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HUM 3306: History of Ideas--The Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Anxiety

Summer 2010

Romantic Era Poems

William Blake:
"And Did Those Feet"
Blake in this poem draws upon a
And did those feet in ancient time legend that Jesus visited Britain (do a
Walk upon England's mountains green? Google search if you are curious).
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen? But the poem quickly opens up and
departs from that notion, wondering in
And did the Countenance Divine amazement if England ever had a
Shine forth upon our clouded hills? sublime presence (this ultimately isn’t
And was Jerusalem builded here a Christian poem), given its
transformation from a “green” world
Among these dark satanic mills?
to one of early Industrial age belching
out of foulness (the “dark satanic
Bring me my bow of burning gold! mills”).
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! The “Lamb” then, transformed into the
Bring me my chariot of fire! prophetic figure of Blake speaking as
“me,” proclaims he will fight for a new,
apocalyptic resurrection of
I will not cease from mental fight,
“Jerusalem.”
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem Blake is condemning a real blighting
In England's green and pleasant land of England, but sees the solution in
the power of the imagination, “mental
fight.”

Read the poem aloud to get the strong

pounding rhythms achieved through
repetition and a simple ballad form.
William Wordsworth:
"The World Is Too Much with Us" (1807)
This poem is (roughly) in a traditional
sonnet form, and the imagery and
allusions may seem “poetic” in a
fashion that made you hate poetry in
The world is too much with us; late and soon, high school.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours; So, you have to read aloud, slowly,
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! letting the sad poignancy of
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, Wordsworth’s voice speak to you. In
The winds that will be howling at all hours, the first 2 lines: think of how tired you
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, are at the end of your work or school
day, plotting out your future to get out
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; of debt, or more money, or whatever.
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be It’s all “getting and spending” and you
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (1) hardly have time to delight in the
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (2) aesthetic power of nature.
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Wordsworth, tired and depressed,
Have sight of Proteus (3) rising from the sea; cannot respond to nature: it “moves”
Or hear old Triton (4) blow his wreathed horn. him “not,” and he imagines the
alternative of seeing nature as full of
(1) Brought up in an outdated religion. mysterious powers.
(2) Meadow.
(3) Greek sea god capable of taking many shapes. Note this poem parallels Blake’s wish
(4) Another sea god, often depicted as trumpeting on a shell. for imaginative power. Both Blake and
Wordsworth critique the “modern”
world that kills aesthetic/spiritual
delight… but both also, implicitly,
recognize that the power is within: we
rejuvenate the world thru an act of
imaginative will.

More psychological and a bit strange:

Wordsworth wants to “suck,” as it
were, on the “bosom” of the sea. The
imagery suggests a psychological
desire to return to some natal unity
with a maternal being; you can’t take
that literally, but in some ways our
restless dissatisfaction (a need to buy
things at the mall) derives from our
“fallenness” from a psycho-bliss state
of being when we were united with our
moms (I make this point because we’ll
be reading Freud down the road.)

William Wordsworth:
"The Tables Turned" I don’t particularly like this poem, but
it usefully conveys the typical
Romantic desire to return to Nature
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,
(“vernal woods”) and the sense that
Or surely you'll grow double. the Enlightenment, scientific way of
Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks; looking (remember Mr. Peale in his
Why all this toil and trouble. . . . museum) can deaden appreciation
(“we murder to dissect”).
Books! 'tis a dull and endless trifle: 5
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it. . . .

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man, 10
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things-- 15
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art,

Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives. 20

William Wordsworth:
"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" on This is challenging poem. It takes me
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798 at least a whole class period to cover
just the basics. It is considered one of
the best poems of the Romantic
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
period.
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs So, start with a clear image of where
With a soft inland murmur. Once again Wordsworth is at. He’s standing on a
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, hillside looking downward/across the
That on a wild secluded scene impress distance to a river, some farm fields,
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect and an old church. He’s been here
The landscape with the quiet of the sky. before, and starts the poem by
The day is come when I again repose comparing what he feels now to what
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view he feels then.
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
The first section describes a pleasant
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, bucolic scene. It’s “pretty” but not
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves sublime; it isn’t overpowering… just
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see pleasant.
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Curiously, decorating this scene is
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke some “vagrant” folk. Notice how
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! Wordsworth doesn’t wonder whether
With some uncertain notice, as might seem these are, say, workers out of a job
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, because during the early Industrial
Revolution killed whole categories of
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
work. It’s as if you were to go to the
The Hermit sits alone. beach, and see some “bum” roasting
a hotdog in a fire, and say “how
These beauteous forms, quaint.”
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye; My point is that this is a poem that is
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din so concentrated on the psychological
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, process of memory and nostalgia that
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Wordsworth doesn’t really see poverty
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; at all (Marx, who we will be reading
soon, would cut through
And passing even into my purer mind,
Wordsworth’s bourgeois
With tranquil restoration: -feelings too sentimentality).
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence The image about the blind man is a bit
hard to follow. Imagine yourself
On that best portion of a good man's life, where you are, right now, in the
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts solitude of your house, reading this
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, professorial stuff. Wouldn’t you like
To them I may have owed another gift, to be elsewhere? Wouldn’t you like to
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, get back to the beach and its
“beauteous forms” that you can
In which the burthen of the mystery,
remember in your mind’s eye?
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world, Your marvelous interior
Is lightened: -that serene and blessed mood, imagination/your human capacity to
In which the affections gently lead us on - respond to beauty gives you mental
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame resources even amidst the dreariness
And even the motion of our human blood that life often is: it gives you
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep “sensations sweet” as you recollect
In body, and become a living soul; nature’s glories; such feelings might
While with an eye made quiet by the power even be linked to religious sentiments,
in which some sense of sublimity
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
(“aspect more sublime; that blessed
We see into the life of things. mood”) helps you make sense of
existential blankness/deadness.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft - Musing on such psycho-theological
In darkness and amid the many shapes possibilities, Wordsworth almost goes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir into a narcotic trance, in which he
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, almost becomes “one” with all
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart - exteriority, as he “sees into the life of
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, things.”
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
(Notice how much Romantic poetry
How often has my spirit turned to thee! keeps playing out a tension between
sublime feelings/deadness.)
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished though
With many recognitions dim and faint, The next section goes into his mental
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, replay of when he used to romp in the
The picture of the mind revives again: woods in childhood freedom. I’m not
While here I stand, not only with the sense especially charmed by that part of the
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts poem; for me, it picks up again when
That in this moment there is life and food he goes transcendental, and feels a
“presence” of “something far more
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
deeply interfused…”. Here, the world
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first of individuality/subjecthood and the
I came among these hills; when like a roe world of objects fuse together and
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Wordsworth has what we would call in
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, a different context a “peak”
Wherever nature led -more like a man experience.
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. -I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. -That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear -both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

John Keats. 1795–1821:

“Ode to a Nightingale”
I hope those lecture notes above
helped you appreciate the poems. I
would provide the same for the Keats’
poem below, but I want you to read it
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains on your own.
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains Some background, though: Keats
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: really went out to his backyard one
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5 afternoon and wrote the poem in a few
But being too happy in thine happiness, hours. He really was slowly dying at
the time of tuberculosis. The love of
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees, his life (they did not get married; who
In some melodious plot wants to marry a dying poet…?!) lived
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, next store, tantalizingly so.
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
So, with nothing but a bleak future,
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been haunted by death and
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, unconsummated passion, Keats goes
Tasting of Flora and the country-green, into his garden and gets “high,” all-
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! too-briefly, in just being able to
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15 experience the bird and its song. The
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, poignancy of the poem is the intimate
clash of sensations of beauty and the
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
certitude of death.
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, Read the poem slowly, softly; with
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20 some Chopin in the background (see
the enhancement site at the top of the
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget main Romanticism lecture). If the
What thou among the leaves hast never known, poem does not melt your heart, you
The weariness, the fever, and the fret are made of wood!
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
 To thy high requiem become a sod. 60

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80