Poems

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.