After
Blenheim
It is one of Southey's most famous
poems. Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic
school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets".
Moreover, Southey was a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer,
historian and biographer.
While
Southey's verse, After Blenheim, is considered an anti-war poem,
arguably Southey was not himself anti-war: Byron himself considered Southey a
puzzle: one the one hand, he denigrated the English victory at Blenheim, but
praised the Battle of Waterloo in The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, a
popular poem.
The battle was fought near the village of Blenheim,
in Bavaria, on the left bank of the river Danube. . This battle broke the prestige of the French
king, Louis XIV; and when Marlborough returned
to England his nation built
a magnificent mansion for him and named it Blenheim Palace
after this battle
Southey's poem tells that Old Kaspar
has finished his work and is sitting in the sun in front of the cottage,
watching his little granddaughter at play. Peterkin found a skull near the
battle-field many years afterward, and the two asked their grandfather how it
came there. He told them that a great battle had been fought there, and many of
the leaders had won great renown. But he could not tell her why it was fought
or what good came of it. He only knew that it was a "great victory."
That was the moral of so many of the wars that devestated Europe
for centuries. The kings fought for more power and glory; and the peasants fled
from burning homes, and the soldiers fell on the fields. The poem gives an idea
of the real value to men of such famous victories as that of Blenheim.
Each stanza contains six lines. The meter is Iambic
tetrameter. In several stanzas, Southey uses alliteration
to promote rhythm and euphony,stanza five is an example. The end rhyme in each
stanza except the second is abcbdd. The third stanza demonstrates this pattern.
An important theme of this poem may be the war
which represents the worst form of human behavior: “man's inhumanity to man”.
William
Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English
Romantic
poet who, with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch
the
Romantic
Age in
English literature with the publication of
Lyrical
Ballads.Wordsworth's
magnum opus is generally considered to be
The Prelude,
a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a
number of times. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's
imagination and gave him a love of nature.
We are
seven
"We are Seven"
is a poem written by
William Wordsworth and published in his
Lyrical
Ballads. It describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and
a "little cottage girl" about the number of brothers and sisters who
dwell with her. The poem turns on the question of whether to count two dead
siblings.
Wordsworth claimed that the
idea for
We are Seven came to him while traveling alone across
England
in October after becoming separated from his friend, William Calvert. The poem
is a dialogue between a narrator who serves as a questioner and a little girl. The
poem is written in ballad form. The poem is composed of sixteen four-line
stanzas, and ends with one five-line stanza. Each stanza has an abab rhyming
pattern.
The speaker
begins this poem by asking what a simple child who is full of life could know
about death. He then meets "a little cottage Girl" who is eight years
old and has thick curly hair. She is rustic and woodsy, but very beautiful, and
she makes the speaker happy. He asks her how many siblings she has, to which
she replies that there are seven including her.The speaker then asks the child
where her brothers and sisters are. She replies "Seven are we," and
tells him that two are in a town called
Conway,
two are at sea, and two lie in the church-yard. She and her mother live near
the graves:
The speaker is confused and asks
her how they can be seven, if two are in Conway and two gone to sea. To this,
the little girl simply replies, "Seven boys and girls are we.The speaker
says that if two are dead, then there are only five left.The little girl then
explains that first her sister Jane died from sickness. She and her brother
John would play around her grave until he also died.
The man again asks how many
siblings she has now that two are dead. She replies quickly, "O Master! we
are seven." The man tries to convince her saying, "But they are
dead," but he realizes that his words are wasted. The poem ends with the
little girl saying, "Nay, we are seven!"
The character Lucy may be
interpreted as: she might be Wordsworth’s childhood friend and later wife Mary
H.,the poet’s sister Dorothy or she was just a muse.
The world
is to musch with us
This poem is one of the many
excellent Wordsworth’s sonnets. 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.
The speaker
begins this poem by saying that the world is too full of humans who are losing
their connection to divinity and, even more importantly, to nature. Humans, the
speaker says, have given their hearts away, and the gift is a morally degraded
one.
In the second quartet the speaker
tells the reader that everything in nature, including the sea and the winds, is
gathered up in a powerful connection with which humanity is "out of
tune." In other words, humans are not experiencing nature as they should.
The speaker ends the poem by
saying that he would rather be a pagan attached to a worn-out system of beliefs
than be out of tune with nature. At least if he were a pagan he might be able
to see things that would make him less unhappy, like the sea gods
Proteus and
Triton.
"The world is too much with us" is a sonnet with an abbaabbacdcdcd
rhyme scheme.
She dwelt
among the untrodden ways
The poem "She Dwelt in
Untrodden Ways"
is very simple. It consists of three short stanzas. The first two stanzas focus
on Lucy while she is still alive, and the last stanza tells the reader of
Lucy's death and the poet's response to it.
In the first stanza, the reader
learns that Lucy comes from the country by the river Dove, and that she was
virtually unnoticed there. There are a few different Dove rivers that this
place could refer to, and he also may be calling to mind the associations the
reader would have with the bird named dove. Lines like, "none to
praise," "very few to love," and the word "untrodden"
tell the reader that Lucy was a nobody to everyone except the poet. She was
unnoticed, untouched, and overlooked.
In the second stanza,
Wordsworth's aim is to show her innocence and beauty again. He uses two simple
metaphors to emphasize these qualities. "A violet by a mossy stone"
and "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky." A violet
can be a symbol of innocence, modesty or mourning. The poem is also one of mourning
and demonstration of Lucy's faithfulness and modesty.
In the third stanza,
Wordsworth tells the reader of Lucy's death. Again, the diction of anonymity is
shown in that she lived "unknown" and "few could know." However,
in the last two lines, her significance to Wordsworth is made very clear. She
is extremely special and the embodiment of beauty to the poet.
Theme: death,nature. Literary techniques as
metaphors,assonance,alliteration,sibilance.
She walks
in beauty
One of
Lord Byron’s
most famous, it is a lyric
poem that describes a woman of much beauty and elegance. The
poem was inspired by
actual events in Byron’s life. Once, while at a ball,
Byron happened upon a
beautiful woman as she walked by. That woman was Byron’s cousin.
“She Walks in Beauty” is written in iambic
tetrameter.
The
rhyme scheme of the first stanza is ababab; the second stanza, cdcdcd; and the
third stanza, efefef. The
theme of the poem is the woman's exceptional beauty, internal as well as
external. The first stanza praises her physical beauty.
The second and third stanzas praise both her physical
and spiritual, or intellectual, beauty.
The first stanza of the poem
describes the physical appearance of the woman. Here, the poet creates an image
of a dark, clear sky with twinkling stars, and make a contrast between
brightness and darkness. This contrast could mean diverse things, such as
“black hair” and “white skin”, or “deep, black eyes” and “clear, white parts of
the eyes.” The image created by this contrast represents the cloth the woman is
wearing; a black dress with sparkles on it.
The second stanza of
She
Walks in Beauty continues to praise the woman’s appearance, the poet
extends this external beauty onto the woman’s personality.
The last stanza also talks both
about the woman’s inner and outer characteristics. Her cheek and her smiles are
beautiful. the theme of this poem, which is the woman’s physical beauty along
with her internal beauty.
CAIN
Perhaps the most important literary influence on
Cain was
John Milton's
epic poem
Paradise Lost, which tells of the creation and
fall of mankind. As Byron himself notes in the preface to
Cain, Cain's
vision in Act II was inspired by the theory of
catastrophism.
