LIT 311 LECTURE NOTE

ENGLISH LITERATURE: THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

LIT 311 COURSE OUTLINE

ENGLISH LITERATURE: THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

WEEK 1 Introduction to and Development of English literature.

WEEK 2 Introduction to Romantic Literature.
WEEK3 Background Study of the History of Romanticism.
WEEK 4 Features, Themes and Perspectives of Romantic Period.
WEEK 5 Industrial Revolution in English Literature.
WEEK 6 Style and Purpose of Romantic Writers.
WEEK 7 The Poets of Romantic Movement.
WEEK 8 Novels of Romantic Movement.
WEEK 9 Drama and Reality of the Romantic Period
WEEK 10-13 Textual Analysis
WEEK 14 Revision
WEEK 15-16 Examination

RECOMMENDED TEXTS
 Lord Bryon’s She Walks in Beauty
 John Keats’s Ode to Grecian Urn
 Samuel Coleridge’s Easter Holidays
 P. B. Shelly’s Lament
 William Wordsworth’s The World is too Much for us
 Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of Ancient Mariner
 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

WEEK I-2: Introduction to and Development of English literature.

The English literature refers to literature written by English men and women that reflects
the English society at a particular period. It is different from the literature in English which could
be the literature of any continent, country or locality but written in English language. In English

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literature, each writer presents his or her perspective of the English society at that particular time
in the history of the people.
The present form of the English literature was originally serialised to the audience and to a large
extent this influenced the author, because sometimes the author conceded to the demand of the
reading public in the plotting and structure of the novel. For instance, the marriage between Pip
and Esther in Charles Dickens Great Expectations was said to have been influenced by the
reading public.
The emergence of the English literature was influenced by several factors which were historical,
moral, structural, and the subject matter at every stage of its development. The application of
fiction and realism to the literature started with the English literature because though the story
was a product of the author’s imagination the reading public expected the story to be credible
and be as close as possible to real life. Consequently, the literature presents many character
types, detailed and vivid description of incidents, action, setting and general environment and
atmosphere that are appear life-like. The character is revealed as the story moves through
suspense, climax and resolution of conflicts.
The development of the literature is hinged on the media that enhanced its circulation to as many
readers as possible. Although the literature is seen as the counterpart of literature narratives in
the traditional society, it is much longer than the folktale and other forms of oral narratives, or
various forms of early documented fiction in prose or verse. Also, the oral narratives do not have
complex plot structure that is the hallmark of the novel unlike the oral narratives the story in
the novel cannot be recounted with ease or be remembered with precision. The novelists
needed a medium that would enable the story to be told correctly and consistently all the times
and relayed beyond the immediate environment of the originator. The literatures were therefore
written and expected to be read beyond the immediate environment of the author and this to a
large extent contributed to the rise of the literature.
Romance
Romance is a genre of fictional narrative that preceded the novel. It concentrates on the
individual and tends towards the idealisation or glorification of the hero who usually lives in a
world of dreams and illusions. It was the first form of fictional narrative that involves a complex
plot characteristic of the modern novel and was popular with the aristocrats. It is presented in a
heroic prose and thrived during the medieval and renaissance periods as a literary genre of high
culture. Its popularity among the aristocratic class of the period is traced to its treatment of
fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant, the hero, and involves a
quest by the hero. In many cases, the stories were adapted from history, fairy tales, myths and
legends. (Briggs 134) Some scholars opine that modern novel is more influenced by the romance
than by any other medieval genre mainly because, unlike epics that were written in verse, early
13th century romances were written as prose (Lewis, 1954, 129).

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Romance dealt with traditional, courtly and chivalrous themes from folklore and presented tales
of fairy characters who were transformed, more and more often, into wizards and enchantresses
(Briggs 233). By the twelfth century, the focus shifted to the of recount marvelous adventures of
a chivalrous, heroic knight, often with a super-human ability, who goes on a quest, gets involved
in fights in which he defeats monsters and giants, and wins favour with a lady (Lewis, 1954,
129). However the focus of medieval romance was mainly on adventure and not on love or
sentiment which is found in the modern romance that presents the romantic relationship between
two people with an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending (Lewis, 1954, 132).
The novel that evolved later differs from romance as it deals realistically with human
relationships and the hero in relating to other people in the story, matures, grows in experience
and progresses from innocence to knowledge and in many cases comes to terms with reality.
Romance played a vital role in the development of the novel.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE Mention two reasons why romance is not regarded as a
novel.
Literacy
Literacy is an important factor in the development of English literature. As more people became
literate in the 14th and 15th century more people joined in the reading of prose fiction. More
women of wealthier households were among the literate class of this period and gradually
literacy spread among the urban populations of Europe and increasing the number of literate
people and the readership of prose fiction. Another factor that influenced the increase in
readership of prose fiction was the Protestant Reformation which enkindled propaganda and
press wars that lasted into the 18th century. People were eager to follow the events, so, by
reading the propaganda articles of the reformation they also read other treatise including prose
fictional narratives. Some of the readers learnt to read and write through these publications.
Thus, as reading and writing skills spread among apprentices and women of the middle classes,
they joined the aristocratic in the reading of prose fiction that eventually evolved into the novel.
In addition, as more people learnt to read and write, the personal letter became a favourite
medium of communication among men and women. Some epistolary novels were offshoots of
such personal letters. Reading became very popular so many people bought popular titles not
necessarily because of they liked the subject matter but “…because they were the books
everyone had heard of, or books of an eternal value to be chosen if one was not too sure about
one's ability to judge. The prefaces exploited these insecurities praising the solid value of the old
and well known titles” (Woods et al, 1936, 456). As time went on, issues like fashions, love,
personal views, intimate affairs/feelings, secret anxieties, and code of conduct and gallantry
became subjects of the novels as the reader identifies personally the characters in a novel. More
people wanted to be part of this new culture and this increased the reading public and contributed
immensely to the rise of the novel.
SELF -ASSESSMENT EXERCISE

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Explain the contribution of literacy to the development of the English literature.
Availability of Paper
Before the invention of paper, the verse epics were presented in parchment and their owners
recited them on festive occasions. The parchment was prestigious but was too expensive to be
used for stories that one would read for leisure. Consequently, only libraries and a few wealthy
individuals could afford them. The invention of paper made books cheaper and available to a
wider audience and an individual could buy a book exclusively for him or herself read it as many
times as possible without going to borrow from the library. Consequently, novels were produced
in large quantities, different formats and sizes to enable the reader carry it wit ease or kept to be
read privately at home or in public without the support of a table. This made it possible and
fashionable for people to read English literatures in coffee houses or on journeys.
Serial Novel
Many novels of the Victorian period were published in serial form in journals. Many of the
novels made their debut in such journals as chapters or sections appeared in each edition of the
journals so like modern soap opera, readers eagerly awaited the appearance of the unfolding and
conclusion stories of novels. This helped to sustain the reader’s interest in such novels and
increased the eagerness of readers to see each new appearance of the novel and the introduction
of some new element in the plot twist or a new character. The authors who published serially
were often paid on an instalment basis and this may be responsible for the popularity of the
three-volume novel during this period.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
List three contributions of the serial novel and invention of paper to the development of the
English literature.
Circulating Libraries
The circulating libraries contributed immensely to the rise of the literature. The libraries were
established in Britain in the 18th century with a cheap and affordable subscription rate. They
stocked wide varieties of literature in different genres to cater for the reader’s interest. It may not
have been possible for a reader to buy all the published works, so many people patronised the
circulating library especially the lower class like tradesmen, housewives, farmers, shopkeepers
who could not afford to buy the novels but could borrow them from the library. This increased
the demand for the novel which in turn influenced the development of the novel positively.
Leisure
Initially, the novel developed as aristocratic entertainment but as the spread of the novel
increased, its readers included almost all classes as the scope of readership widened and the
reading habits differed as more people irrespective of class tried “to follow fashions” by reading

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more books. Novels were read for leisure mostly by women who were left on their own a greater
part of the time since “most men led full and busy lives and were hardly at home for most of the
day, weeks or even months depending on their profession” (Ezeigbo, 1998, 5). The women
therefore spent their leisure reading voraciously since they could not be part of in their husbands’
leisure activities. In addition, the ladies and their daughters in the affluent families who afforded
nannies, valets and servants who did all the household chores were idle so had time to read as
many novels as possible. Also after the industrial revolution, women had more time for leisure
because of the provision of factory-made goods like soaps, bread, cloth and other household
goods which were previously produced manually by them. They therefore had more time for
leisure so novel-reading became a form of entertainment for them.
The popularity of the novel lies more in its presentation format in prose which is easier to be read
and understood than verse and drama. Consequently more novels and short stories were
produced to meet the demands and interest of the ever increasing reading public.
SELF -ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
Explain the relationship between the circulating library, leisure and the rise of English literature.
Shifts in Reading Taste
The emergence of the prose fiction heightened the reader’s interest in secular subjects and in turn
influenced the development of English literature. This is against the medieval practice whereby
most literate people in Britain read the Bible and other books for spiritual growth at their leisure.
The industrial revolution brought with it economic and social transformation which increased
interest in secular issues presented as articles in journals or in books. More people devoted their
leisure to reading literatures as the writers invented new styles to meet the changing tastes of the
reading public. The reader was exposed to a new life with every new novel as against the stories
of the Bible and other devotional books which remained the same. People preferred the novelty
of the story in each new novel so voraciously devoured every new title as topical issues became
the subject matter of the novel.
Also the novelists shifted their foci from the isolated hero of the romantic fiction of the
Medieval Ages to the early novel in which the story was driven by plot. The individual hero is
still preset as portrayed in the novels Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa but
the plot is different from the old romantic fiction as the novel presented more realistic
individuals and incidents.

The Printing Press

The invention of printing complemented the invention of the paper in the acceleration of the
growth of English literature. Printing aided the creation of a medium of comparatively cheap
entertainment and knowledge through the chapbooks which appeared in the 17th and 18th

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century. The chapbooks presented a more elegant production known as the belles letters, a
popular genre that transformed into an amalgamation of the poetry and fiction genres of literature
which gained popularity in late 18th century but the genres were separated in later centuries. The
statistics of the genres printed showed that prose fiction especially the novel was the highest and
continued to increase as “…the press output and the money made with fiction have risen
disproportionately since the 18th century” (Barnet et al, 1987,132).
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE
Discuss the role of printing press in the development of the English novel.
Literary Journals/Criticism
Literary journals provided the platform for literary reviews and criticism. This practice
influenced the growth of English literature positively in the course of the 18th century and
beyond. It created an opportunity for public discussion on the subject matter of the texts which
people were reading at a given period. It also aided the popularity of the novels which in turn
increased sales and circulation. This is not applicable to only the well-written novels because
even the low-rated novels sold too because people wanted to know why it was rated poorly.
Literary criticism published in newspapers and literary journals therefore helped to popularise or
bring down works and this in turn affected the circulation of such works. Journals like The
Spectator and The Tartler at the beginning of the 18th century pioneered literary criticism and
other literary journals emerged in the middle of the century and by the 1780s, the reception of
criticisms by the reading public became a new marketing platform for novels, and authors and
publishers recognised it as such. On the part of the authors, they became self-conscious and
wrote to satisfy the target audience while publishers ensured high quality production of some
literary texts. Consequently, literary criticism contributed to improved artistic quality and
originality of themes in English literatures.
Gradually the novel moved from a form of entertainment to text books with its introduction in
the curricula of secondary school and universities. This further enhanced the development
and rise of the novel. By the end of the 18th century, the public perception of the place of a
particular novel was no longer based on the taste of the aristocratic class or what was fashionable
to read but by the attention accorded it by literary criticism in the journals and other media.

WEEK 2: Introduction to Romantic Literature.

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Read page 1-10 of the JABU Course Material on English Literature: The Romantic Period for
the lecture of Week 2.

Romantic Literature is a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th
century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the
imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use
of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation
of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry
of older verse forms. In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or
criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the
isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors,
such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the
supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as something
unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today. The Romantic movement in
literature was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded by Realism. Some authors cite 16th-
century poet Isabella di Morra as an early precursor of Romantic literature. Her lyrics covering
themes of isolation and loneliness, which reflected the tragic events of her life, are considered
"an impressive prefigurement of Romanticism” differing from the Petrarchist fashion of the time
based on the philosophy of love. The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the
middle of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester
College) and his brother Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph
maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet
James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international
success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young
Walter Scott. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English. Both
Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier
literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work.
In English literature, the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the
group of poets including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord
Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the much older William Blake, followed later by the isolated
figure of John Clare; also such novelists as Walter Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley, and
the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with
many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the
movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the
poor in his native Lake District, or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in
his long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which showed the Gothic side of English
Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured. In the period when they were

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writing, the Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were
supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others.

The Nature of Romanticism

As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who 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. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of
1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of
Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers
thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s
affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another
heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth.
Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was
being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it
became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought
and personal feeling. 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. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an
Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual
distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject
matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity
was the criterion by which it was to be judged.
The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was
in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that
Alexander 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 poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,”
and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined 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. Another key
quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the
Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as
the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being.

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Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,”
but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of
this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on
dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this
last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the
restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was
often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type
was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man. 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.
Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject
matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly
Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and
inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the
language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to
that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory.
Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a
change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely
conventional language.

Characteristics Of Romanticism
Some of the main characteristics of Romantic literature include a focus on the writer or
narrator’s emotions and inner world; celebration of nature, beauty, and imagination; rejection of
industrialization, organized religion, rationalism, and social convention; idealization of women,
children, and rural life; inclusion of supernatural or mythological elements; interest in the past;
frequent use of personification; experimental use of language and verse forms, including blank
verse; and emphasis on individual experience of the "sublime."
Characteristics of the Romantic Age & Romantic Literature
1. Individuality/Democracy/Personal Freedom
2. Spiritual/Supernatural Elements
3. Nature as a Teacher

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 4. Interest in Past History/Ancient Greek and Roman Elements
5. Celebration of the Simple Life
6. Interest in the Rustic/Pastoral Life
7. Interest in Folk Traditions
8. Use of Common Language
9. Use of Common Subjects
10. One Sided/Opinionated
11. Idealized Women
12. Frequent Use of Personification
13. Examination of the Poet's Inner Feelings
Perspective
There is not much agreement about what the Romantic period is - what its dates are, what its
characteristics are. It falls anyway around the end of the 18th Century, and the limits I tend to
recognise are set by the Sturm & Drang movement in what was to become Germany from 1770,
and 1830. I see it as a reaction to the thrust of scientism in the 18th Century - a pause called in
the programme of limitless extension of Newtonian science.
A leading diagnosis of our present condition is that somehow human beings have set
themselves apart from nature, and it is this that leads to the dangerous ways we have of
exploiting the world about us. Understood properly, human beings are part of nature. If we
understood that we would understand that destroying the prairie or exterminating the wolf or
polluting the sea are all forms of self-mutilation. Insofar as we are part of Nature our well-being
is an aspect of the well-being of Nature as a whole. John Donne's famous lines refer most
obviously to the community of human beings to which he is urging we should all remember we
belong. But - it is said - there is a wider point to be made. As human beings we are parts not only
of the community of humanity but of the community which makes up nature as a whole. "We are
all One Life", in the words of Coleridge (quoted in M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp,
Oxford, 1953, [Link] is speaking in appreciation of the Hebrew poets - see Salinger in Blake to
Byron, p.189). So the bell tolls for us not only when a fellow human being dies but at the
destruction of any member of that vastly wider community which is Nature itself.
Introduction to Romanticism
The rhetoric here, which will be familiar, covers a range of views which differ quite seriously
from each other. At one pole the idea that human beings are part of nature is little more than a
reminder that 'he who shits on the path will find flies on his return', as the Yoruba proverb has it.

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In one sense such a reminder might be the most important thing to reiterate and amplify: Be
careful! Think of the medium and long term consequences of what you do! It only needs we
human beings to adjust our behaviour (including the behaviour of our states and corporations) in
the light of that admonition and the human-made threat to our survival would be removed. At the
other pole, the unity that is proposed to embrace in one Nature human beings on the one hand
and all that rich variety of things that are usually located in the 'environment' on the other is of a
more intellectually challenging character, and it is this that we shall now explore.
The most sustained development of the idea that "we are all one life" comes in
contemporary philosophy from a school of thought which calls itself 'deep ecology', associated
first and foremost with the name of Arne Naess. This school adds to the idea of unity the notion
of 'self-expression' as a goal: the unity that is Nature is motivated by a drive towards self-
expression. These concepts are not new, however, and it will I think be helpful to approach them
through an earlier movement of thought, namely the discontent, voiced towards the close of the
18th Century with what had become of 'science': the 'romantic' movement.
What you have in this movement is an attempt to reject the conception of the world and
of the human place in it that had been sponsored (as the Romantics saw it) by the pioneers of
Modern science (such as Bacon and Descartes) in the 17th Century and carried through as the
'Enlightenment' into the 18th C. .Part of the benefit to us of exploring Romantic thought is that it
gives us the occasion to review the mind-set it was reacting against - the mindset of the
Enlightenment. In spite of the best efforts of the Romantics, large elements of the Enlightenment
conception are part of our outlook today, and some of the critics of contemporary thought, the
proponents of deep ecology for example, may be regarded as renewing the Romantic critique.
The perspective of the Enlightenment was to regard Modern science in its earliest days as
having generated an unprecedented increase in knowledge in the fields of mathematics,
astronomy and physics, and as having the potential of generating the same kind of revolutionary
progress as it was applied elsewhere. The Enlightenment thinkers saw their age as one in which
Modern science, having been launched in spectacular fashion by the pioneers, was now
advancing towards maturity - advancing through its application to every field where knowledge
for human beings was held to be possible. The general attempt to apply science throughout the
entire domain of human knowledge is sometimes called the Enlightenment project. Towards the
end of the 18th Century, a reaction set in. It took the form not of the rejection of science, but of
the demand that science should reform. It is not clear that it got very far.. It sponsored new
concepts that became influential, and science certainly took a turn as the century turned.
(Foucault calls the turn a revolution indeed, one that rivalled the birth of Modern science in
significance) What is unclear is whether the new direction was one which the Romantics would
have welcomed.

Poetry

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 Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little
conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics
as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change
the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the
current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought.
His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in
which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in
the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the
visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the
outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the
age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in
contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be
realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and
to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive
figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his
contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and
then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas),
written from about 1796 to about 1807.
“Pity,” colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate
Gallery, London
“Pity,” colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate
Gallery, London
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York
Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and
Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the
imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the
fallen (or Urizenic) condition.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the
implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who 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. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on 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 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,

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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 “The 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,” Wordsworth’s 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 titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two
books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; 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” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant
English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The
poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well 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 devoted
himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious
Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier
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
collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive
descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798,
published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a
new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient
Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed
attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention
bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his
poetic output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which
first took shape as a verse 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 a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder
that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice

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themselves. 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, “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature,
and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own
right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the
failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency,
which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became
fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla
Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an
account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and
made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in
1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the
essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian
readers.
Other poets of the early Romantic period
In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by contrast,
was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the
Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The
Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle
Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly
remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of
Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819);
Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as
Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous
poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to
appear in 1808. His highly coloured narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his
satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant
woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical
Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805)
all contain notable work.
Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked
upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His originality is best
seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the
1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary

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life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems
Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own
time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the
Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”
George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his
diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier
Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of
the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his
collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers
of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to
poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of
the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.
The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in
a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their
experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early
under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical
essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion,
and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or
institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This
fervour burns throughout the early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The
Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself
at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his
grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where
his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most
characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the
reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an
underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behaviour evinced and
approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression
thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of
excitement and power.

John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his early
work, such as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. As the program
set out in his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows, however, Keats was determined to discipline
himself: even before February 1820, when he first began to cough blood, he may have known
that he had not long to live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish

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intensity. He experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published 1820), an
adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in its attempt to
reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same time a poem involved in contemporary
politics. His epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun
again and published posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of
imagery, but Keats soon found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he
called “other sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819,
Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes “To a Nightingale,” “On a
Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of
Keats’s achievement, showing what has been called “the disciplining of sensation into symbolic
meaning,” the complex themes being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb
letters show the full range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and
manner, was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics. Having
thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in
which he directed particular scorn at poets of sensibility and declared his own allegiance to
Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking
hero. His two longest poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24),
his masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and melancholy exile
among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of
amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was further mined in dramatic poems
such as Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he
is now remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in
which he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there
became a formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire on Southey, The Vision of Judgment
(1822).

WEEK 5: Industrial Revolution in English Literature

The Industrial Revolution in Literature

The rapid industrial growth that began in Great Britain during the middle of the
eighteenth century and extended into the United States for the next 150 years provided a wide
range of material for many nineteenth-century writers. The literature of the Industrial Revolution
includes essays, fiction, and poetry that respond to the enormous growth of technology as well as
the labor and demographic changes it fostered. Having observed the adoption of such new
technologies as the steam engine and the blast furnace, the Scottish intellectual Thomas Carlyle

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described this period as the "Mechanical Age," reflecting his belief that the machine was the
dominant symbol of his era, one representing a profound change in both the physical and mental
activities of his society. The Industrial Revolution figured prominently across a broad range of
literary genres. While social critics such as Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Henry
Adams examined the cultural changes that accompanied the machine, novelists ranging from
Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to Rebecca Harding Davis and Herman Melville provided
a realistic treatment of modern working conditions. Meanwhile, poets such as William
Wordsworth and Walt Whitman contemplated the artist's role in such a world.
During the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution in England, the literati, for the most
part, supported the new discoveries of science, often promoting their application in literary
reviews. By the close of the eighteenth century, however, the early romantics began to view the
emerging technology in a different light. In his Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of
Man (1795), Friedrich Schiller argued that the machine was a threat to individual freedom and a
destructive force on contemporary culture. Likewise, William Wordsworth, in his Preface to the
Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads" (1800), asserted that the rise of technology blunted the mind
"to a state of almost savage torpor." Carlyle's influential essay, "Signs of the Times" (1829), in
which he decried the encroachment of "mechanical genius" into the "internal and spiritual"
aspects of life, continued the critique of industrialism and set the stage for the social-problem
novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Dickens's realistic and ironic depictions of
industrial towns in Hard Times (1854), for example, underscored the deleterious affects of
urbanization on the working class. Works by Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë
sisters, and W. M. Thackeray also presented accurate accounts of the industrialism of Victorian
society.
The transfer of new technologies across the Atlantic also shaped the development of
literature in the United States. As in England, many of the initial responses welcomed the new
technology, finding it indispensable to the economic growth of the fledgling nation. Thomas
Jefferson, for instance, writing near the close of the eighteenth century, believed that the machine
would blend harmoniously into the open countryside of the American...

The Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century in Great Britain. It was only the first
stepping-stone to the modern economic growth that is still growing to this day. With this new
bustling economic power force Britain was able to become one of the strongest [Link] the
nation was changing so was the way that literature was written. The Industrial Revolution led to
a variety of new social concerns such as politics and economic issues. With the shift away from
nature toward this new mechanical world there came a need to remind the people of the natural
world. This is where Romanticism came into play; it was a way to bring back the urban society
that was slowly disappearing into cities.
Causes of the Industrial Revolution:

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  The Agricultural Revolution: Between 1750 and 1900 Europe’s population was
dramatically increasing, so it became necessary to change the way that food was being
produced, in order to make way for this change. The Enclosure Movement and the
Norfolk Crop Rotation were instilled before the Industrial Revolution;they were both
involved in the separation of land, and the latter dealt more with developing different
sections to plant different crops in order to reduce the draining of the land. The fact that
more land was being used and there weren’t enough workers it became necessary to
create power-driven machines to replace manual labor.
 Socioeconomic changes: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the European economy was
based on agriculture. From the aristocrats, to the farmers, they were linked by land and
crops. The wealthy land owners would rent land to the farmers who would in turn grow
and sell crops. This exchange was an enormous part of how the economy ran. With the
changes that came with the Industrial revolution, people began leaving their farms and
working in the cities. The new technologies forced people into the factories and a
capitalistic sense of living began. The revolution moved economic power away from the
aristocratic population and into the bourgeoisie (the middle class).
The working conditions in the factories during the Industrial Revolution were unsafe,
unsanitary and inhumane. The workers, men, women, and children alike, spent endless hours in
the factories working. The average hours of the work day were between 12 and 14, but this was
never set in stone. In “Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy”, Frank Forrest said about
the hours “In reality there were no regular hours, masters and managers did with us as they liked.
The clocks in the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night. Though this
was known amongst the hands, we were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry
a watch” (Forrest, 1950). The factory owners were in charge of feeding their workers, and this
was not a priority to them. Workers were ofter forced to eat while working, and dust and dirt
contaminated their food. The workers ate oat cakes for breakfast and dinner. They were rarely
given anything else, despite the long hours. Although the food was often unfit for consumption,
the workers ate it due to severe hunger.

When a society finds that it must become an industrialized one, to build factories bigger,
with higher production value, to replace the connection they had with Mother Nature with
machines, it is also expected that society’s authors and scholars will seek to define new
philosophical ideals. For example, while novelists like Charles Dickens warned society of the
consequences associated with abandoning human emotion and adopting the way of the machine
in novels like Hard Times, poets like William Wordsworth wondered where the introspective
artist belongs in a time known as the “Mechanical Age.” Surely, just as the Watts steam engine
sought to redefine expectations of an industrialized society, the British literati searched for a new

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perspective inside Romanticism that would explain the switch between appreciation of man and
a newfound reliance on the machine.
The most intellectual scholars and authors of England expressed an early interest in the
rationality and preciseness of science. This quickly changed, however, when Romantics came to
view this evolution of machine as a threat to the individual (Gale). In “Preface to the Second
Edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads’”, Wordsworth proclaimed that as technology moves ever closer to
being at the forefront of culture, the mind is reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor.”
Similarly, Dickens’s Hard Times presented the reader with a very valid portrayal of industrial
towns that appear as wastelands inhabited by the working class

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WEEK 7: POETS
Other poets of the later period
John Clare, a Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early success with
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), and The
Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Both his reputation and his mental health collapsed in the late
1830s. He spent the later years of his life in an asylum in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there
was rediscovered in the 20th century. His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent
observation, his almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make
him one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose violent
imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the Jacobean dramatists, represents an
imagination at the opposite pole; metrical virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical passages
from his over-sensational tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously,
1850). Another minor writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was George Darley, some
of whose songs from Nepenthe (1835) keep their place in anthologies. The comic writer Thomas
Hood also wrote poems of social protest, such as “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The
Bridge of Sighs,” as well as the graceful Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827). Felicia
Hemans’s best-remembered poem, “Casabianca,” appeared in her volume The Forest Sanctuary
(1825). This was followed in 1828 by the more substantial Records of Woman.

WEEK 8: NOVELS
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
The death of Tobias Smollett in 1771 brought an end to the first great period of novel
writing in English. Not until the appearance of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and
Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814 would there again be works of prose fiction that ranked with
the masterpieces of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett.
It is possible to suggest practical reasons for this 40-year partial eclipse. The war with
France made paper expensive, causing publishers in the 1790s and early 1800s to prefer short,
dense forms, such as poetry. It might also be argued, in more broadly cultural terms, that the
comic and realistic qualities of the novel were at odds with the new sensibility of Romanticism.
But the problem was always one of quality rather than quantity. Flourishing as a form of
entertainment, the novel nevertheless underwent several important developments in this period.
One was the invention of the Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a politically engaged
fiction in the years immediately before the French Revolution. A third was the rise of women
writers to the prominence that they have held ever since in prose fiction.

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 The sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with Henry
Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and
Charles Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1798). Novels of this kind
were, however, increasingly mocked in the later years of the 18th century.
The comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way. John
Moore gave a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors in Zeluco (1786)
and Mordaunt (1800). Fanny Burney carried the comic realist manner into the field of female
experience with the novels Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796). Her discovery of
the comic and didactic potential of a plot charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the
altar would be important for several generations of female novelists.
More striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace
Walpole’s invention, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as the Gothic
novel. Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of “ancient romance” with the
realistic characterization of “modern” (or novel) romance. Characters would respond with terror
to extraordinary events, and readers would vicariously participate. Walpole’s innovation was not
significantly imitated until the 1790s, when—perhaps because the violence of the French
Revolution created a taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction—a torrent of such
works appeared.
The most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished between
“terror” and “horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of “uncertainty and obscurity.”
Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Radcliffe’s own novels, especially The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), were examples of the fiction of terror.
Vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be
illusions.
Matthew Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the hero
commits both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman’s imprisonment in a
vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of Gothic fiction have more-
sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a
novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a subtle study of religious mania and split personality.
Even in its more-vulgar examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious
political and psychological issues.
By the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the ideas of the
French Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the process. One practitioner
of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered for Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not
(1796), in which a “natural” hero rejects the conventions of contemporary society. The radical
Thomas Holcroft published two novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh
Trevor (1794), influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best

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example of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
(1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a narrative of social oppression.

Women novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such as

Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798), Elizabeth Inchbald
(Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796) celebrated the
rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Jane West (A Gossip’s Story, 1796; A
Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia Opie (Adeline Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-
Control, 1811) stressed the dangers of social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably
Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth, whose
long, varied, and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) to Helen
(1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent (1800), an affectionately comic portrait of
life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the subsequent work of Scott.
Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in novels that
incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into love stories that many
readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels—Sense and Sensibility (first published in
1811; originally titled “Elinor and Marianne”), Pride and Prejudice (1813; originally “First
Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817)—were drafted in the
late 1790s. Three more novels—Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817,
together with Northanger Abbey)—were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen uses,
essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected heroine is gradually
acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously looked down on her (such as
Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-
deceived heroine (such as Emma Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and
Prejudice) belatedly recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she
had previously despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a powerful
case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism, and rationality to
the new “Romantic” values of imagination, egotism, and subjectivity. With Austen the comic
brilliance and exquisite narrative construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in
conjunction with a distinctive and deadly irony.
Thomas Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate knowledge of
Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic debates rather than
conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare Abbey (1818)
are sharp accounts of contemporary intellectual and cultural fashions, as are the two much later
fictions in which Peacock reused this successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll
Grange (1860–61).
Sir Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a Romantic
novelist. After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose fiction in 1814 with the first

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of the “Waverley novels.” In the first phase of his work as a novelist, Scott wrote about the
Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into
the modern world in a series of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815),
The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with Ivanhoe in 1819,
Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with Quentin Durward in 1823, he added
European settings to his historical repertoire. Scott combines a capacity for comic social
observation with a Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the
novel in ways that equip it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.

Discursive prose
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important
early statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.

Title page of the 1792 American edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. The facing page contains an
inscription by woman suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Title page of the 1792 American edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. The facing page contains an
inscription by woman suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C.
20540 USA
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humour of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to

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the new interest in writing about the self, producing a colourful account of his early experiences
in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift
of evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail
Coach” and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the
Victorian Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its
best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to
appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review
(begun 1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling picture,
in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.

WEEK 9 Drama

This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theatres created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.

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 By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the
most important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s
Seduction (1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity,
tragicomic plot, and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft
translated the latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to
intensify the emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-
class audiences of the “illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s
The Castle Spectre (first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were
theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac
Pocock, The Miller and His Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed
Susan, 1829), domestic melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial
melodramas (John Walker, The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form
would gradually help to revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would
persist in the films and television of a later period.

Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theatre (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.

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TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
THE SCARLET LETTER
Plot Overview
SUMMARY PLOT OVERVIEW
The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written. The
nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the
customhouse’s attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was
bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an “A.” The manuscript,
the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred years before the
narrator’s time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write a fictional account
of the events recorded in the manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final product.
The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, then a Puritan settlement. A young
woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms
and the scarlet letter “A” on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester
is being punished for adultery. Hester’s husband, a scholar much older than she is, sent her ahead
to America, but he never arrived in Boston. The consensus is that he has been lost at sea. While
waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth to a child.
She will not reveal her lover’s identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with her public
shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. On this day Hester is led to the town
scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refuses to identify her child’s father.

The elderly onlooker is Hester’s missing husband, who is now practicing medicine and
calling himself Roger Chillingworth. He settles in Boston, intent on revenge. He reveals his true
identity to no one but Hester, whom he has sworn to secrecy. Several years pass. Hester supports
herself by working as a seamstress, and Pearl grows into a willful, impish child. Shunned by the
community, they live in a small cottage on the outskirts of Boston. Community officials attempt
to take Pearl away from Hester, but, with the help of Arthur Dimmesdale, a young and eloquent
minister, the mother and daughter manage to stay together. Dimmesdale, however, appears to be
wasting away and suffers from mysterious heart trouble, seemingly caused by psychological
distress. Chillingworth attaches himself to the ailing minister and eventually moves in with him
so that he can provide his patient with round-the-clock care. Chillingworth also suspects that
there may be a connection between the minister’s torments and Hester’s secret, and he begins to

36
test Dimmesdale to see what he can learn. One afternoon, while the minister sleeps,
Chillingworth discovers a mark on the man’s breast (the details of which are kept from the
reader), which convinces him that his suspicions are correct.

Dimmesdale’s psychological anguish deepens, and he invents new tortures for himself. In the
meantime, Hester’s charitable deeds and quiet humility have earned her a reprieve from the scorn
of the community. One night, when Pearl is about seven years old, she and her mother are
returning home from a visit to a deathbed when they encounter Dimmesdale atop the town
scaffold, trying to punish himself for his sins. Hester and Pearl join him, and the three link hands.
Dimmesdale refuses Pearl’s request that he acknowledge her publicly the next day, and a meteor
marks a dull red “A” in the night sky. Hester can see that the minister’s condition is worsening,
and she resolves to intervene. She goes to Chillingworth and asks him to stop adding to
Dimmesdale’s self-torment. Chillingworth refuses. Hester arranges an encounter with
Dimmesdale in the forest because she is aware that Chillingworth has probably guessed that she
plans to reveal his identity to Dimmesdale. The former lovers decide to flee to Europe, where
they can live with Pearl as a family. They will take a ship sailing from Boston in four days. Both
feel a sense of release, and Hester removes her scarlet letter and lets down her hair. Pearl,
playing nearby, does not recognize her mother without the letter. The day before the ship is to
sail, the townspeople gather for a holiday and Dimmesdale preaches his most eloquent sermon
ever. Meanwhile, Hester has learned that Chillingworth knows of their plan and has booked
passage on the same ship. Dimmesdale, leaving the church after his sermon, sees Hester and
Pearl standing before the town scaffold. He impulsively mounts the scaffold with his lover and
his daughter, and confesses publicly, exposing a scarlet letter seared into the flesh of his chest.
He falls dead, as Pearl kisses him.

Frustrated in his revenge, Chillingworth dies a year later. Hester and Pearl leave Boston,
and no one knows what has happened to them. Many years later, Hester returns alone, still
wearing the scarlet letter, to live in her old cottage and resume her charitable work. She receives
occasional letters from Pearl, who has married a European aristocrat and established a family of
her own. When Hester dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale. The two share a single tombstone,
which bears a scarlet “A.”

Plot analysis
MAIN IDEAS PLOT ANALYSIS
The Scarlet Letter is a novel about what happens to a strict, tight-knit community when one of its
members commits a societal taboo, and how shame functions in both the public and private

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realms of life. In telling the story of the adulterous but virtuous Hester Prynne; her weak,
tormented lover Dimmesdale; and her vengeance-minded husband, Chillingworth, Hawthorne
explores ideas about the individual versus the group and the nature of sin. A first-person,
introductory chapter, written two hundred years after the events of the novel, indicate that the
story will explore attitudes and beliefs that have evolved since the time the story’s set. The next
chapter introduces the main character, Hester, emerging from the prison wearing a dress marked
with a scarlet letter “A,” and carrying her baby, Pearl. By opening the action of the book after
Hester and Dimmesdale’s infidelity has already taken place, Hawthorne establishes the themes of
the book as sin, guilt, and remorse, rather than forbidden passion.
After introducing Hester as the book’s protagonist, Hawthorne incites the central conflict
of the book by bringing Hester in direct contact with her antagonist, Chillingworth, the husband
she has betrayed by committing adultery. Chillingworth vows to discover the identity of Pearl’s
father, acting as a proxy for the reader, who at this point is equally curious who Hester’s lover is
and why she is so dead-set on protecting him. As the reader comes to strongly suspect
Dimmesdale is the father, the tension increases, as the reader wonders if Chillingworth has made
the same realization, or if Dimmesdale will keep his secret. Dimmesdale, Hester, and
Chillingworth all keep their relationships to one another secret, so all three characters exist in
isolation within the community, although Hester is the only one who has been officially
banished. This dramatic irony, in which the reader knows each character’s secret motivations,
but the characters remain ignorant of each other’s true feelings, amplifies the tension as well.
As time passes, the conflict escalates with the growing friendship and dependence
between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. Chillingworth opens Dimmesdale’s shirt while he is
sleeping and sees a mark, convincing him Dimmesdale is Pearl’s father. Meanwhile, Hester lives
in seclusion with her daughter, becoming philosophical about the nature of her crime and the role
of women in society. In the book’s climactic scene, the forces of repression and secrecy directly
confront the human need for confession and forgiveness when Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale
on the scaffold in the middle of the night. But Dimmesdale admits he is too weak to publicly
reveal himself as Pearl’s father, and Hester realizes that Dimmesdale, though he has been able to
remain a member of society, has possibly suffered more than she has. Unlike Hester,
Dimmesdale has kept his sin a secret, and continues to wear one face in public and another in
private. Hester sees how Chillingworth has added to Dimmesdale’s torment, and questions
whether she is at fault for having concealed Chillingworth’s identity. Hester and Dimmesdale
meet in the woods, Hester reveals that Chillingworth is her husband, and the couple resolves to
run away together.

However, all does not go as planned for the couple, as Chillingworth learns of their plans
and conspires to follow them, assuring their guilt will remain active wherever they go. After
preaching a final sermon, Dimmesdale reveals his identity as Pearl’s father, exposes the mark on

38
his chest, and then dies, perhaps aware that his plan for a new beginning with Hester was always
doomed. Although in hounding Dimmesdale to death Chillingworth has achieved his revenge, he
is frustrated by Dimmesdale’s public revelation: “Thou hast he escaped me!” Chillingworth says,
as Dimmesdale dies. “May God forgive thee!” Dimmesdale replies, “Thou, too, hast deeply
sinned.” This statement suggests that Chillingworth’s cold-hearted pursuit of vengeance, and, by
extension, the town’s thirst to punish Hester, are equal if not greater sins to Hester and
Dimmesdale’s adultery. After Dimmesdale’s death, Hester leaves the community, but returns for
unknown reasons and chooses to life out her life in quiet seclusion, wearing her scarlet A by
choice and acting as a confessor to other women who have violated societal norms.

Themes
MAIN IDEAS THEMES
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Sin, Knowledge, and the Human Condition
Sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible begins with the story of
Adam and Eve, who were expelled from the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. As a result of their knowledge, Adam and Eve are made aware of
their humanness, that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures. Once
expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to toil and to procreate—two “labors” that
seem to define the human condition. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story
of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results
in knowledge—specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet
letter functions as “her passport into regions where other women dared not tread,” leading her to
“speculate” about her society and herself more “boldly” than anyone else in New England. As
for Dimmesdale, the “burden” of his sin gives him “sympathies so intimate with the sinful
brotherhood of mankind, so that his heart vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.” His eloquent and
powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. Hester and Dimmesdale contemplate their
own sinfulness on a daily basis and try to reconcile it with their lived experiences. The Puritan
elders, on the other hand, insist on seeing earthly experience as merely an obstacle on the path to
heaven. Thus, they view sin as a threat to the community that should be punished and
suppressed. Their answer to Hester’s sin is to ostracize her. Yet, Puritan society is stagnant,
while Hester and Dimmesdale’s experience shows that a state of sinfulness can lead to personal
growth, sympathy, and understanding of others. Paradoxically, these qualities are shown to be
incompatible with a state of purity.

The Nature of Evil

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The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man,” the embodiment of
evil. Over the course of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated with Dimmesdale,
Chillingworth, and Mistress Hibbins, and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil’s child.
The characters also try to root out the causes of evil: did Chillingworth’s selfishness in marrying
Hester force her to the “evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms? Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s
deed responsible for Chillingworth’s transformation into a malevolent being? This confusion
over the nature and causes of evil reveals the problems with the Puritan conception of sin. The
book argues that true evil arises from the close relationship between hate and love. As the
narrator points out in the novel’s concluding chapter, both emotions depend upon “a high degree
of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent . . . upon another.” Evil
is not found in Hester and Dimmesdale’s lovemaking, nor even in the cruel ignorance of the
Puritan fathers. Evil, in its most poisonous form, is found in the carefully plotted and precisely
aimed revenge of Chillingworth, whose love has been perverted. Perhaps Pearl is not entirely
wrong when she thinks Dimmesdale is the “Black Man,” because her father, too, has perverted
his love. Dimmesdale, who should love Pearl, will not even publicly acknowledge her. His cruel
denial of love to his own child may be seen as further perpetrating evil.

Identity and Society

After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of
humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically
imprisoned, and leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet
letter and resume a normal life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingworth tells
her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behavior is
premised on her desire to determine her own identity rather than to allow others to determine it
for her. To her, running away or removing the letter would be an acknowledgment of society’s
power over her: she would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from
which she desires to escape. Instead, Hester stays, refiguring the scarlet letter as a symbol of her
own experiences and character. Her past sin is a part of who she is; to pretend that it never
happened would mean denying a part of herself. Thus, Hester very determinedly integrates her
sin into her life.
Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the community’s
minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for Chillingworth, those around the
minister willfully ignore his obvious anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately,
Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the truth of what Hester has learned: that individuality and
strength are gained by quiet self-assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a rejection, of one’s
assigned identity.

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Female Independence
Hawthorne explores the theme of female independence by showing how Hester boldly makes her
own decisions and is able to take care of herself. Before the novel even begins, Hester has
already violated social expectations by following her heart and choosing to have sex with a man
she is not married to; she will later justify this decision by explaining to Dimmesdale that “What
we did had a consecration of its own.” Because Hester is cast out of the community, she is
liberated from many of the traditional expectations for a woman to be docile and submissive. She
also has practical responsibilities that force her to be independent: she has to earn a living so that
she and her daughter can survive, and she also has to raise a headstrong child as a single parent.
These unusual circumstances make Hester comfortable standing up for herself, such as when she
violently objects to Governor Bellingham trying to take Pearl away.
The novel suggests Hester’s independence comes at a price. The narrator seems
sympathetic to Hester’s vision of a brighter future where “a new truth would be revealed, in
order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual
happiness.” However, the narrator also makes the point that because Hester has been living
outside of social conventions, she seems to have lost touch with key ethical principles: “she had
wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness.” The novel also ends with Hester
returning to the community to live a humble life, and voluntarily choosing to start wearing the
scarlet letter again, both of which suggest that by the end of the novel she has abandoned some
of her independent and free-thinking ways. The descriptions of Pearl also suggest that female
independence is antithetical to happiness. The narrator says no one knew if Pearl’s “wild, rich
nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness,”
implying that only by forfeiting her independent spirit could Pearl be truly content.

CHARACTERS/ CHARACTER LIST

Hester Prynne - Hester is the book’s protagonist and the wearer of the scarlet letter that gives
the book its title. The letter, a patch of fabric in the shape of an “A,” signifies that Hester is an
“adulterer.” As a young woman, Hester married an elderly scholar, Chillingworth, who sent her
ahead to America to live but never followed her. While waiting for him, she had an affair with a
Puritan minister named Dimmesdale, after which she gave birth to Pearl. Hester is passionate but
also strong—she endures years of shame and scorn. She equals both her husband and her lover in
her intelligence and thoughtfulness. Her alienation puts her in the position to make acute
observations about her community, particularly about its treatment of women.

Pearl - Hester’s illegitimate daughter Pearl is a young girl with a moody, mischievous spirit and
an ability to perceive things that others do not. For example, she quickly discerns the truth about
her mother and Dimmesdale. The townspeople say that she barely seems human and spread

41
rumors that her unknown father is actually the Devil. She is wise far beyond her years, frequently
engaging in ironic play having to do with her mother’s scarlet letter.

Roger Chillingworth - “Roger Chillingworth” is actually Hester’s husband in disguise. He is

much older than she is and had sent her to America while he settled his affairs in Europe.
Because he is captured by Native Americans, he arrives in Boston belatedly and finds Hester and
her illegitimate child being displayed on the scaffold. He lusts for revenge, and thus decides to
stay in Boston despite his wife’s betrayal and disgrace. He is a scholar and uses his knowledge to
disguise himself as a doctor, intent on discovering and tormenting Hester’s anonymous lover.
Chillingworth is self-absorbed and both physically and psychologically monstrous. His single-
minded pursuit of retribution reveals him to be the most malevolent character in the novel.
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale - Dimmesdale is a young man who achieved fame in England
as a theologian and then emigrated to America. In a moment of weakness, he and Hester became
lovers. Although he will not confess it publicly, he is the father of her child. He deals with his
guilt by tormenting himself physically and psychologically, developing a heart condition as a
result. Dimmesdale is an intelligent and emotional man, and his sermons are thus masterpieces of
eloquence and persuasiveness. His commitments to his congregation are in constant conflict with
his feelings of sinfulness and need to confess.
Governor Bellingham - Governor Bellingham is a wealthy, elderly gentleman who spends
much of his time consulting with the other town fathers. Despite his role as governor of a
fledgling American society, he very much resembles a traditional English aristocrat. Bellingham
tends to strictly adhere to the rules, but he is easily swayed by Dimmesdale’s eloquence. He
remains blind to the misbehaviors taking place in his own house: his sister, Mistress Hibbins, is a
witch.
Mistress Hibbins - Mistress Hibbins is a widow who lives with her brother, Governor
Bellingham, in a luxurious mansion. She is commonly known to be a witch who ventures into the
forest at night to ride with the “Black Man.” Her appearances at public occasions remind the
reader of the hypocrisy and hidden evil in Puritan society.
Reverend Mr. John Wilson - Boston’s elder clergyman, Reverend Wilson is scholarly yet
grandfatherly. He is a stereotypical Puritan father, a literary version of the stiff, starkly painted
portraits of American patriarchs. Like Governor Bellingham, Wilson follows the community’s
rules strictly but can be swayed by Dimmesdale’s eloquence. Unlike Dimmesdale, his junior
colleague, Wilson preaches hellfire and damnation and advocates harsh punishment of sinners.
Narrator - The unnamed narrator works as the surveyor of the Salem Custom-House some two
hundred years after the novel’s events take place. He discovers an old manuscript in the
building’s attic that tells the story of Hester Prynne; when he loses his job, he decides to write a
fictional treatment of the narrative. The narrator is a rather high-strung man, whose Puritan

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ancestry makes him feel guilty about his writing career. He writes because he is interested in
American history and because he believes that America needs to better understand its religious
and moral heritage.

The Scarlet Letter Summary

Hester is being led to the scaffold, where she is to be publicly shamed for having committed
adultery. Hester is forced to wear the letter A on her gown at all times. She has stitched a large
scarlet A onto her dress with gold thread, giving the letter an air of elegance. Hester carries Pearl,
her daughter, with her. On the scaffold she is asked to reveal the name of Pearl's father, but she
refuses. In the crowd Hester recognizes her husband from Amsterdam, Roger Chillingworth.
Chillingworth visits Hester after she is returned to the prison. He tells her that he will find out
who the man was, and he will read the truth on the man's heart. Chillingworth then forces her to
promise never to reveal his true identity as her cuckolded husband. Hester moves into a cottage
bordering the woods. She and Pearl live there in relative solitude. Hester earns her money by
doing stitchwork for local dignitaries, but she often spends her time helping the poor and sick.
Pearl grows up to be wild, even refusing to obey her mother.
Roger Chillingworth earns a reputation as a good physician. He uses his reputation to get
transferred into the same home as Arthur Dimmesdale, an ailing minister. Chillingworth
eventually discovers that Dimmesdale is the true father of Pearl, at which point he spends every
moment trying to torment the minister. One night Dimmesdale is so overcome with shame about
hiding his secret that he walks to the scaffold where Hester was publicly humiliated. He stands
on the scaffold and imagines the whole town watching him with a letter emblazoned on his chest.
While standing there, Hester and Pearl arrive. He asks them to stand with him, which they do.
Pearl then asks him to stand with her the next day at noon.
When a meteor illuminates the three people standing on the scaffold, they see Roger
Chillingworth watching them. Dimmesdale tells Hester that he is terrified of Chillingworth, who
offers to take Dimmesdale home. Hester realizes that Chillingworth is slowly killing
Dimmesdale and that she has to help Dimmesdale. A few weeks later, Hester sees Chillingworth
picking herbs in the woods. She tells him that she is going to reveal the fact that he is her
husband to Dimmesdale. He tells her that Providence is now in charge of their fates, and she may
do as she sees fit. Hester takes Pearl into the woods, where they wait for Dimmesdale to arrive.
He is surprised to see them, but he confesses to Hester that he is desperate for a friend who
knows his secret. She comforts him and tells him Chillingworth's true identity. He is furious but
finally agrees that they should run away together. He returns to town with more energy than he
has ever shown before.
Hester finds a ship that will carry all three of them, and it works out that the ship is due to
sail the day after Dimmesdale gives his Election Sermon. But on the day of the sermon,

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Chillingworth persuades the ship's captain to take him on board as well. Hester does not know
how to get out of this dilemma. Dimmesdale gives his Election Sermon, and it receives the
highest accolades of any preaching he has ever performed. He then unexpectedly walks to the
scaffold and stands on it, in full view of the gathered masses. Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl
to come to him. Chillingworth tries to stop him, but Dimmesdale laughs and tells him that he
cannot win. Hester and Pearl join Dimmesdale on the scaffold. Dimmesdale then tells the people
that he is also a sinner like Hester, and that he should have assumed his rightful place by her side
over seven years earlier. He then rips open his shirt to reveal a scarlet letter on his flesh.
Dimmesdale falls to his knees and dies on the scaffold.
Hester and Pearl leave the town for a while, and several years later Hester returns. No one
hears from Pearl again, but it is assumed that she has gotten married and has had children in
Europe. Hester never removes her scarlet letter, and when she passes away she is buried in the
site of King's Chapel.

The Scarlet Letter Themes

Public Guilt vs. Private Guilt
Perhaps the foremost purpose of The Scarlet Letter is to illustrate the difference between
shaming someone in public and allowing him or her to suffer the consequences of an unjust act
privately. According to the legal statutes at the time and the prevailing sentiment of keeping in
accordance with a strict interpretation of the Bible, adultery was a capital sin that required the
execution of both adulterer and adulteress--or at the very least, severe public corporal
punishment. Indeed, even if the husband wanted to keep his wife alive after she committed
adultery, the law insisted that she would have to die for it. It is in this environment that Hester
commits adultery with Dimmesdale, but we come to see that the public shaming cannot begin to
account for all the complexities of the illicit relationship--or the context of it. What Hawthorne
sets out to portray, then, is how the private thoughts, the private torture and guilt and emotional
destruction of the people involved in the affair, are more than enough punishment for the crime.
We wonder whether the state or society has any right to impose law in private matters between
citizens. Does adultery really have no impact upon the lives of others? If not, it should not be
seen as a crime against the village. A more charitable reading of the Bible would come later in
reflections on the New Testament interpretation of adultery law, namely, that the public need not
step in to punish a crime when we ourselves have our own sins to be judged. Each person suffers
enough already for his or her own sins.
Punishment vs. Forgiveness
One of the more compelling themes of the novel is embodied by Chillingworth, who seems the
arbiter of moral judgment in the story, since Dimmesdale--the minister and the supposed
purveyor of righteousness--is himself tainted as a party to the crime. Chillingworth is

44
surprisingly forgiving of Hester's crime. We sense that he understands why she would forsake
him. After all, he is deformed, he is older, he has not been nearby, while she is beautiful and
passionate. Indeed, we get the feeling that Chillingworth's self-loathing allows him to forgive
Hester, but this attribute also increases the relentlessness and rage with which he goes after
Dimmesdale. In Dimmesdale, he sees the vigor and passion which Hester desires and which he
himself does not possess. Like a leech, he's out to suck Dimmesdale of his life force, not just to
punish the minister for the crime of fornicating with his wife, but also to symbolically
appropriate Dimmesdale's virility. And as the novel continues, Chillingworth seems to grow
stronger while Dimmesdale seems to weaken. That pattern continues until Dimmesdale dies in an
act of defiance, his public demonstration of guilt, which essentially leaves Chillingworth stripped
bare of his power to punish or forgive.

The Scarlet Letter

The scarlet letter is symbolic in a number of different ways, but perhaps most in the ways that
the sinners choose to wear it. Hawthorne's generative image for the novel was that of a woman
charged with adultery and forced to wear the letter A upon her clothes, but upon wearing it,
decided to add fancy embroidery as if to appropriate the letter as a point of pride. Hawthorne
read about this choice in an actual case in 1844, recorded it in his journal, and thus The Scarlet
Letter was born as Hester Prynne's story. Hester, a knitter by trade, sees the letter as a burden
laid on by society, an act of community-enforced guilt that she is forced to bear, even though it
seems to make little difference for her private thoughts. Dimmesdale, however, as the town
minister, wears his own scarlet A burned upon his flesh, since it is the community's rage he fears
the most. Thus we see the difference between a woman who has made peace with the crime,
publicly confesses, and endures the suffering the community imposes, and a man who imposes
his own punishment because he cannot bear to reveal the crime to the community.
Sin and Judgment
Hawthorne's novel consistently calls into question the notion of sin and what is necessary for
redemption. Is Hester's initial crime a sin? She married Chillingworth without quite
understanding the commitment she made, and then she had to live without him while he was
abroad, then fell in love with Dimmesdale--perhaps discovering the feeling for the first time. Is
the sin, then, committing adultery with Dimmesdale and breaking her vow and commitment, or
is the sin first marrying Chillingworth without thinking it through? And what is Chillingworth's
sin? Essentially abandoning his wife for so long upon their marriage, or failing to forgive her
once he knew of the crime? Is Dimmesdale's sin his adultery or his hypocritical failure to change
his sermon themes after the fact? Or are all of these things sins of different degrees? For each
kind of sin, we wonder if the punishment fits the crime and what must be done, if anything, to
redeem the sinner in the eyes of society as well as in the eyes of the sinner himself or herself. We
also should remember that what the Puritans thought of as sin was different from what went for

45
sin in Hawthorne's time, both being different from what many Christians think of as sin today.
This should not teach us moral relativism, but it should encourage us to be wary of judging
others.
Civilization vs. Wilderness
Pearl embodies the theme of wilderness over against civilization. After all, she is a kind of
embodiment of the scarlet letter: wild, passionate, and completely oblivious to the rules, mores,
and legal statutes of the time. Pearl is innocence, in a way, an individualistic passionate
innocence. So long as Dimmesdale is alive, Pearl seems to be a magnet that attracts Hester and
Dimmesdale, almost demanding their reconciliation or some sort of energetic reconciliation. But
as soon as Dimmesdale dies, Pearl seems to lose her vigor and becomes a normal girl, able to
marry and assimilate into society. The implication is thus that Pearl truly was a child of lust or
love, a product of activity outside the boundaries imposed by strict Puritan society. Once the
flame of love is extinguished, she can properly assimilate.

The Town vs. the Woods

In the town, Hester usually is confronted with the legal and moral consequences of her crime.
Governor Bellingham comes to take her child away, Chillingworth reminds her of her deed, and
she faces Dimmesdale in the context of sinner (his reputation remains untarnished despite his
role in the affair). But whenever Hester leaves the town and enters the woods, a traditional
symbol of unbridled passion without boundaries, she is free to rediscover herself. The woods
also traditionally emblematize darkness. In the darkness of night, Hester is free to meet
Dimmesdale, to confess her misgivings, and to live apart from the torment and burdens of the
guilt enforced by the community. Dimmesdale too is free at night to expose his guilt on the
scaffold and reconcile with Hester.
Memories vs. the Present
Hester Prynne's offense against society occurred seven years earlier, but she remains punished
for it. Hester learned to forgive herself for her adultery, but society continues to scorn her for it.
(One might remember Jean Valjean's permanent identity as criminal after a single minor crime in
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.) Indeed, Hester reaches peace with her affair and in that peace
comes to see the town as insufficiently forgiving in its thoughts and attitudes. Pearl is enough of
a reminder of the wild choices in her past, and as Pearl grows up, Hester continues to live in the
present rather than in the past. Reverend Dimmesdale, meanwhile, is haunted in the present by
sins past and seems to reflect (along with Chillingworth) the town's tendency to punish long after
the offense. In suppressing his own confession, Dimmesdale remains focused on coming to terms
with a sinful past instead of looking squarely at the problems of the present.

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She Walks in Beauty
George Gordon Byron - 1788-1824
I.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
II.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
III.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

George Gordon, Lord Byron And A Summary of She Walks In Beauty

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She Walks In Beauty is a lyrical, rhyming poem that focuses on female beauty and explores the
idea that physical appearance depends upon inner goodness and, if in harmony, can result in the
romantic ideal of aesthetic perfection. Often labelled a love poem, there is no direct mention of
love and no suggestion of romance between speaker and subject. Clearly there is deep affection
shown, an artist's admiration for a female figure who is perhaps more of a symbol of purity and
innocence.
In the real life of George Gordon, Lord Byron, 'mad, bad and dangerous to know', it is
known that he did attend a party in London on June 11th, 1814 and met a distant cousin of his,
Anne Beatrix Horton, Lady Wilmot, who happened to be dressed in black mourning dress with
shiny spangles. Byron's friend, James Wedderburn Webster, confirmed later on that Lady
Wilmot, young and pale and pretty, had been the inspiration for the poem. So, it seems that the
handsome, witty, passionate poet, known for his drinking and sexual encounters, was simply
struck by a beautiful woman on this occasion.
Byron did include She Walks In Beauty in his book Hebrew Songs of 1815, a collection
of lyrical poems to be put to music. Hence the steady metrical beat, use of religious language and
long vowels.
Whilst the poem is clearly fixated on a female figure and her outward appearance there is
also acknowledgement of an inner spiritual core, where pure thoughts and emotions lie.
Modern day feminists focus on the objectification of the woman and are critical of it,
understandably, but perhaps they should think about the speaker sensing the goodness emanating
from this woman, the moral foundation her beauty is built on.
It's not unreasonable to suggest that George Gordon, Byron, the restless, heroic celebrity
of his time, saw in Anne Wilmot the antithesis of his own soul, expressing purity and peace, two
qualities he recognised as absent in his.

Analysis of She Walks In Beauty - Stanza by Stanza

She Walks In Beauty is a flowing, musical lyric poem initially written as a song by Byron. It
explores the idea of a female's physical appearance being dependent on her inner psychical state.
First Stanza
That well known first line is simple enough yet also slightly mysterious because of that
preposition in which suggests the female figure's relationship to beauty is total.
The caesura midway through the line places special emphasis on that word beauty - the
reader has to pause at the comma - with the feminine ending to beauty contrasting with the
masculine night, the first of many opposites.

48
 And note that the enjambment, when the line continues into the next without punctuation,
is vital to maintaining the sense. The female is compared to the night of cloudless climes and
starry skies, a simile which needs both lines to work to full effect.
Lines three and four are similar in that line three is incomplete without line four, dark and
bright meet - again the duality persists.
The inversion of the iambic foot is important in line four because it reinforces the idea
that these opposites exist both outwardly and inwardly. For the reader the change from iamb to
trochee means that the stress comes on the first syllable - the word Meet - which alters the
rhythm of the line.
The eyes have long been called the windows of the soul so the speaker is suggesting that
her soul tends towards perfection (all that's best).
The last two lines, five and six, imply that the light of the night has the qualities of skin;
it can be touched (tender), and that she has developed a naturally relaxed, softened approach to
it. Daylight in comparison is vulgar and lacking (gaudy).
Note the religious reference - heaven - which hints at the divine.
Second Stanza
Nuances are apparent in this first line. If she gained or lost only a little of either the dark or light
her nameless grace (a second religious reference? as grace is elated to Christian ideals) would be
undermined.
The first line, split midway and ended by a comma, is an important focal point for it
reflects the delicacy of her being. Her natural grace moves from hair - waves in every raven tress
- to face which peacefully reflects her inner thoughts, which must be pure.
Note the repeated use of certain words and phrases, which underlines meaning.
The use of alliteration and internal rhyme brings musicality.
The use of opposites in a line emphasis the contrasts.
Third Stanza
Throughout this poem the concentration has been on the head, hair and face of the woman. This
theme continues in the final stanza as the speaker introduces cheek and brow and lips - she wins
people over with her glowing smile.
This focus on the positive physical attributes leads to the conclusion that morally she is
also faultless - her love is innocent - she spends her time doing good - suggestive of saintly
pursuits and behaviour.
She is content with her earthly existence, unsullied by life and untainted by love.

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She Walks In Beauty - Themes
There are three major themes:
Beauty
The romantic poets sought to idealise beauty by exploiting the emotions. The reactive feelings of
the speaker come to life when the woman walks past, her obvious outer beauty reliant on the
inner.
Harmony

Light and dark exist together in the psyche of this female, opposite qualities delicately balanced
but producing something extra.
Mind and Body
Purity of thought leads to the appearance of beauty, innocence and love combine resulting in fine
features
More Analysis of She Walks In Beauty - Rhyme and Metre
She Walks In Beauty is a rhyming poem of 3 equal stanzas, 18 lines in total.
Rhyme
All the end rhymes are full (except for brow/glow which is a near rhyme) and the rhyme scheme
is: ababab where alternate rhymes add to and complement the idea of balance and harmony.
For example: night/bright.
Metre (meter in American English)
The dominant metre throughout is iambic tetrameter, that is four feet per line each having one
unstressed syllable followed by one that is stressed. This steady rhythm produces a regular beat:
She walks / in beau / ty, like / the night
Of cloud / less climes / and star / ry skies;
However there is one line where a metrical inversion occurs. The iambic foot becomes trochaic,
the stressed syllable being first, the unstressed second:
Meet in / her as / pect and / her eyes;
This trochee draws attention to the fact that the two opposites (dark and bright) join forces in her
appearance.

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She Walks In Beauty - Antithesis
This poem has two lines which contain opposites (antithesis), for example:
And all that's best of dark and light (line 2)
One shade the more, one ray the less, (line 7)
This combining of opposites in a single line also allows a balance to be struck whilst
simultaneously implying that this finely tuned balance only exists because of the innate
competition between light and dark.

Beauty may be far more than skin deep but with just the slightest change, profound loss could
result.
She Walks In Beauty - Literary Devices
Alliteration
Words beginning with consonants when close together in a line bring texture and musicality. As
in:
Line 2 : Of cloudless climes and starry skies
Line 5 : Thus/that
Line 6 : day denies.
Line 8 : Had half
Line 9 : Which waves
Line 11 : serenely sweet
Line 12 : dear/dwelling-place.
Line 14 : So soft
Line 15 : The/that
Assonance
Words with vowels sounding alike or similar have an effect on musicality, especially those long
vowels.
Line 1 : like the night
Line 2 : climes/skies

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Line 7 : nameless/grace
Line 9 : waves/raven
Line 11 : serenely sweet
Line 14 : so/eloquent
Line 15 : win/tints
Line 16 : tell/spent

Sibilance
The letter s is prominent in lines two and eleven, creating special sounds.
Simile
The simile in lines two and three compares the female's beauty with that of the clear, starry night.

John Keats and A Summary of Ode On A Grecian Urn

Ode On A Grecian Urn focuses on art, beauty, truth and time and is one of Keats' five odes,
considered to be some of the best examples of romantic poetry. The four others are Ode To A
Nightingale, Ode to Psyche, Ode On Melancholy, To Autumn - all completed in a burst of
energy in 1819, two years before his death in Italy from consumption. The poem is an example
of ekphrasis, a Greek word meaning to describe a work of visual art in words.
What makes Ode To A Grecian Urn of particular importance is its exploration of the idea
that beautiful art transcends time and reality, that beauty is truth, interpreted through the poetic
imagination. But this ode also raises the perplexing question of art and its effect on the human
psyche. Humans can be deceived because art, although enduring, could be a false ideal, like the
notion of eternity.
In the end, the narrative - the speaker's approach to the urn - is turned on its head as the
urn voices its wisdom to the speaker (and the reader and all humanity)...."Beauty is truth, truth
beauty," Keats believed that spontaneous sensations of the heart held the truth, as opposed to the
dry, reasoning mind. In a letter to a friend Benjamin Bailey on 22 November 1817 he wrote:
What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I
have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of
essential Beauty -

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It's important to note that Keats likened the poetic imagination to a religious edifice. In another
letter to fellow poet Shelley he wrote:
My Imagination is a Monastry (sic) and I am its Monk.
This metaphorical approach to the artistic life of the imagination helped him create some of the
best known romantic poems of his time. In his letters to various friends and relatives he also
developed ideas relating to the role of the poet.
Out of these correspondences came Keats' famous term 'negative capability', (the opposite to
'consequitive reasoning'), whereby the poet's character is completely absent from the poem's
content.

In an earlier letter to his brothers George and Thomas in December 1817 he explained:
I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in Uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'
Some scholars think this means that the poet has to be receptive, passive, which allows the
imagination to do the work of the heart, transforming the initial feelings into poetry.
This is what John Keats lived for, to escape the confines of 'barren' reality by trusting in his
'sensations of the heart', letting go of the self, becoming a receptor, guided by passion and
spontaneous feeling. Of course, he still had to discipline himself and form a coherent poem out
of those initial stirrings.
Ode On A Grecian Urn was inspired by numerous visits of Keats to the British Museum in
london. There he studied ancient artefacts from Greece, including the Elgin Marbles, and was
enthused enough by his friend the artist Benjamin Haydon, to draw one of these antique vases.
Many researchers have sought for the one specific Greek urn described in the poem, but no one
has found it - it is thought that Keats used several sources for the various scenes, so creating an
ideal urn for the ode.

Theme of Ode On A Grecian Urn?

the idea that beauty in art is enduring and permanent and therefore true, as opposed to earthly
human nature which is transient and fades with time.
Ode On A Grecian Urn
Line By Line Analysis of Ode On A Grecian Urn - Stanza 1
Lines 1 - 4

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Here is the speaker addressing the urn, looking at the pictures and designs that decorate the
surface of this classically shaped vessel. Keats is known to have visited the British Museum
several times and took inspiration from Greek friezes and other exhibits.
No one can as yet pinpoint the one urn that so inspired the young poet but it is reasonable to
suggest that he used artistic licence and put together scenes from different artefacts to create an
ideal decorated urn.
The first line has that word still in it, but which meaning fits the sense? Is it an adverb or an
adjective? Is the unravished bride simply not moving or is she unchanged from her virgin state?
Probably the latter meaning is the best fit.
The first four lines contain personification - the unravished bride, the foster child and the Sylvan
historian. The bride is married to quietness, the child is that of the anonymous artist and time and
the historian has the gift of the tale-teller.
Lines 5 - 10
The following sestet has a total of seven searching questions, the speaker uncertain about the
figures being gods or mere mortals (changeless against perishable), and capable only of a reflex
questioning.
As these questions build up, a sense of excitement is sparked. Note the language - mad pursuit...
struggle to escape... wild ecstasy.
The classical rhyme scheme and full rhymes imply a tight-knit closeness - despite the ironical
fourth line which suggests that the quiet ancient urn outstrips poetry when it comes to telling
tales.
This first stanza ends up a bit of a puzzle for the reader because of all those questions but it sets
the scene - ancient Greece, in myth or reality - and perhaps supplies some of the answers.
Ode On A Grecian Urn - Stanza 2
Lines 11 - 14
These four lines relate to music and sound and contrast reality - the sounds that can be heard -
with the abstract - in this case the art on the side of the urn.
Again we have the duality, a comparison between life and art, and a judgement from the speaker
who, at this point in the ode, thinks the abstract melodies 'sweeter'. This is a recurring theme of
the ode and has its origins in the letters of Keats, who wrote:
'The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from
their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.'

54
The speaker addresses the pipes directly, suggesting they play to the spirit 'ditties' (short simple
songs) that cannot be heard. There's an inherent paradox - how can you play music that has no
sound? Well, it has to be imaginary music played to imaginary ears.
Lines 15 - 20
The sestet concentrates on the Fair youth and the speaker's reassurances that despite the
possibility of him never being able to kiss, he will love forever. There's some interesting
symbolism at play here:
the trees, which the youth stands beneath, represent nature.
the song, which the youth cannot leave, is a symbol of art and expression.
the lover, representing unrequited love and potential fertility.
In the end, there is no need for the youth to grieve (because he cannot consummate his love), the
consolation of living forever in art being enough to balance things out.
This second stanza, with its unusual syntax, slows the reader down with its many medial pauses
and focuses on the pros and cons of the real and the abstract.
Stanza 3 - Ode On A Grecian Urn
Lines 21 - 25
The happy stanza - with emphasis on the everlasting nature of the scenes depicted : the trees and
their boughs, the melodist (musician) who can never play a dud or old note. These lines reinforce
the idea of timelessness and sustained joy, carried along on a basic iambic rhythm:
Ah, hap / py, hap / py boughs! / that can / not shed
Your leaves, / nor ev / er bid / the Spring / adieu;
And, hap / py mel / odist, unwear / ied,
Forev / er pi / ping songs / forev / er new;
Lines 25 - 30
Keats uses the word happy six times in the first five lines and the word forever five times,
underlining the positive emotion the speaker invests in the immortal scenes before him. There is
no aging, there will be no seasonal shift; the figures on the urn are free of time, pain, sickness
and death - a theme repeated in Ode to a Nightingale for example - and are destined to stay
forever young.
There is a sexual element here, in lines 25 - 27, where the gods or men are lusting after
the females (maidens) ...Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,/Forever panting,..suggests that
physical love is in the air, suspended for all time.

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 The last three lines, 28 - 30, have caused much controversy over the years. Some believe
them to be a reflection of the state of the speaker, roused to excitement by the goings on on the
urn:
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
The speaker's heart is affected as he is drawn into the charged scene in front of him.
Or do these lines refer to the pictures on the urn themselves? The human passion exists in those
inhabiting the imagined world of the urn and they are subject to the physical effects of all this
wild ecstasy.

Ode On A Grecian Urn - Stanza 4

Lines 31 - 40
This stanza offers a new scene - townsfolk and a priest leading a heifer (female cow not yet
calved) to a sacrificial place. The whole stanza has a questioning tone, as if the speaker is not
quite certain of just who is behind this action.
The heifer is to be sacrificed and represents the flesh and blood of nature; the ritual is religious
(in a pagan sense?) and involves the whole of the community, a shared commitment to the gods.
The fact that everyone attends means that the town is emptied and it is this fact that prompts the
enquiry. The silence of the town matches the silence of the urn; the speaker voicing concern that
no one will be able to explain just why this has happened.
So the town is empty and will remain that way 'forevermore'; and the questions will never be
answered.
Again the iambic rhythms persist, the ten syllables per line a solid foundation (except for line 32
which has eleven)
Ode On A Grecian Urn - Stanza 5
Lines 41 - 50
This stanza deals initially with the urn itself - the Attic shape (classic vase shape from Attica, in
ancient Greece) and the woven pattern (brede) - but ends up with the situation flipped on its head
as the urn is given a voice with which to address the speaker (and all humanity)
In line 44, following a description of the urn itself, the speaker finally reveals something about
the effect the pictures and scenes have had on his mind. The conclusion is that the urn 'dost tease
us out of thought', that is, the urn is just like the notion of eternity...we humans can be deceived

56
by the idea of living forever, as the speaker has been deceived into thinking the scenes can last
forever.
The speaker states 'Cold Pastoral!' - in an accusatory manner. The urn is nothing but cold country
earth shaped so to attract but however it will prevail. When generations have passed, the urn will
persist and in this sense it is to be welcomed as a friend.
Lines 49 - 50
A big debate rages among scholars...in an actual manuscript written by John Keats' brother
George, the last two lines are in quotation marks which means that the urn speaks all of these
words to man (to humanity).
In the published copy only the words "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," are given over to the urn.
So which is correct?
Well, there is no definitive answer but it seems likely that both lines are the voice of urn.
Whatever the truth, the fact is that the five short words have become synonymous with the name
of John Keats and this ode.
Within the confines of the ode beauty may well be truth and vice versa but in real life humans
often seek a truth beyond art and the imagination, reaching for the realms of religious experience
and transcendence.
Keats' ode is a reminder of the age of romanticism and the idea that art could be the salvation of
humankind, an expression of deep spirituality. The ode explores Keats' notion of art being
forever beautiful, beyond the grasp of time and inevitable decay, unlike we humans, creatures of
flesh and blood, struggling with day to day reality.
What Are The Literary Devices Used in Ode On A Grecian Urn?
The literary devices used in Ode On A Grecian Urn include:
Alliteration
When two words close together in a line start with the similar sounding consonants, they are
alliterative, which adds texture and phonetic interest to the poem. For example:
silence and slow time.....leaf-fringed legend.....ye soft pipes, pay on....though thou hast not
thy....heart high-sorrowful....Lead'st thou that heifer lowing...Of marble men and maidens.
Assonance
When two words close together in a line have similar sounding vowels. Again, the sounds
combine to produce echo and resonance:
The second line is a classic:

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Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
As is line thirteen:
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Caesura
A caesura is a pause in a line caused usually by punctuation in a short or medium length line.
The reader has to pause for a fraction. In this poem, the second stanza has fifteen, which means
the rhythm is broken up, fragmented, so the reader is slowed down and the lines become quite
naturally more complex.
This line, 12, is a good example:
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Two semi-colons and two commas are effective and break up the natural flow.
Chiasmus
Is a device where two or more clauses are up-ended or flipped to produce an artistic effect with
regards meaning, as in line 49:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
Enjambment
When a line is not punctuated and runs on into the next it is said to be enjambed. It allows the
poem to flow in certain parts and challenges the reader to move swiftly on from one line to the
next with the meaning intact.
There are several lines with enjambment in Keats' ode, each stanza having at least one line. In
stanza four for example lines 38 and 39 flow on into the last:
And, little town, thy streets forevermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
Personification
The first three lines use personification, giving human attributes to the urn. So:
unravished bride (virgin bride 'married' to the urn's quietness)
foster child ( wrought from the earth by the Greek artist, long dead)
Sylvan historian (able to tell the ancient tale).

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The Metre (Meter in American English) of Ode On A Grecian Urn
Ode On A Grecian Urn has a basic iambic pentameter template but many lines are altered
metrically which helps vary the rhythm and also places special emphasis on certain words.
A good example is the first line. It has four iambic feet (daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM -
unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable) but the fifth foot is a pyrrhic, with two
unstressed syllables, which underlines the word quietness.
Thou still / unrav / ish'd bride / of qui / etness,
Thou fost / er-child / of si / lence and / slow time,
Sylvan / histo / rian, who canst / thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tem / pe or / the dales / of Ar / cady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad / pursuit? / What strug / gle to / escape?
What pipes / and tim / brels? What / wild ec / stasy?

And note the last line of this first stanza. The first and second feet are iambic, the remaining
three a pyrrhic, a spondee and a pyrrhic. That spondee is a double stress, a complete contrast to
the enveloping unstressed pyrrhics. This produces a loud bump and breaks up the steady beat of
the previous two lines.
Vocabulary Used in Ode On A Grecian Urn
Thou - you (the one being addressed) 2nd person singular pronoun
thus - result of
thy - your
Sylvan - pleasant rural/wooded environment; rustic.
ditties - simple songs.
timbrels - circular drum/percussion instrument
adieu - goodbye. (original is french 'to God')

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cloyed - causing distaste by being too sweet or sentimental.
heifer - a young cow not yet given birth to a calf.
Attic - pertaining to Attica, the region around Athens in ancient times.
brede - braid, woven pattern
What Is The Rhyme Scheme of Ode On A Grecian Urn?
Ode On A Grecian Urn has an unusual rhyme scheme because it changes in certain stanzas:
Stanzas 1 and 5 : ababcdedce
Stanza 2 : ababcdeced
Stanzas 3 and 4 : ababcdecde
which is a quatrain followed by two tercets or a sestet. The poem's layout is also geared to the
rhyme scheme, with some lines indented by one space or two:
a and c lines are unindented;
b and d lines are indented by one space;
e lines are indented by two spaces.

Easter Holidays (1787) (1780)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Hail! festal Easter that dost bring

Approach of sweetly-smiling spring,
When Nature's clad in green:
When feather'd songsters through the grove
With beasts confess the power of love
And brighten all the scene.
Now youths the breaking stages load
That swiftly rattling o'er the road
To Greenwich haste away:

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While some with sounding oars divide
Of smoothly-flowing Thames the tide
All sing the festive lay.
With mirthful dance they beat the ground,
Their shouts of joy the hills resound
And catch the jocund noise:
Without a tear, without a sigh
Their moments all in transports fly
Till evening ends their joys.
But little think their joyous hearts
Of dire Misfortune's varied smarts
Which youthful years conceal:
Thoughtless of bitter-smiling Woe
Which all mankind are born to know
And they themselves must feel.
Yet he who Wisdom's paths shall keep
And Virtue firm that scorns to weep
At ills in Fortune's power,
Through this life's variegated scene
In raging storms or calm serene
Shall cheerful spend the hour.
While steady Virtue guides his mind
Heav'n-born Content he still shall find
That never sheds a tear:
Without respect to any tide
His hours away in bliss shall glide
Like Easter all the year.

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Analysis
"Easter Holidays" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he wrote at age fifteen in 1787.
It is one of his earliest known poems and was included in a letter to his brother Luke. The poem
describes the joy of Easter but also warns of possible future sorrows after one loses his
innocence. The poem concludes with a Neoplatonic emphasis of virtue being able to conquer
suffering.
Background
"Easter Holidays", along with "Dura Navis" and "Nil Pejus est Caelibe Vita", is one of
Coleridge's earliest known poems. The poem was written in 1787 while Coleridge attended
Christ's Hospital, London. During his school days, he was a lonely child and was unable to spend
holidays with family like other boys at the school. This loneliness was broken with the arrival of
his brothers George and Luke in 1785, but returned when Luke moved to Devon. In a letter to
Luke on 12 May 1787, he expressed his feelings of loneliness. Included in the letter was his
poem, "Easter Holidays", which seeks to celebrate Easter. This was the first time Coleridge
included a poem with one of his letters.
— lines 16–24
The suffering comes from the youths' fall from innocence, but their innocence is also what kept
them from knowing that they will suffer. However, the poem ends with a message of hope:[6]
While steady Virtue guides his mind
Heav'n–born Content he still shall find
That never sheds a tear:
Without respect to any tide
His hours away in bliss shall glide
Like Easter all the year.
— lines 31–36
Themes
The themes of the poem were influenced by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who wrote the
Cato's Letters, a series of letters on religion, sin, and suffering under the pseudonym Cato. They
promoted the belief that suffering originated in vice, and that man is ever subject to passions that
cannot be controlled. This is connected to Coleridge experiencing both suffering and guilt over
what he described later as his loss of innocence. In "Easter Holidays", Coleridge describes the

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time of innocence as in the past although others that he attends school with are still joyful and
innocent.
However, discussion of beauty within "Easter Holiday", along with the hopeful
conclusion of the poem, reveals a further influence by Neoplatonistic works, especially Plotinus's
Enneads. Of Plotinus in particular, Coleridge derived his understanding of wisdom as the soul
being awakened to the knowledge of God and truth. As such, Coleridge responds to the ideas of
Trenchard and Gordon with a view that those who are virtuous are unaffected by suffering.
Instead, only those who are vicious in nature really suffer and that people are able to conquer
their fallen state.

A Lament
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—Oh, never more!

The poem, A Lament, was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lament means to grieve about
something. It’s unclear exactly what he is grieving. Is he grieving death or something he had
done? “On whose last steps I climb” would suggest that he is grieving the death of someone?

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However, he also states, “Where I had stood before”. A Lament is a poem consisting of two
stanzas of five lines in each. The poem is rhymed as AABAB. The poem is written in iambic
foot.
The poem, A Lament, by Shelley is another great short lyric, which consists of ten lines
only. The poem gives expression to a feeling of deep melancholy. Addressing the world, life, and
time, the poet asks when the glory of their prime will return, and he himself supplies the answer
which is: “No more – Oh, never more.” There is no joy left in this world, says the poet. The
changing seasons move his heart with grief but not with delight as they used to do in the past. All
joy seems to have departed from the world. Nor is there any hope that joy will return.

A Lament Analysis
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more—Oh, never more!
It is a deeply pessimistic poem, like many others by Shelley. There is not the least touch of hope
in the poem. It is a poem of unadulterated sadness which has a depressing effect upon the reader
also. While optimistic readers will revolt against the sentiment of this poem, those who are
naturally pessimistic will certainly respond to its mood and will even derive consolation from the
fact that they are reading the sentiments of a kindred spirit.
The poem may be regarded as a brief specimen of Shelley’s lyrical gift. It is simple in
language and sentiment, and has a musical appeal. It also comes with the quality of spontaneity.
It is an expression of Shelley‘s habitual mood of gloom and sadness, although in many other
poems Shelley, while lamenting the existence of misfortune and evil in the world, strikes a
hopeful note about the future, which is not the case here. It is bitter poem of real despair.
When the poet says: “When will return the glory of your prime?” he asks if the world,
life, and time will ever again get back the beauty and joy which once belonged to them. Thus, the
poet, by implications, refers to the ancient past glorious period. The present of mankind is,
according to him, a period of sadness and evil. The ancient glory of the world will never return.
Elsewhere in his poetry, of course, Shelley utters bright prophecies about the future of mankind.
Here he sees no ray of hope.
Out of the day and night

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A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—Oh, never more!
In the second stanza of the poem, when the poet says “Out of the day and night, A joy has
taken flight,” he talks about the joy which used to brighten the night as well as the day, but now
seems to have departed. Neither the day nor the night brings with it any joy for the poet.
Through the last three lines, when the poet says: Fresh spring, and summer, and winter
hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight, No more—Oh, never more!”, he means
that the changing seasons have lost their charm for the poet. Spring, with its beautiful fresh
flowers, summer, and winter with its snowfalls merely arouse feelings of sorrow in his heart.
They do not give rise to the feelings of delight, which he once used to experience.
Never more will those feelings of delight visit his heart which now throbs only faintly.
The poet feels utterly dispirited, dejected and disappointed with life. A great change seems to
him to have taken place in the world. And it seems he does not want to go with that great change.
This is the reason why he grieves over the past time he spent, and wishes that the gone moments
come again. But he might know that time and tide never comes again. Change is the rule of
nature. Everything on this earth is subject to change. The born thing is destined to decay.
Conclusion
In the poem, Lament, the poet is shown grieving over the past glory. In the entire poem, there is
no mention of anybody, but the past glory that has in today’s world lost its charm. Lamenting
over the lost glory, the poet says that gone are the days when Nature used to delight him with its
varied seasons. Today all these seasons are just spreading sadness. They too have changed with
the time.
There is a mood of longing and sadness in Lament. Shelley’s lyrics are surpassingly
sweet and musical. Indeed, his cries of pain are transformed into beauty and loveliness by the
sweet music which accompanies them. Even the most pessimistic of his lyrics produce in our
minds joy and delight because of their exquisite melody.
As a matter of fact, it is the sadness of these lyrics which makes them so sweetly
melodious. Many of his lyrics are ethereal. In other words, they have an abstract quality. They
seem to have been written by a man living not on earth but in the aerial regions above. There is
very little concreteness in his lyrics.
In all Shelley’s depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as Nature’s, and
not sooner exhaustible. He was well-regarded as the perfect singing-god.

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SUMMARY “THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US”
The World Is Too Much with Us
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;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

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

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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.

Analysis
MAIN IDEAS ANALYSIS
Wordsworth’s monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of important poems, varying in
length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude,
thirteen books long in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry,
and the language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent
throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself
in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in
the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were
then considered “poetic.” He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in
memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of
poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all
human sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native
dignity of man.”

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 Recovering “the naked and native dignity of man” makes up a significant part of
Wordsworth’s poetic project, and he follows his own advice from the 1802 preface.
Wordsworth’s style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms
and idioms of common English have changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many
of Wordsworth’s poems (including masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations
of Immortality” ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the
mind of the adult in particular, childhood’s lost connection with nature, which can be preserved
only in memory. Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism
(as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” in which the evening is described as
being “quiet as a nun”), and the relics of the poet’s rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows,
orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature.
Wordsworth’s poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and
pleasure above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave
expression to inchoate human emotion; his lyric “Strange fits of passion have I known,” in which
the speaker describes an inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have
been written by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward the
future, many of Wordsworth’s important works are preoccupied with the lost glory of the past—
not only of the lost dreams of childhood but also of the historical past, as in the powerful sonnet
“London, 1802,” in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John Milton to
teach the modern world a better way to live.
Themes
MAIN IDEAS THEMES
The Beneficial Influence of Nature
Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on the human
mind. All manifestations of the natural world—from the highest mountain to the simplest flower
—elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the people who observe these
manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature to an individual’s
intellectual and spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect
to both the spiritual and the social worlds. As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of
nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as “The World Is Too Much with Us”
(1807) and “London, 1802” (1807) people become selfish and immoral when they distance
themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate empathy and nobility of spirit
becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the squalor of city life. In
contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity
and nobility of their souls.
The Power of the Human Mind

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Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and imagination, individuals
could overcome difficulty and pain. For instance, the Speaker in “Lines Composed a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) relieves his loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech
gatherer in “Resolution and Independence” (1807) perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty
by the exertion of his own will. The transformative powers of the mind are available to all,
regardless of an individual’s class or background. This democratic view emphasizes individuality
and uniqueness. Throughout his work, Wordsworth showed strong support for the political,
religious, and artistic rights of the individual, including the power of his or her mind. In the 1802
preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained the relationship between the mind and poetry.
Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the raw emotion of
experience into poetry capable of giving pleasure. Later poems, such as “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” (1807), imagine nature as the source of the inspiring material that nourishes the
active, creative mind.
The Splendor of Childhood
In Wordsworth’s poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence. Children form
an intense bond with nature, so much so that they appear to be a part of the natural world, rather
than a part of the human, social world. Their relationship to nature is passionate and extreme:
children feel joy at seeing a rainbow but great terror at seeing desolation or decay. In 1799,
Wordsworth wrote several poems about a girl named Lucy who died at a young age. These
poems, including “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” (1800) and “Strange fits of passion
have I known” (1800), praise her beauty and lament her untimely death. In death, Lucy retains
the innocence and splendor of childhood, unlike the children who grow up, lose their connection
to nature, and lead unfulfilling lives. The speaker in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” believes
that children delight in nature because they have access to a divine, immortal world. As children
age and reach maturity, they lose this connection but gain an ability to feel emotions, both good
and bad. Through the power of the human mind, particularly memory, adults can recollect the
devoted connection to nature of their youth.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Parts I-IV

SUMMARY “THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER,” PARTS I-IV
Summary
Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when one of them is detained by a grizzled
old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily demands that the Mariner let go of him, and the
Mariner obeys. But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s “glittering eye” and can
do nothing but sit on a stone and listen to his strange tale. The Mariner says that he sailed on a
ship out of his native harbor—”below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the lighthouse top”—and
into a sunny and cheerful sea. Hearing bassoon music drifting from the direction of the wedding,

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the Wedding-Guest imagines that the bride has entered the hall, but he is still helpless to tear
himself from the Mariner’s story. The Mariner recalls that the voyage quickly darkened, as a
giant storm rose up in the sea and chased the ship southward. Quickly, the ship came to a frigid
land “of mist and snow,” where “ice, mast-high, came floating by”; the ship was hemmed inside
this maze of ice. But then the sailors encountered an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew
around the ship, the ice cracked and split, and a wind from the south propelled the ship out of the
frigid regions, into a foggy stretch of water. The Albatross followed behind it, a symbol of good
luck to the sailors. A pained look crosses the Mariner’s face, and the Wedding-Guest asks him,
“Why look’st thou so?” The Mariner confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his
crossbow.
At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner for having killed the bird that
made the breezes blow. But when the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors decided that the bird
had actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they now congratulated the Mariner on his deed.
The wind pushed the ship into a silent sea where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds
died down, and the ship was “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The ocean
thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the sea were rotting, slimy creatures crawled
out of it and walked across the surface. At night, the water burned green, blue, and white with
death fire. Some of the sailors dreamed that a spirit, nine fathoms deep, followed them beneath
the ship from the land of mist and snow. The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight and hung
the corpse of the Albatross around his neck like a cross.
A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their mouths so dry, that they were
unable to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner saw a tiny speck on the horizon. It
resolved into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and inform the other
sailors, the Mariner bit down on his arm; sucking the blood, he was able to moisten his tongue
enough to cry out, “A sail! a sail!” The sailors smiled, believing they were saved. But as the ship
neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew included two
figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale woman with
golden locks and red lips, and “thicks man’s blood with cold.” Death and Life-in-Death began to
throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon she whistled three times, causing the sun to sink to
the horizon, the stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a single star, the sailors
dropped dead one by one—all except the Mariner, whom each sailor cursed “with his eye”
before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt from their bodies and rushed by the Mariner.
The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner, with his glittering eye and his
skinny hand. The Mariner reassures the Wedding-Guest that there is no need for dread; he was
not among the men who died, and he is a living man, not a ghost. Alone on the ship, surrounded
by two hundred corpses, the Mariner was surrounded by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures
that crawled across its surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a “wicked whisper” that
made his heart “as dry as dust.” He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the dead men,
each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse. For seven days and seven nights

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the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die. At last the moon rose, casting the
great shadow of the ship across the waters; where the ship’s shadow touched the waters, they
burned red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery moonlight, glittering; blue, green,
and black, the snakes coiled and swam and became beautiful in the Mariner’s eyes. He blessed
the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found himself able to pray, and the corpse
of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking “like lead into the sea.”
Form
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is written in loose, short ballad stanzas usually either four or
six lines long but, occasionally, as many as nine lines long. The meter is also somewhat loose,
but odd lines are generally tetrameter, while even lines are generally trimeter. (There are
exceptions: In a five-line stanza, for instance, lines one, three, and four are likely to have four
accented syllables—tetrameter—while lines two and five have three accented syllables.) The
rhymes generally alternate in an ABAB or ABABAB scheme, though again there are many
exceptions; the nine-line stanza in Part III, for instance, rhymes AABCCBDDB. Many stanzas
include couplets in this way—five-line stanzas, for example, are rhymed ABCCB, often with an
internal rhyme in the first line, or ABAAB, without the internal rhyme.
Commentary
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is unique among Coleridge’s important works— unique in
its intentionally archaic language (“Eftsoons his hand drops he”), its length, its bizarre moral
narrative, its strange scholarly notes printed in small type in the margins, its thematic ambiguity,
and the long Latin epigraph that begins it, concerning the multitude of unclassifiable “invisible
creatures” that inhabit the world. Its peculiarities make it quite atypical of its era; it has little in
common with other Romantic works. Rather, the scholarly notes, the epigraph, and the archaic
language combine to produce the impression (intended by Coleridge, no doubt) that the “Rime”
is a ballad of ancient times (like “Sir Patrick Spence,” which appears in “Dejection: An Ode”),
reprinted with explanatory notes for a new audience.
Analysis
MAIN IDEAS ANALYSIS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s place in the canon of English poetry rests on a comparatively small
body of achievement: a few poems from the late 1790s and early 1800s and his participation in
the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797. Unlike Wordsworth, his work cannot be
understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that book; though it does
resemble Wordsworth’s in its idealization of nature and its emphasis on human joy, Coleridge’s
poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional
archaisms of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the hypnotic drone of “Kubla Khan” do not
imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect.

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 Further, Coleridge’s poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the
simple unity between the child and nature and the adult’s reconnection with nature through
memories of childhood; in poems such as “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge indicates the fragility
of the child’s innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as “Dejection: An
Ode” and “Nightingale,” he stresses the division between his own mind and the beauty of the
natural world. Finally, Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the
commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the “thousand thousand slimy things”
that crawl upon the rotting sea in the “Rime” would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem.
If Wordsworth represents the central pillar of early Romanticism, Coleridge is
nevertheless an important structural support. His emphasis on the imagination, its independence
from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those found in the “Rime,”
exerted a profound influence on later writers such as Shelley; his depiction of feelings of
alienation and numbness helped to define more sharply the Romantics’ idealized contrast
between the emptiness of the city—where such feelings are experienced—and the joys of nature.
The heightened understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the
suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the
idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for Coleridge in
his poetry.
His portrayal of the mind as it moves, whether in silence (“Frost at Midnight”) or in
frenzy (“Kubla Khan”) also helped to define the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism; while
much of poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquility, the origin of Coleridge’s
poems often seems to be emotion recollected in emotion. But (unlike Wordsworth, it could be
argued) Coleridge maintains not only an emotional intensity but also a legitimate intellectual
presence throughout his oeuvre and applies constant philosophical pressure to his ideas. In his
later years, Coleridge worked a great deal on metaphysics and politics, and a philosophical
consciousness infuses much of his verse—particularly poems such as “The Nightingale” and
“Dejection: An Ode,” in which the relationship between mind and nature is defined via the
specific rejection of fallacious versions of it. The mind, to Coleridge, cannot take its feeling from
nature and cannot falsely imbue nature with its own feeling; rather, the mind must be so suffused
with its own joy that it opens up to the real, independent, “immortal” joy of nature.

Themes
MAIN IDEAS THEMES
The Transformative Power of the Imagination
Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for transcending
unpleasant circumstances. Many of his poems are powered exclusively by imaginative flights,
wherein the Speaker temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an

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entirely new and completely fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this way is both
empowering and surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the
confines of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded. Perhaps
Coleridge’s most famous use of imagination occurs in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
(1797), in which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that allows him to take part in a
journey that he cannot physically make. When he “returns” to the bower, after having imagined
himself on a fantastic stroll through the countryside, the speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty of
things to enjoy from inside the bower itself, including the leaves, the trees, and the shadows. The
power of imagination transforms the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot.
The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry
Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious piety. Some
critics argue that Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was simply his attempt to understand the
imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry. To support the claim that his
imaginative and intellectual forces were, in fact, organic and derived from the natural world,
Coleridge linked them to God, spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry,
philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for Coleridge, both on and off the
page. In “The Eolian Harp” (1795), Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the
speaker’s philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an “intellectual breeze” (47)
brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness, collide with those of his orthodox
wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and urges him to Christ. While his wife lies
untroubled, the speaker agonizes over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a
unique, individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends by discounting the
pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by privileging God and Christ over nature and
praising them for having healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox
views.
Nature and the Development of the Individual
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered, imaginative soul of
youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it. According to their formulation,
experiencing nature was an integral part of the development of a complete soul and sense of
personhood. The death of his father forced Coleridge to attend school in London, far away from
the rural idylls of his youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered, city-
bound adolescence in many poems, including “Frost at Midnight” (1798). Here, the speaker sits
quietly by a fire, musing on his life, while his infant son sleeps nearby. He recalls his boarding
school days, during which he would both daydream and lull himself to sleep by remembering his
home far away from the city, and he tells his son that he shall never be removed from nature, the
way the speaker once was. Unlike the speaker, the son shall experience the seasons and shall
learn about God by discovering the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be
given the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity denied

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to both the speaker and Coleridge himself. For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach joy,
love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed individual.

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