Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature

BAN 2375 Seminars on Mondays at 0800-0930 (room 322)

and 1200-1330 (room 300, the departmental library) Dr Richard Major

http://www.richardmajor.com/teaching/Karoli/BAN2375.html

Seminar XI, 8 December 2014:

Romantic lyrics Among the greatest poems ever written in English are the lyrics produced the Romantics. They can be ecstatic and mystical, but behind many of them lies a certain imagiantively –charged despair.

Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it (Lionel Trilling).

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

‘The world’s great age’, a chorus from Hellas (1821)

The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star; Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies; A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. O write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death’s scroll must be— Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free, Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if naught so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give. Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdued: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers. O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy! The world is weary of the past— O might it die or rest at last!

GEORGE GRODON, LORD BYRON

‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’ Byron wrote to his friend Thomas Moore from Venice on 28 February 1817, nine days after Ash Wednesday:

At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival – that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o’ nights – had knocked me up a little. But it is over – and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard’, though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine.

He added this short lyric (based, presumably, on the Scottish shanty that ends Let the moon shine ne’er sae bright, And we’ll gang nae mair a roving). The still shows Jonny Lee Miller from the 2003 Byron.

So, we’ll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

‘England in 1819’ (1819) An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed— Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Cruikshank’s cartoon of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819

JOHN KEATS

Ode to a Nightingale (1819)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness, That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South! Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Joseph Severn (c. 1845) Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Keats listening to the nightingale Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?