wordsworth prelude and coleridge poems

7/27/2019 Wordsworth Prelude and Coleridge Poems

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Business

Quiz: Please clear your desks.

[Maymester: Response papers due.]


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Todays Assignment

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, 188-96; and

Book 12, 223-25, lines 208-335; Coleridge,

Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, 645-50; "Frost

at Midnight" 273-75; "Kubla Khan" 254-57; TheRime of the Ancient Mariner238-54.

This is two days material in one assignment; we

will do what we can, and you can read the rest

on your ownits all here in the slide show.


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Review

We are tracking the following themes:

Imagination

Nature Sacred vs. secular


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The Prelude As Epic

What is an epic? It is a poem in which there is one major action (e.g., Odysseuss

homecoming, the Fall of Man). In WWs poem, the one action isthe Growth of a Poets Mind (page 188).

It is a poem including history (Ezra Pound). In WWs poem, wehave his experience of the French Revolution (1789-1799), butmostly he focuses on common events from his personalexperience. See page 217, note.

It includes an invocation of the muse. WW invokes this gentlebreeze (1.1). In many languages wind and spirit are the same

word. This is an example of what M.H. Abrams (followingThomas Carlisle) calls natural supernaturalism, the substitutionof something natural for something classical (the muse of epicpoetry) or Christian (the Holy Spirit in Milton).


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Now Read Aloud Lines 1-30

Parallel to TA: escaped / From the vast

city, he looks forward to his time in nature

and finds that nature is enlivening his

intellect (lines 19-20: Trances of thoughtand mountings of the mind / Come fast

upon me).

The earth is all before me. Can youidentify the allusion here?


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Last 5 Lines of Miltons PL

Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,Through Eden took thir solitarie way.


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What the Allusion Suggests

A sense that WW is picking up whereMilton left off. Milton ended with theexpulsion of Adam and Eve, and WW

begins his epic squarely in the fallenworld. The allusion reminds us that, in thefallen world, gains will be hard won.

Milton:pathos::WW:joy (line 15).

Another important parallel: blank verse(Miltons verse form in PL).


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Introduction, page 188

His theme is the tempering of imagination by

nature, an educational process that leads to

renovation, and to a balanced power of

imagining that neither yields to a universe ofdecay nor seeks (as Blake did [see page 40:

cleansing the doors of perception]) to burn

through that universe.

Remember: Romantic poetry is about thedialectical relationship between the mind and

nature.


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Correspondent Breeze

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven

Was blowing on my body, felt within

A correspondent breeze, that gently moved

With quickening virtue, but is now becomeA tempest, a redundant energy,

Vexing its own creation. (lines 33-38)

What is he saying here?


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What the C.B. Means

The outer breeze has its counterpart withinthe human mind.

Breeze:nature::imagination:psyche.

BUT he is agitated. As a result, the innerbreeze vexes his minds attempts to createpoetry.

In other words, he starts his great poem bycomplaining about the difficulty of gettingstarted!


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More on Vexation: lines 269ff.

"Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all

rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with

my nurse's song," etc.?

Nature did all this for me, and now I cant

write about it?

But he IS writing.


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Possible Topics for His Epic

Line 109: the life / In common things

Line 120: airy phantasies

Line 129: some noble theme Line 222-23: A tale from my own heart

Line 229-30: some philosophic song / Of

Truth that cherishes our daily life


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The Stages Again

Stage Zero: Intimationssome kind of pre-existence.

Stage One: a five years child (line 288):

physical response to nature. Stage Two: not yet ten years old at line 307, thebird stealing episode, the stolen boat episode:emotional response to nature (fear).

Stage Three: mellower years will bring a ripermind / And clearer insight (236-37).

Stage Four: No hint here of future decay.


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Key Concept: Spots of Time

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence, depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

(page 223, 12.208ff.)


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Examples

First spot: going to a place where a guy washanged in chains and having sexual feelings fora girl.

Second spot: Christmas time, father's death

"appeared / A chastisement" for his sexualfeelings (310-11).

POINT: Such ordinary events are what really

matters in a persons development. All of WWscommon experiences contribute to hismaturation. The Child is the father of the Man(from his poem My Heart Leaps Up, page 168).


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Child = Mans Father

How strange that all

The terrors, pains, and early miseries,

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused

Within my mind, should eer have borne a part,And that a needful part, in making up

The calm existence that is mine when I

Am worthy of myself! (1.344-50)

The Child is father of the man (My Heart Leaps Up,

page 168)


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From Tennysons Ulysses

I am a part of all that I have met.


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Group Activity

Consider the stolen boat episode on

pages 194-95, starting at line 358. What

happens, and what do you make of WW's

reaction?

What kind of imagery does WW employ

here? What is their psychological

significance?


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Imagery in the Boat Episode

Masculine

The oars (374)

The unswerving line hetravels across the lake:

using phallic instrumentsto row a phallic courseacross a feminine lake.

The craggy ridge (370).

The huge peak, black

and huge that Uprearedits head (378-80),representing masculineauthority.

Feminine

The boat

The cave it is kept in

The lake


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Freudian Stuff

Freud holds that one has ambivalent emotions for anaction or object (totem object) that is forbidden: i.e., bothfear and desire. He also holds that a boy has Oedipaldesire for the mate of the father. Both of these ideascome together in the stolen boat episode.

Because of guilt, the theft becomes a mere borrowingan act of compromise: Freud says that we do things thatresemble but fall short of the actual forbidden act (hetakes the mans boat for a ride rather than stealing theboat outright, and both are acts of compromise for taking

the mans woman). But the taboo against stealing hasbeen broken, and Freud says that one is infected andbecomes himself taboo, hence guilt (WWs bad dreamsat line 400) and the development of the superego.


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The Upshot

WW has tried out his own masculine authority,

and he finds himself out of his depth.

Consequently, he suffers guilt for many days, his

dreams are troubled, and he represses into theunconscious the inappropriate sexuality that is

the latent content of the episode.

The result is the development of the superego

(the morality principle).


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Episodes That Anticipate the

Stolen Boat Episode

The bird-stealing episode: lines 317ff.Evidently this experience does not teachWW the proper lesson, so the lesson

repeats with greater intensity in the boatepisode.

Nutting: excised from The Preludeprobably because it duplicates theOedipal/sexual feeling of the boat episode.


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Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV,pages 645-50

There are two sorts of poems (645): Those from ordinary life (stolen boat episode).

Those with supernatural subjects like Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Key concept: "willing suspension of disbeliefconstitutes poeticfaith (645); this is especially important because Cols poems aresupernatural.

Three characteristics of a poem (647): Meter and/or rhyme.

The immediate goal is pleasure (see the pleasure dome in KK).

The ultimate goal is intellectual or moral truth. Cf. 648, top par.

The nature of the imagination (649):

"synthetic and magical power" "balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities"

primary and secondary imagination (next slide)


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BL, Chapter XIII:

"The imagination, then, I consider either as primary orsecondary. The Primary IMAGINATION I hold to be theliving power and prime agent of all human perception,and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act ofcreation in the infinite I AM. The secondary

[imagination] I consider as an echo of the former,coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identicalwith the primary in the kindof its agency, and differingonly in degree and in the mode of its operation. Itdissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; orwhere this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at allevents, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It isessentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) areessentially fixed and dead."


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From Dr. FikesA Jungian Study of

Shakespeare: The Visionary Mode

The primary imagination, an act that is

involuntary and usually unconscious, plays a key

role in the cognitive process because it mediates

not only between sensation and perception, butalso between perception and thought (Rossky

58). Whereas the primary imagination actively

perceives objects and frames concepts, the

secondary imagination, which is voluntary andconscious, re-forms images and thoughts in a

way that makes poetry.


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Chart

Wordsworth

What the eye and ear

perceive: mirror.

What the eye and earhalf create: lamp.

See TA, lines 106-07.

Coleridge

Primary imagination

Secondaryimagination

See BL, XIII


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The Greater Romantic Lyric

Milton

Paradise

Fall

Paradise Regained

Blake

Innocence

Experience

Organized Innocence

GRL like Frost atMidnight

Here and now

There and then(imagination)

Here and now

POINT: Secularizingthe pattern ofsacred pattern.


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Other Characteristics of the GRL

A specific speaker in a specific landscape.

Interplay of the mind with that landscape.

The poem ends where it begins.

Three-part movement: in, out, in; here, there,

here; now, then (the past), now; the minds

detachment, involvement, and detachment

with the external world. Although the poem returns to the first stage, the

speaker is differenthas learned something.


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Outline of Frost at Midnight

Stage one (lines 1-23): Coleridge is sitting by the fire. His son,Hartley, is asleep. And The Frost performs its secret ministry (line1). The stage is set for imaginative transport.

Stage two (lines 24-43): The visionColeridge remembers hisschool days. And there is a vision within the vision: he recalls how,in the past, he remembered (dreampt, line 27) a time further in the

past. Memory within memory. More specifically, it is a memoryabout the anticipation of a stranger. Remembering his ownchildhood prepares him to think about his sons future.

EndingStage Three (lines 44-end): He begins to think about thestranger Hartley will become, the man Coleridge does not yetknow. He predicts a rural future for Hartley (lines 54-57). Irony: H

was to become a kind of vagrant in WW country, who never fulfilledhis potential. Col also predicts that H will become a poetthis too isaccurate: H was a minor poet in the WWian mode. POINT: Thepoet is back where he started, but he is not the same. He now hashopes for his sons future.


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Frost and TA

Frost, line 58-60: so shalt thou see and hear/ Thelovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternallanguage

TA, lines 105: the mighty world / Ofeye, and ear,--

both what they half create, / And what perceive In both poems, nature stirs the imagination in a

constructive way through the agency of sight andhearing.

POINT: Frost was written a few months before TA, soCol may have influenced WW rather than the other wayaround.


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Last Verse Par. in Frost

Here we return to the opening imagefrost.

Frost and memory bind together unlike things

(opposite or discordant qualities) and help

create an imaginative unity. Frost, for example, creates a surface to receive

and reflect the winter moona frequent symbol

in Romantic literature for the imagination.

Sun:reason::moon:imagination.


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Key Points About Kubla Khan

This is a poem about the secondary imaginationand about poetry. It enacts the bringing togetherof opposite and discordant qualities.

Sometimes the imagination is violent (as also in

Blakes The Tyger). In the Romantic period, energy comes up from

below (as it does in a volcano, a favorite imagein Shelley).

The poets act of creation is greater than Kublasbecause it reconciles opposite or discordantqualities in a superior way.


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Question

What opposite and discordant qualities

do you find in KK?


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Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Rime:primary imagination::KK:secondaryimagination.

Important concepts:

Ballad and ballad stanza: See H&H. A Romantic quest poem features a solitary hero whomeets with a supernatural female figure, is alienatedfrom nature, and journeys to recover what is lost(sometimes union with the supernatural female).

A Romantic wanderer is a person with the mark ofCain, a type of the Wandering Jew. Cols AncientMariner parallels but transcends these types; he issomething other and greater.


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Questions

1. Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the albatross? See page 241, line 82.Consider Cols phrase in reference to Shakespeares Iago in Othellomotiveless malignity.

2. What does killing the albatross signify?

3. How is the A.M. redeemed? See line 286. What does he realize here? Cf.Blake: Everything that lives is holy.

4. What does the Ancient Mariners glittering eye suggest?5. Why is the church an appropriate setting? Why does the A.M. speak

to a wedding guest?

6. What is the moral of the poem? See esp. lines 612-17. See The EolianHarp on page 237, lines 26-31.

7. Why is the wedding guest sadder but wiser (last stanza)? See Ecclesiastes1:18 for a possible connection: For in much wisdom is much vexation, /

and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

END

wordsworth prelude and coleridge poems

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