Course: Basic Seminar on British Literature I Students: Sophomore (& others) Convenor: Dr Peter Cheyne

1. William Shakespeare: ‘Sonnet 116’

2. William Shakespeare: ‘Sonnet 116’

3. William Shakespeare: ‘Sonnet 116’

4. William Shakespeare: ‘Sonnet 116’

5. William Shakespeare: ‘Sonnet 116’

6. George Herbert: ‘The Altar’

7. George Herbert: ‘The Altar’

8. George Herbert: ‘Love III’

9. George Herbert: ‘Love III’

10. S. T. Coleridge: ‘Frost at Midnight’

11. S. T. Coleridge: ‘Frost at Midnight’

12. S. T. Coleridge: ‘Frost at Midnight’

13. S. T. Coleridge: ‘Frost at Midnight’

14. William Wordsworth: ‘The Rainbow’

15. In-class essay. This will be the final exam for this course; there will not be a separate exam.

Assessment: Students will write essays throughout the course; each essay will discuss a different poem. There will also be a final examination essay.Coursework: 50%Final essay: 50%

Objectives:Students will become familiar with the main terms of poetry and prosody and will be able to use them in discussing poems in English. They will also study eight important poems from the canon of British Literature. This is a survey course that ranges from William Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Era of the English Renaissance; through the Metaphysical Poets, represented by George Herbert (and some verse by John Donne); to the initiation of British Romanticism with S. T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 1 CheyneWilliam Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Life and times

Born (Stratford-upon-Avon) and lived mainly in Elizabeth I’s (1533–1603) reign. She was succeeded by James I (James IV of Scotland). England’s national poet. Father: alderman and glover. Classical (Latin) education (free) at King’s New School, Stratford. At 18, married Anne Hathaway (26). Their first child, Susanna, was born six months later. He died aged 52. Curiously, he bequeathed Anne his ‘second best bed’.

Wrote around 38 plays (including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear), two long poems (Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece, and possibly a third, A Lover’s Complaint), and 154 sonnets (published 1609). Master of iambic pentameter, as he matured his style became more flexible within the iambic pentameter structure.

His plays were highly successful, and performed at The Globe Theatre, London. Not only did he write and direct, he also acted.

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (1)Admit impediments. Love is not love (2)Which alters when it alteration finds, (3)Or bends with the remover to remove: (4)O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,  (5)That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; (6)It is the star to every wandering bark, (7)Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. (8)Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks  (9)Within his bending sickle's compass come;  (10)Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,  (11)But bears it out even to the edge of doom. (12)   If this be error and upon me proved, (13)   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.  (14)

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Vocabulary and special phrasesGive definitions or paraphrases of the following:

marriage of true minds

admit

impediments

alters

alteration

ever-fixed

tempests

bark

wandering bark

bark,/ Whose worth's unknown

bark,/ Whose . . . height be taken

sickle

compass

sickle's compass

bears it out

doom

Terms in prosodyFeet: Iambs, Trochees, Spondees, Dactyls, and Anapests

Stress: Classical (Greek and Latin) verse varied the rhythm with short and long syllables. This can occur in English verse too, but varying the stress (accent) is more usual. Sometimes the natural stress of a word overrides the underlying rhythm, (e.g. Sonnet 116 l. 1 begins with an anapest, rather than the underlying iamb). Conversely, the

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underlying pattern sometimes changes stress pattern of the word or phrase. Both of these techniques can give satisfying or jarring effects, depending on context.

Many English words and phrases fall naturally into iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls, or anapests. Such words make it easy to spot the metrical pattern in a poem. Here are some examples:

Iamb or Iambus (iambic) = υ / (Gk. assail, throw)behold, amuse, arise, awake, return, that looks, within, depict, destroy, inject, inscribe, insist, employ, to be

Trochee (trochaic) = / υ (Gk. trechein: to run)happy, hammer, double, injure, roses, certain, clever, dental, dinner, shatter, chosen, planet, chorus, widow, bladder, cuddle, doctor, London

Spondee (spondaic) = / / (Gk. solemn libation)football, Mayday, heartbreak, shortcake, spondee, dumbbell, childhood, race-track, bathrobe, black hole, breakdown, love-song

Pyrrhus or dibrach (pyrrhic) = υ υIn practice, poetic lines are not composed solely from pyrrhic feet, which would be too monotonous. However, they can be used in alternation, and Tennyson sometimes alternated pyrrhics with spondees, as in this example from In Memoriam (1850):

υ υ / / υ υ / /When the blood creeps and the nerves prick

Here is another example, this one from Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ (1681):

υ υ / / υ υ / /To a green thought in a green shade

Dactyl (dactylic) = / υ υ (Gk. finger – three divisions)I would like, carefully, changeable, merrily, mannequin, tenderly, prominent, bitterly, notable, horrible, scorpion

Anapest (anapestic): = υ υ / (Gk. aná: back; paíein: to strike = reversed, because a reversed dactyl)‘Let me not’, understand, interrupt, comprehend, anapest, contradict, ‘In the blink of an eye’.

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 2 CheyneWilliam Shakespeare (1564–1616)

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds (1)Admit impediments. Love is not love (2)Which alters when it alteration finds, (3)Or bends with the remover to remove: (4)O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,  (5)That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; (6)It is the star to every wandering bark, (7)Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. (8)Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks  (9)Within his bending sickle's compass come;  (10)Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,  (11)But bears it out even to the edge of doom. (12)   If this be error and upon me proved, (13)   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.  (14)

Form

Rhythm / Meter:Underlying structure/ framework: iambic pentameter

Gk. iamb: iaptein, to attack, to throw; foot = de DUM (e.g. good BYE)Gk. Pentameter: five measuresTherefore: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

However: WS uses the rhythmic form as an underlying framework, and then plays within it. Not robotic/ slavish.

L. 1 does not work as iambs. Instead, he creates an irregular line beginning with two anapests (da da DUM da da DUM):let me NOT to the MARR iage of TRUE MINDS 

By ll. 3–4, the meter becomes more regular:which AL ters WHEN it AL ter A tion FINDS or BENDS with THE rem OV er TO rem OVE 

<Stress variation is usually notated by υ / υ / when doing scansion by hand>

Like musical performance, different stresses have different degrees of emphasis. S. T. Coleridge: ‘graduated emphasis’ (Notebooks 4,

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4844). Thus in l. 4, BENDS will always have greater emphasis than THE. Words in poetry can keep their natural rhythm, or the poet can deviate from it. Thus ‘impediments’ in l. 2 retains its natural fluidity. We say it naturally, more rapidly than the iambic structure would dictate, but this quickness is immediately balanced by the full stop that gives a caesura (break/ rest) to the line and a gravitas to ‘Love is not love’. Ezra Pound (1885–1972):

As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome. (Pound ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry, I, 6, March 1913).

Note also the enjambment from l. 1 to l. 2 that actually prevents the word ‘impediments’ from being next to ‘the marriage of true minds’. Even the structure of the poem refuses to ‘Admit impediments’!

The sonnet formThis is a highly stylised way of presenting and developing an ‘argument’ in verse form. The proposition plus the resolution is called the argument.

Petrarchan sonnetOriginally from C13th Italy; troubadours’ chivalrous love songs. Dante wrote sonnets, as did Michelangelo. Petrarch’s were so famous that we call C13th sonnets Petrarchan sonnets. Form: 14 lines = 1. octave (two quatrains): proposition (problem/question); 2. Sestet (two tercets): resolution. The ninth line is usually a volta, a turnaround, indicating the move from proposition to resolution. The rhyme scheme was usually abba, abba, cde, cde.

Shakespearean sonnetSir Thomas Wyatt introduced the Petrarchan sonnets into English poetry in the early C16th. These are called Shakespearean sonnets not because he was first, but because he is the most famous.

While many English sonnets took the Petrarchan form (including ones by later poets such as John Milton, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning). The distinctly English form has some slight differences: an octave (two quatrains), followed by a sestet (another quatrain plus a rhyming couplet); rhyme scheme = abab, cdcd, efef + gg. Like the Petrarchan, the Shakespearean sonnet also often has a volta at the ninth line. There is still the proposition and resolution structure, although this is looser, and the

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resolution is further divided so that the final couplet can give a succinct concluding statement.

Poets often, indeed usually, use a particular poetic form (e.g. the sonnet) as a metrical and composition frame, like a trellis or floral cage within which their emotions and ideas can grow and take shape. That is to say, the form is never a stricture in good poetry, but neither is it merely an aid, because the relationship between the underlying, and often deviated-from, formal structure and the growth, development, and expression of the ideas and feelings is something far too intricate and interpenetrating (truly synthetic) to hold the two sides apart in any simple dichotomy.

VoltaThe volta in Sonnet 116 turns from describing love as the Pole Star (Venus = the goddess of love), to a personification of love (‘not Time’s fool’)

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 3 CheyneWilliam Shakespeare (1564–1616)

SONNET 116

Discussion of the meaning

Affirmation and Negation

The poem appears to be affirming true love, yet it does this with several negative statements. Much of the poem is spent declaring what love is not. The negative constructions, words, and phrases are:

Let me not; impediments; Love is not love; Which alters; alteration; bends with (opposite of keeping straight); O no; never shaken; worth’s unknown; not Time’s fool; bending sickle’s compass (a sickle cuts, removes); alters not; edge of doom; error; never writ, no man ever loved.

Some critics argue that Shakespeare is being ironic or cynical about the possibility of true love, because he uses so many negations in the poem. However, it is more likely that he is using negation for emphatic effect. A negative statement can be used to give additional force and clarity to a positive one, thus one can say ‘I will always love you; I will never leave you’.

Moreover, straightforward positive assertions are also made about love. Though they are fewer than the negative statements, they are very idealistic:

it is an ever-fixed mark; It is the star; bears it out

Absolutes and relatives

Note also that all of his statements, positive and negative, are in the form of absolutes. There are no conditions here to weaken his bold statements. Regarding relativity, he even states that ‘Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds’. This is to deny relative love any real existence, and to affirm that the only true love is absolute. Notice also that lines 2, 3, and 4 contain similar formulas of repetition:

Love is not love; alters when alteration finds; remover to remove.

Here he is negating negations; and to negate a negative is to affirm a positive.

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Apophatic approach

There is a form of philosophical clarification, used for example by Socrates and Plato, that clarifies something by saying what that thing is not. There is also a long tradition of apophatic or negative theology (e.g. Pseudo-Dionysius; St Thomas Aquinas) that asserts that God is unknowable, but we can progress with knowledge of what God is not.

Reductio ad absurdum

The rhyming couplet at the end is a reductio ad absurdum. That is, it makes an assertion in paradoxical form that what he has said about love must be true, otherwise he ‘never writ’: yet obviously he did write these lines!

The Elizabethan marriage ceremony

In Shakespeare’s time, during the Church of England marriage ceremony, the priest asked the congregation if anybody knew of any impediments to the bride and groom marrying. The 1552 Book of Common Prayer states that the bride and groom should be asked: ‘if either of you doe knowe any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joyned together in Matrimonie, that ye confesse it.’ The Book also says: 

At whiche daye of mariage it any man doe allege and declare any impediment why thei may not be coupled together in Matrimony by god's law or the lawes of this Realme, and wyl be bounde, and sufficient suerties with him, to the parties, or elles put in a caucion to the full value of such charges as the persons to be maried doeth susteine to prove his allegacion: then the Solemnizacion must be deferred, unto such tyme as the trueth be tryed.

It seems therefore that Shakespeare is reflecting on this custom in the sacred marriage ceremony. While some impediments can be announced at marriage ceremonies (e.g. one of the couple is already married), Shakespeare is declaring that he will not admit impediments ‘to the marriage of true minds’.

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The marriage of true minds

What does he mean by ‘the marriage of true minds’? He might mean Platonic love. Or he could mean romantic, sexual love. Or both. He is certainly declaring that true love is absolute and constant, in that it is unchanging and eternally patient (‘bears it out even to the edge of doom’). Because he says ‘minds’, and not ‘hearts’ or ‘bodies’, he seems to be proclaiming the intellectual (and perhaps spiritual) nature of true love. This relates to the traditional ideal of a ‘soul mate’, and his bold affirmation of that romantic notion helps to explain the great appeal of the sonnet and its widespread popularity.

It is an ever-fixed mark

The second quatrain uses the metaphor of the Pole Star (Venus: goddess of love) to symbolize love. First, Venus = love. Secondly, the Pole Star does not rotate (it is ‘an ever-fixed mark’), whereas the other stars rotate around it. Thirdly, it is the first star to rise, and the last to set, symbolizing love’s constancy. Fourthly, as a fixed eye, it sees all dangers, but is ‘never shaken’, it is firm and bold, utterly dependable. Fifthly, sailors navigate by it, from which they know which way is North.

Every wandering bark

A ‘bark’ is a ship. Wandering barks are therefore ships moving around, perhaps having lost their way. The Pole Star (love) helps these lost ships (spiritually lost people) to find their way to their destination and to safe haven. As the Pole Star guides all ships in the Northern Hemisphere, love can guide all souls through life.

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken

This line refers to the practice of seeing how heavily laden with cargo a ship is by measuring its height above the water. Nowadays ships use the Plimsoll Line, but waterlines of various kinds have been used for thousands of years, and the application is based on Archimedes principle of water displacement by mass in a given volume. We can measure the amount of water displacement by measuring the height of the ship above the sea, and thus we can calculate the mass of the cargo. However, the mass alone cannot tell us the worth of the cargo. Paper money will be lighter than iron bars, for example, but have greater economic worth. Or a young baby will be lighter than a cow, but that baby is surely of the greater value, and who knows what kind

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of person the baby will become? Shakespeare is saying the same thing here: We might know external measurements of a person, how tall they are, how much money they have, but by those we cannot know a person’s true value. True love, however, can appreciate a person’s hidden worth.

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 4 CheyneGeorge Herbert (1593–1633): ‘The Altar’

Life and times

Herbert was a Welsh-born English poet, and an Anglican priest. He was born into an artistic and wealthy family, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University. After graduating, he became the Public Orator at Cambridge University. In 1624, he became a Member of Parliament for Montgomery, in Wales. In his mid thirties, he gave up secular life and became rector at St Andrews Church, whichhe helped to rebuild, in Lower Bemerton, Salisbury, where he remained for the last years of his all too brief life. He died of consumption only three years after becoming a priest. For a very good biography of Herbert, see John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Penguin, 2013.

Herbert wrote gentle, spiritual verse. He is usually grouped among the Metaphysical Poets, seventeenth-century poets who used ‘metaphysical conceits’: analogies between spiritual qualities and physical things. E.g. John Donne’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, which likens a pair of lovers to a compass:

If they be two, they are two so   As stiff twin compasses are two;Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,   Yet when the other far doth roam,It leans and hearkens after it,   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;Thy firmness makes my circle just,   And makes me end where I begun.

Herbert’s poems are devotional, and were published posthumously in one volume, The Temple (1633).

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‘The Altar’ is a pattern poem, as the lines are laid out in the shape of an altar.

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart and cemented with teares:

Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.

A HEART aloneIs such a stone,As nothing but

Thy pow'r doth cut.Wherefore each part

Of my hard heartMeets in this frame,To praise thy Name;

That if I chance to hold my peace,These stones to praise thee may not cease.

O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

Vocabulary and phrases

Define or paraphrase the following:

altar:

reares:

cemented:

did frame:

this frame (two meanings):

if I chance:

hold me peace:

blessed:

sacrifice:

sanctifie:

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The sacrificial altar

An altar is a table used in the rituals of various religions. Usually the altar had a drainage hole, and channels to direct the blood of a slaughtered animal so it could drain away. Judaism, from which Christianity developed, instituted the sacrifice of a lamb offered to God, and indeed all animals killed for food are to be slaughtered according to religious rules (Islam has similar rules), and all the blood is to be drained. In Christianity, the sacrifice is the symbolic one of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion. In the Christian Mass, the body and blood of Christ are shared by the priest among the people coming to communion.

Meter

‘The Altar’ scans perfectly into iambic feet. The first two lines are pentameter, ll. 3–4 are tetrameter, and ll. 5–8 are dimeter. This order is then perfectly mirrored below, and the poem is strongly marked by symmetry. Regarding symmetry, note also that the capitalised words––ALTAR, HEART. SACRIFICE, ALTAR––form a symmetry, with ALTAR at the start and finish, and HEART mirrored by SACRIFICE, emphasizing that the devoted poet’s heart is the sacrificial offering to God.

Scriptural allusion

Lines 3–4 allude to Exodus 20:5 (Chapter 20, verse 25):  ‘And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.’

Place in The Temple

The first poem in The Temple is the ‘Dedication’, followed by two poems grouped together in a section called ‘The Church Porch’. The great majority (161 out of 166) of the poems then follow in the longest section, called ‘The Church’, and ‘The Altar’ is the first poem of this section, and is followed by ‘The Sacrifice’. (Love III is the last poem of ‘The Church’.) Herbert’s poetry is therefore organized as an allegory of the Church, with the sacrifice at the altar coming first, and the Love that follows the sacrifice being the ‘last thing’, in the sense of something very important or ultimate.

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Heart as temple

The heart––the place of emotion and the central organ of life––is made by Herbert into an altar for God. He admits it is a ‘broken ALTAR’, and this likely refers to the breaking of Christ’s body (the breaking of the bread) during the Mass. Herbert the poet-priest dedicates not only his working life to God, but his very heart. The heart is also likened to stone (ll. 5–6: ‘A HEART alone/ Is such a stone’; l. 10: ‘my hard heart’), the raw material that is to be sanctified for worship and love. The idea is also communicated that everybody’s heart should become an altar, kept pure and used for love.

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 5 CheyneGeorge Herbert (1593–1633): ‘Love III’

Love III

Love bade me welcome; Yet my soul drew back, (1)         Guiltie of dust and sin. (2)But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack (3)        From my first entrance in, (4)Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, (5)       If I lack’d any thing. (6) A guest, I answered, worthy to be here. (7)        Love said, You shall be he. (8)I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah my deare, (9)        I cannot look on thee. (10)Love took my hand, and smiling did reply: (11)        Who made the eyes but I? (12) Truth Lord; but I have marr’d them; let my shame (13)         Go where it doth deserve. (14)And know you not, says Love; who bore the blame? (15)         My deare, then I will serve. (16)You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. (17)         So I did sit and eat. (18)

Structure

Three six-line stanzas, each with the rhyme scheme of ABABCC. The lines alternate from ten to six syllables each, that is, from pentameter to trimeter. This creates gaps of empty space along the left side of the page, helping to suggest that this is a dialogue. That each longer line has as a reply or continuation a shorter line produces a gentle and soothing effect, and a genuine love poem.

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Biblical allusions

‘Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.’ (Luke 12:37)

The idea here is that faithful servants are treated well by the master, who is happy to serve the servants.

The poem also alludes to the Last Supper, where Jesus broke the bread and shared it with his disciples, saying it is his body, and then shared the wine, saying it is his blood, and they must do this in future, in memory of him. This ritual then became the sacrament of Holy Communion, or Holy Mass.

Love Personified

Love is obviously personified in the poem, being ‘quick-eyed’ and ‘sweetly smiling’. Ideed, Love speaks and acts, as a host speaks and interacts with a guest. In this poem, Love is a person, Jesus in fact. The poet sitting and eating the meat is a reference to the meaning of the act of Communion, where the faithful eat ‘the body of Christ’. Thinking of eating ‘meat’ in this mysterious way that is both sacrifice and an act of love is very striking, and the poet wishes the reader to reflect on the meaning of love, Christ, and the Holy Communion that is the central sacrament of the Church. We can also reflect on how much the sacrament is meant to be understood as a literal eating of Christ’s body, and how much it is a symbolic gesture with memorial and metaphorical meaning.

Humility and confidence-building in loving dialogue

Before Love (Jesus), the poet feels guilty and unworthy. Love welcomed him, yet his ‘soul drew back/ Guilty of dust and sin.’ Ever attentive ‘quick-eyed Love’ notices him ‘grow slack’ (weak and unconfident) and ‘Drew nearer’ to him, and kindly asking if he ‘needed

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anything’. Christ is therefore the attentive, considerate host, who only loves the other, and wants to be kind. He is, then, an ideal model of all forms of love. When the unconfident person says he cannot even look on Jesus, because he feels impure, Jesus takes his hand, smiles, and replies with the question: ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ This is a very delicate and gentle response, just as love is meant to be. He gently persuades the one who feels guilty to recover from his bad feelings, and sit and eat at his feast. Notice that the final lines have Jesus saying that he ‘bore the blame’, so that the sin could be forgiven. Observe also that the poem is written in the past tense, except for the final four lines, which speak in the present, as if to announce that the Love feast is a perpetually present invitation, and that Love is always inviting, it is not too late to join.

Courtship

The poem can be read on a basic, literal level, in which case it is a dialogue between the poet and Love personified, and also on a spiritual and religious level, as a dialogue between Christ and a shameful human being. These two levels both work very well, so the poem successfully oscillates or vibrates with these meanings at all points. As a love poem, then, Christ is courting the poet, patiently drawing near to him, and gently easing his heart to that he can recover in this space of love. Again, like courtship, the poet is cast in the role of the bashful one who loves, but is too shy and ashamed even to look at the beloved. Towards the end, when the poet accepts that they can indeed eat together, he offers to serve. Yet Love declines this offer, and, choosing to be a servant, tells the poet to sit and be served. One of the great qualities of this poem comes from how perfectly Herbert marries the literal and religious meanings of the poem, so that each reading enlightens the other. This has the additional effect of showing that our earthly loves, of our friends, family, and neighbours, should be modeled on this religious love exemplified by the gentle host to the bashful guest.

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British Literature and Culture, Lectures 6, 7, 8 CheyneS. T. Coleridge (1772–1834)

Life and Times

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born the youngest of ten children in Ottery St Mary, Devon, South West England. His father, Rev. John Coleridge, was a parish priest at St Mary’s Church, who also taught Latin and Greek to local children, including his own young Samuel. When his father died in 1781, aged 63, eight-year-old Coleridge was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school in London that educated for free the children of deceased clergy. Coleridge read profusely, describing himself as ‘a library cormorant’, and especially enjoyed reading Neo-Platonist philosophers, such as Plotinus and Iamblichus. At Christ’s Hospital, he also enjoyed writing poetry. He next went to Jesus College, Cambridge, although he left to join the cavalry for a brief period, and therefore did not get his degree.

In his early twenties, he and fellow poet, whom he knew from Cambridge, planned to organize a utopian society in America, beginning with twelve men and their wives. For this reason, Coleridge married Sara Fricker, and Southey married her sister, Edith. The plan never materialised, and Coleridge’s marriage, though it produced children and was happy at the start, was an unfortunate one. Coleridge and his wife often argued, and he separated from her (in the Lake District) to live in London for the rest of his life. Late in life, she moved to London, and they were on good terms, although they lived apart. Sickness and a weak heart led to Coleridge being prescribed opium in his twenties. Unfortunately, he became addicted and struggled with this for the rest of his life. For his last 18 years, he lived in the household of Dr James Gillman, who helped him with his addiction.

It is generally said that Coleridge’s greatest poems were written in early life, but recent attention to his later poems has found that he always continued experimenting with poetic forms. It is, however, universally acknowledged that 1797 was his annus mirabilis, when he started his three great ‘mystery poems’ (‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and ‘Christabel’), and wrote several other highly acclaimed poems, such as ‘The Eolian Harp’ (first drafted in 1795 as ‘Effussion XXXV’), and ‘Dejection: An Ode’. From 1816, Coleridge became increasingly concerned with philosophical and theological questions, and wrote prose works on these topics (such as The Statesman’s Manual, 1816; Biographia Literaria, 1817; The Friend, 1818; Aids to Reflection, 1824; and On The Constitution of Church and State, 1829).

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Frost at Midnight (1798; revised 1817)

The Frost performs its secret ministry, (1)Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry (2)Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. (3)The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, (4)Have left me to that solitude, which suits (5)Abstruser musings: save that at my side (6)My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. (7)'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs (8)And vexes meditation with its strange (9)And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, (10)This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, (11)With all the numberless goings-on of life, (12)Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame (13)Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; (14)Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, (15)Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. (16)Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature (17)Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, (18)Making it a companionable form, (19)Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit (20)By its own moods interprets, every where (21)Echo or mirror seeking of itself, (22)And makes a toy of Thought. (23)

                      But O! how oft, (24)How oft, at school, with most believing mind, (25)Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, (26)To watch that fluttering stranger!* and as oft (27) With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt (28)Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, (29)Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang (30)From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, (31)So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me (32)With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear (33)Most like articulate sounds of things to come! (34)So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, (35)Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! (36)And so I brooded all the following morn, (37)Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye (38)Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: (39)Save if the door half opened, and I snatched (40)A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, (41)

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For still I hoped to see the stranger's face, (42)Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, (43)My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! (44)

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, (45)Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, (46)Fill up the intersperséd vacancies (47)And momentary pauses of the thought! (48)My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart (49)With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, (50)And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, (51)And in far other scenes! For I was reared (52)In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, (53)And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. (54)But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze (55)By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags (56)Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, (57)Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores (58)And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear (59)The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible (60)Of that eternal language, which thy God (61)Utters, who from eternity doth teach (62)Himself in all, and all things in himself. (63)Great universal Teacher! he shall mould (64)Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. (65)

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, (66)Whether the summer clothe the general earth (67)With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing (68)Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch (69)Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch (70)Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall (71)Heard only in the trances of the blast, (72)Or if the secret ministry of frost (73)Shall hang them up in silent icicles, (74)Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. (75)

* [Line 27, strangers:] In all parts of the kingdom these films are called strangers and supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.

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Meter and structure

The poem is composed in unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse), and divides into four verse paragraphs of different lengths. The first version of the poem was longer, but Coleridge cut it so that it would have the overall shape of a ‘rondo, or return upon itself’. He explained this self-contained, circular form in a letter to his publisher, Joseph Cottle:

The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth. (Collected Letters 4, 545)

In 1817, ‘Frost at Midnight’ was included in Sibylline Leaves in a chapter he titled ‘Meditative Poems in Blank Verse’. These meditative poems are eminent examples of what M. H. Abrams (1965) called ‘the greater romantic lyric’. A. Gérard (1960) observed that these poems have a systolic-diastolic structure, like the opening and closing of a beating heart. There are three fundamental movements in these poems, including ‘Frost’: The beginning is in a relatively narrow area, such as a room in a house, with the poet considering domestic thoughts concerning hat is nearby; the poem then opens up to past and future, and a more universal consideration of all life; it then returns to the narrow area of the start, but bringing a new and much broader perspective of life and human concerns in nature in the terms of a religious perspective related to eternity.

Autobiographical and lyrical elements

The poem begins in Coleridge’s cottage in Nether Stowey, with his wife asleep upstairs, and his baby son Hartley sleeping in the cradle in the downstairs living room. Although it is a small village, he calls it ‘populous’(l. 11), as he now thinks of all the life that exists there, all the unseen animals in ‘Sea, and hill, and wood’ (l. 11) and ‘all the numberless goings-on of life/ Inaudible as dreams’ (ll. 11–12). This reflects Coleridge’s deep love of nature and his compassionate and religious feeling for what he called ‘the one Life within us and abroad’ (‘The Eolian Harp’).The fire is dying down, and Coleridge is indulging in his wonted ‘Abstruser musings’ (l. 6) about philosophy and

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theology. The stranger on the grate makes him think of thought in general and the mind itself, which were important topics in Coleridge’s philosophical writings.

This stranger on the grate then reminds him of his unhappy days at Christ’s Hospital, when he would watch the stranger and hope it would portend a visit from a relative, preferably from his dear sister. The school was ‘pent’mid cloisters dim’ (l. 53) in the big city, London, and so he greatly missed natural surroundings.

However, he can now imagine the future life of young Hartley, the baby beside him. They are now in the countryside, and will soon move with the Wordsworths to the beautiful Lake District in North West England. Instead of feeling sad about his own childhood, he is now full of hope for his son Hartley, who will grow up with Nature as his great teacher, surrounded by lakes, hills, and great mountains. These natural shapes are the ‘eternal language, which thy God/ Utters’ (ll. 61–2).

In closing, Coleridge returns to his room, at midnight, in winter, confident that ‘all seasons shall be sweet to’ his son. He himself has entered into a deep and calm meditative mood, where natural forms, such as the icicles hanging from the eaves, reflect the light of life to the heavens.

Vocabulary and phrases

Give definitions, or synonyms / paraphrases for the following:

ministry:

owlet:

hark:

inmates:

cottage:

solitude:

abstruser:

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musings:

cradled:

slumbers:

vexes:

meditation:

populous:

numberless:

inaudible:

quivers:

film:

fluttered:

grate:

unquiet:

methinks:

hush:

dim:

sympathies:

companionable:

form:

puny:

flaps and freaks:

idling:

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toy of Thought:

oft:

presageful:

gazed:

bars:

fluttering stranger:

unclosed lids:

haunted me:

articulate:

articulate sounds:

soothing:

lulled:

prolonged:

brooded:

morn:

mock:

mock study:

swimming book:

hasty glance:

both were clothed alike:

interspersed:

tender:

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lore:

pent:

cloisters:

pent mid cloisters dim:

nought:

crags:

bulk:

mould:

redbreast:

betwixt:

tufts:

mossy:

nigh:

thatch:

sun-thaw:

eave-drops:

trances:

blast:

trances of the blast:

secret ministry of frost:

icicles:

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British Literature and Culture, Lecture 9 Cheyne William Wordsworth (1770–1850): ‘The Rainbow’

Life and timesWordsworth grew up in the natural beauty of Lake District, in Cumberland, North West England. His mother died when he was seven, and his father when he was thirteen. Despite his losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School, and went to St John’s College, Cambridge. Like Coleridge, he was a radical in his youth and sympathetic to the French Revolution. Also like Coleridge, he grew more conservative in later life.

Wordsworth and Coleridge met in 1795, and WW and his sister Dorothy decided to move so they could live close to STC and his wife Sara. In 1798 the two men wrote a volume of poetry that became the founding document of British Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads. That same year, he began writing The Prelude, an epic autobiographical poem about the ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’. He worked on this masterpiece throughout his life, and it was published posthumously in 1850.

My Heart Leaps Up (The Rainbow)

My heart leaps up when I behold (1) A rainbow in the sky: (2)So was it when my life began; (3)So is it now I am a man; (4)So be it when I shall grow old, (5) Or let me die! (6)The Child is father of the Man; (7)And I could wish my days to be (8)Bound each to each by natural piety. (9)

Composition and publication

‘The Rainbow’, or ‘My Heart Leaps Up’, was composed in 1802 and first published in 1807 as an epigraph to ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality on Recollections of Early Childhood’. The longer poem uses the Platonic ideas of the preexistence of the soul and of anamnesis, i.e. that all learning is recollection from the preexistent state of the soul in its purer state, to assert that children are naturally pure because they are closer to heaven. Children, he says, come ‘trailing clouds of glory’ (l. 65), and these dissipate and ‘fade into the light of common day’ (l. 77) as we grow older.

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Scansion

υ / υ / υ / υ /My heart leaps up when I behold (1)

υ / υ / υ / A rainbow in the sky: (2)

/ υ υ / υ / υ /So was it when my life began; (3)

/ υ υ / υ / υ /So is it now I am a man; (4)

/ υ υ / υ / υ /So be it when I shall grow old, (5)

υ / υ / Or let me die! (6)

υ / υ / υ / υ /The Child is father of the Man; (7)

υ / υ / υ / υ /And I could wish my days to be (8)

υ / υ / υ / υ υ / υ /Bound each to each by natural piety. (9)

Evocation of heartbeat

The poem has an underlying iambic structure, and the deviations from that are significant. The heartbeat of da DUM da DUM basically continues through the poem, and ll. 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8 are consistently iambic. However, irregularities accompany moments of excitement (‘So was it when’, ‘So is it now’, ‘So be it when’, ll. 3, 4, and 5). In fact, the heart beat stops for half a line in l. 6, as he considers that life without joy in nature would not be worth living. The cessation of the heartbeat at the word ‘die’ produces a strong effect, physically representing the idea of death as the stopping of the heart.

This thought of death as preferable to life without the joy of naturealso introduces a problem that demands resolution. The first two lines are of

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perfectly regular iambic feet, with l. 1 in tetrameter, and l. 2 in trimeter. They are a statement in the present tense of the poet’s joy at natural beauty, represented by the rainbow. They amount to a defining example of his life and his high evaluation of simple natural wonders. The next three lines (ll. 3–5) are in iambic tetrameter, but with the irregularity that the first foot of each line is reversed into a trochee. We can think of this (and feel and hear it too) as an irregularity in the heartbeat caused by excitement, as when ‘the heart leaps up’. Instead of the da DUM da DUM rhythm established in ll. 1 and 2, these lines commence with the more the excited irregularity DUM da da DUM that then returns to iambics, so that the heart leaps three times, at the word ‘So’ commencing each line. The genius here is that the word ‘So’ refers back to ‘My heart leaps up’, and the reversal of stress commencing these three lines means that the adverb ‘So’ rhythmically embodies, in the added emphasis or leaping up, what it literally means––the heart leaping up.

Line 6, ‘Or let me die!, causes a half-line long caesura in the poem: a meditative pause. The poem could almost end here, at the end of the shortened line and the word ‘die’. But like a stopped heart, it is resuscitated, and indeed defibrillated, as the next line is a perfectly regular iambic tetrameter. This saving line announces a principle, partly empirical, from observation of life, and partly an article of faith, that ‘The Child is father of the man’. This line has been very influential, and was even cited by Sigmund Freud as supporting his psychoanalytic theory of the overwhelming importance of childhood events and experiences in shaping adult life.

The principal can be read at various levels of depth, and some people think that the word ‘Child’ is capitalised as an allusion to the infant Jesus who is also God, and hence one with the Father.* There is no evidence to support or deny this, however, it is true that Wordsworth is maintaining that the experience of children is more pure and vibrantly alive than that or adults who grow world-weary, and this indeed is the theme of the longer poem, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, for which ‘The Rainbow’ is the epigraph. Lines 8 and 9 confirm that the fundamental meaning of line 7 is that the experiences of childhood can carry over into adulthood and help to shape it, as a father helps shape one into an adult. This thought is all the more poignant given that Wordsworth became an orphan at age 13, when his own father died. He may very well have felt that from then on he had to be in many respects his own father, reflecting on the great qualities of nature as he tried to find the model for maturing into adulthood.

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The principle announced in l. 7 is developed in the thought of ll. 8 and 9. In order to allow the joyous and natural energy of childhood to flow through adulthood into old age, as he deeply wishes (‘So be it when I shall grow old/ Or let me die!’), he must ensure a living continuity between all of his days. Therefore he must wish his ‘days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety.’ Binding his days together ensures the circuit is not broken and that joy from nature can flow through his life. But what can be used to bind one’s days together? His solution is ‘natural piety’. This phrase has more than one level of meaning. It refers to piety, that is the actions and feelings of reverence, love and respect, for nature itself. But it also refers to a kind of piety that is not necessarily the product of education by parents, teachers, and priests, which one would call cultural piety, filial piety, and religious piety. This piety is instead one that is instilled by nature itself, both the nature without, as represented by the rainbow, and especially the nature within: The natural outflowing of joy that occurs when nature within corresponds with nature without. This notion offers a reflection on the principle that ‘The Child is father of the man’ by considering that the piety that can bind one’s days together so that childhood joy at nature can flow through life is not something that one must learn through religious education, school, or from one’s parents, but is something that occurs naturally in all children, even the fatherless. A further dimension of hope exists in adults looking to the natural joy of children as inspiration for their own relation to nature.

* There is also the possibility that the rainbow was chosen as the symbol of natural beauty because it is used in the Bible when God sends a rainbow at the end of the great flood to tell Noah and all humanity that he has now made a covenant with mankind that he will never again destroy Earth with a flood (Genesis 9). Although many readers will have felt some resonance from this possible allusion, one does not need think of the Noah story in order to understand the power of the simple and perfect arc of the spectrum of vibrant colours curving in the sky over the Earth in order to appreciate a rainbow as a symbol of joy in nature.

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