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Dover Beach Arnold's "Dover Beach" presents the reader with a virtual journey through time. Lamenting the transition from an age of certainty into an era of erosion of traditions - Modernism - is the backbone of all four stanzas of the poem, brought together in our imagination by the nostalgic image of the sea. "Misery", "sadness" and "melancholy" reign most of the poem, yet the author chooses to conclude it with an emotional appeal for honesty: "Ah, love, let us be true/ to one another" - as it is the only true certainty left as the world around collapses under "struggle" and "fight". The poet's attitude towards the subject of the poem is revealed through key words, which are also references to a number of themes in the poem. The most obvious one of these is "the sea" with its nostalgic nature and ability to represent time and timelessness simultaneously. "Sadness", "misery", "melancholy", "pain" accompany this effect and reveal the overall sense of regret and helplessness the author feels before the powers of time and inevitable change. The tone of the piece is determined by the constant presence of "melancholy" and "misery" in the poem that stretch on into the distance with a "long withdrawing roar..." The calmness of the narrative voice with which the piece is set to work ("the sea is calm to-night. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair.") is essential for the descriptive nature of the first stanza. Yet, later on its role is to emphasise the negativity in the tone of the poem: "But now I only hear /Its melancholy...", "Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow /of human misery..." The end of the piece, however, implies that the alteration of the things around us is something inevitable. The tone changes in the last verse of the poem in the sense that it now not simply resents mutability, but is also a tone pleading with the reader to realise nothing is as stable and reliable as one perceives it, not to take the world for granted, and to stay "true/ to one another". The fundamental issues of the poem are not only obvious in its conclusion. The theme of Time is being discussed in the second verse, where Sophocles - an essential historic figure - is referred to. The mentioning of England and France at the beginning of the first verse can also be considered a historic reference and therefore part of the theme of Time as history is a natural subject of it. Time here is represented by the image of the sea - with its vastness evoking powerful admiration. The theme of mutability follows closely because of the sea's unreliable nature. It is presented as something inevitable and insecure and, in its turn, leads onto the theme of humans staying true and honest to one another - this involving love for each other - as the only way to remain together, "for the world, which seems/ to lie before us like a land of dreams/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light." The structure of the poem gives the immediate impression of being inconsistent and built upon no particular rules. There are four verses, none of which are alike, with no particular rhythm or rhyme pattern. Yet its tremendous effect on the reader is wittily based upon the impression of sharing the author's thoughts as we read - it seems easy to identify with the subject matter just as the latter synchronise with the sea's waves. The verses lead onto one another by theme although they appear to be quite unconventionally structured. Thus the end of the first stanza - occupied with sadness - brings on the "misery" of stanza two; then the image of sea and insecurity of the end of the second verse invites the beginning of the following and ending verse. The unity of the poem is in this way complete and its impact on the reader stretches far beyond the lines. The Romantic Era In 1789, William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850) wrote an influential sonnet sequence, Fourteen Sonnets, a sign of brighter times ahead for the form. As rational, witty, neoclassical seventeenth century poems written in heroic couplets gave way to major works in more open forms, the sonnet was somehow adapted to accommodate the literary values of this period. In many of these works one can sense the new worth placed on intuition and spontaneity. Second, perhaps, only to Shakespeare, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is generally considered one of the greatest sonneteers. Writing over five hundred sonnets (mostly the early ones are still read), he ushered the form back into widespread use and also revived the sonnet sequence. Wordsworth continued the work of Milton in freeing the sonnet's subject matter from the conventional and treated the sonnet as a subjective "verse essay" in which to explore his emotions (White & Rosen). Among the well known poets of the Romantic period, John Keats (1795-1821) and Percy Shelley (1792-1822) wrote the sonnets most commonly anthologized--"Bright Star" and "Ozymandius", respectively. Other notable poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Lord Byron (1788-1824), wrote a few sonnets but did their best work in other forms. Here, perhaps even more than elsewhere, the chronological division of sonneteers is arbitrary, with Thomas Hood chosen as the Victorian to begin the next section. Also, a few of the earlier poets here might have been more comfortable in the diverse Sonnet Central group preceding. "The Solitary Reaper" Summary The poet orders his listener to behold a "solitary Highland lass" reaping and singing by herself in a field. He says that anyone passing by should either stop here, or "gently pass" so as not to disturb her. As she "cuts and binds the grain" she "sings a melancholy strain," and the valley overflows with the beautiful, sad sound. The speaker says that the sound is more welcome than any chant of the nightingale to weary travelers in the desert, and that the cuckoo-bird in spring never sang with a voice so thrilling. Impatient, the poet asks, "Will no one tell me what she sings?" He speculates that her song might be about "old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago," or that it might be humbler, a simple song about "matter of today." Whatever she sings about, he says, he listened "motionless and still," and as he traveled up the hill, he carried her song with him in his heart long after he could no longer hear it. Form The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD, though in the first and last stanzas the "A" rhyme is off (field/self and sang/work). Commentary Along with "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "The Solitary Reaper" is one of Wordsworth's most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth said that he was able to look on nature and hear "human music"; in this poem, he writes specifically about real human music encountered in a beloved, rustic setting. The song of the young girl reaping in the fields is incomprehensible to him (a "Highland lass," she is likely singing in Scots), and what he appreciates is its tone, its expressive beauty, and the mood it creates within him, rather than its explicit content, at which he can only guess. To an extent, then, this poem ponders the limitations of language, as it does in the third stanza ("Will no one tell me what she sings?"). But what it really does is praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry. By placing this praise and this beauty in a rustic, natural setting, and by and by establishing as its source a simple rustic girl, Wordsworth acts on the values of Lyrical Ballads. The poem's structure is simple--the first stanza sets the scene, the second offers two bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker--and its language is natural and unforced. Additionally, the final two lines of the poem ("Its music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more") return its focus to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings. "The Solitary Reaper" anticipates Keats's two great meditations on art, the "Ode to a Nightingale," in which the speaker steeps himself in the music of a bird in the forest-Wordsworth even compares the reaper to a nightingale--and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which the speaker is unable to ascertain the stories behind the shapes on an urn. It also anticipates Keats's "Ode to Autumn" with the figure of an emblematic girl reaping in the fields. The Solitary Reaper Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper is an example of his fundamental belief that poetry was, “Emotion recollected in tranquillity.” What is, on the surface, a very simple poem in which a walker is inspired by hearing the singing of a lovely, but poor Scottish lass working in the fields, becomes, on closer examination, a complex poem about the impact of a unique moment on a man’s sense of his own existence. The image of a human singing against the universe. You have to imagine the scale of the “vale profound” -- the infinity of sky, space and mountain. The sheer scale of the universe set against one human figure singing to infinity. What does the “reaper” represent? Clearly the word gives us a figure of time and death. Yet the substitution of a young woman for an old man (“Father time”) whose harvest is fundamentally less sheaves of corn than the melody of music, adds a central ambiguity to that image. Within the fmrame of death is a life-affirming figure; the young woman. The fact that Wordsworth probably never saw or heard this girl, but took the incident when reading his friend Wilkinson’s “Tour in Scotland” adds poignancy here. He was reading the experience as you read the poem, the capacity of the imagination to be moved by words fascinated him. Language makes the experience vivid, both for him and for you and one of the delights of the poem is his capacity to recall the incident so naturally and effortlessly that it is hard to see it merely as a “literary” creation, rather than the results of a real experience simply recounted. For Wordsworth the act of imagination and the feelings inspired by that were as real as any other form of experiencing human feeling. Reading was an act as real as walking or jumping or seeing. Chart the movement of the subject matter of the poem. Try to be as precise as possible. 1. 1. What and who is each stanza dealing with, in turn? Count the number of stanzas and number of lines per stanza. Establish the overall rhyme scheme of the poem. When such a pattern is broken it foregrounds and associates certain words, as much be them not rhyming as other words are linked by rhyme. 2. 2. Find examples of where the pattern is broken and discuss why. Concentrate on the senses of the human being. 3. 3. Is there any sense in which the poem patterns the senses that the writer appeals to and does this have any parallel with the scene he is describing? 4. 4. To whom is the poet speaking? Does this change from stanza to stanza or is it constant? “Behold her...” “Stop here or gently pass...” “O listen...” “No nightingale did ever...” “A voice...ne’er was heard” Will no one tell me..?” “Whate’er the theme...” “As if her song...” What is paradoxical about these formulations in terms of appealing to a reader. 5. 5. Does this help explain any of the particular emphases in the poem? (Pay particular attention to the tenses and moods of the verbs, the number of participles and plurals). 6. 6. Why should a poet choose to write such an apparently simple poem about such a simple sight? Is there any similarity with the techniques of popular songs? 7. 7. Are there any other themes relayed to you by the idea of a “Solitary Reaper”? Is there any connection with time or death? Are there any other parts of the poem open to symbolic reading? The poem was originally published in “Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803” -- think about “Memorials”... 8. 8. Think about the relationship between human beings, animals geographic and mental landscape in the poem. (Look at the numbers of times words relating to loneliness are mentioned.” Is there not a paradox in the idea of the “silence of the seas”? 9. 9. What emotions are experienced by the persona speaking the poem? Are they strong and dramatic? If they seem less than violent to you, why should a famous critic of Wordsworth, Hartmann, define the poem as “Consciousness of self raised to apocalyptic pitch.”? If he is correct how might the poem succeed in “covering its tracks?” 10.10. 11.11. A woman alone, engaged in manual work... is there anything particularly unusual about that image? 12.12. “The observer becomes increasingly aware of the autonomy, the haeccitas of what he beholds. She is alone in the sense that each one of us is alone” G I James, The Solitary Reaper What is James getting at here? 13.13. The best-known critic of Wordsworth, Geoffrey Hartman uses the following phrases in his critical essays. Think about them as a way of structuring your own responses: “The image has singled him out” “Why he is moved is subordinate to the fact that he is moved.” “a consolation, an eternity structure.” “It flows and overflows” “an idyllic yet elegiac melancholy” “An after-image plays an important role” “The inward echo follows” “not a brooding, analytic inquiry in the source of emotion....he allows the emotion its own life “surmise is fluid...fluidifiying doublings...a parallel lengthening in the second phrase of each ‘doubling’ expands thematically or in the number of syllables...” “the poet’s mind swings far from the present to which it keeps returning.” “a trembling of the imagined on the brink of the real” “a blend of idyll and elegy...tinged with melancholy” “the unusual image points like an epitaph” “the shock of self-consciousness, a suddenness of consciousness recreated by and echoed through a meditative consciousness; a doubling consciousness” "The world is too much with us" Summary Angrily, the speaker accuses the modern age of having lost its connection to nature and to everything meaningful: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" He says that even when the sea "bares her bosom to the moon" and the winds howl, humanity is still out of tune, and looks on uncaringly at the spectacle of the storm. The speaker wishes that he were a pagan raised according to a different vision of the world, so that, "standing on this pleasant lea," he might see images of ancient gods rising from the waves, a sight that would cheer him greatly. He imagines "Proteus rising from the sea," and Triton "blowing his wreathed horn." Form This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets Wordsworth wrote in the early 1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; "The world is too much with us" takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). The rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is somewhat variable; in this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD. In most Petrarchan sonnets, the octave proposes a question or an idea that the sestet answers, comments upon, or criticizes. Commentary "The world is too much with us" falls in line with a number of sonnets written by Wordsworth in the early 1800s that criticize or admonish what Wordsworth saw as the decadent material cynicism of the time. This relatively simple poem angrily states that human beings are too preoccupied with the material ("The world...getting and spending") and have lost touch with the spiritual and with nature. In the sestet, the speaker dramatically proposes an impossible personal solution to his problem--he wishes he could have been raised as a pagan, so he could still see ancient gods in the actions of nature and thereby gain spiritual solace. His thunderous "Great God!" indicates the extremity of his wish--in Christian England, one did not often wish to be a pagan. On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry summation of the familiar Wordsworthian theme of communion with nature, and states precisely how far the early nineteenth century was from living out the Wordsworthian ideal. The sonnet is important for its rhetorical force (it shows Wordsworth's increasing confidence with language as an implement of dramatic power, sweeping the wind and the sea up like flowers in a bouquet), and for being representative of other poems in the Wordsworth canon--notably "London, 1802," in which the speaker dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era. William Wordsworth: "The World is too Much With Us" Comments On The World is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth William Wordsworth’s poem is a statement about conflict between nature and humanity. The symbolism in his poem gives the reader a sense of the conviction and deep feelings Wordsworth had. Wordsworth longs for a much simpler time when the progress of humanity was tempered by the restrictions nature imposed. Wordsworth gives a fatalistic view of the world, past and future. The words “late and soon” in the opening verse describe how the past and future are included in his characterization of mankind. The author knows the potential for humanity, but the mentality of “getting and spending” clouds the perspective of humanity. Wordsworth does not see us as incapable; in fact, he describes our abilities as “powers”. The tendency derided in the accusation that “We lay waste our powers” is blamed on the earlier mentioned attitude of “getting and spending”. The appetite mankind has for devouring all that is around clouds our perspective as to what is being sacrificed for progress. The “sordid boon” we have “given are hearts” is the materialistic progress of mankind. Humanity has become self-absorbed and can no longer think clearly. The destructiveness society has on the environment will proceed unchecked and relentless like the “winds that will be howling at all hours”. Unlike society, Wordsworth does not see nature as a commodity. The verse “Little we see in Nature that is ours”, shows that coexisting is the relationship envisioned. This relationship appears to be at the mercy of mankind because of the vulnerable way nature is described. The verse, “This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,” gives the vision of a woman exposed to the heavens. The phrase “sleeping flowers” might also describe how nature is being overrun unknowingly and is helpless. Wordsworth seems to be the only enlightened one who is able to foresee the inevitable. He sees himself as one with the environment. The verse “I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn,” shows Wordsworth as a visionary who is not responsible for the destruction of nature. This destruction is not seen stopping as a result of any act by mankind. The change Wordsworth is hoping for will come in the form of a mighty revolt by nature. Wordsworth reaches back into ancient Greece for their gods who symbolize nature and strength to make the change. Proteus is seen rising from the sea, facing the injustices inflicted upon nature, placing the cycle of life back in balance. Proteus was a sea god who could change his appearance to elude capture. The ability to change one's appearance is critical in facing the variety of threats mankind might impose. The god Triton was mentioned as a savior to nature as well. Triton was the most imposing of the gods (excluding Zeus) because he was master of the seas. Wordsworth selected a sea god as the savior to the world to represent a re-birth. Water has always been a symbol of new beginnings (birth itself with the amniotic fluid and baptisms which take place in water) and when the sea gods rise from their watery depths to correct the excesses of humanity, a re-birth will have taken place for the world. Wordsworth sees himself as having insight into the problems which exist between humanity and nature. The materialistic progress being made by mankind is not without consequence. The destruction of the environment by mankind’s shortsightedness will continue as Wordsworth has foreseen. The change hoped for by the author will not come as a result of a initiative by humanity, but as an uproar by mother nature in the form of a battle. This battle will bring forth a victory for the environment and stimulate a re-birth for the world. William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much with Us (1807) Wordsworth was born and lived most of his life in the rural northwest of England known as the Lake District. Like many other Romantic writers, he saw in Nature an emblem of god or the divine and his poetry often celebrates the beauty and spiritual values of the natural world. He revolutionized English poetry with the publication of Literary Ballads (1798), co-authored with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge who contributed "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for the volume. In this book Wordsworth sought to break the pattern of artificial situations of eighteenth-century poetry, which had been written for the upper classes, and to write in simple, straightforward language for the common man. Other English Romantic poets would follow Wordsworth's lead in taking apparently insignificant moments and, by observation and contemplation, raising them to illuminations of experience. Wordsworth defined poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," intense "emotion recollected in tranquillity." In the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us" the poet contrasts Nature with the world of materialism and "making it." Because we are insensitive to the richness of Nature, we may be forfeiting our souls. To us there is nothing wonderful or mysterious about the natural world, but ancients who were pagans created a colorful mythology out of their awe of Nature. What does Wordsworth think is wrong with the modern world? The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (1) So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (2) Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus (3) rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton (4) blow his wreathed horn. (1) Brought up in an outdated religion. (2) Meadow. (3) Greek sea god capable of taking many shapes. (4) Another sea god, often depicted as trumpe