University of AL- Muthanna College of Education for Humanities Department of English Third Year/ First course Romantic Poetry A’ida Th. Sallom • Romanticism is an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization. • Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. • Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Romantic Poetry The late 18th to the mid-19th century Romanticism and Romantic poetry signify: • A deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature. • A general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect. • A turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality. • A preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles. • A new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator. • An emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth. • An obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era. • A tendency for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, and even the satanic. Six great Romantic poets will be studied in this course with one poem for each to be scrutinized 1- William Blake's “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” 2- William Wordsworth's “The Solitary Reaper.” 3- S. T. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" 4- Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind.” 5- John Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale.” 6- Lord Byron's “In This Day I Complete My 36th Year.” The Lamb The Tyger “The Lamb” • The title is well-intentioned, the lamb symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a Lamb emphasizes the Christian values of gentleness, humbleness, and peace. • At the beginning of the poem, the speaker, a child, asks a rhetorical question, ―Little Lamb, who made thee?‖ He ponders 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 answers 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 giving a blessing on the lamb. • The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special consideration for children, and the Bible‘s depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as honest and vulnerable. • This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake viewed as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. • The poem is typified as Romantic; the language is simple, the style is direct, but the meaning is very serious; symbolizing, a harmony between the lamb, man, God and nature. • It can also be said that the child is a symbolic image of Adam and Eve in their innocent form before their fall from heaven to earth. • Blake's theory of childhood stressed the notion that the child is born with a mind like a white sheet of paper, that is, the child is born without experience, yet, he does not stay in the same stage, he learns from every moment till he becomes mature man, transforming from the stage of innocence into the stage of experience. The Tyger “The Tyger” • In this poem, Blake asks the same question that he has previously asked in the "The Lamb," which is about the notion of Creation. • There are many descriptions of the tiger in this poem; his eyes are like small balls of fire, his heart is very strong with dread hand and dread feet. His brain is wide. That is why, the tiger is one of the strongest and cleverest animals. • Blake wonders whether the God who creates the lamb is the same One who creates the tiger?, Suggesting that there is no separation between good and evil, between gentle and fierce. The Creator is a mixture of the two, the same Creator who made the lamb made the tiger. It is this idea which makes the poem a universal one. • The poem is concluded with three images that describe "the myth of .the fall of Adam and Eve from heaven to earth ـــ "fall • The first image is associated with the tears that moves from the eyes to the cheek. The second image depicts the stars which fall from heaven to earth. These stars are called "the meteor." Finally, the third image portrays the rain that falls from heaven to earth. In fact, the movement of these three images "tears," stars" and "rain" is just like the fall of Adam and Eve from heaven to earth. William Blake’s Philosophy of the two poems: Both Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" show the two contrary states of human soul. • In the first poem, Blake shows what innocence means, while in the second one, he shows how this innocence was corrupted and destroyed. • For Blake, all human beings are, in some sense, the children of a divine father but experience destroys their innocence. • Blake brings two sides, the good and evil, to create a real man who can regain paradise again after its loss by our father, Adam. This man, for Blake, is Jesus Christ. Behold her, single in the field, Will no one tell me what she sings? Yon solitary Highland Lass! Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow Reaping and singing by herself; For old, unhappy, far-off things, Stop here, or gently pass! And battles long ago: Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; Or is it some more humble lay, O listen! for the Vale profound Familiar matter of to-day? Is overflowing with the sound. Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, ***************************************** That has been, and may be again? ************************************************** No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang bands As if her song could have no ending; Of travellers in some shady haunt, I saw her singing at her work, Among Arabian sands: And o'er the sickle bending;— A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard I listened, motionless and still; In spring-time from the Cuckoo- bird, And, as I mounted up the hill, Breaking the silence of the seas The music in my heart I bore, Among the farthest Hebrides. Long after it was heard no more. • The Solitary Reaper is one of Wordsworth's most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. • The poet was inspired by the scenes of nature and the life of rustic people during his stay at the village of Strathyre in Scotland. He talks about a girl, a ―Highland lass‖, who is in a field alone: "single in the field". As she is harvesting her crops, she is singing a sad tune which echoes in the deep valley. The speaker asks us to listen to her tune or ―gently pass‖ so as not to disturb the smooth flow of the song. • Written in iambic tetrameter, four eight-line stanzas, each closing with two couplets and all written in octosyllabic lines, the poem proofs Wordsworth‘s theory how poetry ought to focus on the mundane and the commonplace. His main character here is a solitary girl, an adjective that sets her apart from people and hence brings her close to nature, a place that unfolds her creativity and art. She is reaping, binding and singing simultaneously. • Metaphorically, her tremulous voice haunts the distances, springs directly from nature and runs musically in the valley just like the water flow. • The visual image reflects the beauty of the lonely girl as well as the beauty of nature. • The auditory (hearing) image reflects the beauty of her voice and the sound of the water flowing in the valley. • Her charming voice is attractively compared to that of ―Nightingale‖ and ―Cuckoo‖, the speaker says that her sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale to weary travelers in the desert ―Arabian sands‖, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with a voice so thrilling in the ―Hebrides islands‖. ―Hyperbole‖ In Scotland, the harvest time is Autumn and there seems no singing bird that could break the silence of the nature. From last spring till this Autumn, no good voice like the girl's is heard. Her only voice has the ability to break the silence of and the. Auditory images: the voice of the two-birds and the voice of the girl break the silence of the nature. • Personifications the sounds have given the ability to break the silence. • In the third stanza, the poet shows inability to understand the words that the girl is singing and cannot understand its meaning. Nevertheless, the tone was sad and melancholic. He speculates that it might reflect sorrowful memories or certain battle in the past or could be a simple rural song about ―matter of today.‖ • Whatever she sings about, he says, he listened ―motionless and still,‖ and as he traveled up the hill, he carried her song with him in his heart long after he could no longer hear it. It would remain fresh in his memories. Furthermore, this unforgettable quality of the song proves its universal appeal. • In the fourth stanza the poet sees the maiden bending on her sickle and keeps murmuring her sad song.