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Wordsworth Prelude and Coleridge Poems
Wordsworth Prelude and Coleridge Poems
Business
Quiz: Please clear your desks. [Maymester: Response papers due.]
Todays Assignment
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, 188-96; and Book 12, 223-25, lines 208-335; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, 645-50; "Frost at Midnight" 273-75; "Kubla Khan" 254-57; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 238-54. This is two days material in one assignment; we will do what we can, and you can read the rest on your ownits all here in the slide show.
Review
We are tracking the following themes: Imagination Nature Sacred vs. secular
Correspondent Breeze
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. (lines 33-38)
Examples
First spot: going to a place where a guy was hanged in chains and having sexual feelings for a girl. Second spot: Christmas time, father's death "appeared / A chastisement" for his sexual feelings (310-11). POINT: Such ordinary events are what really matters in a persons development. All of WWs common experiences contribute to his maturation. The Child is the father of the Man (from his poem My Heart Leaps Up, page 168).
Group Activity
Consider the stolen boat episode on pages 194-95, starting at line 358. What happens, and what do you make of WW's reaction? What kind of imagery does WW employ here? What is their psychological significance?
Freudian Stuff
Freud holds that one has ambivalent emotions for an action or object (totem object) that is forbidden: i.e., both fear and desire. He also holds that a boy has Oedipal desire for the mate of the father. Both of these ideas come together in the stolen boat episode. Because of guilt, the theft becomes a mere borrowing an act of compromise: Freud says that we do things that resemble but fall short of the actual forbidden act (he takes the mans boat for a ride rather than stealing the boat outright, and both are acts of compromise for taking the mans woman). But the taboo against stealing has been broken, and Freud says that one is infected and becomes himself taboo, hence guilt (WWs bad dreams at line 400) and the development of the superego.
The Upshot
WW has tried out his own masculine authority, and he finds himself out of his depth. Consequently, he suffers guilt for many days, his dreams are troubled, and he represses into the unconscious the inappropriate sexuality that is the latent content of the episode. The result is the development of the superego (the morality principle).
Key concept: "willing suspension of disbeliefconstitutes poetic faith (645); this is especially important because Cols poems are supernatural. Three characteristics of a poem (647):
Meter and/or rhyme. The immediate goal is pleasure (see the pleasure dome in KK). The ultimate goal is intellectual or moral truth. Cf. 648, top par.
Chart
Wordsworth What the eye and ear perceive: mirror. What the eye and ear half create: lamp. See TA, lines 10607. Coleridge Primary imagination
Frost and TA
Frost, line 58-60: so shalt thou see and hear / The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language TA, lines 105: the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,-both what they half create, / And what perceive In both poems, nature stirs the imagination in a constructive way through the agency of sight and hearing.
POINT: Frost was written a few months before TA, so Col may have influenced WW rather than the other way around.
Question
What opposite and discordant qualities do you find in KK?
Questions
1. Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the albatross? See page 241, line 82. Consider Cols phrase in reference to Shakespeares Iago in Othello motiveless malignity. 2. What does killing the albatross signify? 3. How is the A.M. redeemed? See line 286. What does he realize here? Cf. Blake: Everything that lives is holy. 4. What does the Ancient Mariners glittering eye suggest? 5. Why is the church an appropriate setting? Why does the A.M. speak to a wedding guest? 6. What is the moral of the poem? See esp. lines 612-17. See The Eolian Harp on page 237, lines 26-31. 7. Why is the wedding guest sadder but wiser (last stanza)? See Ecclesiastes 1:18 for a possible connection: For in much wisdom is much vexation, / and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. END