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The Romantic Lyric: Keats's Nightingale as the Archetypal Romantic Singer or Lyricist. MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsMy sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drainsOne minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:'Tis not through envy of thy ha
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1. Romanticism: Aesthetics and Generic Innovation The Romantic Lyric Barnita Bagchi
2. The Romantic Lyric: Keats's Nightingale as the Archetypal Romantic Singer or Lyricist 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-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
3. The lyric The lyric is originally thought of as a poem to be sung, to be set to music.
Has classical antecedents. Think of lyre, the classical musical instrument.
We find great lyrics in European literature of the medieval and Renaissance periods: think of the troubadors' songs of courtly love, of Petrarch, of Shakespeare's sonnets, of Ronsard....
Post-1660, the lyric undergoes an eclipse, until about 1780.
4. The Lyric The period we associate with the Enlightenment is elegant, but unskilled in conveying emotions or personal feelings with depth and shade.
Enlightenment rationality and great lyrics do not go together.
Enter Romanticism, which prizes individual subjective feelings, the more mysterious, non-rational facets of the world, and we have the creation of some of the greatest lyrics in the canon of world literature: by Keats, Wordsworth, Goethe, Byron, and Hoelderlin, among others.
5. The Lyric A lyric typically focuses on moments of feeling.
It is often brief.
It is also often memorable: readers of poetry, in all languages, tend to remember lines from favourite lyric poems.
In many of the greatest Romantic lyrics, we find a poetic self engaging in a moving transaction with aspects of the world, often beautiful aspects, but also, often mixed with a loss, pain, and transience.
Nature is frequently a prominent theme. Childhood, too, is another subject which becomes important in this period.
6. The Romantic Lyric is Expressive, not Mimetic: The Lamp, Not the Mirror A key trait of Romanticism was put forth by M.H. Abrams: it is an aesthetic of the expressive.
Not mimetic.
Romantic aesthetics does not view art as a mirror which transparently reflects and represents the world.
Rather, Romantic aesthetics, and lyricism, are like lamps. The light of the writer's subjectivity, or self, or soul, spills out to illuminate part of the world.
7. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 The publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, by Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ushered in the British Romantic movement in literature.
Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the beautiful rural Lake District of England.
This region was a powerful shaping force for Wordsworth's lyrics, indeed his entire poetic oeuvre.
Unspoilt rural nature, pastoral and agricultural life, dignified shepherds, peasants, ordinary men and women: Wordsworth was inspired by them, and in turn immortalized them.
8. Wordsworth the Poetic Philosopher Wordsworth uses simple, but dignified language.
He discusses the highest and most difficult questions around life, death, immortality, and loss: and always in this simple but dignified register.
In 'We Are Seven', published in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth gives us the voice of a child.
A village girl, a curly-haired eight-year old.
9. The Child Transcends Death "Sisters and brothers, little Maid, How many may you be?" "How many? Seven in all," she said And wondering looked at me. "And where are they? I pray you tell." She answered, "Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea. "Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother."
10. The Child Is Closest to Immortality Published in the 1807 edition of Lyrical Ballads Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.
11. Romanticism: The Child, Nature, and the Mystical and Transcendent 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal was published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.
It is part of a series called the 'Lucy poems. It has a vision of mystical union of the human soul with nature--even in death.
The death of a much-beloved person, and the attendant sense of tragic loss, are conveyed by matter-of-fact words which sees the loved one, after death, as now part of nature's daily, but eternal, laws and movements.
Going beyond the outwardly visible to a deeply-felt and perceived cosmic order in which the poetic self, the exalted child, and nature together create a temporary FUSION.
12. 'Beauty that must die': The Lyrics of John Keats
Romantic quest for beauty hauntingly captured in the odes of John Keats, 1795-1821. The odes we read in this course were written in 1819, and published in 1820.
It is fitting that a poet who died at the age of 25+ was also the one who most movingly wrote about the Romantic artist's quest and desire for immortal, undying beauty, and about the same artist's sense of aching awareness that this quest may be doomed, in a world filled with pain, loss, transience, and death.
13. 'Beauty that must die': The Lyrics of John Keats In 'Ode to a Nightingale', the poet tries to become one with the nightingale, the symbol since Classical times of timeless song.
How does the speaker try to reach this fusion or union with the nightingale? Through what means?
Through wine, for example:
14. Can He Achieve This Fusion through Wine? O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvčd 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-stainčd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
15. Death Stalks Him, Pain Stalks Him: The Romantic Dialectic between Beauty and Its Loss, Immortality and Death, Wholeness and Fragments of Life Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
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.
16. Melancholy An Inevitable and Necessary Part of Beauty: Typically Romantic Notion But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
17. No Beauty Without Pain or the Darker Elements of Life Romantic lyrics like those of Keats show that we have to achieve our sense of beauty through a constant process of struggle, and that the shadows of life, the hard-to-express emotions, the sadnesses, the losses are all important parts of beauty.
No beauty without beholder: especially true of the Romantic lyric. We are constantly aware of the poetic self, and the processes taking place within the self.
18. Out of this hard-fought struggle, come exquisite moments of beauty ---She dwells with BeautyBeauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips;
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
An acceptance, and aestheticization of the coexistence of beauty, joy, death, and transience.
A tremendous emphasis on PROCESS, rather than only PRODUCT: very Romantic trait.
19. The Mystery and Desolation of the Beautiful Grecian Urn Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
20. Such Mystery Yields Immortal Beauty: The Epitome of the Romantic Lyric's Sense of Aesthetics O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
21. Further Reading M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Aidan Day, Romanticism, Routledge, New Critical idiom Series, London: 1996
