free love.

Simple

alezeditor1 Comment

Alex here. Just popping back in from beyond the veil. The rumours are true: I was halved by a deliveroo driver (carrying a cabbage?) on my way to lectures one morning. Oh well. I couldn’t escape consequence forever – but I don’t have long, so I better send you this now…

Attached is an essay comparing ‘The Sick Rose’ by Blake (he didn’t make it, by the way) and ‘She Dwelt…’ by Wordsworth. Whilst the poem by Wordsworth may well be unfamiliar, widening your knowledge of Romanticism as you read up on ‘The Sick Rose’ (which I do so hope is familiar) can do no harm.

Apparently there are some ‘tantalising’ moments here, though I was beneficially critiqued for often breaking the argument’s flow to force in those oh so golden Romantic buzzwords whom have proven themselves fake-friends since the end of Year 13. Hopefully such a vice has been eradicated. Well. That’s my time. Try your hardest to forget me.

‘Consider the uses to which ideas of ‘the simple’ have been put in these two poems.’

Throughout both The Sick Rose by Blake and ‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways…’ by Wordsworth, the poets mask the hidden complexities of their work through the simple (meaning in tandem ‘unsophisticated’, ‘lacking ornamentation’, ‘commonplace’ and ‘modest’[1])  in order to reflect the delicately intricate mundanity of life. Harnessing preindustrial images, the Romantic poets capture both an atavism whilst satirising contemporary sexual immorality and materialistic gain. Ultimately, Wordsworth and Blake use ideas of ‘the simple’ to make stark how far from what they deem as the natural state of being mankind has fallen.

Firstly, both The Sick Rose and Dwelt are short, spanning respectively two and three stanzas with relatively short lines, and discuss topics bound by natural surroundings. Roughly trimetric, Blake’s poem looks ostensibly simple: end rhymes every second line, often freely arhythmic, occasionally iambic, occasionally trochaic. Every structural aspect points to a liberally penned text, emancipated from the iambic strictures that push Wordsworth into the contraction ‘th’untrodden’ in his poem’s first stanza. Both Blake’s freedom and Wordsworth’s contemporarily unremarkable meter, however, suggest the discussion of simple subjects, particularly in the ordinary sense for Dwelt. Hence, their structure certainly puts the content of each poem ‘into the simple’. The natural setting of the poems is seemingly mundane, just like the character of Lucy, compared to ‘a violet […] half-hidden from the eye’. The compound adjective ‘half-hidden’ begins to reveal that something other than eremitism is at play, shrouded by the ‘mossy stone’ (perhaps her gravestone), suggesting that something of her remains after death. This is enforced by the folkloric sense allotted to the poem by Wordsworth’s choice not to name her until the final stanza – she remains nebulous and universal. This remnant appears to be outside of even the poet’s understanding, being ‘unknown’ to him. Not only does he view this remnant as ‘unknown’, but the narrator too is shown to be completely accepting of this conceptual boundary in the final line (‘the difference to me’), perhaps an acknowledgement that he stood no chance at ever fully comprehending her simplicity. Therefore, the quiet simplicity of Lucy’s life, synecdochic of a return to preindustrial life as shown by her synonymity with ‘a violet’, representative of modesty, is too complex for her biographer to quite fathom. Of these Wordsworth is clearly cognisant, fascinated and content with the boundary of his human knowledge, as shown by the consistent reference to the mysterious (‘the unknown’ and ‘the untrodden’). Compressed by the poet into particulate details like ‘a violet’ and ‘a star’, Lucy’s abstract and now intangible existence is likened to nature’s cycle, marking the mystery with which Wordsworth is invested as living alongside preindustrial wonders. More so is the poem captured by the rhythm of nature than the spawling cityscapes of the new world. Bound both by unsophisticated, primitive environments and unornamented structures, Dwelt is lost for words in its effort to grasp ‘the simple’.

Just as Wordsworth emblemises Lucy through a flower, so too does Blake use a ‘Rose’ to act in the place of the feminine. Moving beyond the literal invasion of a rose by the insipid ‘invisible worm’, the severe tone enriched by Blake’s use of the otherwise hyperbolic description of ‘dark secret love’, as well as the introduction of the masculine pronoun ‘his’ in the second stanza, suggests that the diseased ‘Rose’ and the phallic ‘worm’ are allegories for an unequal and sexual relationship between a woman and a man. Thus, unlike the employment of the natural world as a setting in which Wordsworth can depict a reversion to preindustrial life, Blake acquires commonplace nature as an agent of his social critique, educating his readership on how ordinary the spread of sexually transmitted infections had become, unbeknownst to the wives whose husbands brought them back from the brothel.  Blake elevates the ostensibly simple, therefore, to reflect the socially widespread through prosopopoeia. It is also interesting to note that both poets’ reduction of the female in their poems to flowers, symbols of delicacy and beauty, reflects too the movement of the complex into ‘the simple’. In this light, the poets’ multifaceted abstraction and concretion as ‘Lucy’ and the women possibly symbolised by the ‘Rose’ are torn between allegorical embodiments of atavism or the victims of infidelity and forceless, fragile plants. In Dwelt, this seasonal fragility, coupled with the image of the ‘mossy stone’, evokes more the easing wilt of mankind from birth to eternal sleep, but also the return of such beauty on the advent of Spring. Just like the ‘violet’, humankind is subjugated by the turning of nature from life to death. Consequently, Wordsworth draws on the ordinary to hastening a revival of the simple past spent alongside nature, knowing that the complexity of new industrialism will one day wither too, speaking to the transience of humans who ‘cease to be’ and the permanent natural world that remains ‘fair as a star’, striking and unchanging.  

In The Sick Rose, the concretion of the feminine into a delicate flower, unlike with the ‘violet’, renders Blake’s diagnosis far starker. This ‘Rose’ seems not to be merely withering, but, as implied by the Romantic’s decision to begin the poem with his bleak judgement, unrecoverably ‘sick’ before the male presence is even established. From this angle, the ‘Rose’ is no longer representative of the victimised female alone, but seems also act as an insignia of England, the national flower of the country. This in turn broadens the consequence of sexual immorality to one endangering the whole of society, rather than the young wives of deceitful adulterers, particularly once the ‘invisible worm’ is considered to be an allusion to the snake of Genesis’ third chapter in this Edenic garden setting. Not only is The Sick Rose allegorical, but also typological. Just as Wordsworth prophesises the eventual end of the Industrial Revolution through means of his purely natural poem, Blake alludes to the Fall of Man to call in an end to equally deceitful infidelity within marriage and what man has made of England. Reflecting on the depictions of worms in Acts 12:23-24[2] and the apocalyptic third and fourth line of his poem, the ‘worm’ becomes a possible agent of divine will, bringing judgement upon a fallen nation, typified by the ‘sick Rose’, beset with abject poverty and swelling pollution. Aligning with Wordsworth’s understanding that death makes way for new life, Blake’s analogue of the New Testament and decision to frame his satire in a garden clarifies his belief that God will find a way to restore His order on earth by way of uprooting the impure and morally ‘sick’. Therefore, Blake shifts his didactic message of restoration onto the simplistic archetypes of the ‘worm’ and the ‘Rose’ in order to define starkly his understanding of the complexities of divine will.  

Wordsworth and Blake, in framing their educative verdicts within simplistic settings and poetic structures, uncover dually the complexity of nature and the brevity of human life once placed alongside nature. Placing their complex social critiques concerning sexual and industrial deviance from the world both poets grew up in, with Blake himself experiencing a population growth of one to six million in his time, ‘into the simple’, the poets make stark the fallen nature of humankind whilst keeping in mind their desire for reversion.

[1] “simple, adj., n., adv., and int.”. OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/179955?rskey=ifpM0V&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed November 07, 2022).

[2] ‘Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him [Herod] down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last. But the word of God increased and multiplied.’

I hope this helped – if even a little bit :).