A sonnet is a 

poem generally structured in the form of 14 lines, usually

iambic pentameter, that expresses a thought or idea and utilizes an
established rhyme scheme. As a poetic form, the sonnet was developed by an early
thirteenth century Italian poet, Giacomo da Lentini. However, it was the Renaissance Italian
poet Petrarch that perfected and made this poetic literary device famous. Sonnets were
adapted by Elizabethan English poets, and William Shakespeare in particular.

Primary Types of Sonnets

In English literature, there are two basic sonnet patterns:

 Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet: Named for the Italian Renaissance lyrical poet

Francesco Petrarch, this sonnet pattern consists of an eight-line Octave with
the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA, followed by a six-line Sestet that follows one of two
rhyme schemes, CDE CDE or CDC CDC.

 English or Shakespearean Sonnet: Named for William Shakespeare and a

variation of Italian sonnet, this sonnet pattern consists of three four-
line quatrains and a concluding couplet with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF
GG.

John Milton Biography
Poet, Historian (1608 - 1674)

John Milton, English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, is best known for writing "Paradise
Lost," widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English.

Synopsis

John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in
English. Together with Paradise Regained, it formed his reputation as one of the greatest
English writers. In his prose works he advocated the abolition of the Church of England. His
influence extended through the English civil wars and also to the American and French
revolutions.

Early Life & Education

John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608 to John and Sara Milton. He had
an older sister Anne, and a younger brother Christopher, and several siblings who died
before reaching adulthood. As a child, John Milton attended St. Paul’s School, and in his
lifetime he learned Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, French, and Spanish. He attended Christ’s
College, Cambridge, graduating in 1629 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and 1632 with a
Master of Arts.

Poetry, Politics, and Personal Life

After Cambridge, Milton spent six years living with his family in Buckinghamshire and
studying independently. In that time, he wrote “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On
Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and "Lycidas," an elegy in memory of a friend
who drowned.

In 1638, John Milton went to Europe, where he probably met the astronomer Galileo, who
was under house arrest at the time. He returned to England earlier than he had planned
because of the impending civil war there.

Milton was a Puritan who believed in the authority of the Bible, and opposed religious
institutions like the Church of England, and the monarchy, with which it was entwined. He
wrote pamphlets on radical topics like freedom of the press, supported Oliver Cromwell in
the English Civil War, and was probably present at the beheading of Charles I. Milton wrote
official publications for Cromwell’s government.

It was during these years that Milton married for the first time. In 1642, when he was 34,
he married 17-year-old Mary Powell. The two separated for several years, during which
time Milton wrote The Divorce Tracts, a series of publications advocating for the availability
of divorce. The couple reunited and had four children before Mary died in 1652. It was also
in 1652 that Milton became totally blind. In 1656, he married Katherine Woodcock. She
died in 1658.

Near the end of 1659, Milton went to prison because of his role in the fall of Charles I and
the rise of the Commonwealth. He was released, probably due to the influence of powerful
supporters. The monarchy was reestablished in 1660 with Charles II as king.
Paradise Lost

After his release from prison, Milton married for the third time, this time to Elizabeth
Minsull. In 1667, he published Paradise Lost in 10 volumes. It is considered his greatest
work and the greatest epic poem written in English. The free-verse poem tells the story of
how Satan tempted Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In
1671, he published Paradise Regained, in which Jesus overcomes Satan’s temptations,
and Samson Agonistes, in which Samson first succumbs to temptation and then redeems
himself. A revised, 12-volume version of Paradise Lost was published in 1674.

John Milton died in England in November 1674. There is a monument dedicated to him in
Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.

On His Blindness” is one the most popular sonnets in English literature composed by a
great English poet, John Milton. It is based on Petrarchan sonnet having autobiographical
touches. The Petrarchan sonnets deal with love and romance but Milton with his talent and
skillful expression has converted it into a sonnet based on the theme of love for God or his
relationship to God. In the poem under discussion, the poet tells us how he becomes blind.
Definitely, he wants to go through this period of misery and have satisfaction to face this
period with patience.

On His Blindness by John Milton 

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
 And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

John Milton’s On His Blindness Summary

In the first half of “On His Blindness,” John Milton asks a question whether God is angry
with him. The speaker contemplates the loss of his eyesight and feels bad about not being
able to serve God, his Maker. He confesses that he is intent more than ever to make the
Almighty happy but he is helpless. Moreover, he fears the consequences he might get as a
result of his absence in the service of God. The speaker also wants to know whether his
creator denied him light the same day of his creation.

In the second half of “On His Blindness,” his inner Patience replies that God does not need

man’s help. Instead, those who bear their fate without complaint are the ones who are loyal

to God. Patience, further, argues that God’s state is kingly and he has thousands of

servicemen. When God orders, they run without stopping in order to help those who stand

and patiently wait.

John Milton’s On His Blindness Analysis

John Milton’s poem “On His Blindness” begins with contemplation of the speaker’s life
before and after turning blind. “When I consider how my light is spent/ Ere half my days in
this dark world and wide,” means when he thinks of how he lost his eyesight before he had
half of his life ahead. It clearly says, Milton spent half of his life in darkness.

Milton makes a metaphoric use when he says “And that one talent, which is death to hide.”
Here, ‘talent’ means the ‘ability to see’, and the speaker thinks that losing the vision is no
less than death. He says, he is not only blind but the blindness has made him useless as well.

Despite all odds, Milton is determined more than ever to serve his Maker by presenting
what God asks of him. “lest he returning chide” shows that the speaker is obviously
heartbroken by the loss of vision and for the same reason, he fears the price he might have
to pay because he cannot serve his Creator sufficiently. Furthermore, he wants to know if
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?” It means whether God bestowed him with fate
in which he has to spend half of his life in darkness.

The second half of the poem begins with Patience’s reply to Milton’s question. The poet
personifies Patience which, in fact, is his own inner-self. Now, we come to know that the
speaker has been murmuring so far and Patience wants to “prevent/ That murmur.” It
says: “God doth not need/ Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best/ Bear his mild
yoke, they serve him best.” According to Milton’s Patience, God is omnipotent and self-
sufficient who does not need man’s work nor his gifts. Instead, whoever accepts their fate as
they come are the best servers of God because it means the acceptance of God’s creation.

Patience also reminds Milton that God’s state is kingly in which “thousands at his bidding
speed/ And post o’er land and ocean without rest.” There are thousands who follow God’s
order regardless of circumstances and impending results. However, “They also serve who
only stand and wait.” Patience quickly informs the murmuring speaker that those who
patiently wait for help will get their wishes fulfilled. The last line might connotatively mean
that the speaker is waiting for his death and he cannot tolerate life any longer.
Nevertheless, he finally decides to wait patiently for the arrival of his death after which he
might get rid of life’s troubles.

John Milton’s On His Blindness Theme

John Milton poem “On His Blindness” has multiple themes like faith in God, frustration,
acceptance, patience, God’s omnipotence, God’s omnipresence, etc.

Despite his blindness and despite the fact that God designed his fate that way, Milton
promises to remain faithful to God. He is definitely frustrated with his fate, but he finally
accepts his destiny as well. God’s omnipotence and omnipresence are also significant themes
of Milton’s poem. We can do nothing to change God’s creation and wherever we are God
comes to help us when we seriously need him. Likewise, patience is a highly important
theme “On His Blindness” presents. It imparts that we need to wait patiently for the things
to happen in our life as per God’s decisions.

What is Song?
A song is a lyrical poem which is sung with the playing of some musical instrument. It is a
very old form of literature which is passed from one generation to the other generation. In
the beginning when people could not read and write songs were passed from one to
another orally. These were popular among people, and these are called folk songs.

John Donne Biography
(1572–1631)

John Donne, leading English poet of the Metaphysical school, is often considered the
greatest loved poet in the English language.

Who Was John Donne?

The first two editions of John Donne's poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and
1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. Readers continue to find
stimulus in his fusion of witty argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex
states of mind, and his ability to make common words yield up rich poetic meaning. Donne
also wrote songs, sonnets and prose.

Early Life and Family

John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572, during a strong anti-Catholic period
in England. Donne’s father, also named John, was a prosperous London merchant. His
mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the grand-niece of Catholic martyr Thomas More.
Religion would play a tumultuous and passionate role in John’s life.

Donne’s father died in 1576, and his mother remarried a wealthy widower. He entered
Oxford University at age 11 and later the University of Cambridge, but never received
degrees, due to his Catholicism. At age 20, Donne began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn and
seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. During the 1590s, he spent much of his
inheritance on women, books and travel. He wrote most of his love lyrics and erotic poems
during this time. His first books of poems, “Satires” and “Songs and Sonnets,” were highly
prized among a small group of admirers.

Family and Wife

In 1593, John Donne’s brother, Henry, was convicted of Catholic sympathies and died in
prison soon after. The incident led John to question his Catholic faith and inspired some of
his best writing on religion. At age 25, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir
Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England. He held his position with
Egerton for several years and it's likely that around this period Donne converted
to Anglicanism.

On his way to a promising career, Donne became a Member of Parliament in 1601. That
same year, he married 16-year-old Anne More, the niece of Sir Egerton. Both Lord
Egerton and Anne’s father, George More, strongly disapproved of the marriage, and, as
punishment, More did not provide a dowry. Lord Egerton fired Donne and had him
imprisoned for a short time. The eight years following Donne’s release would be a struggle
for the married couple until Anne’s father finally paid her dowry.

Poems and Writing Career

In 1610, Donne published his anti-Catholic polemic “Pseudo-Martyr,” renouncing his faith.
In it, he proposed the argument that Roman Catholics could support James I without
compromising their religious loyalty to the pope. This won him the king’s favor and
patronage from members of the House of Lords. In 1615, Donne was ordained soon
thereafter was appointed Royal Chaplain. His elaborate metaphors, religious symbolism and
flair for drama soon established him as a great preacher.

In 1617, Donne’s wife died shortly after giving birth to their 12th child. The time for
writing love poems was over, and Donne devoted his energies to more religious subjects. In
1621, Donne became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. During a period of severe illness, he
wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” published in 1624. This work contains the
immortal lines “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it
tolls for thee.” That same year, Donne was appointed Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West
and became known for his eloquent sermons.

Death

As Donne’s health continued to fail him, he became obsessed with death. Shortly before he
died, he delivered a pre-funeral sermon, “Death’s Duel.” His writing was charismatic and
inventive. His compelling examination of the mortal paradox influenced English poets for
generations. He died on March 31, 1631. Donne’s work fell out of favor for a time, but
was revived in the 20th century by high-profile admirers such as T.S. Eliot and William
Butler Yeats.

Song: Go and catch a falling star by John Donne

‘Song: Go and catch a falling star’ by John Donne is a three-stanza poem that is separated
into sets of nine lines. The lines follow a consistent rhyme scheme, conforming to the
pattern of ABABCCDDD. The lines also stick to a syllable pattern that changes within the
different sets of rhyme. For example, the first four lines are the same, with seven syllables.
The next two contain eight, then there are two two syllable lines. Finally the stanza ends
with a seven syllable line. This is a very unusual pattern that works best if read aloud. The
fact that Donne titled this piece ‘Song…’ makes it clear that it was meant to be read, or
sung. 
Throughout the poem, Donne employs a light and sometimes humorous tone. He is annoyed
by the general theme of the poem, the inconstancy of women, but seems to have come to
terms with it. He speaks as though this is just how things are, and one must make the best
of a constantly bad situation. 
While this piece does not feature the characteristics of metaphysical conceit found in other
Donne works, there is an interesting comparison presented between the stanzas. He
compares the impossibility of something like catching a star to finding an honest and
beautiful woman. While a clear exaggeration, it appears to be the speaker’s own true belief
that he’ll never come upon a woman who will treat him fairly and not run off with
someone else. 

Summary of Song: Go and catch a falling star 

Song: Go and catch a falling star’ by John Donne tells of a speaker’s belief that there are no
women in the world who are to him both beautiful and faithful.

In the first lines of this piece, the speaker begins by giving the reader a number of

impossible tasks. These include catching a “falling star” and teaching him how to “hear

mermaids singing.” It is not until the second stanza that one comes to realize that Donne is
comparing these impossibilities to the locating of a beautiful and faithful woman. He

believes that one is just as likely to figure how why the devil’s foot is cleft as find a woman

who has both of these traits. 

The speaker goes on to tell the listener that if one were to venture into the strange
unknown, they would come across endless wonders, but not a woman who would please
him in totality. In the last stanza, he explains how if he thought that such a woman did
exist that he’s suffered to find her. He’d go on a pilgrimage and do anything he had to. The
speaker does not believe it is really possible though. In fact, he states that one might think
they’ve found a woman of his liking but she would eventually turn out to be “False.” 
 

Analysis of Song: Go and catch a falling star 

Stanza One 
Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the devil’s foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

In the first stanza of this piece the speaker begins by telling the listener to “Go and catch a
falling star.” It is for this line that the poem is best known and is only the first
representative of the outlandish tasks the speaker sets out. The next is to “Get with child,”
or impregnate, a “mandrake root.” Both of these statements have a magical mood about
them. The mandrake root is commonly associated with witchcraft or hallucinogens. 
He goes on to ask the listener to “Tell” him facts about the past, an impossibility as no one
can truly know the history. The next statement refers to the “cleft” in the devil’s foot. He
wants to know how it got there, or more simply, how it was decided which form the devil
was to take. 
In the next section of the first stanza, he asks the listener to teach him to “hear mermaids
singing” or alternatively how to “keep off envy’s stinging.” There is an interesting contrast
in these requests between personal need and personal interest. In the final tercet of
rhyming lines, he adds that he wants to know what makes people honest. What “wind” or
for what reason is some people honest and some deceitful. 
 

Stanza Two 
If thou be’st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,

All strange wonders that befell thee,

And swear,

No where

Lives a woman true, and fair.

In the second stanza, he reveals the true purpose of this piece, to complain about the unfair
way he has been treated by women. He expresses his belief that there are no women who
are “true, and fair” or honest and beautiful, in the world. In the first lines, he tells the
listener that maybe if “thou be’st born to strange sight.” Or more simply, if you are used
to seeing unbelievable things, then you should “Ride ten thousand days and nights” and
seek as many “strange wonders” as can be found. 
He believes that anyone who attempted this would have to ride until their hair turned
white and still they would not come upon a woman “true, and fair.” It is interesting to
consider how the speaker came to this conclusion. It is not clear why he believes this to be
the case, but obviously, something in his past tuned his mind in this direction. He is having
trouble finding love, or perhaps he doesn’t believe in love at all. 
 
Stanza Three 
If thou find’st one, let me know,

Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not, I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet;

Though she were true, when you met her,

And last, till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

In the final nine lines of ‘Song: Go and catch a falling star’ the speaker states that if “thou
find’st” a woman who is both of these things, true and fair, then he will go on a
“pilgrimage” to find her. He would suffer if there was a chance he could find the perfect
partner. He knows that this isn’t going to be the case though so he does not go. 
The speaker states that there is always the possibility that a woman who seems true and
fair comes to him, but he thinks more than likely that “she / Will be / False” eventually.
There might be a period of time before the realization comes to pass, but he knows that it
eventually will. These lines are clearly problematic from a contemporary perspective. Donne
does not explain what flaws these women have nor does he include women who are not to
him beautiful. He, therefore, separates women into two categories, those who are beautiful
and faithless and those who are ugly and not worth considering. 

Song: Go and catch a falling star” Themes

Theme Women's Infidelity: The poem explores a traditional (and misogynistic) literary
theme of Donne's era: women’s romantic infidelity. Using vivid images of magic and
mystery, the speaker insists that a faithful woman is so hard to find, she might as well be
the stuff of legends!
 Dramatic Monologue
Dramatic monologue means self-conversation, speech or talks which includes interlocutor
presented dramatically. It means a person, who is speaking to himself or someone else
speaks to reveal specific intentions of his actions. However, in literature, it is a poetic form
or a poem that presents the speech or conversation of a person in a dramatic manner.

Features of a Dramatic Monologue:

A dramatic monologue has these common features in them.

A single person delivering a speech on one aspect of his life

The audience may or may not be present

Speaker reveals his temperament and character only through his speech

Types of Dramatic Monologue

There are three major types of dramatic monologues such as:

Romantic monologue

Philosophical and psychological monologue

Conversational monologue

Robert Browning Biography

(1812–1889)

English poet and playwright Robert Browning was a master of dramatic verse and is best
known for his 12-book long form blank poem 'The Ring and the Book.'

Who Was Robert Browning?

Robert Browning was a prolific Victorian-era poet and playwright. He is widely recognized
as a master of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. Browning is perhaps
best-known for a poem he didn’t value highly, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a children's
poem that is quite different from his other work. He is also known for his long form blank
poem The Ring and the Book, the story of a Roman murder trial in 12 books. Browning
was married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Early Life

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell, a suburb of London. He and a
younger sister, Sarianna, were the children of Robert Browning and Sarah Anna Browning.
Browning’s father supported the family by working as a bank clerk (foregoing a family
fortune because he opposed slavery), and assembled a large library — some 6,000 books —
which formed the foundation of the younger Browning’s somewhat unconventional
education.

Browning’s family was devoted to his being a poet, supporting him financially and
publishing his early works. Robert Browning’s Paracelsus, published in 1835, received good
reviews, but critics disliked Sordello, published in 1840, because they found its references
to be obscure. In the 1830s, Browning tried to write plays for the theater, but did not
succeed, and so moved on.

Browning lived with his parents and sister until 1846, when he married the poet Elizabeth
Barrett, an admirer of his writing. Barrett’s oppressive father disapproved of the marriage
and disinherited her. The couple moved to Florence, Italy.

During his married years, Browning wrote very little. In 1849, the Brownings had a son,
whom Browning educated. The family lived on an inheritance from Elizabeth’s cousin,
residing mostly in Florence. Elizabeth died in 1861, and Browning and his son returned to
England.

Popular Recognition

Browning only began to attain popular success when he was in his 50s. In the 1860s, he
published Dramatis Personae, which had both a first and second edition. In 1868-69, he
published the 12-volume The Ring and the Book, which some critics believe to be his
greatest work, and which earned the poet popularity for the first time.

One of Browning’s biggest successes was the children’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
Published in Dramatic Lyrics in 1842, the poem was not one that Browning deemed
consequential; however it is one of his most famous.
Browning secured his place as a prominent poet with dramatic monologue, the form he
mastered and for which he became known and influential. In dramatic monologue, a
character speaks to a listener from his or her subjective point of view. In doing so, the
character often reveals insights about him or herself, often more than intended. While
Robert Browning’s work was disparaged by many of the early 20th century modernist
poets, by mid-century critics asserted the importance of his work.

Later Life and Death

In his more advanced years, Browning became widely respected: the Victorian public
appreciated the hopeful tone of his poems. In 1881, the Browning Society was founded to
further study the poet’s work, and in 1887, Browning received an honorary D.C.L. (Doctor
of Civil Law) from Balliol College at Oxford University. Browning continued publishing
poetry, with his final work, Asolando, published on the day he died. 

Browning died on December 12, 1889 in Venice, and is buried in the Poets’ Corner in
Westminster Abbey.

“My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue written by Victorian poet Robert Browning in
1842. In the poem, the Duke of Ferrara uses a painting of his former wife as a
conversation piece. The Duke speaks about his former wife's perceived inadequacies to a
representative of the family of his bride-to-be, revealing his obsession with controlling
others in the process. Browning uses this compelling psychological portrait of a despicable
character to critique the objectification of women and abuses of power.

“My Last Duchess” Summary

 The speaker (the Duke of Ferrara) directs the attention of a guest to a painting of
his former wife, the Duchess of Ferrara, which hangs on the wall. The Duke praises
the painting for looking so lifelike and then remarks on how hard the painter, Fra
Pandolf, worked hard on it. The duke asks the guest to sit and look at the work. The
duke then explains that he deliberately mentioned the name of the painter, because
strangers like the emissary always look at the duchess’s painted face—with its deep,
passionate, and earnest glance—and turn to the duke (and only the duke, since only
he pulls back the curtain that reveals the painting) and act as though they would
 ask, if they dared, how an expression like that came into her face. The duke
reiterates that the guest isn’t the first person to ask this question.

The duke continues by saying that it wasn’t only his presence that brought that look into
the painted eyes of the duchess or the blush of happiness into her painted cheek; he
suggests that perhaps Fra Pandolf had happened to compliment her by saying "her shawl
drapes over her wrist too much" or "paint could never recreate the faint half-blush that’s
fading on her throat." The duke insists that the former duchess thought that polite
comments like those were reason enough to blush, and criticizes her, in a halting way, for
being too easily made happy or impressed. He also claims that she liked everything and
everyone she saw, although his description suggests that she was ogling everyone who
crossed her path. The duke objects that, to his former duchess, everything was the same
and made her equally happy, whether it was a brooch or present from him that she wore
at her chest, the sun setting in the West, a branch of cherries which some interfering
person snapped off a tree in the orchard for her, or the white mule she rode on around the
terrace. He claims that she would say the same kind words or give the same blush in
response to all of them. The duke also objects to her manner of thanking men, although he
struggles to describe his concerns. Specifically, he complains that she values his pedigree and
social position (his 900-year-old name) as equally important to anyone else’s gifts to her.

The duke rhetorically asks whether anyone would actually lower themselves enough to
argue with someone about their behavior. The duke imagines a hypothetical situation in
which he would confront the former duchess: he says that even if he were good with words
and were able to clearly say, "This characteristic of yours disgusts me," or, "Here you did
too little or too much"—and if the former duchess had let herself be degraded by changing,
instead of being stubborn and making excuses— that even then the act of confronting her
would be beneath him, and he refuses to ever lower himself like that.

The duke then returns to his earlier refrain about his former wife’s indiscriminate
happiness and complains to his guest that, while the duchess did smile at him whenever
they passed, she gave everyone else the same smile as well. The duke explains that she
began smiling at others even more, so he gave orders and all her smiles stopped forever,
presumably because he had her killed. Now she only lives on in the painting.
The duke then asks the guest to stand up and to go with him to meet the rest of the guests
downstairs. He also says that the Count, revealed here as the guest's master and the father
of the duke's prospective bride-to-be, is so known for his generosity in matters of money
that no request the duke could make for a dowry could be turned down. The duke also
adds quickly that he has always insisted since the beginning of their discussions that the
Count’s beautiful daughter, and not the dowry, is his primary objective.

The duke ends his speech by demanding that he and the Count's emissary go downstairs
together, and on their way, he directs the emissary’s attention to a statue of the God
Neptune taming a seahorse, which is a rare work of art that Claus of Innsbruck cast in
bronze specifically for him.

“My Last Duchess” Themes: The Objectification of Women.

“My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue in which the Duke of Ferrara tells the
messenger of his potential wife’s family about his previous wife, the “last” duchess of the
poem's title. Using a painting of that former duchess as a conversation piece, he describes
what he saw as her unfaithfulness, frivolity, and stubbornness, and implies that he prefers
her as a painting rather than as a living woman. Throughout the poem, the duke reveals
his belief that women are objects to be controlled, possessed, and discarded. In many ways,
this reflects the thinking of Browning’s own era, when Victorian social norms denied
women the right to be fully independent human beings. Through this portrayal of the duke,
Browning critiques such a viewpoint, presenting sexism and objectification as dehumanizing
processes that rob women of their full humanity.

The duke’s treatment of the painting reflects his treatment of women as objects to be
owned. His description of the painting as a “piece” and a “wonder” portray it as a work of
art rather than a testament to a former love. By repeating the name of the painter (the
famous “Fra Pandolf) three times in the first 16 lines of the poem, he again implies that he
values the painting because of its status as an object that shows off his (that is, the duke's)
wealth and clout. The painting is meant to aggrandize the duke rather than honor the
woman it portrays.

This is made even clearer by the fact that the duke has placed this painting in a public area
of his palace so he can proudly display it to guests, whom he invites to “sit and look at
her” much like a museum curator would direct visitors to a famous work of art in a
gallery. Such an attitude is reflected yet again when he tells the messenger that the Count’s
“fair daughter’s self [… is his] object”: he intends to make his new bride another one of his
possessions. Women, in the duke’s mind, are simply ornamental objects for men rather
than actual people in their own right.

The poem thus implies that the duke finds his former wife’s actions unforgivable because
they reflected her status as an independent person rather than an inanimate possession.
Her crimes appear to be not sexual or romantic infidelity, but rather being happy (“too
soon made glad,”), appreciative of others (she considered the duke’s “gift of a nine-
hundred-years-old name / With anybody’s gift”), self-confident (she wouldn’t “let /
Herself be lessoned”), and willing to stand up for herself (she “plainly set / Her wits to
[his]”). The duke, however, appears to believe that a husband owns his wife, and therefore
has the right to dictate her feelings and to be the sole recipient of her happiness, kindness,
and respect; any indication that she has thoughts or feelings of her own are unacceptable.

Ultimately, the poem heavily implies that the duke was so vexed by the idea that his
former wife had an inner life of her own that he had the "last duchess" killed. Of course,
the duke avoids explicitly confessing to assassinating his wife, and Browning himself
allegedly once said in an interview that the duke may have simply had her sent to a
convent. Regardless, the outcome is the same: there is no “last duchess” present in the
poem to speak for herself and give her side of the story. The poem thus underscores how
objectifying women ultimately silences them, robbing them of their voices and autonomy.

The role of women in society, The role of women in relationships, Deception, Ownership
and power, Control over assets, Control over a partner, Dominance within a relationship,
and Art and Influence.

My Last Duchess

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
- E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Line by Line Analysis of My Last Duchess

My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue, is a single stanza poem made up of heroic

couplets (heroic is a term used for iambic lines), all fully rhyming.

Lines 1 - 4

The speaker is a man of means, a duke no less, of Ferrara most likely, a town in Italy. He is
very much in charge of things, the reader introduced to him as he is about to show off an
unusual painting to an anonymous guest.

Who he addresses is unknown at first but later it becomes clear that the listener is an
envoy (marriage broker, emissary) representing another aristocrat.

Perhaps he is pointing a refined finger as the first line starts. Obviously this is the interior
of his home, his house, his palace? If that first line is innocent enough, the second line
immediately darkens proceedings.
The woman in question is no longer alive but looks alive in the painting. What an odd thing
to say. Of course a painting shows a person alive and not the opposite, dead.

So the reader's antennae are beginning to twitch already. What sort of a man have we
here? The speaker thinks the picture a wonder, now perhaps because he's had a little time
to digest it and ponder on the fact that his wife is no more.

Does this imply that, when the painting was first hung, he couldn't stand to look at it
because it reminded him of her beauty, her character? Or maybe the portrait was done too
well, was too lifelike and so he felt compelled to put it behind a curtain? Out of guilt?

The artist's name is Fra Pandolf, the Fra meaning a brother which links the artist to
innocent monkhood and distances the duchess from any thought of a sexual liaison with
him.

Lines 5 - 21

The duke asks the as yet unknown second person if he'd care to sit and study the portrait.

Fra Pandolf's name was mentioned purposefully (by design) because the duke is the one
asked by strangers who, having looked at the duchess's expressive face (countenance) want
to ask - how did the artist get so much depth and passion in a simple glance?

But hold on a minute, strangers only appear to want to ask the duke but they dare not (if
they durst). The duke senses their trepidation perhaps. He's the only one allowed to move
the curtain, implying control and possession over the duchess, even in death.

It seems the broker (emissary) also wanted to ask this same question but the duke got in
there first with his slick answer. He addresses the emissary as Sir and goes on to suggest
that the special spot of joy, a red blush perhaps, on the sitter's cheek could have been
caused by the artist, Fra Pandolf. How?
Well, the duke seems to think that it should have been only him who could have made the
duchess blush but what if the artist had wanted her to show a little more flesh ( Her
mantle, - or cloak - covers too much of her wrist) or hinted that such a blush could never
be adequately reproduced in paint.

In other words, the duke is fabricating a story, attempting to brainwash the emissary or
circumvent the truth by implying that the artist's flattery and compliments caused the
duchess to blush.

According to the duke, his wife would have bought the artist's politeness, which is rather
judgemental of him and surely points to an increasing jealousy. Perhaps in real life he never
was able to inspire such blushes or glances from his wife?

Lines 22 - 34

The duke goes on, seemingly unable to stop himself, telling of his wife's happy disposition
and positive outlook on life. Again there is judgement, it's as if the duke despised her for
being 'Too easily impressed' suggesting she was frivolous, superficial, unable to discern
between the important and the trivial (Sir, 'twas all one!)

The duchess treated everything with the same light touch, which must have displeased the
duke, despite him being her closest bosom friend (or sexual partner?), at first romantically
inclined (watching the sunset together) but then coming to realise that she treated
everyone (even some idiot offering her cherries) and everything the same.

She was too light-hearted it appears - happy to ride a white mule, happy to accept fruit
from a fool. Perhaps the duke took a dislike to her constant innocent optimism and equal
treatment for all approach to life.

He'd have preferred a dour and subservient woman for a wife, not a blushing flirtatious
type who had little truck with the traditions and trappings of wealth, which the duke
clearly revelled in. Nine hundred years of his family name was worth just as much as
anyone's name to her.
The duke's complaints are building up momentum. It's quite obvious that she got his goat
and it seems that he had to do something drastic to stop it.

Lines 35 - 46

Who'd stoop to blame....the duke asks a rhetorical question which he himself will answer (of
course)...because he has all the control all of the time.

He asks the emissary who would bother debating or denouncing such behaviour - he uses
the word stoop which means to lower, so he's basically saying that, even if he had the
verbal skills to have a go at the duchess he wouldn't because it's just a small thing in life (a
trifling) and he would never stoop so low.

It's a slick piece of denial. The duke does have verbal skills. He's none stop going on about
the picture, so when he denies having the skills it's a blatant pretence. Plus, he's really
bringing the duchess down in this section of the dramatic lyric and giving the game away
somewhat. He admits that one or two of her traits disgusted him, and that he couldn't
teach her differently.

He says he never stooped that low (down to her level?) but in real life he probably did.
Remember he's talking to the man who will report to his own boss about the suitability of
the duke for hand in marriage of a second aristocratic female. So the duke is constantly
addressing this man as Sir...and subtly plying him with fake news about his first wife.

The duchess smiled at him yes, but it was the same smile she gave everyone. He wasn't that
special to her. Or at least, that was his perception. She smiled too often it seems. The
duke's jealousy grew. And grew.

In lines 45 and 46 the poem shudders and shocks. The duke had the smiles stopped - does
this mean he had someone murder his wife? Or did he send her off to a convent never to
be seen again?

Lines 47 - 56
The duke repeats what he said in lines 2 and 4...There she stands/As if alive. Note the
pregnant pause between the lines. It's a chilling statement to end what has been an
avalanche of pitiful, snobbish complaint from the duke.

He asks the listener to get up. They've more people to meet so down the stairs they'll have
to go. But the duke first mentions that this listener's boss, The Count, is known for his
wealth so he expects to get a decent dowry...and that of course, it's the count's daughter
who is uppermost in his thoughts (is my object).

As they descend, the duke points out another work of art, this time a sculpture of Neptune
taming a sea-horse. Again the theme is dominance, the Roman god of the sea managing to
control the tiny sea-horse, just as the duke controls the picture by being the only one
allowed to move the curtain.

By mentioning the name of Claus of Innsbruck the duke is showing that he's really in it for
the money and prestige. His ego and vanity cannot be suppressed - the poem ends with
the words for me - how apt.

The reader has to decide whether or not this man has done away with the duchess, still
behind the curtain with that passionate glance, perhaps showing her true nature? Or did
she die in sorrow, informing the artist to paint that spot of joy in defiance of her
pretentious jealous husband?

Elegy
Elegy Definition

Elegy is a form of literature that can be defined as a poem or song in the

form of elegiac couplets, written in honor of someone deceased. It typically
laments or mourns the death of the individual.

Elegy is derived from the Greek work elegus, which means a song of

bereavement sung along with a flute. The forms of elegy we see today were
introduced in the 16th century. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by
Thomas Gray, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, by Walt
Whitman are the two most popular examples of elegy.

Thomas Gray

The English poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771) expressed deep and universal human feelings
in forms derived from Greek and Roman literature. Although his output was small, he
introduced new subject matter for poetry.

Thomas Gray was born on Dec. 26, 1716, of middle-class parents. He was the only one of
12 children to survive infancy. In 1727 Thomas became a pupil at Eton, where he met
several bookish friends, who included Richard West (his death, in 1742, was to reinforce
the melancholy that Gray often felt and expressed in his poems) and Horace Walpole, son
of England's first modern-style prime minister and later an important man of letters.

Gray attended Cambridge University from 1734 to 1738 and after leaving the university
without a degree undertook the grand tour of Europe with Walpole from 1739 to 1741.
During this tour the two friends quarreled, but the quarrel was made up in 1745, and
Walpole was to be a significant influence in the promulgation of Gray's poems in later
years. In 1742 Gray returned to Cambridge and took a law degree the next year, although
he was in fact much more interested in Greek literature than in law. For the most part,
the rest of Gray's life, except for an occasional sojourn in London or trip to picturesque
rural spots, was centered in Cambridge, where he was a man of letters and a scholar.

Gray's poetry, almost all of which he wrote in the years after he returned to Cambridge, is
proof that personal reserve in poetry and careful imitation of ancient modes do not rule
out depth of feeling. (He was one of the great English letter writers; in his letters his
emotions appear more unreservedly.) The charge of artificiality brought against him later
by men as different in their poetic principles as Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth
is true, but there is room in poetry for artifice, and while spontaneity has its merits so also
does the Virgilian craftsmanship that Gray generally practiced.

The "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1747) certainly inflates its subject when
it describes schoolboy swimmers as those who "delight to cleave/With pliant art [the
Thames's] glassy wave," but it concludes with a memorably classic sentiment that deserves
its lapidary expression: "where ignorance is bliss,/'Tis folly to be wise." Even so playful a
poem as the "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes"
(1748) concludes with the chiseled wisdom, "Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes …is
lawful prize;/Nor all that glisters, gold."

In his greatest poem (and one of the most popular in English), the "Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard" (1751), Gray achieves a perfect fusion of the dignity of his subject
and the habitual elevatedness of his poetics. His style and his melancholy attitude toward
life are perfectly adapted to the expression of the somber, time-honored verities of human
experience. In the two famous Pindaric odes "The Progress of Poetry" and "The Bard"
(published with Walpole's help in 1757) Gray seems to anticipate the rhapsodies of the
romantic poets. Some readers in Gray's time found the odes obscure, but they are not so
by modern standards. Much of Gray's energy in his later years was devoted to the study of
old English and Norse poetry, a preoccupation that reveals itself in his odes.

Gray declined the poet laureateship in 1757. After a somewhat hypochondriacal middle

age he died on July 30, 1771.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” belongs to the genre of elegy. An
elegy is a poem written to mourn a person’s death. Gray wrote this elegy in the year
1742. However, he published it only in the year 1751. He wrote this poem after the death
of his friend Richard West.
The poem is an elegy of the common man. It is Gray’s masterpiece. The poem is
philosophical and emotional at the same time. The beauty of the poem lies in its simplicity.
Nonetheless, the poet brings out the ultimate truth about life and death in free-flowing
poetic lines.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Summary

The speaker is hanging out in a churchyard just after the sun goes down. It's dark and a bit

spooky. He looks at the dimly lit gravestones, but none of the grave markers are all that

impressive—most of the people buried here are poor folks from the village, so their

tombstones are just simple, roughly carved stones. 

The speaker starts to imagine the kinds of lives these dead guys probably led. Then he

shakes his finger at the reader, and tells us not to get all snobby about the rough

monuments these dead guys have on their tombs, since, really, it doesn't matter what kind

of a tomb you have when you're dead, anyway. And guys, the speaker reminds us, we're all

going to die someday.

But that gets the speaker thinking about his own inevitable death, and he gets a little

freaked out. He imagines that someday in the future, some random guy (a "kindred spirit")

might pass through this same graveyard, just as he was doing today. And that guy might

see the speaker's tombstone, and ask a local villager about it. And then he imagines what

the villager might say about him.

At the end, he imagines that the villager points out the epitaph engraved on the

tombstone, and invites the passerby to read it for himself. So basically, Thomas Gray writes

his own epitaph at the end of this poem.

Analysis of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Stanzas 1 – 4

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

         The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

         And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,

         And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

         And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r

         The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,

         Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,

         Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

         The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

As it opens, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” begins with the description of the
evening in a rural place. The evening church bell tells the passing of the day. Cattle bleed as
they turn homewards. Tired farmers also follow. Darkness begins to cover the world. The
speaker, that is, the poet is standing in a graveyard. All is quiet and. Only the beadle
buzzes and the owl hoots. Among a group of elm trees, there is the graveyard. It belongs to
the village. There are burials of the villagers’ ancestors in the graveyard.
 

Stanzas 5 – 8

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,

         The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,

The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

         No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

         Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire’s return,

         Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

         Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

         How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

         Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

         The short and simple annals of the poor.

In these stanzas of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the poet goes on to talk
about the people buried in the graveyard. They are sleeping in beds that are low to the
ground. No sound can wake them up. The twittering of the swallow, the morning call of
the cock, even a horn cannot wake them. Their wives and their children, nobody care for
them anymore. They were hard-working men when they were alive. Their plowing, their
harvesting, and their farming, all were efficient. The speaker asks not to look down upon
their simple life and hard work. Ambitious people think of village life as simple. But the
villagers had their joy and sorrow much like others.

Stanzas 9 – 12

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

         And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

         The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,

         If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

         The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

         Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

         Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,

         Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.

Also, the poet says that the poor are not inferior to the rich in death. Invariably, every
human life ends in death. The beauty, the wealth, the glory all lead to the unavoidable end.
The villager’s grave does not have the grandness in ceremonies and tombstones. But, none
of that can bring a person back to life. So, there is no use of them. One should remember
that no one knew that one of the dead villagers may have achieved greatness in life.
Therefore, there may be a ruler or a poet buried in there.

Stanzas 13 – 16

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

         Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,

         And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

         The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

         The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

         Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,

         The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,

         And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,

In these stanzas, the poet remarks, the villagers who were dead would also have talent.
There might be a Milton or a Cromwell buried there. They did not get opportunities to
prove themselves. Like gems hidden deep under the ocean and like desert flowers, they
have perished without notice. Given opportunities, they would have also succeeded. People
would have read their deeds in history.
 
Stanzas 17 – 20

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone

         Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,

         And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

         To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

         With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

         Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;

Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

         They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,

         Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,

         Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

To put the content of these stanzas in a nutshell, the villagers did not wish to involve in
treachery and deceit. They were honest people and wished to lead simple lives. So, they
kept themselves away from the mad crowd of the cities and kingdoms. They were true to
themselves. They liked peace and honesty. But still, there were markings to note their
memory. The tombstones were simple. The language was ordinary. But, there is truth in
their memory.

Stanzas 21 – 24

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse,

         The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

         That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

         This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

         Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

         Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

         Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead

         Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely contemplation led,

         Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

The dead villagers rest in the graveyard without recognition. Also, this poem will be a
tribute to them. They lived their lives with morals. They died in the care of a loving person.
And, they closed their eyes with prayers in one’s eyes. One day, a kind soul may come and
enquire after the dead one out of curiosity.

 
Stanzas 25 – 29

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

         “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

         To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

         That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,

His listless length at noontide would he stretch,

         And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

         Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove,

Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,

         Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.

“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,

         Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

         Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

If someone asks about the poet who rests in the graveyard, one of the villagers may talk
about him. A free-spirited man was the poet. He went to the mountains in the morning,
stood under the beach tree sometimes. Then, he went to the brook. Besides, he was
sometimes muttering his fancies. The villager would say that he missed seeing the man one
day. The poet was missing. The villager did not see him in his usual places. But, he saw the
funeral procession and how the man was buried in the graveyard

Stanzas 30 – 33

“The next with dirges due in sad array

         Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

         Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”

THE EPITAPH
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
       A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,

       And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

       Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,

       He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

       Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

       The bosom of his Father and his God.

In this part of the poem, he says that his epitaph would read thus: Here lies the young man
who was not popular. His life was full of sorrow. Knowledge was his only wealth. He gave
his life to misery and all he longed was for a friend to support. One need not look away to
know about him. All that he did lies with him, close to god in the lap of earth.

 What is a Ballad? A ballad is a poem that tells a story, usually (but not always) in four-

line stanzas called quatrains. The ballad form is enormously diverse, and poems in this form

may have any one of hundreds of different rhyme schemes and meters. Nearly every culture

on earth produces ballads, often in the form of epic poems relating to the culture’s
mythology. However, the word “ballad” typically refers to the relatively short lyrical poems
th
produced by European poets starting around the 13  century.In popular music, the

word ballad can also refer to a slow, romantic, or sentimental song. However, this has no

significant relationship to the literary definition.

John Keats and A Summary of La Belle Dame sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci is in the form of a folk ballad and relates the story of a man (a
knight) and a beautiful woman (a faery's child), in what is a curious allegorical romance.

Many think John Keats got the idea for the title from a medieval French poem written by
one Alain Chartier (in old french merci meant mercy, not thank you as it does today) and
he could also have been inspired by the earlier Scottish story of Thomas the Rhymer, who is
taken off by the beautiful Queen of Elfinland on a white horse.

There are some strong arguments for a later version of this story being of particular
interest. Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border contained the original ballad of
Thomas, written in rhyming verse, and Keats could well have come across it.

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has also been cited as a possible influence. Published in
1590, it has a character called Florimell, a lady, 'Fair Florimell, beloved of many a knight.'

Other events in his life may well have contributed to the idea of an enigmatic and slightly
disturbing romance in poetic form such as a ballad.

For instance, his brother Tom had died in the winter of 1818, of tuberculosis (which was
to claim Keats himself in 1821) and during this illness some cruel, deceptive letters from
trickster friends purporting to come from a French woman Amena, who was in love with
Tom, arrived, with Keats's brother on his death bed.

And Keats too had his own anguished relationship with Fanny Brawne to contend with. He
was madly in love with her but hadn't the resources or good health to fully commit. His
letters to her are painful and passionate, and he knew that he would never be able to fulfil
his hopelessly romantic dream.
 There is no doubt that he had difficulty expressing himself when in the company of women.

'When I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen - I cannot speak or be silent
- I am full of suspicions and therefore listen to no thing - I am in a hurry to be gone...I
must absolutely get over this - but how?'

Letter to Benjamin Bailey 1818

 So, La Belle Dame sans Merci is perhaps the result of emotional conflict merging with poetic
craft. Keats created the poem using his imagination out of which came beauty and truth,
contained in a dream-like and disturbing drama.
 In addition, the poem takes the reader into a supernatural world, where real or imagined
experience morphs into fairy tale, where conscious control is lost to the seductive powers of
a fleeting sensuality.
Is the Belle Dame a kind of femme fatale? A succubus of sorts? She seems to have a way
with mortal men that's for sure. And the man? What were the occupiers of his dream
warning him about? His impending destruction?

Just as in the first and second stanzas and that question 'O what can ail thee?', there are
no definitive answers.

The poem first appeared in a letter he wrote to his brother George in April 1819. This
version is the one shown below, as opposed to the second version, later published in The
Indicator in 1820.

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” Themes

Love, Obsession, and Death

In the poem, a knight tells the story of how he becomes obsessed with, and then gets

abandoned by, a spirit known as La Belle Dame sans Merci, or "The Beautiful Lady Without

Mercy." Though seemingly aware she’s an illusion, the knight lingers in his memory of the

Lady, and it’s implied he will do so until he dies. In this relationship, the knight’s love turns

from enchantment into obsession.

Through his example, the poem expresses two linked warnings about the dangers of intense

romantic love. First, obsession drains one’s emotional energy. Second, when the object of

obsession disappears, the lover left behind undergoes a spiritual death, losing the ability to

appreciate beauty in anything but the memory of what is lost. These warnings suggest that

love, though wonderful, can quickly shift into a kind of death if it becomes obsessive.

The knight first describes falling in love with the Lady as a kind of enchantment that

consumes him completely. The Lady he finds in the meadow is "Full beautiful—a faery’s

child." The Lady’s perfect beauty captures the knight’s attention. By describing her as the

child of a magical creature, he emphasizes that her ability to charm him is a supernatural

force. Enchanted further by the mysterious wildness in her eyes, the knight begins serving

the Lady and devoting all his emotional energy to her. He weaves the Lady "bracelets" and

"a garland," and in reward receives her "love" and "sweet moan."

However, the line between enchantment and obsession is dangerously thin. The Lady soon

becomes the knight’s single focus—seemingly his single source of life. Besides the Lady, the

knight sees "nothing else … all day." This may sound like hyperbole, but the knight means it:

the Lady creates a private world for herself and the knight.

Soon, the knight sees her in everything—he is obsessed. The flowers transform into suitable

material for the Lady to wear. The hillside cave, a feature of the natural landscape,

becomes the Lady’s "Elfin grot." As the knight’s obsession deepens, he grows to depend on

the Lady even for basic nutrition. The Lady feeds the knight "roots of relish sweet, / And

honey wild, and manna-dew."

The allusion to manna, the supernaturally nutritious substance provided by God to the

Israelites on their journey out of Egypt, implies that the Lady is literally responsible for the

knight’s survival. At this point the Lady says, "I love thee true." The knight’s response is to

give himself over fully to the Lady—he follows her home, soothes her, and makes himself

vulnerable before her, allowing her to lull him to sleep.

Having devoted so much emotional energy to the Lady and put himself completely under

her control, the knight undergoes a spiritual death when she disappears. In his dream the

knight sees the Lady’s former victims: "pale kings," "princes," and "warriors"—"death-pale

were they all." In their faces he sees the man he will become: someone deathly, starved,

and captivated by memories of the Lady to the point of enslavement. Like them, he will

wake up "death-pale," or, as the speaker first describes him, "Alone and palely loitering"—

physically alive, yet condemned to replay his memory of an obsessive love for the rest of his

days. The Lady is finally revealed to be La Belle Dame sans Merci—literally, The Beautiful

Lady Without Mercy.

Strangely, the Lady’s merciless behavior actually consists of the love and joy she provides;

her sudden disappearance is what makes the knight’s experience so painful

exactly because she was previously so kind. The shape of the Lady’s cruelty suggests that

anything one falls in love with or obsesses over can cause such pain, since anything can

disappear in an instant. The poem thus cautions against such intense, obsessive love,

arguing that it’s ultimately not worth the agony it can cause.

Imagination vs. Reality

In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the speaker asks a medieval knight to explain why he’s

lingering in a clearly inhospitable area, where winter is setting in. The knight answers by

telling a sort of fairy tale that sets up a colorful, imaginative world in opposition to the

barren gray reality. By the end of the story, however, it is clear that the fairy-tale world is

directly responsible for the knight’s exhausted desperation. The poem suggests that the two

worlds are bound together: the imagination can shape reality so profoundly that the two

become indistinguishable.

The physical descriptions of the setting ground the first stanzas in the real world. Stanzas

1 and 2 evoke a specific time of year: late autumn. Plants have "withered," birdsong is
absent, and the animals are preparing for winter. This somewhat harsh imagery will

deepen the contrast between reality and the imagination when the knight begins his

fantastic story.

That story, in turn, blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. The Lady the knight meets

is "a faery’s child" who sings a "faery’s song" as she rides with the knight on his "pacing

steed." She feeds him "manna-dew," then brings him to her "Elfin" cave. The story

emphasizes these fanciful aspects of the knight’s experience, but it is not entirely clear at

first whether the knight is using terms like "faery’s child" and "Elfin grot" literally. At this

point in the poem, they could just as well be the knight’s way of saying that the Lady was

extremely, enchantingly beautiful.

Even the revelation that the Lady is a spirit being doesn’t negate that. The knight describes

what he saw and how it affected him—the result is the same no matter who the Lady

actually is. This is why, at the end of the poem, he says quite somberly and seriously, "And

this"—"this" being his experience—"is why I sojourn here."

As he dreams in the hillside cave, the knight learns from "pale kings and princes" (the

Lady’s previous lovers) that he is in the deadly grips of a spirit known as La Belle Dame

sans Merci. The dream is a fantasy within the knight's story—a kind of double fantasy—but

it’s also here that the knight finds the actual future reflected. That is, at the deepest

moment of his imaginative experience, the knight learns the truth about what has

happened to him.

By the end of the poem, the knight’s actual, lived reality becomes a fusion of the barren

lakeside and the memory of his experience. The knight wakes from his dream "On the cold

hill’s side" and surges back into the real world—that is, the world where the poem started.

This moment raises the possibility that the knight was dreaming all along. However, given

how closely bound the real and imaginative worlds have become for the knight, waking

doesn’t imply an escape from the memory of the Lady.

 In the last stanza, the first stanza is repeated—but now the knight is speaking. The knight

acknowledges his place, “Alone and palely loitering” by the lifeless lakeside, and the poem’s

final image is of a desperate man lingering in the memory of an experience that may not

have even happened. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter whether the Lady was ever

really there. Unable to take his mind off this fantastical memory but also unable to return

to it, the knight ends up trapped in the place where his imagination merges with his

reality.

Analysis of La Belle Dame sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci with its mysterious narrative and ethereal atmosphere, combines
innocence and seduction in an unusual ballad form to produce a haunting story.

In one sense it's little more than man meets woman in the countryside, they have a fling
and the man ends up dumped, by a lake. He doesn't know if he's been drugged or not but
it certainly seems he has been intimate with this beautiful stranger.

It's up to the reader to fill in the details.

Perhaps this is why the poem is so successful in its portrayal of a relationship that came out
of nowhere, progressed to a different dimension and had such a profound effect on the
male, and probably the female too.

The reader is left hanging on, with a need to know more, thanks to the metrical pattern of
the stanzas and the bizarre circumstances the man finds himself in.

 And in certain sections of the poem there is the suggestion of a sexual liaison which is
perhaps drug inspired. Notably, stanzas five and seven stand out, with mention of the man
making garlands and bracelets and a fragrant girdle (Zone) whilst the woman made sweet
moan. And later she finds sweet roots, honey wild and manna dew (manna is the food
from heaven as stated in the Bible), most certainly the food of love.
The other question that has to be asked is: Has this whole scenario been imagined by the
speaker? Is it some sort of dream sequence based on the polarities of pleasure and pain?
Who Is The Knight? Is he dead? Why Is La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Mercy)?

The knight could be John Keats himself, who found only frustration in his love life. He may
be physically dead, waking in some afterlife, but more likely he is a loveless man who has
been emotionally deceived by a woman he believed loved him. This mirrors what happened
in real life for John Keats. So this is why the lovely woman has no mercy - she leaves men
cold and emotionally drained - at least, that is the experience of the Knight, a persona
created in the imagination of the poet.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Stanza 1 - A stranger encounters a pale knight by a lake. There is something wrong with
the man. Sedge grass has died, the birds are quiet - is this a winter scene or an integral
part of the atmosphere?

Stanza 2 - The stranger repeats his enquiry. This knight looks miserable and sick. It's the
back end of autumn, approaching colder weather.

Stanza 3 - There is a direct observation by the stranger. The lily and the rose are both
symbols of death (in a Petrarchan sense). Is the knight so close to meeting his Maker?

Stanza 4 - The knight replies. He met a woman in the meadows (Meads), no ordinary
woman but a beauty, an otherworldly figure.

Stanza 5 - The knight made love to her in the meadow. It was consensual.

Stanza 6 - Afterwards he put her on his horse and he walked alongside as she sang her
exotic songs.

Stanza 7 - She knew just where to look for sweet and heavenly foods. I ate them and she
loved me for it, even though I didn't really understand what was happening.

Stanza 8 - She took me to her special place, deep in a grotto, where she became so
emotional I had to reassure her, so wild were her eyes. I kissed them 4 times.

Stanza 9 - She calmed me down too, so much so I feel asleep and had a dream. There was
trouble brewing. That was my last ever dream.

Stanza 10 - In the dream I saw pale kings, warriors and princes, near to death. They were
warning me about the beautiful woman.

Stanza 11 - Their mouths were gaping open in that dreamy twilight gloom. Then I woke
up on a cold hill side.
Stanza 12 - And so you find me here by the lake. I don't know what I'm doing.

So the cycle is complete, yet the reader is none the wiser about the woman's or indeed the
man's, intentions or motivations.

Was she an evil entity set on absorbing the knight's life forces? A kind of vampire come to
the human world to seek knowledge of flesh and blood? Or did he take advantage of the
woman first, after which she wanted some kind of revenge?

Perhaps their chance meeting was a combination of wishful thinking on behalf of the knight
and opportunity grasped by the beautiful if supernatural female.

The whole poem suggests that the borderline between reality and imagination is often
blurred. We give ourselves up to ideals of beauty, then in a trice it is gone, or we go through
experiences that are not to our liking, that leave us spent, hollowed out.

Definition of Ode

An ode is a form of poetry such as sonnet or elegy. Ode is a literary technique that is lyrical
in nature, but not very lengthy. You have often read odes in which poets praise people,
natural scenes, and abstract ideas. Ode is derived from a Greek word aeidein, which means
to chant or sing. It is highly solemn and serious in its tone and subject matter, and usually
is used with elaborate patterns of stanzas. However, the tone is often formal. A salient
feature of ode is its uniform metrical feet, but poets generally do not strictly follow this
rule though use highly elevated theme.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography

(1792–1822)

Known for his lyrical and long-form verse, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a prominent English
Romantic poet and was one of the most highly regarded and influential poets of the 19th
century.
Who Was 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, including Queen Mab and Alastor. He went
on many adventures with his second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. 

Early Life

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a controversial English writer of great personal conviction, was born
on August 4, 1792. He was born and raised in the English countryside in the village
Broadbridge Heath, just outside of West Sussex. He learned to fish and hunt in the
meadows surrounding his home, often surveying the rivers and fields with his cousin and
good friend Thomas Medwin. His parents were Timothy Shelley, a squire and member of
Parliament, and Elizabeth Pilfold. The oldest of their seven children, Shelley left home at
age of 10 to study at Syon House Academy, about 50 miles north of Broadbridge Heath
and 10 miles west of central London. After two years, he enrolled at Eton College. While
there, he was severely bullied, both physical and mentally, by his classmates. Shelley
retreated into his imagination. Within a year’s time, he had published two novels and two
volumes of poetry, including St Irvyne and Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson.

In the fall of 1810, Shelly entered University College, Oxford. It seemed a better academic
environment for him than Eton, but after a few months, a dean demanded that Shelley
visit his office. Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg had co-authored a pamphlet
titled The Necessity of Atheism. Its premise shocked and appalled the faculty (“…The mind
cannot believe in the existence of a God.”), and the university demanded that both boys
either acknowledge or deny authorship. Shelley did neither and was expelled.

Shelley’s parents were so exasperated by their son’s actions that they demanded he forsake
his beliefs, including vegetarianism, political radicalism and sexual freedom. In August
1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a 16-year-old woman his parents had
explicitly forbidden him to see. His love for her was centered on the hope that he could save
her from committing suicide. They eloped, but Shelley was soon annoyed with her and
became interested in a woman named Elizabeth Hitchener, a schoolteacher who inspired
his first major poem, Queen Mab. The poem’s title character, a fairy originally invented
by William Shakespeare and described in Romeo and Juliet, describes what a utopian
society on earth would be like.

In addition to long-form poetry, Shelley also began writing political pamphlets, which he
distributed by way of hot air balloons, glass bottles and paper boats. In 1812, he met his
hero and future mentor, the radical political philosopher William Godwin, author
of Political Justice.

Relationships with Harriet and Mary

Although Shelley’s relationship with Harriet remained troubled, the young couple had two
children together. Their daughter, Elizabeth Ianthe, was born in June 1813, when Shelley
was 21. Before their second child was born, Shelley abandoned his wife and immediately
took up with another young woman. Well-educated and precocious, his new love interest
was named Mary, the daughter of Shelley’s beloved mentor, Godwin, and Mary
Wollstonecraft, the famous feminist author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. To
Shelley’s surprise, Godwin was not in favor of Shelley dating his daughter. In fact, Godwin
so disapproved that he would not speak with Mary for the next three years. Shelley and
Mary fled to Paris, taking Mary’s sister, Jane, with them. They departed London by ship
and, mostly traveling by foot, toured France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland, often
reading aloud to each other from the works of Shakespeare and Rousseau.

When the three finally returned home, Mary was pregnant and so was Shelley’s wife. The
news of Mary’s pregnancy brought Harriet to her wit’s end. She requested a divorce and
sued Shelley for alimony and full custody of their children. Harriet’s second child with
Shelley, Charles, was born in November 1814. Three months later, Mary gave birth to a
girl. The infant died just a few weeks later. In 1816, Mary gave birth to their son, William.

WRITERS
WRITERS
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A dedicated vegetarian, Shelley authored several works on the diet and spiritual practice,
including A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). In 1815, Shelley wrote Alastor, or The
Spirit of Solitude, a 720-line poem, now recognized as his first great work. That same
year, Shelley’s grandfather passed away and left him an annual allowance of 1,000 British
pounds.

Friendship with Lord Byron

In 1816, Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont, invited Shelley and Mary to join her on a
trip to Switzerland. Clairmont had begun dating the Romantic poet Lord Byron and
wished to show him off to her sister. By the time they commenced the trip, Byron was less
interested in Clairmont. Nevertheless, the three stayed in Switzerland all summer. Shelley
rented a house on Lake Geneva close to Byron’s and the two men became fast friends.
Shelley wrote incessantly during his visit. After a long day of boating with Byron, Shelley
returned home and wrote Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. After a trip through the French
Alps with Byron, he was inspired to write Mont Blanc, a pondering on the relationship
between man and nature.

Harriet’s Death and Shelley’s Second Marriage

In the fall of 1816, Shelley and Mary returned to England to find that Mary’s half-sister,
Fanny Imlay, had committed suicide. In December of the same year, it was discovered that
Harriet had also committed suicide. She was found drowned in the Serpentine River in
Hyde Park, London. A few weeks later, Shelley and Mary finally married. Mary’s father
was delighted by the news and accepted his daughter back into the family fold. Amidst
their celebration, however, loss pursued Shelley. Following Harriet’s death, the courts ruled
not to give Shelley custody of their children, asserting that they would be better off with
foster parents.

With these matters settled, Shelley and Mary moved to Marlow, a small village in
Buckinghamshire. There, Shelley befriended John Keats and Leigh Hunt, both talented
poets and writers. Shelley’s conversations with them encouraged his own literary pursuits.
Around 1817, he wrote Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. His
publishers balked at the main storyline, which centers on incestuous lovers. He was asked to
edit it and to find a new title for the work. In 1818, he reissued it as The Revolt of Islam.
Though the title suggests the subject of Islam, the poem’s focus is religion in general and
features socialist political themes.
Life in Italy

Shortly after the publication of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley, Mary and Clairmont left for
Italy. Byron was living in Venice, and Clairmont was on a mission to bring their daughter,
Allegra, to visit with him. For the next several years, Shelley and Mary moved from city to
city. While in Venice, their baby daughter, Clara Everina, died. A year later, their son
William also passed away. Around this time, Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound. During
their residency in Livorno, in 1819, he wrote The Cenci and The Masque of Anarchy and
Men of England, a response to the Peterloo Massacre in England.

Death and Legacy

On July 8, 1822, just shy of turning 30, Shelley drowned while sailing his schooner back
from Livorno to Lerici, after having met with Hunt to discuss their newly printed
journal, The Liberal. Despite conflicting evidence, most papers reported Shelley’s death as
an accident. However, based on the scene that was discovered on the boat’s deck, others
speculated that he might have been murdered by an enemy who detested his political
beliefs.

Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach in Viareggio, where his body had washed ashore.
Mary, as was the custom for women during the time, did not attend her husband’s funeral.
Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. More than a century
later, he was memorialized in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘Ode to the West Wind’ was written in Cascine Woods, outside of Florence, Italy, and

published in 1820. It focuses on death’s necessary destruction and the possibilities of

rebirth.

In this poem, Ode to the West Wind, Percy Shelley creates a speaker that seems to worship

the wind. He always refers to the wind as “Wind” using the capital letter, suggesting that

he sees it as his god. He praises the wind, referring to its strength and might in tones

similar to the Biblical Psalms which worship God. He also refers to the Greek God, Dionysus.

The speaker continues to praise the wind and to beseech it to hear him. When he is
satisfied that the wind hears him, he begs the wind to take him away in death, in hopes

that there will be a new life waiting for him on the other side.

Summary of Ode to the West Wind 

Ode to the West Wind’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley focuses on the west wind, a powerful and
destructive force, yet a necessary one.
In the first lines, the speaker addresses the wind and describes how it creates deadly
storms. it drives away the summer and brings with it the cold and darkness of winter. He
imagines what it would be like to be a dead leaf lifted and blown around by the wind and
he implores the wind to lift him “as a wave, a lead, a cloud!” The speaker sees the wind as
a necessary evil, one that eventually means that spring is on the way.

Themes in Ode to the West Wind  

Shelley engages with themes of death, rebirth, and poetry in ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ From
the start, Shelley’s speaker describes the wind as something powerful and destructive. It
takes away the summer and brings winter, a season usually associated with death and
sorrow. It’s not a peaceful wind, he adds, but despite this, the speaker celebrates it. It is
necessary for the circle of life to progress. Without death, there is no rebirth. The wind
serves an important role in preserving this. Poetry is one of the less obvious themes in ‘Ode
to the West Wind.’ The speaker seems to allude to a process of creation in the text, one
that involves him personally. This might, considering the format, be the creation of poetry.

Analysis of Ode to the West Wind

Canto 1

Stanza One

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

In the opening stanza of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker appeals to the wild West Wind.
The use of capital letters for “West” and “Wind” immediately suggests that he is speaking
to the Wind as though it were a person. He calls the wind the “breath of Autumn’s being”,
thereby further personifying the wind and giving it the human quality of having breath. He
describes the wind as having “unseen presence” which makes it seem as though he views
the wind as a sort of god or spiritual being. The last line of this stanza specifically refers to
the wind as a spiritual being that drives away death and ghosts.
 

Stanza Two

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

This stanza of Ode to the West Wind describes the dead Autumn leaves. They are not
described as colorful and beautiful, but rather as a symbol of death and even disease. The
speaker describes the deathly colors “yellow” “black” and “pale”. Even “hectic red”
reminds one of blood and sickness. He describes the dead and dying leaves as “Pestilence
stricken multitudes”. This is not a peaceful nor beautiful description of the fall leaves.
Rather, the speaker seems to see the fall leaves as a symbol of the dead, the sick, and the
dying. The wind then comes along like a chariot and carries the leaves “to their dark
wintry bed”, which is clearly a symbol of a grave.
 

Stanza Three

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

The speaker continues the metaphor of the leaves as the dead by explaining that the wind
carries them and “winged seeds” to their graves, “where they lie cold and low”. He then
uses a simile to compare each leaf to “a corpse within its grave”. But then, partway
through the second line, a shift occurs. The speaker says that each is like a corpse “until”
the wind comes through, taking away the dead, but bringing new life. The use of the word
“azure” or blue, to describe the wind is in sharp contrast to the colors used to describe the
leaves.
 
Stanza Four

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

With this stanza of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker describes the wind as something
which drives away death, burying the dead, and bringing new life. It brings “living hues”
and “ordours” which are filled with new life.
 

Stanza Five

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

Here, the speaker again appeals to the wind, calling it a “wild spirit” and viewing it as a
spiritual being who destroys and yet also preserves life. He is asking this spirit to hear his
pleas. He has not yet made a specific request of the wind, but it is clear that he views it as
a powerful spiritual being that can hear him.

Canto 2

Stanza One

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Again, the speaker addresses the wind as a person, calling it the one who will “loose
clouds” and shake the leaves of the “boughs of Heaven and Ocean”. This reads almost as a
Psalm, as if the speaker is praising the wind for its power.

 
Stanza Two

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Again, the speaker refers to the wind as a spiritual being more powerful than angels, for
the angels “of rain and lightening” are described as being “spread on the blue surface” of
the wind. He then describes these angels as being “like the bright hair” on the head of an
even greater being.

Stanza Three

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

In this stanza of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker compares the wind to a “fierce
Maenad” or the spiritual being that used to be found around the Greek God, Dionysus.
Remember, this is the being that was also described as having hair like angels. Thus, the
wind is described as a being like a god, with angels for hair. These angels of rain and
lightening reveal that a storm is on the way.
 

Stanza Four

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

The speaker then explains that the storm approaching is the impending doom of the dying
year. The use of ‘sepulcher’ is interesting too since this is referring to a small
room/monument, in which a person is buried in, typically Christian origin. To refer to
something like this could suggest that Shelley wants to trap and contain all of the power of
nature inside the tomb, for it to ‘burst’ open in stanza 5. As well as this, a sepulcher is an
isolating way of being buried, which could indicate Shelley wants to move away from all his
miseries and be finally at one with nature.
 

Stanza Five

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

The speaker then describes the wind as the bringer of death. He has already described it as
the Destroyer. Here, he describes it as one who brings “black rain and fire and hail..” Then,
to end this Canto, the speaker again appeals to the wind, begging that it would hear him.

Canto 3

Stanza One

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

To begin this Canto, the speaker describes the wind as having woken up the Mediterranean
sea from a whole summer of peaceful rest. The sea, here, is also personified.

Stanza Two

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

With this stanza of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker simply implies that the sea was
dreaming of the old days of palaces and towers and that he was “quivering” at the
memory of an “intenser day”.
Stanza Three

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
The speaker continues to describe the sea’s dreams as being of slower days when everything
was overgrown with blue “moss and flowers”. Then, he hints that something is about to
change when he mentions to Atlantic’s “powers”.

Stanzas Four and Five

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

This stanza of Ode to the West Wind is in reference to the sea’s reaction to the power of
the wind. At the first sign of the strong wind, the sea seems to “cleave” into “chasms” and
“grow grey with fear” as they tremble at the power of the wind. Again, this stanza reflects
a Psalm in the worship of a God so mighty that nature itself trembles in its sight.
 

Canto 4

Stanza One

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

Here, the speaker finally brings his attention to himself. He imagines that he was a dead
leaf which the wind might carry away or a cloud which the wind might blow. He thinks
about what it would be like to be a wave at the mercy of the power of the wind.

Stanza Two

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The speaker stands in awe of the wondrous strength of the wind. It seems to act on
“impulse” and its strength is “uncontrollable”. He then mentions his own childhood.

Stanza Three

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

Here, the speaker seems to wonder whether the wind has gotten stronger since his
childhood, or whether he has simply become weaker. He thinks that when he was a boy, he
may have been about to “outstrip” the speed of the wind. And yet, his boyhood “seemed a
vision”, so distant, and so long ago. The speaker is clearly contrasting the strength of the
wind to his own weakness that has come upon him as he has aged.

Stanza Four

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Here, the speaker finally comes to his request. Until now, he has been asking the wind to
hear him, but he has not made any specific requests. Now, he compares himself to a man
“in prayer in [his] sore need” and he begs the wind to “lift [him] as a wave, a leaf, a
cloud”. He longs to be at the mercy of the wind, whatever may come of it. In the final line,
he refers to himself as one who is in the final stages of his life when he says, “I fall upon the
thorns of life! I bleed”. Just like the wind swept away the dead leaves of the Autumn, the
speaker calls for the wind to sweep him away, old and decaying as he is.

Stanza Five

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
The speaker says that the weight of all of his years of life have bowed him down, even
though he was once like the wind, “tameless…swift, and proud”.

Canto 5

Stanza One

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Again, the speaker begs the wind to make him be at its mercy. He wants to be like a lyre
(or harp) played by the wind. He wants to be like the dead leaves which fall to the ground
when the wind blows.

Stanza Two

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
In this stanza of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker asks the wind to come into him and
make him alive. This is yet another reference to the wind as a sort of god. In some
religions, particularly the Christian religion, there is the belief that to have a new life, one
must receive the Holy Spirit into his bodily being. This is precisely what the speaker is
asking the wind to do to him. He realizes that for this to happen, his old self would be
swept away. That is why he describes this as “sweet though in sadness”. But he asks the
spirit of the wind to be his own spirit and to be one with him.
 

Stanza Three

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
The speaker asks the wind to “drive [his] dead thoughts over the universe” so that even as
he dies, others might take his thoughts and his ideas and give them “new birth”. He thinks
that perhaps this might even happen with the very words he is speaking now.

Stanza Four

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The speaker asks the wind to scatter his thoughts as “ashes and sparks” that his words
might kindle a fire among mankind, and perhaps awaken the sleeping earth.

Stanza Five

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The speaker has used spiritual and biblical references throughout Ode to the West Wind to
personify the wind as a god, but here he makes it a little more specific. When he says, “The
trumpet of prophecy” he is specifically referring to the end of the world as the Bible
describes it. When the trumpet of prophecy is blown, Christ is believed to return to earth
to judge the inhabitants. The speaker asks the Wind to blow that trumpet. Because of the
speaker’s tone throughout Ode to the West Wind, it would make sense if this was the
speaker’s own personal trumpet, marking the end of his life. He wants the wind to blow
this trumpet. With the last two lines of Ode to the West Wind, the speaker reveals why he
has begged the wind to take him away in death. He says, “If Winter comes, can Spring be
far behind?” This reveals his hope that there is an afterlife for him. He desperately hopes
that he might leave behind his dying body and enter into a new life after his death.

Themes in Ode to the West Wind  

Shelley engages with themes of death, rebirth, and poetry in ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ From
the start, Shelley’s speaker describes the wind as something powerful and destructive. It
takes away the summer and brings winter, a season usually associated with death and
sorrow. It’s not a peaceful wind, he adds, but despite this, the speaker celebrates it. It is
necessary for the circle of life to progress. Without death, there is no rebirth. The wind
serves an important role in preserving this. Poetry is one of the less obvious themes in ‘Ode
to the West Wind.’ The speaker seems to allude to a process of creation in the text, one
that involves him personally. This might, considering the format, be the creation of poetry.

John Keats Biography

(1795–1821)

English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked
by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend.

Who Was John Keats?

John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery,
great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In
1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on
that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis, which ended his life.

Early Years

A revered English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years, John Keats was born
October 31, 1795, in London, England. He was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’
four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age. He was eight years old when his
father, a livery stable-keeper, was killed after being trampled by a horse.

His father's death had a profound effect on the young boy's life. In a more abstract sense, it
shaped Keats' understanding for the human condition, both its suffering and its loss. This
tragedy and others helped ground Keats' later poetry—one that found its beauty and
grandeur from the human experience. 

In a more mundane sense, Keats' father's death greatly disrupted the family's financial
security. His mother, Frances, seemed to have launched a series of missteps and mistakes
after her husband’s death; she quickly remarried and just as quickly lost a good portion of
the family's wealth. After her second marriage fell apart, Frances left the family, leaving
her children in the care of her mother.

She eventually returned to her children's life, but her life was in tatters. In early 1810, she
died of tuberculosis.

During this period, Keats found solace and comfort in art and literature. At Enfield
Academy, where he started shortly before his father's passing, Keats proved to be a
voracious reader. He also became close to the school's headmaster, John Clarke, who served
as a sort of a father figure to the orphaned student and encouraged Keats' interest in
literature.

Back home, Keats' maternal grandmother turned over control of the family's finances,
which was considerable at the time, to a London merchant named Richard Abbey.
Overzealous in protecting the family's money, Abbey showed himself to be reluctant to let
the Keats children spend much of it. He refused to be forthcoming about how much money
the family actually had and in some cases was downright deceitful.

There is some debate as to whose decision it was to pull Keats out of Enfield, but in the fall
of 1810, Keats left the school for studies to become a surgeon. He eventually studied
medicine at a London hospital and became a licensed apothecary in 1816.

Early Poetry

But Keats' career in medicine never truly took off. Even as he studied medicine, Keats’
devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, whose
father was the headmaster at Enfield, Keats met publisher, Leigh Hunt of The Examiner.

Hunt's radicalism and biting pen had landed him in prison in 1813 for libeling Prince
Regent. Hunt, though, had an eye for talent and was an early supporter of Keats poetry
and became his first publisher. Through Hunt, Keats was introduced to a world of politics
that was new to him and had greatly influenced what he put on the page. In honor of
Hunt, Keats wrote the sonnet, "Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison."
In addition to affirming Keats' standing as a poet, Hunt also introduced the young poet to
a group of other English poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Williams Wordsworth.

In 1817 Keats leveraged his new friendships to publish his first volume of poetry, Poems by
John Keats. The following year, Keats' published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand
line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name.

Keats had written the poem in the summer and fall of 1817, committing himself to at
least 40 lines a day. He completed the work in November of that year and it was published
in April 1818.

Keats' daring and bold style earned him nothing but criticism from two of England's more
revered publications, Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review. The attacks were an
extension of heavy criticism lobbed at Hunt and his cadre of young poets. The most
damning of those pieces had come from Blackwood's, whose piece, "On the Cockney School
of Poetry," shook Keats and made him nervous to publish "Endymion."

Keats' hesitation was warranted. Upon its publication the lengthy poem received a lashing
from the more conventional poetry community. One critic called the work, the
"imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion." Others found the four-book structure and its
general flow hard to follow and confusing.

Recovering Poet

How much of an effect this criticism had on Keats is uncertain, but it is clear that he did
take notice of it. But Shelley's later accounts of how the criticism destroyed the young poet
and led to his declining health, however, have been refuted.

Keats in fact, had already moved beyond "Endymion" even before it was published. By the
end of 1817, he was reexamining poetry's role in society. In lengthy letters to friends,
Keats outlined his vision of a kind of poetry that drew its beauty from real world human
experience rather than some mythical grandeur. 
Keats was also formulating the thinking behind his most famous doctrine, Negative
Capability, which is the idea that humans are capable of transcending intellectual or social
constraints and far exceed, creatively or intellectually, what human nature is thought to
allow. 

In effect Keats was responding to his critics, and conventional thinking in general, which
sought to squeeze the human experience into a closed system with tidy labels and rational
relationships. Keats saw a world more chaotic, more creative than what others he felt,
would permit.

The Mature Poet

In the summer of 1818, Keats took a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland. He
returned home later that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd fallen deeply ill with
tuberculosis.

Keats, who around this time fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, continued to
write. He'd proven prolific for much of the past year. His work included his first
Shakespearean sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," which was published in
January 1818.

Two months later, Keats published "Isabella," a poem that tells the story of a woman who
falls in love with a man beneath her social standing, instead of the man her family has
chosen her to marry. The work was based on a story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio,
and it's one Keats himself would grow to dislike.

His work also included the beautiful "To Autumn," a sensuous work published in 1820 that
describes ripening fruit, sleepy workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and others,
demonstrated a style Keats himself had crafted all his own, one that was filled with more
sensualities than any contemporary Romantic poetry. 

Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic
piece inspired by Greek myth that told the story of the Titans' despondency after their
losses to the Olympians.
But the death of Keats' brother halted his writing. He finally returned to the work in late
1819, rewriting his unfinished poem with a new title, "The Fall of Hyperion," which would
go unpublished until more than three decades after Keats' death.

This, of course, speaks to the small audience for Keats' poetry during his lifetime. In all, the
poet published three volumes of poetry during his life but managed to sell just a combined
200 copies of his work by the time of his death in 1821. His third and final volume of
poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems , was published in July
1820.

Only with the help of his friends, who pushed hard to secure Keats' legacy, and the work
and style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during the
latter half of the 19th century, did Keats' stock rise considerably.

Final Years and Death

In 1819 Keats contracted tuberculosis. His health deteriorated quickly. Soon after his last
volume of poetry was published, he ventured off to Italy with his close friend, the painter
Joseph Severn, on the advice of his doctor, who had told him he needed to be in a warmer
climate for the winter.

The trip marked the end of his romance with Brawne. His health issues and his own
dreams of becoming a successful writer had stifled their chances of ever getting married.  

Keats arrived in Rome in November of that year and for a brief time started to feel better.
But within a month, he was back in bed, suffering from a high temperature. The last few
months of his life proved particularly painful for the poet.

His doctor in Rome placed Keats on a strict diet that consisted of a single anchovy and a
piece of bread per day in order to limit the flow of blood to the stomach. He also induced
heavy bleeding, resulting in Keats suffering from both a lack of oxygen and a lack of food.

Keats' agony was so severe that at one point he pressed his doctor and asked him, "How
long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"
Keats' death came on February 23, 1821. It's believed he was clutching the hand of his
friend, Severn, at the time of his passing.

John Keats And A Summary of To Autumn

To Autumn is one of the most popular poems in the English speaking world and is
considered by many critics to be one of Keats's finest creations. It is a shortened ode, a
formal poem of meditative reflection.

Over the years it has been interpreted in several different ways, the most recent being a
political reading of the poem by a prominent Marxist poet. This article will explore all the
various alternatives, from literal to allegorical, and focus on rhyme, metre (meter in
American English), syntax, allusion and language.

Suffice to say that, despite these alternative approaches, the poem has retained its
reputation as a masterpiece of form and content, and elicits positive reaction wherever it is
read.

John Keats wrote in a letter to a friend, Leigh Hunt: 'We hate poetry that has a palpable
design upon us...Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters one's soul.'

Keats would be happy to know that much of his poetry is still considered great art and
affects even the post-modern mind (and soul). But the question has to be asked - Can a
poem written by a leading poet be totally immune to the social, political and cultural
environment it is born in to at that time?

Certainly Keats was aware of social and political upheavals of his day, including the
infamous massacre of working protestors at the Battle of Peterloo in Manchester in the
summer of 1819. He did have radical leanings but tended not to express them in his
poetry, unlike say, Shelley.

So, is To Autumn simply about the season and nothing else?

 To Autumn seems to have been written following a walk Keats took on Tuesday 21st
September 1819, when living in Winchester. He wrote a letter to a friend, John Hamilton
Reynolds:

'How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really,
without joking, chaste weather - Dian skies - I never liked stubble-fields so much as now -
Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm - in
the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk
that I composed upon it.'

Keats's composition, based on his observations and imaginative sensitivity, was inspired by
an autumnal walk. This simple act produced a work of art that has enthralled and
intrigued ever since.

Critics will make of it what they will but there is no mistaking the central themes
contained within each stanza:

 the fecundity and natural bounty of the season.

 the cessation/culmination of that now managed process.
 the cyclical nature of time, change.
What is also clear is that the speaker visualises Autumn as a god or goddess of sorts. This
divine spirit is a close bosom-friend of the sun, conspiring with him to load and bless;
is sitting carelessly...drowsed...sound asleep...with patient look; is still full of music, of a
different kind, despite the inevitable melancholic change.

To Autumn
 Analysis of Keats's To Autumn Stanza by Stanza

To Autumn is many things to many different people:

 a literal exploration of autumn,

 an allegory of part of life's journey,
 a metaphorical depiction of creative processes,
 an illustration of political energies in the workplace.
Stanza 1

There is no doubt that personification is at work in this wonderfully balanced ode. From
the first three lines it is crystal clear that the sun, a male symbol associated with Apollo
the Greek god, is conspiring with a partner, who is a close bosom-friend, of the opposite
sex.

This female could be Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and natural fertility. They
combine their energies to load, bless, bend, fill, swell, plump and set all the flora; harvest
time has arrived and there is a bounty, secretly produced by these powerful spirits.

Note the sensuous language, the soft consonants enhancing - m, h and f - the contrasting
short and long vowels reflecting the tension at work as the whole plant world comes to
fruition.

The first stanza is one long sentence, taking in cosmic sun and microcosmic bee and cell,
building into a heaped and humming climax, onomatopoeia filling the last line.

Stanza 2

After all the hard work through the late summer months comes the question - a direct
question based again on imaginative sensitivity - perhaps this female spirit, this goddess,
near exhaustion, now relaxes, even sleeps? Stasis has been reached.

The speaker suggests that her hair is soft-lifted by winnowing wind, an alliterative,
onomatopeiac line that conjures up whistling or the whinny of horses. This female spirit
overlooks various aspects of the harvest now that the reaping, threshing and gleaning has
finished - she takes her time as the apple juice ferments.

Note the languid, slow feel of the last line (22) with its slow, long vowels, almost an adagio.
 Stanza 3

The second and third questions appear, asking about the inspirational music of Spring. But
that enlivening season and its song have gone, replaced by a more sombre music.

Think not of them....is the speaker reassuring the female spirit that Autumn too has a valid
role to play in the cycle of life. There is no turning back the clock. The language of lines 25
- 29 speaks for itself - soft-dying day, wailful, mourn, sinking, dies - things are coming to
an end and the atmosphere is one almost of lament.

 The rhythms in line 29 enhance the feeling of the seasonal changes about to take place.
Note the spondee and the pyrrhic alongside the iambic which alters the pace, reflects the
gnats river dance and gives a lilt to the cadence.
This melancholic mid-section of the final stanza has to be acknowledged, but the ending is
one of inevitable renewal and positive change. The hedge-cricket, the robin red-breast and
the swallows are communicating, the latter about to journey south to find warmth and a
new life.

“To Autumn” Themes

Beauty and Death

As its title would suggest, “To Autumn” celebrates the bountiful beauty of the fall. In the

poem, autumn is a season characterized by a rich abundance of life. The culmination of

weeks of summer warmth and sunshine, autumn sees trees overloaded with fruit, beehives

dripping with honey, and thick vines trailing up the sides of farmhouses.

Often, the poem is taken to be no more than an ode to a lovely, life-filled time of year

that is often overshadowed by spring and summer. And yet, running underneath this

celebration of life is a sense of impending decay. Autumn’s abundance is only possible

because it comes at the end of the growing season, and all this well-being exists on the

brink of death; as winter approaches, fruit will rot, leaves will fall, and crops will be

harvested. This doesn't diminish the loveliness of autumn, however, and instead suggests
that beauty shines all the more powerfully in the moments before it will soon be gone. In a

way, then, death is just as much a part of autumn's loveliness as is life.

The speaker envisions autumn as a transitional season that straddles the line between

abundance and decay. Tree limbs “bend” under the load of their apples, while gourds

“swell” and the flowers are “set budding more, / And still more.” The fruits are at their

sweetest and juiciest, ripe “to the core.” In a sense, they are beautiful and delectable

precisely because they are on the verge of rot (that is, of dying).

Indeed, all of these images veer close to destruction: were things to grow without end,

perhaps the tree limbs would break under the weight of their fruit, the gourds would burst,

and the bees would drown in "their clammy cells" (i.e., their over-filled hives).

More life would transform this beauty into something grotesque—which perhaps is why the

speaker appreciates autumn not as a season of growth, but rather one of impending death

and reaping.

The second stanza takes up this idea by focusing on the harvest, describing the “winnowing

wind,” the “half-reap’d furrow,” and the harvester’s “hook.” Each of these images depicts

the separation and cutting associated with farming, especially the “hook,” or scythe; each

also clearly evokes death.

But the speaker softens these images, lending all this death a kind of pleasure. The

“winnowing wind” results in “hair soft-lifted”; the personified autumn lies “sound asleep”

on the “half-reap’d furrow”; and the scythe does not cut, but “Spares the next swath.”

Later, autumn loiters drowsily in the fields, gazing into the brook and the “last oozings” of

the cider press. Like the swollen fruit from stanza 1, these end-of-autumn images bulge

forth with sensuous beauty that combines both life and decay.

The poem ultimately presents death as a sort peaceful rest at the end of frenzied activity.

To this end, the speaker depicts the day's transition into night (and the broader seasonal

transition into winter) as a process similar to falling asleep. First comes the onset of

evening, as “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Like autumn and its fruits, the day

is dying—but softly. This process has the beautiful quality of a flower that slowly blooms
and wilts. Next, the dying sunlight “touch[es] the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” It makes

the freshly mowed plains, an image of death, appear gentle and beautiful.

Meanwhile, a chorus of animals elegizes the end of autumn. Knowing death is on the

horizon, the speaker interprets the gnats’ hum as “wailful” and mournful. The speaker also

recognizes beauty in the singing crickets and the robin who whistles “with treble soft.”

Finally, the swallows gather and sing against the void of the darkening sky, which will soon

pummel the land with harsh weather. All this music, which might appear any time of year,

takes on a special beauty in the gathering shadow of death.

Embracing the Present

In “To Autumn,” the speaker stays rooted in the colorful world of the moment. The

speaker urges personified autumn not to think about “the songs of spring,” but rather to

appreciate that “thou hast thy music too.” That is, the speaker asks both autumn and the

reader to focus exclusively on the here and now. Yet even while focusing on

autumnal imagery, the speaker can’t help but be reminded of what comes before and after

this particular season. As such, the poem suggests that embracing the present somewhat

paradoxically leads to a deep appreciation of the past and future as well.

The poem’s first lines contain bending apple trees, swelling gourds, ripe fruit, and beehives

overflowing with honey. These images of teeming life emphasize that this poem is about the

bounty of autumn. This bounty results from autumn’s close relationship with the “maturing

sun, / Conspiring with him to load and bless.” While appreciating this specific point in

time, then, the poem also recognizes that autumn only appears as the end of a long

process of growth and ripening.

Indeed, focusing on the fruits of the present leads to an obvious question: where did all this

come from? To answer it, the poem must acknowledge autumn’s precursor: summer. For

instance, the bees see autumn as a lovely extension of summer—“they think warm days

will never cease / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.” In other words, the

bees recall the summer that enabled their hives to thrive.

On the one hand, then, the poem urges readers to simply stop and take in the beauty of

this particular moment. At the same time, the poem subtly implies that to do so properly
requires an appreciation of everything that led to this moment—as well as an appreciation

of what will come next.

To that end, the poem presents autumn as a sort of mixture of winter and spring by

highlighting features shared among the seasons. First off, both autumn and spring are full

of noise and diverse life. The bleating lambs, whistling robin, and twittering swallows of the

third stanza might just as well appear in a description of a spring morning, as might the

“river sallows” (or willows), “Hedge,” and “garden.”

At the same time, these images hint at the impending winter and its associated forms of

death. The lambs, for example are “full-grown,” and therefore ready for slaughter. The

swallows, which would perish in the cold, are gathering to migrate south. Thus, although

autumn is distinct from these other seasons, it contains hints of each of them in its

characteristic imagery. The poem conveys autumn’s depth without explicitly referring to

the other seasons. Instead, it focuses on “thy music”—autumn’s music. At the same time

that it distinguishes autumn, this lively, mournful music joins it with the past and future.

Definition of Free Verse

Free verse is a literary device that can be defined as poetry that is free from limitations of
regular meter or rhythm, and does not rhyme with fixed forms. Such poems are without
rhythm and rhyme schemes, do not follow regular rhyme scheme rules, yet still provide
artistic expression. In this way, the poet can give his own shape to a poem however he or
she desires. However, it still allows poets to use alliteration, rhyme, cadences, and rhythms
to get the effects that they consider are suitable for the piece.

Features of Free Verse

 Free verse poems have no regular meter or rhythm.

 They do not follow a proper rhyme scheme; these poems do not have any set rules.
 This type of poem is based on normal pauses and natural rhythmical phrases, as
compared to the artificial constraints of normal poetry.
 It is also called vers libre, which is a French word meaning “free verse.”
 Biography of William Carlos Williams 
 William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in September of 1883.
His father was English and his mother was Puerto Rican and French. As a young
man, he attended Horace Mann High School, this was where he first started writing
poetry. It was his intention, even at this young age, to become both a doctor and a
writer. After his primary and secondary education, he was sent to school in a town
near Geneva, Switzerland, and then later to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. This
school was founded in 1803 and educated the likes of Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine,
and Henri Bergson.
  
 Education
 Williams eventually moved to New York where he attended the Horace Mann School.
He was later admitted into the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. He
became close friends with fellow poet Ezra Pound during this time period. He
graduated from this institution in 1906. It was three years later that Williams
published his first book of poetry entitled, Poems. A few years later he married
Florence Herman. Together they moved back to Williams’ hometown of Rutherford. 
 In 1913, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, Williams published his second
collection, The Tempers. One year later Williams’ first son, William E. Williams, was
born. He was followed by a second son in 1917. During the 20s Williams broke from
the Imagist movement and garnered a significant amount of criticism from his peers
and colleagues. A number of well-known writers, such as H.D. and even Pound
himself, considered some of Williams’ works to be disjointed and incomprehensible.
On the back of this criticism, one of Williams’ most important books, Spring and
All, was published in 1923. 
  
 Later Life
 Throughout his career, Williams worked as both a family doctor and poet. During
the 1930s the tone of Williams’ works changed. Up until this point he was known
for his celebration of the world in the style of the Imagist poets. Then, within the
darkest parts of the Depression, his work focused on the wrongs of the world. 
 In 1949 Williams won the first National Book Award for poetry and was named
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1952. His term was cut short
though during the years of McCarthyism. In the late forties, Williams suffered a
stroke. He never fully recovered as a second stroke sent him into a deep depression.
 Williams was confined to a hospital in 1953 and he died ten years later in March of
1963. 

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams might at first seem like a bizarre poem
about a meaningless “wheelbarrow.” Upon deeper consideration, however, the reader can
uncover layers of depth that speak of disguise, appreciation, and usefulness that can be
applied outside of the poem—like in the relationships we have with companions. Basically,
from this story of “a red wheelbarrow,” we can realize that some of the most crucial
elements in our lives can go overlooked, and we can use that information to show more
appreciation to those who merit it.

Summary of The Red Wheelbarrow 

‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams depicts, in very simple language, a red
wheelbarrow outside in the rain.

As an imagist poem, The Red Wheelbarrow is doing exactly what its supposed to. There is
nothing “extra” about this piece. It is incredibly direct while also making use of memorable
images that help the reader connect with what’s being described.
You can read the full poem The Red Wheelbarrow here.

Themes in The Red Wheelbarrow 

In ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ Williams engages with themes that include sentimentality and
nostalgia, as well as nature. The latter can be expended to include human beings and what
they create. The wheelbarrow is, by Williams’ own depiction, an incredibly important tool.
He sees it as something upon which practically the whole world hinges. through his focus on
the wheelbarrow, Williams is also asking the reader to consider nature and humankind’s
connection with it. It is a tool that allows for rural and farming communities to make a
living and support their families day to day.
 

Literary Devices in The Red Wheelbarrow 

Williams makes use of several literary devices in ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. These include but
are not limited to examples of alliteration, juxtaposition, and imagery. The latter is one of
the most obvious and important techniques at work. By using images clearly and succinctly,
Williams enures that readers connect with the sentiments that he’s interested in.
Juxtaposition is another interesting and important technique that helps to convey the
meaning behind ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. the clearest example of this technique is the
wheelbarrow itself, which in a non-poetic context is unimportant and the importance that
Williams bestows on it. He depicts it as the hinge upon which the entire world rests.
Alliteration is a formal device that is concerned with the use and reuse of words that start
with the same consonant sounds. For example, “rain” and “red” as well as “barrow” and
“beside”. Each example takes on a greater significance in the poem due to the overall
brevity of the text.

Analysis of The Red Wheelbarrow

Stanzas One and Two

so much depends

(…)

a red wheel

barrow

The structure of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’  is remarkably fitting for the commentary that is
taking place regarding the “red wheelbarrow”. Specifically, no word of this set of lines (or
of the lines to follow) is capitalized, which shows a lack of visible importance for everything
said. Even with the beginning of a sentence with “so,” there is no capitalization. This speaks
of how unadorned and overlooked a “wheelbarrow” can be, though its uses are many. No
doubt, the “wheelbarrow” can be utilized as a grand tool for manual labor, but when
someone sees it, there is little significance to note, like a lowercase tool that is surrounded
by things that seem more important. Still, “so much depends upon” this tool that the lack
of visible grandeur is somewhat misleading, just as the lowercase lettering can be a
misleading detail that hides the fact that what is presented is, in fact, a full sentence.
As well, the structure of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is very reliable. Each first line of every set
is three words, and the second line of each set comes with just one word. This shows that
the “wheelbarrow” is sturdy and reliable in its nature to be a sound tool. Worth noting as
well is that the only way that this basic three-to-one-word structure for line sets can be
accomplished is for the poet to separate “Wheelbarrow” into two words. This manipulation
of the wording to fit into the structure indicates that this tool can be used in various
manners like it too can be made into the right tool for jobs even when it logically is not a
perfect fit. Essentially, then, this overlooked “wheelbarrow” is multifaceted and
dependable, even if circumstances logically stand outside of its normal reach.
That the narrator says “upon” instead of “on” is telling as well since it comes with an
elegant connotation like something out of a fairy tale. Given that fairy tales often include
royalty and disguises—like Snow White’s stepmother as an old lady, Cinderella at the ball,
and Princess Aurora in a quaint cottage—this hints that there is something above and
beyond at work with this “wheelbarrow.” Like these fairy tale characters, there is more to
this “wheelbarrow” than meets the eye.
One final note about these beginning lines is that this “wheelbarrow” is “red.” This is such a
connected color for a “wheelbarrow” that it borders on cliché, and if a person pictures it in
front of a “red” barn, the “wheelbarrow” could easily blend in. In this, the narrator has
addressed the “wheelbarrow” in a manner that makes it very typical in coloring, and
something that likely does not stick out from its surroundings. Basically, it is doomed to be
overlooked though “so much depends upon” it.

Stanzas Three and Four

glazed with rain

(…)

chickens

These lines continue with the same structural patterns of word counts and no
capitalization, though it does add a bit of elegance to the noted “wheel barrow.” In
particular, the “wheel barrow” is “glazed with rain water.” While this speaks to the level of
disregard the “wheelbarrow” endures to be left out to the elements, the verb choice of
“glazed” comes with a connotation of a shining covering. Though it comes from neglect, in
a way, this is a glimmering sheen that adds something to the visual of the “wheelbarrow.”
It is no longer just “red” and ordinary, but “glazed”—shining and more likely to gain
attention.

However, that attention is stunted with the final line of the poem when the poet notes
that this “wheelbarrow” is “beside the white chickens.” As was noted earlier, “a red
wheelbarrow” can certainly blend into a typical farm lifestyle, particularly when something
as bright as a “white chicken” is there to catch a viewer’s eyes. The irony, though, is that
this “wheelbarrow” could be used to help tend to the chickens as well, such as carrying
their food. Regardless of this usefulness, the “wheelbarrow” could be overlooked in favor of
the “chickens” and their brighter coloring.
There is no punctuation mark within ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ outside of the final period.
What this indicates is that only the final act of the “wheelbarrow” matters, as in only its
ability to function fully. There is no appreciation shown, though the owner of the
“wheelbarrow” must have his tasks finished to completion by the “wheelbarrow.” In this,
the period is needed because it indicates that the ending details are what matter. As well,
it indicates that this is the ultimate end to the existence of the “wheelbarrow.” It will never
escape this cycle, and this situation of being overlooked and little appreciated is its ultimate
end.
When applied to human nature, this poem could indicate that there are people around us
who are essential to our being, but they go overlooked as well for various reasons. However,
their influence on our lives makes it so they should glisten more brightly, like a “glaze” that
comes from “water” on the “wheelbarrow.” In essence, this poem could be a lesson, by
comparison, to look for those who truly matter in order to make sure we do not take
them for granted. Otherwise, the lack of appreciation could continue to the relationship’s
end, like the period is the only punctuation mark within this poem.

It is noteworthy, though, that nothing in the poem indicates that the “wheelbarrow” will
stop functioning or lower its quality because of the lack of appreciation, other than the
possibility of becoming rusted from the “water,” so there is little hint of warning of losing
someone who is not cared for in a right manner. It is, rather, the very essence of allotting
the due amount of appreciation that makes the concept worth putting into action. Overall,
there is a great deal to learn about how to treat our companions found with this
“wheelbarrow” so that our friendships do not become tainted and rusty.