Robert Burns “Holly Willie’s Prayer” & “To a Mouse”

Holly Willie’s Prayer

- Holy Willie's Prayer is a poem that was written about a certain Willie Fisher who was an elder in
the Parish church of Mauchline, in Ayrshire. Fisher was a hypocrite and himself a sinner who
spied on people and reported them to the minister if he thought they were doing wrong.
- The poem is a satire based on Fisher's sickly self-righteousness. The phrase "Holy Willie" have
become part of the Scots language for describing someone that is humorless and ultra-religious.
- Burns was a God fearing man. This poem is not anti-religion. It is strictly a condemnation of
religious hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
- Fisher spied on Hamilton and added the charges of: travelling on the Sabbath, not reading the
Bible on a Sunday, digging his garden on the Sabbath
- Fisher's complaint against Hamilton was heard and adjudicated by the Presbytery of Ayr, as is
stated in Burn's own commentary on the poem
- Hamilton won the case. Hence, Holy Willie complains bitterly to God not only against Hamilton
himself but also against the Presbytery: "Lord, hear my earnest cry and pray'r, Against that
Presbyt'ry o' Ayr!"
- Willie Fisher never recovered from the ignominy of this public defeat, and, legend has it, was
found dead in a ditch with a bottle of whisky.

- The poem is an attack on the bigotry and hypocrisy of some members of the Kirk (Church), as
told by the (fictional) self-justifying prayer of a (real) kirk elder, Holy Willie.
- Throughout the poem, Holy Willie displays his hypocrisy by justifying his own transgressions
while simultaneously asking God to judge harshly and show no mercy to his fellow transgressors.
- The Kirk was still a powerful moral force in Burns' day, and one which he believed he had a
justified grievance against.
- Burns felt that belief in predestination, whether to salvation or damnation, could make people
morally reckless, because their salvation was believed to rest, not on their own moral actions but
on the "election" to salvation by an inscrutable God. He observed that belief in predestination,
particularly to salvation, could have the additional tendency to make people insufferably self-
righteous. It is this last tendency in particular, and the more general theological and moral
sterility embodied in much of the teachings of the contemporary Kirk, that he rails against very
effectively in this work.
- Willie's soapy sanctimony is alternated with his self-justifying tales of his own fornication and
other transgressions with very great skill. The characters are drawn from real life, with no names
being changed.
To a Mouse

- The speaker of the poem is talking to a mouse in the poem.

- The speaker had accidentally destroyed the mouse’s home while ploughing the field. The mouse
is now without a house and winter is fast approaching. The man comforts the panicked mouse
first, and then he apologizes not just on behalf of himself but of the whole mankind, as he feels
that mankind’s domination ruined the ‘social union’.
- The poem starts with the description of the mouse; the speaker doesn’t explicitly say that he’s
speaking to a mouse but the title and the descriptions in the first verse of the poem give it away.
- He continues by saying that he would loath to chase the mouse with murdering prattle.
- He says that the mouse is justified to be startled by him, what with the bad reputation mankind
has. The speaker describes himself as poor, earth-born companion and mortal.
- The speaker speaks of the mouse’s nature next. He says he does not doubt that the mouse steals
food; but what of it, he says, after all, it too must live.
- The speaker then speaks of the mouse’s house. He describes it as wee-bit (very small) house and
now, it is in ruins. And now, the mouse has nothing to build a new house with.
- The speaker then speaks of the mouse’s plans; or at least what he thinks them to be. He says the
mouse saw the fields bare and knew that the tiring period of winter was coming fast.
- He then thinks of all the work the mouse put into building that house; of how it cost her many
nibbles to make that heap of leaves
- The speaker says the mouse isn’t alone in this; foresight may be in vain was already proven by
many before. The best plans made by man and mouse often go astray and leaves us with, in
place of the promised joy, nothing but grief and pain.
- The speaker ends the poem by saying that the mouse was still when compared to him. The
mouse lives only in the present. But the speaker can go backward into the past and think about
his dreary prospects. He can forward to the future but he cannot see anything; so he can only
guess and fear it. The mouse is free from these troubles.
- Some say the mouse is a metaphor for poor people; some say it is a reflection of how things go
wrong when everything was planned right, of how there is always an unknown.
- The tone of the poem is comforting in the beginning. The mouse was startled and the speaker
tries to comfort it. It then turns apologetic, then into one of contemplation. It then turns a bit
melancholic and depressing when he says of how the best laid plans can go awry and nothing is
set in stone.
- The final tone of the poem is self-pity when the speaker says of how he has the past and future
too in his thoughts.
William Blake “Songs of Innocence” & “Songs of Experience”

- Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of
childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression
- Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens
of innocence first and then experience.
- Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to
be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both.
- The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and
trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written
from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult
perspective
- The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh
experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the
weaknesses of the innocent perspective (“The Tyger,” for example, attempts to account for real,
negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront)
- The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and
the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex.
- Some of Blake’s favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical
symbolism and language

“The Lamb”

- The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its
particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice”
- In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was
made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and
the lamb.
- The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.

- The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters
and contains explanation and analogy.
- The question (“who made thee?”) is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep
and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of
creation.
- The child’s answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent
acceptance of its teachings.
- The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the
Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace
- The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is “The Tyger”;
taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as
well as the terrible and inscrutable.
 - These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than either offers
independently.
- They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of
innocence and experience he projects.

“The Tyger”

- The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have
created it
- Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one.
- From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared
to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would
have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart?
- The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had
the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the
anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have
wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have
felt? “Did he smile his work to see?”
- Could this possibly be the same being that made the lamb?

- Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way
contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity
for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger?
- In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell
us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once
contain both beauty and horror?
- Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the
world.
- The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine
creation of the natural world.
- The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he
recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only
the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act.
- Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not
just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the
“dare” to replace the “could” of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and
willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.
- The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb
have been created by the same God
- “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions
- The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s
innocent faith in a benevolent universe.
W. Wordsworth “Daffodils”, “Immortality Ode”, We Are Seven” & “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”

THE BENEFICIAL INFLUENCE OF NATURE

- Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on the human
mind. All manifestations of the natural world—from the highest mountain to the simplest
flower—elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the people who observe
these manifestations.
- Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature to an individual’s intellectual and
spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect to both the
spiritual and the social worlds.
- As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of nature can lead to a love of humankind.
- In such poems as “The World Is Too Much with Us” and “London, 1802” people become selfish
and immoral when they distance themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate
empathy and nobility of spirit becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the
squalor of city life.
- In contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the
purity and nobility of their souls.

THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND

- Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and imagination, individuals
could overcome difficulty and pain.
- The transformative powers of the mind are available to all, regardless of an individual’s class or
background. This democratic view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness.
- Throughout his work, Wordsworth showed strong support for the political, religious, and artistic
rights of the individual, including the power of his or her mind.
- In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained the relationship between the mind
and poetry. Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the raw
emotion of experience into poetry capable of giving pleasure.
- Later poems, such as “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), imagine nature as the source of
the inspiring material that nourishes the active, creative mind.

THE SPLENDOR OF CHILDHOOD

- In Wordsworth’s poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence. Children form an

intense bond with nature, so much so that they appear to be a part of the natural world, rather
than a part of the human, social world. Their relationship to nature is passionate and extreme:
children feel joy at seeing a rainbow but great terror at seeing desolation or decay.
- In 1799, Wordsworth wrote several poems about a girl named Lucy who died at a young age.
These poems, including “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” (1800) and “Strange fits of
passion have I known” (1800), praise her beauty and lament her untimely death. In death, Lucy
 retains the innocence and splendor of childhood, unlike the children who grow up, lose their
connection to nature, and lead unfulfilling lives.
- The speaker in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” believes that children delight in nature because
they have access to a divine, immortal world. As children age and reach maturity, they lose this
connection but gain an ability to feel emotions, both good and bad. Through the power of the
human mind, particularly memory, adults can recollect the devoted connection to nature of their
youth.

WANDERING AND WANDERERS

- The speakers of Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers: they roam solitarily, they travel
over the moors, they take private walks through the highlands of Scotland. Active wandering
allows the characters to experience and participate in the vastness and beauty of the natural
world. Moving from place to place also allows the wanderer to make discoveries about himself.
- The speaker of this poem takes comfort in a walk he once took after he has returned to the grit
and desolation of city life. Recollecting his wanderings allows him to transcend his present
circumstances.

VISION AND SIGHT

- Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the vehicles through which
individuals are transformed. As speakers move through the world, they see visions of great
natural loveliness, which they capture in their memories.
- Later, in moments of darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in “Daffodils”. Here, the
speaker daydreams of former jaunts through nature, which “flash upon that inward eye / which
is the bliss of solitude” (21–22).
- The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find comfort even in our darkest,
loneliest moments. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s poems, including
descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be seen, rather than touched,
heard, or felt.

MEMORY

- Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of the contemporary world.
Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to reconnect with the visionary power and
intense relationship they had with nature as children. In turn, these memories encourage adults
to re-cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible as an antidote to sadness,
loneliness, and despair.
- Poems cannot be composed at the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead, the
initial emotion must be combined with other thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past
experiences using memory and imagination. The poem produced by this time-consuming process
will allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers and will permit
the readers to remember similar emotional experiences of their own.
LIGHT

- Light often symbolizes truth and knowledge.

- Generally, the light in Wordsworth’s poems represents immortal truths that can’t be entirely
grasped by human reason.
- In “Ode: Imitations of Immortality,” the speaker remembers looking at a meadow as a child and
imagining it gleaming in “celestial light”. As the speaker grows and matures, the light of his youth
fades into the “light of common day” of adulthood. But the speaker also imagines his
remembrances of the past as a kind of light, which illuminate his soul and give him the strength
to live.

Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud)

- The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a
field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the
shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the
water in glee.
- The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers.
- He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him.
- For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye /
That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”

- This simple poem revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a
particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence.
- The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field of
daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored,
or restless.
- The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a
cloud / That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings,
dancing and “tossing their heads” in “a crowd, a host.”
- This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of
Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet
so often describes himself as experiencing.

Immortality Ode

- In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed
dreamlike to him
- In the second stanza, he says that he still sees the beauty in nature. Nonetheless the speaker
feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.
- In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in springtime and
watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief; but the sound
of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to
 strength. He declares that his grief will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the
earth is happy. He exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him.
- In the fourth stanza, he addresses nature’s creatures, and says that his heart participates in their
joyful festival.
- In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely “a sleep and a forgetting”—that human
beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth.
- In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man
forget the “glories” whence he came.
- In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life, and the love
his mother and father feel for him. The speaker imagines that all human life is a similar imitation.
- In the eighth stanza, the speaker addresses the child as though he were a mighty prophet of a
lost truth, and rhetorically asks him why, when he has access to the glories of his origins, and to
the pure experience of nature, he still hurries toward an adult life of custom and “earthly
freight.”
- In the ninth stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of
childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence , and
exploration.
- In the tenth stanza, bolstered by this joy, he urges the birds to sing, and urges all creatures to
participate in “the gladness of the May.”
- In the final stanza, the speaker says that this mind—which stems from a consciousness of
mortality, as opposed to the child’s feeling of immortality—enables him to love nature and
natural beauty all the more

- The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood,” makes explicit Wordsworth’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier,
purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up.
- Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker’s mind at odds with the atmosphere of joyous nature
all around him, a rare move by a poet whose consciousness is so habitually in unity with nature.
- Understanding that his grief stems from his inability to experience the May morning as he would
have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfully into a state of cheerfulness; but he is
able to find real happiness only when he realizes that “the philosophic mind” has given him the
ability to understand nature in deeper, more human terms—as a source of metaphor and
guidance for human life.
- The poem’s use of metaphor and image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the register
of the philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the main tactic of the poem is to offer
joyous, pastoral nature images, frequently personified—the lambs dancing as to the tabor, the
moon looking about her in the sky.
- But when the poet attains the philosophic mind and his fullest realization about memory and
imagination, he begins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that, rather than jauntily
imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply draw human characteristics out of their natural
presences, referring back to human qualities from earlier in the poem.
 - In the process of imaginative creativity possible to the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can
be found in nature and vice-versa.
- A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a flower can embody the shape of
human life, and it is the mind of maturity combined with the memory of childhood that enables
the poet to make that vital and moving connection.

We Are Seven

- The speaker begins this poem by asking what a simple child who is full of life could know about
death. He then meets "a little cottage Girl" who is eight years old and has thick curly hair. She is
rustic and woodsy, but very beautiful, and she makes the speaker happy. He asks her how many
siblings she has, to which she replies that there are seven including her
- The speaker then asks the child where her brothers and sisters are. She replies "Seven are we,"
and tells him that two are in a town called Conway, two are at sea, and two lie in the church-
yard. She and her mother live near the graves
- The speaker is confused and asks her how they can be seven if two are dead, then there are only
five left, but the little girl tells him that their green graves are nearby, and that she often goes to
sew or eat supper there while singing to her deceased siblings
- The little girl then explains that first her sister Jane died from sickness. She and her brother John
would play around her grave until he also died. Now he lies next to Jane
- The man again asks how many siblings she has now that two are dead. She replies quickly, "O
Master! we are seven." The man tries to convince her saying, "But they are dead," but he realizes
that his words are wasted. The poem ends with the little girl saying, "Nay, we are seven!"

- The poem is an interesting conversation between a man and a young girl. It is especially
intriguing because the conversation could have been less than five lines, and yet it is 69 lines
long. The reason for this is that the man cannot accept that the young girl still feels she is one of
seven siblings even after two of her siblings have died, and even though she now lives at home
alone with her mother.
- The speaker begins the poem with the question of what a child should know of death. Near the
beginning it seems as if the little girl understands very little. She seems almost to be in denial
about the deaths of her siblings, especially because she continues to spend time with them and
sing to them.
- By the end of the poem, however, the reader is left with the feeling that perhaps the little girl
understands more about life and death than the man to whom she is speaking. She refuses to
become incapacitated by grief, or to cast the deceased out of her life. Instead she accepts that
things change, and continues living as happily as she can.

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

- In the first of the poem's two stanzas, the speaker declares that a "slumber" has kept him from
realizing reality. In essence, he has been in a dream-like state, devoid of any common fears
 ("human fears"). To the speaker, "she" (his unnamed female love) seemed like she would never
age
- In the second and final stanza, however, we learn that she has died. She lies still and can no
longer see or hear. She has become a part of the day-to-day course of the earth

- We see the speaker's realization not only that this young woman has died, but also that bad
things can happen in a beautiful world.
- In the first stanza the speaker is innocently unaware that age can touch the woman, but he is
quickly taught a harsh lesson when she dies between stanzas one and two.
- The choice to hide the death between the stanzas is interesting, as it seems to imply that the
speaker is unable to verbalize the pain that goes along with the sudden loss.
- On the other hand, the poem may be less about the speaker's innocence than about his belief in
the young woman's power. Indeed, he seems to have built her up in his mind into a goddess,
untouched by age and mortality. This desire to keep her perpetually young is a testament to the
speaker's feelings for the young woman.
- In the second stanza Wordsworth offers an eerie description of the woman's current situation.
She is blind and deaf--wholly incapable of taking in the world around her.
- In the last two lines the speaker describes the young woman trapped beneath the surface of the
earth. In fact, she has become a part of the earth, rolling with it as it turns day to day.

S.T. Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” & “Kubla Khan”

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

 Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for transcending
unpleasant circumstances.
 Many of his poems are powered exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein the speaker
temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an entirely new and
completely fabricated experience.
 Using the imagination in this way is both empowering and surprising because it encourages a
total and complete disrespect for the confines of time and place.
 These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded.

THE INTERPLAY OF PHILOSOPHY, PIETY, AND POETRY

 Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious piety.
 Some critics argue that Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was simply his attempt to understand
the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry.
 To support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces were, in fact, organic and
derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked them to God, spirituality, and worship.
  In his work, however, poetry, philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for
Coleridge, both on and off the page.

NATURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

 Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered, imaginative soul
of youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it.
 According to their formulation, experiencing nature was an integral part of the development of a
complete soul and sense of personhood.
 For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial
characteristics for a worthy, developed individual.

CONVERSATION POEMS

 Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his poetry.
 Many of his poems openly address a single figure—the speaker’s wife, son, friend, and so on—
who listens silently to the simple, straightforward language of the speaker.
 Unlike the descriptive, long, digressive poems of Coleridge’s classicist predecessors, Coleridge’s
so-called conversation poems are short, self-contained, and often without a discernable poetic
form. Colloquial, spontaneous, and friendly, Coleridge’s conversation poetry is also highly
personal, frequently incorporating events and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen
the scope of possible poetic content.

DELIGHT IN THE NATURAL WORLD

 Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized poetry’s capacity to
describe the beauty of the natural world.
 Nearly all of Coleridge’s poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close
observation, great attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly demonstrate
Coleridge’s respect and delight.
 Even poems that don’t directly deal with nature, including “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” derive some symbols and images from nature.
 Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded against the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling
to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature contained an innate, constant joyousness wholly
separate from the ups and downs of human experience.

PRAYER

 Rather than recommend a manner or method of prayer, Coleridge’s poems reflect a wide
variety, which emphasizes his belief in the importance of individuality.

THE SUN

 Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of expressing deep
religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God.
  In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge compares the sun to “God’s own head” and,
later, attributes the first phase of the mariner’s punishment to the sun, as it dehydrates the
crew.
 All told, this poem contains eleven references to the sun, many of which signify the Christian
conception of a wrathful, vengeful God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the day,
while smooth sailing and calm weather occur at night, by the light of the moon.
 Frequently, the sun stands in for God’s influence and power, as well as a symbol of his authority.

THE MOON

 Like the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive connotations than
the sun.
 In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the sun and the moon represent two sides of the Christian
God: the sun represents the angry, wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent,
repentant God. All told, the moon appears fourteen times in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
and generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors that occur during the
day. For example, the mariner’s curse lifts and he returns home by moonlight.

DREAMS AND DREAMING

 Coleridge explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate the power of the
imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision.
 “Kubla Khan” is subtitled “A Vision in a Dream.” According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while
reading and dreamed of a marvelous pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon awakening,
he began transcribing the dream-vision but was soon called away; when he returned, he wrote
out the fragments that now comprise “Kubla Khan.”
 Some critics doubt Coleridge’s story, attributing it to an attempt at increasing the poem’s
dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the poem speaks to the imaginative possibilities of the
subconscious.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when one of them is detained by a grizzled
old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily demands that the Mariner let go of him, and the
Mariner obeys.
 But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s “glittering eye” and can do nothing but
sit on a stone and listen to his strange tale.
 The Mariner says that he sailed on a ship out of his native harbor and into a sunny and cheerful
sea. The Mariner recalls that the voyage quickly darkened, as a giant storm rose up in the sea
and chased the ship southward. Quickly, the ship came to a frigid land “of mist and snow,”
where “ice, mast-high, came floating by”; the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. But then
the sailors encountered an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew around the ship, the ice cracked
 and split and a wind from the south propelled the ship out of the frigid regions, into a foggy
stretch of water. The Albatross followed behind it, a symbol of good luck to the sailors.
 A pained look crosses the Mariner’s face, and the Wedding-Guest asks him, “Why look’st thou
so?” The Mariner confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow.
 At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner for having killed the bird that made the
breezes blow. But when the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors decided that the bird had
actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they now congratulated the Mariner on his deed.
 The wind pushed the ship into a silent sea where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds
died down. The ocean thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the sea were rotting,
slimy creatures crawled out of it and walked across the surface. At night, the water burned
green, blue, and white with death fire. The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight and hung
the corpse of the Albatross around his neck like a cross.
 A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their mouths so dry, that they were unable
to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner saw a tiny speck on the horizon. It resolved
into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and inform the other sailors,
the Mariner bit down on his arm; sucking the blood, he was able to moisten his tongue enough
to cry out, “A sail! a sail!” The sailors smiled, believing they were saved.
 But as the ship neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew
included two figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale
woman with golden locks and red lips, and “thicks man’s blood with cold.” Death and Life-in-
Death began to throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon she whistled three times, causing
the sun to sink to the horizon, the stars to instantly emerge.
 As the moon rose, chased by a single star, the sailors dropped dead one by one—all except the
Mariner, whom each sailor cursed “with his eye” before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt
from their bodies and rushed by the Mariner.
 The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner, with his glittering eye and his skinny
hand. The Mariner reassures the Wedding-Guest that there is no need for dread; he was not
among the men who died, and he is a living man, not a ghost.
 Alone on the ship, surrounded by two hundred corpses, the Mariner was surrounded by the
slimy sea and the slimy creatures that crawled across its surface. He tried to pray but was
deterred by a “wicked whisper” that made his heart “as dry as dust.” He closed his eyes, unable
to bear the sight of the dead men, each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse.
 For seven days and seven nights the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die. At
last the moon rose, casting the great shadow of the ship across the waters; where the ship’s
shadow touched the waters, they burned red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery
moonlight, glittering; blue, green, and black, the snakes coiled and swam and became beautiful
in the Mariner’s eyes. He blessed the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found
himself able to pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking “like lead into the
sea.”
 The Mariner continues telling his story to the Wedding-Guest. Free of the curse of the Albatross,
the Mariner was able to sleep, and as he did so, the rains came, drenching him. The moon broke
 through the clouds, and a host of spirits entered the dead men’s bodies, which began to move
about and perform their old sailors’ tasks. The ship was propelled forward as the Mariner joined
in the work.
 The Wedding-Guest declares again that he is afraid of the Mariner, but the Mariner tells him that
the men’s bodies were inhabited by blessed spirits, not cursed souls.
 At dawn, the bodies clustered around the mast, and sweet sounds rose up from their mouths—
the sounds of the spirits leaving their bodies. The spirits flew around the ship, singing. The ship
continued to surge forward until noon, driven by the spirit from the land of mist and snow, nine
fathoms deep in the sea.
 At noon, however, the ship stopped, then began to move backward and forward as if it were
trapped in a tug of war. Finally, it broke free, and the Mariner fell to the deck with the jolt of
sudden acceleration. He heard two disembodied voices in the air; one asked if he was the man
who had killed the Albatross, and the other declared softly that he had done penance for his
crime and would do more penance before all was rectified.
 In dialogue, the two voices discussed the situation. The moon overpowered the sea, they said,
and enabled the ship to move; an angelic power moved the ship northward at an astonishingly
rapid pace.
 When the Mariner awoke from his trance, he saw the dead men standing together, looking at
him. But a breeze rose up and propelled the ship back to its native country, back to the Mariner’s
home; he recognized the kirk, the hill, and the lighthouse. As they neared the bay, seraphs—
figures made of pure light—stepped out of the corpses of the sailors, which fell to the deck. Each
seraph waved at the Mariner, who was powerfully moved. Soon, he heard the sound of oars; the
Pilot, the Pilot’s son, and the holy Hermit were rowing out toward him. The Mariner hoped that
the Hermit could shrive (absolve) him of his sin, washing the blood of the Albatross off his soul.
 The Hermit, a holy man who lived in the woods and loved to talk to mariners from strange lands,
had encouraged the Pilot and his son not to be afraid and to row out to the ship. But as they
reached the Mariner’s ship, it sank in a sudden whirlpool, leaving the Mariner afloat and the
Pilot’s rowboat spinning in the wake. The Mariner was loaded aboard the Pilot’s ship, and the
Pilot’s boy, mad with terror, laughed hysterically and declared that the devil knows how to row.
 On land, the Mariner begged the Hermit to shrive him, and the Hermit bade the Mariner tell his
tale. Once it was told, the Mariner was free from the agony of his guilt. However, the guilt
returned over time and persisted until the Mariner traveled to a new place and told his tale
again. The moment he comes upon the man to whom he is destined to tell his tale, he knows it,
and he has no choice but to relate the story then and there to his appointed audience; the
Wedding-Guest is one such person.
 The church doors burst open, and the wedding party streams outside. The Mariner declares to
the Wedding-Guest that he who loves all God’s creatures leads a happier, better life; he then
takes his leave. The Wedding-Guest walks away from the party, stunned, and awakes the next
morning “a sadder and a wiser man.”
  A more interesting, though still questionable, reading of the poem maintains that Coleridge
intended it as a commentary on the ways in which people interpret the lessons of the past and
the ways in which the past is, to a large extent, simply unknowable.
 In any event, this first segment of the poem takes the Mariner through the worst of his trials and
shows, in action. The Mariner kills the Albatross in bad faith, subjecting himself to the hostility of
the forces that govern the universe (the very un-Christian-seeming spirit beneath the sea and the
horrible Life-in-Death).
 It is unclear how these forces are meant to relate to one another—whether the Life-in-Death is
in league with the submerged spirit or whether their simultaneous appearance is simply a
coincidence.
 After earning his curse, the Mariner is able to gain access to the favor of God—able to regain his
ability to pray—only by realizing that the monsters around him are beautiful in God’s eyes and
that he should love them as he should have loved the Albatross.
 This second segment of the “Rime” concludes the Mariner’s narrative; here he meets the host of
seraph-like spirits who (rather grotesquely) rescue his ship by entering the corpses of the fallen
sailors, and it is here that he earns his moral salvation through his confession to the Hermit and
the subsequent confessions he must continue to make throughout his life—including this one, to
the Wedding-Guest.
 This second segment lacks much of the bizarre imagistic intensity found in the first section, and
the supernatural powers even begin to seem sympathetic .
 The more gruesome elements still surface occasionally, however.

Kubla Khan

 The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of
Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man
/ Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile
ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a
green hill, occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung
boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.”
 Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated
on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a
miracle of rare device,” the speaker says, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”
 The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an Abyssinian maid who played
her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.”
 He says that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the
pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His flashing eyes,
his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with “holy dread,”
knowing that he had tasted honeydew, “and drunk the milk of Paradise.”
 The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination: The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is not
a useful metaphor for anything in particular; however, it is a fantastically prodigious descriptive
act.
 The poem becomes especially evocative when, after the second stanza, the meter suddenly
tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost beating out the sound of the war drums.
 The fourth stanza states the theme of the poem as a whole (though “Kubla Khan” is almost
impossible to consider as a unified whole, as its parts are so sharply divided).
 The speaker says that he once had a vision of the damsel singing of Mount Abora; this vision
becomes a metaphor for Coleridge’s vision of the 300-hundred-line masterpiece he never
completed.
 The speaker insists that if he could only “revive” within him “her symphony and song,” he would
recreate the pleasure-dome out of music and words, and take on the persona of the magician or
visionary.
 His hearers would recognize the dangerous power of the vision, which would manifest itself in
his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” But, awestruck, they would nonetheless dutifully take part
in the ritual, recognizing that “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
G.G. Byron “She Walks in Beauty”, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”, Childe Harold
& Don Juan

BYRONIC HERO

The Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes include: great
talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and
privilege (although possessing both); being thwarted in love by social constraint or death;
rebellion; exile; an unsavory secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and,
ultimately, a self-destructive manner.
These types of characters have since become ubiquitous in literature and politics.

She Walks in Beauty

 The poet describes a woman who “walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry
skies”.
 Immediately the light of stars and the shadow of night are brought forth as contrasts,
foreshadowing the further contrasts the poet notices regarding this beautiful woman.
 In the second stanza, the poet reflects on the balance in the woman’s beauty: “One shade the
more, one ray the less” would hinder the “nameless grace” which surrounds her.
 He then turns to her inner life, seeing her external beauty as an expression of thoughts that
dwell in a place (perhaps her mind, or her beautiful head and face) both “pure” and “dear”
 The final stanza returns to her face, but again sees the silent expression of peace and calm in her
cheek, brow, and smiles. Her pleasant facial expressions eloquently but innocently express her
inner goodness and peacefulness.

 While ostensibly about a specific woman, the poem extends to encompass the unobtainable and
ideal. The lady is not beautiful in herself, but she walks in an aura of Beauty. In contrast to
popular conceptions, her beauty is not easily described as brilliant or radiant, but it is also dark
“like the night”
 Indeed, the beauty of Wilmot is found largely in its balance of opposites: the darkness she walks
in (and her dark hair) counterpoise her fair skin and the bright pureness of her soul.
 These issues raise a concern that the woman seems so pure because she is so simple; she wears
her thoughts directly on her face, and she shows no evidence of discrimination of better from
worse.
 Byron eschews erotic or physical desire in this poem, preferring instead to express the lady’s
beauty without professing his own emotions. He restricts his physical descriptions of her to her
eyes, brow, hair, and smiles.
 Her loveliness has to do with her innocence and her “days in goodness spent”, whether it results
from her virtue or simply from the poet’s imagination of that virtue.
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 This was the last poem Lord Byron wrote before he died at age 36.
 It seems as if he is almost anticipating his death and talks about how he wants his death to be.
He wants to die an honorable and memorable death like a warrior.
 Because of this an almost foreboding tone is created as most of the poem is alluding to his
death.
 There isn't really an actual theme to the poem, but rather a main point which is simply that
Byron wants a memorable death.

Childe Harold (Canto III)

 This time, the muse is Ada, Childe Harold is older, and his journey is from Dover to Waterloo,
then following the Rhine River into Switzerland.
 Harold is still independent, “proud though in desolation,” nature being his favored companion
on his travels, the world of men and war being relatively distasteful.
 Waterloo inspires Byron’s consideration of battlefields and the bloodshed and wasted upon
them; he contrasts violence in the name of aggression with the struggles of oppressed people for
liberty. He particularly cites the heroism of the Hon. Major Frederick Howard (who died in battle
and was disinterred and repatriated to England in 1816), and turns to consider the thousands of
others who died.
 The poet dwells on sorrow and remembrance for many stanzas, then meditates upon the nature
of human genius and the desire for greatness—and on Napoleon, who drew so many others into
his battles.
 Harold spends time considering that there is still someone he loves, despite his general distaste
for others.
 Then, back to his travels, Harold is in Switzerland, where he extols the bravery of General
François-Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, who died in battle at age 27 fighting for France’s “rights”,
and then visits the majestic Alps in all their “cold sublimity,” far above mankind.
 And in contrast to Waterloo, which was about power, “true Glory’s stainless victories” were
accomplished in the name of liberty in the 15th-century battle of Morat and the ancient battle of
Marathon.
 The poet would choose nature over the problems of “the rushing crowd.” Contemplating his own
death, he chooses to live seeking “the Spirit of each spot”.
 The poet returns to his main subject, contemplating Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political
philosopher from Geneva, while he is at Lake Leman (Lake Geneva). Rousseau is another man
misunderstood by the “vulgar minds” of his contemporaries.
 Overarching this scene, with Rousseau in the background, is Nature, an amoral force for both
beauty and danger. The natural world and its laws become the “great equalizer” among men, as
nature demonstrates her power in the storm and earthquake while men hide in fear. However,
Nature also can be seen as the works and struggles of men writ large, and so is connected to, if
separate from, human life.
  The canto concludes with the poet invoking his muse, who regretfully is not physically present
with him on his travels.

 Byron opens and closes Canto III by addressing his absent daughter (she was taken by his wife
when she left him). This apostrophe indicates Byron’s sense of loss and isolation in being bereft
of his beloved daughter and by extension the family of which she was a part and the union
between himself and the former Lady Byron.
 Besides crying out in self-pity, Byron also subtly calls upon his daughter Ada as his muse for
Canto III. She will be his inspiration as he describes the battlefields and men of greatness who
are the subject of this canto. At the same time, Byron does not hide Ada’s identity under a
pseudonym as he did in the first two cantos; he is now ready to erase the line separating himself
and the fictional “Childe Harold” completely by making this canto entirely autobiographical and
expressive of his own political and philosophical beliefs in no uncertain terms. Harold is hardly
mentioned.
 Byron remarks on two great men of genius in Canto III, Napoleon and Rousseau. He suggests that
both men continue to be misunderstood by their inferiors. Although Byron does not condone
Napoleon’s attempt at tyranny, he nonetheless maintains an objective admiration for the man’s
accomplishments and vision. As for Rousseau, while he expresses concern that some of
Rousseau’s ideas were deluded, Byron acknowledges that the man was full of passion and drive
beyond the scope of most men.
 Byron supplements his admiration of Napoleon and Rousseau with his recurring theme of liberty.
 Unlike Wordsworth, who saw Nature as something separate from and superior to man, wherein
a person could experience purity and perfection and thus improve himself, Byron saw Nature as
a magnification of man’s—particularly his own—greatness and follies. To Byron, Nature was not
an escape from his problems, but a vast landscape of reminders.
 Canto III is a different poem entirely from that of Cantos I and II; it is mainly the form of the
poetic travelogue and the overarching themes of liberty, isolation, and individualism that
connect these disparate works together.

Don Juan (Canto III)

 When Juan at last opens his eyes, he sees a lovely young face peering into his. It is Haidée, the
only daughter of a Greek freebooter who has made the isolated Aegean island his headquarters.
 Haidée and her maid help the weak and emaciated Juan to a cave, where they gradually nurse
him back to health. Haidée does not dare bring Juan into her home, for she knows that her
father would sell him as a slave.
 Inevitably Juan and Haidée fall in love and marry without benefit of clergy. A month after Juan's
arrival, Lambro, Haidée's father, takes his fleet on a piratical expedition. Sometime later word is
brought back that Lambro has died.
 Juan and Haidée move into his mansion as man and wife.
 But the rumor of Lambro's death is false. When he returns to his island port and walks toward
his house, he is surprised to see people idling, feasting, and entertaining themselves.
  He does not make his presence known immediately. At the time of his arrival, Juan and Haidée,
attired in gorgeous costumes, are feasting in Lambro's dining hall and being entertained by a
minstrel.

 Canto III is essentially a long digression from the main story in which Byron, in the style of an epic
catalogue, describes Haidée and Don Juan's celebrations.
 It is in this latter section is "The Isles of Greece", a section numbered differently from the rest of
the canto with a different verse, which explores Byron's views on Greece's status as a "slave" to
the Ottoman Empire.

P.B. Shelley “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”, “Ozymandias”, “England 1819” & “Adonais”

THE HEROIC, VISIONARY ROLE OF THE POET

 In Shelley’s poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is
not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic
hero.
 His poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change
the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change.
 Shelley’s poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave
it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets
in Shelley’s work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from
other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a
tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class
values.
 In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of
government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.

THE POWER OF NATURE

 Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great
reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to nature’s power.
 In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a
divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe.
 However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature
destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately.

THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND

 Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power
seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s
 beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because
it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature.
 It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe
nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it
exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the
experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the
perceiver and the perceived.

AUTUMN

 Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it shows both the creative and destructive powers of
nature, a favorite Shelley theme.
 As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelley’s vision of political and social
revolution. In “Ode to the West Wind,” autumn’s brilliant colors and violent winds emphasize
the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay and death inherent in the season
suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-like poet.

GHOSTS AND SPIRITS

 Shelley’s interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The ghosts and spirits in his
poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live.

CHRIST

 From his days at Oxford, Shelley felt deeply doubtful about organized religion, particularly
Christianity.
 Yet, in his poetry, he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the poet up as
a secular replacement for Christ. Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure
is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions
over the earth.

MONT BLANC

 For Shelley, Mont Blanc represents the eternal power of nature.

 Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an idea he explores in “Mont Blanc.”
 The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying.
 Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders if the mountain’s power might be meaningless, an invention
of the more powerful human imagination.

THE WEST WIND

 Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by
nature.
 Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the
West Wind.” While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change.
  Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.

STATUE OF OZYMANDIAS

 In Shelley’s work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias,
symbolizes political tyranny.
 The broken monument also represents the decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after
all, a human construction, a piece of art made by a creator, and now it—and its creator—have
been destroyed, as all living things are eventually destroyed.

Ozymandias

 The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the
ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country.
 Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies
“half sunk” in the sand.
 On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing
remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it.

 Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert
wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription. The once-great
king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and
disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal,
indiscriminate, destructive power of history.
 The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement
about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time.
 But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride
and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of
Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley
demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.
 Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables
Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—
rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone
who heard about it from someone who has seen it.
 Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves
to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time.
 Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of
kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And
wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor,
and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression
of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand
that mocked them and the heart that fed.”
  The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary,
prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
 With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of
ruin between it and us.

The Cloud

 The cloud brings rain, moisture, hail, and snow, and gives shade.
 It is infused with electricity which acts as its guide in the form of lightning accompanied by
thunder.
 When the cloud covers the rising sun, it causes its beams to be spread out over the sky.
 At evening the cloud floats over the setting sun like a bird; at night, the cloud provides a thin
covering for the moon.
 Where the cloud cover is removed by the wind, the moon and stars are reflected in the earth's
bodies of water.
 The cloud under certain conditions forms a ring around the sun and the moon.
 During storms the cloud spreads across the sky like a roof.
 At other times the rainbow acts as an arch of triumph for the cloud to march under.
 The cloud, formed in the sky, draws its substance from the earth and water below it and is part
of a never-ending cycle in which it alternately disappears and reappears.

 The cloud is not merely a physical substance but seems to be an immortal minor divinity.
 By employing this form of personification, Shelley is able to endow nature with the powers and
attributes of immortals. Thus his cloud is not only capable of changing its form almost at will but
is incapable of dying as well.
 Shelley's cloud is almost bewilderingly multiform. It begins as a gardener watering flowers,
changes to a mother or nurse shading a child from the midday sun while the child takes a nap,
becomes a bird that shakes dew from its wings to awaken the buds, and becomes a thresher
wielding a flail.
 It laughs, sifts, sleeps, folds its wings like a bird, puts a girdle around the sun, becomes a roof,
marches through a triumphal arch, is a baby daughter, passes "through the pores of the ocean
and shores," and tears down an empty tomb.
 As a divinity, it can be and do a multiplicity of things. Shelley's "The Cloud" is compact with
images, which, taken together, give the reader a good account of this natural phenomenon in
the language of poetry.
 Shelley's "Cloud," although extraordinarily rich in changing imagery, presents no special difficulty
except perhaps in the second stanza, in which he makes lightning the pilot of the cloud. What
Shelley is saying is that atmospheric electricity or lightning is formed in the tiny droplets of vapor
that make up the clouds. He is merely asserting a familiar fact.
Ode to the West Wind

 The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and
spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind hear him.
 The speaker describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him.
 The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves
the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for
a third time that it hear him.
 The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or
a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind’s “wandering over
heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers.
 He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at
heart, untamable and proud—he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon
the earth.
 The speaker asks the wind to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe,
“like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.”
 He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the
“trumpet of a prophecy.”
 Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes
his words to have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

 Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both “destroyer and
preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”
 In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a
metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered
leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”—that is, to quicken the coming of the spring.
 Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination,
liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human
mind.
 Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical
spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums
the leaves of the trees.
 The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed
nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed
nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience.
 In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with
which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic
expression.
England 1819

 The speaker describes the state of England in 1819.

 The king is “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying.”
 The princes are “the dregs of their dull race,” and flow through public scorn like mud, unable to
see, feel for, or know their people, clinging like leeches to their country until they “drop, blind in
blood, without a blow.”
 The English populace are “starved and stabbed” in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by
“liberticide and prey”; the laws “tempt and slay”; religion is Christless and Godless, “a book
sealed”; and the English Senate is like “Time’s worst statute unrepealed.”
 Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which “a glorious Phantom” may burst
to illuminate “our tempestuous day.”

 For all his commitment to romantic ideals of love and beauty, Shelley was also concerned with
the real world: he was a fierce denouncer of political power and a passionate advocate for
liberty. The result of his political commitment was a series of angry political poems condemning
the arrogance of power, including “Ozymandias” and “England in 1819.”
 Like Wordsworth bitterly lists the flaws in England’s social fabric: in order, King George is “old,
mad, blind, despised, and dying”; the nobility (“princes”) are insensible leeches draining their
country dry; the people are oppressed, hungry, and hopeless, their fields untilled; the army is
corrupt and dangerous to its own people; the laws are useless, religion has become morally
degenerate, and Parliament (“A Senate”) is “Time’s worst statute unrepealed.”
 The furious, violent metaphors Shelley employs throughout this list (nobles as leeches in muddy
water, the army as a two-edged sword, religion as a sealed book, Parliament as an unjust law)
leave no doubt about his feelings on the state of his nation.
 Then, surprisingly, the final couplet concludes with a note of passionate Shelleyean optimism:
from these “graves” a “glorious Phantom” may “burst to illumine our tempestuous day.”
 What this Phantom might be is not specified in the poem, but it seems to hint simultaneously at
the Spirit of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and at the possibility of liberty won through
revolution, as it was won in France.

Adonais *nisam uradila, nema ništa o odlomku, al’ pročitaj generalno o delu, nema mnogo (Cliff Notes
ili nešto tako na tu temu)
J. Keats “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Greacian Urn”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH

 For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal
occurrences.
 The end of a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumn—all
of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it.
 Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality.

THE CONTEMPLATION OF BEAUTY

 In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability
of death.
 Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry,
looking at beautiful objects and landscapes.
 Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for
all time.

DEPARTURES AND REVERIES

 In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a transcendent, mythical,
or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed
in some way and armed with a new understanding.
 Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful object makes the departure possible. The
ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering
about plausibility or rationality, is part of Keats’s concept of negative capability.
 As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have experiences and insights that
they can then impart into poetry once they’ve returned to conscious life.

THE FIVE SENSES AND ART

 Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected with various types of
art.
 The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the pictures depicted on the urn, including
lovers chasing one another, musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All
the figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the
urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the vessel.
Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot
hear the music.
 In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that he
might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five senses must be
involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE POET AND THE SPEAKER

 In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the work—that is, the work
itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader recognizes and responds to the
experience without requiring the intervention or explanation of the poet.
 Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an object that they erase themselves and their
thoughts from their depiction of that object.
 In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and indistinguishable from the object being
described.
 For instance, the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the scenes on the urn for several
stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in quotation
marks.

MUSIC AND MUSICIANS

 Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry and poets.
 In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes musicians playing their pipes.
Although we cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we can imagine and
thus hear music.
 “Ode to a Nightingale” uses the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of humans with the
immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of
using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music represents the ecstatic,
imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death
through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.

NATURE

 Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and
he described the natural world with precision and care.
 For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” hearing the bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate
on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans.

THE ANCIENT WORLD

 For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn, have a permanence and
solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life.
 In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still
spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic
object from Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of
Keats or another writer or creator.
 This achievement was one of Keats’s great hopes.
Ode to a Nightingale

 The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had
taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in
the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness,
but rather from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music
of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.
 In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine.
 In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the
troubles the nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life,
with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts.
 In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through
alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give him
“viewless wings.”
 In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess
them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the
murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”
 In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often
been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes.
 Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer
than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours
its soul ecstatically forth.
 If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in
vain” and be no longer able to hear.
 In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born
for death.”
 He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns,
by homesick Ruth;
 In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his
preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself.
 As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him
and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking
dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or
asleep.

 With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the
themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life
and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music.
 Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird.
  His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a
“draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself.
 But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being
“charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to
have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first
time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”
 The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music
and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened
forest.
 The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly
succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any
further pain or disappointment.
 But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself,
recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable.
 As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken,
unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

 In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it.
 He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time.
 He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story.
 He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from
where they come.
 He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and
wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes
and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
 In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man
playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees.
 The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because
they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because
he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade.
 In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will
never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and
happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into
“breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead,
and a parching tongue.”
 In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of
villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green
altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town,
 empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who
have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return.
 In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth
tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain,
telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says
that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

 If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid
expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the
static immobility of sculpture.
 The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing,
exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien
to all such concepts.
 In the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into
the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time.
 The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks
different questions of it.
 In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath
the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must
be like; he tries to identify with them.
 In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they
were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little town”)
and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be
deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it.
 It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage
with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification
in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the
processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous
feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure.
 The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts
the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this
subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.
 The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind—
”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats
canon.
 After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure
who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
 It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing mankind.
 If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its
limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth,
 but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained
phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge.
 If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson,
as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is
that beauty and truth are one and the same.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

 An unidentified speaker asks a knight what afflicts him.

 The knight is pale, haggard, and obviously dying. "And on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast
withereth too — ."
 The knight answers that he met a beautiful lady, "a faery's child" who had looked at him as if she
loved him. When he set her on his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had sung him to
sleep. In his sleep he had nightmarish dreams. Pale kings, princes, and warriors told him that he
had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady.
 When he awoke, the lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.

 Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is appropriate to it:
"The sedge has wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing!" The repetition of these two lines,
with minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the
unfortunate knight and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning.
 In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or the knight, or the
destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in his poem contributes as much to it in
arousing the reader's imagination as what he puts into it.
 La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a Circelike figure
who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers. She destroys because it is
her nature to destroy.
 Keats could have found patterns for his "faery's child" in folk mythology, classical literature,
Renaissance poetry, or the medieval ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a woman who
is at once beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating, and deadly.
 Some readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains of love. In his letters
and in some of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the pains, as well as the pleasures,
of love and that he resented the pains, particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in
love. However, the ballad is a very objective form, and it may be best to read "La Belle Dame
sans Merci" as pure story and no more.
 How Keats felt about his love for Fanny Brawne we can discover in the several poems he
addressed to her, as well as in his letters.
A. Tennyson “The Lady of Shalott“, “Ulysses“

THE GLORY OF ENGLAND

 Tennyson used his poetry to express his love for England.

 Although he expressed worry and concern about the corruption that so dominated the
nineteenth century, he also wrote many poems that glorify nineteenth-century England.
 As poet laureate, Tennyson was required to write poems for specific state occasions and to
dedicate verse to Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert.
 Nevertheless, Tennyson praised England even when not specifically required to do so.

TRAGIC DEATH

 Early, tragic death and suicide appear throughout Tennyson’s poetry. Perhaps the most
significant event of his life was the untimely death of his best friend Arthur Hallam at age
twenty-two, which prompted Tennyson to write his greatest literary work, In Memoriam.
 The speaker of “Break, Break, Break” (1834) sees death even in sunsets, while the early
“Mariana” (1830) features a woman who longs for death after her lover abandons her. Each of
that poem’s seven stanzas ends with the line “I would that I were dead.”
 The lady in “The Lady of Shalott” brings about her own death by going out into an autumn storm
dressed only in a thin white dress. Similarly, the cavalrymen in “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
ride to their deaths by charging headlong into the Russian cannons.
 These poems lyrically mourn those who died tragically, often finding nobility in their characters
or their deaths.

SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE

 Tennyson took a great interest in the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, and his
poetry manifests this interest in its reliance on scientific language.
 “The Kraken” (1830), which describes an ancient, slumbering sea beast, mentions a “cell” and
“polypi”.
 Section 21 of In Memoriam alludes to the 1846 discovery of Neptune. There, a traveler tells the
speaker not to grieve for his friend. Rather than grieve, the traveler says, the speaker should
rejoice in the marvelous possibilities of science. Section 120, in contrast, features the speaker
wondering what good science might do in a world full of religious doubt and despair.
 Other poems praise technological discoveries and inventions, including the steamships and
railways discussed in “Locksley Hall,” or mention specific plants and flowers, as does “The Lotos-
Eaters” (1832, 1842).
 Taking metaphors and poetic diction from science allowed Tennyson to connect to his age and to
modernize his sometimes antiquarian language and archaic verse forms.
THE ANCIENT WORLD

 Like the romantic poets who preceded him, Tennyson found much inspiration in the ancient
worlds of Greece and Rome.
 In poems such as “The Lotos-Eaters” and “Ulysses,” Tennyson retells the stories of Dante and
Homer, which described the characters of Ulysses, Telemachus, and Penelope and their
adventures in the ancient world. However, Tennyson slightly alters these mythic stories, shifting
the time frame of some of the action and often adding more descriptive imagery to the plot.
 For instance, “Ulysses,” a dramatic monologue spoken by Homer’s hero, urges readers to carry
on and persevere rather than to give up and retire. Elsewhere Tennyson channels the voice of
Tithonus, a legendary prince from Troy, in the eponymous poem “Tithonus” (1833, 1859). He
praises the ancient poet Virgil in his ode “To Virgil” (1882), commenting on Virgil’s choice of
subject matter and lauding his ability to chronicle human history in meter.
 Tennyson mined the ancient world to find stories that would simultaneously enthrall and inspire
his readers.

KING ARTHUR AND CAMELOT

 To Tennyson, King Arthur symbolizes the ideal man, and Arthurian England was England in its
best and purest form. Some of Tennyson’s earliest poems, such as “The Lady of Shalott,” were
set in King Arthur’s time. Indeed, Tennyson rhymes Camelot, the name of King Arthur’s estate,
with Shalott in eighteen of the poem’s twenty stanzas, thereby emphasizing the importance of
the mythical place.
 Furthermore, our contemporary conception of Camelot as harmonious and magnificent comes
from Tennyson’s poem. Idylls of the King, about King Arthur’s rise and fall, was one of the major
projects of Tennyson’s late career.
 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert envisioned themselves as latter-day descendents of Arthur and
the Knights of the Round Table, and their praise helped popularize the long poem.
 But King Arthur also had a more personal representation to Tennyson: the mythic king
represents a version of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose death at twenty-two profoundly
affected Tennyson. Hallam’s death destroyed his potential and promise, which allowed Tennyson
to idealize Hallam. This idealization allows Tennyson to imagine what might have been in the
best possible light, much as he does when describing King Arthur and his court.

THE IMPRISONED WOMAN

 The imprisoned woman appears throughout Tennyson’s work.

 In “Mariana,” a woman abandoned by her lover lives alone in her house in the middle of
desolate country; her isolation imprisons her, as does the way she waits for her lover to return.
Her waiting limits her ability and desire to do anything else.
  “The Lady of Shalott” is likewise about a woman imprisoned, this time in a tower. Should she
leave her prison, a curse would fall upon her. Tennyson, like many other Victorian poets, used
female characters to symbolize the artistic and sensitive aspects of the human condition.
 Imprisoned women, such as these Tennyson characters, act as symbols for the isolation
experienced by the artist and other sensitive, deep-feeling people. Although society might force
creative, sensitive types to become outcasts, in Tennyson’s poems, the women themselves
create their own isolation and imprisonment. These women seem unable or unwilling to deal
with the outside world.

The Lady of Shalott

 Part I: The poem begins with a description of a river and a road that pass through long fields of
barley and rye before reaching the town of Camelot. The people of the town travel along the
road and look toward an island called Shalott, which lies further down the river. The island of
Shalott contains several plants and flowers, including lilies, aspens, and willows. On the island, a
woman known as the Lady of Shalott is imprisoned within a building made of “four gray walls
and four gray towers.”
 At night, the tired reaper listens to her singing and whispers that he hears her: “ ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”
 Part II: The Lady of Shalott weaves a magic, colorful web. She has heard a voice whisper that a
curse will befall her if she looks down to Camelot, and she does not know what this curse would
be. Thus, she concentrates solely on her weaving, never lifting her eyes.
 However, as she weaves, a mirror hangs before her. In the mirror, she sees “shadows of the
world,” including the highway road, which also passes through the fields, the eddies in the river,
and the peasants of the town. Nonetheless, she enjoys her solitary weaving, though she
expresses frustration with the world of shadows when she glimpses a funeral procession or a
pair of newlyweds in the mirror.
 Part III: A knight in brass armor (“brazen greaves”) comes riding through the fields of barley
beside Shalott; the sun shines on his armor and makes it sparkle. As he rides, the gems on his
horse’s bridle glitter like a constellation of stars, and the bells on the bridle ring. The knight
hangs a bugle from his sash, and his armor makes ringing noises as he gallops alongside the
remote island of Shalott.
 In the “blue, unclouded weather,” the jewels on the knight’s saddle shine, making him look like a
meteor in the purple sky. His forehead glows in the sunlight, and his black curly hair flows out
from under his helmet. As he passes by the river, his image flashes into the Lady of Shalott’s
mirror and he sings out “tirra lirra.” Upon seeing and hearing this knight, the Lady stops weaving
her web and abandons her loom. The web flies out from the loom, and the mirror cracks, and
the Lady announces the arrival of her doom: “The curse is come upon me.”
 Part IV: As the sky breaks out in rain and storm, the Lady of Shalott descends from her tower and
finds a boat. She writes the words “The Lady of Shalott” around the boat’s bow and looks
downstream to Camelot like a prophet foreseeing his own misfortunes. In the evening, she lies
down in the boat, and the stream carries her to Camelot.
 The Lady of Shalott wears a snowy white robe and sings her last song as she sails down to
Camelot. She sings until her blood freezes, her eyes darken, and she dies. When her boat sails
silently into Camelot, all the knights, lords, and ladies of Camelot emerge from their halls to
behold the sight. They read her name on the bow and “cross...themselves for fear.”
 Only the great knight Lancelot is bold enough to push aside the crowd, look closely at the dead
maiden, and remark “She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace.”

 Much of the poem’s charm stems from its sense of mystery and elusiveness; of course, these
aspects also complicate the task of analysis. That said, most scholars understand “The Lady of
Shalott” to be about the conflict between art and life.
 The Lady, who weaves her magic web and sings her song in a remote tower, can be seen to
represent the contemplative artist isolated from the bustle and activity of daily life. The moment
she sets her art aside to gaze down on the real world, a curse befalls her and she meets her
tragic death. The poem thus captures the conflict between an artist’s desire for social
involvement and his/her doubts about whether such a commitment is viable for someone
dedicated to art.
 The poem may also express a more personal dilemma for Tennyson as a specific artist: while he
felt an obligation to seek subject matter outside the world of his own mind and his own
immediate experiences—to comment on politics, history, or a more general humanity—he also
feared that this expansion into broader territories might destroy his poetry’s magic.
 Part I and Part IV of this poem deal with the Lady of Shalott as she appears to the outside world,
whereas Part II and Part III describe the world from the Lady’s perspective. In Part I, Tennyson
portrays the Lady as secluded from the rest of the world by both water and the height of her
tower. We are not told how she spends her time or what she thinks about; thus we, too, like
everyone in the poem, are denied access to the interiority of her world. Interestingly, the only
people who know that she exists are those whose occupations are most diametrically opposite
her own: the reapers who toil in physical labor rather than by sitting and crafting works of
beauty.
 Part II describes the Lady’s experience of imprisonment from her own perspective. We learn that
her alienation results from a mysterious curse: she is not allowed to look out on Camelot, so all
her knowledge of the world must come from the reflections and shadows in her mirror.
 Tennyson notes that often she sees a funeral or a wedding, a disjunction that suggests the
interchangeability, and hence the conflation, of love and death for the Lady: indeed, when she
later falls in love with Lancelot, she will simultaneously bring upon her own death.
 Whereas Part II makes reference to all the different types of people that the Lady sees through
her mirror, including the knights who “come riding two and two”, Part III focuses on one
particular knight who captures the Lady’s attention: Sir Lancelot. He is described in an array of
colors: he is a “red-cross knight”; his shield “sparkled on the yellow field”; he wears a “silver
bugle”; he passes through “blue unclouded weather” and the “purple night,” and he has “coal-
black curls.” He is also adorned in a “gemmy bridle” and other bejeweled garments, which
sparkle in the light.
  Yet in spite of the rich visual details that Tennyson provides, it is the sound and not the sight of
Lancelot that causes the Lady of Shalott to transgress her set boundaries: only when she hears
him sing “Tirra lirra” does she leave her web and seal her doom. The intensification of the Lady’s
experiences in this part of the poem is marked by the shift from the static, descriptive present
tense of Parts I and II to the dynamic, active past of Parts III and IV.
 In Part IV, all the lush color of the previous section gives way to “pale yellow” and “darkened”
eyes, and the brilliance of the sunlight is replaced by a “low sky raining.” The moment the Lady
sets her art aside to look upon Lancelot, she is seized with death.
 The end of her artistic isolation thus leads to the end of creativity: “Out flew her web and floated
wide”. She also loses her mirror, which had been her only access to the outside world: “The
mirror cracked from side to side”.
 Her turn to the outside world thus leaves her bereft both of her art object and of the instrument
of her craft—and of her very life. Yet perhaps the greatest curse of all is that although she
surrenders herself to the sight of Lancelot, she dies completely unappreciated by him. The poem
ends with the tragic triviality of Lancelot’s response to her tremendous passion: all he has to say
about her is that “she has a lovely face”.
 Having abandoned her artistry, the Lady of Shalott becomes herself an art object; no longer can
she offer her creativity, but merely a “dead-pale” beauty.

Ulysses

 Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with
his old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses who live in his
kingdom.
 Still speaking to himself he proclaims that he “cannot rest from travel” but feels compelled to
live to the fullest and swallow every last drop of life.
 He has enjoyed all his experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a
symbol for everyone who wanders and roams the earth. His travels have exposed him to many
different types of people and ways of living. They have also exposed him to the “delight of
battle” while fighting the Trojan War with his men.
 Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: “I am a part of all that I
have met,” he asserts. And it is only when he is traveling that the “margin” of the globe that he
has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.
 Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust
rather than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of
breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter
this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes
“to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.
 Ulysses now speaks to an unidentified audience concerning his son Telemachus, who will act as
his successor while the great hero resumes his travels: he says, “This is my son, mine own
Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle.”
 He speaks highly but also patronizingly of his son’s capabilities as a ruler, praising his prudence,
dedication, and devotion to the gods. Telemachus will do his work of governing the island while
Ulysses will do his work of traveling the seas: “He works his work, I mine.”
 In the final stanza, Ulysses addresses the mariners with whom he has worked, traveled, and
weathered life’s storms over many years. He declares that although he and they are old, they
still have the potential to do something noble and honorable before “the long day wanes.” He
encourages them to make use of their old age because “ ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
 He declares that his goal is to sail onward “beyond the sunset” until his death. Perhaps, he
suggests, they may even reach the “Happy Isles,” or the paradise of perpetual summer described
in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been
taken after their deaths.
 Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in youth, they are “strong in
will” and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly: “To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield.”

 Ulysses, who symbolizes the grieving poet, proclaims his resolution to push onward in spite of
the awareness that “death closes all”. As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own
“need of going forward and braving the struggle of life” after the loss of his beloved Hallam.
 The poem’s final line, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” came to serve as a motto for
the poet’s Victorian contemporaries: the poem’s hero longs to flee the tedium of daily life
“among these barren crags” and to enter a mythical dimension “beyond the sunset, and the
baths of all the western stars” ; as such, he was a model of individual self-assertion and the
Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity.
 “Ulysses,” like many of Tennyson’s other poems, deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits
of one’s field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life. Like the Lady of Shallot, who
longs for the worldly experiences she has been denied, Ulysses hungers to explore the
untraveled world.
 As in all dramatic monologues, here the character of the speaker emerges almost unintentionally
from his own words. Ulysses’ incompetence as a ruler is evidenced by his preference for
potential quests rather than his present responsibilities.
 He devotes a full 26 lines to his own egotistical proclamation of his zeal for the wandering life,
and another 26 lines to the exhortation of his mariners to roam the seas with him. However, he
offers only 11 lines of lukewarm praise to his son concerning the governance of the kingdom in
his absence, and a mere two words about his “aged wife” Penelope. Thus, the speaker’s own
words betray his abdication of responsibility and his specificity of purpose.
R. Browning “My Last Duchess”, “Andrea del Sarto”

MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON SINGLE EVENTS

 The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of
specific characters in specific places struggling with specific sets of circumstances.
 Dramatic monologues allow readers to enter into the minds of various characters and to see an
event from that character’s perspective. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motivations
of a character not only gives readers a sense of sympathy for the characters but also helps
readers understand the multiplicity of perspectives that make up the truth.
 In effect, Browning’s work reminds readers that the nature of truth or reality fluctuates,
depending on one’s perspective or view of the situation. Multiple perspectives illustrate the idea
that no one sensibility or perspective sees the whole story and no two people see the same
events in the same way.
 Browning further illustrated this idea by writing poems that work together as companion pieces,
such as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Poems such as these show how people with
different characters respond differently to similar situations, as well as depict how a time, place,
and scenario can cause people with similar personalities to develop or change quite dramatically.

THE PURPOSES OF ART

 Dramatic monologues about artists attempt to capture some of this philosophizing because his
characters speculate on the purposes of art. For instance, the speaker of “Fra Lippo Lippi”
proposes that art heightens our powers of observation and helps us notice things about our own
lives.
 According to some of these characters and poems, painting idealizes the beauty found in the real
world, such as the radiance of a beloved’s smile.
 But art also helps its creators to make a living, and it thus has a purpose as pecuniary as creative,
an idea explored in “Andrea del Sarto.”

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND MORALITY

 Throughout his work, Browning tried to answer questions about an artist’s responsibilities and to
describe the relationship between art and morality.
 He questioned whether artists had an obligation to be moral and whether artists should pass
judgment on their characters and creations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browning
populated his poems with evil people, who commit crimes and sins ranging from hatred to
murder. The dramatic monologue format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance
between himself and his creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could
explore evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served as personae that let him
adopt different traits and tell stories about horrible situations.
 In “My Last Duchess,” the speaker gets away with his wife’s murder since neither his audience (in
the poem) nor his creator judges or criticizes him. Instead, the responsibility of judging the
 character’s morality is left to readers, who find the duke of Ferrara a vicious, repugnant person
even as he takes us on a tour of his art gallery.

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EUROPEAN SETTINGS

 Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance Europe, most often in Italy.
 He drew on his extensive knowledge of art, architecture, and history to fictionalize actual events,
and to channel the voices of actual historical figures, including the Renaissance painter in the
eponymous “Andrea del Sarto.”
 The remoteness of the time period and location allowed Browning to critique and explore
contemporary issues without fear of alienating his readers.
 Browning indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of England, which was in a
state of disarray at the time of the poem’s composition in the mid-nineteenth century.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PORTRAITS

 Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing at least one silent, usually unnamed
person, and they provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike
soliloquies, in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly to listeners.
 Browning’s characters are usually crafty, intelligent, argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed,
they often leave out more of a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand the
speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay attention to word choice, to logical
progression, and to the use of figures of speech, including any metaphors or analogies

GROTESQUE IMAGES

 Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry with images of ugliness, violence, and the
bizarre.
 Browning’s use of the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who filled his fiction with
people from all strata of society, including the aristocracy and the very poor. Like Dickens,
Browning created characters who were capable of great evil.
 Browning was instrumental in helping readers and writers understand that poetry as an art form
could handle subjects both lofty, such as religious splendor and idealized passion, and base, such
as murder, hatred, and madness, subjects that had previously only been explored in novels.

TASTE

 Browning’s interest in culture, including art and architecture, appears throughout his work in
depictions of his characters’ aesthetic tastes. His characters’ preferences in art, music, and
literature reveal important clues about their natures and moral worth.
 For instance, the duke of Ferrara, the speaker of “My Last Duchess,” concludes the poem by
pointing out a statue he commissioned of Neptune taming a sea monster. The duke’s preference
for this sculpture directly corresponds to the type of man he is—that is, the type of man who
 would have his wife killed but still stare lovingly and longingly at her portrait. Like Neptune, the
duke wants to subdue and command all aspects of life, including his wife.
 Characters also express their tastes by the manner in which they describe art, people, or
landscapes. Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance artist who speaks the poem “Andrea del Sarto,”
repeatedly uses the adjectives gold and silver in his descriptions of paintings. His choice of words
reinforces one of the major themes of the poem: the way he sold himself out. Listening to his
monologue, we learn that he now makes commercial paintings to earn a commission, but he no
longer creates what he considers to be real art. His desire for money has affected his aesthetic
judgment, causing him to use monetary vocabulary to describe art objects.

EVIL AND VIOLENCE

 Synonyms for, images of, and symbols of evil and violence abound in Browning’s poetry.
 Symbols of evil and violence allowed Browning to explore all aspects of human psychology,
including the base and evil aspects that don’t normally appear in poetry.

My Last Duchess

 This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived
in the 16th century.
 The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come
to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another
powerful family.
 As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess,
apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then
about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he
claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a nine-hundred-years- old
name.”
 As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke
in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; /
Then all smiles stopped together.”
 Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another
marriage, with another young girl.
 As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable
artworks in his collection.

 The temporal setting allows Browning to again explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all
entangled, complicating and confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact
that the Duchess was punished for her natural sexuality.
 The Duke’s ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his mind.
Like some of Browning’s fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin lurking in every corner.
 The Renaissance was a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power,
and as such it is a fascinating study for the Victorians: works like this imply that, surely, a time
 that produced magnificent art like the Duchess’s portrait couldn’t have been entirely evil in its
allocation of societal control—even though it put men like the Duke in power.
 A poem like “My Last Duchess” calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level. Because
we hear only the Duke’s musings, we must piece the story together ourselves.
 Browning forces his reader to become involved in the poem in order to understand it, and this
adds to the fun of reading his work. It also forces the reader to question his or her own response
to the subject portrayed and the method of its portrayal.
 We are forced to consider, Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s
fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development? Thus by posing this
question the poem firstly tests the Victorian reader’s response to the modern world—it asks, Has
everyday life made you numb yet?—and secondly asks a question that must be asked of all art—
it queries, Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an aesthetic exercise?

Andrea del Sarto

 This poem represents yet another of Browning’s dramatic monologues spoken in the voice of an
historical Renaissance painter. Andrea del Sarto, like Fra Lippo Lippi, lived and worked in
Florence, albeit a little later than Lippo, and was later appointed court painter by Francis, the
King of France.
 Under the nagging influence of his wife Lucrezia, to whom he speaks in this poem, he left the
French court for Italy but promised to return; he took with him some money that Francis had
given him to purchase Italian artworks for the court, and also the money advanced to him for his
own commissioned paintings. However, he spent all of the money on a house for himself and his
wife in Italy and never returned to France.
 This poem finds Andrea in the house he has bought with the stolen money, as he thinks back on
his career and laments that his worldly concerns have kept him from fulfilling his promise as an
artist.
 As he and Lucrezia sit at their window, he talks to her of his relative successes and failures:
although Michelangelo (here, Michel Agnolo) and Raphael (Rafael) enjoyed higher inspiration
and better patronage—and lacked nagging wives—he is the better craftsman, and he points out
to her the problems with the Great Masters’ work. But while Andrea succeeds technically where
they do not (thus his title “The Faultless Painter”), their work ultimately triumphs for its
emotional and spiritual power.
 Andrea now finds himself in the twilight of his career and his marriage: Lucrezia’s “Cousin”—
probably her lover—keeps whistling for her to come; she apparently either owes the man
gambling debts or has promised to cover his own. The fond, weary Andrea gives her some
money, promises to sell paintings to pay off her debts, and sends her away to her “Cousin,”
while he remains to sit quietly and dream of painting in Heaven.

 This poem has a most compelling premise—an artist’s comparison of his own work to that of the
Great Masters. Andrea blames his disappointing career on his inability to match his unparalleled
 technical skills with appropriate subject matter: all the Virgins he paints look like his wife, and he
has never had the time at court to allow his work to blossom.
 While Raphael and Michelangelo often err in their representations (while he speaks Andrea
mentally “fixes” a figure’s arm in a scene by Raphael), the intentions and the spirit behind their
work shine through so strongly that their work nonetheless surpasses his. This seems to
contradict what Browning asserts in other poems about the unconnectedness of art on the one
hand and morality or intention on the other. But perhaps we can explain this seeming
contradiction by interpreting the Great Masters’ motivation as not so much any specific spiritual
or moral purpose, but rather an all-consuming passion for their art.
 As Andrea notes, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo did not have wives: they lived for their
work. For Andrea, painting is reduced to a means to make money; he has the avaricious Lucrezia
to support. Between trying to pay her debts, buying her the things she wants, and keeping her
attention, Andrea cannot afford to focus solely on his art. Is the creation of art incompatible with
a “normal” life, a life of mundane duties and obligations?
 It may be worth considering why Browning chooses to write about painters rather than poets in
his discussions on art and the artist-figure. During the Renaissance era where Browning sets his
verses, poetry would have had a somewhat limited audience. Painting, on the other hand, was—
and still is—a more public art form. Whether a painting hangs in a museum or on the wall of a
church, it remains constantly accessible and on display to anyone who passes, regardless of his
or her education. Moreover, particularly since most Renaissance art portrayed religious themes,
painting had a specific didactic purpose and thus an explicit connection to moral and spiritual
issues. This connection between art and morals is precisely what most interests Browning in
much of his work—indeed, it much preoccupied Victorian society in general.
 Browning and his contemporaries asked, What can be forgiven morally in the name of aesthetic
greatness? Does art have a moral responsibility? Because Renaissance painting was public and
fairly representational, it highlights many of these issues; poetry is always indirect and symbolic,
and usually private, and thus makes a harder test case than painting. Indeed, Andrea’s paintings
in particular, which often depict religious scenes, get right at the heart of the art-morality
question, especially given his works’ imbalance between technical skill and lofty intentions.
 Andrea presents us with a different kind of character than we are used to seeing in Browning’s
work. Unlike the Duke of “My Last Duchess,” Fra Lippo Lippi, or Porphyria’s Lover, Andrea
expresses a resigned, melancholy outlook; his wife keeps him completely under her thumb.
 He lacks the hubris of these other characters, and thus to some extent seems to represent
Browning’s insecurities.
 Like “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” this poem “takes place” (is spoken) after the
fact: Andrea has long since left Francis’s court, and the money he stole has long since
disappeared into the house and Lucrezia’s wardrobe. While this monologue comes across as
dramatic in nature, it does not dramatize anyone’s actions. Rather, it seeks to capture a mood
and an attitude. In this way it has more in common with Tennyson’s dramatic monologues (such
as “Ulysses”) than it does with other poems of Browning’s.