Lingual-Stylistic Peculiarities of Poetic Works of English Romanticism
Мiжнародний Гуманiтарний Унiверситет
Кафедра Лiнгвiстики та Перекладу
Курсова робота
на тему:
“Lingual-Stylistic Peculiarities of Poetic Works of English Romanticism”
студента 6 курсу
Руснака Геннадiя
науковий керiвник
канд. фiлол. наук
доц. Мартинюк О.А
Одеса 2013
Plan
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Notion of Romanticism in terms of Style
1.1 General View of Romanticism
1.2 Life and Heritage of the Romantic Poets
Chapter 2 Peculiarities of Style of the works of Romantic Poets
2.1 Stylistic analysis of Lord Byron’s works “Destruction of Sennacherib”,
“Prometheus”, “Darkness”
2.2 Stylistic analysis of Shelly’s works “Adonais”
3.3 Stylistic analysis of Wordsworth’s work “A Fact and Imagination”
Conclusion
References
INTRODUCTION
The value of English Romanticism can be hardly ever overestimated. It is not just poetry or prose in itself, but an entire world of philosophy, world of brilliant ideas and world of crushed hopes for the future of mankind. It shows us the widest range of human potential to analyze and feel, the universe of dreams collected in lines of masterpieces that will outlive the centuries.
And, of course, it represents a wonderful field for stylistic analysis. Doubtless the works of great masters are loaded with immense amount of different means to create an image.
This paper researches the lingual-stylistic peculiarities of style reproduction: the way the author’s style is created via the combination of different artistic means at all levels of language. The aim of the research is to study the methods and procedures which were applied for the reproduction of specific ideas; and the influence that they cause on the reader. Poetic works by Lord Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley are the object of the research; and lingual-stylistic peculiarities of the poems “Destruction of Sennacherib”, “Prometheus”, “Darkness”, “A Fact and Imagination”, “Adonais”, “To the Men of England” are its subject.
The present work concentrates mainly on that second part and researches what formal elements create the style at different levels, ways of their rendering and their overall influence on the style reproduction.
The aim of this paper is to contrast the style of the poems, finding the convergent and divergent features in their building elements and defining their impact at the correspondent level as well as generally at the level of a poem. In the course of research different methods were used, quantitative, comparative, contrastive and oppositional being among them.
As the material for the research, it was decided to take poems of Romantic poets as the variety of artistic means at all the language levels provides a rich base for the study. The introduction focuses upon the theoretical premises of the research, its topic and objectives.
The first chapter covers the study of theoretical problems discussed in the research, outlines the Romanticism as art and works of the Lord Byron, Wordsworth, Shelly studied.
The second chapter discusses the peculiarities of the style-creating means of reproduction of Lord Byron`s, Wordsworth’s, Shelly’s poems at all the language levels.
The results of the research are summarized in the conclusions.
CHAPTER 1 THE NOTION OF ROMANTICISM IN TERMS OF STYLE
1.1 General view of Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary,
and intellectual movement that originated in the European culture, originating
toward the end of the 18th century. Having reflected the despair and
disappointment caused by the results of the French Revolution, ideology
of Enlightment and scientific progress, it opposed the utilitarianism
and leveling of personality the tendency to unlimited freedom, will
for perfection and renovation, pathos towards personal and civil independence(8,97).
Tense and painful dissonance of an ideal and social reality is the basis
for romantic type of perception of the world and art. The assertion
of self-worth of spiritual and creative life of an individual, representation
of strong feelings, spiritual and healing nature meet in art of Romantics
the themes of heroic protest along with motifs of “universal sorrow”,
“universal evil”, “night” side of a human soul, that are often
covered in forms of irony, grotesque and tragicomic essence(3,111).
The interest towards national folklore and culture of own and foreign
nations, towards the past and it’s idealization, tendency to create
it’s own universal world view (and in particular of history and literature),
the idea of synthesis of arts and philosophy is considered to be among
the most prominent features of ideology of Romanticism. Its effect on
politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic
period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism
In English literature, the group of poets now considered the key figures of the Romantic
movement includes William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the much older William Blake, followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare. 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 the poet's feelings about nature, which were to be more fully
developed in his long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime(6,48).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 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.
In contrast Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works
exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings;
Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century"(6,217). Scott achieved immediate
success with his long narrative poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” in 1805, followed by the full epic poem “Marmion” in
1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian; Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success
with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form
of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing the themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different
variations of the "Byronic hero", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile
was effectively inventing the historical novel, beginning in 1814 with Waverley, set in the 1745 Jacobite Rising, which was an enormous and highly profitable success, followed by
over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to the Crusades that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature(20,117).
The writers tried to solve the problems, but we can't treat all the
Romantics of England as belonging to the same literary school. William
Blake (1757-1827) was bitterly disappointed by the downfall of the French
Revolution. His young contemporaries, Samuel Coleridge (1772— 1834)
and William Wordsworth (1770-1850), both were warm admirers of the French
Revolution, both escaped from the evils of big cities and settled in
the quietness of country life, in the purity of nature, among unsophisticated
country-folk. Living in the Lake country of Northern England, they were
known as the Lakists. The Late Romantics, George Byron (1788-1824),
Percy Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), were young rebels
and reflected the interests of the common people. That is why the Romantic
Revival of the 18th-19th centuries can be divided into three periods:
the Early Romantics, the Lakists and the Later Romantics. In some poets this spirit of revolt and defiance resulted in a sort
of titanism in an overstatement of passions. In others it led to the
exaltation of the irrational and mystic aspects of life and a concern
with the supernatural.
Some looked for solace in an idealized Hellenism inspired by a Greek
ideal of beauty and by the concept of poetry for poetry’s sake. Others
romantic English poets found the escape from reality in the exotic and
distant following the lead of the Gothic novels. This love for the strange,
the exotic and the distant also informed the new interest in history
and especially in the Middle Age, the historic period that was loved by the romantic writers. Romantic
poets turned to other aspects of the past and motivated by Percy’s
collection of medieval ballads, they looked to the Middle Age for inspiration and they rediscovered the fascination of the past
writers. The romantic writers revisited the past through their imagination.
Imagination or rather belief in imagination as part of the individual
became the distinguishing feature of the romantic writers. Far from
simply meaning daydreaming as it had previously done imagination came
to mean the highest and noblest gift of the poet using it as a God-like
faculty. For the romantic poets the imagination was able to modify or
even re-create the world around them.
1.2 LIFE AND HERITAGE OF THE ROMANTIC POETS
(Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley)
George Gordon Byron, (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly
known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic Movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric "She Walks in Beauty." He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains
widely read and influential. He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died at age 36 from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.
Byron underwent a tumultuous schooling at three different schools
(Harrow, Trinity, and Cambridge), through which he was forced to fend
for himself due to mockery from peers about his club foot and his weight
(13, 75). By the end of his schooling, Byron had forged himself into
the lordly, urbane, slim and debaucherous man who would become famous.
Like his father, Byron accumulated debts through his excesses and fiscal
irresponsibility, all in the service of removing himself both socially
and emotionally from his painful, shame-filled youth. He avoided his
mother as much as possible and gathered around him a circle of friends
with whom he could discuss politics and poetry or carouse with equal
verve. He enmeshed himself in several affairs with lovers from both
genders, including a deep connection to a choirboy and later a series
of relationships with live-in prostitutes. Byron also entered a one-sided
romance with his cousin Mary Chaworth, going so far as to temporarily
suspend his education to be near her at Annesley Hall. Chaworth was
unattainable—she became engaged in the midst of Byron’s pining for
her in 1803—and would become the basis of many future unattainable
beauties in his life, both real and literary. In 1804 Byron began corresponding
with his half-sister Augusta, to whom he grew emotionally attached to
even as he withdrew his sympathies from his mother. In 1806 Byron self-published his first book of poetry, Fugitive
Pieces. His mentor, the Reverend John Thomas Becher, raised objections
to some of the more erotic lines of verse, so Byron suppressed the book.
He republished many of the poems—now heavily edited—along with new
verse in his 1807 Poems on Various Occasions, followed later by an expanded edition
titled Hours of Idleness, this last edition being the first published work
bearing his name. Upon completion of his schooling and assuming the
peerage (being recognized as belonging to the House of Lords), Byron
took a long-delayed journey to see the rest of Europe. Arriving in Lisbon
at the height of the English-French conflict, Byron remained mostly
oblivious to the political climate of the world around him, so focused
was he on enjoying himself. It was from this journey that Byron produced
the work that would make him famous: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The first two cantos, written during
his European travels, were published in 1812. The print run sold out
in three days, making Byron suddenly famous. Soon Byron was a sought-after
attendee at salons throughout England, where he also met a number of
influential and impassioned women and engaged in several affairs. One
such affair was with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose pursuit of Byron eventually
wearied him. From 1813 to 1816, Byron published several works, most
of them inspired by his travels in Turkey and Greece: The Giaour in June of 1813, followed by The Bride of Abydos later that year; then The Corsair in February 1814 and Lara in August; finally The Siege of Corinth and Parisina in February of 1816. All the while, Byron continued revising and adding
to “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. In May of 1816, Byron met Percy Shelley in Geneva, Switzerland. Although
his enjoyment at this visit was tempered by the presence of Clairmont
and her unborn child—Byron’s—the two men nonetheless enjoyed boating
on Lake Leman and discussing poetry and politics. It was at this time
that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Byron’s travels with Shelley inspired him to write The
“Prisoner of Chillon”, published in 1817. He also completed and
published Cantos iii and iv of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, completed Manfred, and began his
mock epic “Don Juan”. Although prolific and gaining a reputation as a great
writer of his time, Byron settled in Genoa, Italy, and became bored
with his self-imposed exile from England. He was drawn again to the
cause of Greek independence, this time donating large sums of money
to refit and arm the Greek military. Byron eventually gained a division
of Greek soldiers under his own command, but before he could sail to
attack the Turkish fortress, he became ill. The favored medical practice
of the day, bloodletting, only weakened him further. He eventually developed
an infection and died in 1824, leaving his military action and several
of his literary works unfinished.
The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics,
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of
the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy,
haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He
is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution,
he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never
lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his
youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed
liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally
his life to the Greek war of independence. His faceted personality found
expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama,
historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic
epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas,
heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous
prose. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for
freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western
mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century
letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as
the embodiment of Romanticism (17, 283).
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventually attained minor noble
rank—the poet’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received a baronetcy
in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the
poet’s father, was a Member of Parliament and a country gentleman.
The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the
age of twelve. While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher
named William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he
became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the
ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and
devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing
others of the rightness of his beliefs. Entering Oxford in 1810, Shelley was expelled the following spring for his part in authoring
a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism—atheism being an outrageous idea in religiously
conservative nineteenth-century England. At the age of nineteen, Shelley
eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern
keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike for the tavern.
Not long after, he made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin
in London, and promptly fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary Wollstonecraft,
whom he was eventually able to marry, and who is now remembered primarily
as the author of Frankenstein. In 1816, the Shelley’s traveled
to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron, the most famous, celebrated, and
controversial poet of the era; the two men became close friends. After
a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling
throughout Italy; during this time Shelley wrote most of his finest
lyric poetry, including the immortal “Ode to the West Wind” and
“To a Skylark.” In 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm off the Italian coast.
He was not yet thirty years old.
Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets,
the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked
by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger
generation (which also included John Keats and the infamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism,
their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism,
and their tragically short lives. Shelley died when he was twenty-nine,
Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six
years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism
meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because
Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young (and never had the opportunity
to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have
attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists.
Shelley’s life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding,
but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that
they obscure a poet’s individual character. Shelley’s joy, his magnanimity,
his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics;
his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth
century’s most significant writers in English (8, 116). The central
thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes
that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets
of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty,
creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s
treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to
his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than
that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and
his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive
even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity
for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility
of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his
moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length
poems such as the monumental “Queen Mab”) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing
that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelley’s intense feelings
about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as “Ode to
the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he invokes metaphors
from nature to characterize his relationship to his art.
The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important
essay A Defense
of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley
argues exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is
the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability
to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes, A
man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument
of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect
by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination
by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the
power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts,
and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves
fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the
moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley
demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels
closely connected to nature’s power. In his early poetry, Shelley
shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or
a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe.
He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it
as the “spirit of beauty” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and
identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in “Mont Blanc.”
This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure,
and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley
asserts several times that this force can influence people to change
the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes
that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often
as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately.
For this reason, Shelley’s delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness
of its dark side. Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In
such poems as “The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the
Massacre at Manchester” (1819) and “Ode
to the West Wind,” Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a
sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a
stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s
beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power
over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination
has creative power over nature. It is the imagination—or our ability
to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different,
original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore,
how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the
power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes
a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because
Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are
only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to
attribute nature’s power to God: the human role in shaping nature
damages Shelley’s ability to believe that nature’s beauty comes
solely from a divine source. Shelley’s interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his
work. The ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of
glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live. In “Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty,” the speaker searches for ghosts and explains that ghosts
are one of the ways men have tried to interpret the world beyond. The
speaker of “Mont Blanc” encounters ghosts and shadows of real natural
objects in the cave of “Poesy.” Ghosts are inadequate in both poems:
the speaker finds no ghosts in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and
the ghosts of Poesy in “Mont Blanc” are not the real thing,
a discovery that emphasizes the elusiveness and mystery of supernatural
forces.
No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized
the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in
the power of art’s sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron’s
pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness;
Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley
was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is
suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would
affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the
same time (19, 36).
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication 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. It was posthumously titled and published,
prior to which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".
Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson,
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest
England, the Lake District. His father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and,
through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town.
Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their
father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.
Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, taught him poetry, including
that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spe
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
(5, 189). 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.” 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 1802preface.
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.
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.
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.
In many of his poems he praise the childhood days. In his 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. Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of
the contemporary world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a
chance to reconnect with the visionary power and intense relationship
they had with nature as children (5, 50). In turn, these memories encourage
adults to re-cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible
as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and despair. The act of remembering
also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the calm remembrance of passionate emotional
experiences. Poems cannot be composed at the moment when emotion is
first experienced. Instead, the initial emotion must be combined with
other thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past experiences using
memory and imagination. The poem produced by this time-consuming process
will allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to
his readers and will permit the readers to remember similar emotional
experiences of their own.
The speakers of Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers: they
roam solitarily, they travel over the moors, and they take private walks
through the highlands of Scotland. Active wandering allows the characters
to experience and participate in the vastness and beauty of the natural
world. Moving from place to place also allows the wanderer to make discoveries
about himself. In “I travelled among unknown men” (1807), the speaker discovers his patriotism only after he has traveled
far from England. While wandering, speakers uncover the visionary powers
of the mind and understand the influence of nature, as in “I wandered
lonely as a cloud” (1807). The speaker of this poem takes comfort in a walk he once took after
he has returned to the grit and desolation of city life. Recollecting
his wanderings allows him to transcend his present circumstances. Wordsworth’s
poetry itself often wanders, roaming from one subject or experience
to another, as in The Prelude. In this long poem, the speaker moves from idea to idea through digressions
and distractions that mimic the natural progression of thought within
the mind.
Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the
vehicles through which individuals are transformed. As speakers move
through the world, they see visions of great natural loveliness, which
they capture in their memories. Later, in moments of darkness, the speakers
recollect these visions, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Here,
the speaker daydreams of former jaunts through nature, which “flash
upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude” (5, 22).
The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find comfort
even in our darkest, loneliest moments. Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes
the connection between seeing and experiencing emotion, as in “My
heart leaps up” (1807),
in which the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across
the sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s
poems, including descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on
what can be seen, rather than touched, heard, or felt. In Book Fourteenth
of The Prelude, climbing to the top of a mountain in Wales allows the speaker to
have a prophetic vision of the workings of the mind as it thinks, reasons,
and feels.
Light in his works often symbolizes truth and knowledge. In “The
Tables Turned” (1798),
Wordsworth contrasts the barren light of reason available in books with
the “sweet” and “freshening” light of the knowledge nature brings.
Sunlight literally helps people see, and sunlight also helps speakers
and characters begin to glimpse the wonders of the world. In “Expostulation
and Reply” (1798),
the presence of light, or knowledge, within an individual prevents dullness
and helps the individual to see, or experience (5, 157). Generally,
the light in Wordsworth’s poems represents immortal truths that can’t
be entirely grasped by human reason. In “Ode: Imitations of Immortality,”
the speaker remembers looking at a meadow as a child and imagining it
gleaming in “celestial light». As the speaker grows and matures,
the light of his youth fades into the “light of common day” of adulthood.
But the speaker also imagines his remembrances of the past as a kind
of light, which illuminate his soul and give him the strength to live.
CHAPTER 2 PECULIARITIES OF THE USE OF STYLISTIC DEVICES IN THE WORKS
OF ROMANTIC POETS
2.1 Stylistic analysis of Lord Byron’s works “Destruction of Sennacherib”,
“Prometheus”, “Darkness”
"The Destruction of Sennacherib" is a poem by Lord Byron first published in 1815 in his Hebrew Melodies. It is based on an event from the campaign by Assyrian king Sennacherib t
Byron's use of meter and rhyme is especially evident in the poem and
rewarding when one reads the lines out loud. The lines have a powerful,
rolling, and very precise rhythm, and they rhyme in a way that is impossible
to ignore. In other words, the physicality of the language — how it sounds and feels — accounts
for a large measure of the poem's effect. The rhythm of the poem has
a feel of the beat of a galloping horse' shoves (an anapestic tetrameter) as the Assyrian rides into battle. The pattern “aabb”
emphasizes the power of image, deliberate repetition of conjunction
“and”, morphemic repetition of prefix “un” underline the scheme
chosen by the author.
“The Destruction of Sennacherib” is an example of Romantic philosophy
in both its revolutionary subject matter and in how Byron uses vivid
details and descriptive language. “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
retells an ancient story that is firmly rooted in the nineteenth- century
Romanticism. It describes the defeat of the king of Assyria by the hand
of God and his death thereafter. In the beginning of this poem,
the speaker describes the might of the enemy’s army to the reader.
He shows the Assyrians ruthless warriors and a force feared by all.
To describe their ferocity, he chooses such similies as “came
down like the wolf on the fold”, “like stars on the sea”. The epithet”Assyrian” refers to the
king himself as the personification of the military might. Afterwards
the author gives us an extended metaphor comparing the invasive force
with
“…the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown…”(18, 235)
Moreover, here we observe the sudden change in reproduction of the
meaning. Interrelation of the two opposing similies shows the tremendous
awe about the Assyrian army that had been so numerous and then was shattered
so fast.
The “Angel of Death” here seemingly used in the direct meaning as
a force sent by God to destroy the infidels, to my mind, has one more
connotation – the plague.
The proof towards this we can see in the following lines –
“And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!”(18. 235)
It is too obvious that here is the depiction of the dreadful disease
that suddenly struck the enemy’s army. So the “Angel of Death”
can be additionally referred to as the personification of plague. The
hearts that “once heaved, and forever grew still” is, of course,
a hyperbole used to strengthen the effect.
“The rider” apparently here symbolizes the king; “the rust on
his mail” should be metaphorically understood as his vanished power
and the decline of his empire.
The last strophe summarizes the utmost despair that befell the Assyrian
nation. “Widows of Ashur” – Ashur is a metonymy derived from the
city name and used to symbolize the fallen soldiers; if to remind the
legend that mythological Ashur was once an invincible king who ruled
over the earth, we can realize that the destruction of the army could
also mean the lost dominance and glory of Assyria. Same as “Gentile”
capitalized intentionally to denote the absolute power forever gone
by this time.
“And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal” – allusion to
the Biblical evidence that the banished Sennacherib was killed in his
capital in the temple by the hands of his two sons. The use “unlifted,
unblown, unsmote” emphasizes the fact that the whole army was crushed
without any single combat, but by the Holy Power, as well as “melted
like snow in the glance of the Lord” – another simily to describe
the essence of the entire poem – any wicked and evil force will be
inevitably crushed by God, by any means, at any circumstances.
To conclude this humble analysis, we should mention that this poem
is one of the most powerful and conceptual works of the great master,
and deserves to be read and admired.
The poem “Prometheus” was written in 1816. Byron had left England for the last time and settled in Switzerland, where he started a friendship with Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley. The influence of the Shelley’s over Byron (and vice versa) is especially noticeable in this particular poem, and, as an evidence, we must mention both Percy Shelley’s poem “Prometheus unbound” and Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus”.“Byron and the Shelley’s’ shared a period of intense creativity together.
The poem is about the figure of Prometheus, the famous titan who brought fire to men and was condemned by Zeus to be eternally chained to a rock with his liver eaten every day by an eagle. Here we are dealing not exactly with a narrative poem, but with a demonstration of praise to the figure of a heroic character.
The given poem is structured in three stanzas that are irregular to each other, not following the same rhyme pattern and having an extension which varies from one to another. In the first stanza we are introduced to Prometheus as an immortal being who, however, is paradoxically subjected and condemned to suffer, something that is characteristic of human race (“The sufferings of mortality”). Here, we observe for the first time in the poem with two aspects that are essential for it: the semi-god nature of Prometheus, which fits with the duality of man (“Like thee, Man is in part divine”,), and the inexorable existence of suffering, consubstantial to man (14, 178).
Next, Byron throws a question, notably tainted with irony (“What was thy pity's recompense?”), which gets an immediate answer that shows and emphasizes the injustice of his punishment and that occupies the next and last 9 lines of the strophe: His recompense is a strong and extreme imposed suffering (note that “the chain”, mentioned in line 7 symbolizes very well this imposition), a suffering that is noiselessly and heroically bore by Prometheus (“A silent suffering”), who is represented as a lonely and remarkably individualized being who, however, must be contented as far as his cry is listened (“nor will sigh until its voice is echoless”), fact that provides him with a perceptible revolutionary nuance.
In the second stanza, the term power is the essential concept that is treated. While we are reading this part of the poem we are led through a process of inversion of what is “power” and to whom it really belongs.
At the beginning, Prometheus is represented as the one who is oppressed and defenceless, in the same way Zeus (and, extensively, all form of deity or superior being, ruling class, etc.) incarnates the powerful oppressor (“inexorable Heaven”, “tyranny of Fate”, etc.). But at the end, the fact is that the power and inner strength of Prometheus as an individual surpasses and goes beyond any supernatural and apparently superior power of Zeus. “And in thy Silence was his Sentence / And in his Soul a vain repentance / and evil dread so ill dissembled / that in his hand the lightings trembled.” This passage symbolizes the victory of the individual and his strong spirit over any kind of oppressor trying to reduce and silence him. It shows how the direct comparison between gods and man illustrates the ability of man to overcome power and display bravery despite his shortcomings and the gods' advantage for being powerful and possessing extraordinary skills (14,157).
Finally, in the third stanza, the paradoxical relation between Prometheus’ punishment and its cause is ironically remarked again: “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind” and at the same time his labour and greatness (“thine impenetrable Spirit”) is thanked and recompensed as it was to the benefit of man, whose inherent pain and fatal destiny is highly stressed in this particular strophe from a very pessimistic point of view: “His own funereal destiny / his wretchedness, and his resistance / And his sad unallied existence”.
Prometheus
serves as a model for man to bear pain and suffering with “a firm
will, and a deep sense”, to overcome the misfortune of mortality with
a strong Spirit characteristic of immortality (20, 124).
Byron draws an admirable and idealized character, punished due to a
generous and benevolent “crime”, victim of the tyranny of a God
and condemned to suffer an eternal torture in complete loneliness. However,
as it has been said at the beginning, he was not the only one who made
this representation of Prometheus. Defeated but unsubmissive, the Titans
(and Prometheus in particular) were popular in the nineteenth century
as symbols of revolution or resistance to tyranny.
Now we are going to place the poem in relation with all the poetical production of Byron as a whole, which is the final aim of that paper. The presence of a heroic character in Byron’s work seems to be a constant and characterising feature. The sum of the almost autobiographical character in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, the protagonists of his famous Oriental Tales (The Giaour, The Corsair, etc.) and others like Manfred, Mazeppa, etc., have contributed to configure what we know as the “Byronic hero”, that has been described as “embodying the ultimate in individualism, self-sufficiency, ambition, and aspiration, yet isolated, gloomy, unsatisfied, and dangerous to himself and others”.
Still, Prometheus does not seem to perfectly fit this description, because, as we may have perceived when analysing the poem, Prometheus is much more idealised and lacks that “carnal” aspect that completes the figure of the Byronic hero, who combines the grandness and ambition of his spirit with a sinful and “vicious” corporeal life.
Nonetheless, since Byron’s first successful work, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, we can observe his melancholic feelings towards the Ancient Greek, from where he is reclaiming the hero he’s trying to find. “In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”—and throughout his entire career—Byron is looking for a hero”.
Prometheus’ revolutionary spirit matches also with that of Napoleon Bonaparte, and in Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” (1814), a very symbolic and revealing comparison is made:
"Or, like the thief of fire from heaven / Wilt thou withstand the shock? / And share with him- the unforgiven / His vulture and his rock?".
“Prometheus' suffering can be likened to Napoleon Bonaparte who has to experience suffering and death first before the society realized his fight for freedom of all people” (18, 146).
Also we can find the same pessimistic and apocalyptic view of man’s “funereal” destiny in Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816).
“All earth was but one thought--and that was death / Immediate and inglorious; and the pang / Of famine fed upon all entrails—men / Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh” (22,45).
The importance of Prometheus’ myth during the Romantic age can be hardly compared with any other time’s. Prometheus gave the romantics an example of courage and rebelliousness against Zeus, who they saw as personification of tyranny. He was the spirit of the French Revolution and of the divinely inspired artist, and “Prometheus” is one of the best examples of this.
“Darkness” - Byron wrote this poem in July-August
1816. It is composed in a style of an apocalyptic vision dealing with
degeneration of the human race and total destruction of the world.
It was greatly influenced by 2 events that occurred at that time –
a mysterious prognosis made by an Italian astronomer who proclaimed
that sun would burn itself that year and darkness would fall on earth,
marking the end of the world; and sudden eclipse that really occurred
but as a result of a sudden eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The
poet was at that time in state of depression (he left his family and
England for the last time) and his cynic attitude towards human civilization
and it’s future reached the highest peak. All this stuff along with
the tendency to implement allusions from Bible made the poem sound especially
terrifying (14, 115).
First it is essential to discuss the rhythm of the poem under analysis. Byron employs several poetic techniques to unify "Darkness" and to create a sense, of time passing away. The poem's blank verse creates the feeling of time beating wildly, and then slowing to a stop when world's destruction is completed. Time, after this smooth, regular beat, soon changes to a faster, different pace. As men run wildly to preserve light and their lives, time runs like a clock gone wild. Byron doesn’t use complex stylistic devices to describe the scene. Everything happens unbelievably fast, and as rapidly as Byron envisioned it. But closer to the end pace of the poem slows down giving us a feeling of the calm after the storm.
One
should also pay attention to the fact that there are only 6 sentences
throughout the entire poem. Byron allows no time to pause to rest once
the narration begins. It creates feeling of despair and hopelessness
intensified by the use words relating to destruction, chaos and death.
In the poem the author uses alliteration to compensate the absence
of rhymed lines. This can be seen in the following lines:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.(14,144)
It also gives emphasis to words - beasts are described as "tame and tremulous”, Death as "immediate and inglorious".
Then it should be also mentioned that there are some sets of images. First, movement downwards, all the time descending, like into the abyss – men burn the palaces and huts down, then birds flutter on the ground, masts are falling, and then “the silent depths” – everything moves down in the direction of hell.
Then we observe the direction from light to darkness, comparison of men with animals, and the whole desperation and anguish that fill the narration and impress in that way that one can imagine the annihilation of the humanity on his/her own. This calls to mind the words of Jesus in the Gospels, where those who are cast away from God are cast “into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:11-12). The biblical allusion increases the apocalyptic tone of the poem, making this darkness a curse of Biblical proportions.
Deliberate morphemic repetition of functional suffixes –less and
–ing support the idea of despair and emphasize the process of dying.
Another thing to add is the description of mental and moral state of
men – they lost their faith, but still express hope in that “selfish
prayer for light”. They degenerated to the lowest limit, but it’s
not the only thing that unites humanity.
As Byron envisions the very end of the human world, famine has killed
all but two men, “and they were enemies”. These last two survivors
of a dead world meet by accident at a place where other horrors have
been perpetrated: “a mass of holy things / For an unholy usage”
(here we observe antithesis, that is seen throughout the human history).
The blasphemers, who sacrificed morality for a little temporary safety,
are now dead. In the small flames the two enemies cooperate, not thinking
of themselves as enemies. But when they manage to stoke the flames they
see one another’s faces in horror and die. The men die only able to
see the “fiend” (could mean the Devil and then another allusion
to the Bible) written upon each other’s brow by famine .They see the
utter horror of the end and can no longer take it.
Frequent use of antonomasia – Death, War, Darkness also makes us
remind the New Testament and the similar acts done by the supernatural
forces used as God’s servants(the 4 Horsemen or 7 Angels if to recall
a few of them).
Death and Darkness are represented as the great levelers, as houses of the rich and poor are equally burnt down and all men gathered together in their last hope. Still the bitter sarcasm is heard in the lines when the War that has stopped because of the supernatural disaster, however rages on; but here it turns from political warfare to fighting and killing out of a desire to survive. Here’s another moral from Bible as it is said that nothing but Death will teach the human race, what inevitably comes as the result in the poem.
“Adonais”
– is an elegy written in memory of one of the greatest Romantics and
a close friend of Shelley, John Keats. The whole poem is a an outstanding
allusion to the Ancient Greek mythology, dealing in some sense with
the motifs from Christianity. Strictly speaking, Keats was the first
to promote the idea of relating to Ancient Greek times as ideal times
for humans (poets in particular). This could be one of the points why
Shelley chose such an exclusive form of praising his friend who died.
The other is that Christian theme was always close to Shelley, as well
as to Byron, despite their mutual hatred towards the Church. In “Adonais”
Shelley sees Jesus Christ in Greek disguise, as we feel from the tone
of the poem, the main hero is praised as a martyr. Yet, in his poetry,
he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the
poet up as a secular replacement for Christ. Martyred by society and
conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of
nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions over
the earth. Shelley further separates his Christ figures from traditional
Christian values in “Adonais”, in which he compares the same character
to Christ, as well as Cain, whom the Bible portrays as the world’s
first murderer. For Shelley, Christ and Cain are both outcasts and rebels,
like romantic poets and like himself.
It is also interesting to dwell upon the name of the poem and the
main hero himself. Adonais is a conversion made up by means of combining
two versions of one name of a Deity – Adonis and Adonai. Adonis was
a Phrygian god of dying and reviving nature; he emanated on the earth
and died suddenly, likening the fate of Christ, his cult became a part
of Greek-Roman religious system and influenced the further Christian
dogmatism. Adonai is a form of address to the Almighty God originally
taken from Judaism and then also transferred to the Christian religion.
So the peculiarities of different systems were synthesized here in one
notion and the author created a somewhat new mysterious and super powerful
image.
Concerning the type of verse – Shelley chose the specific Spenser
verse (so admired by Byron, by the way). It is the pastoral elegy, so
specific for Greek and Roman poetry (so we see Lucan, mentioned in the
poem). The difference between ancient and Shelly’s poem lies in the
fact that in “Adonais” Shelley accuses a person who, to his viewpoint,
was the real cause of poet’s death – literary critic. Next thing
is the obvious prediction of own Shelley’s death – he described
with admiration a part of Roman cemetery, and told that he would follow
his friend to the Otherworld. Indeed, he died just in two years and
was buried in the place he described.
Beyond the obvious parallel that both were taken at a young age, Shelley
uses this poem to make readers hold onto him in memory and rejoice in
his virtual resurrection by reading his words.
As we apparently see from the narration, Shelley blames Keats’ death
on literary criticism that was recently published (he was unaware that
Keats was suffering from tuberculosis). He scorns the weakness and cowardice
of the critic compared with the poet. The poet wonders why Adonis’
mother (“Urania”) was not able to do more to save her beloved son,
and he summons all spirits, living and dead, to join him in his mourning(so
he mentions Byron “Pilgrim of Eternity”, Thomas Moore - “sweetest
lyrist”, Chatterton, Sydney – calling them by name). Shelley argues
that Keats’ had great potential as a poet and is perhaps the “loveliest
and the last” great spirit of the Romantic period.
Stanzas eight and nine continue with Shelley’s beckoning of mourners.
Stanza ten changes to dialogue: his mother, Urania, holds the corpse
of her young poet son and realizes that some “dream has loosened from
his brain”
(19, 134).That is, something about his mind is not dead although his
body may be dead. The body is visited by a series of Greek Goddesses,
who take three or four stanzas to prepare the corpse for the afterlife;
Keats deserves it.
Even nature is mourning the loss, where things like the ocean, winds,
and echoes (here we observe a great example of antonomasia) are stopping
to pay their respects. As the seasons come and go, the mourned is feeling
no better. By stanza twenty, the hero finally perceives a separation
between the corpse and the spirit, one going to fertilize new life in
nature, the other persisting to inspire aesthetic beauty. This is when
Urania awakens from her own dejected sleep and takes flight across the
land, taunting death to “meet her” but realizing she is “chained
to time” and cannot be with her beloved son, so she is again left
feeling hopeless and dejected. She acknowledges her son’s “defenselessness”
against the “herded wolves” of mankind but then compares him to
Apollo, suggesting he will have more inspiration in death than he would
have in life (1, 217).
The poet then describes the death of Keats with scorn for those he
thinks is responsible. Keats visits his mother as a ghost whom she does
not recognize. The author calls for Keats to be remembered for his work
and not the age of his death, and Shelley takes an unusual religious
tone as he places Keats as a soul in the heavens, looking down upon
earth. Shelley contends that Keats, in death, is more “alive” than
the common man will ever be, and he can now exist peacefully, safe from
the evils of men and their criticisms.
In stanza forty-one, the poem takes a major shift. The narrator begins
to rejoice, becoming aware that the young Adonis is alive (in spirit)
and will live on forever. We see the Romantic notion that he is now
“one with nature,” and just as other young poets who have died (Shelley
lists them), their spirits all live on in the inspiration we draw from
their work and short lives. Even so, Keats is a head above the rest.
Completely turning on his original position, the speaker now calls upon
anyone who mourns for Adonis as a “wretch,” arguing that his spirit
is immortal, making him as permanent as the great city of Rome. Shelley
ends the poem wondering about his own fate, when he will die, and if
he will be mourned and remembered with such respect as he is giving
Keats (1, 145).
The poem is overloaded with stylistic devices that are aimed to express
deep sorrow for Adonais, splendor of his rebirth and ultimate doom that
awaits everyone, the author in particular. Mentioning the deliberate
use of antonomasia along with capitalization which is so common for
all the Romantic poets (i.e. Light, Beauty, Benediction, Curse, Love,
Time, Hour etc.) one should notice that those images are not only personified,
they act as characters too and mourn Adonais along with real human beings.
Epithets are also numerous, concerning only Adonais himself – young
Dawn, a pardlike Spirit, a Power, a Love, Vesper etc. Among others –
trembling throng, revolving year, eclipsing Curse, sustaining Love,
cold mortality, kingless sphere, dazzling immortality, unascended majesty,
mourning mind. We can observe several important cases of other lexical
stylistic devices, such as metaphor (soft sky smiles, ages, empires,
religions lie buried), metonymy (Light whose smile shines, bones of
Desolation’s nakedness), simily (Rome as Paradise, grave, wilderness;
time feeds a slow fire, soul like flame, life like a dome of many colored
glass), comparison (wrecks like shattered mountains, , Adonais like
a star). Among syntactical stylistic devices we may enumerate frequent
use of repletions (Adonais died, weep for Adonais; why, why, why; up
to Rome etc), suspense and asyndeton. Although the whole poem is an
immense allusion we must mark some cases inside of it – spirit’s
bark, allusion to Charon’s ferry; sphere skies , allusion to the movement
of Gnosticism, kingly Death has his court, allusion to Hades, Greek
God of Underworld.
Taken as a whole, then, “Adonais” expresses the many stages of
grieving, mourning, with deep lamentation being soon replaced with rejoice
of Adonais revival. Shelley chooses allusion and allegory going back
to ancient myth in order to express his sorrow for the loss of his friend
and to implore the rest of the world to never forget the work of the
young bard. The use of ancient mythology suggests that Shelley sees
Keats as a truly majestic figure, as the rest of the poem demonstrates.
“A Fact and Imagination”
– a poem was written in form of a vision where truth is mixed with
an unreal supposition that, however, is inclined to prove the central
theme. We evidently observe that the poem consists of 2 parts, one spoken
by King Canute, the other by King Alfred. Both of them were real historical
figures that from different times, so the author “intrudes” into
the narration to bind both parts. The main aim of the poet was to show
the people that all material things like wealth, status, and power are
of little value when compared to God’s grace bestowed upon the people.
Let us have a closer view. The first part, obviously, “the Fact” deals with King Canute, the
Danish Conqueror who invaded England in the 10th century and successfully
occupied it thus becoming King of England. He was a religious man who
supported the Church and was told to be a faithful man.
He put the God’s authority higher than man’s ambitions that is seen
in such passages:
“He only
is a King, and he alone
Deserves the name (this truth the billows preach)
Whose everlasting laws, sea, earth, and heaven, obey (10, 86).”
Though initially he is presented as a powerful man, which might is so
great that he alone is able to command the waves –
'O ye
Approaching Waters of the deep, that share
With this green isle my fortunes, come not where
Your Master's throne is set.(10, 86)
Twice in the poem he turns to his servants who praise him, he tells
them about God’s eternal power, but they are blind and do not accept
the highest meaning of his words. Therefore, King Canute bends before
God’s authority as it is seen the only true one and defies the human
power as being senseless to gain and hold -
“From that time forth did for his brows disown
The ostentatious symbol of a crown;
Esteeming earthly royalty
Contemptible as vain.”(10, 86)
Then the narration stops abruptly and with the help of the authors
guide, the “vision” transfers to another scene, with King Alfred.
This second part is mostly pantheistic, praising nature as God’s emanative
representation. This way of stylistic description was adopted by W.
Wordsworth and is commonly seen throughout his poetry. Alfred once had
lost all his power and sought any place to stay and rest with his thoughts
of own fate. He spent much time on the run, wandering around
the villages and, as he too was a religious man, might have turned to
God for help. This is also quite obviously shown in the entire second
part of the poem.
Special attention should be drawn to the distinct variety of stylistic
devices used by the author in the poem: epithets ( “Rich Theme of
England’s fondest praise” towards Alfred, “wanton air”, “oriental
flattery”, “earthly royalty”), metaphors (“Waters of the Deep”
towards sea, “sluggish pools” as bays), simily (“souls like the
flood”), anaphoric repetition (such…..such) – all that powerful
items were used to draw our attention and to intensify the effect that
is made by the magnificent plot. Extensive use of capitalization (Conqueror,
King – relating to God, Nature, Ocean etc.) and antonomasia make that
pantheistic and sublime image so admired by Wordsworth. One more thing
that attracts our view is the attitude of the author to the barren men.
He calls them “Servile Courtiers”, “the undisguised extent of
mortal sway”, even “rugged northern mouths” (metonymy) to convey
the thought of their mutual incapability to accept and evaluate the
grace and power of the nature and thus God’s authority even despite
King’s speech and personal example of loyalty towards the Highest
Power, they are only able to display “oriental flattery”. This is
important for understanding of his views concerning the extensive degeneration
of the human society and his disregard towards this, meanwhile accentuating
that only love to nature can bring back all the purity of thoughts and
feelings in men’s minds, and only faith can return people to the real
progress.
Also significant is the point that both main characters (Canute and
Alfred) don’t communicate with each other, as it couldn’t occur
in the real time; they are not confronted with each other too. But both
of them are doubtlessly considered as the greatest rules of England
and ones among the most prominent leaders in Europe of that time. And
they both “serve” the only aim in the poem – by their own example
of virtue, faith and goodness they would guide to light and grace those
who would read the poem and realize the great power of the Creator.
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- Lexical and Grammatical Means of Expressing Supposition in Modern English
- Lexical peculiarities of American English
- Lexical problems of literary translation by the examples of the novel “Theater” by Somerset Maugham
- Lexical problems of translation
- Lexical-semantic field of the concept “sport” in English and Ukrainian
- Lexicography. Types of Vocabularies
- Life of Diana Frances Spencer
