British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

The description of “burning bright” here has a meaning of the view of the two burning eyes in the darkness, but the phrase itself makes the tiger a symbol of a “burning” quality – wrath, passion, ardour. At the same time “burning bright” brings a sense of light, something glorious and shiny in the quality symbolized.

Most of Blake’s writings reflect his struggle to establish order among apparently conflicting aspects of his own personality expressed as symbolic figures and situations.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are also called the poets of the Lake School because they all lived in the Lake District of Cumbria in Northern England. Critics used to call them “reactionary” and “conservative” poets. “Romantic revival“ is another label that has been attached to them by the critics. The latter label is only an attempt to show how their work differed from that of their predecessors. They all had a deep interest in nature, not as a centre of beautiful scenes but as an informing and spiritual influence on life. The Lake School poets had a new intuition for the primal power of the wild landscape, the spiritual correspondence between Man and Nature, and the aesthetic principle of “organic” form. They were turning to nature for protection, or as if, with the declining strength of traditional religious belief, men were making a religion from the spirituality of their own experiences. They all valued their own experiences to a degree that is difficult to parallel in earlier poets. Spenser, Milton, and Pope make verse out of legend or knowledge that is common to humanity. The Romantic poets look into themselves, seeking in their own lives for strange sensations. With Wordsworth, such sensations have a moral value, and are often associated with simple and human objects. The poet made no secret of his desire to instruct. In one of his letters he wrote: “Every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing… There is scarcely one of my poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle…”

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Their poetry is also notorious for the insights of childhood. Coleridge, one of the most famous adherents of this trend, believed that “the sense of novelty and freshness with the old and familiar objects could be achieved especially by carrying on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood”. The Lake School poets also wrote about conventional society and the individual, the poor and unlettered, turned back to history.

Samuel Coleridge’s most famous poems are Cristabel and The Ancient Mariner, and they remind us of Gothic novels. Both poems are built on popular superstitions. The Ancient Mariner impresses itself on the reader as an irresistible vision a world beyond our own, in language of a kind uniquely fitted to force into that “suspension of disbelief” which Coleridge saw as necessary in poetry. Though the poem begins in a real world of weddings, of blushing brides and laid tables, it soon takes on a very different aspect as the Mariner fixes his auditor with his “glittering eye” hypnotism fascinated by the Romantics and the Victorians, like all other irrational manifestations that seemed to offer access to areas of the kind beyond the conscious ones. In spite of the debt Coleridge owed to Elizabethan books of travel and mariners' tales, both for incident, superstition and individual phrases, the voyage soon takes on the air of ritual and of myth, with nature powerfully yet mysteriously animated, the albatross - a bird of priestly aspect and function. It is the shooting of the albatross – an action unmotivated and unexplained, as so often in myth and ballad – that cuts the Mariner off from the healing, restorative natural world. Coleridge seems to image here the alienation of modern man, to whom society denies all the conditions of mental and spiritual wholeness. The drought conveys unforgettably a physical equivalent of this state:

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

By reason of his flouting the community between man, beast and the whole natural world, the Mariner suffers a period of virtual death, of near self-annihilation. In Part IV, the centre of the poem, the Mariner lies on deck with the dead bodies of the other sailors, and progresses from the state of being unable to pray, via that of wonder at the beauty of the moon and stars, to admiration of the beauty of the water-snakes, “Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,” which previously had been “slimy things . . . / Upon the

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slimy sea.” Only when he begins to recognize again his kinship with the world of nature does the wind starts blowing, the ship sails home and the mariner is saved. The long process of spiritual regeneration begins.

The Ancient Mariner is in fact a highly sophisticated poem, but Coleridge disguises this by his brilliant use of every conceivable device from the balladry – alliteration, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme, above all repetition, so that every phrase seems carved from ice in one single, brilliant stroke:

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a sound!

Coleridge’s favourite image is illumination – moonlight suffusing the sky, or the Neo-Platonic symbol of the sun dispersing mists of ignorance and superstition.

It is interesting to note that Coleridge widely uses margine notes for commenting on the events of the poem in order not to distract a reader from its emotional context:

The childhood and adolescence of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was spent in the Lake District, and it is impossible not to see his poetry as influenced by the beauty and grandeur of that region. The country people of Cumberland and Westmoreland had not been reduced (as in most other

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areas of Britain) to the status of tenants or labourers, and the independence and attachment to their own native soil also set their mark of his poetry. The crucial emotional events of his life were first his sojourn in France (1791–1792) during a year of tumultuous political changes, a year that also saw a youthful love affair that produced an illegitimate daughter; and secondly the close intimacy of Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and t Coleridge, first in the West Country, then back in the Lake District, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. This close friendship of the two greatest poets of their time - a friendship of men very different in temperament and aspiration – is unparalleled in the history of poetry. Their union started the revolution in English poetry. They both produced a collection of poems, known under the title Lyrical Ballads, its first edition appeared in 1798 and became a landmark of English Romanticism. In Coleridge's Biographia Literaria he states that Wordsworth's contributions to the volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798) were intended to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day” and to awaken “the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and direct it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.” Wordsworth himself in the Preface he later wrote to the volume talked about choosing “incidents and situations from common life.” Wordsworth's concern to draw at least some of his subject matter from the life of the humble peasantry around him drew easy ridicule in his own time, and even today it is possible to feel that he not merely fell into pathos, but jumped in enthusiastically, in such often ridiculed lines as:

For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell

or

I've measured it from side to side: “Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Yet for all that, and for all the intrusive Sunday school moralizing in many of the poems of simple peasant life, his concern with the uneducated rural population both moves the reader and enlarges his sympathies. In one of his best poems, The Ruined Cottage, he tells us about misfortune befalling a farmer and his wife. The husband leaves home and joins a troop of soldiers going to a distant land. The wife waits for him, but in vain, soon she dies, and their cottage goes to ruins. This poem is frequently defined as a tragedy, but its conclusion is profoundly optimistic: confronted by the pain and suffering of the ill-fated Margaret, we are di-

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rected to feel consolation at the sight of the plants in her garden. The idea of the poem is that though life is full of sorrow and despair, it is no more than an “idle dream”. Nature cures.

Many of Wordsworth's best poems are about encounters of his own with people or natural objects, in which he movingly conveys the very experience of the moment, the complex of aesthetic, moral and emotional reactions that are aroused. Much of Wordsworth’s best works, even outside his famous The Prelude, constitutes a kind of a diary. The poem Influence of Natural Objects may serve as an illustration. Written in 1799, it was eventually printed as part of The Prelude. It is a kind of an autobiographical account, the movement of the words is subtle and flexible. The adjectives used to describe the scene – lonely, lonesome, gloomy, calm, trembling build up not only the atmospheric setting, but also describe the state of mind:

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,

Feebler and feebler, and I stood by and watched

Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.

In The Solitary Reaper, the physical oneness of the girl with nature, the incomprehensible beauty of her Gaelic song, arouse in Wordsworth feelings of physical and emotional pleasure, mysterious apprehensions of the direct link with folk traditions and “battles long ago,” appreciation of her dignity and wholeness. And these apprehensions are not analyzed, but are conveyed in simple and evocative language – the sort of language, close to normal speech:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago;

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss or pain

That has been, and may be again?

In She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, his reactions to the death of Lucy, the heroine of the poem, are all the more poignant because of their heartfelt understatement:

She lived unknown, and few could know

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When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

During his greatest, most fertile period of creativity, Wordsworth managed to recapture, or even retain, the freshness of the response to nature that he had had as a boy, freely ranging the mountains, dales and lakes. It was this closeness to his responses that Wordsworth most valued and saw the need to maintain:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

Wordsworth emphasizes that this pristine response grew to have a moral and religious dimension that is an essential part of the function of nature in his poetry.

The modern vulgarization of this, that a walk in the mountains is more spiritually uplifting than a church service, shows the long-lasting influence of Wordsworth’s poetry. The level of sophistication at which the message is conveyed varies greatly. There is a famous passage in The Prelude in which Wordsworth describes how one night, when a boy, he borrowed a boat for an unlawful night expedition. He rowed out into the lake, and as he got further and further from the shore he saw “a huge peak, black and huge,” which, as it got larger, seemed to threaten him more and more with retribution. The apprehension here has the grotesque simplification of the adolescent boy Wordsworth was at the time. In the Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on the other hand, he joyously recalls the freshness of his childish response to nature, but convincingly and movingly expands this to a much more complex, mature response.

William Wordsworth is very clever with wording. For example the verse with a swinging, accelerating movement, builds up a sense of speed:

… and oftentimes,

When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

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The rapid line of motion.

Tasks

1. The Garden of Love is a lyric taken from Blake’s collection Songs of Experience. The latter and the collection Songs of Innocence show, according to the author’s own words, “the contrary states of the human soul”, the joy of uncorrupted and unsophisticated existence on the one hand, and the sorrows that come with experience. Read the poem and answer the following questions:

–What does the Garden symbolize?

–What other symbols can be found in the poem?

–What marks the simplicity of the diction?

–What does the use of the sevenfold repetition AND suggest?

–What is the purpose of the use of contrast?

–What shows “experience”, and not “innocence” in this lyric?

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

2. Read Song by William Wordsworth that is taken from the collection Lyrical Ballads and answer the following questions:

–Analyze the syntax of the poem. Is it simple or elaborate? Does direct word-order prevail? Are there any inversions?

–Why is the epithet “untrodden” so important here?

–What character feature of Lucy is particularly emphasized by Wordsworth?

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– Characterize the diction of the poem. Are there any abstract nouns and poetic words?

She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone

Half-hidden from the eye,

Fair as a star when only one

Is shining in the sky!

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh!

The difference to me.

Chapter V

ROMANTICISM: PART II

Byron, Shelley and Keats belong to the second generation of English Romantics. The poetry of Byron and Shelly was often called “revolutionary” or “active”. Now it is sometimes labeled as “the poetry of development”.

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) began his great literary triumph with the publication of the first two cantos of Child Harold’s Pilgrimage in March 1812. In 1813 appeared The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour in 1814. The poetry of Byron broke upon the public of England and of Europe with a startling effect, which it is difficult for us to comprehend, either in its character or in its range. Of the Romantic poets none except Byron attracted much attention abroad, for it was to the novels that Scott owed his wide reputation. Of Scott, Goethe could say in 1823: “Byron alone will I let stand by myself; Walter Scott is nothing beside him.“

G.G. Byron has been over-discussed as a man and underestimated as a poet. Even in his boyhood days at Harrow he had the desire to write, though his first volume, Hours of Idleness is a sorry collection of maudlin lyrics. When this was abused he replied with a wholesale attack on critics and poets alike, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The poem was unwise, unjust, and impertinent, but it had spirit and a flair for satire.

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Apart from his verse Byron had already a reputation as a romantically sinister personality. The lame schoolboy at Harrow had grown into the English proud, contemptuous lord. That his mind had a more profound mood can be seen from his speech in the House of Lords against the death-penalty for the Nottingham frame-workers. Had he followed the direction of that speech he might have become a great national leader. But the romantic within him demanded the exploitation of his sensations, not the dreary and exacting labours of politics.

When he returned from a three-year visit to the Peninsular and the Mediterranean, and after some hesitation published the first two cantos of Childe Harold (1812), he sprang into fame. The poem itself owed its attraction partly to adventitious circumstances: first to the determination of readers to identify the character of the hero with that of the poet and young peer; and secondly, to the picturesque and romantic scenes described – Spain where English armies were fighting, the classic lands of Greece and the East.

The later cantos of' this poem (1818) combined comment with description. Landscapes, towns, ruins, are all conjured up before the reader, along with Byron's own comment. Everything is arranged ultimately to be the background of his romantic sentiment, his nostalgia for some more magnificent way of life, and his melancholy before the presence of the relics of past magnificence.

But if Childe Harold attracted lovers of poetry, it was the tales in verse, which followed the first two cantos, suggested doubtless by those of Scott that won him still wider popularity. These romances, which began with The Giaour (1813), captured the taste of his generation not in England alone, but throughout Europe from France to Russia. Passion, love and hatred, gave to Byron's verse a weight and speed that distinguish it from Scott's flowing and at times facile verse. The poem was the first in his cycle of “Oriental poems”, which also includs The Corsair, Lara, Mazeppa, and some others. All these poems are dedicated to a hero who is lonely, courageous and strong-willed. The poems were inspired by the Balkan Wars for national liberation and made a strong influence on the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov.

The mysteries Manfred and Cain are very important for Byron’s literary heritage because they reflect one of his main themes – the struggle against authorities.

Don Juan is a picaresque novel in verse. Byron’s Don Juan is a victim of women, an innocent boy. The poet describes the wonderings of his hero in many countries, including Greece, Turkey, Russia. It is possible to say

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that it is a philosophical work because here we deal not only with Don Juan’s actual travels, but also his traveling in time. His life with Haidee is like life in Eden, the life as a slave in Constantinople can symbolize barbarism, Catherine’s court is semi-barbarism, semi-civilization. The Greek island can also be interpreted as primitive life, then – slavery in the sultana’s harem, serfdom at the Russian court, etc.

Don Juan, started in 1819 and unfinished, is a performance of rare artistic skill. Humour, sentiment, adventure, and pathos are thrown together with that same disconcerting incongruity as they are to be found in life. The style is a clever imitation of the idiom and phrasing of ordinary conversation, used with great cunning for satiric and comic effects.

But Byron’s spirit might have flourished better in some world other than the heavy Georgian society in which he grew up. He was a man of action, a fighter by nature. The last episode in Greece showed that he had leadership and courage. He knew freedom of spirit only in Italy. His admirable Letters and Journals show how easily his whole nature flowed in this Italian period, and the result was the satires through which his name as a poet is best remembered.

In 1822 Byron wrote two poems of real excellence – The Vision of Judgement and The Age of Bronze. The former is the greatest political satire in the English language. The main attack is on Southey, the Tory Poet Laureate, who had celebrated the arrival of George III in Heaven. This king who had died early in the previous year, was old, blind and insane. Southey's poem simply asked for ridicule; and Byron so disliked Southey, both as a convert to Toryism and as a suspected slanderer of himself, that he was more than ready to supply it. But ferocious ridicule of Southey's poem is only a part of his achievement in The Vision of Judgement. In Byron's view, George III had been a political calamity to his country and to mankind; and the plot of the poem enables Byron severely to castigate not only an official Tory bard but a royal instrument of political oppression as well. In The Age of Bronze he turned his satire on the Holy Alliance and the greed of landlords and farmers determined to keep up the high prices of war at the expense of the poor.

Unfortunately, the prudery of Victorian critics obscured these satirical poems from the public, and they have never received their due esteem.

John Keats(1795–1821) has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the Romantic movement. Tennyson considered him the greatest poet of the XIX century.

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