We are seven

The poem "We are seven" by Wordsworth seems to contradict Blake's idea of innocence and experience. The little girl demonstrates signs of innocence when she portrays her idea of death at the beginning. The narrator symbolizes experience when he questions the little girl's childish thoughts. However, she, seemingly stubbornly, refuses to accept his perspective, even after his doubts persist. She claims the children are still connected even though they are dead. What is truly interesting is that she still holds generally innocent views even after she has gained experience--she still believes they are together as seven even though she knows and understands that they are dead or gone. I suppose an argument could be made against her truly understanding that they are dead or gone, but I like to think that she does because she listens to what the man has to say and still believes they are seven.

One thing that I don't quite understand is why there is that little intro (the first stanza on page 377), or what it means. It seems to me like the poem doesn't need this verse.

Ode to a Nightingale

I'm interested in the phrase: "Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!" I don't really know what to make of it. I can't decide if he is saying that animals are immortal because they lack consciences and thus have despairs because "where but to think is to be full of sorrow." I would think that because he aspires to be like the nightingale, he would simply want to tap into his more spiritual and natural side through poetry, rather than lose his conscience--so to speak.

Nature plays a strange role in this poem. As I already said, he both aspires toward nature as well as derogates its to an extent. Also, at the beginning he metaphorically speaks of plants like hemlock and opiate that have caused him to have a "drowsy numbness" that pains his sense. He then goes on to talk about plants that have "soft incense" and sweetness. I really can't understand what he thinks of nature in this poem, but nature seems to be the crux of this poem. I think it is almost supposed to be both something beautiful and something deleterious, but it is very confusing to me. If anyone has any opinions on nature in this poem, I would really like to hear them.

Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and "Spots of Time" from The Prelude

Wordsworth's musings in Tintern Abbey's which establish his notion of nature as a healing force arise once more in direct connection with the section "Spots of Time" in his Prelude. He writes of memories of nature and how they can be restorative both in the moment and later in times of despair. As he ventures about the "steep and lofty cliffs" in Tintern, he connects this imagery with the cliffs he sat upon as he waited for the carriage to take him home in Prelude. Though both poems reflect back on his childhood, attempting to immerse the reader and poet within that time, they cannot abstain from harboring a tone of condescension as Wordsworth speaks of his younger self. His "hour of thoughtless youth," (Tintern Abbey: 90-91) and "trite reflections of morality," (The Prelude: 373) while amidst his awe-inspiring and formative moments nature seem to him as a man both naive but also gravely important to him. They remind him of a perspective of life that an adult can often lose sight of in the face of maturity and all its troubles. By this we see an inner struggle with Wordsworth in which he attempts to reconcile the anxieties of his adult self with the earnest and naive--though powerful--meditations as a youth.

Soot to soot

Coleridge's Frost at Midnight is a cyclical poem. It begins with the "secret ministry" of the winter frost--a curious phrase--and ends with it, as well. No doubt this is an allusion to the cyclical patterns of nature, such as seasons, measurements of time, the biblical-inspired notion of ashes to ashes (in which the body returns to the earth from which it came and becomes one with God's other creations) or soot to soot in his case, and by that reference the juxtaposition between death or decay and life or rebirth, which is enforced in this poem by the presence of his son. Though, this poem has much more complex properties than just that of a circle. It weaves through the stream of consciousness-like atmosphere of Coleridge's late-night "Abstruser musings," into the ashes of his dying fire, only then to move into the faint memories of his childhood, and finally scale back rapidly to the future of his son's life and God's will upon the universe.
The strangeness of the first setting calls to question the "inaudible" quality of dreams that he speaks of: are dreams inaudible because they remain out touch and we are often unable to grasp them when we wake? The structure of the motif of dreams in the poem is surely consistent with the weaving of its overall structure in that its scale and characteristics morph throughout its verses. His dreams are at once both sleeping and waking with "unclosed eyes," and it is often unclear when he is supposed to be dreaming or whether its a dream within a day-dream. Coleridge seeks to ground us back in his cottage at midnight with the cyclical mention of frost.

Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: a Moral Tale with Supernatural Elements

English Blog entry 6
Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: a Moral
Tale with Supernatural Elements
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” is interesting in that it combines a message of morality, similar to
the hubris and folly that afflicted heroes of the classical Greek plays and Homeric-era
epics, while also carrying elements of the sublime and spirituality within
nature that are typical of the romantic era in which it was written. The Mariner
foolishly kills an Albatross early on in the poem. His penance is extensive and
grim; including the death of his crew, and the destruction of his ship. He is
left with a future in which he must travel the vast lands of the earth,
spreading a message of “love and reverence” to all things “God made and loveth.”
Amidst
this story of the Mariner’s poor decision and subsequent curse, is a variety of
spiritual elements that exist in the seemingly magical world of the ocean. In
the fifth stanza on page 574, the Mariner describes the beauty of water-snakes swimming
under the moonlight. The snake is often a symbol of Lucifer, yet in this
context it is enchanting to the eyes of the Mariner. This spiritual beauty transcends
to the level of the sublime when the corpses of the Mariner rise up from the
dead, guided by angelic spirits to sail the ship. While this scene is
beautiful, the notion of a corpse rising from the dead has an element of impossibility
that evokes the horror of the sublime. The atmosphere in which the corpses rise
up is one in which the natural is emphasized; “Beneath the lightning and the
Moon/ The dead men gave a groan (329-330)”. The supernatural of this scene
draws power from the natural world of the ocean, a place in which the
impossible can be possible.
Ultimately Coleridge fuses a narrative
of moral folly with elements of the sublime and supernatural, creating a work
wholly unique in its fusion of traditional and contemporary (romantic) methods
of writing.

Why a Wedding?

Upon reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in high school, Coleridge's mystical yet fran language suprised me, and though I presently don't have a complete understanding of the epic, I understand it to be one of a young man's journey in isolation, after witnessing death, struggling with his identity and with God's. After the journey, he has significantly aged. The line "I shot the ALBATROSS" (82), dripping in fate, seems to launch the young mariner into a journey to adulthood, then grief, dehydration and supposed divine encounters age him.

I've still found myself wondering why Coleridge set the narration at a wedding, and why the mariner engaged a wedding guest, for whom the wedding may not be a significant moment. Perhaps Coleridge did this for the sake of humor, as the mariner's being out of place does create and odd and somewhat comical situation. However, the maturity change that the wedding guest seems to have undergone is significant enough for there to be a deeper motive. I have always seem the wedding guest as a third party outsider, as the wedding seems to move seamlessly without his being there. Perhaps, the mariner speaks to him to caution him and educate him on the effects of loneliness.

The mariner could also be speaking to him because he is too burdened by this memory not to.

The Romantic Artists' Depiction of Manfred

For my third paper, I decided to draw connections between Byron's poem Manfred and art depicting the poem. It was common for romantic artists to draw on poetry and literature for their subjects; Manfred was a popular subject for painters. I will limit my paper's scope to include only one of these paintings, but I thought I might use this blog post to draw some similarities between the artistic representations of Manfred. Interestingly, the artists of these paintings romanticized Byron's poem by heightening the sublime beauty of nature.

Manfred and the Witch of the Alps, John Martin

Manfred, Thomas Cole

Manfred on the Jungfrau, John Martin

These depictions of the poem bring together the literary and visual representations of romanticism. The landscapes that Byron describes in his poem are larger than life in many ways. One line that stands out to me from Act 3 Scene 4 is when Manfred describes the effect of the moon on his surroundings, "leaving that beautiful which still was so,/ And making that which was not, till the place/ Became religion" (line 38). Even as he contemplates suicide in Act 1, Scene 2, Manfred remarks on the beauty of his surroundings and how humans will never live up to the greatness of nature (lines 37 - 45).

The romantic poets Thomas Cole and John Martin took the romantic descriptions Byron made and translated them into another of the period's popular media: painting. Like in Manfred, nature in these paintings is on an epic scale-- the characters of the poem are only a small portion of the painting, which makes the audience focus on nature the way Manfred did.

I do think the paintings failed to capture the spirit of the poem in at least one way: in Martin's paintings especially, we see a sublime depiction of nature that was not present in the poem. The perfectly blue skies and the rainbow surrounding the witch give the impression that nature is perfect. Cole even included a water sprite on the right of his painting. But, although he praises their beauty, Manfred also recognizes that not everything about nature is picturesque. In Act 1, Scene 2, he writes about the destruction that mountains cause when they fall, "filling up/ The ripe green valleys with destruction's splinters;/ Damming the rivers with a sudden dash," (lines 93-96). In the final scene, as he stands in the tower, Manfred describes his surroundings as "a noble wreck in ruinous perfection," (line 28). For Manfred, much of nature's beauty comes out of destruction. By choosing to portray pristine and sublime representations of nature in their paintings of Manfred, these painters have romanticized Byron's romantic poem.