Syllabus:

UNIT 1: Renaissance poetry

1.1. Reading sonnets: William Shakespeare's sonnets: sonnet 130 (to be read in relation to Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 15 from Amoretti. We have

to underline Amoretti), 18, 55 (optional), 116, 129 (optional), 138 and 144.

1.2. Metaphysical and 17th-century poetry: John Donne's sonnet 14 from Holy Sonnets, "The Sun Rising” and "The Flea", Andrew Marvell's

"To His Coy Mistress” and George Herbert's "Easter Wings”.

You must study:

You must study the entry for "Renaissance" in M.H. Abrams's volume A Glossary of Literary Terms
-
http://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/a-glossary-of-literary-terms-7th-ed_m-h-abrams-1999.pdf (págs 264-267, que en el pdf es a

contar la página 284)Hacer resumen

Handout on Shakespeare’s sonnetsHacer resumen

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You must study the entry for "Metaphysical poets" in M.H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms
-
http://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/a-glossary-of-literary-terms-7th-ed_m-h-abrams-1999.pdf (págs 158-159, que en el pdf es a

contar la página 178)Hacer resumen

Handout on John Donne’s poetry

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UNIT 2: From the Renaissance to the Restoration: John Milton

2.1. John Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IV, ll. 288-324, 339-369.

You must study:

Definition of epic provided below

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Handout on John Milton and Paradise Lost
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UNIT 3: Augustan poetry in the eighteenth century

3.1. Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock”, Canto I, ll. 13-36 and 105-148.

You must study:

You should be able to identify its form in heroic couplets and some elements of mock epic poetry in it
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You must study the handouts: Alexander Pope and “The Rape of the Lock”
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Mock epic definition
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UNIT 4: Romantic poetry

4.1. First generation of Romantic poets: Mary Robinson's "London's Summer Morning”, William Blake's "Introduction to Songs of

Innocence”, "Infant Joy”, "Infant Sorrow” "The Lamb”, "The Tyger", "The Blossom" and "The Sick Rose”;

William Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring", "We Are Seven", "My Heart Leaps up”, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also called “The

rainbow”).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Part I (selections).

4.2. Second generation of Romantic poets:

P.B. Shelley's "England in 1819” and John Keats's "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”.

YOU MUST STUDY:

 The handout below on the differences between Neoclassic and Romantic to be able to write an essay on this topic (HANDOUT 1).
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The handout below on S. T. Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (HANDOUT 2)
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The handout below on Lord Byron's Don Juan and literary genre (HANDOUT 3)
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UNIT 5: Victorian poetry

5.1. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess”.

YOU MUST STUDY:

The handout on the Victorian period provided below (HANDOUT 1).

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UNIT 6: 20th-century and contemporary poetry

6.1 Early 20th-century poetry: Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush” and "The Convergence of the Twain”.

6.2. Modernism: William Butler Yeats's "A Coat” and "The Second Coming” and T.S. Eliot's "Preludes”.

6.3. Contemporary poets: Carol Ann Duffy's "Anne Hathaway”.

You must study:

Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" and study its intricate rhyming pattern; also you must be able to summarize in your own
-
words how the poet is describing the ship, the iceberg and their encounter. Study the analysis of the poem provided below.

Read the examples of Modernist poetry by Yeats and Eliot in 6.2. You must be able to summarize in your own words what the poet is
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describing in each one of the three poems.

Read Carol Ann Duffy's sonnet "Anne Hathaway". You must be able to discuss its structure and find connections with the sonnets read in
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unit 1.Evaluation:

90% exam

10% class and tasks

 Exam (remember quotation marks for a poem, and underlining for a volume). Es obligatorio aprobar todas las partes.

 Underline the books, and put in italics the collections and volumes

1. Identify the poem and author to which the following passages belong. Answer the question(s) for each passage (1 point for each part):

(a) Discuss this fragment in the context of the poem to which it belongs. Discuss its most important formal features.

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain'd the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

(b) Place this moment in the work and discuss its significance. Discuss its most important formal features.

But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust.

(c) Place this passage in the context of the whole poem to which it belongs and discuss its formal features.

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,

Godlike erect, with native honour clad

In naked majesty seemed lords of all,

And worthy seemed, for in their looks divine

The image of their glorious Maker shone,

Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure.

2. Answer the following short questions (100 words per question. 1 point for each part):

(a) Define mock-epic.

(b) John Donne’s religious poetry.

(c) Name the features of Romantic poetry.

3. Write an essay on the following topic (500 words. 4 points) Dos poemas de un período, dos autores, patrones que se repitan:

Write an essay about William Shakespeare’s sonnets

27/09/22

Task for Thursday:

What is a sonnet?
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A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines traditionally written in iambic pentameter with several rhyme schemes originated in Italy in the Renaissance,

14th century (sonetto, ‘little song’), and brought to England in the 16th century. It usually takes a volta ( a turn) about eight lines in, and then

resolves the issue by the end.

What kind of sonnets do we have in English?

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There are two main types of sonnets: the English sonnet and the Italian sonnet

English sonnet (16th century):

Shakespearean/Elizabethan/English sonnet is a 14-line poem that rhymes in a particular pattern: abab cdcd efef gg, with the final

couplet used to summarize the previous 12 lines or present a surprise ending. The rhythmic pattern of the sonnets is

the iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable — as

in da-DUM, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Shakespeare uses five of these in each line, which makes it a

pentameter. The sonnet is a difficult art form for the poet because of its restrictions on length and metre.

Italian sonnet (13th century):

 Petrarchan sonnets (fourteen lines divided into two subgroups: an octave and a sestet). The problem is aborded in the octave and the

solution is aborded in the sestet.

29/09/22
Power point:

The English Renaissance (name the main features of the Renaissance POSIBLE PREGUNTA EXAMEN)
-
The Renaissance is the period of European history following the Middle Ages; it began in Italy in the late 14th century and continued, both in

Italy and other countries of Western Europe, through the 15th and 16th centuries.

The dates of beginning and ending of the English Renaissance are 1485 (first Tudor King, Henry VII) and 1660 (the restoration of the monarchy

with Charles II after the Puritan Interregnum)

Sonnets were particularly popular at two points in the 16th century: the 1550s and the 1590s. The two sonnets that we read belong to the second

period.

For the Renaissance, dark skin people were not seen as beauty.

Renaissance ("rebirth") is the name commonly applied to the period of European history following the Middle Ages; it is usually said to have begun in Italy in

the late fourteenth century and to have continued, both in Italy and other countries of western Europe, through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Many attempts have been made to define "the Renaissance" in a brief statement, as the birth of the modern world out of the ashes of the Dark Ages; as the

discovery of the world and the discovery of man; and as the era of the emergence of untrammeled individualism in life, thought, religion, and art.

Recently, some historians have denied that the Renaissance ever existed.

Beginning in the 1940s, a number of historians have replaced (or else supplemented) the term "Renaissance" with early modern to designate the span from

the end of the middle ages until late in the seventeenth century.

1) The new learning. Renaissance scholars of the classics, called humanists, revived the knowledge of the Greek language, discovered and disseminated a

great number of Greek manuscripts, and added considerably to the number of Roman authors and works which had been known during the Middle Ages. The

result was to open out the sense of the vastness of the historical past, as well as to enlarge immensely the stock of ideas, materials, literary forms, and styles

available to Renaissance writers.

The rapidity of the spread of ideas, discoveries, and types of literature in the Renaissance was made possible by this new technology of printing.

The humanistic revival sometimes resulted in pedantic scholarship, sterile imitations of ancient works and styles, and a rigidly authoritarian rhetoric and

literary criticism. It also bred, however, the gracious and tolerant humanity of an Erasmus (beloved), and the concept of a cultivated Renaissance aristocracy

(expressed in Baldassare Castiglione’s “The Courtier”). This was the most admired and widely translated of the many Renaissance courtesy books. It sets up

the ideal of the completely rounded or "universal" man, developed in all his faculties and skills, physical, intellectual, and artistic.

2) The new religion. The Reformation led by Martin Luther was a successful heresy which struck at the very foundations of the institutionalism of the Roman

Catholic Church. This early Protestantism was grounded on each individual's inner experience of spiritual struggle and salvation. Faith was alone thought

competent to save, and salvation itself was regarded as RENAISSANCE a direct transaction with God without the necessity of intermediation by Church,

priest, or sacrament.

Although England officially broke with the Catholic church during the reign of Henry VIII, the new state religious establishment headed by the monarch

retained many of the characteristics of the old church while embracing selected Protestant theological principles.

(3) The new world. In 1492 Christopher Columbus. sailed west to find a new commercial route to the East, only to be frustrated by the unexpected barrier of

a new continent. The succeeding explorations of this continent and its native populations, and its settlement by Europeans, gave new materials to the literary

imagination.

Important for English nature was the fact that economic exploitation of the new world put England at the center of the chief trade routes, and so helped

establish the commercial prosperity.

(4) The new cosmos. The cosmos of medieval astronomy and of medieval Christian theology was Ptolemaic (based on the astronomy of Ptolemy) and

pictured a stationary earth around which rotated the successive spheres of the moon, the various planets, and then the fixed stars. Heaven, or the Empyrean,
was thought to be situated above the spheres, and Hell to be situated either at the center of the earth or else below the system of the spheres (as in John

Milton's Paradise Lost). In 1543 Copernicus published his new hypothesis. This theory proposed a system in which the center is the sun, and the earth is not

stationary.

Investigations have not borne out the earlier assumption by historians that the world picture of Copernicus and of the scientists who followed him delivered

an immediate and profound shock to the theological and secular beliefs of thinking men.

Still later, Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) expressed a suspension of judgment between the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories; Much more important, was

the effect on men's opinions of the general principles and methods of the new science developed by the great successors of Copernicus in the late sixteenth

and early seventeenth centuries, such as the physicists Johannes Kepler and Galileo. Even after Copernicus, the cosmos of many writers in the Elizabethan era

remained also an animate cosmos that was invested with occult powers and inhabited by demons and spirits, and was widely believed to control men's lives

by stellar influences and to be itself subject to control by the powers of witchcraft and of magic. The cosmos that emerged in the course of the seventeenth

century, was the physical cosmos of René Descartes. The universe of Descartes and the new science consisted of extended particles of matter which moved in

space according to fixed mathematical laws, free from interference by angels, demons, human prayer, or occult magical powers.

In Descartes and other thinkers, the working hypotheses of the scientists about the physical world were converted into a philosophical worldview, helped

constitute the climate of eighteenth-century opinion known as the Enlightenment.

HANDOUT WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

Context: The Life and Times of William Shakespeare

Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English

Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son

of a successful middle-class glove-maker, he attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In

1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind

and travelled to London to work as an actor and playwright.

His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I as the favourite of both monarchs. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to

Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. Later on, luminaries as Ben Johnson hailed him as the apogee of

Renaissance theatre.

The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life; but the paucity of

surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people

have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays in reality were written by someone else.

A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so

influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems around
it.

The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we do not know whether they deal with real events or not, because
no one knows enough about Shakespeare’s life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings.

04/10/22

According to Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, write down a list of the summer problems:

‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ (you are more beautiful than a summer day)
-
‘Rough winds’ (line 3)
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‘Too short to a date’ (line 4)
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‘Too hot’ (line 5)
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‘dimmed’ (line 6)
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 ‘every fair from fair sometime declines’: it will deteriorate through the time (line 7)
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- ‘thy eternal summer shall not fade’: summer is not eternal (line 9)
Power point (about ‘Handout on Shakespeare’s sonnets):
THE SONNETS
The collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets contains 154 sonnets.
The first 126 sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman.
The two addresses in the collection, a man and a woman, are usually referred to as
the “young man” and the “dark lady”.
Within this group in the first 17 sonnets, the speaker tries to convince the handsome
young man to marry and beget children so that his beauty will not die when he dies.
The first of these sonnets belongs to the part of the collection devoted to a young
man (1-126); the second belongs to the part devoted to a woman (127-152).
Starting in Sonnet 18, when the youth appears to reject this argument
for procreation, the poet glories in the young man's beauty and takes
consolation in the fact that his sonnets will preserve the youth's beauty,
much like the youth's children would.

(Sonnet 18 and 55 deal with the passing of time and the preservation of the lover in
poetry).
Similar to his friendship with the young man, this relationship fluctuates
between love, hate, jealousy, and contempt, but in general the poetic
voices expresses more frequently in his relationship with this woman
feelings of disgust at his being trapped by his own lust and attraction
for the lady. (Sonnet 116 describes LOVE and sonnet 129 describes LUST)

Sonnets 127 to 152 (the final two are unrelated) are addressed to the “dark lady”, a
woman with whom he becomes infatuated.
Sonnet 116 opens with an allusion to the marriage service ceremony in the world
“impediments”
“If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be
joined together in holy matrimony…”
Concept of hyperbaton, because it is everywhere: the change in the grammatical
order of words in a sonnet.
*Controversial issues surrounding the sonnets:
-
Read the 3 quatrains (what is love in the 2, and in 1 and 3 what love is not ) of
sonnet 116:
-Fake love:
 ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’
  ‘Admit impediments’
 ‘remover to remove’ (distance)
- True love:

06/10/22
Power point:
- Sonnet 116 provides a definition of love as CONSTANT and PERMANENT.
- Lines 2-3 state that love is NOT love if it changes (“alters”, “bends”, “remove”).
- The second quatrain if full of sea images, with two metaphors:
 It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Love
is a mark (lighthouse, because it guides people’s lives) that sees
storms but remains stable. ‘Tempest’ is also a metaphor for the
obstacles and problems in love and life. It is the star to every wand’ring
bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love is the
north star that guides ships at sea: we do not fully understand what
it is (its “worth is unknown”), although we see where it is.
- Father Time is traditionally visualised in a personification as an old man with a
scythe (or a sickle) that cuts people’s lives.
- The rosy lips and cheeks could be read as METONYMY, the part represents the
whole: healthy lips and cheeks stand for young healthy individuals.
- A fool: the servant that entertains a king or a nobleman.
- Sonnet 116 states that love is not the servant of time: it is stronger, more
powerful than time.
- Doomsday (or the Day of Judgement or the Final Judgement): the day, after the
Resurrection at the dead at the end of the world, when God will determine the
final destiny of all Human beings.

- Sonnet 138 is about the dark lady: it presents a negative vision of the
relationship between the speaker and his woman lover; instead of focusing on
lust as sonnet 129, it describes this relationship as based on lies on both sides:
both lovers tell lies.

- Sonnet 138 belongs to the part of the collection that is thought to be written
about the so-called dark lady.

- The sonnet uses a PUN (PARANOMASIA) throughout: the lady lies means two
things:

1) tell lies;
2) Sleeps with someone else.
 A PUN (PARANOMASIA): is a play on words that are either identical in sound
(homonyms) or very similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning.
An example is the last word in the title of Oscar Wilde’s comedy, The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Puns are used in literature but also in jokes.
Be careful since the two verbs have different forms for the past and the
participle:
LIE (mentir)-lied-lied
LIE (yacer)- lay-lain
Instead of seeing sonnet 138 as another negative vision of the relationship
between the speaker and his woman lover (as in 129), we could read sonnet 138
in a more optimistic way as stating that someone in love seems to be blind to
what he/she undeniably (innegablemente) sees:
- The lady sees that the speaker is old but appears not to notice; the speaker sees
that the lady betrays him but also appears not to notice.
- And in this reading the sonnet could be linked to Helena’s words in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream about how love changes our perceptions and can
make us blind:
“Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and
dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind and therefore is winged
cupid painted blind”

11/10/22

Sonnet 144

Exercise: write down a list of words in the text that the speaker uses for the
lady, and another list of words that the speaker uses for the young man.

- Man:
 Comfort
 Better angel
 Right fair
 My saint
 Purity
 My good one
- Woman:
 Despair
 Worser spirit
 Coloured ill
 Female evil
 Tempteth
 Corrupt
  Devil
 Wooing (it is described as something bad)
 Foul pride (it is the opposite of beautiful and pure, something that is
dirty)
 Be turned fiend (synonym of bad spirit)
 Hell
 Bad angel
This sonnet is about a love triangle: we have the speaker who feels love for the young
man. He is also involved with a dark lady.
The speaker is placed in the tension of good angels and bad angels. They are always
putting him in two opposite directions.
This sonnet is a kind of morality play, Medieval and early modern plays in which the
central character, who represents humankind, subjected to the promptings of:
Vices, who tempt him to do evil;
Virtues, who try to convince him to do good actions.
The speaker is concerned and worried that the corrupting lady is wooing, seducing the
young man.
This fight of good and evil forces for the soul of the protagonist is called
psychomachia.
The second quatrain states that the woman is seducing the beautiful young man
The third quatrain states that this thinking is only a suspicion (“Suspect I may”), which
cannot be demonstrated (“not directly tell”).
They are getting away from me, but they are getting close to each other (“One angel in
another’s hell”). Hell as a bad place, but also as a location in the human body.
(“Till my bad angel fire my good one out”) I will never know it, until the young man
would not be so pure anymore because of the influence of the dark lady. In addition,
“To fire out” would be related to sexually transmitted diseases, because he could be
infected with that.
1.2. Metaphysical and 17th century poetry
METAPHYSICAL POETS
John Dryden said in his Discourse Concerning Satire that Donne employs the
terminology and abstruse arguments of the medieval Scholastic philosophers. In 1779
Samuel Johnson extended the term "metaphysical" from Donne to a school of poets.
The name is now applied to a group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether or not
directly influenced by Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in
secular poetry (Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley) and in religious poetry (Herbert, Vaughan,
Crashaw, and Traherne).
The term “metaphysical”, fits these very diverse writers only if it is used, to indicate a
common poetic style, use of figurative language, and way of organizing the meditative
process or the poetic argument. He was above all "witty," making ingenious use of
paradox, pun, and startling parallels in simile and metaphor.
These poets have had admirers in every age, but beginning with the Neoclassic Period of the
later seventeenth century, they were by most critics and readers regarded as interesting but
perversely ingenious and obscure exponents of false wit, until a drastic revaluation after World
War I elevated Donne, and to a lesser extent Herbert and Marvell, high in the hierarchy of
English poets

John Donne
It is an Italian sonnet in rhyming scheme, but John Donne chose to have a couplet at the
end. He is one of the Metaphysical poets. The label is applied to a diverse group of 17th
century English poets whose works are marked by philosophical exploration, colloquial
diction, ingenious conceits, irony, and metrically flexible lines.
This term was coined as a pejorative label by the late 17th century poet John Dryden,
who found the intellectual complexities of these poems unappealing.
*Possible exam questions: Define conceit and give one example.
Definition of conceit: an unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile
presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things.
Example: Donne compares the two souls of the lovers to a compass ( or pair of
compasses).
If they be two, they are two so [the=our souls]
As stiff twin compasses are two.
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’ other do
13/10/22
John Donne (1572-1631)
- Donne was born in a Catholic family, which meant that he could not expect any
kind of public career; he was not even allowed to receive a university degree ( to
advance in society).
- He converted to the Church of England in the 1590s, and about twenty years
later in 1615 he was ordained and started a distinguished career as a court
preacher and later as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
- His poetic production is generally divided into two kinds of poems:
 Love poetry, assumed to have been written before he started his
ecclesiastical career
 Religious poetry, in his years as a cleric and a dean of St. Paul’s
Cathedral
This chronological division is not all together clear.
- He did not publish during his lifetime but circulated his poems in manuscript
among friends.
 - His most admired collection of poems is Songs and Sonnets, published in 1633,
two years after his death.
- We will discuss two of Donne’s love poems from Songs and Sonnets (“The
Sung Rising” and “The Flea”) and one religious poem from Holy Sonnets
(“Sonnet 142).
Holy Sonnet 14
- The same wit that Donne brings to the poetic treatment of love is present in his
poetic discussions of faith and his dealings with God.
- The speaker passionately asks God (“you”) in sonnet 14 to violently bring down
the walls of his heart so that He can get in.
- The first word is a verb of attack and conquest: “batter my heart”. The
METAPHOR in the first quatrain is that the heart is a besieged town.
(The verb “batter” brings to mind the battering rams used in Medieval warfare).
- If you find this metaphor shocking or unusual you can call it a conceit (justify
it); if you think that is not surprising enough to be a conceit, simply call it a
metaphor.
- “Holy Sonnet 14” is one of his most famous and often-studied poems and it
develops the METAPHOR of the soul as a city that the speaker is requesting
God to conquer. CONCEIT.
- Depending on where we stand. The speaker addressing to an entity that cannot
respond (apostrophe) if you are non-religious.
- Make me your prisoner, but in a sexual way.
- In lines 3 and 4 there is an example of a PARADOX (apparently contradictory):
 Overthrow me, so that I can rise and stand
 Break, burn and blow me, so that I become new
- In order for the speaker (the speaker’s heart, his soul) to be chaste God must
rape him. Another PARADOX: Your rape makes me chaste
- He needs to be under the complete power of God in the sense of possession and
submission.
“The Sun Rising”
John Donne’s love poetry
- In a poem entitled ‘The Good-Morrow’, the speaker says that love “makes one
little room an everywhere”.
- A similar idea is presented in “The Sun Rising”: the speaker says that this bed
where we are together is the entire universe: “Nothing else is”.
18/10/22
John Donne’s poems were divided into two types: love and religion.
Exercise: Look at the two poems “The Sun Rising” and “The Flea” and underline
words in both poems that let us know that the speaker is addressing another
person or object (considering the idea of ‘apostrophe’, which in poetry means a speech
that the speaker addresses an inanimate object or a person that is not there).
The Sung Rising:
 - Busy old fool, unruly Sun
- Thou (informal form of address). The speaker is addressing the sun using this
pronoun
- Thy
- Saucy pedantic wretch
- Go tell
- Thy
- Thou
- Look and tell me
- Where thou leftst them
- Thou saw’st yesterday
- Thou shalt hear
- Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we
- Thine age
- Thy duties
- Shine here to us
- Thy centre
- Thy sphere
*PREGUNTA DE EXAMEN: Find evidence in the text that the speaker is
addressing the sun
In the final stanza (stanza 3), the main idea of the poem is reinforced: the lovers are the
centre of the world.
Stanza 1: my lover and I are more important than the sun, and we do not measure time
following days, months and years.
Stanza 2: we are wealthier than the gold and spices of the world; we are stronger than
the sun
Stanza 3: we contain the world, since she is all states and I am all the princes
This poem is written in the form of APOSTROPHE, because the speaker is addressing
an inanimate object ie, a direct speech to an absent person or to an abstract or
nonhuman entity, in this case, the sun.
The ten lines in each of the three stanzas are not of the same length: metrical irregularity
is a feature of Metaphysical poets.
The colloquial words and phrases that we find in this stanza are a typical element of
Metaphysical poetry, expressions such as “busy old fool”, “go tell” for “go and tell”,
and “go chide” for “go and chide”.
In the closing argument of this poem, the bed of the lovers is the centre around which
the sun must move: This bed thy centre is; these walls thy sphere.
Throughout this poem, the tone is that of a relaxed conversation: the poetic voice is
addressing the sun in a casual way.
Donne’s “The Sun Rising” plays on the traditional poem called “aubade”, a poem or
poem about lovers’ separating at dawn (alba, amanecer).
20/10/22
The Flea:
- Thou
- Thee
- Two
- Thou
- Thou
- This Flea is you and I
- Three sins in killing three
- thou
- thy
- thee
- thou
- thou
- thou
- thee
In the second stanza, she is going to kill the flea. And the speaker is telling to her not to
do it, because this flea is their marriage bed, and if she kills it, she will kill three lives.
- We have three stanzas of nine lines. Each one: couplet+couplet+couplet+triplet
(when a stanza of three lines has the same ending. A kind of tercet).
- The idea of a couple (two) is important in the poem: the union of the speaker
and the lady.
- The idea of three is also very important: the speaker, the lady and the flea (in
which both are contained).
- Each stanza opens with a direct address to the lady:
 “mark”, ie, see: look at this flea; it sucks both our bloods;
 “stay”, ie, stop: do not kill the flea; we are united in its body;
 “cruel and sudden”, i.e, you cruel woman; you have killed the flea, but
nothing has happened to you—or me.
The speaker in the second stanza changes his way of speaking to a more formal for
speaking of union of marriage.
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell (1861)
- This is a seduction/love poem that lends itself to a fruitful comparison with “The
Flea”.
25/10/22
Exercise: find linguistic clues in the first poem that let us know that it is an erotic
love poem, and in the second linguistic clues that let us know that it is a religious
poem.
“To His Coy Mistress”
- Lady
- Love’s day
 - My vegetable love (organic slow growing like a plant)
- Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze
- Two hundred to adore each breast
- Thirty thousand to the rest
- Nor would I love at lower rate
- That long preserved virginity
- And your quaint honour
- All my lust
- At every pore with instant fire
- Let us sport us while we may
- Amorous birds of prey
- Our time devour
- Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into a ball
- And tear our pleasures with rough strife
“Easter Wings”
- Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store
- Oh let me rise
- Then shall the fall further the flight in me
- Thou didst so punish sin
- That I became most thin
1st part of the poem: about the human kind being borned with everything, loosing it and
regaining it again.
27/10/22
In “To His Coy Mistress” the type of versification that we have is a couplet.
Concept for this particular poem (not very important to know):
- Tone: is the attitude you perceive in the speaker
Exercise: look at of the three sections of “His Coy Mistress” and try to decide what
is the mood/tone of the speaker in each one of them. (Look at words that have to do
with ‘death’, ‘decade’ in part two).
1st stanza:
- It is a positive tone, with the exaggeration of time and space. If we had all the
time of the world we will walk around beyond
- This first section is very playful and humorous
- As the poetic voice states at the end of part one, this very slow wooing is what
the lady deserves.
- He is presenting all these possibilities to make the Lady lighting, to convince
her. In 17th century, the only power that women could have was virginity.
2nd stanza:
- The tone changes from playful to serious, solemn and threatening (there is
nothing that we can do)
 - Memento mori related to Christianity (we are going to die).
Words related to death:
- Deserts of vast eternity
- Thy beauty shall no more be found
- Marble vault
- Worms
- Dust
- Ashes
- Grave
3rd stanza:
- Serious but not quite dark as in part two, very intense (let’s take action, let’s
become lovers and enjoy the experience)
- The pleasure is the only reasonable answer to death, but death is coming, and we
cannot stop it.
Unit 2. John Milton
2.1. John Milton
We move from first person speaker to third person narrator. But the passage that we
read has someone that observes everything. Exercise: search for the context of this.

03/11/22
Power point:
Before we continue with Milton, let us remember Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet
and singer
- This poem is at the opposite extreme of Milton: short, simple, with no pattern of
metre
- And yet, we cannot understand it if we are not familiar with Greek mythology

Icarus in Love
I loved you as
Icarus loved
The sun

Too close
Too much.
Context: Icarus felt so proud that he gets to the sun, then he fell in the sea and died.
‘Icarus in Love’ message: loving you has killed me.
Similarly, in order to follow the story presented in Paradise Lost, we must be familiar
with the history of human beings as narrated in the Bible.
We must be familiar with the story of the creation of Adam and Eve, the Garden of
Eden, the rebellion of Satan, etc.
Paradise Lost
Exercise: there are two people who are described in the first 25 lines. Find out how
many people are being described in those lines and highlight the features that we
can understand of how the characters of these lines look like. On the other hand,
underline those elements that we do not understand.
Two of them called the observer’s attention: Satan was the favourite of God, and now
he is jealous about all the beautiful things God has created.
E.g ‘Two of far nobler shape erect and tall’
Milton is telling the story of the humankind in twelve consecutive lines: ‘Of Man's First
Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death
into the World, and all our woe […]’.
‘In naked majesty seemed lords of all’: they are naked, but they are majesty. They
seemed God creatures.
It is not this fruit, it is that the apple comes from the tree of curiosity, the tree that must
not be touched. That is why ‘the apple’ is the forbidden fruit.
Differences between those creatures from our knowledge of the Bible:
They are Adam and Eve.
Adam was created by God. Eve is in connection with God through Adam. She was
created after Adam and from a piece of Adam’s body.
Expections of women in the 17th century: men took the decisions and women stayed in
the house looking beautifully.
Who is witnessing (observing) those characters?
The Fiend, which is Satan. As we will see, Satan used to be known as his proper name
Lucifer. He is undelighted, but he observes all delight. ‘All kind of living creatures’ he
comes to see the new place that God has created: ‘The Garden of Eden’. That kind of
noun phrase: we get premodifiers and modifiers, the adjectives go after the noun.
We must remember that before his rebellion, the angel Lucifer (“the shining one”) was
God’s favourite; after his rebellion and defeat, he was hurled down to Hell and his name
became Satan (which in Hebrew means “adversary”).
The story of Lucifer turned traitor and enemy has been retold many times, in popular
culture.
08/11/22
Exercise: Easter Wings and Paradise Lost. Think about the form of versification
(what kind of stanza, line, how long the line) is used; do we have a lyric poem (1st
person speaker presenting feelings) or a narrative poem (3rd person speaker); is
there in the poem an addressee (the ideal presence of somebody else in the poem).
“Easter Wings”:
- Versification: We have an unusual poem in the metaphysical period, because the
lines have different length (metrical irregularity). Some lines are long, and some
lines are short. Actually, the poem, was printed sideways.
Something to add: Why is the idea of wings important? Because the speaker
wishes to fly. Indeed, the speaker is praying to God. A prayer, a request to a
higher entity for something.
- It is a lyric poem
- It is an addressee: God
Paradise Lost (underline the title in the exam):
- Versification: blank verse (five-stress iambic verse) which ate unrhymed-hence
the term “blank”.
Of all English metrical forms, it is closest to the natural rhythms of English
speech, yet flexible and adaptative to diverse levels of discourse.
- It is a narrative poem of a very particular kind, an epic poem.
- There no addressee
*Features of the epic (handout) quite important for the exam
Paradise Lost is a story centred on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions
depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or in this case, the human race.
Adam and Eve are presented as they live happily in the Garden of Eden.
Exercise: underline the words that give us the key clues of Adam’s description
Adam:
- His fair (very light skin) large front (latin meaning of forehead) and eye sublime
(it means oriented heavenward) declared absolute rule (su hermosa frente
despejada demuestra que él es el que manda). Large front is an indication of
intelligence.
- Hyacinthine locks: a classical metaphor for hair curled in the form of hyacinth
petals, and perhaps also implying dark or flowing.
- His parted forelock manly hung (he has beautiful curly hair, but in a masculine
way)
- His shoulders broad
Eve:
- She as a veil down to the slender waste (It was the spelling of the moment but
waist, cintura, is the correct spell)
 - Her unadorned (she is quite natural and does not carry any adorn in her hair)
golden tresses wore
- Dishevelled (despeinado, wild), but in wanton ringlets waved
- Yielded with coy submission, modest pride
- Subjection, but required with gentle sway (she knows that she is inferior)
- Yielded with coy submission, modest (she is submissive, but she takes her time)

Eve’s hair is wavy and abundant like the vegetation in Paradise. While Adam is
ruler, Eve is subjected to him.
We must notice how frequently Milton uses an adjective postmodifying a noun:
front, sublime, hyacinthine, broad.
10/11/22
The Rape of Lock:
It deals with a lady whose hair is cut by a man. This poem uses heroic couplets
(iambic pentameter but organised in couplets). Heroic couplets were introduced by
Geoffrey Chaucer.
What is been described by: “sweet reluctant amorous delay”. It means that she is
obedient, but she takes her time attached to rebellion and independence.

What typical feature of Milton’s style do we find here? A noun modified by several
adjectives.
Adam and Eve’s nakedness, in the prelapsarian world (mundo perfecto). The shame
did not exist until the arrival of the sin.
Exercise: look at the lines 340 to 352. Find the animals and their acts.
- Lion
- Kid
- Bears
- Tigers
- Ounces (lynxes)
- Pards
- Elephant
- Serpent
Those animals are enjoying themselves and playing (Garden of Eden, no pain). All
these animals are vegetarians, so they are not going to kill the other.
Frisking, played, sporting, dandled, gambolled, mirth.
All the animals of Eden live also in harmony. The lion plays with the kid instead of
eating it; and other predators also play around the kid, which lie close to grazing
animals.
Satan is disturbed to see so much happinessline 358
This idea of what Satan sees and how he feels is seen from the beginning of the passage,
in the opposition of what Eve is seen (all kinds of beautiful, attractive, harmonious
things).
He perceives the beauty and the perfection of these two human creatures, who are close
to angels. He realises they have been created in God’s image.
The last four lines of the poem: It seems an addressee but he is not really talking to
Adam, he is talking out loud. He is simply talking about them.
What is he saying? Poco os imagináis que vuestro cambio se acerca. “Delight”
(everything that is wonderful) and “woe” (el sufrimiento, la pena). “Vanish” conveys
the idea of pain. Cuanto mejor lo paséis ahora, más vais a sufrir después.
This fragment is a soliloquy.
Like one of Shakespeare’s villains, for instance, Iago in Othello. In his soliloquy Satan
expresses his jealousy at the blessed situations of the happy couple, and announces he is
going to put and end to it.
Satan’s plan: convince him to break the rules for the expulsion of the Garden of Eden.
That means that Adam and Eve fall into the real world with pain, suffering and disease.
Paradise Lost was written for educated readers, and in some editions the explanatory
notes for the poem can be almost as long as the poetic text itself. The American poet T.
S. Eliot profoundly disliked Milton’s obscure style. He said: “Milton writes English like
a dead language”.
Milton’s works have added works to the English dictionary, among them, for instance,
“Pandemonium” (all the devils) which came to mean uproar, riot, confusion.
He is responsible for introducing some 600 words into the English language, making
him one of the country’s greatest neologists, together with Ben Johnson, John Donne
and Shakespeare (E.g., words coined by John Milton: unoriginal, earthshaking,
enjoyable).
Critics use the term GRAND STYLE to refer to the peculiarities of Milton’s language
and way of writing in Paradise Lost, such as: “allusions to the Bible to classical
literature and mythology science, astronomy, etc, many of which seem obscure”. Think,
for instance, of the adjective “hyacinthine”).
*archaic vocabulary, and many words that are used with their original Latin meaning.
(Think, for instance, of “front” for brow).
*sentence structure. Milton uses frequent hyperbaton, changing the normal order of the
elements in the sentence, for instance, the adjective after the noun, a noun with several
adjectives, some of them before and others after.
Find examples of this in the passage you have read.
He rarely uses simple sentences; he prefers very long sentences with a lot of subordinate
clauses.
Milton’s sentences are sometimes so convoluted that they are difficult to understand.
The effect of the grand style (in which we can also include his many poetic devices such
as metaphor, long epic similes, oxymoron, etc) is to remove the text of Paradise Lost as
much as possible from common everyday language.
The Rape of the Lock
The text poem that we see, “The Rape of the Lock”, is equally removed from common
language.
It will take one more century and another generation of poets, the Romantics, to strive
to write poetry that is, on the contrary, as close as possible to the real language spoken
by people.
*“rape” in the poem means stealing.
Most of the 18th century is also called the NEOCLASSIC PERIOD.
“The Rape of the Lock” is based on an actual episode that provoked a quarrel between
two prominent Catholic families:
Some time in 1711 a gentleman had cut off a lock of hair from the head of the lovely
Arabella Fermor, much to the indignation of the lady and her relatives.
In Pope’s poem the heroine Belinda represents Arabella and the sylphs (guardian spirits
of maids) are her protectors. They are a parody of the goods and goddesses of
conventional epic.
Brillante, whose work is to guard Belinda’s earnings: Momentilla, who is in charge of
taking care of Belinda’s watch.
Crispissa, who is assigned to guard Belinda’s “favourite Lock”.
Pope elaborated the trivial episode that occasioned the poem into an epic in miniature,
the most perfect mock epic poem in English.
A mock epic or mock heroic poem imitates, in a sustained way, the elaborate form and
the ceremonious style of the epic genre, but applies it to narrate a commonplace or
trivial subject matter.
Pope also states that he is going to use “the machinery” (ie the supernatural creatures) of
epic poems, but adapted to his comic poem.
The main supernatural creatures in his poem are the Sylphs, creatures of the air who
protect young society ladies.
The highest of the Sylphs in charge of Belinda is Ariel, who oversees all the others.
17/11/22
The selection that we read opens with the sun (sol) timidly shining into Belinda’s
bedroom, since, following the conventions of old Petrarchan love poetry, her eyes are
described as more powerful than his: eyes that must eclipse the day”.
Belinda still her downy pillow pressed, her guardian Sylph prolonged the balmy rest.
Her guardian spirit, a Sylph, appears to her in a morning dream to warm her that
something dangerous will happen to her that day.
An example of mock epic poetry/ heroic couplet definition PREGUNTAS DE
EXAMEN
“Twas he has summoned to her silent bed
The morning dream that hovered over her head”
Lines 27 to 114 present his speech to her in this vision.
He addresses her as the most beautiful of women, protected by thousands of spirits:
Fairest of mortals, thou distinguished care
Of thousands bright inhabitants of air! (lines 27-28)
He introduces himself in line 105:
Of these am I, who thy protection claim,
A watchful sprite, and Ariel is my name.
The spirit who wants Belinda to be careful that day identifies himself as “a watchful
sprite” (line 106), one of the “thousand bright inhabitants of air” (line 28) that take care
of her.
His name, he says, is Ariel, and he has had a vision of “some dread event impend” (line
109): But Heaven reveals not what, or how, or where: Warned be by thy Sylph, oh pious
maid beware! (lines 111-112).
She forgets about the spirit’s warning when she sees there is a letter from an admirer
and reads about “wounds, charms and ardours” (line 120).

Line 120: we have alliterations.

Exercise: look at the description of Belinda’s dressing table (tocador) (lines 120-
147) and pay attention to: make a list of the objects that we find on her table, and
then do read how she gets ready for the morning with Betty that to us convey a
feeling of spirituality and religion.
List of objects:
1) Toilet (object of beauty)
2) Silver vase
3) Robed in white
4) cosmetic powers
5) glass
6) unnumbered treasures
7) glittering spoil
8) offerings
9) India’s glowing gems
10) Arabia breathes
11) Tortoise
12) elephant
13) to combs
14) of pins
15) Puffs
16) powders
17) patches
18) Bibles (trinkets)
19) Billet-doux
Spirituality and religion:
1. Mystic order
2. Robed in white (like an Angel)
3. The nymph (it is not a religious word, but it is a mythological creature) intent
adores
4. A heavenly image (herself)
5. Priestess
6. Altar
7. Sacred
8. Rites

Belinda is getting ready for battle:

“Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms” (line 139).
She is transformed into an even more beautiful woman with the help of all the
instruments of beauty that she keeps on her dressing table.
Who is helping her in her preparations for the “battle” in the social gatherings of the day
apart from her maid?
The familiar elements of the epic are maintained, but the characters and the situations
are trivial and comic.
Think about the last two poems we have read:
John Milton wants to tell the history of the universe and humankind in an elaborate epic
poem written in language as far removed as possible from common language.
He writes in blank verse
His purpose is “to justify the ways of God to man”.
His characters are Adam, Eve, Satan, angels and archangels, God and Christ.
Alexander Pope recreates a trivial event of the high society of his time, but uses for his
light topic the formal style of the epic, in this case written in heroic couplets.
His characters are the members if the upper classes, and we see them interacting in the
polite society of his time.
In both cases, Paradise lost and the rape of the lock, the language and the style they use
is removed from everyday language.
As we move to the poetry of the end of the 18th century, a more democratic impulse
appears among poets.
As Wordsworth states, they want to write a new type of poetry based on the “real
language of men”. Which “avoids the poetic vocabulary (diction) of much 18th-century
poetry and deals with topics considered unpoetic until that time.
Unit 4. Romantic poetry
London’s Summer Morning by Mary Robinson (written in blank verse as Paradise
Lost):
Exercise: find the type of persons (professions) in this poem
- Chimney boy
- Housemaid
- Dustman office (barrendero o basurero)
- Implicit is the idea that somebody is in charge of bringing the milk (milk pail
rattles)
- Tinmen (hojalateros)
- Trunk-makers
- Knife-grinders
- Coopers
- Cork-cutters
- Fruit barrows
- Hunger-giving cries
- Vegetable vendors
Apuntar las demás

22/11/22

***In the exam, if we use the word ‘Romantic’, use it with capital ‘R’, because it is not
referring to something lovely or romantic, but to a period of time. (Use with too with concepts
like: Metaphysical, Renaissance…etc).

Romantic period
Romantic period is a nice period for essays.

Lyric:

Romantic poetry is mainly lyric. A lyric poem is any fairly short, non-narrative poem presenting
a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind, or a process of thought and/or feeling. We
have many of those in the romantic period, so we can say that this period is predominately
lyric.

Relevant in this context is William Wordsworth’s definition of good poetry as ‘the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings’. The poet is so full of feelings and ideas that wanted to be
expressed, and it was done thanks to poetry. ****Recordar para ponerlo en el ensayo, le da muy
buen toque si la usamos.

‘Spontaneous overflow’: emphasis not on craft that imitates models, but on the urge, the
impulse to write.

‘Powerful feelings’: topics are not taken from the outside, but have to do with individual
thoughts and feelings. Something from the inside of the creator.

As a genre, the lyric is the appropriate vehicle for the expression of individuality.

General features of Romantic poetry:

1. Lyric poetry
2. Imagination (connected with madness, synonym, as we can see in Midsummer’s
Night Dream, when Shakespeare compares the poet, the lover and the…)
3. Prophets or outcasts? Some of them thought they were prophets and others
though they were outcast from society.
4. Nature, this is a key topic in most of the poems: trees, flowers…etc
5. Idea of revolution, the Romantic period is more or less in 1789, the beginning of
breaking out of the French revolution, so this period is associated with
revolution, changes in society and of course, changes in writing.
6. Medievalism
7. Poetry about commonplace situations and people, humble simple people. Not
members of the aristocracy, not heroes or warriors. People that make a living
working with their hands.

In Romantic poetry the imagination plays a crucial role: not material from the exam

For the Romantics it is a positive creative force, not a source of delusion to be mistrusted
as in previous generations.

Blake: ‘Mental things alone are real: what is called corporeal, nobody knows of its dwelling
place’.
Where man is not, nature is barren: if there is no mind to perceive reality, when there is
not a human mind to look at things, nature is empty.

Nature becomes a primary poetic subject

Nature is so central that for some readers Romantic poetry is nature poetry. The interest is
not so much external nature itself but how the human mind relates to it. We will see two
approaches to nature in Romantic poetry:

1. As a place to think and feel: Wordsworth (use of nature directly to create a

poem).
2. As a source of symbols to think about reality: Blake and Shelley (Look for
elements in nature to talk about other themes).

Revolution

Romantic poets felt they were living at a time of political and social revolutions:

The American Revolution

The French Revolution

The Beginning of the industrial revolution

In some of his poem, Shelley invites workers to rebel against the oppressive powers of
Society. Poets have the sense that they are profoundly changing how poetry is written. In
the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth describes the novelty of his poetry.

**Brief possible tricky question (difference between capital letters or not)

lyrical ballad: if you find this you have to describe the definition of what kind of poem it is

Lyrical Ballads: this is the title of a volume, collection of poems of lyrical ballads. If you find the title in
italics and capital letters you have to talk about the VOLUME!!

Poetic revolution

Democratic principles applied to poetry

-In the subject matter, since humble persons and common, everyday topics are used for
serious poetry: a child, a walk in the woods, seeing a rainbow…

-In the form, since poets try to use ‘the very language of men’, not poetic diction.

There is a mixing of poetic genres, as for instance in the lyrical ballad, which will analyze
later.

Gender vs. genre: gender has to do with female/male and genre means kind, type.
24/11/22
Medievalism:
In the late 18th century there is a Medieval revival, embodied in fiction in the popularity
of Gothic novels (e.g. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765); Matthew
Lewis’s The Mork(1796).
Romantic write poems about the Middle Ages:
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“The Eve of St Agnes”
“La Belle Dame sans Merci”
They retrieve the traditional oral Ballad.
Romantic women poets:
When Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798, the best known poets were:
- Anna Barbauld (1743-1825)
- Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
- Mary Robinson (1758-1800).
Mary Robinson’s London’s Summer Morning” is a good example of the

democratisation of poetry:

Skim the poem and underline the words related to jobs and occupations of the poem

that are presented in the poem. What do they all have in common? They belonged to

what we would refer to today as the working class.

First generation of Romantic poets:

William Blake, William Wordsmith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Second generation of Romantic poets: Lord Bryon, P. B Shelley, John Keats.

To remember about the poem:

- The poem is a description of the early summer morning in London.

- There is no lyric ‘I’, but a third-person narrator or voice.

 - It is written in BLANK VERSE, ie unrhymed iambic pentameter, a very solemn

and serious form of verse, appropriate for high important topics.

This poem is Romantic in its presentation of low, humble persons as the topic of

a solemn serious poem in blank verse.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Background:

- He was born in London in a working-class environment (his father was a

haberdasher- a person who sells small articles for sewing).

- He lived in London throughout his life (except a brief period between 1800-

1803 on the coast of Sussex).

- He was not only a poet but also an engraver and a painter.

The profession of engraver was profitable at the time;the illustrator for books

(diagrams for anatomy books, illustrations for other poets), reproductions of

portraits, ornaments or costumes for contemporary magazines, etc.

He started in 1789 a new method of publication with Songs of Innocence (put it in

the exam: “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence and Experience)

*first he engraved every page with both text and design;

*then he water-coloured every page.

In 1794 these poems appeared combined with another set poems: (primer grupo de

poemas songs of innocence,después escribió otros y luego los unió en la colección

songs of innocence an experience. Si nos pone un poema en el examen de la colección,

especificar si es más de experience with the ugly elements in live, o de innocence with

possitve good elements of live)

 - The whole collection was called Songs of Innocence and Experience, then he

added the subtitle: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

“Introduction” to Songs of Innocence:

Piping can have a negative connotation, but in this case it is positive.

Winter singing is unsual in British birds, but the Robin’s melancholic song.

The nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin” was published in the first volume ever

printed of nursery rhymes.

The poem ends with this stanza:

All the birds of the air. Cock Robin.

In “The Blossom” from Songs of Innocence the happiness and strength of a budding

flower are celebrated.

Exercise: write two paragraphs comparing and contrasting ‘The Blossom’ and

‘Sick Rose’.

- In the first poem we get the voice of the flower, whereas in the second one the flower

is the adressee. In the first poem, the flower is very much alive, while in the second the

rose is sick, so we can visualise the petals withered. There is something from the outside

that is destroying the flower. In the first poem we can appreciate the energy of the

flower, and in the second one the deterioration of the flower. In the first poem, we have

the Robin which we visualise as red, and in the second poem we have a variation of the

colour red: crimson joy, related to joy.

*Lamp and Tyger are too probable to appear in an exam question of an essay for

comparing both.
29/11/22

“The Sick Rose” is written in the form of an apostrophe, in which the poetic voice

addresses the rose to tell her that:

- It is sick; the reason for its sickness is “an invisible worm”; the worm is eating

out the heart of the rose, “thy bed of crimson joy”; the worm really likes the

rose, but his love is destructive: “dark secret love”.

One of the meanings we get about this poem is that love can destroy you, that can be

toxic and possesive. Love should make people free and opened.

Nature is very important in romantic poetry.

We are going to see two approaches to nature:

1) As a place to think and feel: Wordsworth;

2) As a source of symbols to think about reality: Blake and Shelley.

Clearly in this poem William Blake is using the rose to talk about something else:

- The nature of destructive love, jealousy, venereal disease, the passing of time...

Natural elements that can represent another thing: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”.

At the time, Tyger was not expelled with ‘y’, but he chose to write it with ‘y’.

Exercise: read both poems ( “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”) and consider who is

speaking (think about what he is asking and what he is answering) in each one of

the poems, and highlight elements in the description of the animals that you find

significant.

“The Lamb”

- Speaker: a little child, and he is baby Jesus before he grew up into an adult.
 (We have to take into account that Jesus Christ in the new testament came and get

sacrifice as a “lamb”, that is why he is called ‘the Lamb of God’)

- Elements:

 “By the stream & o’er the mead”

 “He is called by thy name” (he calls him a Lamb with capital letters)

 “He became a little child”

 “We are called by his name” (the Lamb is for three: for jesus, for the real

lamb and for the child)

“The Tyger”

We have twelve questions in this poem.

- Speaker: the speaker remains unknown, but in line 16 he is terrified. So there is

no answer to the question of who created the tyger.

- Elements:

 “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

 “Tyger Tyger burning bright” (‘bright’ suggest clean. La luz del tigre, o

su mirada o su pelaje se ven cuando no hay luz como fuego, que ha

intervenido de alguna manera en la creación de esta criatura. Esta

criatura está relacionada con el fuego, that provokes rejection and

attraction). This mysterious creature provokes fear and admiration.

 He is created in a very elaborate process, there are questions but not

answers.

It talks about a terrified creature that has been created with the result of a the tyger and

that was burned. However, it is beauty at the same time.

In “The Lamb” we have a world of certainty, peace and unity with God.
In “The Tyger” we have a world of mystery, and also beauty but fear. Here we have an

oxymoron (a contradiction of two words that come together: “fearful symmetry”).

For each reader,” The Tyger” means something different. Some readers believe that

“The Tyger” represents the end of the Industrial Revolution. The images of the fire

would be the images of the building.

The tyger can represent attractive forces in the world that are appealing but are evil

(sublime), Lucifer and Satan.

So, both animals are symbolic, they represent something else.

The Lamb represents innocence, and The Tyger represents experience (it sounds more

from a voice of an adult).

God is the creator of The Lamb, but there is no answer of who the creator of The Tyger

is.

The questions are indirectly describing the Tyger.

There is a kind of symmetry in “The Tyger”, the verb “could” to describe the actions of

the creator, physicall or artistic ability, and the verb “dare” about braveness. First he

was excited about his creation, but then later he questioned his actions.

This is the end of our study of William Blake:

Let’s read poems in which nature does not stand for anything symbolic but is mainly a

place for peacefulness and spiritual recovery.

We move on to Wordsworth’s poetry.

Exerciseconsider:

 “My Heart Leaps Up” (known as “The Rainbow”)

 “Lines Written in Early Spring”

 “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

1) Find evidences of these poems that they belong to nature

2) Is the element of nature on the poems by its own? Is there something else? Or

whoelse?

I wandered lonely as a cloud:

- There is a change between stanza 3 and stanza 4.

We change from the outside flower to the memories, the stamen (estambres).

The enjoyment of the daffodils remains after “a spot of time”, you remember it,

because it remains forever in your head. Those powerful memories that make

you feel happy when you remember them.

“Lines written in early spring”

- Evidences (nature in the poetry of william wordsworth TEMA ESSAY). He

spent a lot of time walking in the countryside is something we could mention.

 Grove

 Nature in capital letters (nature acquires a spiritual value, a connection

with God)

 Primrose tufts

 Bower (it is a structure that supports plants, a secluded area in which the

plants grow)

 Periwinkle (climbing plant)

 Flower

 Air

 Birds
  Twigs

 Breezy air

 Nature’s holy plan (plan of nature: is to make me connect and feel happy,

in contrast with the cruelty of people to other people)

1/12/22

William Wordsworth:

Personal context:

He was born and raised in the Lake District, a region whose sights and sounds

were absorbed and recorded in his poetry.

He had as a child free use of his father’s good library and read extensively.

He always kept in touch with NATURE, which awakened the poetic spirit in

him.

He grew up very close to his sister Dorothy, who in his twenties became an

encouraging companion.

In her diaries, we find details of her life with her brother and clues for his poems

(for instance, her journal entry for April 15th 1802, when they both see beautiful

daffodils).

In “We are Seven”, Wordsworth tried to do “the glorification of the common

place” (common place would mean normal everyday and events, whereas

glorification means a high level).

The flowers walking around the valley in “I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is a

common event, but he presents that everyday event has magic, and it creates

powerful emotions on him, something important to remember because it brings

him joy, so that is the glorification of the common place.

In “Lines written in early spring”, it is a common place for people of this social

standing, a man who is enjoying the sounds and the side of nature, as every

normal human.

In the rainbow we have a speaker who is looking at a rainbow and feeling such

emotion that makes it feel emotion with that emotion.

Memory is central in his work: for him, poetry is “emotion recollected in

tranquility” (we must remember the end of “The Daffodils”).

He accounts for the power of some memories through the concept of “spots of

time”: moments of intense experience that when recalled can nourish and repair

the mind, bring joy and stimulate creativity.

Exercise: What can we lament in 2022 or in 1798 when this poem was

published (sentir pena por lo que el ser humano hace con el ser humano):

The cruelty of revolution (1798), the industrial revolution for some people who

were destroying the countryside, and children worked as chimney sweepers were

working in factories (smalls and contaminated places), and they were killed,

then the legal slave trade and this was a terrible thing than europeans were

doing.

Nowadays: the war in Ukraine

*Possible exam question: describe the typical features of its period that we

find in this poem (“The Rainbow”, also known as “My Heart Leaps up”):

- This is a very simple moment of intimacy of a human being, because it is a

personal moment

- It is about the enjoyment of a rainbow

 - It is not only a description of nature, but a description of how the human being

feels with human nature

- Nature as a place to feel and think (the element of nature)

- It is also a lyric poem about personal feelings

- It is short

- the idea of revolution

“We are Seven”

09/12/22

(William Wordsworth poems are not only about nature, but they are also about

human beings in relation to the nature). They are in first person.

About the poem:

- She lives in a countryside near to the cottage

- This is a ballad because:

 It talks about an incident because it is just one moment in time between

an adult and a girl

 Ballads (type of poem, a medieval poem) were songs that were

transmitted orally in the Middle Ages played by minstrels as a form of

entertainment to the audience. Performers were from town to town, and

they will recite the poems. These stories involved some mystery. They

were written in a kind of versification called ballad stanza (4 lines, 4

stresses and a rhyming pattern -b-b)

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (there is a

connection between this poem with “We are Seven” by William Wordsworth:

- We have the presence of archaisms (words that are no longer used)

- It begins in a strange manner, with no context. We know that he encounters three

young men, but we will know who are these three lately. This is typical of the

ballads; they take extraordinary events.

- The narrative voice in this case is a third person narrator.

- We get quotation marks, and we hear a voice

- Very strange beginning, an unusual event: an old man stopping a young man

before of a wedding. Now the old mariner starts to tell a story of when he was

young, the did something and he carries what he did for feeling peace.

- Throughout this ballad we will see many poetic devices that have to do with

sound: alliteration and internal rhyme (e.g. “The guests are met, the feast is

set”[…]. This is called internal rhyme because we get the rhyming pattern

within the same line/ another examples: “And he shone bright, and on the

right”[…]/“The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast”[…]/)

- Exercise: look at the poem “We are Seven” and try to find evidences that

this poem is a medieval ballad.

 We have a ballad stanza

 From the point of view of the story, we have and adult who is presenting

common sense: if you were seven brothers but two of them died, you are

no longer seven, you are five.

 The girl keeps insisting that they are seven. She knows that they are

dead, but she still plays with them and seems to feel this connection with

them, she talks about them as they will be still alive.

 Another feature of medieval ballads is the dialogue, and the repetition of

sentences (e.g., “We are seven” is repeated many times).

  One possible meaning of the poem: it is about a child that does not

understand dead

 The real meaning of the poem: This adult seems to be very inflexible,

and that does not know how to interact with children, an adult who is

very strict and rational in his thinking. The child is much more sensitive.

She feels such love for her siblings that for her they are not dead, she

sees them and perceives them.

 Supernatural element: the ability to love goes beyond material

presence. The child feels with her heart, she is not seeing ghosts.

 This poem is about love-human connection beyond actual presence, of

what an adult can learn about children.

Both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth put together this collection of

Lyrical Ballads (1798) including personal feelings of the speaker (much more than the

traditional ballad) or of one of the characters. For example, “We are Seven” does not

present feelings explicitly.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):

- He was a great thinker with a very wide range of interests from metaphysics to

politics to religion or critical theory.

- He started taking laudanum (liquid opium, which was high addictive) for a

medical condition in his mid-twenties.

- He is the poet of the supernatural, mystery and demonism in “Christabel”,

“Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a literary ballad, written in imitation of

Medieval oral ballads.

 - In the 18th century a number of collections of Medieval ballads were published,

in which the editor gathered popular ballads.

- The most famous collection is Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English

Poetry (1765).

- Coleridge published this poem with the stanzas and the notes to the left for

clarify the meaning of the stanzas called “glosses” to create the impression that

we are reading an old poem.

13/12/22

Read for the next class: “England in 1819”, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to

Be” for a comparison with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

OVERVIEW:

This is the evidence of the Medieval revival in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

*in the content: supernatural elements in the story, use of a crossbow, gothic

atmosphere of terror, the ending with a Christian moral lesson;

*in the language: examples of archaisms (endings of verb forms, individual words, etc)

*in the form, that is, elements of the ballad, present in the poem: type of stanza,

repetitions of words/phrases/lines, sound devices that make the poem musical and easy

to remember (alliteration and internal rhyme)

The mariner committed a crime when he was young. He was sailing and he encountered

with an Albatross, and he killed him. We do not know why he did it, because he was

friend of animals until the very end of part I of the poem, in which he kills the

Albatross.
There is a narrative frame, which is in the present tense and in the third person. Within

this we have the first-person narrative of the mariner in first person narrative. There is a

moment in which we hear the voice of the mariner (line 10).

After killing the Albatross, a number of terrible things happen.

*We must highlight that it originally was an anonymous collection that got an author

name two years later.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was Coleridge’s main contribution to the collection

Lyrical Ballads (1798) that he published together with William Wordsworth.

Coleridge’s task in the collection was to create poems in which supernatural events and

characters could resonate with common human concerns: the very strange story of what

happened to this old mariner in his youth, when without any justification he killed a

living creature (the albatross), is a story about human guilt and the pain of isolation.

A possible theme for the essay:

Wordsworth takes very normal things and becomes them in supernatural (wordsworth)

Try to find in this horrifying moments the common human feelings. From the

supernatural to the human feelings (Coleridge).

Supernatural events in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

- The moment after killing the Albatross, they were surrounded by water but they

were dying because of thirst. There was no wind and movement and they

seemed a paint.
 PART III:

- We must remember that repetition is a feature of the traditional ballad.

- They see in the distance something, a non-identified object.

- The narrative of the mariner maintains the surface as he describes the uncertain

shape.

- Their throats are so dry that they cannot speak to celebrate the approach of

another ship.

The last two stanzas of the poem are ballad stanza (PUEDEN CAER EN EL EXAMEN)

Now we are going to see side by side the two poems: “England in 1819” and “When I

Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”

“England 1819” was not published by Shelley at the time that he wrote it. This is an

example of a sonnet being used a social criticism. On the other hand, ‘When I have fears

That I may cease to be’ is about personal feelings:

Find evidences that we could use to argue that one is about social criticism and the other

one about personal feelings:

- The first poem is about, as the title says, the situation of England in 1819. The

poem is in third person speaker.

- There is only main verb in each poem.

- In the first sonnet, the main verb is the verb ‘to be’.

Shelley was an optimistic person, and that is why he is thinking of those bad

things as a “grave”. He wants to write an optimistic poem so he has to be open to

change those bad elements in contemporary society. From that bad situation

something good has to emerge. The idea of revolution is presented in the words

of ‘glorious’ and ‘Phantom’.

 - Percy has a sort of dementia, and it could be showed in the very beginning of

this poem, with the words ‘old’ and ‘mad’. However, the world ‘blind’ could

imply that metaphorically he was ‘blind’ to the reality of the time.

- The King had three sons, so the ‘Princes’ could be them or the nobles.

- Muddy conveys the idea of corruption, of a family that has a lot of secrets. The

Princes are what has kept from a deplorable family; the rulers (son los politicos)

do not see, feel or known. However, they ‘leechlike’ to suck the wealth of the

country (to get as much as they can until they are so full of what they have

conveyed so they cannot take anymore).

The context of England in 1819:

- The Peterloo Massacre in August 1819:

*at St Peter’s Field, near Manchester,

*a troop of calvary charged into a crowd peacefully rallying for parliamentary

reform.

- On the one hand, in the first poem do not get specific details, we get a

description of society. On the other hand, in the second poem we get specific

details, and according to the form: sestet, quatrain and two couplets.

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”

- Each one of the quatrains is a temporal clause, that would be subordinate clauses

and the main verb is at the end of the sonnet (‘stand’). He feels that he is going

to die before writing his literary work, so he stands alone looking at the sea and

think, and in that act of thinking, love and fame sink.

- He is putting very strong feelings in this poems.

Next day we will talk about dramatic monologue in comparison with this poem.