Poems2

In the early years of the Victorian Period, poetry was still the most visible of literary forms. Both the purpose of poetry and its basic style and tone changed drastically during the Victorian Period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, poetry was still mired in the escapist, abstract imagery and themes of the earlier generation. Victorian Poetry was an important period in the history of poetry, providing the link between the Romantic movement and the modernist movement of the 20th Century.

 

La Belle Dame sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci  "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy"^[1] ) is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. It is divided into twelve four-line stanzas, called quatrains. Each of those quatrains rhymes according to an ABCB pattern. The basic meter of the poem is iambic tetrameter. The poem has a plot,the first three stanzas introduces us in the nature and we meet the knight and,then,in the next stanzas is described the girl and their love story.In the last three stanzas we have the explanation what really happened to him.

Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is appropriate to it,a gloomy place. The repetition of these two lines, with minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate knight and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning.

 "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is in the form of a dialogue between three speakers. The first is the unnamed speaker who comes across a sick, sad knight and pesters him with questions for the first three stanzas. The second voice is the knight and the third one is the girl but not directly.  It’s autumn and that may be the symbol of the nature’s death and even of the love.Autumn generates depression and melancholy. Stanzas 4-12 are the knight’s response by telling us about the lady who stoled his heart and then she had gone. It’s summer,which may represents the season of the love. They lived a beautiful short love story.

When I have Fears

"When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be" is an Shakespearen sonnet by the English Romantic poet John Keats. The 14-line poem is written in iambic pentameter and consists of three quatrains and a couplet. Keats wrote the poem in 1818. It was published (posthumously) in 1848

This poem falls into two major thought groups:

• Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12).
• Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet.

The narrator discusses things that he loves in life and how meaningless they appear when faced with death. Specifically, he references the opportunity to experience love and the chance to record his thoughts so that others might read them. His only reaction to this revelation though, is to continue to sit and think. While this poem was written when Keats was only twenty-two, it shows his deep contemplation of death and what it means to die.

The theme of the poem is the death. The rhyme pattern is abab cdcd efef gg. In the first four lines the poet fears that he doesn’t have time to write everything;the next four lines,he wants love,he also fears that he wouldn’t have the time to meet the true love because he would die young. And in the last lines,he realize that fame and love are not so important because we lose them when death comes.

     The poet's concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of "when" at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers ("faery power"), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought ("I feel" and "unreflecting love").

Tears, Idle Tears

"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Tennyson was inspired to write "Tears, Idle Tears" upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, an abbey that was abandoned in 1536. He said the convent was "full for me of its bygone memories", and that the poem was about "the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient.

.The theme of the poem is the pleasing pain of remembering the past. The predominant verse format of the poem is unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse), but several lines do not conform strictly to this pattern. The last two lines of the first stanza demonstrate the metric pattern of most of the lines.

This poem is written in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. It consists of four five-line stanzas, each of which closes with the words “the days that are no more.”

The speaker sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears that rise
in his heart and pour forth from his eyes when he looks out on the
fields in autumn and thinks of the past.

This past,(“the days that are no more”) is described as fresh and
strange. It is as fresh as the first beam of sunlight that sparkles on
the sail of a boat bringing the dead back from the underworld, and
it is sad as the last red beam of sunlight that shines on a boat that
carries the dead down to this underworld.

The speaker then refers to the past as not “fresh,” but “sad” and
strange. As such, it resembles the song of the birds on early
summer mornings as it sounds to a dead person, who lies
watching the “glimmering square” of sunlight as it appears
through a square window.

In the final stanza, the speaker declares the past to be dear,
sweet, deep, and wild.It is as dear as the memory of the kisses of
one who is now dead, and it is as sweet as those kisses that we
imagine ourselves bestowing on lovers who actually have
loyalties to others. So,too, is the past as deep as “first love” and
as wild as the regret that usually follows this experience. The
speaker concludes that the past is a “Death in Life”.

Porphyria's Lover

"Porphyria's Lover" is a poem by Robert Browning and it was first published as "Porphyria". "Porphyria's Lover" is Browning's first ever short dramatic monologue, and also the first of his poems to examine abnormal psychology. A possible inspiration for the poem is John Wilson's "Extracts from Gosschen's Diary", a lurid account of a murder published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1818. Browning's friend and fellow poet Bryan Procter acknowledged basing his 1820 "Marcian Colonna" on this source, but added a new detail; after the murder, the killer sits up all night with his victim.^[2]

The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work.

How do I love Thee

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her love sonnet “How Do I Love Thee” beautifully expresses her love for her husband. Listing the different ways in which Elizabeth loves her beloved, she also insists that if God permits her she will continue loving the love of her life even after her death.

A prominent Victorian poet Elizabeth wrote 44 sonnets to express the courtship between herself and Robert Browning, her love and would be husband. “How Do I Love Thee” is a sensitive poem because of the reason that the poetess here defines herself only in the ways she loves Robert. Love is portrayed to be intangible; it can even be felt even after one settles in the cold grave.

It's a sonnet – a fourteen-line rhymed lyric poem written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme of this sonnet  is ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. Barrett Browning chose to model her sonnet on the Italian or Petrarchan pattern.

The poem is not related to how she loves or why, but just the way in which she does so; freely and purely. They had never met but they were just expressing how much they loved each other and this is one of the love poems that they shared. She defines herself with the ways she love Robert.

She certainly would not be the speaker of the poem without her love, or her beloved. This actually what makes this poem very sensitive. Besides her love to Robert she actually has admiration toward him.The poem begins with a question, and answers it. In the poem, main point is the author’s desire to tell us how much she loves him with all her heart. The author expresses how she adores her beloved by repeating it often. Reader shall immediately understand the greatness of the intensity of Elizabeth\'s love for her beloved. The poem contains internal rhymes that tell us Elizabeth loves Robert with every dimension of her entity. His love sustains her and that I why she needs him. We should consider the times period this was written in, when the concept of God was acknowledged as a certainty not a theory. She tells that she loves him with the blind faith of a child..It explains that she had lost believing in holy things after growing up. However, Robert has awakened her spirit in a way that she has again begun to reaffirm her belief in all the things holy. He is her savior and means the whole world to her. There is passion, excitement and spontaneity in her love. Also, she has a big hope that her love will transcend the boundaries of time, space, life and death; it will live forever. She hopes that only something as violent and destructive as death will intensify her passion.
“Sonnet 43\" expresses the poet’s intense love for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning. So intense is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level (Lines 3 and 4). She loves him freely, without coercion; she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain. She even loves him with an intensity of the suffering (passion: Line 9) resembling that of Christ on the cross, and she loves him in the way that she loved saints as a child. Moreover, she expects to continue to love him after death. \"Sonnet 43\" is written in iambic pentameter .Author uses metaphors, as follows:

thee, the (Lines 1, 2, 5, 9, 12).
thee,they (Line 8)
soul, sight (Line 3)
love, level (Line 5)
quiet, candle-light (Line 6)
freely, strive, Right (Line 7)
purely, Praise (Line 8)
passion, put (Line 9)
griefs, faith (Line 10)
my, my (Line 10)
love, love (Line 11)
With, with (Line 12)
lost, love (Line 12)
lost, saints (Line 12)
Smiles, tears (Line 13) (z sound)
smiles, all, life (Line 13)
shall, love (Line 14)
but, better (Line 14)
but, better, after (Line 14)