Romanticism

William Blake
Blake's poetry is difficult because of his use of complex symbols. His language and syntax
are fairly simple. He often adopts an apparently naive style, wich is typical of ballads,
children's songs and hymns. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) were intended
by Blake to be read together

Tyger
The 'Tyger' is a symbolic tiger which represents the fierce force in the human soul. It is
created in the fire of imagination by the god who has a supreme imagination, spirituality and
ideals. The anvil, chain, hammer, furnace and fire are parts of the imaginative artist's
powerful means of creation.
It is six quatrains, four-line stanzas rhymed AABB, so that they are each made up of two
rhyming couplets.
fearful symmetry: In other words, he questions the creation of evil by God, when God is
supposed to create only beauty and perfection.
The main theme of William Blake's poem "The Tyger" is creation and origin. The speaker is
in awe of the fearsome qualities and raw beauty of the tiger, and he rhetorically wonders
whether the same creator could have also made "the Lamb"

The tones of "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" are strikingly different; Blake uses dark, powerful
imagery to create an awed tone in "The Tyger" whereas the tone of "The Lamb" is gentle
and crooning. The organization of "The Tyger" and "The Lamb" is different as well.

The Lamb
The main theme of the poem "The Lamb" by William Blake is praise for specific qualities of
Jesus Christ and His gifts to humanity. In the first stanza, Blake asks the lamb if it knows
who gave it life, soft wool, and a tender voice.
This poem has a simple rhyme scheme: AA BB CC DD AA AA EF GG FE AA. The layout is
set up by two stanzas with the refrain: "Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who
made thee"

William Wordsworth
Wordsworth was called by Shelly “Poet of nature”. He, too, called himself “A Worshiper
of Nature”. ... The purpose of this essay is to study his source of forming such a lyrical style
and the process he expressed his ideal in singing highly of the nature to show my respect
towards him.
William Wordsworth is generally acknowledged as the father of Romantic poetry, he spent
his life quietly in English Lake District, writing passionate poetry inspired by the beautiful and
lonely countryside
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) Theme of Happiness. "I wandered lonely as a
Cloud" is a poem that just makes you feel good about life. It says that even when you are by
yourself and lonely and missing your friends, you can use your imagination to fine new
friends in the world around you.
"I wandered lonely as a Cloud" has a fairly simple form that fits its simple and folksy theme
and language. It consists of four stanzas with six lines each, for a total of 24 lines. The meter
is iambic tetrameter, which just means that each line has four ("tetra") iambs
Personification/Metaphor: Comparison of daffodils to a crowd of people (lines 3-4).
Alliteration: Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Personification/Metaphor: Comparison
of daffodils to dancing humans (lines 4, 6). The poem contains four stanzas of six lines
each.
In the first line Wordsworth uses personification and simile: 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'.
A cloud can obviously not wander or feel lonely - these are human attributes or actions. ...
A large number of the daffodils seem to be dancing, celebrating their freedom and being in
nature (natural).
This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits
the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare,
musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet’s wandering and his
discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him
when he is lonely, bored, or restless.

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

- Tintern Abbey” is composed in blank verse

Published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, this poem is widely considered to be one of

Wordsworth's masterpieces. It is a complex poem, addressing memory, mortality, faith in
nature, and familial love.
- The poem's structure is similarly complex, making use of the freedom of blank verse
(no rhyming) as well as the measured rhythm of iambic pentameter (with a few
notable exceptions). The flow of the writing has been described as that of waves,
accelerating only to stop in the middle of a line (caesura). The repetition of sounds and
words adds to the ebb and flow of the language, appropriately speaking to the ebb and
flow of the poet's memories.
- Divided into five stanzas of different lengths,

- the poem begins in the present moment, describing the natural setting. Wordsworth
emphasizes the act of returning by making extensive use of repetition: "Five years
have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! and again I hear /
These waters..." He also uses the phrase "once again" twice, both times in the middle
of a line, breaking the flow of the text. It is in this manner that the reader is introduced
to the natural beauty of the Wye River area.

- In the second stanza, Wordsworth departs from the present moment to describe how
his memories of the scene inspired and sustained him over the past five years. Life
away from nature is described as being "in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns
and cities." Meanwhile, nature is described with almost religious fervor: Wordsworth
uses words such as "sublime," "blessed," and "serene." Wordsworth refers to a
 "blessed mood" twice, emphasizing his spiritual relationship with nature. Interestingly,
while Wordsworth uses many words related to spirituality and religion in this poem,
he never refers to God or Christianity. It seems that nature is playing that role in this
poem, especially at the end of the second stanza, when Wordsworth describes a sort of
transcendent moment:Nature, it seems, offers humankind ("we") a kind of insight
("We see into the life of things") in the face of mortality ("we are laid asleep").
Wordsworth lays emphasis on the last line by making it only eight syllables (four
iambs) long, as opposed to ten.

- In the third stanza, Wordsworth returns to the present and acknowledges that his faith
might be in "vain," but reiterates how important his memories of this landscape have
been to him, addressing the river directly: "O sylvan Wye!" As in many of his other
poems, Wordsworth personifies natural forms or nature as a whole by addressing them
directly (apostrophe).

Wordsworth seems to value this period of his life, and remembers it with a somewhat
nostalgic air, although he admits that in this simpler time ("The coarser pleasures of my
boyish days"), he was not so sophisticated as he is now. In the present, he is weighed down by
more serious thoughts. He alludes to a loss of faith and a sense of disheartenment. This
transition is widely believed to refer to Wordsworth's changing attitude towards the French
Revolution. Having visited France at the height of the Revolution, Wordsworth was inspired
by the ideals of the Republican movement. Their emphasis on the value of the individual,
imagination, and liberty inspired him and filled him with a sense of optimism. By 1798,
however, Wordsworth was already losing faith in the movement, as it had by then
degenerated into widespread violence. Meanwhile, as France and Britain entered the conflict,
Wordsworth was prevented from seeing his family in France and lost his faith in humanity's
capacity for harmony. Wordsworth turns to nature to find the peace he cannot find in
civilization.

Wordsworth goes on to describe a spirit or a being connected with nature that elevates his
understanding of the world:

This "presence" could refer to God or some spiritual consciousness, or it could simply refer to
the unified presence of the natural world. In the interconnectedness of nature, Wordsworth
finds the sublime harmony that he cannot find in humankind, and for this reason he
approaches nature with an almost religious fervor:

In this key passage, Wordsworth outlines his understanding of consciousness. Like other
Romantic poets, Wordsworth imagines that consciousness is built out of subjective, sensory
experience. What he hears and sees ("of all that we behold... / of all the mighty world/ Of eye
and ear") creates his perceptions and his consciousness ("both what they half-create, / And
what perceive"). The "language of the sense"--his sensory experiences--are the building
blocks of this consciousness ("The anchor of my purest thoughts"). Thus, he relies on his
experience of nature for both consciousness and "all [his] moral being."

In the last stanza, Wordsworth returns to the present to address his sister Dorothy, and
explains that like his memory of this natural place, her presence offers a kind of continuity in
his life. Although he experiences anxiety about his own mortality, the idea that Dorothy will
remember him and remember this moment after his death comforts him. Dorothy offers
continuity because Wordsworth sees himself in her (Dorothy was also a poet and the two
spent a great deal of time together), literally seeing his "former pleasures in the shooting lights
/ Of thy wild eyes." Wordsworth sees that Dorothy experiences the Wye with the same
enthusiasm as he did five years earlier. Moving into a discussion of the future, he hopes that
Dorothy's memories of this landscape will sustain her in sad times the way they sustained
him, and offers up a "prayer" that this will be the case:

Again, Wordsworth addresses nature with a sort of spiritual faith without actually citing God
or religion. Instead, he focuses entirely on nature and on Dorothy.

In the last lines of the poem, Wordsworth creates a sort of pact between Dorothy, the natural
environment, and himself, as if trying to establish and capture the memory of this precise
moment forever:

With these words, Wordsworth creates a beautiful illustration of the mechanics of memory.
Not only does he want to remember this moment in this beautiful landscape, but he also wants
Dorothy to remember how much he loved it, and how much more he loved it because he knew
that she would remember it too. Thus, nature is not only an object of beauty and the subject of
memories, but also the catalyst for a beautiful, harmonious relationship between two people,
and their memories of that relationship. This falls in line with Wordsworth's belief that nature
is a source of inspiration and harmony that can elevate human existence to the level of the
sublime in a way that civilization cannot.

Although the poem is often referred to simply as "Tintern Abbey," this is misleading because
the poem is actually located "a few miles" away! At the time the poem was written, Tintern
Abbey was already just the ruins of a gothic cathedral--a stone shell with no roof, carpeted
with grass. Although it is a romantic image, it is not the subject of the poem.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge

- Petrarchan Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter
- He used the exclamation point ( !)wich is a terminal punctuation mark in English and
is usually used at the end of a sentence with no extra period. It can turn a simple
indicative or declarative sentence into a strong command or reflect an emotional
outburst. It can also indicate rhetorical questions
- features a speaker looking at London just as the sun rises. In the still of the morning,
the city sleeps, and the wonders of nature are temporarily highlighted.
- What is strange about this poem is that Wordsworth, a Romantic poet who focussed
so much on the beauty of Nature and the countryside, takes as his topic the city of
London and treats it with a distinctly Romantic flavour. This sonnet praises the quiet
and shimmering beauty of London in the light of an early morning. Throughout the
poem Wordsworth uses personification to present the city and its houses and so on
as humans, emphasising the peace of tranquility of his view:
- The theme of this poem thus seems to be that cities can inspire similar feelings of
"calm so deep" as Nature can, and in the final line, Wordsworth uses a paradox to
present us with a final image of tranquility and silence:
- Of course, hearts by their very nature never lie still, yet from his viewpoint,
Wordsworth is able to imagine the "heart" of the country, London, "lying still" as he
savours the peace and relaxation that the sight gives him. Such a poem allows us to
see that Romanticism does not exclusively focus on Nature, and that similar themes
can be found in poetry describing cities, which were normally seen as the anithesis of
the simplicity and beauty to be found in nature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A friend to poet William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of the English Romantic
Movement. His best known poems are "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan,"
the latter of which was reportedly written under the influence of opium

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The poem is based on the theme of sin and redemption. After the ancient mariner commits
a sin by killing the albatross, guilt hounds him in the form of strange natural and supernatural
phenomena. During one terrifying experience, he has a change of heart and repents his
wrongdoing.
In Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is cursed because he has
killed the albatross, showing a criminal disregard for a creature of nature. Everyone on the
ship is cursed (the mariner because he killed the bird—and the crew that eventually
condoned his action). Their sentence is death.

Kubla Khan
- Kubla Khan Theme of Man and the Natural World. The interaction between man and
nature is a major theme for Coleridge. It's painted all over "Kubla Khan," as we go
from the dome to the river, and then from the gardens to the sea. Sometimes he's
focused on human characters, sometimes on natural forces.
- Analysis. The speaker of the poem describes Xanadu, the stately pleasure dome, the
palace of Kubla Khan. ... A power of dreams and imagination is seen throughout
Coleridge's poem. In fact, it is believed that the most fantastical world created by
Coleridge is that in Kubla Khan
- Definition of pleasure dome. : a place of pleasurable entertainment or recreation :
resort.
- Definition of Xanadu. : an idyllic, exotic, or luxurious place.
- The Dome. The speaker seems fascinated by the symbol of Kubla Khan's "pleasure-
dome" and repeats the imagery at different points throughout the poem.
The dome can be seen as symbolizing the act of creating a poem itself
- Romantic poem : One thing to associate with Romanticism is a focus on nature.
- Even though there is a river ALPH in Antarctica, the river mentioned in Samuel T.
Coleridge's poem, “Kubla Khan,” is fictional and represents the power, force and
excitement of the natural world. It also represents movement

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the epic poets of the 19th century and is best known for his
classic anthology verse works such as Ode to the West Wind and The Masque of Anarchy.
He is also well known for his long-form poetry,

Ozymandias

- Ozymandias" takes the form of a sonnet in iambic pentameter. A sonnet is a

fourteen-line poem, whose ideal form is often attributed to the great Italian poet
Petrarch. The Petrarchan sonnet is structured as an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6
lines)
 - Ozymandias is Shelley's anthologised poem written in 1817, and one of his most
famous. The statue is described as two huge standing legs, without a torso. A
massive but crumbling stone head lies nearby and half buried in the sand. The
face is supposed to have had a 'sneer of cold command'
- is based on a theme which tells us that arrogance is of no use. The poem coneys us
the message that 'Pride comes before a fall' and no one has the power to conquer
either nature or time. The poem revolves around the King Ozymandias who was
very boastful and arrogant
- The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story
about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone
stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk”
in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command”
on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions (or
"passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives
"stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are
both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around
the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,”
which stretch out around it.

Ode to the West Wind

- The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and
spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a
“destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying
year,” and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The
speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves
the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks
for a third time that it hear him.The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind
could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy,
“the comrade” of the wind’s “wandering over heaven,” then he would never have needed to
pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf,
a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud—he is now chained
and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.The speaker asks the wind to “make
me thy lyre,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “like
withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse,
to scatter his words among mankind, to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in
regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to
have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
- Each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas—four three-
line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme
scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme
scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza,
the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the end sound of
that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines in the next
stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line stanza.
Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme: ABA
BCB CDC DED EE.
 George Byron
Sonnet to Chillon
- This sonnet is actually the lead-in to Byrono's much larger
poem entitled "The Prisoner of Chillon". The poem was written
after touring a castle in which Bonivard (a Genevois monk) was
imprisoned.

- This sonnet is written as four stanzas (although it is often seen

as one stanza in publications). It holds the rhyme scheme
ABBABCCB-DEDEDE. Since it is also written in iambic
pentameter, it is easy to see that "Sonnet to Chillon" is actually
a Petrarchan Sonnet.

John Keats

English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry
marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a
philosophy through classical legend

Ode on a grecian urn

- The Grecian urn symbolises an important paradox for Keats: it is a work of

applied art (urns being associated with death), silent, motionless and made out
of cold materials, yet at the same time it moves him with its vitality and its
imaginative depictions of music, passion and sacrifice

- The central theme of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the complex nature of art.
The dramatic situation—the narrator's puzzling one-way exchange with
the urn as he views the scenes painted upon it—is intended to provoke in the
reader an awareness of the paradoxes inherent in all art, but especially visual
art.

- There are numerous poetic techniques employed in "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

by the Romanticist poet John Keats. Among these are elements of the sonnet
form and rhyme, imagery, symbolism, alliteration, and personification.