Download Arnold`s "Dover Beach" presents the reader with a virtual journey

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