Romantic Period 2

8/3/2019 Romantic Period 2

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Duality, Eternity and Entanglement

Final paper Submitted to.

By

Ezgi Uluer


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Abstract

The main theme lies beneath this paper is an odyssey through the Romantic Period

and the canons of this period. This odyssey starts from the river Lethe to reincarnate

itself and to mount a new understanding of these canonical works under the light of

nowadays understanding. Therefore, this paper gains its grassroots from the lyrical

ancient understanding to the intuitive interpretation of the poets. Therefore, in this

paper, not only the ways they live is taken into consideration but also their

experiences and beliefs are reflected upon this paper.


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Duality, Eternity and Entanglement

The main theme lies beneath this paper is an odyssey through the Romantic

Period and the canons of this period. This odyssey starts from the river Lethe1

to

reincarnate itself and to mount a new understanding of these canonical works under

the light of nowadays understanding. For this reason, before starting the journey, it is

better to understand the importance of this period, the desperate need from the poets

to use epic and lyrical figures from the Greek Mythology and their significance in the

British Literature. It is a known fact that there is disbelief for the necessity of the

mythology usage in poetry as Larkin:

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly

created universe, and therefore have no belief in tradition or a common

myth-kitty To me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and

biblical mythology, means very little, and I think that using them today not

only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the poets duty to be original.

(Philip Larkin)

Despite Larkins disbelief, a classical tradition does exist: a continuous line of

inheritance and influence connects ancient Greece and Rome with starting from the

early versions of relatively modern western world. Thus, it is not an oblivious notion

in the Romantic Period for coming across with the wind of the mythology. More

than that, it is the Greek Mythology that shapes western arts, western institutions,

philosophy and values. Therefore, one cannot understand John Keats or Percy Shelley

without reading or grasping the Greek Mythology. For many centuries writers in

English have been able to draw upon a common stock of mythological stories,

1In Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Let heflowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complet e forgetfulness. Lethewas also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified.


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characters, and images a myth-kitty, to use Larkins derisive term- in the

confidence that their readers will recognize and understand their allusions. In the

words of the critic George Steiner,

From Chaucer to [Eliots] Sweeney among the Nightingales much of English

poetry has relied on a code of instantaneous recognition. Where the codelapsesa good deal of the poetry may lapse too.

(Quoted in Radice 1973)

The writers of the Romantic Movement, arising in the last decades of the eighteenth

century, were predisposed to do so. With their exaltation of imagination over mere

reason, their worship of nature, their love of fantasy and romance, they were prepared

to see myth not as a childish and outmoded habit of thought but as a perennially valid

vehicle of insight; an intuitive approach from the inner side of the human to the outer

side of the world. For them, to see the landscape as inhabited by the presences of

gods, nymphs, and satyrs was not a primitive superstition or a conventional image but

a vivid metaphor for the omnipotent power which saturates the natural world. For the

first generation of Romantics, however, classical myth was still contaminated with the

fustiness of eighteenth-century convention; the Wordsworth and Coleridge ofLyrical

Ballads turned more readily to medieval ballads and folk-tales. It was only the second

generation who found a fresh breathe, a new inspiration and a dimension in Greek

myth. Keats embodied his concerns with love and beauty and human suffering in

Endymion and the unfinishedHyperion poems, whereas Percy Shelley, by being more

radically, transformed myths in Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley was a

scholar who loved and translated much of Plato and the Greek poets and dramatists.

In the preface to his play Hellas (1822) he declared:

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their

roots in Greece The human form and the human mind attained to a

perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless

productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has

propagated impulses which cannot ceaseto ennoble and delight mankind

until the extinction of the race.

The British romantic period is at least as complicated and diverse as any other

period in literary history. For many decades of the twentieth century, scholars singled


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out five poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, adding

Blake belatedly to make a sixth and constructed notions of a unified Romanticism

on the basis of their works. However, there were problems all along: even the two

closest collaborators of the 1790s, Wordsworth and Coleridge, facing on a daily basis,

would fit no single definition; Byron had despised both Coleridges metaphysics and

Wordsworths theory and practice of poetry; Shelley and Keats were at opposite poles

from each other in terms of stylistically and philosophically; Blake was not at all like

any of the other five poets. Thus, following a widespread practice of historians of

English literature, this era was signified as the Romantic period between the year

1785, the midpoint of the decade in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake and Burns

published their first poems, and 1830, by which time the major writers of the

preceding century were either dead or no longer productive. This was a highly

turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change

concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, in which

the balance of economic power shifted to large-scale employers, who found

themselves classified against a massively enlarging and increasingly restive working

class. Moreover, this change occurred in a context of revolution first the American

and then the much more radical French Revolution and of wars, of economic cycles

of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat to the social structure from

imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes reacted by the

repression of traditional autonomies. Support for the sprit of the early years of the

French Revolution remained since it was a way of expressing intuitive feelings. In

other words, this expressing was a very naturalistic way to rebel against the whole

inequalities. Among more liberal and radical thinkers there was a feeling of

ambivalence when England went to war against France and, after many years, finally

they managed to defeat Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The victory was

followed by years of social unrest at home. The end of the war led to a deterioration

in manufacturing output and to unemployment, as ex-soldiers returned from war to a

world in which the divisions between the two nations were becoming sharper. (new

classes had already came to surface)

In terms of literary history, which was shaped not only by the social reactions but also

by the economic factors, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a

landmark. The volume contained many of the best-known Romantic poems. The

second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the


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theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridges

contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the

spirit of the age. The movement towards to a greater freedom and to the democracy in

political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the

existing regime and establish a new, more democratic poetic order, which could be

interpreted as the wish to overthrown existing political structure in England. To do

this, the writers used the real language of men namely Lyrical Ballads and even, in

the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves.

Thus, not only a person can realize this rebellious and radical atmosphere in these

poems but also observe the gorgeous mythical structure of these poems. Also, it may

be suggested that this turning to Greek Mythology was a reaction against the

materialism which took its place with the industrial revolution. (Norton p689-98)

Keats

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (Ode on a Grecian Urn)

John Keats is likewise a poet who reflected on the nature of poetry. Keatss letters are

important documents and offer many revealing insights into the nature of poetry and

many critical precepts which are still cited today as a basis for the evaluation of

poetry. Keats once wrote that we hate poetry that has too palpable a design upon us.

By this he means that we distrust poetry which tries blatantly to convince or convert

readers to the poets point of view. According to this statement, poetry had to be more

indirect, communicating through the power of its images without the poet making his

own presence exposed. In addition to this statement, like other Romantic poets, Keats

wrote poems which were incomplete; unfinished fragments of a larger vision. He also,

like several other Romantic artists, died at a very young age due to tuberculosis before

fulfilling his potential and completing the poetic journey he had begun. However, by

the age of 25, he had written a major body of work containing some of the most

memorable poems in the English language. Keatss best-known poetry was composed

twenty years after the pamphlet of Lyrical Ballads and, although his poetry juxtaposes

with that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, they remained an important influence on his

work and his theories of poetry. A main theme of Keatss poetry is the conflict

between the everyday world and eternity: the everyday world of suffering, death and

decay, and the timeless beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination.

This duality in his poems of course was the result of his tuberculosis. Being a surgeon


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doctor, he was aware of the process of that disease; therefore he was on the edge

between the death and life.

In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker observes an artifact of ancient Greek

civilization, an urn painted with two scenes from Greek life. Via this artifact, he takes

an odyssey through the ancient Greek history. In the first scene there are musicians

and lovers in a setting of rustic beauty. The speaker attempts to identify with the

characters. The reason is that, for him they represent the timeless perfection only art

can capture. Unlike the dueling fates of life and aspiration for his lover (which was

defined in the other paper meticulously) in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is

characterized by "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" brought on by humans'

awareness of their own passing, the urn's characters are frozen in time. The lovers will

always love, though they will never consummate their desire. The musicians will

always play beneath trees that will never lose their leaves. This music signifies the

eternal echoing of their desires and emotions. Even the time passes by, their emotions

will live through the time.

The speaker admires this state of existence, but in the end it leaves his "heart high-

sorrowful." The reason that lies behind this situation is that the urn, while beautiful

and seemingly eternal, is not life. The lovers, while forever young and happy in the

chase, can never engage in the act of fertility that is the basis of life, and the tunes,

while beautiful in the abstract, do not play to the "sensual ear" and are in fact "of no

tone." Filled with dualitiestime and timelessness, silence and sound, the static and

the eternalthe urn in the end is an enigma that has "tormented" the speaker into

believing that beauty is the only truth. In life, however, beauty is not necessarily the

ultimate truth, and the urn's message is one appropriate only in the exclusive, timeless

world of art. In order to understand this duality, it is better to scrutinize the lines in the

poem:

In the lines from 1-4, the door opens with three successive metaphors: the implied,rather than directly stated, comparisons between the urn the speaker is viewing and,

respectively, a "bride of quietness," a "foster-child of silence and slow time," and a

"Sylvan historian." From these metaphors, most probably the last is the easiest for the

reader to immediately grasp. Ancient Grecian urns were commonly illustrated with

scenes or subjects that varied depending on the era and style in which a given urn was


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created. Conversely, more ancient vessels featured paintings of war and heroic deeds,

especially the paintings of Ares and Hades that remind the mortals of time of the

omnipotent powers of Gods. However, the one Keats had in mind probably came

from the early free-style period. Urns of this era are depicted by scenes from religious

and musical ceremonies similar to the ones described throughout "Ode on a Grecian

Urn." Because of its subject matter, Keats's urn can be dated to before the fourth

century B.C., yet the bucolic scenes it depicts have been preserved through the

millennia. For this reason, the urn reveals to the viewer a "leaf-fring'd" bit of history:

it is a "Sylvan historian."

More perplexing to readers are the first two metaphors. Each of these involves the

idea of "quietness" or "silence" because the urn relates its story in pictures rather than

words. As a result, this question raises another debate: a "bride of quietness" and a"foster-child of silence and slow time" was articulated in his lines, and the very reason

behind this fact may be because while the urn's creation was the result of a fertile

union between an ancient artist and some experience that informed his work, the same

artist is now long-forgotten and the experience long-ended. Thus the urn, his "child,"

has fallen into the custody of the ages"slow time." People who look at the urn can

imagine but cannot actually hear the musical sounds and the story it depicts.

Moreover, while in its own day the urn was used by people in their everyday lives, it

has since become an artifact, perhaps in a museum, that viewers inspect

reverentiallyin "silence."

The most puzzling meaning in these lines is of the word "still." It may be an adjective,

suggesting the urn is "unmoving," or an adverb, meaning "not yet" deflowered or

ravished. A dual intent seems to fit the poem best. While "unmoving" suggests the

urn's static condition as an artifact, "not yet defiled" suggests that its beauty, though

still present after thousands of years, will one day be vanished. This points directly to

a major theme of the poem: the painful knowledge that all things must pass, including

(and perhaps especially) beauty. Though the urn is ancient and might seem eternal, in

fact it remains subject to decay and destructionsubject to time, even if, in the case

of an antiquity, it seems to be "slow time." The urn's perishability is made apparent by

a simple understanding: one of beauty's qualities is that it is rare, though many urns

were created, only few survive, and while this contributes to the speaker's conception


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that the urn is uncommon and therefore more striking, it is also evidence that even

ancient relics are not immune to time. As a result, duality plays an important role not

only from the starting lines, but as it will be observed, throughout the whole poem.

This duality is one of the universal themes that can be realized in the Romantic

Period. The reason is that, the duality signifies the situation of the poet, in which he is

entrapped and wants to escape from the reality but he cant, seeks for an alternative

world. Thus, in the lines from 5 to 10, the poem's dualities are further expressed. First,

while the urn seems both unchanging and perishable, the questions its pictures raise

suggest both the eternal and the mortal. Though the urn expresses "a flowery tale"

(line 4), the tale itself is unclear in many ways. Observing the figures painted on the

urn'ssurface, the poet cannot tell whether they are "deities or mortals," whether they

exist in Apollo's valley of Tempe or the heaven-like but mortally inhabited region of

Arcady. Those characters may be "men orgods"they cannot be bothyet the

speaker's repeated question illustrates that he is unsure in his interpretation.

Furthermore, although the urn is signified by its stillness and silence, the activities it

depicts are filled with full motion and sound: a "mad pursuit," "pipes and timbrels,"

"wild ecstasy." Though the speaker cannot hear the music, hecan see the

instruments; though he cannot see the motion, the still representations force him to

imagine it.Thus the urn possesses a dual nature which embodies not only

emotionally but also visually in the poets imagination. On the one hand, these

drawings may be taken into account as a symbol of the static quality of art; on the

other hand, however, its painted figures represent the dynamic process of life, which

art refines in "slow time" and often in "silence." This is the puzzling nature of all art:

its viewer responds to it both as a work, which seems eternal, and as an experience,

which he knows to be fleeting. Though he pursues meaning the way the males in the

painting pursue the females, the meaning is "loth" to yield itself. In such a way, the

urn has a "teasing" nature that brings about more questions than answers, for if the

answers were easily available thenart itself would have little reason to exist. In other

words, this pursuit turns out to be an eternal quest which he is never able to

accomplish it but endlessly tries to grasp the very meaning of these paintings.

In the second stanza the speaker turns completely to the sounds and activities depicted

on the urn. There he makes the distinction between ideal nature of art and the flawed,

fleeting nature of life. Though he cannot physically hear the "melodies" the urn's


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characters play, "those unheard are sweeter" because they exist in the Platonic world

of abstract forms. They are perfect precisely because they are unheard, because the

"spirit" to which they appeal can grant them an imagined flawlessness impossible in

songs perceived by the "sensual ear." If life forces imperfection on all things, art

retains the ability to makeas Keats wrote in one of his letters"all disagreeables

evaporate." One such disagreeable is time. In life, where chronology is the rule, even

the sweetest tunes must be brief. In art, however, the "soft pipes" can "play on"

forever. Yet there is a paradox. What makes music both recognizable and beautiful is

its tonal quality. The urn's musicians, however, play "ditties of no tone." While these

songs may be ideal in their abstraction, they cannot possess the beauty of the real

songs whose tones, however flawed, have at some point pleased the speaker's "sensual

ear" and instilled in him the idea of musical perfection.

In lines 15 to 20, by the sestet of the second stanza, the ode's behavior of timethetension between the perishable and the timeless ("men or gods"), the static and the

dynamic (the urn's stillness, the characters' "struggle" and "pursuit")has fixed itself

into the three central symbols of the poem: "the trees," which represent nature, "thy

song," which represents art, and the "Bold Lover," who represents the most basic

process of human existence, fertility. In life, time takes its toll in each of these areas.

Nature changes, going through its seasonal cycles of death and regeneration since the

nature has an ever-changing process by the same token Heraclitus stated as: You

cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in.

Art grassroots from both nature and the experience of life, but it does so in a way that,

while more lasting, is actually neither. Finally, life, in its entire splendor, is dictated

by time: it is chronological, and its momentssuch as those of love and desireare

transient, mutable, and therefore less perfect than either art or nature. On the urn,

however, time is stilled. The melodist "canst not leave / Thy song," the trees can

never be bare, and the lovers are fated to remain eternally as they are depicted,

midway in the process of the chase, filled with "wild ecstasy" but never able to

consummate their desires. Yet again,there is a paradox. Though the lovers are

captured forever in a moment of supreme beautythe moment before they are apt to

be disappointedthey are also abstracted from the process of life. While life depends

on fertility (the reason for the chase in which they are engaged), the lovers are in fact


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infertile. Through apostrophe, or the direct addressing of the inanimate "Bold Lover,"

the speaker hints at the paradox: "Do not grieve," he says. Yet the lover, because

abstract and not alive, is as incapable of grief as he is of ever "winning near the goal."

Grief is the negative side life's process: the painful result of love. Only living, fertile

lovers can feel the weariness, fever and fret brought on by time, and while the speaker

tries to imagine that the timeless world of the urn is the perfection of life, his

observations suggest it is in fact the opposite of life and that his attempt must in the

end be doomed. From another perception, since he had Tuberculosis, he had known

the end of his life was very close; he wanted to freeze the joys of life, and namely

the biggest joy of life as being love. Therefore, if there had been a way for capturing

an image like a photograph of this joyful love and scene, it would have been the way

of creating a vivid but eternal moment for Keats by using these lines. As a result, once

again a duality takes its place against the ever-changing process of nature by

challenging via remaining as an eternal frame in these lines.

From lines 23 to 30,while the second stanza establishes the three central symbols ofthe poem, there is as yet no order to them: they exist together in the same type of

"wild ecstasy" as the lovers' chase. In the third stanza, however, the speaker clearly

defines a hierarchy among nature, art and life. This order is expressed in the first three

couplets of the stanza, each addressing one of the three symbols. First is nature: if it is

"happy," then art (here, "songs") must also be happy, since art reflects nature. If art is

happy, then life (here, "love") is happy, since art also expresses experience. In order

to understand the term happy it is better to turn to "Ode to a Nightingale," which

similarly addresses the tension between time and experience, to understand the way in

which Keats uses the word. In that poem, the speaker's heart "aches" for the

nightingale's "happiness," expressed in its song. The bird's happiness is not of the

human variety, however: it is the happiness that comes from lacking the ability to

"think" and therefore to be aware of time, change and death or the inevitable end

which would end with eternal separate of entangled hearts of the lovers. Thus, it is the

happiness of nature, which the speaker, retaining human consciousness. This is what

creates his ache. Though he wishes to fully identify with the nightingale, to fade with

it into nature, or to live with it or its signifying: the love; he is incapable of feeling the

bird's sense of "immortality," the real meaning of "happiness." Therefore, it is

interesting to have the same word bears the same sense in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."


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Like the nightingale, the urn's abstract beings, their natural world and their artistic

expression exist outside of time and are therefore immortal. The speaker comes

nearby to identifying with their "happiness" in the third stanzathus, his repetition of

the word. Yet the identification is fleeting. As in "Ode to a Nightingale," the

experience surpasses him, he realizes he is detached from the urn's world he longs to

be a part of, and the poem's tone shifts from ecstasy to alienation. Thus, the lovers'

passion exists "far above," in the world of ideas rather than of life. The speaker's heart

aches as it does in the presence of the nightingale: it is "high-sorrowful and cloy'd."

His physical presence, the reminder that he is not abstract but real, enters the poem for

the first time: a "burning forehead, and a parching tongue." After approaching the

world of the urn, therefore, he quickly drops away from it and is left to reflect on the

significance of the experience.

In the fourth stanza the scene on the urn changes, perhaps implying that the speaker

has moved to the other side of the vessel. The quick shifting in the subject matter

suggests the poem's urn may in fact be a composite of different artifacts the poet

observed: free-style urns of the type Keats seems to describe generally depict only

one scene, running continuously around the boundary. The new scene shows a priest

leading a heifer to sacrifice at some "green altar" not portrayed. Having come to the

end of his attempt to identify with the secular, bucolic bliss of the lovers in the first

three stanzashaving been left, in fact, "high-sorrowful" in the processthe speaker

searches the urn for a different kind of immortality. Beyond the fleeting passions of

life and the abstract perfection of art exists religion, or religion exists within the realm

of art such an entangled vision which attempts to synthesize nature, symbol, and

experience within a single overriding principle. Yet the urn's religious significance

offers no more relief than its eternal lovers. Represented by a "mysterious priest" of a

spiritual practice long dead, the urn's religion has itself become art, eternal but

perpetually abstract. Lacking the proper context to understand the meaning of the

priest's sacrifice, the speaker feels as barren as the town "emptied of this folk." Thus,

the major mood of the poem has become melancholic, its shift embodied by the

emptiness, nothingness and silence of the town. This silence is really the silence of

the universe when religion becomes an antique artifact rather than a means of

understanding the "high romance" Keats talks about in "When I Have Fears That I

May Cease To Be." Therefore, it may be interpreted as Keats understanding of the


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Christianity is rather different than the others of his time. By rejecting the omnipotent

dogmas and forceful sanctions of the Christianity, Keats chooses to interpret it as an

amalgamate of the nature, myth and his own understanding of the religion.

By the final stanza, the urn has lost much of its vitality for the speaker. It is reverted

from a "bride," "foster-child," and "historian"all human personificationsto its

objective identity: an "Attic shape." The characters are transformed from living beings

to artistic renderings. As such, they are "overwrought"either by the artist, who has

portrayed them as larger than life, or by the speaker, who has elevated them to a

significance they cannot possess. This term recalls the first stanza, where the

characters were overwrought in a different way: with desire and ecstasy. This duality

is part of the overall riddle the urn has become. Instead of granting meaning, it instead

serves to "tease us out of thought"thought being what divides us from nature and"eternity," what gives us the sense of our own mortality and dooms us to the world of

weariness, fever and fret. However, the speaker suggests, we can be teased only

briefly, and even then our deception is the product of our imaginations rather than of a

"cold" piece of pottery. When the deception is ended, we return to reality

disillusioned. As the speaker of "Ode to a Nightingale" concludes, "the fancy cannot

cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf." Nevertheless, it is not really

clear if the speaker wants to be awakened from this deception since it seems as if the

speaker enjoys being confined in this illusion. If the urn has become a riddle to the

speaker, the final two lines are equally frustrating to the readers. The urn says to man,

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," which makes sense in terms of the urn's world. For

the lovers and for the urn itself, beauty is the only measure of existence: they cannot

conceive, as humans do, that in life beauty is often deceptive and truth often ugly. In

contrast, for the speaker, the first five lines of the stanza seem to ratify his

understanding that beauty has its false side. The "truths" of lifethe sufferings of

men, the atrocities of historycertainly demonstrate that what we know to be real can

only occasionally be called beautiful. It may be suggested that the words after the

dash are part of the urn's message: that punctuation has been omitted, leading to easy

misinterpretation. However, it seems unlikely that in a poem as controlled as "Ode on

a Grecian Urn" Keats would have left such an evident flaw in such a crucial point.

Another suggestion would be that the last words are the speaker's and that he is


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addressing the reader. Thus, the urn's message contains "all that people need to know

on earth, and all they need to know." Yet this reading seems to contradict the entire

rest of the poem. The speaker recognizes, after all, that he has only been "teased" into

believing that the urn's beauty is truth and that what passes for truth in the urn's

complex world can hold also true in life. The most likely answer seems to lie in the

ode's consistent use of apostropheits manner of directly addressing the urn, its

characters and its images. "Ye," then, must be the urn itself. Though originally plural,

the pronoun had come to denote the singular "you" by Keats's time, and though the

urn has been addressed as "thou" previously in the poem, the use of the word here

would create an unnecessary awkwardness of sound: "all thou need'st to know on

earth, and all thou need'st to know." More vital than that, if the speaker in the final

lines is addressing the urn, then the ending recollects a meaning consistent with the

rest of the ode. For the urn and its characters, beauty is truth since they do not endure

beyond the thoughtless state of nature. Not only is the urn "on earth," it is made of

earth: it is, like the nightingale, a part of nature, or a reflection of the Keats intuitive

world. Nevertheless, for humans, truth cannot be limited with beautyit is not all that

humanity needs to know. The main reason is that as being human consciousness,

mankind doesnt exist solely on earth. Man perceives the abstractthe ideas drawn

from the urn by the speakerand man perceives the grander secrecy, the "high

romance," which places him beyond earth. Furthermore, his awareness of time and of

death forces him to seek for truth beyond beauty, which can exist as truth only in the

timeless world of the urn. Thus, the tone of the final lines seems one of mild

complaint similar to "Cold Pastoral!"for the urn's having attempted to "tease" the

speaker into believing a truth only appropriate to the urn itself.

St. Agnes Eve

It was a cold St. Agnes Eveso cold that even the owl with all its feathers shivered,

so cold that the old Beadsmans fingers were numb as he told his rosary and said his

prayers. Passing by the sculptured figures of the dead, he felt sorry for them in their

icy graves. As he walked through the chapel door, he could hear the sound of music

echoing from the castle hall. He miserably turned again to his prayers. The great hall

of the citadel was a part of dining and revelry, but one among the merry throng was

hardly ever aware of her surroundings. The lovely Madelines thoughts were on the


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myth of St. Agnes Eve, which told that a maiden, if she tracked the ceremonies

carefully and went without having a dinner to bed, might there meet her lover in her

dreams.

Meanwhile, across the moonlit hills came Porphyro. He entered the castle and hid

behind a pillar, being aware that his presence meant danger, because his family was

an enemy of Madelines. Soon the elderly crone, Angela, came by and proposed to

hide him, in case his enemies find him there and execute him. He followed her to the

along dark arched passageways, out of sight of the revelers. When they stopped,

Porphyro begged Angela to let him have one sight, one quick vision of Madeline. He

promised on oath that if he so much as disturbed a lock of her hair, he would give

himself up to the foes that waited below. As a matter of fact, he seemed in such

sorrow that the poor woman gave in to him. She took Porphyro to the maidens halland there hid him in a closet, where was stored a mixture of sweetmeats and

confections brought from the feast downstairs. Angela then limped away, and soon

the breathless Madeline appeared.

She came in with her candle, which blew out, and kneeling before her high arched

casement window, she began to pray. Watching her kneeling down, her head an aura

of moonlight, Porphyro grew faint at the sight of her beauty. Soon she undressed and

crept into bed, where she lay entranced until sleep came over her.

Porphyro stole from the closet and gazed at her in admiration as she slept. For an

instant a door opened far away, and the noises of another world, energetic and festive,

broke in; but soon the sounds faded away again. In the silence he brought dainty

foods from the closetquinces, plums, jellies, candies, syrups, and spices that

perfumed the chilly room. Madeline slept on, and Porphyro began to play a soft

melody on a lute. Madeline opened her eyes and supposed her lover a vision of St.

Agnes Eve. Porphyro, not being enough bold to speak, fell upon his knees until she

spoke, begging him never to leave her or she would die.

St. Agnes moon went down. Outside the casements, snow and ice began to dash

against the windowpanes. Porphyro told her that they have to escape before the house

awakened, if they do not want to be caught. Madeline, afraid and trembling, followed

her lover down the cold, gloomy corridors, through the wide deserted hall, and past


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the porter, asleep on his watch. So they fledinto the wintry dawn.

John Keats had written The Eve of St. Agnes in January and February of 1819, the

first of an astonishing spate of masterpieces that came one after another, despite his

failing health and emotional turmoil. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Lamia, and six

great odes were all written before October of that year. The situation of his death

shortly afterward seems to throw into a kind of relief the delightful descriptions of

physical beauty in this and other poems, however as it is described in this paper

previously, this was a deliberate choice from Keats to keep his world alive eternally.

There is something more striking there which is the poets refusal to take comfort in

the simplistic assurances of any religious or philosophical system that denied either

the complexity of mind or the reality and importance of sense. As it is also described

in this paper, his interpretation towards religion is slightly different from he others bygrasping its norms not only through the myths but also from the nature. Thus, it is

observable that The Eve of St. Agnes manifests Keatss characteristic concern with

the opposition and subtle connection of the sensual world to the interior life.

Therefore, this intuitive duality and different approach to the exterior and interior

worlds of man reappears. He shared this preoccupation with other Romantic poets,

remarkably Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, taking as his subject

the web of an antithesis at the heart of human experience; like them, he covered his

meditations in sensuous imagery. (Perkins p56-78)

In this and other ways, Keats and all the Romantics abandoned the poetic theory of

the century before. Eighteenth century poetry was formal, didactic, and objective in

stance. Its chief aim was to show to humanity a picture of itself for its own

improvement and edification. Its chief ornament was wit: puns, wordplay, satiric

description, and so forth. It was a different approach than the common art for arts

sake notion. In short, what eighteenth century poets saw as virtue in poetry was logic

and rigid metrics. Nineteenth century poets wrote from a radically different

philosophical base, due in part to the cataclysmic political changes surrounding the

American and French revolutions. Before these upheavals occurred, a belief in order

and measure extended into all facets of life, from social relations to literature;

extremes were shunned in all things as unnatural, dangerous, and perhaps

blasphemous.


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After 1789, when the social order in France turned upside down, an expectation of the

millennium arose in England, especially in liberal intellectual circles; the old rules of

poetry were thrown off with the outworn social strictures, and a new aesthetic

flourished in their place. Its ruling faculty was ingenuity. The world seemed made

new, and poetry unconfined from being captive. Romantic poets frequently stated that

poems ought to be composed on the inspiration of the moment, thereby faithfully to

record the purity of the emotion. That is to say, it was their intuitive and indigenous

world. Thus, Keats and his contemporaries labored hard over their creations; they

exerted themselves not to smoothness of meter but to stabilizing the beauty of

spontaneity while achieving precision in observation of natural and psychological

phenomena. Poets saw themselves as projecting the things reached or seen so far and

unexplored touches of human experience, extremes of joy and dejection, guilt and

redemption, pride and poverty. They wrote meditations, confessions, and

conversations, in which natural things were seen to support internal states, and they

wrote ballads and narratives, such as The Eve of St. Agnes, set in the past or in

distant parts of the world and using ancient language and rhythms to make the events

related seem even more strange and wonderful or to reflect the duality or signalize the

entangled fates of people, nature and time. In other words, they described epiphanous

moments when the human consciousness becomes one with nature, when all is made

new, when divinity animates the inanimate, and the lowest creature seems wondrous.

This way of seeing was thought to be a return to an earlier consciousness lost in early

childhood, and is the theme of Wordsworths seminal Ode: Intimations of

Immortality.

In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats attempts, among other things, to maintain this

elevated state of mind throughout the narrative. He sets the story in medieval times,

so that the familiar fairytale characters take on charm from their quaint surroundings,

and from the archaic language in which they speak and are described. Its verse form is

the smooth, supremely-difficult-to-write Spenserian stanza 2 , with its slightly

asymmetric rhyme scheme that avoids the monotony of couplet or quatrain, and the

piquant extension of the ninth line which gives to the whole an irregularity echoing

ordinary speech. The first five stanzas contrast the Beadsman, coldly at his prayers,

2The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains ninelines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is"ababbcbcc."


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with the argent revelry of the great hall. This imagery of cold and warmth, silver

and scarlet, chastity and sensuality continues throughout the poem, a comment on the

plot. That the poem is named for a virgin martyr yet tells the story of an elopement is

likewise significant; for the point of the poem, on the one hand, is that piety and

passion are opposing but inseparable drives. Each without the other has no point of

reference. Porphyro without Madeline becomes the gross Lord Maurice, the savage

Hildebrand; Madeline without Porphyro becomes the Beadsman with his deathlike

abrogation of sense. Instead, Porphyro is made to faint at the celestial beauty of

Madeline at her prayers, Madeline to be wooed by songs and colors and fragilities.

The passage describing the array of food that Porphyro set out is understandably

famous; these are not mere groceries but rather the glowing essence of fruitfulness,

tribute to a love match of the meditative and emotional facilities that, when

accomplished in one individual, fulfills the whole human potential.

Another aspect, or perhaps the other face of the same theme, is the unyielding press of

quotidian misery on the poetic personality, another favorite arena of reflection among

the Romantics, and one that was emotionally near Keatss heart, endangered by

tuberculosis as he was, and his younger brother having died of the disease the

previous winter. The lovers are shown, unearthly fair, escaping from a house where

wrath and drunkenness hold sway, bound for a dream vision of happiness.

Significantly, the poet does not trail them to their southern sanctuary. Instead he

relates the wretched end of Angela, who dies palsy-twitched in her sleep; the cold

sleep of the Beadsman among the ashes; the drunken nightmares of the Baron and his

guests. The ending, in short, is not completely happy, but assists of that bittersweet

emotion which in the heart of joy recognizes desolation, the mark of a mind that

struggles for aesthetic disinterestedness while believing in its duty to the rest of

humanity.

Consequently, entangled mortality and immortality concepts; in other words

the concept of nature and the nature of mankind are enrolled together. His very quest

through the unknown path from Lethe to forget all pains but to reserve the joy and

happiness into an eternal realm is the predominant concept behind these poems.

Shelley

The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Ozymandias)


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The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is similar to that of Keats in a number of respects,

but, unlike Keats, Shelley explores political and social questions more explicitly.

However, Shelleys approach to these matters through the myths and the Ancient

Greek thought is identical to Keats. In addition to that, Shelley represents the more

revolutionary and non-conformist element in English Romanticism and was

constantly critical conventional authority. He was the individualist and idealist who

rebelled against the institutions of family, church, marriage and the Christian faith and

against all forms of tyranny. He started writing and publishing poetry at Oxford

University, some three years before Keats had his first publication. In Prometheus

Unbound(1820), generally regarded as one of Shelleys most successful long poems,

he employs the Greek Myth of Prometheus, who was punished for stealing the gift of

fire from the gods and giving it to mankind; but in Shelleys poem he is transferred by

the power of love and acts as a symbol of human fulfillment resulting from a change

in his imaginative vision. Prometheus represents archetypal humanity and, as in The

Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, an apocalyptic change in his life reveals limitless

possibilities, above all, a new way of seeing the world:

To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. (The Norton Anthology, 4th

ed.

P1987Prometheus Unbound)

Shelleys reputation is based on the 1820 volume of verse containing Prometheus

Unbound, a lyrical drama on a cosmic scale that presents more fully than any other

poem Shelleys philosophy of life. In order to understand how the mythical events

and intuitive paradigms exist by the same token in Shelleys poems occur, it is crucial

to understand what the significance of Prometheus is.

When Prometheus separated humanity from the gods and gave it fire, symbolizing


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imaginative powers of thought. According to Greek Mythology, it is the Prometheus

who brought the light and life to the mankind. Therefore, if it werent for Prometheus,

man wouldnt have established his very own splendid citadels throughout the worldly

realms. Resulting from his betrayal to Gods, Jupiter punished Prometheus by nailing

him to a rock in the Caucasus mountain range. Shelley begins his sequel to

Aeschyluss playPrometheus desmts (date unknown; Prometheus Bound, 1777) with

Prometheus still in that difficulty after some time has elapsed. The Titan describes his

torment and tells the hopeful Ione and the faithful Panthea that he has secret

knowledge of the time when Jupiter will fall from power. Misery has made

Prometheus wise. He has realized that hatred makes one like the object of hate, and

thus his captivity is primarily internal, self-imposed, and even within his will to end.

His hatred for Jupiter having cooled to mere pity, Prometheus wants to gather his

sundered strength, reunite with his beloved Asia, and recall the curse that he had cast

upon Jupiter. However, he cannot remember it and Nature is too fearful to utter it, so

he orders the Phantasm of Jupiter to repeat it. Once revealed, Prometheus, who

declares, I wish no living thing to suffer pain, repudiates the curse. Earth

mistakenly thinks Jupiters victory is now complete, and Mercury carries that

message to Jupiter while Panthea goes in search of Asia. As the first act closes,

Prometheus has been regenerated, but the creatures of earth are still slaves to the

tyranny of heaven, still split apart by self-hate, blaming themselves for committing

sins and deserting ambitions.

Later on Asia learns of Prometheuss change of heart and sets out on a symbolic

journey to rejoin him. She passes through the world of deep experience to the higher

level of ideal Truth and Beauty. In which the idealism and the separation of the

beauty and the truth has a correspondence with Keats idealism and understanding of

beauty in his Ode on a Grecian Urn that is discussed above. The realm of

Demogorgon, an awesome deity not named in the classical pantheon, but deliberately

invented by Shelley. Gazing into his cave, Asia beholds the deep Truth and finds it

imageless. Only the radiant reflection of her beauty appears. Demogorgon is beyond

the forms and shapes and images of things; utterly fundamental, he is sheer process,

the inevitability of change. Asias love has stirred him to action. When she asks him

the fateful hour of Jupiters fall, he responds, Behold! This work is no stage play.

Shelley has collapsed the familiar dimensions of time and space into an ideal, eternal


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moment and place within the human mind, which is again an identical aspect of

intuitive approach of time and space concept by Keats.

Jupiter opens the third act by confidently declaring his omnipotence. However, his

fate is about to be sealed, for it had been prophesied that his son would return to

overthrow him at the destined hour, just as he himself had overthrown Saturn. Indeed,

that fatal child is Demogorgon, now making his way toward Jupiters throne in the

Car of the Hour. He arrives and delivers his ultimatum, Descend, and follow me

down the abyss. Thus, Jupiter is deposed and free will is restored to humankind.

Hercules releases Prometheus to rejoin Asia. The rest of the drama surveys the

regeneration of humanity and nature in the new Promethean age of perfection. Earth

sings out the joys of Shelleys apocalypse, when Man as one harmonious soul sports

gentle and free in the familiar world made newly beautiful by love. The last wordbelongs to Demogorgon, who professes Shelleys artistic credo:

To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it

contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory,

Titan, is to be good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life,

Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To a Skylark

One evening in June 1820, while walking in a meadow near Livorno (Leghorn), Italy,

Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley heard skylarks sing.

The next day, reflecting upon the experience, he wrote To a Skylark and sent it to

his London publisher to be added to a forthcoming volume featuring Prometheus

Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (pb. 1820). A similar story is told about

Ode to a Nightingale (1820), which John Keats wrote in May, 1819, the morning

after hearing the song of a nightingale nesting in a tree outside his window. The

opening stanza of William Wordsworths To a Cuckoo (1802) anticipates Shelleys

poem in language and theme.

O blithe newcomer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice. O cuckoo! Shall I call theebird, or but a wandering voice?


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Wordsworths The Green Linnet (1803, 1807), a similar paean to a songbird,

includes the following lines:

Hail to Thee, far above the rest in joy of voice and pinion! Thou, Linnet! In thy

green array, Presiding Spirit here to-day, dost lead the revels of the May; And this is

thy dominion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his To the Nightingale (1796), calls the bird Sister of

love-lorn Poets. In all of these works, the essential reality of a bird is represented as

being manifest not in a physical presence, but in a non-corporeal song that suggests to

the poet a durability denied to humankind. In sum, long before Shelleys 1820 walk in

the meadow, songbirds had become commonplace muses to Romantic poets.

To a Skylark is one of several poems Shelley wrote between 1816 and 1821 that

jumped from his contemplation of the natural world. Others include Ode to the West

Wind (1820), Mont Blanc (1817), and The Cloud (1820). It is divided into

stanzas of four trimeter lines with a concluding alexandrine and has a traditional

ababb rhyme scheme. This pattern of short lines with frequent enjambment rushes

the progress of each stanza, which Shelley then brings to an abrupt close with a final

hexameter line. In addition, the opening trochaic foot of each line not only provides

emphasis but also, combined with other aspects of the metrics, may be Shelleys

attempt to replicate in verse the flight of the bird.

The poem effectively breaks into three parts. In the first part (lines 1-30), Shelley

describes the flight of an actual skylark, although one that already has flown beyond

his ability to see. The skylark, unlike most birds, sings only when flying, usually

when it is too high to be seen from the ground: from Heaven, or near it . . . singing

still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. Shelley betrays a note of envy in the opening

words of the poem Hail to thee, blithe spirit! by implying a contrast between the

bird and himself. Earthbound, the speaker has suffered emotionally devastating

personal tragedies and is struggling to achieve recognition as a poet, while the freedskylark enjoys a joyful freedom that is given expression by the shrill delight of its

song. This metaphor could be interpreted through the revolutionary acts. On the one

hand bird represents the utmost freedom of a living thing; man is totally cluttered with

the responsibilities and heavy duties surrounded him as a labor.

By employing the phrase blithe Spirit at the start, Shelley instantly focuses attention


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not only on the sheer joy the bird shows but also upon its non-corporeal, symbolic

quality. He continues this thought in the second line Bird thou never wert by

suggesting that the skylark differs from other birds, which neither rise as high nor sing

as profusely. Unpremeditated art, which concludes the stanza, suggests a

spontaneity central to Romanticism but that humans, constrained by societys mores,

usually are forced to sublimate. The next three stanzas trace the upward flight of the

singing bird with a series of similes that continues to emphasize the creatures

freedom from earthly restraints, in part because the object of each simile also is

unseen. The most effective simile compares the bird, whose progress the speaker

follows by the sound of its song, to Venus, the morning star, that silver sphere

whose arrows (rays of light) fade in the white dawn clear, but whose presence

continues to be felt.

In the second section of the poem (lines 31-60), Shelley shifts his style and tone.

Rather than invoking heaven, sun, clouds, or star, his imagery focuses upon

earthbound things: a poet struggling to find an audience, a lovelorn maiden in a tower,

a glowworm whose aereal hue is hidden by flowers and grass, and a rose

deflowered by winds and obscured by its leaves. All of these earthly things, though

beautiful, are unseen and thus unappreciated. By contrast, the skylarks song

compensates the fact that the bird is not seen, so it can still be appreciated. There is

universality to Shelleys several similes, as the images encompass the human, animal,

vegetable, and mineral realms. What is more, his imagery in these stanzas (lines 36-

60) also evokes all five senses.

Having liberated the skylark with his opening solicitation, Shelley the human poet in

the third section (lines 61-105) pays tribute to the skylark as natural poet, whom he

then asks to teach him and his fellows the secret of its joy. The opening (Teach us,

Sprite or Bird . . . ) echoes the start of the poem, though Spirit now is Sprite and

the earlier animated greeting (Hail to thee . . . ) now is an imploring Teach us. . . .

(There is a similar pleading in the first line of the last stanza of Ode to the West

Wind, which Shelley wrote a year earlier: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.

The two poems often are compared.) Nothing else he has heard neither the traditional

Greek poems in praise of love or wine, nor a Chorus Hymeneal (marriage song),

nor even a triumphal chant (an armys victory march) matches the flood of rapture


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so divine that is the skylarks song. Therefore, not only does he create a parallelism

to the entanglement of permanent life as eternal life and temporary life as earthly life.

This time, he converts this duality in order to take the attention to the unappreciated

beauties of the world.

In four questions that compose the next stanza (lines 71-75), Shelley asks what the

sources are of the skylarks happy strain, its love of thine own kind, and

ignorance of pain, and he again invokesvaried aspects of the physical world:

fields, waves, mountains, sky, and plain. He proceeds further to highlight differences

between the bird and humankind, culminating in the implied contrast to himself

personally in line 80: Thou lovestbut neer knew loves sad satiety. In the next

stanza, we mere mortals also suggeststhat the poet is speaking both of his

situation and of that of humankind generally. Continuing this thought, Shelley furtherhighlights the contrast between the lives of humans and that of the skylark.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With

some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

In the next and final stanza, however, Shelley retreats to a self-serving introverted

plaint, asking the skylark to help him attain public recognition as a poet:

Teach me half the gladness; That thy brain must know; Such harmonious madness;

From my lips would flow; The world should listen then as I am listening now.

Since Shelley portrays the skylark as totally happy and not needing to confront

mortality, one can conclude that the bird symbolizes ultimate joy, maybe even a

Platonic ideal. Like so much Romantic lyric poetry, however, To a Skylark

ultimately is a personal manifesto: As a poet, Shelley also is a singer and expresses in

his poems a yearning for an immortality that he imagines the skylark, through its

song, surely has. In the summer of 1816, in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Shelley

asked the awe-inspiring but unseen loveliness or Spirit of Beauty that pervades

the material world to endow him with whateer these words cannot express. Four

years later, in To a Skylark, a more straightforward lyric, he continued his quest,

which is a very similar quest of Keats as a quintessential aspect of Romanticism.


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Works Cited

Colvin, Sidney. "John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame."

January 2006.

David Perkins, "Percy Bysshe Shelley,"English Romantic Writers, 2nd edition (Harcourt:

1995), 1012.


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From Mary Shelley - Romance and Reality, by Emily W. Sunstein, "Shelley's

Vegetarianism," International Vegetarian Union, http://www.ivu.org/history/shelley/veg.html,

Accessed 04 January 2011.

M, H, Abrams Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: Norton. Vol. 2

7th ed. 720-749.

Documents

Romantic Period 2