British Romantic Poetry

William Blake (1757–1827)

Your GRE exam will probably have a poem from either Songs of Experience or from Songs of Innocence -- almost certainly either "The Tyger" or "The Lamb." Chances are good that the more psychedlic stuff like Visions of the Daughers of Albion will not be on the test, but they might.

"Songs of Innocence "

Songs of Innocence is a collection of illustrated lyrical poetry, published by William Blake in 1789. Its companion volume is Songs of Experience.

Blake believed that innocence and experience were "the two contrary states of the human soul," and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. This collection includes “The Lamb.”

“The Lamb”

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight;
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

Songs of Experience

The Songs of Experience is a poetry collection, forming the second part of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Many of the poems appearing in Innocence have a counterpart in 'Experience', with quite a different perspective of the world. The disastrous end of the French Revolution caused Blake to lose faith in the goodness of mankind, explaining much of the volume's sense of despair. Blake also believed that children lost their innocence through exploitation and from a religious community which put dogma before mercy. This collection includes “The Tyger.”

“The Tyger"

Tyger! Tyger! 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 sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau”

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, is the most complex work of Blake's early years. It consists of 24 Plates (as well as three further Plates under the separate title “A Song of Liberty”) and has at its heart an opposition between Heaven, conceived as an image of restraint and passivity, and Hell, an image of energy and action. Both of these “contraries”, Blake claims, are necessary for human life; but there is little doubt as to which is more to his taste. In the fourth Plate we hear the voice of the Devil, making three crucial claims which in turn underpin Blake's own world-view:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

This rejection of reason as the touchstone of the human in favour of a revaluation of the body and its desires is pursued throughout the Marriage, perhaps most famously in some of the “proverbs of Hell” which comprise Plates 7 to 10 of the poem. Some of the best-known, frequently to be found as recently as the 1960s as emblematic graffiti, are the following:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Some of these aphorisms, especially the last-quoted, may appear mystically anarchic; but it must be remembered that Blake is trying to assert a different set of values against the received wisdom of his day. Later in the poem, the narrator has an encounter with an “Angel”, who threatens him with Hell for his beliefs; but the narrator counters by delving into his own imagination and showing the “Angel” that his vision of Heaven and Hell is merely an extension of his belief in the changelessness of society, and that an alternative vision, based on change and potentiality, is also possible.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen as a kind of treatise on how to think beyond confining limits, on how to value energy and excitement and not to be restrained by conventional patterns of thought. If it speaks in its title of a “marriage”, the reader is nonetheless at liberty to question whether this marriage will necessarily be a smooth one, and whether what is really at stake here is an eternal battle between order and chaos, between reason and energy, between social constraint and imaginative freedom.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

The central action of Visions of the Daughters of Albion is clear. The maiden Oothoon, accepting love, goes fearlessly to her lover Theotormon, but her happiness is short-lived. She is raped by a figure of violence, Bromion, but worse, Theotormon thereafter regards her as defiled; in his jealousy he ties Oothoon and Bromion back to back, and it is with this unmoving scene that the poem concludes. What, then, is the poem about? At one level, it is clearly about sexual jealousy and about double standards. In the last part of the poem, Oothoon has a long and very powerful speech on these themes:

I cry, Love! Love! Love! Happy, happy love, free as the mountain wind!
Can that be love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day,
To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary, dark,
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?
Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.

But it also needs to be remembered that alongside this indictment of the curtailment of sexual freedom, Oothoon is referred to as the 'soft soul of America', and throughout the poem there runs a critique of both British oppression of the colonies and also the American slave trade.

“London”

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Lord Byron

Byron is not as much of a player on the GRE as you might imagine, though the fact that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages is written in Spensarian stanzas is the kind of thing that those GRE people would love to quiz you over.

“She Walks in Beauty”

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

"Manfred "

A 1817 poem by Lord Byron, and considered by some to be his response to the ghost story craze sweeping through England at the time, Manfred is a dramatic poem very much in the tradition of Goethe’s Faust. It begins:

Mandred: The lamp must be replenish'd, but even then
It will not burn so long as I must watch.
My slumbers-- if I slumber-- are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men.
But grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Philosophy and science, and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,
I have essay'd, and in my mind there is
A power to make these subject to itself--
But they avail not: I have done men good,
And I have met with good even among men--
But this avail'd not: I have had my foes,
And none have baffled, many fallen before me--
But this avail'd not: Good, or evil, life,
Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear
Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes
Or lurking love of something on the earth.
Now to my task.--

Byronic Hero

A theme that pervades much of Byron's work is that of the Byronic hero, an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:

* being a rebel
* having a distaste for social institutions
* being an exile
* expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege
* having great talent
* hiding an unsavoury past
* being highly passionate
* ultimately, being self-destructive

Not only is the character a frequent part of his work, Byron's own life could cast him as a Byronic hero. The literary history of the Byronic hero in English can be traced from Milton, especially Milton's interpretation of Lucifer as having justified complaint against God. One of Byron's most popular works in his lifetime, the closet play "Manfred," was loosely modeled on Goethe's anti-hero, Faust. Byron's influence was manifested by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement during the 19th century and beyond. An example of such a hero is Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages

A long narrative poem about masculinity. In Byron's poem, the main character is portrayed as a dark brooding man, who doesn't like society and wants to escape from the world because of his discontent with it. It deals with the underdog and Military might. Byron uses gothic literature imagery to get sublime nature, representing adventure, such as climbing mountains for sport. Previous to this, mountain climbing had been thought of as being associated with evil. Instead this poem deals with engaging and conquering the dark side of nature. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.

(Note: The term childe was a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.)

**It has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and rhyme ababbcbcc.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31