bmmstudent
Aaliya KHAN
Creative Writing Assignment:
19th Century Poems
Topics Covered:
(1) Background of the 19th Century
(2) Romanticism in 19th Century
(3) Rudyard Kipling
(4) John Keats
(5) William Wordsworth
The 19th century began on January 1, 1801 and ended on December 31, 1900, according to the Gregorian calendar. During the 19th century, the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Ottoman empires began to crumble, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, and the Mughal Empire collapsed. This helped pave the way for The British Empire, The German Empire, and additionally The United States of America to spread their influence internationally. This led to each power engaging in conflicts and new advancements in exploration and various sciences.
The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America and Australasia, with a significant proportion of the two continents' largest cities being founded at some point in the century. In the 19th century approximately 70 million people left Europe
On the literary front the new century opens with Romanticism, a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German Sturm und Drang spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.
There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, and Jane Austen; the Scottish Sir Walter Scott; the Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire.
19th Century Poets:
John Keats
His portrait, an image of a handwritten letter, poem manuscripts, a photo of Keats House in Rome & RealAudio readings of several of Keats’ poems are in the British Library’s Keats exhibition
William Wordsworth
Our reference page on William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), whose theory of poetry began the Romantic movement in English poetry at the end of the 18th century, and whose poems immortalize the sublime landscapes of his beloved Lake District
Emily Dickinson
She only published 8 poems in her liftime, but now!... we have all 1768 as written, complete with the abrupt dashes and bumpy wordplay. No titles for her, thank you.
John Clare
Passions in Poetry also has the texts of several of Clare’s poems & a brief biography in its “classic poetry” collection
Robert Browning
Known during his lifetime mostly as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s husband, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues & poems earned later acclaim & made his work a major influence on the 20th century modernists. His works are archived on the Net at the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry On-Line & in the eMule
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A reference page on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861), British Romantic poet of the Victorian era, best known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, love poems written for her husband Robert Browning, with whom she eloped to Italy at the age of 40.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
-Rudyard Kipling
'IF' by Rudyard Kipling
Analysis:
In the first stanza, the poet is asking us to keep our head high when others have not and are blaming out on you. He wants us to keep our trust on oneself no matter what others think about you. And wait for your time to come and not be tired for waiting for you’re that time to arrive. He asks us not to lie and even not to support it and do not led others to hate you and do not hate hers. And you should not be proud of what you are and do not show up your wittiness everywhere.
In the second stanza, the poet inspires us to dream big but at the same time asks us not to believe in each and every dreams. To think before our act but at the same time do not make every thought are aim is said by the poet. To treat both failure and success the same way irrespective of the consequences.
In the third stanza, the poet describes how one keeps on heaping all his wins and at one risk taken may turn down or success to failure. So then you must have the courage to start all again from the beginning and never regret about your loss. Then you may pray out for something good to happen when everything around you is wrong but you must keep your will strong because its just yours and will be with you every time.
In the fourth stanza, the poet basically describes about the humanity one can have within oneself. When one is in the crowd you should be able to be one of them, at the same time and able to keep up your virtue. When you may become rich or when you are in the crowd of rich one must never leave the common touch that is the humanity towards others. The poet describes that happiness can be brought around just by the basic thought of not hurting others; it would be your best friend or a foe. You will be called a human not by the works but by common humanity deeds.
The poet in the poem is the speaker himself. He is addressing to the audience. The general topic of the poem is humanity towards others. The way one can have the qualities of regaining again after a failure and not blaming others for it and at the same time not allowing others to point fingers on you. The poet has used antithesis a lot to describe the various forms of human personality. The poet has used an inspirational and a serious tone towards an audience.
But, what really made Rudyard Kipling to write this poem and why?
Rudyard Kipling's (1865-1936) inspirational poem 'If' first appeared in his collection 'Rewards and Fairies' in 1909. The poem 'If' is inspirational, motivational, and a set of rules for 'grown-up' living. Kipling's 'If' contains mottos and maxims for life, and the poem is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behaviour and self-development. 'If' is perhaps even more relevant today than when Kipling wrote it, as an ethos and a personal philosophy. Lines from Kipling's 'If' appear over the player's entrance to Wimbledon's Centre Court - a poignant reflection of the poem's timeless and inspiring quality.
The beauty and elegance of 'If' contrasts starkly with Rudyard Kipling's largely tragic and unhappy life. He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply.
Rudyard Kipling achieved fame quickly, based initially on his first stories and poems written in India (he returned there after College), and his great popularity with the British public continued despite subsequent critical reaction to some of his more conservative work, and critical opinion in later years that his poetry was superficial and lacking in depth of meaning.
Significantly, Kipling turned down many honours offered to him including a knighthood, Poet Laureate and the Order of Merit, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling's wide popular appeal survives through other works, notably The Jungle Book (1894) the novel, Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).
WALDENSIANS:
The Waldensians, also called the Poor Men of Lyons, originated with Pierre Valdès, or Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, France. The dates of his birth and death are not known, nor is his exact name. The name Peter was given to him later by his followers, probably to stress his affinity with Peter, first of Christ's disciples. About 1170 Valdès was converted from his worldly life after hearing the story of Saint Alexis, who on his wedding day abandoned his bride and all his worldly possessions to become a pilgrim. The account led Valdès to seek the advice of a priest on how he, too, could obey God and become perfect. The reply he received was the same text from Matthew (19:21) that Francis of Assisi was to come upon forty years later: "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and then you will have treasure in heaven; and, come, follow me." Valdès acted on the injunction, and took to a life of wandering poverty and preaching, living on alms, in emulation of Christ's life on earth.
He was soon joined by others, among them priests who translated into French passages from the Bible for the group's use in preaching.
William Wordsworth :
William Wordsworth is the Romantic poet most often described as a "nature" writer; what the word "nature" meant to Wordsworth is, however, a complex issue. On the one hand, wordsworth was the quintessential poet as naturalist, always paying close attention to details of the physical environment around him (plants, animals, geography, weather). At the same time, Wordsworth was a self-consciously literary artist who described "the mind of man" as the "main haunt and region of [his] song." This tension between objective describer of the natural scene and subjective shaper of sensory experience is partly the result of Wordsworth's view of the mind as "creator and receiver both." Wordsworth consistently describes his own mind as the recipient of external sensations which are then rendered into its own mental creations. (Shelley made a related claim in "Mont Blanc" when he said that his mind "passively / Now renders and receives, fast influencing, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around".) Such an alliance of the inner life with the outer world is at the heart of Wordsworth's descriptions of nature. Wordsworth's ideas about memory, the importance of childhood experiences, and the power of the mind to bestow an "auxiliar" light on the objects it beholds all depend on this ability to record experiences carefully at the moment of observation but then to shape those same experiences in the mind over time. We should also recall, however, that he made widespread use of other texts in the production of his Wordsworthian (Keats said "egotistical") sublime: drafts of poems by Coleridge, his sister Dorothy's Journals, the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and countless others. Wordsworthian "nature" emerges as much a product of his widespread reading as of his wanderings amid the affecting landscapes of the Lake District.
His poems often present an instant when nature speaks to him and he responds by speaking for nature. The language of nature in such instances is, like the language Wordsworth uses to record such events, often cryptic and enigmatic. The owls in the often-quoted "Boy of Winander" passage of The Prelude hoot to a Wordsworthian child who answers first in their owl-language and then with a poem that records only the mirroring image of an "uncertain heaven," the dark sky reflected in a still silent lake. Wordsworth longs for a version of nature that will redeem him from the vagaries of passing moments, but he usually records those natural phenomena that promise only the passing of time and the cyclical transience of natural process. "Nutting" holds us up painfully against the ravaging of a pristine and naturally spiritualized bower. The Lucy poems tells us that Lucy is back into nature at her death, but that consolation seems small recompense for the humanized "nature" of the loss. The Prelude wants to keep us in touch with a childhood and subsequent adult identity realized within the natural world; at the same time, however, this autobiographical epic leaves adult readers feeling a long way from the "spots of time" of childhood. Nothing in Wordsworth is simple or singular; like Milton, he is a poet who almost resists the possibility of final or definitive interpretation. His view of nonhuman nature is likewise open-ended. Wordsworth's "nature" points us away from the closed world of ethnocentric symbol-making toward the unstable world of postmodern meaning.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, meanwhile, were exploring the implications of the Revolution more intricately. Wordsworth lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. While sharing the horror of his contemporaries at the massacres in Paris, he knew at first hand the idealism and generosity of spirit to be found among the revolutionaries. For the rest of his career he was to brood on the implications of those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and of the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy's immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge's imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” an attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later entitled The Prelude (1805; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (in true Gothic style) by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme that reaches its most memorable expression in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge's poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth's. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he had devoted himself to more public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned with contemporary politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but entitled more accurately by Coleridge himself “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” opened a new vein of exotic writing, which he exploited further in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, however, renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche bore fruit in letters and notebooks; simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.” The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was serving as a sea captain, was a grim reminder that while he had been living in retirement as a poet others had been willing to sacrifice themselves for the public good. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal . . . as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge's periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon's first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse. This work was to be “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society,” and Wordsworth hoped to complete it by adding “meditations in the Author's own Person.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Wordsworth benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts.
Romanticism & Romantic Period:
This term which flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. The feature most likely to strike a reader turning to the poets of the time after reading their immediate predecessors is the new role of individual feeling and thought. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society, addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. The implied attitude to an audience varied accordingly: although Wordsworth maintained that a poet did not write “for Poets alone, but for Men,” for Shelley the poet was “a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds,” and Keats declared “I never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought.” Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. Provided the feeling behind it was genuine, the resulting creation must be valuable. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry.
Wordsworth called it “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined “natural poetry” as “Feeling itself, employing Thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. The degree of intensity was affected by the extent to which the poet's imagination had been at work; as Coleridge saw it, the imagination was the supreme poetic quality. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.
The Romantic Movement began somewhere near the end of the 18th century in Western Europe and lasted well into the first half of the 19th century. In part, the movement was a rebellion in response to the Enlightenment of the century prior, which focused on the more scientific and rational thought. Characteristics of Romantic literature emphasize passion, emotion, and nature. Romantic poetry was often written in common everyday language for all to relate, not just the upper class. Nature was a focus of many famous poets. The early 19th Century saw the blossoming of the great Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley and William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman etc.
The best known Romantic poets were Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats and their poetry was dependent on various features peculiar to their time: a reaction against previous literary styles, arguments with eighteenth century and earlier philosophers, the decline in formal Anglican worship and the rise of dissenting religious sects, and the rapid and unprecedented industrialization of Britain and consequent changes in its countyside. Above all, however, it was the impact of the French Revolution which gave the period its most distinctive and urgent concerns. Following the Revolution itself, which began in 1789, Britain was at war with France on continental Europe for nearly twenty years while massive repression of political dissent was implemented at home. Against this background much of the major writing of the period, associated with the term Romantic, takes place between 1789 (when the French Revolution began) and 1824 (the death of Byron) and can be seen as a response to changing political and social conditions in one respect or another..
John Keats:
One of England’s greatest poets, Keats was a key element in the Romantic Movement. Known especially for his love of the country and sensuous descriptions of the beauty of nature, his poetry also resonated with deep philosophic questions Born in 1795, Keats published three books of poetry in his lifetime but was dismissed as a middle-class interloper by most critics. He had no advantages of birth, wealth or education; he lost his parents in childhood, watched one brother die of tuberculosis and the other immigrate to America. Poverty kept him from marrying the woman he loved. And he achieved lasting fame only after his early death in 1821. Yet grief and hardship never destroyed his passionate commitment to poetry.
Known especially for his love of the country and sensuous descriptions of the beauty of nature, his poetry also resonated with deep philosophic questions.
The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting -
John Keats to his brother George.
Keats in a letter to his publisher John Taylor, 1818 : But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it.
The early critical opinion of Keats's poetry was not favorable, with the notable exceptions of his close friends and the exiled Percy Shelley. It is to Keats's credit that he understood the political purpose of the attacks and continued his work with increasing confidence in his own talent. At this site, I have collected some of those early reviews as well as later commentary on his poems.
The characteristic features of English Romantic poetry are:
1. Love and worship of Nature and dislike for the urban life.
2. Love for the Medieval Age.
3. Love for the supernatural and the mystical.
4. Poetry came to be regarded as the spontaneous expression of the poet's own subjective feelings and did not conform to the poetic conventions of classical doctrines.
5.Completely abandoned the 'Heroic Couplet' and substituted it with simpler verse forms like the ballads which belonged to the English rural Folk. In fact the 'Ballad Revival' is said to have sparked off the English Romantic Movement.
6. The 'poetic diction' of the Neo-Classical Age was completely done away with and the language of the ordinary people became the language of Romantic poetry.
7. The subjects of Romantic poetry were often ordinary people:"The Idiot Boy."
Romantic poetry from the 1800's is that it emphasizes feeling, intuition and imagination to a point of ir-rationalization.
• Charles Baudelaire quoted that "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
• Others feel that it emphasizes individualism, freedom from rules, spontaneity, solitary life rather then life in society, and the love of beauty and nature.
• Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas
Romanticism as a literary movement lasted from about 1789 to 1832 and marked a time when rigid ideas about the structure and purpose of society and the universe were breaking down. During this period, emphasis shifted to the importance of the individual’s experience in the world and his or her interpretation of that experience, rather than interpretations handed down by the church or tradition.
Romantic literature is characterized by several features. It emphasized the dream, or inner, world of the individual. The use of visionary, fantastic, or drug-induced imagery was prevalent. There was a growing suspicion of the established church, and a turn toward pantheism (the belief that God is a part of the universe rather than separate from it). Romantic literature emphasized the individual self and the value of the individual’s experience. The concept of “the sublime” (a thrilling emotional experience that combines awe, magnificence, and horror) was introduced. Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to logic and analysis.
BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEADFAST
-By John Keats
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.
Theme and Poetic Analysis of John Keats's Sonnet "Bright Star" :
A “Bright Star” by Keats, is a sonnet that shows his infatuation to be with his lover for eternity. The poem’s main theme deals with the love and appreciation of things that are unchanging. This theme is brought up many times in the poem. For example, Keats uses a bright star and the earth to describe his innermost desires to be immortal, unchanged, and rejuvenated. He expresses deep feelings toward his lover, and if he had to live without her, he would welcome death.
In the first two lines, Keats shows us that he would love to be around forever and full of life. “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art” (1). A star implies something that is around forever and unchanging because, in spite of occurrences throughout life, the star will reside in the sky each night. Adding bright to the star shows the importance of life to it and that to be unchanging alone is not enough for admiration. “Not alone splendour hung aloft the night” (2). This line states the bright star is not alone in its brilliance, but is accompanied by other stars. With this line, Keats expresses the importance of companionship and the fear of being alone.
“And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Ermite” (3-4).
Using the term eternal lids apart projects Keats’ immortality and human characteristics because he cannot see everything and grows tired. If he could be a bright star, he would see his love endlessly without losing desire. Line four compares the earth to the bright star. Like the star, the earth is sleepless and, therefore, full of life and lasting forever. Patient implies the earth’s ability to be unaffected by the events that occur around it. The earth continues its course around the solar system un-waverly.
Keats then continues his poem, “The moving waters at their priest like task / Of pure abolition round earth’s human shore’s” (5-6). The water acts as a purifier to the earth like a priest blesses his children. Keats desires to have this quality in order to earn the advantage of revitalizing himself. Keats knows that he is subsequent to change and needs something to return to his pure state.
In the next two lines, Keats brings about another quality of earth, in which he has deep admiration towards. He describes snow as being a mask that hides the ugliness of the mountains and moors. These in-depth feelings show insecurity about a certain unattractiveness that he possesses.
“Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors” (7-8).
Keats now shows us his real intent of the poem by describing his emotional journey to be with his lover eternally and without change. “No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable / Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breasts” (9-10). His deep emotions appear in line ten as he yearns to be as close as possible to his love. Keats’ true motive is revealed in that he strides for an eternal, unchanging existence only to be with her.
“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest” (11-12).
Now Keats explains that he has yet another desire, in which his lover be alive for eternity. The interpretation of soft fall and swell could only represent the precious breaths taken by his lover everyday of her eternal life. Her presence is mandatory in Keats’ life because he possesses an undying love for her. Keats implicitly describes being with her in a wakeful state forever without the troubling effects of mortality, which would prevent him from spending every possible second with her due to sleep.
Keats’ concludes his poem by displaying a powerful statement that if he cannot hear his lover breathe, he will welcome his own death with no regrets. “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” (13-14). Keats shows that as long as he can be with his lover, he will live forever. But if they must part, then he welcomes death. This portrays Keats’ feelings towards life where death brings no fear and life means nothing without his lover.
John Keats explains to us his feelings toward his human emotions, which leaves no room to explore his deeper spiritual desires. He tends dip into mystic and unexplained phenomena in the universe to describe his feelings. This is probably due to the fact that his earthly human self is on the verge toward death and his spiritual side is fully alive.
“Bright Star” by John Keats, expresses the poet’s desire to be like a star. In the poem the tone is melancholic while the theme is the desire to live in an unchanging state. Keats uses rhyme and literary techniques to reveal these ideas.
The melancholic tone is expressed throughout the poem. He begins with the use of apostrophe, by addressing the star. “Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art”. His desire is to be the impossible, unchanging like a star. Although he understands that a star is “sleepless”, he acknowledges this as a positive trait being “patient”. He also recognizes that the star is alone, but refers to this as “splendour”, giving the impression of the bittersweet existence of the star. The imagery of the next few lines involves the observation of life’s great spirituality as he refers to “the moving waters at their priest like task” and the snow on the mountains. Keats seems to feel that watching life changing from afar would be better than living in it and having to change with it. He ends the poem by saying that he would like to live as a star “or else swoon to death”. It is apparent that Keats understands the sacrifices of living as a star, but acknowledges its benefits as well.
The theme of the poem is the desire to live in an unchanging state. This is achieved by Keats metaphorical analysis of the star. The entire poem personifies the star as a human creature that watches patiently from above. Keats also relays his message through the use of oxymoronic ideas such as “sweet unrest” and patient sleepless”. This concludes that Keats knows the impossibility of his desire to live in an unchanging state. The descriptions of the “earth’s” gifts represent what is changing and the star represents what is “steadfast” and what he desires to be. He finds comfort “pillw’d” in this locale which helps express the theme.
In the poem “Bright Star” by John Keats the desire to experience a life that never moves forward is expressed. The impossibility of this desire leads to its melancholic feeling.
Conclusion:
Thus, the 19th Century saw the blossoming of the great Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley and William Wordsworth. In America there was also a powerful movement of poets, loosely termed "Early American Poets" these included Emily Dickinson, Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman. After the great Romantic poets the next generation of British Poets became associated with the Victorian age. To some extent they offered greater conformity of vision and were more likely to use Christian imagery but they were still influenced by powerful undercurrents of the Romantic Movement. In fact the influence of Romanticism can be seen even in modern poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Later poets of the twentieth century also acknowledged the influence of this creative period in poetry.
In India Swami Vivekananda epitomized the revitalization of Hindu culture. After centuries of decline under Muslim and then British rule Vivekananda powerfully called his countrymen to invoke the ancient universal and eternal ideals of Santana Dharma.
19th Century Poems
Topics Covered:
(1) Background of the 19th Century
(2) Romanticism in 19th Century
(3) Rudyard Kipling
(4) John Keats
(5) William Wordsworth
The 19th century began on January 1, 1801 and ended on December 31, 1900, according to the Gregorian calendar. During the 19th century, the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Ottoman empires began to crumble, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, and the Mughal Empire collapsed. This helped pave the way for The British Empire, The German Empire, and additionally The United States of America to spread their influence internationally. This led to each power engaging in conflicts and new advancements in exploration and various sciences.
The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America and Australasia, with a significant proportion of the two continents' largest cities being founded at some point in the century. In the 19th century approximately 70 million people left Europe
On the literary front the new century opens with Romanticism, a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German Sturm und Drang spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.
There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, and Jane Austen; the Scottish Sir Walter Scott; the Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire.
19th Century Poets:
John Keats
His portrait, an image of a handwritten letter, poem manuscripts, a photo of Keats House in Rome & RealAudio readings of several of Keats’ poems are in the British Library’s Keats exhibition
William Wordsworth
Our reference page on William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), whose theory of poetry began the Romantic movement in English poetry at the end of the 18th century, and whose poems immortalize the sublime landscapes of his beloved Lake District
Emily Dickinson
She only published 8 poems in her liftime, but now!... we have all 1768 as written, complete with the abrupt dashes and bumpy wordplay. No titles for her, thank you.
John Clare
Passions in Poetry also has the texts of several of Clare’s poems & a brief biography in its “classic poetry” collection
Robert Browning
Known during his lifetime mostly as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s husband, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues & poems earned later acclaim & made his work a major influence on the 20th century modernists. His works are archived on the Net at the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry On-Line & in the eMule
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A reference page on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861), British Romantic poet of the Victorian era, best known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, love poems written for her husband Robert Browning, with whom she eloped to Italy at the age of 40.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
-Rudyard Kipling
'IF' by Rudyard Kipling
Analysis:
In the first stanza, the poet is asking us to keep our head high when others have not and are blaming out on you. He wants us to keep our trust on oneself no matter what others think about you. And wait for your time to come and not be tired for waiting for you’re that time to arrive. He asks us not to lie and even not to support it and do not led others to hate you and do not hate hers. And you should not be proud of what you are and do not show up your wittiness everywhere.
In the second stanza, the poet inspires us to dream big but at the same time asks us not to believe in each and every dreams. To think before our act but at the same time do not make every thought are aim is said by the poet. To treat both failure and success the same way irrespective of the consequences.
In the third stanza, the poet describes how one keeps on heaping all his wins and at one risk taken may turn down or success to failure. So then you must have the courage to start all again from the beginning and never regret about your loss. Then you may pray out for something good to happen when everything around you is wrong but you must keep your will strong because its just yours and will be with you every time.
In the fourth stanza, the poet basically describes about the humanity one can have within oneself. When one is in the crowd you should be able to be one of them, at the same time and able to keep up your virtue. When you may become rich or when you are in the crowd of rich one must never leave the common touch that is the humanity towards others. The poet describes that happiness can be brought around just by the basic thought of not hurting others; it would be your best friend or a foe. You will be called a human not by the works but by common humanity deeds.
The poet in the poem is the speaker himself. He is addressing to the audience. The general topic of the poem is humanity towards others. The way one can have the qualities of regaining again after a failure and not blaming others for it and at the same time not allowing others to point fingers on you. The poet has used antithesis a lot to describe the various forms of human personality. The poet has used an inspirational and a serious tone towards an audience.
But, what really made Rudyard Kipling to write this poem and why?
Rudyard Kipling's (1865-1936) inspirational poem 'If' first appeared in his collection 'Rewards and Fairies' in 1909. The poem 'If' is inspirational, motivational, and a set of rules for 'grown-up' living. Kipling's 'If' contains mottos and maxims for life, and the poem is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behaviour and self-development. 'If' is perhaps even more relevant today than when Kipling wrote it, as an ethos and a personal philosophy. Lines from Kipling's 'If' appear over the player's entrance to Wimbledon's Centre Court - a poignant reflection of the poem's timeless and inspiring quality.
The beauty and elegance of 'If' contrasts starkly with Rudyard Kipling's largely tragic and unhappy life. He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply.
Rudyard Kipling achieved fame quickly, based initially on his first stories and poems written in India (he returned there after College), and his great popularity with the British public continued despite subsequent critical reaction to some of his more conservative work, and critical opinion in later years that his poetry was superficial and lacking in depth of meaning.
Significantly, Kipling turned down many honours offered to him including a knighthood, Poet Laureate and the Order of Merit, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling's wide popular appeal survives through other works, notably The Jungle Book (1894) the novel, Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).
WALDENSIANS:
The Waldensians, also called the Poor Men of Lyons, originated with Pierre Valdès, or Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, France. The dates of his birth and death are not known, nor is his exact name. The name Peter was given to him later by his followers, probably to stress his affinity with Peter, first of Christ's disciples. About 1170 Valdès was converted from his worldly life after hearing the story of Saint Alexis, who on his wedding day abandoned his bride and all his worldly possessions to become a pilgrim. The account led Valdès to seek the advice of a priest on how he, too, could obey God and become perfect. The reply he received was the same text from Matthew (19:21) that Francis of Assisi was to come upon forty years later: "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and then you will have treasure in heaven; and, come, follow me." Valdès acted on the injunction, and took to a life of wandering poverty and preaching, living on alms, in emulation of Christ's life on earth.
He was soon joined by others, among them priests who translated into French passages from the Bible for the group's use in preaching.
William Wordsworth :
William Wordsworth is the Romantic poet most often described as a "nature" writer; what the word "nature" meant to Wordsworth is, however, a complex issue. On the one hand, wordsworth was the quintessential poet as naturalist, always paying close attention to details of the physical environment around him (plants, animals, geography, weather). At the same time, Wordsworth was a self-consciously literary artist who described "the mind of man" as the "main haunt and region of [his] song." This tension between objective describer of the natural scene and subjective shaper of sensory experience is partly the result of Wordsworth's view of the mind as "creator and receiver both." Wordsworth consistently describes his own mind as the recipient of external sensations which are then rendered into its own mental creations. (Shelley made a related claim in "Mont Blanc" when he said that his mind "passively / Now renders and receives, fast influencing, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around".) Such an alliance of the inner life with the outer world is at the heart of Wordsworth's descriptions of nature. Wordsworth's ideas about memory, the importance of childhood experiences, and the power of the mind to bestow an "auxiliar" light on the objects it beholds all depend on this ability to record experiences carefully at the moment of observation but then to shape those same experiences in the mind over time. We should also recall, however, that he made widespread use of other texts in the production of his Wordsworthian (Keats said "egotistical") sublime: drafts of poems by Coleridge, his sister Dorothy's Journals, the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and countless others. Wordsworthian "nature" emerges as much a product of his widespread reading as of his wanderings amid the affecting landscapes of the Lake District.
His poems often present an instant when nature speaks to him and he responds by speaking for nature. The language of nature in such instances is, like the language Wordsworth uses to record such events, often cryptic and enigmatic. The owls in the often-quoted "Boy of Winander" passage of The Prelude hoot to a Wordsworthian child who answers first in their owl-language and then with a poem that records only the mirroring image of an "uncertain heaven," the dark sky reflected in a still silent lake. Wordsworth longs for a version of nature that will redeem him from the vagaries of passing moments, but he usually records those natural phenomena that promise only the passing of time and the cyclical transience of natural process. "Nutting" holds us up painfully against the ravaging of a pristine and naturally spiritualized bower. The Lucy poems tells us that Lucy is back into nature at her death, but that consolation seems small recompense for the humanized "nature" of the loss. The Prelude wants to keep us in touch with a childhood and subsequent adult identity realized within the natural world; at the same time, however, this autobiographical epic leaves adult readers feeling a long way from the "spots of time" of childhood. Nothing in Wordsworth is simple or singular; like Milton, he is a poet who almost resists the possibility of final or definitive interpretation. His view of nonhuman nature is likewise open-ended. Wordsworth's "nature" points us away from the closed world of ethnocentric symbol-making toward the unstable world of postmodern meaning.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, meanwhile, were exploring the implications of the Revolution more intricately. Wordsworth lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. While sharing the horror of his contemporaries at the massacres in Paris, he knew at first hand the idealism and generosity of spirit to be found among the revolutionaries. For the rest of his career he was to brood on the implications of those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and of the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy's immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge's imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” an attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later entitled The Prelude (1805; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (in true Gothic style) by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme that reaches its most memorable expression in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge's poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth's. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he had devoted himself to more public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned with contemporary politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but entitled more accurately by Coleridge himself “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” opened a new vein of exotic writing, which he exploited further in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, however, renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche bore fruit in letters and notebooks; simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.” The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was serving as a sea captain, was a grim reminder that while he had been living in retirement as a poet others had been willing to sacrifice themselves for the public good. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal . . . as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge's periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon's first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse. This work was to be “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society,” and Wordsworth hoped to complete it by adding “meditations in the Author's own Person.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Wordsworth benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts.
Romanticism & Romantic Period:
This term which flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. The feature most likely to strike a reader turning to the poets of the time after reading their immediate predecessors is the new role of individual feeling and thought. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society, addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. The implied attitude to an audience varied accordingly: although Wordsworth maintained that a poet did not write “for Poets alone, but for Men,” for Shelley the poet was “a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds,” and Keats declared “I never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought.” Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. Provided the feeling behind it was genuine, the resulting creation must be valuable. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry.
Wordsworth called it “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined “natural poetry” as “Feeling itself, employing Thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. The degree of intensity was affected by the extent to which the poet's imagination had been at work; as Coleridge saw it, the imagination was the supreme poetic quality. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.
The Romantic Movement began somewhere near the end of the 18th century in Western Europe and lasted well into the first half of the 19th century. In part, the movement was a rebellion in response to the Enlightenment of the century prior, which focused on the more scientific and rational thought. Characteristics of Romantic literature emphasize passion, emotion, and nature. Romantic poetry was often written in common everyday language for all to relate, not just the upper class. Nature was a focus of many famous poets. The early 19th Century saw the blossoming of the great Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley and William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman etc.
The best known Romantic poets were Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats and their poetry was dependent on various features peculiar to their time: a reaction against previous literary styles, arguments with eighteenth century and earlier philosophers, the decline in formal Anglican worship and the rise of dissenting religious sects, and the rapid and unprecedented industrialization of Britain and consequent changes in its countyside. Above all, however, it was the impact of the French Revolution which gave the period its most distinctive and urgent concerns. Following the Revolution itself, which began in 1789, Britain was at war with France on continental Europe for nearly twenty years while massive repression of political dissent was implemented at home. Against this background much of the major writing of the period, associated with the term Romantic, takes place between 1789 (when the French Revolution began) and 1824 (the death of Byron) and can be seen as a response to changing political and social conditions in one respect or another..
John Keats:
One of England’s greatest poets, Keats was a key element in the Romantic Movement. Known especially for his love of the country and sensuous descriptions of the beauty of nature, his poetry also resonated with deep philosophic questions Born in 1795, Keats published three books of poetry in his lifetime but was dismissed as a middle-class interloper by most critics. He had no advantages of birth, wealth or education; he lost his parents in childhood, watched one brother die of tuberculosis and the other immigrate to America. Poverty kept him from marrying the woman he loved. And he achieved lasting fame only after his early death in 1821. Yet grief and hardship never destroyed his passionate commitment to poetry.
Known especially for his love of the country and sensuous descriptions of the beauty of nature, his poetry also resonated with deep philosophic questions.
The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting -
John Keats to his brother George.
Keats in a letter to his publisher John Taylor, 1818 : But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it.
The early critical opinion of Keats's poetry was not favorable, with the notable exceptions of his close friends and the exiled Percy Shelley. It is to Keats's credit that he understood the political purpose of the attacks and continued his work with increasing confidence in his own talent. At this site, I have collected some of those early reviews as well as later commentary on his poems.
The characteristic features of English Romantic poetry are:
1. Love and worship of Nature and dislike for the urban life.
2. Love for the Medieval Age.
3. Love for the supernatural and the mystical.
4. Poetry came to be regarded as the spontaneous expression of the poet's own subjective feelings and did not conform to the poetic conventions of classical doctrines.
5.Completely abandoned the 'Heroic Couplet' and substituted it with simpler verse forms like the ballads which belonged to the English rural Folk. In fact the 'Ballad Revival' is said to have sparked off the English Romantic Movement.
6. The 'poetic diction' of the Neo-Classical Age was completely done away with and the language of the ordinary people became the language of Romantic poetry.
7. The subjects of Romantic poetry were often ordinary people:"The Idiot Boy."
Romantic poetry from the 1800's is that it emphasizes feeling, intuition and imagination to a point of ir-rationalization.
• Charles Baudelaire quoted that "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
• Others feel that it emphasizes individualism, freedom from rules, spontaneity, solitary life rather then life in society, and the love of beauty and nature.
• Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas
Romanticism as a literary movement lasted from about 1789 to 1832 and marked a time when rigid ideas about the structure and purpose of society and the universe were breaking down. During this period, emphasis shifted to the importance of the individual’s experience in the world and his or her interpretation of that experience, rather than interpretations handed down by the church or tradition.
Romantic literature is characterized by several features. It emphasized the dream, or inner, world of the individual. The use of visionary, fantastic, or drug-induced imagery was prevalent. There was a growing suspicion of the established church, and a turn toward pantheism (the belief that God is a part of the universe rather than separate from it). Romantic literature emphasized the individual self and the value of the individual’s experience. The concept of “the sublime” (a thrilling emotional experience that combines awe, magnificence, and horror) was introduced. Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to logic and analysis.
BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEADFAST
-By John Keats
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.
Theme and Poetic Analysis of John Keats's Sonnet "Bright Star" :
A “Bright Star” by Keats, is a sonnet that shows his infatuation to be with his lover for eternity. The poem’s main theme deals with the love and appreciation of things that are unchanging. This theme is brought up many times in the poem. For example, Keats uses a bright star and the earth to describe his innermost desires to be immortal, unchanged, and rejuvenated. He expresses deep feelings toward his lover, and if he had to live without her, he would welcome death.
In the first two lines, Keats shows us that he would love to be around forever and full of life. “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art” (1). A star implies something that is around forever and unchanging because, in spite of occurrences throughout life, the star will reside in the sky each night. Adding bright to the star shows the importance of life to it and that to be unchanging alone is not enough for admiration. “Not alone splendour hung aloft the night” (2). This line states the bright star is not alone in its brilliance, but is accompanied by other stars. With this line, Keats expresses the importance of companionship and the fear of being alone.
“And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Ermite” (3-4).
Using the term eternal lids apart projects Keats’ immortality and human characteristics because he cannot see everything and grows tired. If he could be a bright star, he would see his love endlessly without losing desire. Line four compares the earth to the bright star. Like the star, the earth is sleepless and, therefore, full of life and lasting forever. Patient implies the earth’s ability to be unaffected by the events that occur around it. The earth continues its course around the solar system un-waverly.
Keats then continues his poem, “The moving waters at their priest like task / Of pure abolition round earth’s human shore’s” (5-6). The water acts as a purifier to the earth like a priest blesses his children. Keats desires to have this quality in order to earn the advantage of revitalizing himself. Keats knows that he is subsequent to change and needs something to return to his pure state.
In the next two lines, Keats brings about another quality of earth, in which he has deep admiration towards. He describes snow as being a mask that hides the ugliness of the mountains and moors. These in-depth feelings show insecurity about a certain unattractiveness that he possesses.
“Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors” (7-8).
Keats now shows us his real intent of the poem by describing his emotional journey to be with his lover eternally and without change. “No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable / Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breasts” (9-10). His deep emotions appear in line ten as he yearns to be as close as possible to his love. Keats’ true motive is revealed in that he strides for an eternal, unchanging existence only to be with her.
“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest” (11-12).
Now Keats explains that he has yet another desire, in which his lover be alive for eternity. The interpretation of soft fall and swell could only represent the precious breaths taken by his lover everyday of her eternal life. Her presence is mandatory in Keats’ life because he possesses an undying love for her. Keats implicitly describes being with her in a wakeful state forever without the troubling effects of mortality, which would prevent him from spending every possible second with her due to sleep.
Keats’ concludes his poem by displaying a powerful statement that if he cannot hear his lover breathe, he will welcome his own death with no regrets. “Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” (13-14). Keats shows that as long as he can be with his lover, he will live forever. But if they must part, then he welcomes death. This portrays Keats’ feelings towards life where death brings no fear and life means nothing without his lover.
John Keats explains to us his feelings toward his human emotions, which leaves no room to explore his deeper spiritual desires. He tends dip into mystic and unexplained phenomena in the universe to describe his feelings. This is probably due to the fact that his earthly human self is on the verge toward death and his spiritual side is fully alive.
“Bright Star” by John Keats, expresses the poet’s desire to be like a star. In the poem the tone is melancholic while the theme is the desire to live in an unchanging state. Keats uses rhyme and literary techniques to reveal these ideas.
The melancholic tone is expressed throughout the poem. He begins with the use of apostrophe, by addressing the star. “Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art”. His desire is to be the impossible, unchanging like a star. Although he understands that a star is “sleepless”, he acknowledges this as a positive trait being “patient”. He also recognizes that the star is alone, but refers to this as “splendour”, giving the impression of the bittersweet existence of the star. The imagery of the next few lines involves the observation of life’s great spirituality as he refers to “the moving waters at their priest like task” and the snow on the mountains. Keats seems to feel that watching life changing from afar would be better than living in it and having to change with it. He ends the poem by saying that he would like to live as a star “or else swoon to death”. It is apparent that Keats understands the sacrifices of living as a star, but acknowledges its benefits as well.
The theme of the poem is the desire to live in an unchanging state. This is achieved by Keats metaphorical analysis of the star. The entire poem personifies the star as a human creature that watches patiently from above. Keats also relays his message through the use of oxymoronic ideas such as “sweet unrest” and patient sleepless”. This concludes that Keats knows the impossibility of his desire to live in an unchanging state. The descriptions of the “earth’s” gifts represent what is changing and the star represents what is “steadfast” and what he desires to be. He finds comfort “pillw’d” in this locale which helps express the theme.
In the poem “Bright Star” by John Keats the desire to experience a life that never moves forward is expressed. The impossibility of this desire leads to its melancholic feeling.
Conclusion:
Thus, the 19th Century saw the blossoming of the great Romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley and William Wordsworth. In America there was also a powerful movement of poets, loosely termed "Early American Poets" these included Emily Dickinson, Ralph Emerson and Walt Whitman. After the great Romantic poets the next generation of British Poets became associated with the Victorian age. To some extent they offered greater conformity of vision and were more likely to use Christian imagery but they were still influenced by powerful undercurrents of the Romantic Movement. In fact the influence of Romanticism can be seen even in modern poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Later poets of the twentieth century also acknowledged the influence of this creative period in poetry.
In India Swami Vivekananda epitomized the revitalization of Hindu culture. After centuries of decline under Muslim and then British rule Vivekananda powerfully called his countrymen to invoke the ancient universal and eternal ideals of Santana Dharma.