Pied BeautySPARKNOTES: Summary

The poem opens with an offering: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” In the next five lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric of “dappled.” He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the “brinded” (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting color on a trout. The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell; they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within. The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the “trades” and activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment.

In the final five lines, Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the characteristics of these examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now to the concept of variety and diversity that he has elaborated thus far mostly in terms of physical characteristics. The poem becomes an apology for these unconventional or “strange” things, things that might not normally be valued or thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God, which, in their multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and inspire us to “Praise Him.”

FormThis is one of Hopkins’s “curtal” (or curtailed) sonnets, in which he miniaturizes the traditional

sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and shortening the six lines of the sestet to four and a half. This alteration of the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating originality and contrariness. The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem (“dappled,” “stipple,” “tackle,” “fickle,” “freckled,” “adazzle,” for example) enacts the creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a pleasing and coherent whole.

CommentaryThis poem is a miniature or set-piece, and a kind of ritual observance. It begins and ends with

variations on the mottoes of the Jesuit order (“to the greater glory of God” and “praise to God always”), which give it a traditional flavor, tempering the unorthodoxy of its appreciations. The parallelism of the beginning and end correspond to a larger symmetry within the poem: the first part (the shortened octave) begins with God and then moves to praise his creations. The last four-and-a-half lines reverse this movement, beginning with the characteristics of things in the world and then tracing them back to a final affirmation of God. The delay of the verb in this extended sentence makes this return all the more satisfying when it comes; the long and list-like predicate, which captures the multiplicity of the created world, at last yields in the penultimate line to a striking verb of creation (fathers-forth) and then leads us to acknowledge an absolute subject, God the Creator. The poem is thus a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. It expresses the theological position that the great variety in the natural world is a testimony to the perfect unity of God and the infinitude of His creative power. In the context of a Victorian age that valued uniformity, efficiency, and standardization, this theological notion takes on a tone of protest.Why does Hopkins choose to commend “dappled things” in particular? The first stanza would lead the reader to believe that their significance is an aesthetic one: In showing how contrasts and juxtapositions increase the richness of our surroundings, Hopkins describes variations in color and texture—of the sensory. The mention of the “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” in the fourth line, however, introduces a moral tenor to the list. Though the description is still physical, the idea of a nugget of goodness imprisoned within a hard exterior invites a consideration of essential value in a way that the speckles on a cow, for example, do not. The image transcends the physical, implying how the physical links to the spiritual and meditating on the relationship between body and soul. Lines five and six then serve to connect these musings to human life and activity. Hopkins first introduces a landscape whose characteristics derive from man’s alteration (the fields), and then includes “trades,” “gear,” “tackle,” and “trim” as diverse items that are man-made. But he then goes on to include these things, along with the preceding list, as part of God’s work.

Hopkins does not refer explicitly to human beings themselves, or to the variations that exist among them, in his catalogue of the dappled and diverse. But the next section opens with a list of qualities (“counter, original, spare, strange”) which, though they doggedly refer to “things” rather than people, cannot but be considered in moral terms as well; Hopkins’s own life, and particularly his poetry, had at the time been described in those very terms. With “fickle” and “freckled” in the eighth line, Hopkins

introduces a moral and an aesthetic quality, each of which would conventionally convey a negative judgment, in order to fold even the base and the ugly back into his worshipful inventory of God’s gloriously “pied” creation.Q: What does Hopkins believe about the presence of God in the natural world? Illustrate your answer with reference to two or more poems. Q: Hopkins is famous as a poet of both nature and religion. How does he combine these two traditional poetic subjects, and to what effect?

IGCSE blog Line 1: gives thanks to God for creating ‘dappled things’.Lines 2 – 5

provides a list of specific things which are ‘dappled’ and which cumulatively express delight at such variety in the natural world. In order, they are:skies presumably of blue sky and white clouda ‘brinded’ cow – i.e. a cow streaked with different coloursthe trout with its specks of different colour (‘stipple’ is a speck)chestnuts glowing like coal – an image approaching the surreal, the black of the coal and the glow of the flame finches’ wings landscape of fields ‘plotted and pieced’ like a patchwork, some planted, some fallow and some recently ploughed (‘fold, fallow and plough’).Line 6 shifts attention from natural phenomena to the jobs that men (!) have and the different types of equipment they have. ‘Gear’ and ‘tackle’ are more recognisablycomprehensible to the twenty-first century reader than the word ‘trim’ as used here. Line 7 marks a turning-point. The language becomes more abstract in character, afterthe concrete detail of the previous lines. It might be helpful to look at the final two lines ofthe poem first: God is the creator of all things mentioned in the poem, and should bepraised. Then go back to the adjectives in line 7: God is creator of ‘all things counter,original, spare, strange’. These ‘fickle’ things are themselves ‘freckled’ with oppositequalities: swift / slow; sweet / sour; adazzle / dim.

Pied Beauty Summary The speaker says we should glorify God because he has given us dappled, spotted, freckled,

checkered, speckled, things. (This poem says "dappled" in a lot of different ways.)The speaker goes on to give examples. We should praise God because of the skies with two colors,

like a two-colored cow. And the little reddish dots on the side of trout. And the way fallen chestnuts look like red coals in a fire. And the blended colors of the wings of a finch (a kind of bird). And landscapes divided up by humans into plots for farming. And for all the different jobs that humans do.

In short, the speaker thinks we should praise God for everything that looks a bit odd or unique, everything that looks like it doesn't quite fit in with the rest.

All these beautiful, mixed-up, ever-changing things were created or "fathered" by a God who never changes. The speaker sums up what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."

Line 1Glory be to God for dappled things –

• The speaker says that we should give glory to God for having created "dappled," or spotted things. • If you're worried about not knowing exactly what "dappled" looks like, fear not: Hopkins is going

to give you lots of examples.• "Glory be to God" is a way of giving praise. If you've been to a service at a Christian Church, you

might have heard this phrase before. Often it is sung in church hymns. • In fact, the "hymn to creation" is a popular genre of hymn, which gives praise to God for all the

things He has created. The speaker points to "dappled" things in particular.• The "hymn to creation" is inspired by the Psalms in the Old Testament. These short songs are

traditionally thought to have been written by King David of Israel (yes, the one with the sling shot who took on Goliath).

• Psalm 148 is one of the original hymns to creation:Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies.

Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created.

• As an ordained priest, Hopkins would have known these hymns well.Line 2

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;• The speaker gives examples of "dappled things." In this poem, at least, "dappled" refers to things

with multiplied colors.• Hopkins's first example is really two examples in one. "Skies of couple-color" are skies that have

two colors. The most obvious possibilities are blue and white in a clear sky that is "dappled" or streaked with clouds. This image in turn reminds the speaker of a "brinded cow."

• This line surely has to be the most famous usage of "brinded" in all of literature. The word means to have hair with brownish spots or streaks. It means the same thing as the more common word "brindle," often used to describe the color of dogs like boxers or pit bulls.

• "Brindle" is also a kind of cow, but maybe not the one you'd expect. If you're anything like us, you were probably thinking of the famous black-and-white Holstein cows. But brindled cows have a much more uneven coloring, usually in shades of brown.

• So there you go: a little lesson in livestock.Line 3

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;• The small light-reddish dots or "rose-moles" on the side of trout are another example of "dappled

things." They look like they have been drawn "in stipple" on the trout's body.• "Stipple" is a technique in arts like drawing, painting, and sewing, to create texture through the use

of small dots. (Here's an example.) • Many trout, such as this Brown Trout, do have red dots on their bodies.• You may have noticed by now that Hopkins likes to use hyphens to create new words. "Couple-

color" was one example, and "rose-moles" is another.Line 4

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;• And here come two more hyphenated words, along with two more examples of "dappled things."

The first example is "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls." • This is probably the trickiest image in the poem, partly because we're not nearly as familiar with

chestnuts as 19th-century English people would have been.• "Chestnut-falls" is not too hard to imagine. It refers to chestnuts that have fallen off the chestnut

tree. This hyphenated word points to the specific chestnuts that have fallen from the tree. • But "Fresh-firecoal" requires some background on nuts, a field we at Shmoop like to call nut-ology. • When they are on a tree, chestnuts are covered by a spiky, light-green covering, but the nuts

themselves are reddish-brown. (Here's a picture.)• When the nuts fall, they are "fresh" from the tree. Because of the contrast of red nuts with their

outer covering, they look like the burning of coals inside a fire. • To add another layer to this chestnut conundrum, people also like to cook these delectable nuts over

fire. When the nuts get hot, they open up to reveal their "meat," inside. These opened chestnuts also look like embers.

• We're almost certain you now know more than you ever wanted to about chestnuts. Fortunately, the second example of a "dappled thing" in this line is much easier.

• Finches are small birds with streaks and spots. (Here's a photo.) • The speaker focuses only on the finches' wings – a sign of his great attention to detail.

Line 5Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;

• Another dappled thing: the English landscape, divided up into different "plots" and "pieces" for farming and raising livestock.

• A "fold" is a fenced-in area for sheep, "fallow" describes a field that has been left empty, and the "plough" is a tool used to turn over the topsoil before planting crops.

• So far, the poem has not distinguished between big and small things. The cloud-speckled skies are comparable to the dots on a fish, despite the fact that these things are very different in size.

• Here the speaker transitions from a very small example – the "finches' wings" – to whole fields. • He's also using a lot of alliteration, and "plotted/pierced" and "fold/fallow" are examples from this

line. • Finally, the speaker makes no distinction between untouched parts of nature and the parts that have

been adapted by humans. According to the speaker, farming is a part of God's creation, just like the finches and the fish.Line 6

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.• The speaker widens his focus from a single trade, or skilled job – farming – to all trades. • He chooses three to represent the tools or accessories of all different kinds of jobs.• Without delving too deep into their many possible uses, the words "gear and tackle and trim" point

to fishing, sailing, and clothes-making, among other trades. • "Trade" sounds old-fashioned now, but it suggests a natural connection between a person and his or

her life's work.• In this line, the dappled or spotted appearance of things becomes a metaphor for variety and

mixture. In other words, the poem sets up a transition where "dappled" has a wider meaning in the second stanza.

• This meaning stands in direct contrast to the scope of the first stanza, in which the speaker focuses mainly on the visual.Line 7

All things counter, original, spare, strange;• The speaker expands and elaborates upon his list of things for which to praise God.• Rather than list specific objects, he uses adjectives to describe their qualities. • The items in the list are characterized by their uniqueness. They are "counter" to what is normal;

they are original, they are "spare" and don't appear in great numbers; and they are "strange" or unusual.

• Remember, in this poem, Hopkins is primarily concerned with the quirky and unusual things in nature. Line 8

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)• This line gives two more adjectives to add to our main adjective, "dapple." • Surprise, surprise, they begin with the same letter: "fickle" means something that changes a lot, and

"freckled" returns to the topic of spots or dots. • In other contexts, "fickle" can be a negative quality in a person who changes his or her mind too

often, but in nature, fickleness brings about new things at which we can marvel.• In parentheses, the speaker voices his private wonder at how all these things acquired their "pied

beauty."Line 9

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;• Check out the semi-colons in this line. They mark the division between three pairs of opposites: fast

and slow, sweet and sour, and bright ("adazzle") and dim.• The speaker doesn't know how it's possible for one thing to be "freckled" with two opposite

qualities.• Think of a slice of sugary lemon cake, which is both sweet and sour. Hopkins would be in ecstasies

over that slice of cake. How'd they do that?Line 10

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:• The speaker says that God is the "father" of all these beautiful things, but his own beauty never

changes.• According to Christian thought, God remains the same even as the world he created constantly

shifts and flows.• We think that Hopkins must have read his Shakespeare. The phrase "fathers-forth," which means

"to bring into existence," resembles a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet. The character Hamlet sarcastically notes that his mother's marriage to his uncle after his father's death was so fast that

"The funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (Act 1, Scene 2).Line 12

Praise Him.• The end of the poem circles back to the beginning of the poem and the idea of praise and glory. • The phrase "Praise Him" occurs over and over again the Psalms, and Psalm 148 in particular. • This simple declaration of humility contrasts with the high-flying language and rhetoric that comes

before. • This statement could be a two-word summary for the entire poem.

Symbols, Imagery, WordplayDappled Things

The first line tells us that "dappled things" are the most amazing things in the world. The rest of the poem is devoted mostly to explaining what the speaker means by "dappled things." The beauty of the poem's descriptions is supposed to convey their awesomeness, even if we can't look at a "couple-coloured" sky at the moment we are reading. The examples begin with objects that consist of two colors, but at the end of the first stanza, "dappled" becomes a metaphor for the mixture of different kinds of things.

• Line 2: The two-colored skies are compared using simile to a "brinded cow."• Line 3: The speaker paints a vivid image of the reddish dots on the sides of swimming trout.• Line 4: The first half of the line includes an implicit metaphor comparing fallen chestnuts to coals

in a fire.• Line 5: This line contains imagery related to farming, including the "plotted" land, the sheep-fold, a

"fallow" field, and a plough.• Line 6: All the trades of humankind are "dappled" only metaphorically. "Dappled" is a word to

describe a visual appearance, and jobs don't have a particular appearance. But they are varied and diverse, just like a "dappled thing."

• Lines 8-9: The speaker uses another implicit metaphor, comparing three sets of contrasts, "swift, slow," "sweet, sour," and "adazzle, dim," to freckles.Praise and Glory"Pied Beauty" is a "hymn to creation." It argues that the wonders and mysteries of nature provide

ample reasons to praise and glorify God. The poem reads like a prayer. It ends with the speaker urging us to get on the bandwagon and join him in praise.

• Line 1: "Glory be to God" alludes to the beginning of prayers, particularly prayers that are based on the Biblical Psalms.

• Line 8: A rhetorical question in parentheses makes the point that no one knows how or why the world is "freckled" with so many diverse and mixed things.

• Line 10: We don't know enough theology to say whether this is actually a metaphor, but we'll point it out anyway. God's relationship to creation is compared to a father and his children.

• Line 11: The speaker talks to someone who can't respond, which is called apostrophe. In this case, that "someone" is us, the reader. He wants us to "praise" God.

AlliterationThere's a lot of alliteration in this poem. The use of different words that begin with the same sound contributes to the idea of unity-in-diversity. It also contributes to the unique, strongly accented sound of the poem. The most common sounds in "Pied Beauty" are f, p, s, and t. Alliteration doesn't really need explanation – it's just fun to use – so we'll just point out all the examples we can find.

• Line 1: "Glory" and "God"• Line 2: "Couple-colour" and "cow"• Line 4: "Fresh-firecoal" "falls" and "finches'"• Line 5: "Plotted," "pieced," and "plough"; "fold" and "fallow"• Line 6: "Trades," "tackle," and "trim"• Line 7: "Spare" and "strange"• Line 8: "Fickle" and freckled"• Line 9: "Swift," "slow," "sweet," and "sour." "Adazzle" and "dim."• Line 10: "Fathers-forth"

Pied Beauty: Rhyme, Form & MeterWe’ll show you the poem’s blueprints, and we’ll listen for the music behind the words.Hymn in Sprung Rhythm

"Pied Beauty" has no regular meter. Instead, Hopkins invented "sprung rhythm." In this case, the name says it all. "Sprung rhythm" is like a spring, or more accurately, many small springs scattered throughout the poem. The accents and downbeats are concentrated together. The rhythm consists of small explosions of energy. Often, the grouping of accented syllables results in the cramming together of meaning as well. A perfect example occurs in line 4:Fresh fire-coal chest-nut-falls.

Hopkins literally fuses words together in order to have the maximum amount of meaning and accents using the minimum number of words. The rhythm is characterized by stops and starts. Another way that Hopkins creates strong accents is by using alliteration everywhere. There is alliteration in (almost) every single line. "Sprung rhythm" is the big takeaway from Hopkins's poetry.

"Pied Beauty" does not have a regular form. Its genre, on the other hand, is a hymn. Hymns are religious songs of praise and prayer, and this poem takes its cues from the Book of Psalms in the Bible. The poem has two stanzas, the first with six lines and the second with five (assuming you count the final two words "Praise Him," as their own line). There are not a standard number of syllables per line. However, look at the way that each group of three lines is indented like three stairs going down. The poem has a rather complicated rhyme scheme, and lines with the same indentation tend to rhyme at the end. The scheme goes: ABCABC DBEDE. Then the last line "Praise Him" is set apart with its own indentation far to the right. It almost looks like the concluding "amen" of a religious prayer.

Speaker Point of ViewWho is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

The speaker is a religious man who has read and absorbed the Christian scriptures. He talks like a priest or preacher. He isn't simply content to quote or recite scripture; he takes his inspiration from the Book of Psalms, but turns his attention to the specific qualities of nature. He looks at nature almost like a biologist.

You could imagine the speaker as the kind of person who collects samples to add to his personal collection, such as a bird's feather or a particularly colorful stone. You might see him sitting underneath a tree with a notebook and making sketches of the "dappled things" he has seen. Indeed, the word "stipple" (line 3) is a term from drawing. He always notices the unusual or eccentric features of the landscape. He is very pious, and he wants you to be pious, too. He thinks that merely describing the world as it is should be enough to give people a sense for the mysteries of spiritual life, and would lead naturally to praising God.

Pied Beauty Setting Where It All Goes Down

"Pied Beauty" is a hymn that is sung in nature instead of church. The setting is the English countryside. Some nature poems describe the exotic, such as jungles, mountains, and other varieties of wilderness. The landscape of this poem is decidedly domesticated. Instead of tigers, dense trees, and rushing waterfalls, we have cows, trout, chestnuts, and birds. The land is divided into "plots and pieces" for farming (line 5).

Still, humans don't dominate the scene or stick out in any particular way. Humans don't control nature – they are an important part of nature, and the variety of their jobs is compared to the variety of colors on a trout or a bird's wings. But they do not dominate nature. Most important for "Pied Beauty," the landscape is characterized by dots, spots, dabs, and dapples of all kinds. It reminds us of a painting by the famous French pointillist Georges Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon in the Park." (It's the painting featured in the museum scene of Ferris Beuhler's Day Off). There is no uniformity anywhere in this vision of nature – everything is a kaleidoscope of color and other qualities like "sweet" and "sour" (line 9).

Sound CheckRead this poem aloud. What do you hear?

Reading a poem in "sprung rhythm" is like driving with someone who has just gotten his or her learning permit. This person hasn't learned to give a steady amount of gas to keep the car moving at an even speed. He alternates between putting the gas pedal to the floor and slamming on the breaks. The rhythm of the poem is stop-and-go: gas! brake. gas! brake. gas! brake. We don't mean to suggest, though, that Hopkins is as inexperienced as a learning permit driver. In fact, Hopkins has one of the most unique styles in English poetry.

Look at all the adjectives in the second stanza, each followed by the pause of a comma or semi-

colon. As the driver of the poem, Hopkins puts a mini-brake after each of those words. In other places, he adds extra words to keep the poem hurtling forward. In line 3, he describes "trout that swim," which makes us wonder: "Are there trout that don't swim?" Of course not. There are no incredible walking trout. The last two words are redundant in meaning, but necessary for the rhythm.

The same principle holds for line 6, where Hopkins writes, "gear and tackle and trim" instead of "gear, tackle, and trim." Notice how the first version sounds much quicker. Reading "Pied Beauty" provides all the excitement of being a first-time driver, except that Hopkins is really an experienced veteran with the poetic equivalent of a perfect driving record. Plus, you don't have to fear for your life, which is nice.

What’s Up With the Title?"Pied beauty" is a kind of beauty characterized by mixture, blending, and contrast. To be "pied" is

to have two or more colors in dots or splotches. The famous "Pied Piper" was so named because his clothes were made from parts of many different-colored clothes. The word "piebald" comes from the same root, and it has a similar meaning: both are good SAT words! When you hear "piebald," think Snoopy, that lovable cartoon beagle with the black-and-white splotches.

Here's an interesting question: is the title saying that all beauty is mixed or "pied," or that "pied beauty" is just one kind of beauty?Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Calling Card - What is the poet’s signature style?

Hyphenated WordsThe technique of cramming two words into one hyphenated word like "couple-colour" and

"chestnut-falls" is not a recent development. Shakespeare used such words frequently, and so did later Romantics like John Keats. But this technique came to be associated with the innovative sonic experimentation of 20th-century modernism, as expressed in the work of authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and others.

Because of his innovative technique and use of language, Hopkins is sometimes considered a "modernist" or "proto-modernist" poet. But it doesn't really make sense to call Hopkins a modernist because he wrote his poems well before the turn of the century. He belonged to no established school, and hyphenated words were just one of the tools of his own brand of "sprung rhythm."

Tough-O-MeterIn poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the sound is like a thread that guides you through each line.

Even if you have never seen a chestnut, you know that when he says "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls," he is talking about a "dappled thing" that is part of nature. His language is loaded like a spring, but his ideas are not complicated. That's it. Aside from a few lesser-known words like "brinded" and "stipple," there is not much to trouble even a new reader of poetry.

ThemesPied Beauty Theme of Religion"Pied Beauty" is a celebration of natural creation bookended by traditional religious expressions of

praise and glorification. We have trouble deciding whether the poem is meant to be a private and personal prayer (it was never published in Hopkins's lifetime), or if the speaker is addressing an imagined audience. The poem was written in 1877, the same year that Hopkins was ordained as a Jesuit priest by one of his heroes, the famous English writer and theologian John Henry Newman. "Pied Beauty" comes near the height of Hopkins's religious fervor.Questions About Religion

1. Does this poem strike you as particularly Christian (Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, which is a branch of Catholicism)? Could a non-Christian or a non-religious person appreciate the sentiments in the poem?

2. Does the speaker make any kind of religious arguments, or does he assume that his audience shares his views?

3. Have you ever heard a hymn before? Where? What other kinds of hymns do you know? Does "Pied Beauty" sound like any hymns you know?

4. Why does the speaker "praise" or give glory to God? What does this action demonstrate about the person giving praise?

Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. In "Pied Beauty," the sounds of words are supposed to convince the reader of the beauty of the things they represent.

3. When the speaker says, "Praise Him" in the final line, he is talking to himself.Pied Beauty Theme of Man and the Natural WorldIn Hopkins's poetry, nature does not exist without man. He doesn't take the view that man exploits

nature, but rather Hopkins's landscapes are filled with the tools and marks of humanity just as it is filled with trees in birds. On the other hand, his view of nature, at least in this poem, is limited to the things you might see in the English countryside. The poem is pastoral, meaning it shows natural beauty in an agricultural setting. Humans model their own activities after nature, and the diverse blend of colors and forms in the natural world serves as a metaphor for the diversity of man's trades and crafts.Questions About Man and the Natural World

1. Are there any images of nature that are not associated with agriculture or farming in some way? 2. What kind of landscape does the poem make you imagine? What kinds of images pop into your

head when you hear phrases like "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls"? 3. What is the opposite of "Pied Beauty"? Is there an opposite? 4. What kind of role does humanity play in nature? Does the poem suggest that humans are destined

to use nature, even if not in an exploitative way? Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. In "Pied Beauty," Hopkins doesn't really praise specific things so much as he praises the general structure of nature.3. Although Hopkins clearly sees humans as a part of nature, he also believes they have the responsibility to guide and order nature, which places them in a superior position.

Pied Beauty Theme of Awe and AmazementThe speaker admits that he has no idea how the world came to be filled with "dappled things." He

can offer no explanation but can only describe and admire. Some religious thinkers would say that nature must be beautiful because it was created by God. Hopkins says that God is praise-worthy because He created such a mysterious and beautiful world. Maybe there's not a huge distinction between the two views, except one of attitude. Hopkins seems to have an appreciation of natural diversity for its own sake, in all things great and small, and regardless of their relation to human ends.Questions About Awe and Amazement

1. How does the speaker's awe manifest itself in Hopkins's "sprung rhythm"? 2. The poem uses "dappled" as an umbrella for a lot of different things. In one sentence, what do all

these things have in common? 3. Can you think of any "dappled things" that maybe aren't so great or beautiful? Does Hopkins

purposefully ignore these not-so-great things? 4. Does the speaker talk more like a priest or a scientist, or maybe both?

Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. The poem is an expression of naïve and childish innocence that could not possibly be sustained.

Pied Beauty Theme of TransienceAccording to "Pied Beauty," the beauty of the earth is dependent on change. With the help of our

microscopes and telescopes, we now know that when you look close enough, both the macro and microscopic appear "dappled." Hopkins sees the same patterns of transient beauty in the greatness of a clouded sky or the smallness of finches' wings. According to the speaker of this poem, God is the only being that does not change. God brings change into the world, like a person who slowly turns a kaleidoscope. Hopkins adopts the Catholic view that God is the only unity in the world – everything else exists in diversity.Questions About Transience

1. Why is God "past change"? And when, then, is change a good thing? 2. In a famous poem called "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens argues that "Death is the mother of

beauty" because death brings change. Do you think Hopkins would agree, disagree, or would he want to tweak Stevens's idea?

3. Do all of the various "dappled things" in the poem change in the same way, or in different ways? How, exactly, are they "transient"?

4. How would you define the word "fickle" in its context in line 8? In what contexts have you heard the word used before?

Chew on This

1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. The poem argues that worldly beauty is created through the cycles of life and death.

3. Although "Pied Beauty" speaks of God's "beauty," the poem has no means of evaluating the beauty of God, because in the poem God is praised according to the beauty of creation, which is changeable. In other words, there is no absolute concept of beauty that does not change.Pied Beauty Religion Quotes

Quote #1 Glory be to God (line 1)The poem begins with an expression of Christian humility in the face of "God's Grandeur" (to quote the title of another of Hopkins's poem). The first line lets us know that the poem will be a "hymn to creation," inspired by the Biblical Psalms.Quote #2 For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow (line 2)After the first line, "Pied Beauty" turns into a nature poem – a major departure from the Psalms in the Bible. Although much of Christian scripture does praise nature, it does not do so in such a specific and sensuous way.Quote #3 Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) (line 8) he speaker does not try to explain the way the world is, he just admires it. The parenthetical "who knows how?" discourages us from questioning God's designs.Quote #4 He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: (line 10)God is the "father" in the Christian Trinity. Did you notice how Hopkins just slipped that in casually?Quote #5 Praise Him. (line 11)The poem ends abruptly when the speaker urges us to praise God. Or do you think that the speaker is talking to himself?

Pied Beauty Man and the Natural World QuotesQuote #1 For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; (line 2)

The natural landscape in "Pied Beauty" is oriented around agriculture. Hopkins has farming on the brain, as with this comparison of the sky to a cow. That's a little like saying, "That waterfall looks like bales of hay falling off a cliff." Notice how Hopkins looks at the positive ways in which humans interact with nature. He could have written about the ways in which humans have harmed nature, but clearly did not have this theme in mind when writing this poem. Check out "God's Grandeur" to read Hopkins's version of the darker side of human interaction in nature.Quote #2 For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; (lines 3-4)

Hopkins subtly mixes references to human activity with his descriptions of nature. The chestnuts are compared to the coals in a fireplace.Quote #3 Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough; (line 5)

The landscape was always so "pied." Humans have divided up the countryside into "plots" and "pieces" for farming different crops. Hopkins considers this process to be natural.Quote #4 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. (line 6)

Humans are further integrated into the list of natural marvels. Does it seem strange to consider different "trades" or jobs to be God's creations?

Pied Beauty Awe and Amazement Quotes Quote #1 Glory be to God for dappled things – (line 1)

"Dappled things" has to be one of the more unusual endings to a clause that begins "Glory be to God." Our first mental associations for "dappled" might have to do with color, drawing, or painting.Quote #2All things counter, original, spare, strange; (line 7)

The poem becomes more general about what "dappled things" are as it goes along. Here the category widens to include anything that is "one-of-a-kind." The speaker is clearly most amazed by odd or unusual things.Quote #3Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; (lines 8-9)

Part of the poem's effect is to fill the reader with wonder not only about things that are unique and "one-of-a-kind," but also about things that seem commonplace. The coexistence of pairs "swift" and "slow"

and "sweet" and "sour" is nothing new. That's the point – they have been around since the creation, but the creation was so incredible that we should still be awed by it.Quote #4 Praise Him. (line 11)

At the end of the poem, the speaker gives up trying to express his amazement in language. The direct spiritual emotion of the final line contrasts with the linguistic fireworks that have built up to it.

Pied Beauty Transience Quotes Quote #1 For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; (line 2)

The sky is "couple-colour" when filled with clouds, and we all know that clouds don't like to stay in one place. When it comes to the sky, the only thing you can count on is eternal variation.Quote #2 For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; (line 3)

Though the "rose-moles" stay in one place on the trout's body, the trout themselves do not. Why else would Hopkins include the redundant information that trout are swimmers, unless he wanted to bring special attention to their restless motion.Quote #3 All things counter, original, spare, strange; (line 7)

Nature constantly produces new forms, which is why the natural world has so many unique individuals. The speaker values singular, irreducible things over general categoriesQuote #4 Whatever is fickle, (line 8)

"Fickle" is not used in a negative sense, as you might use it to describe someone who is your friend one day and not the next. "Fickle" just means "changeable" or "transient," and it is true of everything in nature. According to "Pied Beauty," God is the only thing that remains unchanged.Quote #5 He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: (line 10)

Hopkins compares the beauty of God, which he considers simple, perfect, and unchangeable, to the complex and shifting beauty of the world. The question of the nature or character of God is a complicated one in Christian thought. According to Aristotle, who inspired a lot of Catholic thought, God is the "unmoved mover" who brings change to the world while remaining always and forever the same.

Pied Beauty QuestionsBring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.

1. What other "dappled things" in the world would you want to praise? 2. Hopkins loved to invent new words, especially by using hyphens between two shorter words. Try

coming up with your own new words. 3. If God is the ultimate good, and God is "past change," then why does Hopkins praise things that

change and might therefore seem "impure"? 4. What political connections do you think this poem could have? Does it seem relevant to the

contemporary topic of diversity? 5. How does the poem's rhythm express the virtues of being "dappled" or spotted?

Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins Poem Analysis1. The speaker’s emotional state is in praise of God, appreciating the beauty of everything that was

put on the Earth. All the amazing and beautiful things present, are presented by God according to the speaker. This poem on a personal level does make me feel grateful for the things on the Earth, but not in praise of anyone in particular.

2. The speaker mentions “skies of couple-color”, “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls”, and “landscape plotted and pieced”. These are all references to the pied beauty found in the poem.

3. When the poet says that all things counter, he is saying that things different and strange can still be beautiful.

4. The poet combines antithesis and alliteration by using countering words with opposite meanings, but using the same starting letters of each word to create alliteration.

5. The poet offers glory and praises God because of all the things he listed in the poem that he finds beautiful, are as he claims, put on the Earth by God.

6. The contrast is where the poet says his beauty is past change. For example ‘God’’s beauty is never changed because in the Christian faith ‘God’ is perfect while the physical world is always changing.

7. The words flow together nicely, making the phrase all the more beautiful.8. It is a praise song because it talks of something ‘God’ has given the Earth and praises ‘God’ for it.

(Not finished) The poem "Pied Beauty" begins by praising God for all the colorful and diverse things in nature. The speaker is thankful for everything with dots, circles, different colors, etc. He seems to be fond of nature and "the great outdoors." Many of the images in the poem made me think of camping out, or a

picnic. For example, fresh fire-coal, chestnut falls, finches, skies of two colors, cows, etc. But the poem does not only speak of natures' diversity. It also makes reference to manmade things. For example, man's trades, tackle, and trim are also varied. The landscape plotted and pieced. The poem goes on to thank God for more things. Everything that is different, everything that is changing, everything that has dots, etc. At the end of the poem, the speaker says, "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change." I had trouble with this line, because I did not know what the speaker meant by this. But after researching, and asking around, I came to the conclusion that it means that God, who creates change, is unchanging himself. While the beauty of the earth lies in its change, and it's diver ...

Opinion: Hopkins was born in 1844, and died just 45 years later, in 1889, but in this relatively short life he wrote some of the most startling and original poetry of the whole 19th Century. He was a deeply intellectual and religious man, and became a Jesuit priest in 1877, the same year in which he wrote ‘Pied Beauty’.

Throughout his life Hopkins was deeply fond of the countryside and its beauty, in which he could see the work and power of God. In ‘Pied Beauty’ he expresses his delight and astonishment at the sheer diversity of nature.

‘Pied Beauty’ is a short poem, but a complex one in both its meaning and its form. The lines are generally iambic in basis, though while some are regular (lines 2 and 3, for instance, and line 10) others are certainly not, though the iambic beat can still be felt (lines 4 or 8, for instance). What effect, or effects, does this irregularity have? The short final line has been mentioned already, and its completion of the praise with which the whole poem began is very striking and very powerful. Given the brevity of the poem, too, the rhyme scheme is fairly complex (ABCABCDBCDC), though this is something that is unlikely to be noticed when actually reading the poem aloud; it does, however, ensure that despite the altering rhythms the poem never loses its tightness and focus. Given the date when Hopkins was writing, this is quite a daring style, far removed from much of the conventional formality of his Victorian contemporaries.

In lines 3 to 5, he is struck by the way in which so many things – skies, cattle, fish, leaves, birds, the landscape itself – all have different and multiple colours and shapes. Even man-made things are equally attractive, and he finds himself full of wonder at the constant changes and contrasts in everything that he sees.

The most powerful thing of all, however, is that all these changing things are created by God, for Hopkins the one unchanging being, and all he can do in the final line of the poem is to express his amazement in a short, utterly simple and almost breathless short line.

Some points for classroom discussionThere are some very unusual and initially difficult words in the poem, some of which Hopkins has

apparently invented – ‘couple-colour’, ‘fresh-firecoal’, fathers-forth’, for example. What do you notice about each of these words? What makes them so effective?

Opinion: The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is often described as an early modern poet ahead of his Victorian time. This is perhaps why, while he wrote “Pied Beauty” in 1877, in common with most of his other poetry, it was first published twenty-nine years after his death. It appeared in the first collected edition of his poems, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (1918). The poem subsequently appeared in the second complete edition of Hopkins’s poetry, published in 1930. As of 2006, “Pied Beauty” was available in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips (1986).

“Pied Beauty” is one of the first poems that Hopkins wrote in the so-called sprung rhythm that he evolved, based on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon and ancient Welsh poetry. His aim was to approximate the rhythms and style of normal speech, albeit speech infused with a religious ecstasy and enthusiasm that are characteristics of his poetry. The poem also embodies Hopkins’s innovative use of condensed syntax and alliteration. It is written in the form of a curtal or shortened sonnet, another of Hopkins’s stylistic inventions. Thematically, the poem is a simple hymn of praise to God for the “dappled things” of creation. God is seen as being beyond change but as generating all the variety and opposites that manifest in the ever-changing world. Hopkins is best known as a nature poet and a religious poet, and “Pied Beauty” perfectly exemplifies both these aspects of his work.

Stanza 1, lines 1–2; stanza 2, line 11“Pied Beauty” opens and closes with variants of the two mottoes of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), of which Hopkins was a member. As cited by Peter Milward in A Commentary on the Sonnets of G. M. Hopkins, the two mottoes are: “Ad majorem Dei gloriam (To the greater glory of God) and Laus Deo semper (Praise be to God always).” Milward points out that it is

customary for pupils in Jesuit schools to write an abbreviated form of the former motto, A. M. D. G., at the beginning of each written exercise, and the latter motto, L. D. S., at the end. Thus Hopkins appears to be treating his poem as an exercise in the Jesuit tradition.

Line 1 begins a hymn of praise to God for creating “dappled things” that embody the “Pied Beauty” of the title. These are things of mottled or variegated hue that display variety and pairs of opposites (such as light and dark). The whole of stanza 1, the sestet of the curtal sonnet, consists of a number of such things. Line 2 gives two examples of dappled things. In a simile, the poet likens “skies of couple-colour” to a “brinded” or striped cow, since both are of two contrasting colors.

Stanza 1, lines 3–4The poet turns his attention to the river, where trout swim, their skins showing rose-colored

markings “all in stipple,” meaning spots such as an artist might create by using small touches of the brush, a technique known as stippling. Then the poet draws attention to the windfalls from chestnut trees. When chestnuts hit the ground, their dull brown shells break open to reveal reddish-brown nuts within, which the poet likens in a metaphor to coals that break open in a fire and glow red. He notes the wings of finches, which are of varied colors.

Stanza 1, lines 5–6The poet broadens his vision to take in the landscape. This is not an untouched, virgin landscape,

but a landscape worked and shaped by man: it is “plotted and pieced,” meaning divided into sections or plots. A “fold” is an enclosure for sheep; “fallow” refers to a field left for a period of rest between crops; and “plough” refers to a field tilled in preparation for crop planting. All these references include, by implication, man’s intervention in the natural landscape. In line 6, the poet draws more direct attention to man, this time in the form of his trades and the clothes and tools associated with them. The trades are spoken of in terms of their neatness and orderliness: “gear and tackle and trim,” with “trim” perhaps suggesting the sailboats of fishermen.

Stanza 2, lines 7–8In the quatrain of the curtal sonnet, the poet leaves behind the concrete examples of dappled things

of stanza 1. He turns his attention inward, to his reflections on the abstract qualities he admires in “dappled things.” He appreciates their oddness, uniqueness, and rarity, all of which contribute to their preciousness. His use of the words “fickle” and “frecklèd” to describe these things is noteworthy, as these are both qualities that were neither admired nor appreciated in the Victorian age. “Fickle” was most often applied to inconstant lovers (more frequently women) and unstable and capricious people. Many ladies with freckled complexions employed poisons and potions to try to remove the marks and attain the uniformly pale color that was fashionable. The poet’s description of these things as “counter,” as well as meaning contrary to expectation and therefore unusual, suggests an opposition to the mainstream of opinion. The interjection of “who knows how?” adds an element of wonder and mystery.

Stanza 2, lines 9–11The poet describes the way in which the dappled things are “fickle, frecklèd”: they embody pairs of

opposite or contrasting abstract qualities. Those mentioned are swiftness and slowness, sweet and sour, and brightness and dimness. In conclusion, the poet returns to the theme he introduced in the first line: the creator of all this variety, change, and contrast is God, “whose beauty is past change.” He ends with a simple half-line consisting only of the exhortation, “Praise him.”

ThemesNature’s Variety and God’s Unity

“Pied Beauty” is a hymn of praise to the variety of God’s creation, which is contrasted with the unity and non-changing nature of God. This variety is embodied in the “dappled things” of nature, as detailed in the sestet of the curtal sonnet. The significance of these things lies in the union of contrasting or opposite qualities in one being or aspect of creation. Thus bi-colored skies and streaked cows display contrasting hues; the “rose-moles” on the trout stand out against the background color of the skin; finches’ wings have bars of contrasting colors; broken-open chestnuts show a bright color inside against their dull-colored outside; and the worked landscape consists of divisions that separate one part from another.

The “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” seems to open up a moral and personal aspect to the theme of variety. The idea of the broken-open chestnuts revealing a shining hidden glory within symbolically suggests that a humble, unremarkable, or flawed exterior can conceal a beautiful, divinely inspired soul. This suggestion is picked up by the ambiguous adjectives “fickle, frecklèd,” which are commonly used to describe things of which the Victorian mainstream did not approve, such as inconstant lovers and less-than-flawless complexions. From the point of view of the visual arts (Hopkins was a keen painter), these

elements represent asymmetry, or broken symmetry. Whereas an even-colored object or being displays symmetry, a dappled object or being displays asymmetry. In the visual arts, the power of a painting, drawing, or sculpture comes from the interplay between symmetry and broken symmetry. In terms of poetry, this might be expressed in terms of regular rhythm (symmetry) and broken rhythm (asymmetry). In giving thanks to God for “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” Hopkins includes in his hymn of praise people and other beings who are different, unusual, and (figuratively speaking) swimming against the mainstream. It can be no accident that such words were repeatedly applied to Hopkins’s poetry, which was stylistically and thematically so far ahead of its time that readers found it odd, difficult, and even incomprehensible. Hopkins was aware of this, writing in a letter of February 15, 1879, to Robert Bridges (reproduced in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works), “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.” In “Pied Beauty,” oddness and contrariness are brought into the fold of God’s diverse creation.

Man and his environment are also unified. The landscape is not one of untouched nature, but one that is formed and shaped by man, to such an extent that it is defined by the activities of man within it: the sheepfold, the land that man has ploughed, and the land that he has left to rest between crops. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was prompting many writers and thinkers to lament the growing gap between man and the countryside, and the consequent destruction of the countryside by the manufacturing activities of man, this poem is a celebration of the oneness between rural man and his land. Hopkins portrays man as just another organic part of God’s creation, enfolded into the landscape, not a force that is destroying that creation. The “trades” that he mentions are not the searing, smearing, and blearing trades of that other poem of 1877, “God’s Grandeur,” but trades that bring man into a cooperative and order-creating relationship with creation, embodied in the neatness of the image, “their gear and tackled and trim.”

Piedness or variety is unified and embodied by each being named in the poem. Thus, though the cow is bi-colored, it is a single being and thereby represents a unity of contrasting elements. There is unity in diversity too in the poet’s juxtaposition of contrasting beings or elements. Thus the solid, familiar form of the cow is set against the unbounded, infinite skies or heavens, just as the various, finite, and ever-changing forms of creation are set against the oneness, infinity, and constancy of God. In the second stanza, the theme is broadened to include abstract qualities that are opposite or contrasting in the same way in which, in the concrete examples of the first stanza, the colors on the cow and the trout are opposite or contrasting. To unify such abstract opposites as swift and slow, bright and dark, is a greater imaginative stretch than envisaging contrasting colors on an object, but such is the momentum of the poem that nothing could seem more natural. The poem concludes with the ultimate expression of piedness: God and his creation, the one and the many. The one and the many, however, are ultimately one, the God that is praised in the extremely simple, disyllabic final line before the poem drops into the silence of contemplation. Q: How does hopkins explore the breathtaking variety of nature in its many forms?

The opening of the poem is designed to give credit for the great beauty that the poet is going to discuss to god or to its creator. This establishes the tone of the poem as one of thanksgiving or celebration of the beautiful creations that the poet is surrounded by.

The poet uses poetic devices such as similes to point out the varied hues and shadows connecting "skies of couple color" to a striped bovine in order to point out the beauty there. The poet goes on to describe fish in the river and the various beautiful trees surrounding the river continuing to connect images of flora with images of fauna to point out their similar beauty.

The poet moves on to include the farmers and the farms and the way that the earth has also been affected by men and changed but also in ways that are fertile and productive and beautiful. In his descriptions of people and his look inward at himself, he continues to use the contrasting images to point out and describe the "fickle" nature of things and man.Q: What is the central idea of the poem "Pied Beauty"?

Hopkins' curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" (written 1877,published 1918) is an unabashed celebration of the wide variety of contrasts found in God's creation the Natural Universe. The Eternal God the Father is the creator and the cause of all contrasting differences in the natural universe.

Man in his foolishness constantly attempts to reshape Nature according to his rules of symmetry and uniformity. He is convinced that God's creation is imperfect and he goes about organising and streamlining and make everything smooth and even. He swears by the mantra of 'sameness.' This results in drabness and monotony. Man's thoughtlessness distorts and perverts God's perfect plan for the Natural Universe.

The poem counters this negative tendency of man by revealing to us the wide variety of contrasts which add colour and beauty to God's creation the Natural Universe. Everything in the Natural Universe

-whether on land, air or water- has been created by God to be different and dissimilar. The central idea of "Pied Beauty" is that variety and contrast are the defining characteristics of

Eternal God our Father and Creator. Man instead of complaining and wasting all his time and energy and resources in making everything same and uniform must learn to appreciate this important characteristic of God and praise him always.Q: What is Gerard Manley Hopkins praising?

An Englishman who converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins begins and ends his poem with lines similar to the opening and closing lines of the Jesuit order: "To the greater glory of God," and "Praise to God always." With this prayerful arrangement of his unique sonnet, the poet praises oddity and uniqueness because all that is created has been made by God and is, therefore, worthy of this exaltation.

In the first stanza, Hopkins mentions the "pied beauty" and "dappled things" of nature as well as the fields altered by the farmer along the various trades of man, thus including man in these myriad forms of beauty. The linesAll things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)point to those variegated properties which are derogated in Manley's Victorian Age as freckles were considered physical flaws, and fickleness certainly a character flaw. However, with inward fervor Hopkins praises "fickle" and "freckled"; he appreciates their uniqueness and rarity, qualities that make them all the more worthy. For, after all, God created these qualities and, while current tastes have them in disfavor, tastes will later change:He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Hopkins praises all that is different in nature and life because the creator of all that is pied or dappled or variegated or fickle or freckled is, in the final analysis, God "whose beauty is past change" and superior to all other standards.Q: Explain how Gerard Manely Hopkins uses language structure in "Pied Beauty" to convey his message.

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is one of my favorite poems. Its appeal lies both in its imagery and its musical nature. The imagery is stunning in that Hopkins creates pictures in the mind of the listener with lines like: ...rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim...

This describes the rosy dots scattered across the side of a trout that shine in the sun. Another beautiful images is found in: Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls...

This image brings to mind the chestnut trees in the fall, with leaves that are the color of glowing coals. This captivating imagery is employed throughout the poem's stanzas. However, the musical element comes from the poem's sounds, and the primarily literary device that creates these sounds so resoundingly when the poem is read aloud (as poetry has always historically been treated) is alliteration, which is......a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds.

Alliteration is completely based in sound, though at first one might at first believe it depends upon what is seen as the poem is read. However, when a duplicate sound is made by an "f" and a "ph," we can hear the similarities where we cannot always see them. And the use of similar sounds is what the ear registers much more quickly than what the eye sees. In fact, it is the pattern of sound that catches the ear—hence the need to read the poem out loud.

Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of a group of words clustered together. It is this pattern the ear hears. Examples in the poem include:

• "Glory be to God..." is alliterative with the repetition of the "hard" "g;" • "couple-colour as a brinded cow..." repeats the "hard" "c" (that sounds like a "k"); • "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings..." repeats the "f;" • and, "Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough..." uses alliteration first with the

repetition of the "p" sound, followed then by the repeated "f" sound. The lilting (swaying) nature of the poem also creates a musical quality in the poem. It is called

"sprung rhythm," and is based on "Anglo-Saxon and traditional Welsh poetry."In addition, the poem begins and ends like a hymn. The first line starts off the poem drawing attention to God: "Glory be to God." The end of the poem sounds like the closing of a hymn: "Praise him." There are short hymns sung in a variety of churches: one begins with "Glory be to the Father..." and another ends "Praise Father, Son..." In essence, then, the musical and the repetitive alliterative sounds, and the phrases

that begin and end the poem, make the work sound like a hymn.The poem's structure, then, creates something much like a church song or anthem—with the

repetition of sounds and a rhythm; the content of the poem is used to lift up specific images in nature that the poet feels are worthy of adoration, to praise of God for their creation.Q: List and develop the ideas of beauty in the poem "Pied Beauty."

The two stanzas of "Pied Beauty" focus on beauty in two different forms: the concrete and the abstract. In the first stanza, Hopkins is literally praising God for "dappled things" and for anything exhibiting beauty in two colors. Of course, Hopkins puts specific emphasis in beauty of the natural world with his mention of cows, trout, roasted chestnuts, finches' wings, landscapes, and even the trades of men. As Hopkins enters his second stanza, however, the items of beauty become more abstract in nature, focusing on traits such as being different, unique, weird, and indecisive. Hopkins even enters the world of opposite abstractions with the mention of fast and slow, sweet and sour, bright and dim. One can see the connection with the first stanza, in that these traits and opposites are also two-toned in their own way (although we may not have thought of them as elements of "beauty"). Of course, Hopkins gets to his main point in the last couple of lines when he says, "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him." Ironically, although the beauty and wonder of nature were created by God and are glorious in themselves, God himself has a beauty that is greater than change (that is "past change"). All this for the glory and praise of this beautiful God. Q: Compare and contrast the theme of beauty of man and nature in "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins and sonnet "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" by William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth was a first-generation Romantic poet. Romantic poetry generally included one or several of approximately seven characteristics—a respect for nature is one of these characteristics. Gerald Manley Hopkins' lovely poem "Pied Beauty" reflects the same theme of the beauty in nature as is found in "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge."

The first example of Wordsworth's praise of nature is found in lines such as:A sight so touching in its majesty... In the poet's sight are elements of nature, including... The beauty of the morning

The city—made by man—the author states—on this morning—is opened up to nature—which is untouched by mankind: ...Open unto the fields, and to the sky.../...glittering in the smokeless air.../...Never did sun more beautifully steep.../....valley, rock, or hill.../...The river glideth at his own sweet will.../

Compare, then, the images presented in "Pied Beauty." /Glory be to God for dappled things—"Dappled" means: having spots of a different shade, tone, or color from the background; mottledThe next line continues......For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cowThe images here described more things of several colors, such as "couple-colour." "Brinded" means

"brindled," defined as...gray or tawny with darker streaks or spotsThe poet continues presenting "pictures" of things in nature that have several colors, including

"trout," "chestnut-falls" and "finches' wings." He also mentions "landscape plotted and pieced." For both poems, the sense of being drawn or pulled in by images of nature are found in Hopkins'

title, "Pied Beauty" and Wordsworth's lines...Dull would he be of soul who could pass by./A sight so touching in its majesty...

These lines infer that one would have a cold heart or "soul" not to be touched by the scene the poet describes. Use of the word "pied" is defined as...having patches of two or more colors

However, the association can also be tied to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In this story, the Pied Piper was a piper......dressed in pied (multicolored) clothing, leading the children away from the town...

The children (as the story goes) were drawn to follow the piper—the inference is that they were entranced—drawn by some kind of magic. So whereas "pied" can mean multi-colored, it also alludes to a sense of enchantment, and with regard to nature, this beauty is irresistible.

What is different between these poems is that Wordsworth concentrates on elements in nature that are similar in their beauty: he lists them (e.g., "valley, rock, or hill"). In Hopkins' poem, he focuses on things that are beautiful in their dissimilarity. In other words, it is the contrasting nature of the beauty in nature that he sees that "enchants" him. All things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckléd (who knows how?)

Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster BridgeIn lines 1 through 8, which together compose a single sentence, the speaker describes what he sees

as he stands on Westminster Bridge looking out at the city. He begins by saying that there is nothing "more fair" on Earth than the sight he sees, and that anyone who could pass the spot without stopping to look has a "dull" soul. The poem takes place in the "beauty of the morning," which lies like a blanket over the silent city. He then lists what he sees in the city and mentions that the city seems to have no pollution and lies "Open unto the fields, and to the sky."

In lines 9 through 14, the speaker tells the reader that the sun has never shone more beautifully, even on nature ("valley , rock, or hill"), and that he has never seen or felt such deep calm. He goes on to describe the way that the river (which he personifies) glides along at the slow pace it chooses. The poem ends with an exclamation, saying that "the houses seem asleep" and the heart of the city is still.

Analysis"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is an Italian sonnet, written in iambic

pentameter with ten syllables per line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abbaabbacdcdcd. The poem was actually written about an experience that took place on July 31, 1802 during a trip to France with Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy Wordsworth.

The poem begins with a rather shocking statement, especially for a Romantic poet: "Earth has not anything to show more fair." This statement is surprising because Wordsworth is not speaking of nature, but of the city. He goes on to list the beautiful man-made entities therein, such as "Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples." In fact, nature's influence isn't described until the 7th line, when the speaker relates that the city is "open to the fields, and to the sky." While the city itself may not be a part of nature, it is certainly not in conflict with nature. This becomes even more clear in the next line, when the reader learns that the air is "smokeless" (free from pollution).Wordsworth continues to surprise his reader by saying that the sun has never shone more beautifully, even on natural things. He then personifies the scene, giving life to the sun, the river, the houses, and finally to the whole city, which has a symbolic heart. The reader imagines that the city's heart beats rapidly during the day, while everything and everyone in it is bustling about, but now, in the early morning hours, the city's heart is "lying still." By using personification in his poem, Wordsworth brings a kind of spirit to the city, which is usually seen as a simple construction of rock and metal.

Wordsworth's sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 falls into the category of Momentary Poems. The poet is describing what he sees, thinks and feels on a specific day at a specific moment. Had September 3, 1802, been a dismal day of rain, fog or overcast skies, we would not have this lyric to enjoy. Fair weather is often an inspirational awakening to the muse of poetry.

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had traveled to London to take a ship to France, where Wordsworth's mistress Annette Vallon was living with the ten-year-old Caroline, whom Wordsworth had sired but had never seen. The coach taking him and his sister to the seaside dock paused on the Westminster Bridge that crosses the Thames. Looking back in the brilliant morning sunlight at the sleeping city of London, the poet composed his Petrarchan sonnet in a tone peaceful and serene.He presents a panorama of London, commencing with two metrically irregular lines of 5 accents. I will convey my scansion by placing the stressed syllables in capitals.

EARTH HAS not ANYthing to SHOW more FAIR:DULL would he BE of SOUL who could PASS BY

(And then lines of regular iambic pentameter:)A SIGHT so TOUCHing IN its MASterY;

This CITy NOW doth, LIKE a GARment, WEARThe BEAUty OF the MORning: SIlent, BARE,

The spondaic substitution, or successive accented syllables, lends emphasis to the emotional feeling that strikes the poet. Here is a romantic who spends most of his time in the Lake Country, in fields of daffodils, exulting in an urban morning cityscape, unconcerned with the getting and spending that he decries elsewhere.

The second quatrain generalizes about the skyline shapes without detailing them. The poet has personified London through his use of the simile "like a garment" and the verb "wear." The catalog of man-made structures includes "Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples." Paradox intrudes as the garment worn by the city is bright and glittering sunshine that does not conceal, clothe, or protect but emphasizes bare beauty.

The next personifications are of the sun and the river. The verb "steep" in the opening of the sestet

can support a variety of definitions including cleansing, softening, bleaching, bathing, imbuing. The personified morning sun performs these actions on "valley, rock, or hill."

The magic performed by the sun on the City, while the Thames "glideth at his own sweet will," induces in the poet a feeling of calm, as though the personified houses were peacefully asleep, and the mighty, throbbing heart of the metropolis is wrapped in stillness.

"Dull would [they] be of soul" who do not feel the power and excitement of this lyric.Setting The setting is London as seen from Westminster Bridge, which connects the south bank of the

Thames River with Westminster on the north bank. Westminster, called an inner borough, is now part of London.

Inspiration Wordsworth's inspiration for the poem was the view he beheld from Westminster Bridge on the

morning of July 31, 1802, when most of the residents were still in bed and the factories had not yet stoked their fires and polluted the air with smoke. He and his sister, Dorothy, were crossing the bridge in a coach taking them to a boat for a trip across the English Channel to France. In her diary, Dorothy wrote: We mounted the Dover Coach at Charing Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St. Paul's, with the River and a Multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight.... The houses were not overhung with their cloud of smoke and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such pure light that there was even something like a purity of Nature's own grand spectacles.

Theme: Seeing the City in a New Light London during the workday was rude and dirty. A walk across a bridge or through streets and alleyways confronted the pedestrian with smoke, dust, grimy urchins, clacking carts, ringing hammers, barking dogs, jostling shoppers, smelly fish, rotting fruit. But at dawn on a cloudless morning, when London was still asleep and the fires of factories had yet to be stoked, the city joined with nature to present the early riser a tableau of glistening waters, majestic towers, unpeopled boats on the River Thames--bobbing and swaying--and the glory of empty, silent streets. The message here is that even an ugly, quacking duckling can become a lovely, soundless swan.

Rhyme Scheme and Meter The rhyme scheme of "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" and other Petrarchan sonnets is as

follows: (1) first stanza (octave): abba, abba; (2) second stanza (sestet): cd, cd, cd (or another combination, such as cde, cde; cdc, cdc; or cde, dce.

The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, with ten syllables (five iambic feet) per line. (An iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.) The first two lines of the poem demonstrate the metric pattern:

.......1...... . ..2......... ....3................4..................5 Earth HAS..|..not AN..|..y THING..|..to SHOW..|..more FAIR: ........1....... . ..2......... ....3.................4.................5 Dull WOULD..|..he BE..|..of SOUL | who COULD..|..pass BYImagery The most striking figure of speech in the poem is personification. It dresses the city in a garment

and gives it a heart, makes the sun "in his first splendour" a benefactor, and bestows on the river a will of its own.

Examples of other figures of speech in the poem are as follows: Line 2, alliteration: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by Line 3, alliteration: A sight so touching in its majesty Lines 4, 5 simile: This City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning: silent bare (comparison of beauty to a garment) Line 13: metaphor: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; (comparison of houses to a creature that sleeps)

Study Questions and Writing Topics • Write a poem describing a view of your community at dawn or at sunset. • Can the theme of the poem apply to a person? In other words, does a person change in relation to

his or her environment or in relation to the time of day or another factor? • Write an essay that compares and contrasts the tone and theme of "Composed Upon Westminster

Bridge" with the tone and theme of Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us." • What is the meaning of in his first splendour (line 10)?

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802In A Nutshell

In the summer of 1802, William Wordsworth traveled with his sister, Dorothy, to Calais, France. They stopped in London where, as Dorothy charmingly wrote in her journal, they ran into "various troubles and disasters." Dorothy frequently traveled with her brother – the two were like best friends – and her journals provide an interesting counterpoint to Wordsworth's poetry. They left London early on the morning of July 31st, and Dorothy wrote about crossing over the famous Westminster Bridge to get out of town:

Left London between five and six o'clock of the morning outside the Dover coach. [Note from Shmoop: a coach is a small carriage drawn by horses.] A beautiful morning. The city, St Paul's, with the river – a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spectacles.

Hmm, now this sounds familiar. Yes, it's the same scene described by her brother in "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802." Only poor Wordsworth got the date wrong when he published the poem under this title in 1807 – it was the end of July, not the beginning of September.

No matter. The poem is remembered not as a biographical record, but as a beautiful depiction of London in the morning, written in plain language that any Englishman could understand. Wordsworth apparently wrote the sonnet while sitting on top of his coach. Maybe he was so awed by the city because he didn't live there: he was a country mouse who spent much of his time up in the scenic Lake District of England. When he finally made his way into the city, he was like, "Whoa. This is actually pretty cool."

At this point in Wordsworth's career, in 1802, he was writing at the peak of his powers, having already published the hugely influential Lyrical Ballads with his friend and fellow genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" was not published until 1807, in Poems in Two Volumes.

"Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" captures the feeling of those lucky moments when it seems that the tired, old world is made completely new again. Everything becomes simple and bright, like a freshly-minted penny. Everyone, we assume, has these feelings at one time or another, whether on the first day of spring or after falling in love or, as in William Wordsworth's case, while traveling. You think to yourself, "Yup. This is it. I couldn't possibly find a more beautiful vision than this." And it's true, because if you were to go hunting for beautiful sights, even that activity would probably get old after a while.

Instead, that "freshly-minted penny" feeling tends to come when we least expect it. For Wordsworth, it happened as he rode across the Westminster Bridge in his coach. We imagine him all groggy at 6 in the morning, and then he looks out the window is like, "Whoa, there, stop the coach!" And he hops out, climbs atop the coach, stares out at the scene, and jots down the notes that will become this poem.

As you probably know, the feeling of newness usually comes when you're actually looking at something new or unusual. Even if you lived in the most scenic place on earth, you'd probably grow accustomed to it after a while. In fact, Wordsworth did live in one of the most scenic places on earth, the Lake District in England. Although he had been to London before, it still felt like a different world to him. On the other hand, if he had lived in London, he might not have been so impressed. Contrast this sonnet with a poem written about a decade before by William Blake, called "London":I wander through each chartered street,/Near where the chartered Thames does flow,/And mark in every face I meet,/Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Pretty bleak, right? Well, Blake lived in London for much of his life, so he had grown painfully aware of the grunginess of the city, not to mention the injustices it contained. It just goes to show how a change of scenery can make a great difference in whether the world looks fresh or faded. Whenever you start to fall into a rut, it might be time to take a trip to see new sights and new people.

Summary The speaker declares that he has found the most beautiful scene on earth. You'd have to be someone

with no spiritual sense, no taste for beauty, to pass over the Westminster Bridge that morning without stopping to marvel at the sights. London is wearing the morning's beauty like a fine shirt or cape. London, you're lookin' good.

The time is so early that all is quiet. The various landmarks visible from the bridge, including St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London, stand before him in all their grandeur in the morning light. Fortunately, there happens to be no "London fog" to obscure the view.

The speaker compares the sunlight on the buildings to the light that shines on the countryside, and he seems surprised to feel more at peace in the bustling city than he has anywhere else. The River Thames moves slowly beneath him. In a burst of emotion, he pictures the city as blissfully asleep before another busy day.

Lines 1-8 SummaryLine 1 Earth has not anything to show more fair:

• While crossing over the Westminster Bridge, the speaker makes a bold statement: he has found the most beautiful scene on the planet. All you other artists can call off the search! Wordsworth has located the very heart of beauty, or "fairness."

• Of course, though, he's exaggerating. He really means something like, "At this particular moment, I can't imagine anywhere being more beautiful than the place I'm standing." It's almost more a reflection of his mood than of the outside world. He can't compare the scene from the bridge with anything except his own memories, but since that's all anyone can do we'll let him run with this one.

• The line ends with a colon, letting us know that he's going to tell us what earth is "showing" after the line break.

Line 2-3 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty:• Instead of trying to describe the scene, as we might expect by now (hurry up, a sonnet is only 14

lines long!), the speaker tries to express how beautiful it is from another angle as well.• He justifies his decision to stop his coach along the way to look at the view from the bridge.• He says that anyone who didn't stop, who just passed by with a glance, would be "dull...of soul."

The opposite of dull is sharp, so we're imagining that the speaker's soul must be like one of those knives they advertise on TV that can cut through coins.

• The person who could just pass by has been jaded and worn down by experience to the point of dullness. He's also boring, which is another meaning of the word "dull."

• The sight from the bridge is "touching in its majesty," an intriguing phrase that suggests both intimacy and grandeur. "Touching" scenes are often small and intimate, like a kid giving flowers to his sick grandmother. "Majestic" scenes are often large and public, like a snow-covered mountain or a king entering a throne room. The view from Westminster Bridge combines both this elements.

• The speaker feels both awed by and close to the landscape. • He uses another colon: maybe now he'll stop keeping us in suspense and describe this amazing

view.Lines 4-5 This City now doth, like a garment, wear/The beauty of the morning;

• We learn what time it is: London "wears" the morning like a nice coat or some other piece of clothing ("garment").

• These lines hint that maybe the morning, not London itself, is responsible for the stunning quality of the view. As in, the garment could be so beautiful that it doesn't matter what the person wearing it looks like. Anyone could be wearing it, and you'd be like, "That's one heck of a garment, there."

• Similarly, the word "now" shows that the beauty depends on the time of day. It's a fleeting, transient beauty. Maybe when the morning is over, and London is forced to change clothes, as it were, the speaker would think, "Oh. Now it's just London again. Been there, seen that." (There we go with our skepticism again.)

Lines 5-7silent, bare,/Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie/Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

5. In general terms, the speaker describes some of the sights that are visible from Westminster Bridge. 6. The words "silent" and "bare" are positioned in the poem such that they could describe either the

morning or the sights. Because of the semi-colon before them, the sights are the more obvious choice, but the ambiguity is important.

7. The setting is "silent" because of the early hour which, from Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, we know was around 5 or 6am.

8. "Bare" is an interesting word that means "naked" or "unadorned." It contrasts with the image of the city wearing clothing from line 4. Here, the ships and buildings are nude.

9. From Westminster Bridge in 1802, you could have seen a lot of the highlights of London, including the "ships" of the River Thames; the "dome" of the famous St. Paul's Cathedral, designed by the architect Christopher Wren; and the iconic Tower of London.

10. One thing you could not have seen in 1802, but that you could see today, is the Big Ben clock – it wasn't built yet.

11. Despite being all crowded together within one city, the speaker gives an impression of spaciousness by noting that the ships and buildings are "open" to the fields of London and to the sky.

12. One source points out that London had fields that were close to the city in 1802 but that no longer exist (source).

Line 8 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.5. The speaker sums up the whole scene at the end of the poem's first chunk of eight lines, called an

"octet."6. He focuses on the early morning summer sunlight, which makes the buildings "bright and

glittering." The word "glittering" in particular suggests that the scene is not static but rather constantly changing with the shifting light.

7. Our favorite word in the poem is "smokeless." What a word. He means that neither the characteristic London Fog nor smoke from chimneys obscures the bright light.

8. In London, as in San Francisco, it is common for fog to cover the city throughout the morning. The speaker is lucky to catch the city on a morning that is completely free of fog.

Lines 9-10 Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;5. The speaker returns to his bold claim from the beginning of the poem: that earth has never

presented a scene quite so beautiful as this one.6. Specifically, he compares the morning sunlight falling on the city to the sunlight that might cover

more remote parts of the countryside, such as a valley, a boulder or mountainous cliff ("rock"), or a hillside.

7. These sights would have been more familiar to Wordsworth than the scenery of London, who spent most of his life in rural parts of England, such as the picturesque Lake District in the northwest part of the country.

8. "First splendour" just means morning.9. Basically, he's ragging on his hometown, saying even it can't compare with this view of London.10. The word "steep" means to submerge or cover – think of how you let a tea bag "steep" in

water.Lines 11-12 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!/The river glideth at his own sweet will:

5. The speaker continues on the topic of the Greatest Scene Ever. He describes how the vision of London makes him feel calm, which is perhaps surprising because London is a huge, bustling city. That's a little like saying you go to Manhattan to get away from it all.

6. The speaker seems to again compare London to places that you would normally think of as calming, like the hills and valleys from line 10.

7. This section of the poem engages in the personification of various elements of the picture. Here the river is described as a patient person who takes his time and doesn't allow himself to be rushed. He moves according to "his own sweet will."

8. The river Thames is not a fast-moving river.Lines 13-14 Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;/And all that mighty heart is lying still!

• You would think the speaker couldn't possibly get more excited about this view after declaring it the most beautiful thing on earth, but no: he gets more excited.

• He cries out to God as if he has just recognized something astonishing he had not noticed before.• He personifies the houses as asleep, when it's actually the people inside the houses who are sleeping

at this early hour. • The city looks like one big, peaceful, sleeping body. Shh...don't wake it.• The "heart" of this body is "lying still" for the moment before the city awakens for a new day. The

heart probably doesn't refer to anything specific, but rather the city's energy or vitality. • The last two lines mark a shift in tone with their two exclamation marks. The tone goes from

amazed to Really Amazed!Symbolism, ImageryThe Most Beautiful Thing Ever

Wordsworth's claim that his vision of London is the best on earth is clearly an exaggeration, not to mention impossible to verify. But it's an innocent exaggeration, one that puts us "in the moment" of his passing experience. It's really not much different from an expression that many people use all the time nowadays:

saying that such-and-such is the most fun ever, or the best movie ever, or the most awkward party ever. In other words, Wordsworth talks a little like a contemporary teenager.

• Line 1: Earth, you really outdid yourself on this one. The claim that no sight is more beautiful than the view from Westminster Bridge is a case of hyperbole, or exaggeration.

• Line 2: The word "dull" suggests a contrast with a knife or some other sharp object. In the implicit metaphor, the dull person's soul has been worn down by time and experience.

• Line 3: To say that something is "touching in its majesty" is almost a paradox, a contradiction in terms. A touching sight is intimate and personal, while a majestic one is grand and public. With this phrase, Wordsworth comes close to capturing the indescribable feeling of familiarity and distance all at once.

• Lines 9-11: Lines 9 and 11 have a parallel structure, in which he claims that the effect of the morning light on London creates a beauty that has "never" been experienced before. As in the first line, these claims are hyperboles.Things as People

Wordsworth uses personification in several places in the poem, in reference to the city, sun, river, and houses. He creates the impression that nature is a living being with a soul. It's as if all these forces have decided to come together to treat the speaker to a "One Morning Only!" show of Nature's Greatest Marvels.

• Line 4: The morning beauty is compared to clothing, a "garment," in a simile. Only people can wear clothing (OK, dogs can wear sweaters, too, but those are strangely disconcerting), so London must be personified.

• Line 10: "His first splendour" is a roundabout way of talking about the sunrise. The sun is personified as a male.

• Line 12: The river is personified as a person who likes to take things at his own pace. He's like the person in front of you at the supermarket who's going to spend 10 minutes at the cash register and there's nothing you can do about it.

• Line 13: The houses are personified as sleeping people because the city is quiet and still. In reality, the people inside the houses are the ones who are asleep.

• Line 14: The city is personified as a person with a heart. The heart is "lying still," perhaps because the city, like its houses, is asleep.

Clothing and NudityIn "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," clothes are a metaphor for the way the city and nature in general seem to put on different appearances depending on the way the light "dresses" them. This raises the question of whether it's only the clothes that make the person beneath them beautiful, or whether that person is beautiful as well.

• Line 4: The morning light is compared to clothes worn by London. A "garment" is just an article of clothing.

• Line 5: The word "bare" could be a pun that means both "open to view" or "unadorned" but also "naked."

SleepFor the speaker, a large part of the city's charm early in the morning is the fact that this huge metropolis – a hub of energy and activity – lies completely still. Most people are still literally asleep, so the city seems metaphorically asleep.

• Line 13: This line contains a simile that compares the inactivity of the houses to the sleeping people within them. It would have been a metaphor if Wordsworth had written, "the very houses are asleep."

• Line 14: Is the city, with its energetic "heart," also being compared to a sleeping person? We think so, because the heart is "lying still," like a person in bed.

Rhyme, Form & MeterPetrarchan Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter

"Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" is a Petrarchan sonnet, as opposed to a Shakespearian sonnet or a Spenserian sonnet. Petrarch was a famous Italian Renaissance poet whose sonnets eventually became well known across Europe. Romantic poets appreciated Petrarchan sonnets in part because Italy was thought to be the hub of classical European civilization, and they loved the classics (i.e., all things relating to ancient Greece and Rome).

A Petrarchan sonnet has fourteen lines that are divided into two sections: one with eight lines and one with six. At the ninth line, the poem makes a "turn" (or volta in Italian) and begins to elaborate in a different way on the subject or, sometimes, introduce a new topic altogether. Wordsworth's sonnet has a more subtle turn. In the first eight lines he introduces the idea that he has never seen such beauty before and then describes the scene. In the last six lines he returns to the idea of unparalleled beauty, this time comparing London to the countryside. The rhyme scheme is fairly simple: ABBAABBA CDCDCD. Only one pair of rhyming lines is slant (not quite a real rhyme, but almost): "by" and "majesty" in lines 2 and 3.

The poem is written in a loose iambic pentameter, consisting of five ("penta") pairs of unstressed and stressed beats ("iambs"): Dear God! | the ver|-y hous|-es seem | a-sleep.

But not all of the lines follow this pattern. The first two lines, for example, both begin on stressed beats: "Earth" and "Dull." This loose rhythm comes closer to capturing momentary experience and a conversational tone than a stricter meter would. Wordsworth tried to write how regular people speak, which is one of the reasons he is considered one of the first "modern" English poets.

Speaker Point of ViewWho is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

Though we'd love to be able to say that the speaker is a guy from the Lake District passing through London on the way to France with his sister (see "In a Nutshell"), the poem tells us none of these things. For all we know, the speaker could be a Londoner, born and raised.

Clearly, though, when this guy gets excited about something, he gets really excited. He has no patience for people who cannot appreciate beauty, and he calls them "dull [...] of soul." He's like that friend who gets carried away every time he has a new favorite song: "You have to hear this. It's the greatest song I've ever heard, seriously." And you're like, "What about that song you heard last week that was the 'greatest ever'?" But he says, "Huh? No, this song is the greatest!" His moment-by-moment approach to life makes him fun to be around because he carries an infectious enthusiasm.

Finally, the speaker has obviously spent at least some time in the countryside, because he is able to compare the London scene with the sunlight that falls on "valley, rock, or hill."

Setting Where It All Goes Down

Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, wake up early to catch a coach to the port of Dover, where they will cross over to Calais, France. As Dorothy wrote in her journal, the time is around 5 or 6am. We can guess that the only others awake were the working-class laborers, beginning their long, arduous day. Everyone else is safe in his or her bed. The streets are mostly empty, and there's no traffic to hold them up. But when Wordsworth and his sister cross the famous Westminster Bridge over the Thames River, they can't resist getting out of their coach to marvel at the scene. Though these details aren't captured in the poem itself, this is how we imagine the scene.

Unlike many a damp London morning, there is no fog, and the sky seems airy and spacious. The sun has begun to rise, casting a bright yellow light over those famous London landmarks. As the sun moves from the horizon, the buildings begin to glitter, as do the innumerable ships docked along the crowded river. The light makes London appear to be a completely different city.

In the second half of the poem, the speaker reflects on other times when he has felt a similar sense of peace and wellbeing. He thinks of his explorations around the English countryside, with its many green hills and valleys, but he decides that even these cannot compare with the vision before him.

Suddenly the city turns into a big sleeping body. The speaker can almost see the expansion and contraction of the houses, as if they were taking deep breaths. This usually vibrant city is calm, for once. The impression is made even more touching by speaker's knowledge that, in a few hours, all will be bustle and hubbub once again.

Sound CheckThe language in this poem seems to mimic the gesturing of a person pointing out sights: "Look over there! Now look here!" Imagine Wordsworth, stopped on the Westminster Bridge and standing on top of the coach, making sweeping motions with his hands toward the city at large. Except his hands are words. Formally, one way he accomplishes this gesturing is with accents at the beginning of lines, breaking up the iambic pentameter pattern. "Earth," "Dull," "Ships," "O-pen," and "Ne-ver." He also accents important visual cues like "bright, "glit-tering," and "smoke-less." In line 6, he scans the city from one end to the other, pointing out all he sees along the way. Each word, of course, begins with an accent.

The poem should be read slowly and calmly, both because the speaker is clearly in a relaxed mood and, more importantly, so that we can imagine everything he wants us to see. Some parts are slower than

others, like the two words "silent, bare" in line 5 that don't seem completely attached to what comes before or after them. Also, the final lines slow down to a near-crawl, like someone who is tiptoeing toward an infant's crib, trying not to wake the baby. All the more important to be careful and quiet when that "infant" is one of the biggest cities in the world. That London can be a real screamer if it doesn't get its rest!

What’s Up With the Title?The title tells us nothing about the poem except where and when it was written, and even that date

is inaccurate. Most scholars agree that the poem was written on July 31, 1802, not on September 3. That Wordsworth mistook the date when he published the poem some five years later tells us that it most likely did not have a title to begin with, or that its original title was just meant to be temporary. The published title makes the poem almost sound like a journal entry, which is appropriate, because the poem is a spontaneous record of passing experience. We've also seen it called, "Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France," which sounds even more spontaneous. But usually you'll see it presented as either "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" or "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802."William Wordsworth’s Calling Card What is the poet’s signature style?Caption-Like Titles

The Romantics, a group of poets that includes Wordsworth, characteristically tried to capture the visions and emotions of momentary experiences. An interesting flip-side, though, is that these poets' titles often instead sound like the dry captions that people write on the back of photographs to remember where and when they were taken: ex., "Taken in Hawaii, 1989, during our honeymoon." Many poets throughout history have used such caption-like titles, but Wordsworth and his crew used them more than most. A quick look at his works reveals titles like "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798," "London, 1802," and "Composed by the Sea-side, near Calais, August 1802." Sometimes his urge to give us information leads to titles that seem much longer than they need to be, like his poem titled "Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree, which stands near the lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the shore, commanding a beautiful prospect." Talk about Too Much Information!Theme of Awe and Amazement

This poem is a classic example of someone being taken by surprise by beauty and just staring at it, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. On the other hand, the neatness and precision of the sonnet form might seem at odds with the speaker's spontaneous bursts of joy. We don't know too many people who speak in Petrarchan sonnets when they're happy. Also, the speaker spends a significant portion of the poem talking about how great the scenery is rather than describing it. The second half of the poem contains more description than the first.Questions About Awe and Amazement

• Does the amount of formal skill and concentration that must have been required to write this poem undermine Wordsworth's attempt to convey a spontaneous, childlike joy?

• Does the speaker seem more amazed by the city itself, by the morning light, or only by the combination of the two?

• How does the use of personification contribute to the speaker's sense of awe? • How does the speaker's tone change in the last two lines? What do you think brings about this

subtle change? Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. Wordsworth was attracted to the scene by the juxtaposition (or contradiction) of a chaotic metropolis that seemed to be resting or "asleep."3. Despite the absence of most people at such an early hour, Wordsworth "peoples" the city with inanimate things like the light, the river, and the houses.Theme of TransienceThe poem makes clear that London is not entirely responsible for its beauty in the morning. A number of factors, including the unusual absence of any fog and the way the light strikes the ships and buildings, combine to make a perfect scene. Because the speaker knows that such a combination does not happen very often, he thinks that a person would be foolish just to pass by, assuming there will always be other chances to see such beauty. The speaker believes you have to take advantage of such opportunities when you have them.Questions About Transience

• What is it about the early morning that makes the city appear different than at other times?

• How do you explain the phrase, "so touching in its majesty" (line 3)? Why is this phrase almost like a paradox?

• What is the purpose of the speaker's claim that only a dull person would be able to pass by a scene like this one?

• What does the image of the light as a garment suggest about the permanence or impermanence of the vision?

Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. The poem expresses the speaker's desire to stop time, to prevent the city from ever "waking up."3. The image of a beautiful garment implies that the city is like a blank canvas that nature adorns, rather than something possessing beauty on its own.Theme of Man and the Natural WorldWordsworth is the quintessential nature poet. In this poem, London seems like a part of nature rather than a separate sphere of existence. Contrast Wordsworth's attitude with the attitude of William Blake in his poem "London," from the Songs of Experience, in which the city teems with unnatural political and social problems. "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" takes the view that the city can be surprisingly restful, and the speaker goes so far as to compare it favorably with the solitude of nature.Questions About Man and the Natural World

• What is the effect of the personification of the sun and river? • In what ways does the city resemble a natural space in this poem? • How might the speaker's appreciation of the city change if it were crowded with people? • Why would the sunlight be more beautiful on buildings than on natural landmarks like valleys and

hills? Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. Wordsworth's use of personification attempts to paint the beauty of nature as an achievement of human culture.3. The poem tells us very little about how Wordsworth feels about everyday city life. He abstracts the buildings and landmarks of London from their inhabitants.Theme of Contrasting Regions: City and CountrysideCity, 1. Countryside, 0. The city wins! OK, so if you took the whole of Wordsworth's poetic works, the score would probably run more like: City, 6. Countryside, 250. Few writers, past or present, have expressed their love for rural life quite so much as Wordsworth. Maybe that's why it's somewhat surprising to hear him say that he never felt so calm as he did when standing on London's Westminster Bridge. He seems surprised himself. Maybe the answer to this riddle is that Wordsworth integrated the city into his general vision of the countryside, breaking down the barrier between the two. But we still think he would have been very unhappy if he had been forced to move to London permanently.Questions About Contrasting Regions: City and Countryside

• Would you guess that the speaker is native or foreign to the city? Why? • Do you think that the speaker is aware that he is using exaggeration in calling the vision the most

beautiful that earth has to offer? • Do you think that the Wordsworth's sense of calm had anything to do with the fact that he was in

the process of leaving the city? Why or why not? • How do the poem's images juxtapose the city with the countryside? Where can you tell these two

regions apart? Chew on This1. Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.2. The city's freshness is more beautiful than the freshness of the countryside because it runs counter to expectation. The element of surprise accounts for the speaker's enthusiasm.Awe and Amazement QuotesQuote #1 Earth has not anything to show more fair: (line 1)

The use of exaggeration (hyperbole) give the impression of childlike wonder, of the world made fresh and new again. This is not a philosophical poem. It's a poem about a person's emotions "in the moment."Quote #2A sight so touching in its majesty: (line 3)The speaker can only describe the beauty of the city using paradoxes like this one. Imagine telling a king that he's adorable, pinching his cheeks, and then bowing before him, and you'll get an idea of how the phrase "touching in its majesty" works.Quote #3 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. (line 8)The light on the buildings "glitters" like a precious metal. The speaker might be describing the play of the sun on some of the windows.Quote #4 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! (line 11)It's rare to feel completely at ease in a large city, so the speaker's statement is unexpected. The unusual silence of the city in the morning contributes to this feeling.Quote #5 Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; (line 13)Transience Quotes Quote #1 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by (line 2)The speaker's message is that you have to take the good things as they come, because they won't last for long. The dull person can't appreciate the transient nature of beauty.Quote #2 This City now doth, like a garment, wear/The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, (lines 4-5)Garments are things you can put on and take off, and even throw away when they get old and ratty, or if you accidentally throw your whites in with your colors (doh!). They are transient by definition. At this moment, the city happens to be wearing a particularly stunning garment.Quote #3 the smokeless air. (line 8)There's a reason chimney sweepers appear so often in 19th century depictions of London: it was a smoky city. Not to mention the frequent fogs that appear on a chilly London morning. In other words, "smokeless air" was something to get excited about for a Londoner in Wordsworth's time.Quote #4 In his first splendour (line 10)The poem is about making the old seem new again. Even the sun is remade every morning. Each day is a new and transient world.Quote #5 And all that mighty heart is lying still! (line 14)This moment will not last long. The speaker catches London at a time after the sun has risen but before most people have awoken for work or play.Man and the Natural World Quotes Quote #1 Earth has not anything to show more fair: (line 1)Ah, so the speaker gives "earth" all the credit for the beauty of the scene. What about all the people who designed and built those towers and domes? Poor Christopher Wren. (Jeopardy points: Christopher Wren designed St. Paul's Cathedral in London).Quote #2 like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning; (lines 4-5)Nature brings out the beauty in the landmarks of London. Interestingly, though, the effects of the light are compared to clothing, a product of human culture. It is hard to tell nature and culture apart.Quote #3 Open unto the fields, and to the sky;/All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. (line 7-8)These images give London an almost heavenly appearance, and certainly make the city seem less cramped and crowded. Nature is the vast frame that surrounds the scene on all sides.Quote #4 In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; (line 10)Wordsworth is famous for his poems that praise natural wilderness and pastoral life, such as "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (also on Shmoop). To hear him speak about his beloved valleys and hills in anything less than glowing terms is odd, to say the least.Quote #5 The river glideth at his own sweet will: (line 12)Even the images of nature play against the expectation of feeling rushed and harried by the city. The river does not allow itself to be rushed. It flows at a slow and even pace. Also, the elements of nature are like people that populate the empty-feeling city.Contrasting Regions: City and Countryside Quotes Quote #1 Earth has not anything to show more fair: (line 1)Hear that, Lake District? Wordsworth totally dissed you behind your back. (Lost? See "In a Nutshell.")

Quote #2 This City now doth, like a garment, wear (line 4)Rather than contrasting two regions, you could see the poem as integrating two regions – the natural and the man-made. The city "wears" the pure sunlight like a shirt or jacket.Quote #3 the smokeless air. (line 8)The beauty of the city is praised for things that people usually associate with the countryside instead: pure fresh air, silence, and bright skies.Quote #4 Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; (line 9-10)These lines are the most explicit contrast between the city and the countryside. It's hard to tell if Wordsworth actually means to say that the London sunlight is more beautiful, or whether he wants to use the beauty of the countryside, which he takes for granted, as a way to express the unique qualities of the morning.Quote #5 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! (line 11)The words "not" and "never" express the singular beauty of the city throughout the poem. The speaker seems taken by surprise, as if he never would have thought that London could produce a sense of calm.QuestionsBring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.

• Would Wordsworth have appreciated the city so much if he had lived there? • Why does this famous nature poet compare nature unfavorably with London, or at least this

particular London setting? Blasphemy! • Do you agree that the poem is written in simple, common language? (Keep in mind that simple

language was a little different back in the early 19th century.) • What was the most stunning landscape you have ever seen? Did you have a chance to stop and stare

at it for a while? • Do you find that the world looks better in the early morning? If so, why? If not, what's your favorite

time of day and why? Analysingthe Poem• In the first three lines, Wordsworth set the scenes while creating an air of suspense. We are told that Earth has nothing fairer and that it’s a sight so touching that only a dull person would be unable to pass it by and yet he does not name what this sight is.• The next two line leaves the reader surprise as we found out that this amazing sight is, a city. The reader sees that Wordsworth has a deep appreciation of London, but as the fifth line reveal, only in the early hours of the morning.• In line six, there’s a distinct absence of detail by Wordsworth. This gives the imagery of the city being looked at from above. If it was being looked at from ground level then the buildings listed would be in more detail than from above. This is also emphasised by the lack of sounds and olfactory however this does not neglect imagery but rather enhances it. The reader can now see a very vivid setting of London from above.•In the seventh line, the theme of nature co-existing with man is introduced as these manmade buildings, “Open unto the fields, and to the sky,”•The sestet begins on line nine and here we have a slight subject change. Wordsworth stops merely describing London and begins to talk more about nature. Surprisingly he uses words that you might expectmore from a poem about his home region, the Lake District, such as: “valley, rock or hill;”•The word “steep”is used to describe the sunrise for the reason to appeal to our senses. Our sense of touch is brought into use, making us feel the warmness from the rays.•Words such as “bright”, “glittering”and especially “smokeless air”are used to describe the manmade features of London in a way that makes them feel more in tuned with nature, a far cleaner London that really exists.•The single word “splendour”is used to explain the grandeur of the scene before Wordsworth.• The final line of the poem gives the sense that London is the heart of England and taking into the account of the date, the heart of the world. And yet Wordsworth finds that he prefers this “mighty heart” when it’s lying still, something that usually alludes to death. However Wordsworth prefers London this way, without the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but rather a nice peaceful sunrise. Considering he grew up in the Lake District it’s not surprising he likes his peace and quiet.Language TechniquesFirstly, Wordsworth uses rather simple language to get the point across of London’s unsophisticated beauty.

However he does use the odd language device to get his point across.• The scenery of London is brought to life by personification. Wordsworth uses Earth as an entity capable of action. Meanwhile the city is able to wear a garment.• The simile in line 4, “like a garment wear…”, tells the reader in a subtle way that London’s beauty is only passing. That London won’t be wearing this beautiful garment for long.• Finally in line 13, the houses are personified to be asleep. Generally when someone is asleep there’s a sense of calmness around them. Wordsworth exclaims “Dear God!”for the houses are usually alive with activities. And yet these sleepy houses are far more pleasant when they’re asleep.Structure and Rhythm• Composed Upon Westminster Bridge is a petrarchan sonnet, which is comprised of an octet and then an sestet. The octet is used to describe London and its manmade features while the sestet is more focused with the nature of the region.• The rhythm scheme is that of a typically petrarchan sonnet, ABBAABBA in the octet and a scheme of DEDEDE in the sestet. This boring scheme matches the simple language of the poem to get across the message, that London’s beauty is simple and should not be overlooked.• Composed Upon Westminster Bridgehas an iambic pentameter. This is where each line consists of 10 syllables, half of them being long and heavy syllables followed by 5 short syllables.• To show his thought process, Wordsworth uses commas to break up the rhythm of the line.InterpretationThe meaning of Composed Upon Westminster Bridge is at first straight forward, the beauty of London. And in the end, that’s the meaning of the poem however there’s a few other lesser meanings as well.• Wordsworth believe that London’s beauty is unsophisticated but still amazing.• There’s only an appreciation for London’s beauty in the morning not in the day.• That London is the heart of Britain and perhaps the rest of the western world.

Themes, language and imageryThe dominating theme in the poem is Nature. London is not introduced in its negative aspect, but it

is inserted in natural scenery. The author describes the beauty of the city as the towers, the cathedrals, the theatres and the temples. Wordsworth personifies the city along with the earth and the sun. This reiterates his conviction that the city, at this particular point of day, does not clash with nature but becomes a part of it. In Wordsworth's view, the air is clean and only the light of the sun illuminates the city. The poet transmits to the readers the calm and the tranquillity described in his poem. There are neither sounds or noises, there is only silence. In Blake's poem, hearing is the prevailing sense. In Wordsworth's one, it is the sight that emerges, while the hearing is absent. On the one hand in Blake's composition, the town is presented through the smoke that pervades the walls of the Churches. On the other hand, in Wordsworth's poem, London shows clean air and the sun illuminates the whole city.

In this poem, Wordsworth brings the scenery around him to life (an example of the Pathetic fallacy). Wordsworth personifies the Earth by giving it a capital letter, and describing it as having the ability to "show". He also personifies the city, by describing it as wearing the morning beauty "like a garment". The image of the sun is powerful, as it is referred to as "he", with actions described by diction such as "steep". This diction creates the image of sunlight slowly submerging into the Earth's splits. The river is personified when it is described as having its "own sweet will", and the houses are personified by their description of being asleep. Lastly, the city itself is personified with the line "and all that mighty heart is lying still". These personifications again help us to draw the conclusion that Wordsworth is considering a sleeping city as part of nature. The compact description of London in lines six and seven emphasize the compactness of the city, and long vowel sounds such as "glideth" and "silent" emphasize the calm feeling of the occasion.

The description "bright and glittering in the smokeless air" creates a distinct image of the clarity of the morning. These images combine to create a breathtaking image of the morning. Despite this excitement created by the vivid descriptions, prevalent in this poem is a sense of calmness. The poem describes "a calm so deep" that "even the houses seem asleep".

The poem depicts a vivid scene that is yet another fond memory shared between Wordsworth and his sister. He uses beautiful language and clever literary devices, especially imagery, to make the city come alive before the reader's eyes. The passionate picture that the poem paints is a memory that calms and placates.

The spondaic substitution or successive accented syllables lends emphasis to the emotional feeling that strikes the poet. Here is a romantic who spends most of his time in the Lake District, in fields of

daffodils, exulting in an urban morning cityscape, unconcerned with the getting and spending, buying and lending that he decries elsewhere.

The poem, written in the Petrarchan sonnet form, describes the beauty of London in the early morning just when the sun rises. We perceive the beauty of the city not so much through the description of what can be seen as through a sense of the admiration of the speaker. It is as if he is looking at a wonder, at something that cannot be but is still there. This sense of admiration is communicated through the development of a strange paradox, which states the impossible unity of two contradictory things: the industrial city and the organic beauty of nature (cf. Cleanth Brooks' analysis of this poem in his essay "The Language of Paradox"). This paradox is introduced through the image of dress, which the rhymes of the octave highlight: the city is fair (beautiful) because it wears "like a garment" the natural beauty of the morning; but wearing the beauty of the morning in fact means that the city is bare (naked): what it wears is just "the smokeless air".

The paradox is carried over and developed further in the sestet. The connection with the dress metaphor is established through the image of the city being steeped in the light of the sun and then the paradox is extended to the strange union of being dead (or asleep) and being alive. The city is now more beautiful and more alive than nature itself, but this is only so because it is steeped in the light of the sun and is thus deep asleep. The rhyming words steep – deep – asleep highlight these connections. As opposed to the city, which is "lying still", the natural parts of the landscape, the sunlight, the "valley, rock, or hill" as well as the river are now active, they dominate over the sleeping city, as is emphasized by the rhyming words hill – at their will – lying still. The city, represented in the last line by the metaphor of the heart, is thus alive because it is dead, because it is inactive and is dominated by its natural environment.

The thematic development of the poem is seconded by the rhythms. The enjambments (and the eye rhyme) in the octave express the boundless admiration for this beautiful sight, the overflowing emotion of the poet. This is further emphasized by the fact that although the lines of the Petrarchan sonnet in English should be iambic pentameters, none of these lines are exactly iambic. Even where the rhythm gets very close to this (lines 3, 4, 5, and 12); the sentence structure or a caesura disrupts the smooth iambic rhythm. This is true of all the lines except the very last one where the rhythms smoothes out and a perfect iambic pentameter ends the poem: "And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

One function of this metrical development is clearly to mark the end of the poem. Apart from this, however, the clear iambic rhythm also functions here on another level. By the sound effect it creates it contradicts the explicit verbal meaning of the line in which it appears. While the line says that the "mighty heart" of the city "is lying still", the iambic rhythm gives us a strong sense of the beating of a heart. Thus the paradox that is developed all through the poem reaches its final statement in this line. The city now is "lying still", it is dead, it is not itself, it is dominated by its natural environment; and it is precisely because of this that it can come to life: the mighty heart begins to beat only when it is lying still.Q: "Write an essay in which you explore the way the sonnet represents the city to the reader."

The poem expresses Wordsworth's impression upon viewing London, particularly the part of London visible from Westminster Bridge, in the early morning. He notes various items making it obvious that he is in an urban setting, but open areas are visible, and the overall impression is not polluted or spoiled by the surrounding civilization.Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie/Open unto the fields, and to the sky;/All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

In the second stanza, Wordsworth compares the city views from Westminster Bridge with natural scenery he has seen in the past, and finds the comparison quite pleasing. The sunshine on the buildings is apparently just as pleasant as sunshine on mountains and valleys; the impact on his view of life is identical. "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!"Your essay should examine the positive impression that London makes upon Wordsworth as he views it.Q: In "Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802," what two passages present London as a living being? 'This city now doth like a gament wear/The beauty of the morning;'/'Dear God! The very houses seem asleep,/And all that mighty heart is lying still.'

In both these cases apparently inanimate objects are given human qualities or abilities. I'm not sure I would describe them as personification though, because the first makes clear that it is an image, specifically a simile, 'like a garment', while the second uses 'seem', the word itself declaring an image. However, they both have the same effect as personification in that they give life and character to an inanimate scene. It is perfectly appropriate here because although there are no people in the scene we know

that a city is a living, breathing place, not just because there are sleeping people in the houses but because a city can feel as if it has a character and personality of its own.Q: Discuss how the sonnet form has been used to effect the sonnet, "Composed upon Westminster Bridge."

There are two basic types of sonnets: English (two divisions here include Shakespearian and Spenserian) and Italian (Petrarchan). The types are named for the most famous authors, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser for the English and the Italian poet, Petrarch. The rhyme schemes differ from each author, but the line groupings for the English are 3 groups of 4 lines (quatrains) and a couplet; for the Italian, 1 group of 8 lines (octave) and 1 group of 6 lines (sestet). All sonnets have 14 lines.This sonnet is an Italian sonnet. Every sonnet introduces a problem or situation, discusses the problem/situation and then solves the problem or makes a final comment. There is usually a TURN between the problem and the solution, which I like to call "the big BUT". The Turn is usually made obvious by a transition word like "but, yet, so" to let you know that there is a change of mood, feeling, tone, or idea. For instance, "All of time and energy is spent on loving this woman. She resists me, BUT I will continue to love her."

In Wordsworth's poem, the turn is not after the octave like usual Italian sonnets. It occurs in the sestet between lines 10 and 11, so it's not as obvious to the reader. True to his style, Wordsworth uses simple language to make the poem flow like every day conversation even within the confines of rigid sonnet format.

Focus on the images and line breaks for your analysis.Q: In William Wordsworth's poem "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," how does the speaker sense the "mighty heart" of London by viewing, from a Romantic perspective, the landscape of the city?

In his poem titled “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802,” William Wordsworth writes in a Romantic mode about the “mighty heart” of the City of London. He does so in a number of ways, including the following:

• In line 1, the speaker immediately mentions “Earth” – a fact that already helps suggest that this may be a “Romantic” poem. Whereas poets of earlier centuries often emphasized God, heaven, and the afterlife, the Romantics tended to be concerned with the visible world before them. The brief reference to God at the very end of this poem might almost seem perfunctory; certainly Christian themes are not stressed in this work as they might have been in a poem written, say, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

• In the rest of line 1, the speaker shows enthusiasm for beauty – another common feature of Romantic poetry.

• In line 2, the speaker posits the existence of persons whose souls are “Dull” – persons precisely the opposite of the Romantic, with their heightened sensitivity to anything sublime or lofty. A typical Romantic focus of sublimity is in fact explicitly stated when the speaker refers, in line 3, to London as

A sight so touching in its majesty . . . [emphasis added]3. Line 5 is typically Romantic in is double emphasis on beauty and on the calm quiet of the morning.

London, in other words, is at this time of day not only beautiful but also peaceful – a trait greatly admired by the Romantics.

4. Line 7 is typically Romantic in its stress on the beauty of nature, particularly the kind of nature associated with the countryside. Subsequent lines also emphasize the sheer visual beauty of nature.

5. Line 8 is Romantic in its emphasis on air that is “smokeless” and thus untainted by the kind of ugliness often produced by humans living in large cities.

6. Of particular interest, from a Romantic perspective, is line 12: The river glideth at his own sweet will . . .This line not only emphasizes the beauty of nature untrammeled by human interferences (such as locks and dams), but it also implicitly celebrates one of the most important of all Romantic values: freedom. Just as the river flows freely, so Wordsworth and other Romantics wished that human beings could live freely.

6. The reference in line 14 to London’s “mighty heart” can be seen as typically Romantic in its generous assessment of the citizens of London. If we think of them as the “mighty heart” of the city who are “lying still” before they awake and begin their busy days, then Wordsworth is writing with the kind of cheerful optimism we often associate with the Romantics. He is not mocking or satirizing London or its citizens here, as a poet of a hundred years earlier might have done. Instead, he is celebrating London as the heart of England – looking for the positive and finding it, as the Romantics often did. Wordsworth here also personifies London, treating it as if it were a living

thing – thus reflecting the common tendency among the Romantics to use the so-called “pathetic fallacy” of treating inanimate things as if they were human beings.

7. Finally, the speaker feels inspired by the beauty he sees before him and re-creates that beauty for us, so that we might feel inspired and awe-struck as he is -- a typical Romantic purpose for writing a poem.

In all these ways, the, Wordsworth extols London in fashions that seem typical of a Romantic writer.Q: In "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," what is the significance of the exclamation at the end of the poem?

Certainly the ending of the poem is remarkable for the exclamation that seems to escape the mouth of the speaker involuntarily: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;/And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Note how these final lines are significant because they emphasise what seems to impress the speaker most about this view of London: the city's calmness and tranquillity. In these lines, Wordsworth uses personification to compare the houses to sleeping creatures, emphasising the lack of movement and peacefulness of the view. Let us not ignore either that the poem ends on a paradox. A heart can't be both alive and still at the same time, and yet the "mighty heart" of London, that throbs with such action and movement at the best of times, from the speaker's vantage point appears to be "still," emphasising the tranquil and peaceful mood that dominates the poem.Q: In "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," how does Wordsworth’s view of the sleeping city fit with his view of nature?

Excellent question. It is very interesting that this, one of Wordsworth's most famous poems, is not actually based on the countryside or the Lake District of England, where he had been inspired to write so often, but on a big, polluted city! This sonnet clearly demonstrates that Wordsworth could also be moved by the solemnity and magnificence of a sleeping city and not just waterfalls and mountains. However, if you read the poem carefully you will note that it is London as viewed from a distance, conveniently ignoring the squalor, misery and poverty that other Romantic poets such as Blake captured in their writings.

The city of London clearly produces a similar sense of calm and tranquillity as nature does for the poet. However, note how even in this urban Romantic poem, nature is used to show the beauty of the sight Wordsworth is contemplating: Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;/Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

Although it is London that the poet is describing, he feels the need to compare it to natural beauty to help explain how profoundly amazing he truly finds what he is viewing. Likewise, just as his nature poetry views nature as a whole as an organism, the last line of the poem, "And all that mighty heart is lying still," equally views the city of London as one organism. Thus, although the focus of this poem is very different, Wordsworth seems to use similar strategies to explain the similar impact that the sight has on him as in his nature poetry. This view fits with his view of nature through of the affect on him and the descriptive strategies he uses.Q: How does this quotation from "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3... (unclear)The poem does change in tone, but the shift occurs earlier than in the line you cite here. Consider it in context:Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!/The river glideth at his own sweet will:/Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;/And all that mighty heart is lying still!

These are the final lines in the poem, and for the first time in the poem, the exclamation point has been employed, indicating a change in tone.

From the beginning of the poem until these concluding lines, the speaker has described the beauty and serenity of London as it appears to him in the early morning hours. It is a city asleep; the air is clean and the city is quiet. He describes it as an extension of nature itself, as it is "Open unto the fields, and to the sky." The tone is one of quiet reverence.

In the final four lines, however, the tone changes. The speaker is no longer merely an observer; he has been drawn into the moment. The peaceful calm of the city has infused his spirit; he, too, now feels serene. Thus "Dear God!" expresses his joy and wonder in the experience. His feelings are so all encompassing and profound that every part of the city, even the houses themselves, affect him. Every part of the "mighty heart" of London exists in a state of peace, reflective of his own.

An interesting feature of Wordsworth's poem its subject. In Romantic literature, spiritual experiences are most usually inspired by nature. In this poem, London is presented in these circumstances as being more beautiful and awe-inspiring than nature itself.

Q: Refering to "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," show why the speaker feels so awestruck and amazed at his first sight of London so early in the morning.

You might want to focus on the way that the poem personifies the city of London, making it seem human. Note that we are told that London "like a garment" wears "the beauty of the morning," the river has "its own sweet will" and the houses are said to "sleep." Lastly, the entire sight is personified in the last line as being a "mighty heart":Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;/And all that mighty heart is lying still!

If we examine all of these characteristics, what seems to amaze the speaker so much is the city's beauty and tranquility on this morning. The city throughout the poem is presented as being peaceful and beautiful, as these three lines make clear:Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;/Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

It is the sight of this "mighty heart lying still" in the beautiful morning sunshine that produces this sense of calm and peace in the speaker, which makes him feel more calm than he has ever felt in his life. This is a very novel perception of the city, for in Romantic literature they were normally depicted as ugly and enchaining men rather than liberating them. Wordsworth in this poem re-envisions the city, showing that it to can be a sight of natural beauty and exploring how it can bring peace to the soul.Q: In "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," why is the city so in tune with nature in this poem?

I hate to disagree with the main point of your question, but I don't actually agree that this poem presents the city as being in tune with nature. I think that maybe you are confusing the comparisons that Wordsworth makes with nature with saying that the city is in tune with nature. Let us examine the relevant parts of the poem carefully:Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;/Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

Note here that although nature is obviously mentioned, Wordsworth is saying that the sun was never so beautiful shining over various aspects of nature such as valleys and hills as it is shining on London. Also, he says that he has never felt a calm so deep as looking at the sight of London he is contemplating now. So, the poem does not actually say that the city is in tune with nature. Rather, nature is used as part of the way Wordsworth presents the beauty of the view.Answer 2: You might say that the city is like nature in this poem. Wordsworth’s poetry often celebrates nature, its quiet and solitude. The city is its polar opposite. However, in this poem, he is clearly in awe of the beauty of the city. However, he is viewing the city at its most nature-like time: in the early morning. There is no mention of the hustle and bustle of city life. The people are still asleep. He even describes the buildings as asleep. He does indicate that this beauty is fleeting. It will be gone when the city gets going.This city now doth, like a garment, wear,/The beauty of the morning; silent, bear, (4-5).

It does seem odd to say that the city is in tune with nature. But maybe it is. Wordsworth certainly describes the city as he would describe nature in his other poems. In its sleeping state, the city is described as interacting with nature. The sun is shining on it. Industry has not yet begun, so there is no smoke. If the city is sleeping, it is breathing and alive, thus completing the personification that the Romantic poets often attributed to natural phenomena. I think you could say the city is in tune with nature in one respect and it is a stretch. If we say the people of the city, who are asleep, are in tune with nature, it is because they are asleep. They are not being social or industrial and the image of the city in the early morning reflects this. Being asleep, they are dreaming and breathing. These are somewhat like the elements of poetry and imagination that Wordsworth celebrated. His theory of poetry was centered on the individual imagination and that poetry was the spontaneous overflow of emotion reflected in tranquility. What could be a more appropriate way to describe an individual in the process of dreaming.

It is fleeting. And this is the only time when a city dweller (or the city itself) can be nature-like, or “in tune” with nature as you put it. As soon as the people get up and the factories fill the air with noise and smoke, that congestion will obscure any connection or comparison with nature.Q: 1.Explain the personification in line 12-14?/2.Explain the metaphor in the last two lines?

In the poem 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge' William Wordsworth uses personification to depict the city, the river and the business heart of the city.

The line 'the river glideth at his own sweet will' refers to the autonomy that Nature has - always used by, but still more powerful than, man. Yes London is big, powerful and man-made but it can only use the river, not control it nor divert it, nor make it flow faster or slower. He may have been comparing, thinking back and reminiscing about his own Lakeland mountainous river 'The Derwent' which hurried and babbled its way past his childhood home. This river could be a life-threatening dangerous torrent (as has been the case this mionth in th UK where it has taken lives, including that of a police officer in the floods.)

The River Thames glides by because it chooses to, not because it is under London's control. Yes, we have the multi-million pound Thames Barrier in case of flooding nowadays, but the jury is out on whether that will be any match for a global warming tsunami coming up the Thames estuary or the Thames in a climate change spate. Wordsworth was always aware of the terrible force of danger that lay behind the beauty of Nature - how right he was.The City as Landscape: "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," by William Wordsworth

This sonnet is arguably not a true nature poem so much as a poem in which a city appears as part of a natural landscape. In it, Wordsworth (or his speaker) gazes at the industrial city of early 1800s London before it wakes up for the day, and sees it as beautiful and in harmony with its natural surroundings.

In fact, his description of the city has a deeply idealized quality, as if he is talking about a heavenly rather than an earthly city. It uses beautiful and descriptive language, an easy flow of meter, and satisfying rhymes to convey a sense of the exalted feeling that has been evoked in the poet/speaker. These lines convey that sense of exaltation:This City now doth like a garment wear /The beauty of the morning; silent, bare/Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie/Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

The poem also describes the city as if it is a person since we are told that it is wearing the beauty of the morning and, later, that "the very houses seem asleep."

As the title suggests, the poem is based on something the poet himself experienced since it was, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge." Of course, as has been pointed out before, the speaker sees the city's beauty only because it is asleep. In a sense, he has to rob it of its identity -- idealizing it and catching it when it isn't manifesting the activity and work we most associate with it -- to appreciate it. Catching it in this state, he depicts it as being in harmony with nature when it really isn't at all.

It is interesting to compare "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" to Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, "God's World," which expresses a similar state of mind involving a deep enthusiasm for the beauty of the world. Like this poem, Millay's poem "humanizes" nature by giving it qualities such as primeval mystery that are about our own thoughts and perceptions.

In both poems, the speaker also describes a state of mind that matches what he or she is experiencing in nature. In the case of "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," the speaker suggests that his calm state of body and mind is inspired by the same state in nature: Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!/The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Similarly, Millay's poem suggests her passion is inspired by the dynamism and beauty of nature -- by "Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! / Thy mists, that roll and rise!" The speaker also says:Long have I known a glory in it all,/But never knew I this;/Here such a passion is/As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear/Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;

But the calm and dynamism that the two claim to observe really has more to do with them than nature. At most, they have come to nature ready to have these states of mind evoked.

"Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" can also be compared to another Wordsworth poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," which offers another idealized depiction of the world, but one that expresses delight rather than awe at the sight not of a city that is "sleeping," but "dancing" flowers. But then Wordsworth tended to idealize and romanticize his subjects, and produce beautiful word combinations, just as Millay tended to speak with great power, because their personalities predisposed them to both respond to the world and express themselves in certain ways.

Where I Come FromBiographical Information• Elizabeth Brewster was born in 1922 in the small lumber town of Chipman, New Brunswick, Canada.• As a young poet in the 1940s, Elizabeth Brewster wrote in an almost desperate attempt to order the chaos of her own psyche.• Most of Brewster’s early poetry was based on rural and small-town rather than urban experience and that it was mainly traditional in form. The bulk of her poems centre around trees, oceans, cabins and childhood recollections, lulling thSummary

The key idea of the poem seems to be that a person’s character is always formed at least in part by the place where he or she is born – “People are made of places”. Wherever you go in life you will carry with you memories and echoes of your birthplace, whether it is a city, as in the first stanza, or the quiet Canadian countryside where Elizabeth herself was born – “Where I come from, people carry woods in

their minds” – and certainly the picture she draws in the second stanza does seem at first to be idyllic and wonderful, strongly contrasting with the city images in the first stanza.This idea shows us that who we are is shaped by where we were born and where we grew up, but this is not the end of the shaping process, as the first line suggests ‘People are made of places’, you are shaped as much by where you were born and grew up as the places that you go to after your childhood, the things that you experience in other places, the things that you see. Stanza 1• This stanza deals with the organized and fast paced life of the city. In the city everything is precise and controlled; everything runs like clockwork.• Line 1-3: The first two lines of the poem summarise the main theme of the poem perfectly. ‘People are made of places.’ As the theme suggests people will never be able to forget their past, or where they came from. People will always be able to tell where you come from ‘They carry with them hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace or the cool eyes of seagazers.’• Line 3-4: ‘Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them’ The author is trying to show that the atmosphere of the place you live in can affect the way that you live, throughout the year as nature progresses through its seasons, atmospherically city life changes greatly. Stanza 1• Line 4-5: ‘Like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring’, smog telling us about a typical winters day with density of the air being greater and the water vapor blinding our site, ‘the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring’ this tells us how the flowers of spring are starting to blossom, not fully produced and grown the smell of the tulips can not yet be appreciated fully and with the combined smells of the city one could think that they are smelling the tulips when actually the city life prevents the scent of the tulip to a high degree.• Line 6-7: The idea of the city being organized and tidily planned out is introduced in these lines, ‘nature tidily plotted in little squares with a fountain in the center’, telling us that within the city life, nature still exists in public parks, which have been plotted around the city in small areas toprovide the reassurance of sanity within the community, that nature still exists within the city environment but is scarce and nature cannot go about its business how intended to because of the interruptions of city life and pollution. Stanza 1• Line 7-8: ‘museum smell, art also tidily plotted with a guidebook’. This compares the tidily plotted countryside to tidily plotted art in an art museum, with a guidebook. The guide book can be a metaphor for life, we try to control everything, to guide ourselves through life instead of taking one step at a time.• Line 9-10: ‘the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices’, the city is full of skyscraping office buildings built of steel and other sharp precise materials to give a uniform look and feel to the atmosphere, also with great complexes comes great amounts of pollution, which Elizabeth is relating to with ‘the smell of work, glue factories maybe’.• Line 10-11: In the end of the stanza ‘smell of subways crowded at rush hours’, this shows the congestion that is caused by overpopulation of the city. It also shows how rushed life in the city is. Also it shows that at the end of the day, no matter where you come from, if you work in chromium plated offices or glue factories, everyone has the same goal and that is to get home. Stanza 2Stanza 2The second stanza introduces an idea change in the poem. The focus of the poem now shifts more to country and rural life; similar to that in which Brewster herself grew up in.• Line 12-13: These lines provide us with key details in which we can relate to Brewster’s childhood, ‘Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods’. Coming from New Brunswick, Canada, is 80% forested and so the forest or ‘woods’ will always be in the peoples minds as it is the centre of the little community.• Line 14: People here care about things that people in the city would laugh at, like ‘blueberry patches in the burned-out bush’. To the people in the community this is relatively significant as it is the growing of something new where before there was nothing. Stanza 2• Life 15: ‘wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint’. This is in direct contrast to the first stanza where everything is new and attractive. The old farmhouses are there solely to serve a purpose and until they stop serving that purpose they will be kept, regardless of looks.• Line 16-17: Brewster portrays a farming life with the ideas of chickens and hens kept in yards, generally used to provide a source of food in the form of eggs, or literally speaking the chickens themselves. Also the chickens and hens being kept in yards, shows us that in the country there is the room to spare to be able to keep these chickens and hens, whereas in conjunction with the first stanza, the chickens would not be kept

as there is no room nor is there any need to keeping the chickens and hens.• Line 17-18: ‘The battered schoolhouse’ again places emphasis on it being an old building remaining only for practical purposes and not being replaced by a more attractive building. ‘behind which violets grow’ just backs up the earlier line of ‘blueberry’s growing in the burnt out bush’, itshows how nature can create a picture of beauty anywhere, out of anything. Stanza 2• Line 18-19: ‘Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.’ Spring and winter are two opposing seasons and winter could therefore represent the cold city life and spring the colorful country life. ‘Ice and breaking of ice’ refers to something in the mind that is broken when one makes the transition from the city to the country.• Line 20-21: ‘A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.’ The last two lines are puzzling. The door blowing open is just another gateway opening in the mind to the memories that she holds of her childhood. The second half these lines ‘and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.’ is there to give a feel to the picture that she has been describing and it gives the reader a cold feeling. The frosty wind from the fields of snow is relevant because in Canada the winter is very frosty with a lot of snow and wind. Another idea to ponder on the last two lines of the poem.

The “door” could be the memory opening in a blast of nostalgia, but the association of winter and the “frosty wind” suggest something less pleasant, like a realisation that the past, her place, is not so good after all. This is supported by the content of the second stanza, where things may seem superficially attractive in a rustic way, but are “burned out”, “old, in need of paint”, where the chickins cluck “aimlessly” and buildings are “battered”. So the suggestion is that it is easy to remember formative places all to positively, but their legacy can be negative; a “frosty wind” in the mind? Structure• The Poem is set out into three stanzas, the last being a rhyming couplet, with the words ‘blow’ and ‘snows’.• If you look at the poem at the end of the first stanza, the last line finishes as a half line. The first line of the second stanza then starts halfway down the line. The reason Elizabeth has done this is because she would like to start the second stanza at the same place that she finished the first stanza; so she has the same line of thought, but it is like she has jumped locations. She finishes the first stanza with ‘subways crowded at rush hours’ and starts the second stanza with ‘Where I come from’. This is to show a distinct change between the two stanza with the first being city life and thesecond being country life. Structure• If you look at the lines in the poem every single line with the exception of 5 out of the 21 lines has some sort of a comma, full stop, colon or semi-colon splitting the lines into two sections. This technique used is a great way to show the reader that the poem is meant to be read slow and appreciatively, taking in what is being said and thinking about it more, and not meant to be quickly read and feeling bewildered afterwards when you are confused about the poem to which you have just rushed.• Apart from the previously mentioned no other apparent structure can be found, so it is more contemporary and free versed poetry, done to provide uniqueness with the poem and also this allows Elizabeth to get her ideas and points across as there is next to no boundaries which allows her to use any form of poetry language that she wants to, getting the reader thinking more about the poem and its content rather than what words rhyme with what and so on.e reader into a state of rustic complacency.Q: Write a detailed (5 paragraphs) essay plan discussing the theme of identity with reference to language used in the poem 'Where I come from'.

An "essay plan" is basically an outline of the essay you intend to write with notes concerning areas to which you will pay greatest attention or important themes.Introduction: Contextualize the poet in terms of Canadian identity and particularly the tradition of prarie poetry.

Paragraph 1: Examine the treatment of urbanism in the opening stanza. Does this represent a rejection of an urban literary tradition? What does this stanza claim about the nature of Canadian poetry as well as the poet?

Paragraph 2: Examine this fairly cliched image of the small prarie town in the second styanza as a locus of Canadian and personal poetic identity.

Paragraph 3: Discuss how the final couplet refigures the identity questions in the poem. Are the praries more "open-minded" than the more `multi-cultural`cities of Vancouver or Toronto? More authentically Canadian?

Conclusion: Show how the use of adverbs, specifically, supports your claims about the treatment of identity themes.Q: In the poem "Where I come From" what does the poet suggest about people who grow up in and around cities and those who grow up in the countryQ: How does the beginning of the poem establish the purpose in Brewster''s "Where I Come From"?

This poem purports to be a contrast between city and country. At first reading, the poem’s speaker seems to be elevating country living above city living. However, the concluding two lines come as a contradiction of this idealization, and for this reason create surprising final twist. The poem’s first eleven lines establish details that support the opening statement that people are “made of places.” Thus, their very outlook on life is conditioned by the areas from which they spend their childhood and adulthood. Even their very thoughts and ways of looking at life are inextricable from their locations. People who work in “chromium-plated offices” assume that it is natural for human existence to take place exclusively in such an environment, just as people riding subways at rush hour accept the premise that life might usually take place where there are always crowds. Interestingly, while most of the details about city life are negative, the poet does include details about tulips and fountains—but these objects of Nature are regulated and organized, and are not growing without human intervention and control. Q: Explain the last two lines of Brewster's "Where I Come From"?

The final two lines of the poem, appear to be problematic. A reader might expect a continuation of the pride of country places of lines 11-19, but such an attitude is not there. Rather, the reader is told that doors blow open, and that a frosty wind blows from fields of snow. In the light of this shift of reference, a reader might conclude that no matter where people come from—city or country, north or south, or east or west, no one escapes human difficulties and problems. A marvelous or not-so-marvelous location of residence does not guarantee anyone immunity from the problems that beset human beings. Q: In "Where I Come From", what does Elizabeth Brewster say about rural life?

From details of city life, the poem after line 11 shifts to details about country life. Clearly the speaker admires the more spontaneous aspects of Nature that are to be found where she comes from, where pine woods, blueberry patches, burned-out bush, and wooden farmhouses are features of the landscape, where people might see many farmyard animals, and where violets voluntarily exhibit their colors for country folk to appreciate. All these scenes and descriptions are clearly designed as a contrast with the more constricting urban life as detailed in the first eleven lines, a view that nature is more rewarding to an individual, more uplifting than the confines of city life.

(Unfinished) In both poems ‘Where I Come From by Elizabeth Brewster’ and ‘Summer Farm by Norman MacCaig’, the author makes a dominant connection between the natural world and mankind by addressing the importance of digging down to your roots, finding your own identity through it and also focusing on how nature alters to fit with your emotional state. In ‘Where I Come From by Elizabeth Brewster’, it concentrates on idea that wherever you come from, you carry a sense of that place in your mind. By trying to convey this message and create the effect of a nostalgic poem, the author had used many techniques such as sibilance, similes, alliteration and metaphors. On the other hand, in ‘Summer Farm by Norman MacCaig’, the author’s central idea is to get across the message that the natural world is created according to the emotions of man. The author tries to put across his thoughts through using techniques such as juxtaposition, introspective perception, recursion, rhyme, assonance and alliteration.

‘Where I Come From by Elizabeth Brewster’ states the importance of having an identity and that your identity comes from your link to the natural world. The author splits the poem up into two stanzas to show the difference the speakers past and present. On the first stanza, the author focuses on getting the message “people are made of places”, a metaphor, across, leading the audience to catch the central meaning of the poem. Alternatively, ‘Summer Farm’ states that the natural world is fitted and altered to what emotional state one is in. The poem is divided into four stanzas; each one has two pairs of rhyme. In the poem, the author also explores metaphysics, which are concepts that are abstract and intangible beyond in physical world. This helps the audience to be imaginative of what is beyond the natural world and beyond what is in sight.

Both poems explores the powerful connection between the natural world and mankind in different ways, but the way the authors convey...

‘Where I Come From’, by Elizabeth Brewster, is a poem that has it’s theme readily stated in the first sentence of the poem; that ‘People are made of places” – that memories of a person of where they live make up a portion of who they are. The first stanza essentially is a list of the possible places people have lived, such as mountains, jungles, near the sea, cities. Smell is most primarily the sense most associated

with memory, and that link is used here extensively in the description of the city; ‘the smell of smog’, ‘almost-not-smell of tulips’, ‘museum smell’, ‘smell of work’. The description of the city is slightly plain and generic however, as it describes things that all cities generally have, fountains in the centre of the square, museums, libraries, glue factories, ‘chromium plated offices,’ ‘subways’, etc. There is nothing distinct about the city she is describing, and so the description could fit any city in the world. It also gives a sense that the poet is not familiar, not connected with a city; she is writing as if she has not lived here, has only visited as a tourist. She is unfamiliar with the city, and this is emphasized by the numerous pauses and enjambments within the stanza; she frequently has to pause to think about what to say next. The second stanza however is a description of her hometown. The environment is vastly different to the city, it is a small, friendly countryside town, where ‘people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods…’ The way in which her hometown is described is also different, unlike the faltering way the city is described, the second stanza has less enjambments, and her memories seem to flow in an unstoppable rush. The descriptions here are also more exact, distinct, such ‘blueberry patches in burned out bush’, ‘wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint’, ‘battered schoolhouse behind which violets grow’ – memories that only one who has lived here for a long time would remember, memories that only one who is familiar with it would remember. Only simple adjectives are used here, possible emphasizing the simple, uncomplicated way people live their lives here. A faint tone of unreserved affection when she is describing her hometown can be sensed; unlike the first stanza when her feeling towards the city is positive, but mild. The language and punctuation of the second stanza also slows down the pace of the poem – emphasizing the slow, comfortable way of life here. A contrast between city-life and countrylife is made between the two stanzas. The last stanza appears to be a kind of true ending to the poem, ‘A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow’ a possible new memory is opened in her mind, or it is a continuation of her long-ago memories.

Elizabeth Brewster’s “Where I Come From” is a poem that is rooted in Brewster’s childhood and early experiences in the rural Canada of the 1920s and 1930s. This is a trait of much Canadian poetry (although with notable exceptions, such as Margaret Atwood), although hardly one to complain about. “Where I Come From” is a wonderfully well-expressed work that on repeated readings reminded me of Robert Frost’s depictions of New England. Like Frost’s work, this poem is simple but not inelegant, subtle and understated, and undoubtedly effective. It is a poem that is enjoyable even if one does not look beyond its most obvious level.

The poem begins with a declaration: “People are made of places”. While this might be considered too sweeping a generalization, there is no doubt from the poem that whether or not all people share this trait of Brewster’s, she is certainly very much a result of the places she has lived in and that she most identifies with. The first stanza goes on to give examples of the kinds of places that “make” people: jungles, mountains, the sea and the city. It is with the last of these that the stanza is most concerned. The rest of the stanza consists of a description of the sights and sounds of city life that influence city-dwellers: here the poem is at its weakest, as Brewster’s images are rather generic: museums, glue factories, offices and subways at rush hour. Her city is unmistakably Western, and it would not be too far to go to say that it is Canadian. If so, her poem has renewed interest, as a comparison of two Canadas.

The second stanza is the poem’s heart. Here Brewster introduces us to the place that made her, and in her view made Canadians of her generation. Here her images are less cliched and her language far more evocative: witness such artfully constructed phrases as “blueberry patches in the burned-out bush” and the warm, romantic imagery of “battered schoolhouses/ behind which violets grow”. She closes the stanza by returning to her main theme, the link between nature and the mind. “Spring and winter/ are the mind’s chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice”, she writes, and it is central moment of the piece. This is what Brewster is made of; it is a poem that truly involves the reader, as she is inviting us to consider the places that made us, and to consider how exactly they did so. It is a truly important thought.

Indeed, “Where I Come From” is just as much about things unsaid as the writing itself. Does Brewster truly dislike the city (in my opinion, she doesn’t)? Are her memories of her hometown unreservedly affectionate? Is the poem an exercise in comparing two Canadas, the Canada of the past and the urban, multicultural Canada of the present? How exactly does the landscape affect the Canadian psyche (Brewster describes the place brilliantly, but its importance much more briefly)? How have Canadians changed with Canada?

Brewster’s omissions are, to my mind, quite deliberate. She doesn’t seek to explain everything but rather to invite the reader to think about what she has thought. Her words express those thoughts very effectively, and while it is rather a modest pleasure, it is a decidedly unambitious work and this is almost

refreshing. To read “Where I Come From” is to undertake an exercise in the appreciation of subtlety, deep reflection and the quietest kind of beauty. If every reader of the poem uses it as a springboard for clear-eyed self-reflection of this kind, Brewster will have been remarkably successful. I have little doubt that this will be so.

Task: From the title of poem, we can assume that Elizabeth Brewster’s ‘Where I Come From’ is about _________________________ Although the opening line ‘People are made of places’ can be loosely described as form of alliteration, the repetition of the ‘p’ sound is particularly effective because it creates the impression that ______________________ . Brewster goes on to describe the ‘Atmosphere of cities’ which is created be various distinctive smells such as ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘ , ‘ ‘ ,‘ ‘ and ‘ ‘. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight and sound, suggests that it is the speaker’s memory of city-life and this is sharply contrasted in the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grew up. I think the line _______________________________ has a strong impact on the reader because__________________. The second part of the poem is about the place where she grows up and she provides us with some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as ____________________ and __________________. The line ‘Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons’ reinforces the contrast established in the poem between town and rural life, though there is a change experienced in the final two lines. ‘A door in the mind blows open’ suggest that _____________________ Possible answers:

From the title of the poem, we can assume that Elizabeth Brewster’s “Where I Come From” is about the place or places where the writer was born in or where she spent her whole childhood. We also assume that she is going to describe, tell memories and her opinion about the completely different places. Although the opening line “People are made of places” can be loosely described as form of alliteration, the repetition of the “p” sound is particularly effective because it creates an effect, which the shortness of sound reinforces the statement by establishing it as a truth. It also grabs the attention of the reader and makes the reader curious to read the rest of the poem. Brewster goes on to describe the “Atmosphere of cities” which is created by various distinctive smells such as “smell of smog”, “almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring”, “museum smell”, “smell of work, glue factories maybe” and “smell of subways crowded at rush hours”. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight and sound, suggests that the speaker’s memory of city-life and this sharply contrasted in the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grew up. I think the line “Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods” has a strong impact on the reader because the speaker of the poem is starting to describe where she is from, how different and how better it is compared to the city-life. The writer also begins to idealizes farm-life. Brewster makes it sound much better than it really is. The second part of the poem is about the place where she grows up and she provides us with some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as “wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint” and “with yards where hens and chickens circle about”. The line “Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons” reinforces the contrast established in the poem between town and rural life, though there is a change experience in the final two lines. “A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from the snow” suggests that a change occurs. The speaker is now in the present. The cold wind stops her thoughts. In the end of the poem the reader realizes that Brewster is mostly talking about nostalgia, affection for the past.

Answer 2: From the title of the poem, we can assume that Elizabeth Brewster’s ‘Where I Come From’ is about the different places where people come from, in particularly where the speaker of the poem comes from. Although the opening line ‘People are made of places’ can be loosely described as form of alliteration, the repetition of the ‘p’ sound is particularly effective because it creates the impression that the speaker wants to insist on this short line and it creates a strong effect on the beginning of the poem. It reinforces the statement , establishing it as a truth. Brewster goes on to describe the ‘Atmosphere of cities’ which is created be various distinctive smells such as ‘the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring’ , ‘museum smell’ , ’smell of work, glue factories maybe’ , ‘smell of subways crowded at rush hours’. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight and sound, suggests that it is the speaker’s memory of city-life and this is sharply contrasted in the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grew up. I think the line ‘Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods’ has a strong impact on the reader because the speaker starts speaking about herself and she idealises the life and the nature of the farm. The second part of the poem is about the place where she grows up and she provides us with some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as ‘Wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint’ and ‘with yards where hens and chickens circle about’. The line ‘Spring and winter are the mind’s

chief seasons’ reinforces the contrast established in the poem between town and rural life, though there is a change experienced in the final two lines. ‘A door in the mind blows open’ suggest that a change occurs. The speaker is now in the present, indeed, the cold wind stops her thoughts.

Answer 3: From the title of poem, we can assume that Elizabeth Brewster’s “Where I Come From” is about comparing the situation between urban area and rural area where she comes from. She is comparing it with the smell of things in the area. Although the opening line ‘People are made of places’ can be loosely describe as form of alliteration, the repetition of the ‘p’ sound is particularly effective because it creates the impression that the shortness of sound reinforces this statement, establishing it as a truth. Brewster goes on to describe the ‘Atmosphere of cities’ which is created by various distinctive smells such as ‘smog’, ’museum’, ‘glue factory’, ‘chromium-plated office’ and ‘subways’. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight and sound, suggest that it is the speaker’s memory of city-life and this sharply contrasted in the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grew up. I think the line ‘Where I come from’ has a strong impact on the reader because it shows a change, and the rest of the poem contrasts to the manmade imagery. The second part of the poem is about the place where she is grows up and she provides us with some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as wooden farmhouse and yards with hens and chickens. The line ‘Spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons’ reinforces the contrast established in the poem between town and rural life, though there is a change experienced in the final two lines. ‘A door in the mind blows open’ suggests that there is a change occurs the speaker is now in the present and the cold wind stops her thoughts.

Answer 4: From the title of the poem, we can assume that Elizabeth Brewster’s “Where I Come From” is about a place where your heart belongs to, the place where you came from. Although the opening line “People are made of places” can be loosely described as form of alliteration, the repetition of “p” sound is particularly effective because it creates the impression that it really sounds and matches the rhythm for words people and places, you can feel the poem. Brewster goes on to describe the “Atmosphere of cities” which is created be various distinctive smells such as “smell of smog” “museum smell” “smell of work” “smell of glue factories” and “chromium-plated offices”. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight and sound, suggest that it is the speaker’s memory of city-life and this is sharply contrasted in the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grew up. I think the line “carry woods in their minds” has a strong impact on a reader because this line is about Elizabeth’s memory, the way she remembers her home place, and it’s sarcastic. The second part of the poem is about the place where she grows up and she provides us with some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as “woods in their minds” means forest is near or around a place and “with yards where hens and chickens circle about” means that they had chickens and hens, running around freely on the farm territory. The line “spring and winter are the mind’s chief season” reinforces the contrast established in the poem between town and rural life, though there is a change experienced in the final two lines. “A door in the mind blows open” suggest that she was in deep thinking, other world, and when someone opened the door she came back to herself, from other world, the world of mind.

Answer 5: From the title of the poem, we can amuse that Elizabeth Brewster’s where I come from is about. The title is where I come from because se want’s to tell us we are made up out of places. We are made up out of all the things we have done and where we have done it. Later in the poem she tells us where she came from. Although he opening line ‘people are made of places’ can be loosely described as from of alliteration, the repetition of the ‘’p’’ sound is particularly effective because it creates an impression that the sound really matches the rhythm of the poem it actually makes the rhythm. Brewster goes on to describe the ‘atmosphere of cities’ which is created be various distinctive smells such as cow shit, kimchee, and pizza hut. Focusing on smells, rather than on sight it is the speaker’s memory of city-life and this is sharply contrasted. In the next half of the poem which is about nature, and the environment where she grow up. I think the line carry woods in their minds has a strong impact on the reader because, it is sarcastic not realistic so you have to think about it. The second part of the poem is about the place where she grow up and she provides us whit some stereotypical imagery of farm-life such as chickens and wood. The line ‘spring and winter are the mind’s chief seasons’ reinforces the contrast established between town and rural life, though there is a change experienced in the final two lines ‘A door in the minds blow open’ suggest that you think everything is so good if you lose/leave it but when you come back it is different.

Answer 6: The first two lines from the first stanza states that people carry some memory of the place they were born in. Anyone could be born in the mountains, jungles, cities or seas. It signifies that Brewster is stating her views after she has visited these places. She also talks about smell,”atmosphere of cities”, “smell of smog”, “almost-not-smell of tulips in spring” which also signifies that the smell of tulips

are lost in the smell of smog and other smells. There is just a hint of it too. Then she talks about how nature is cared about people ” nature tidily plotted in little squares. She again switches back to smell ” museum smell” “glue factories maybe” and the “smell of subways at rush hours” which also tells us that she has visited these place very curiously. The \second stanza talks about where she was born or where her childhood passed and gives views of how rural life is better than urban life. She gives a vivid imagery of chickens who are circling about clucking aimlessly. She also gives and imagery of houses which need paint and are old and blueberry patches.The last line brings Brewster to her present and lets the reader know she was thinking and telling about her past

Q: With Reference To Two Or Three Poems Explore The Varying Ways Poets Present The Natural World. Essay

In both the poems ‘Summer Farm’ by Norman MacCaig and ‘Where I Come From’ by Elizabeth Brewster, an insight to the natural world is given through the poet’s reflective and quiet tone. The poets demonstrate how although the human world interacts with the natural world, it is also completely separate.Within the poem ‘Where I Come From’ a variety of different aspects adds to the appreciation of life. In the first two sentences the lines flow smoothly and carry imagery of the pleasantness of nature, in comparison to the rest of the stanza which expresses the poet’s opinion about cities. The way the poet tell the reader ‘they carry with them’ emphasizes the flow of nature whereas the first sentence which describes the city is structured around the alliteration ‘different drops’. This use of alliteration highlights that while nature flows smoothly, the city is like rapids. The unusual syntax used ‘atmosphere of … different drops’ emphasizes how unnatural the city is. In the first stanza the repetition of ‘tidily plotted’ and ‘smell’ helps to create the idea that the city does not have diversity, that it is all roughly the same whereas in the second stanza the description of nature is made to seem as though it goes on forever. These techniques are therefore reinforcing the main idea by showing the reader that different perspectives can only be reached by having contrast.

In ‘Summer Farm’, the poet describes his natural surroundings with such detail and clarity whilst in a meditative state of thoughtless observation. The juxtaposing ideas, ‘tame lightenings’ bring the idea that nature is uncontrollable and no matter how much humans try to control it, nature will always do its own thing. The alliteration ‘green as glass’ highlights the comparison of the natural world and the man made equivalent; It shows how humans try and establish links with nature. In the first two stanzas of the poem, Norman MacCaig describes the natural world which surrounds him on his farm, allowing a picture to form in the readers mind. He shows how narrow the majority of humans views are, ‘stares at nothing with one eye’, this underlines how even though something might be there; our minds are so closed off that we see nothing. The fact that the hen only looks with one eye also mirrors how humans in general are bias and will only look at the part of the whole picture.

Nature as seen by the poet is beautiful. In the second stanza of the ‘Where I Come From’, the listing underlines how nature is unbound and free unlike the man made structures which have to be ordered the people who live with nature are also unbound and free ‘they carry woods in their minds’. This means that their minds are crowded but always coming up with new thoughts and idea just like a wood is always brimming with new life. The way the sentence is structured suggests that the people in the cities are also like the place where they live, more ordered and rigid than the people who live with nature. The alliteration of ‘burnt-out bush’ reinforces how even though this part of nature is dead, it still contributes to the sense of beauty. As the ‘hens and chickens circle’ the idea of the cycle of life is pushed to the forefront of the readers mind. It highlights how just like a circle, nature has no beginning and no end which in turn underlines another contrast between man-made and nature.

In the last two stanzas of ‘Summer Farm’, the poet highlights how nature and humans are similar but different. As man continues to speculate about his surroundings, he concludes that he is ‘in the centre’; however the reader is brought to question this as it has been shown that he has been wrong before. Although he believes himself ‘in the centre’, he lies ‘not thinking’ in the grass just like the straw which is described in the first stanza. This could show that man can only truly be like nature when all thought is let go of, this highlights the difference between man and nature as nature does not think about things. The man’s ‘lack of thought’ implies how humanity would rather believe that everything does resolve around it than look at the evidence and conclude otherwise. Nature and man are both similar as he stands ‘self under self’, just as the farm is ‘farm under farm’ showing how both have complex layers and are both constantly changing. Several times within ‘Summer Farm’, nature is compared to the man made, ‘the water in the horse-trough’ and ‘green as glass’ suggesting that man seeks for the familiar; this in turn leads to the conclusion that man is unfamiliar with nature.

The use of a quiet reflective tone throughout both poems whilst containing different complex ideas echoes how similar and different man and nature are. The ignorance of man’s surroundings and how both poets comment on man’s ability to see only what it wants to see shows how man’s view of the world is shrewd. The main messages of both poems are developed through observations and through these the reader is allowed to draw his or her own conclusions about nature

Summer FarmBiographical Information

• MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910 and divided his time, for the rest of his life, betweenhis native city and Assynt in the Scottish Highlands from where his mother’s family came from.• He was schooled at the Royal High School and studied classics at the University of Edinburgh.• During World War II MacCaig registered as a conscientious objector, a move that many at thetime criticised.• For the early part of his working life, he was employed as a school teacher in primary schools.• His first collection, Far Cry, was published in 1943. He continued to publish throughout hislifetime and was extremely prolific in the amount that he produced.• In 1967 he was appointed Fellow in Creative Writing at Edinburgh. He became a reader inpoetry in 1970, at the University of Stirling.

Metaphysics• Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. It is concerned with explaining the ultimate nature of being and the world.• It relates to questions that cannot be answered in factual terms. i.e. science may tell us how the universe works, but why it exists is a metaphysical question.- Consciousness of your own being - which can be burdensome, frightening, confusing- Putting things in perspective – from being self-centred to being a tiny part of something vast/expansive/complex

Analysis• In the first stanza MacCaig examines the world around him. While this examination can be viewed as a mere description of a setting for the poem, it also speaks for the thought process of the narrator (MacCaig). He considers the vast scale of the world but also its detail and preciseness.• This random preciseness “hang zigzag” “nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines”leads the narrator into metaphysical thought and the next stanza, as he questions, why?• The second stanza contains dual meaning. One meaning is a continuation of the description of setting• The second meaning looks at how MacCaig’s observation leads him into deep thought. The swallow is used as a metaphor of his thought, free to roam through the “sky”. As the “hen stares at nothing with one eye”, so does the narrator gaze at his surroundings absent-mindedly. “A swallow falls”, suddenly a thought comes to him “out of an empty sky”and he gains a flicker of understanding or emotion as the thought is “flickering through the barn” before it “dives up again into the dizzy blue”and he loses his train of thought. The word dizzy conveys a sense of confusion afterwards.• The third stanza is the beginning of a change of focus in the poem. Until now MacCaig has focused his attention on those things outside of him and he now redirects his thought toward himself. This change is immediately denoted by the use of “I”• MacCaig shows fear at the idea of contemplating something that we cannot understand and not knowing what thoughts it will lead him to. The prospect of metaphysical thought: trying to make sense of an idea that cannot be solved in a logical way is daunting.• MacCaig’s conscious now leaves him, in a figurative sense, so as to better see himself, or try and view himself objectively. The grasshopper, representing MacCaig’s conscious, “unfolds his legs”, jumps free of himself. “Finding himself in space”refers to his conscious being above himself as he looks down upon the world and himself within the farm.• “Self under self, a pile of selves I stand threaded on time”is a portrayal of the idea that he (his perception of things) is just the now, there is also versions (different perceptions) of himself in thepast and the future, the “pile of selves… threaded on time”.• The “metaphysic hand”is his mind reaching out and looking beyond the farm, lifting “the farm like a lid”, and seeing the past and future of the farm as well as his own as they are intertwined inthe present.• What he sees when he lifts the farm is described in the last line, “farm within farm, and in the centre, me”. This shows that like himself, there are more farms in the past and future and that he is in the centre.

• Overall, this illustrates the metaphysical idea that we are just the now, there is also the infinite nature of the past and present which we can imagine or consider but not understand. • Further interpretations that can be taken from the last stanza are that in removing his conscious from himself and conceiving the idea of his perspective changing over time he “brings discontinuity and instability to the self”and has “wrenched it both from its original contemplative and fusional unity with the world and from its eternal self-sufficient wholeness, into an agonising and lonely consciousness of itself”• This sense of multiple selves changing over time means that “the self as such no longer appears as the enduring core substance of the personality, but an extremely problematic concept which can never be fully comprehended but only glimpsed” • This sense of loss of identity is the consequence of his metaphysical thought which he was so afraid of in stanza 3.• “Having bypassed the objective reality of the world around him, the subject is now caught up in the contemplation of himself.”The use of the subjective pronoun “I”in the latter part of the poem changes to the objective “me”. MacCaig ends up “naming and pinpointing himself at the cost of losing his own truth”in an attempt to gain an illusive image of himself. “For the subject cannot (or must not) be objectified nor be studied in an objective way”• The “I”in the poem rhyming with the “eye”in the second stanza indicating that it is the conscious viewing “me”the object that MacCaig is trying to “see”which is also a rhyme.

Line 1- 2: oxymoron: not only is the farm described; it depicts the series of contrasts that plague McCaig’s mind. Straws exude an aura of domesticity, nature and comfort, but at the same time are as dangerous as lightning. his thoughts which move abruptly and not smoothly like zigzags. They are tame because he decision he must make is not dangerous but at the same time can affect his life forever (they sear through his heart like lightning. The position of hanging is uncertain and not stable, reflecting his thoughts.

Line 2-3: oxymoron - Water is typically seen as shiny and glassy but here it is also countered by the murky green, reflecting the uncertainty of his future. uncertain of the consequences of selling his farm or maintaining it.

Line 4: Symbolism: Nine = odd number, signifying disharmony; ducks wobble in “two straight lines,” = an impossible task. This reflects the conflicting sides of a situation when it can be seen in two opposing ways Despite his ability to see both sides of the question, his mind wobbles like the ducks in indecision.

Line 5-6: This is literally impossible. But it looks with “one eye” instead of none or two. This signifies a one-sided view of things. Nothing makes sense. Still, he gropes around for inspiration out of the nothingness. He picks up a thought without analyzing deeply.

Line 6-8: Metaphor “an empty sky” =symbol of nothingness, Paradox: “A swallow falls … dives up again” It comes down in search for food (symbol for inspiration and substance) but finding nothing, returns to the “dizzy” uncertainty. The colour blue exudes calmness. The setting, the barn, is an enclosed room, representing a mind closed to inspiration

Line 10: ‘I’ persona - He tries not to think because he is “afraid of where a thought might take me.” He is afraid because such thoughts can be heavy/daunting/unproductive; he is afraid of the burden of philosophical indulgence – contemplating existing can be depressing

Line 11-12: Analogy - grasshopper with plated face, unfolding his legs = face is rigid, no expression, wants to keep things straight/simple; unfolding his mind might propel him into nothingness. What he fears is that like the grasshopper that jumps, he will tread into the unknown, symbolized by empty space. There is none of the stability of the ground (which symbolises the known, mundane/everyday life) states his conclusion/epiphany:

Line 13: repetition “a pile of selves,” “self under self.” This alludes to his ancestors who had managed the farm.

Line 14-16: Metaphor: “threaded on time.” - he is the descendent of a line of farm-owners, he explains that “with metaphysic hand/Lift the farm like a lid and see/ Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.” (Russian-doll-structure, he’s trapped in the layers) Metaphorically and philosophically, he tries to detach himself and see the farm from a distant perspective, but: farm = his identity, connected to it and its past, he belongs there and makes him him

I persona is contemplating his identity: farm serves as analogy but also as a grounded root for his identity Tone: philosophical, uncertain, nostalgic, contemplating Style and form: Rhyme scheme AABB for 4 stanzas. It is regular. The language used is

metaphysical, that is to say, philosophical and associating the poet’s thoughts with nature. It is highly symbolic. McCaig was known as a metaphysical poet.

Poetic Devices/Techniques• MacCaig uses two similes in the first stanza to create a detailed image in our minds as to whathe is seeing. “Straws like tame lightnings”creates the image of the sharp crooked nature of lightningreflected in a less extreme, “tame”, way by the straw.• The second simile, “green as glass”, is a strange one as one would not normally consider glass tobe green. However MacCaig’s use of this phrase vivifies the idea that the water is still and calmwithout having to say so.• MacCaig also uses the alliteration of like, lightnings and lie in the first stanza. As mentioned earlier, this creates a calm feeling by slowing down the reader• The first line of the second stanza ends unfinished, the rest of the sentence is the beginning of the second line, “then picks it up”. This emphasises the idea of picking it up, of having a thought, as mentioned earlier. • The hen in this stanza also acts as a metaphor for people and the way they think• The rest of the second stanza is written with commas so as to separate out the swallow’s journey into three pieces, a pause between each. By splitting up the journey it further reflects the idea it represents, that of thought.• The calm state of mind is further emphasised in the third stanza. MacCaig uses commas to slow down the reader and the long vowel sound in cool to create this effect• The second line of the stanza leaves us hanging on the dash (-) as we consider where the poem is leading us just as MacCaig ponders where his thoughts might take him.• The dash then serves as a link to the rest of the stanza to compare the way the grasshopper is jumping to the way the narrator is “afraid of where a thought might take”them, “in space”.• MacCaig’s use of animals in metaphors to describe human thought is ironic considering that animals are considered incapable of deep thought, especially chickens and insects. In this way MacCaig suggests that humans are but animals in the face of the mysteries of the universe.• In the fourth stanza MacCaig uses commas to slow down the reader and make them think about what they are reading.• This is most obvious in the last line of the stanza and poem which is split up into three parts, each of which builds up the main idea.• MacCaig uses the simile lifting “the farm like a lid”with a “metaphysic hand”. The metaphysic hand is his mind looking beyond the farm now and seeing what was and what will be.• Summer Farm has an obvious rhyme scheme of AABB CCDD AEFF GGHH. The AE lines may have been intended to rhyme, but the break in the rhyme scheme leads to a noticed change thatplaces emphasis on this line.• There appears to be no specific meter which ties to the idea that the poem is a stream of consciousness.

In the opening line of the poem, MacCraig provides the reader with a simile, comparing the ________ to _______. This description is also oxymoronic as lightning is described as ‘tame’, whereas is nature lightning is often wild, explosive and threatening. By comparing ‘straws’ to ‘tame lightnings’, MacCraig gives the impression ……………………Another descriptive device is given in the run-on line in relation to the straws which ‘ hang …………’ which suggests that ……………………… . In the second line of the first line a simile is used again ‘green as glass’. Here the poet is describing ………………………. In the final line of the first stanza MacCraig gives the reader another contrasting image the ‘ducks wobbling’ in ‘two straight lines’. ‘Wobbling’ denotes the way ……………, though there is a sense of order portrayed by …………………………… In the second stanza, movement is conveyed by the swallow. The actions of the swallow are described as __________________. ‘Dizzy blue’ is also an effective image because —————————— . In the third stanza, the speaker of the poem becomes more evident through the use of the ———— ‘I’. The use of ‘I’ reinforces ______________________ . Though a subtle comparison, it is clear that the speaker of the poem has compared himself to the grasshopper. The grasshopper is similar to him because ……………. The tone of the poem shifts completely to the speaker of the poem as he describes himself as ‘a pile of selves’. This suggests that ……… . In the final lines of the poem the poet describes an invisible hand – a metaphysic hand –which lifts the farm ‘like a lid’ and we see eventually ‘ in the centre, me’. In this final image the writer is describing ………………………………………………

In the opening line of the poem, MacCraig provides the reader with a simile, comparing the straws to the tame lightning. This description is also oxymoronic as lightning is described as ‘tame’, whereas is

nature lightning is often wild, explosive and threatening. By comparing ‘straws’ to ‘tame lightings’, MacCraig gives the impression of that everything can be different and even if we don’t expect it. Another descriptive device is given in the run-on line in relation to the straws which ‘hang zigzag’ which suggests that really looks like lightning, because lightning is also described as a zigzag. In the second line of the first line a simile is used again ‘green as glass”. Here the poet is describing the water in the house-through. In the final line of the first stanza MacCraig gives the reader another contrasting image the ‘ducks wobbling’ in ‘two straight lines’. ‘Wobbling’ denotes the way they move, though there is a sense of order portrayed by “two straight lines”In the second stanza, movement is conveyed by the swallow. The actions of the swallow are described as a bird that appeared from nowhere and disappeared the same as appeared. ‘Dizzy blue’ is also an effective image because it describes the color of the sky using literature words. In the third stanza, the speaker of the poem becomes more evident through the use of the sentence which starts with ‘I’. The use of ‘I’ reinforces that the reader of the poem started talking about himself. Though a subtle comparison, it is clear that the speaker of the poem has compared himself to the grasshopper. The grasshopper is similar to him because they are both on the grass and under the sun, they feel free like in space. The tone of the poem shifts completely to the speaker of the poem as he describes himself as ‘a pile of selves’. This suggests that he is describing himself as a Kalinka doll.. In the final lines of the poem the poet describes an invisible hand – a metaphysic hand –which lifts the farm ‘like a lid’ and we see eventually ‘in the center, me’. In this final image the writer is describing like he is dreaming.

‘Summer Farm’ by Norman MacCaig, is a poem about a persona observing the world around him, and also the thought process of the persona/narrator. The first stanza is a collection of observations by the persona of the environment around him (presumably a summer farm) – of straws like tame lightning (an oxymoron, for how can lightning be tame?), the water in a horse-trough that is green as glass, and ‘nine ducks (that) go wobbling by in two straight lines’. The random precision of the stanza (ie. ‘nine ducks’, ‘two straight lines’, ‘hang zigzag’) the leads the persona into metaphysical thought, and the readers into the second stanza. The second stanza has dual meaning; one in which it is simply a continuation of the collection of observations by the persona, and the second, in which it is a metaphorical description of his train of thought. “The hen stares at nothing with one eye’ – the persona gazes at his surroundings absent-mindedly; “A swallow falls’ - a thought suddenly comes to him ‘out of an empty sky’ and he gains understanding or emotion only for a moment (‘flickering through the barn’ ) until it ‘dives up again into the dizzy blue’ – he loses his train of thought. The word dizzy, as well as the fact that if read literally, the stanza appear confusing, emphasizes the confusion that the persona feels afterwards. The third stanza shows the persona now changing his focus towards himself; and showing fear at the idea of contemplating something we cannot possibly understand (metaphysical thought) and where it might take him. Then, his conscious figuratively leaves him in the form of a grasshopper and ‘finds himself in space’ – his conscious being above himself as he looks down upon the world with a better, clearer view, therefore eliminating confusion. The fourth and last stanza starts of with the line ‘Self under self, a pile of selves I stand / Threaded on time’ – the idea that he (his perception of things) is just the present, there are other versions (different perceptions of himself) in the past, and that will be created in the future. The persona then ‘with metaphysic hand / Lift the farm like a lid and see/ Farm within farm, and in the centre, me’. The metaphysic hand represents figuratively his mind reaching out and looking beyond the farm, seeing beyond the present at the past and future of the farm, for the farm is like himself (‘Farm within farm’) having other versions of itself in the past and future’), and he is in the centre of it.

However, soon enough again, there will be a clear shift from not-self to self, as is the case, for instance, in “Summer Farm” (CP 7), where “we see him [...] as the centre-point of his own poetry” (Hendry, 67)

As a matter of fact this early poem (1955) already sets the pattern for a long list of structurally similar pieces, including “I and my thoughts of you.” In it, too, the speaker veers from contemplation of nature (“the poet is marvelling at the world around him,” says McCabe — 113) to self-engrossment, and contrary to what happens in “Instrument and agent” there is no attempt at blurring the clear-cut division between self and not-self, each of these taking up one half of the poem. The farm is metonymically foregrounded in the first two stanzas (“Straws” and “hen” at the incipit of each), whereas the poet’s self (“I”, “Self”) becomes the focus of the last two. And, if it does appear in the second part of the poem, the farm is then just a simile for the poet’s self (“Farm within farm,” l. 16, being an analogy for “Self under self,” l. 13), which is by now the true focus of the poem.

To be sure, “MacCaig is never simply a ‘nature’ poet and his preference for linking precise

observation with creative wit can be seen in [this] poem [...]: ‘A hen stares at nothing with one eye, / Then picks it up’” (Watson, The Literature of Scotland 430). However, his “wit,” highly idiosyncratic as it may be, is always geared to poetic insight into reality: “straws” look indeed “like tame lightnings” and the hen does “stare [...] at nothing with one eye, / Then picks it up;” metaphors do not strike us as far-fetched and intricate expressions of subjectivity, unlike, for instance, the Metaphysicals’ conceits. Instead, they highlight the peculiarities of the world around us, much as Zen koans or haikus do, revealing the object as it is hic et nunc — “la chose comme elle est, dans l'instant de sa révélation soudaine et là” (Munier iv). Besides, most statements are plainly descriptive (“The water in the horsetrough shines,” “Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines,” “A swallow falls,” etc.). In that sense, the first half of the poem is definitely concerned with the object, and not with the subject, of perception. The latter is, to that extent, transparent and at one with the scene he describes.

The intrusion of the “I” as of the third stanza marks the beginning of consciousness (still dormant — “not thinking” — at that stage) and the attendant distance that will then open up between the observer and the object at which he gazes, both in terms of space (“Afraid of where a thought might take me,” l. 10; “in space,” l. 12) and time (which crops up in the last stanza). Whereas “there is no distinction between the subject and the object in the real experienc. When one starts to distinguish subject and object, the experience disappears” (Hanh 83). Consciousness becomes possible only at the cost of the original indifferentiation. As Garaudy points out, rephrasing Hegel’s thought, “consciousness demands opposition, otherwise there is no consciousness of nature but merely nature. Consciousness, even in its most basic form, implies division and the splitting of unity: the knowledge of the object is not equal to the object of knowledge.”6 What the poem acknowledges is the basic incompatibility of being and consciousness, or of being and the symbolic order (speech or thought), which constitutes a mediation but also a division between the subject and reality — what Lacan epitomizes in the formula: “I think where I'm not, therefore I am where I do not think”7 (Écrits 277).

In addressing this philosophical issue MacCaig enters into what Linda R. Williams describes as “the familiar modern dichotomy in British poetry, that of the privileging of inside or outside. Is poetic writing an attempt to clarify as succinctly as possible the autonomous and the objective, or is it an act of poetic individuation and self-definition?” (81). It is certainly somewhere between these two extremes that MacCaig will attempt to find the right positioning.

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00mr8yj/profiles/norman-maccaigQuestions

1. Farm life and the poet’s observationsa) Write down 3 examples of oxymorons used in the first 2 stanzas.(two of them could also be classed as similes). Explain why they are oxymorons. b) Write down 2 animals featured in the poem that have symbolic value. What are those animals doing? Explain in detail what they symbolise. (hint: linking it to the poet himself) 2. From External observation to Internal struggle. a) At which point in the novel do we see the transition from observations of farm live/nature to MacCaig’s inner thoughts? Which technique is used to indicate this? b) Despite the persona’s claim of “not thinking” we know that there is a lot that occupies his mind. What could that be? Write down 2 things that the persona is contemplating. (hint: link to the theme of identity and to background information about the author) .c) What is a ‘metaphysical thought’? Why is he “afraid of where a thought might take [him]”? (or: What is he afraid of?) 3. The epiphany/realisationa) Write down your interpretation of the last stanza: what is the poet realising that might help him make a decision? Which line represents the idea that the past – present – future is ultimately linked? Which technique is used? How do you interpret the “pile of selves”? \we know the author is not plagued by a form of multiple personality disorder. Explain this metaphor. a) What is the “metaphysic hand” in stanza 4? Tick the 3 answers you think fit best. God’s hand giving the author insight and clarityb) His mind detaching itself from the restrictions of the present and his confused emotions to see more clearly the relationship between farm and himselfc) His desire to become a farmerd) His thoughts that reach deep into his heart to search for his identity

e) His own hand that will take the farm house and replace it with new buildings to renovate the farm.f) The hands of his ancestors who build the farmg) Links to the Russian doll concept; the metaphysic hand is the first doll that opens up to reveal another similar but smaller doll which can be opened again to reveal another doll identical to the first two and so on.h) His mind looking beyond the present farm in order to see the past and the future of the farm and how his identity links to it4. In his interpretation of the poem, Ben Ingram writes: “The last line “farm within farm, and in the centre, me” illustrates the metaphysical idea that we are just the ‘now’, there is also the infinite nature of the past and the unknown future which we can imagine or consider but not understand.” What kind of struggle is this statement talking about? Why has MacCaig problems seeing himself in an objective way? Respond in a short paragraph. 5. Write a short personal response on how a reader like yourself could relate to the poem, its subject matter and ideas.6. Farm life and the poet’s observationsc) Write down 3 examples of oxymorons used in the first 2 stanzas.(two of them could also be classed as similes). Explain why they are oxymorons. d) Write down 2 animals featured in the poem that have symbolic value. What are those animals doing? Explain in detail what they symbolise. (hint: linking it to the poet himself) 7. From External observation to Internal struggle. d) At which point in the novel do we see the transition from observations of farm live/nature to MacCaig’s inner thoughts? Which technique is used to indicate this? e) Despite the persona’s claim of “not thinking” we know that there is a lot that occupies his mind. What could that be? Write down 2 things that the persona is contemplating. (hint: link to the theme of identity and to background information about the author) .f) What is a ‘metaphysical thought’? Why is he “afraid of where a thought might take [him]”? (or: What is he afraid of?) 8. The epiphany/realisationb) Write down your interpretation of the last stanza: what is the poet realising that might help him make a decision? Which line represents the idea that the past – present – future is ultimately linked? Which technique is used? How do you interpret the “pile of selves”? \we know the author is not plagued by a form of multiple personality disorder. Explain this metaphor. i) What is the “metaphysic hand” in stanza 4? Tick the 3 answers you think fit best. God’s hand giving the author insight and clarityj) His mind detaching itself from the restrictions of the present and his confused emotions to see more clearly the relationship between farm and himselfk) His desire to become a farmerl) His thoughts that reach deep into his heart to search for his identitym) His own hand that will take the farm house and replace it with new buildings to renovate the farm.n) The hands of his ancestors who build the farmo) Links to the Russian doll concept; the metaphysic hand is the first doll that opens up to reveal another similar but smaller doll which can be opened again to reveal another doll identical to the first two and so on.p) His mind looking beyond the present farm in order to see the past and the future of the farm and how his identity links to it9. In his interpretation of the poem, Ben Ingram writes: “The last line “farm within farm, and in the centre, me” illustrates the metaphysical idea that we are just the ‘now’, there is also the infinite nature of the past and the unknown future which we can imagine or consider but not understand.” What kind of struggle is this statement talking about? Why has MacCaig problems seeing himself in an objective way? Respond in a short paragraph. 10. Write a short personal response on how a reader like yourself could relate to the poem, its subject matter and ideas.Noku te whenua, o oku tupuna. - The land is mine, inherited from my ancestors.

- searching for one’s identity can be a long process - location is a vital part to our identity, - decision making can be difficult especially if we try to look at a problem/dilemma objectively-could relate to people forgetting their past and not thinking of the value of family ties for the future generations

A BirthdaySynopsisThe object of the speaker’s celebratory statement, ‘my love is come to me’, is ambiguous.

Throughout the poem, she attempts to capture in language her joy at the return of the ‘birthday of her life’ (line 15).Investigating A Birthday

What are your associations with the idea of a ‘birthday’? Do you see these associations shared by the speaker in that poem?

Rossetti refers to the act of singing and musical expression. How does this affect the mood the poem creates? Write down references to the act of singing. Of what is the creation of music shown to be an expression?

CommentaryPublication

Rossetti composed A Birthday in 1857. It was first published in the literary periodical, Macmillan’s Magazine, in 1861 and was included in Goblin Market and Other Poems the following year. Macmillan’s Magazine was founded in 1859 and was one of the most significant literary and intellectual periodicals of the Victorian era. By having samples of her work printed in periodicals such as Macmillan’s Magazine, Rossetti widened her readership significantly.

More on periodicals: A periodical is a magazine which is issued at regular intervals throughout the year. The Victorian period saw a rise in the publication and readership of periodicals. Periodicals often contained serialised fiction, poetry, articles and reviews. Rossetti wrote poetry for several literary and intellectual periodicals during her career.

Language and musicRossetti’s interest in combining language with music becomes apparent given that:

• Several begin with the mention of singing • Many, such as A Birthday, are composed with a song-like structure and rhythm.

The return of a loverIn A Birthday, the speaker is celebrating her love coming ‘back’ to her. It is not clear where he has

been away but this is not the important factor here. More significant are the feelings that his return arouses.The language used to describe his return is similar to that used in the Old Testament book, the Song

of Songs. Here, joy is expressed about a powerful love relationship. One long-held view is that the Song is an allegory of the love relationship between any of:

• God and Israel • Christ and the Church • Christ and the individual soul.

Here, the speaker declares that her happiness and comfort come from the presence of a certain lover. Whether this lover is Jesus, a spouse, or someone else is not revealed.

Easter and the arrival of springThroughout A Birthday, the arrival of spring is celebrated. The trees are in blossom, the birds are

singing and shoots are springing into life. With winter coming to an end, the speaker’s own state of waiting is finally over.

In Western Christianity, the celebration of Easter always falls on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. The celebration of Jesus rising from the dead can therefore be associated with the appearance of new life in nature in the season of spring.

The ultimate birthdayThroughout her writings Rossetti repeatedly speaks of the ultimate ‘birthday’ of the Second

Coming.More on the Second Coming: Central to the Christian faith is the idea that ultimately a new Kingdom will arrive which will replace earth. This Kingdom will have Jesus at its head and be a

place of peace and security. The New Testament book of Revelation describes this place as somewhere

where there will be no more hunger, thirst, or tears (Revelation 7:16-17). See Aspects of literature > Big ideas from the Bible > Apocalypse, Revelation, the End Times, the Second Coming.Investigating A Birthday

• What comes to mind when you think about spring? • Do you see these associations shared by the speaker of the poem?

• List the phrases which indicate that the speaker depends on another for happiness • To what extent do you think people are defined by the relationships they are in (somebody’s

child, somebody’s sibling, somebody’s pupil/employee etc)? • Do you think an individual can understand him/herself in isolation from such relationships? • What evidence of this can you find in the poem?

In A Birthday by Christina Rossetti, vivid descriptions of happiness fill the verse. Some such descriptions are 'a singing bird,' 'an apple-tree' filled with fruit, and 'a rainbow shell in a halcyon sea.' On this birthday, love is first experienced. Ms. Rossetti uses lots of description from nature to convey her feelings toward a birthday.

She expresses happiness as fullness and as a well-watered tree that sustains life by harboring a nest in its branches and a tree ready for harvest. A raised platform made of down and silk speaks of warmth and comfort. She wants it lined with fur and purple as in royalty. Doves, pomegranates and peacocks add to this royal theme. She feels special and royal on her birthday because she has found love. The verbs "hang," "carve," "work," are commands that an official might daily use. The doves represent purity and innocence. While at the same time, they are common, just like love. Pomegranates bring out the red and show multiplicity. The peacocks show royalty with blue and green feathers. The spots on the tail symbolize her desire that the whole world to see that she has a lover.

Ms. Rossetti lived between 1830 and 1894. The poem appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in April of 1861. It uses lots of medieval terms to convey the message of her feelings about that special birthday. Ms. Rossetti wrote mostly devotional and children's poems in her later years after she experimented with forms such as sonnets, ballads, and hymns finally settling on devotional and children's poetry.

Ms. Rossetti had three lovers any of which could describe the one in A Birthday. She never married however; though, she had these three suitors. She always refused to marry because of religious reasons. She, her mother and sister devoted themselves to the Anglo-Catholic movement from the time she was fourteen until her death. Two of the three suitors were painters, so maybe a lot of her vivid descriptions come from watching them work.

If one is to look at this poem from a religious viewpoint, as much of her work did, then A Birthday would not refer to a physical birthday but to a spiritual one. The peacock symbolizes Christianity. The dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit. The pomegranates symbolize the resurrection, symbols Christina would know and envision for her poem. The dais too would remind her of the church and her going forward to give her heart to God.

First of all, I think it's fair to say that there are loads of similies in this poem. In the first stanza alone, every other sentence uses the words 'like a', comparing her heart to a bird, a tree and a shell. I also think that the speaker of the poem is a female. I can't say it is the poet, but it seems like it is about a woman who has finally found someone to make her happy. I get the feeling that it is not an outside factor that has brought all of this joy to her, but some inner peace. She never makes any mention of a man (or woman), so it's difficult to place the cause of her happiness on one thing.

Please bear with me now because I'm going to deviate a little bit and talk about symbols. To be fair, I'm really really bad at analyzing poetry. I'm also just going to ignore the first stanza because I can't find any symbols in this. The first thing to catch my attention was when she talked about fleurs-de-lys. That could be one of two things: the fleurs-de-lys is the symbol of French royalty as well as a flower itself. The flower represents female virtue and spirituality. I think with the way the poem is structured and the diction (words used) works, it's fair to say that she means the flower itself. At least, that would work for the first verse since it deals a lot with nature. The second verse does seem to deal more with rich and material things. All in all, I think the poem is really Rosetti talking about how she doesn't need anyone else to make her happy but herself. I also think it is about her loving herself. But, as I said earlier, I'm really bad at analyzing poetry on my own.

Answer: She never makes any mention of a man (or woman), so it's difficult to place the cause of her happiness on one thing. I am going to propose something that may be making her happy. The literal and most obvious interpretation i believe is to assume it is a lover. What if, however, it were a child? This

may seem far fetched but the Birthday part confuses me unless i take it as maybe the birthday of a child? In the poem, “A Birthday”, Christina Rossetti uses extensive and positive imagery, mostly

pertaining to natural descriptions. In fact, the whole poem is composed of imagery, that are all solely for the purpose of relaying the sense of pure joy the speaker is feeling. The first line starts off with “My heart is like a singing bird” which gives the impression that her heart feels as elated as a bird does when singing. Another example is, “My heart is like an apple tree whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit.” This illustrates the fact that just like the apple tree with its limbs full of apples, the speaker’s heart is also “full” which could mean they are content, fulfilled, at peace, or something along those lines. The speaker also says “My heart is like a rainbow shell,” a colorful image possibly meaning that her “colorful” heart means the speaker feels vibrant and bright. Obviously the first part of the poem explains the emotions that the speaker is feeling. The second part of the poem is more focused on celebratory imagery, celebrating the speaker’s anticipation for the “birthday of their life.” It’s clearly known that the speaker is in love when they say “Carve it in doves and pomegranates,” since both doves and pomegranates symbolize love and romance. From these examples it can be confirmed that the speaker gives a lot of picturesque examples meant for explaining how the speaker passionately feels ecstatic, happy, and in love. Most of the imagery mentions natural things like plants, animals, etc. and this poem describes the speaker’s joy and bliss, which means that the speaker associates nature with feelings of happiness and romance.

"A Birthday" is one of Rossetti's most exuberant poems and at the same time, significantly, one of her most "aesthetic." This brief lyric, written in 1857, is dense with beautiful, richly ambiguous images. It is symmetrically structured in two eight-line stanzas. In the first the speaker compares her heart, burgeoning with love, to images of perfect fulfillment from nature: a "singing bird" at home in a "watered shoot"; an "apple tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit"; a "rainbow shell" paddling in "a halcyon sea." The second stanza moves indoors as the speaker orders preparations for the elaborate ceremonial celebration of "the birthday of my life," because "my love is come to me."

Thus, the poem moves in interior directions away from descriptions of the natural world, perhaps because the idealized images of nature that appear in the first stanza carry with them the inevitability of their own disruption. The "singing bird" inhabits a "watered shoot," surrounded by dangerous turbulence. The apple tree with its "thickset fruit" bears weighty resonances of the Fall. The "rainbow shell" paddling in "a halcyon sea" is vulnerable, as a delicate object, to the changing moods of the potentially destructive ocean. These images of natural perfection are momentary and precarious, and the speaker's choice of them as analogues to her heart insists upon the transience of fulfilling love. The need to retreat from mutability is confirmed in stanza two, in which the speaker moves away from nature and orders the erection of what can alternately be perceived as a ceremonial platform, a bed, and an ornate memorial work of art. However, the ambiguity of the initial words of command in the stanza — "Raise me" — suggest resurrection and favor the last reading. The world of art into which the rejoicing speaker withdraws in stanza two serves as a bulwark against mutability while producing a celebratory monument. The rich artistic details of the "dais" overshadow the impulse of love that generates its gothic artifice (note, for instance, the use of the archaic "vair"), and those details, in contrast with the natural images of the poem's first stanza, imply that the only true and permanent fulfillment of love is to be found in the art it gives birth to.

It's pretty straightforward but it does introduce some puzzles: like whether the 'love' she celebrates is religious or sensual (or both). The metaphor of the birthday of her life could be celebrating a 'born again' kind of experience, and the metaphor of the 'dais' in the second stanza has been taken to be (among other things) an altar, a throne, and a big double-bed (with silk sheets and downy pillows!)...

I think you will need to look at the connotations of some of the words in the second stanza: pomegranates, for example, are symbols of fertility because of the many seeds they contain.

The other things that stand out in this poem are the transition from simple similes in the first stanza to an extended metaphor in the second, and the effect this has (imagine the poem without the second stanza - it would be pretty trite really); also the rhythm - notice how many of the lines in the second stanza are stressed on the first syllable - think about what effect this has, and how it builds up to the last two lines where you get that powerful enjambment (the best thing in the poem, in my opinion): Because the birthday of my life/Is come, my love is come to me.

This poem is surely the most exquisite recognition and celebration of the ecstasy of falling in love for the first time (a kind of love typically as much spiritual as sensual). The lover feels reborn into a life charged with new and richer meaning. Hence the birthday metaphor.

A merely mechanical analysis (naming the meter, pointing out the rhymes, etc) risks missing the

point, or at least diminishing its impact. When some marvellous butterfly emerges from its chrysalis and takes wing, you don't best appreciate its beauty by catching and dissecting it.

Another poem of CGR's, in bitter contrast to 'A Birthday', is 'A Better Resurrection' (see in the Classical Poet List at the top of this thread). In that, she echoes the first poem by the word 'resurrection' (analogous to a birthday) in the title, and by using several 'My heart is like ...' similes, but the mood is dark. The only comfort she can envisage is to turn to religion.

I don't know whether she was bipolar and wrote these two poems at the opposite ends of a mood swing, or whether her first love really did end in some shattering let-down. The generally melancholic tone of the rest of her work suggests that the latter was the case, and that she never got over it.

It is in the nature of love to connect. Our love flies out into the world to link itself with any common bird, tree or shell that reflects its sudden joy—and returns to store these images deep within our heart as proof that we have, in this intoxicated moment, glimpsed something real. The doors of perception are thrown open and before they slam shut, the inner and outer domains become one.

Rossetti’s poem starts with the plainest sights and ends in an exotic scene of mystical rapture. In the first stanza, a “singing bird” conveys sheer happi-ness, and reminds us of the naïve charm we find in the perfectly ordinary when we are smitten. The “apple tree” groaning under the weight of its fruit at harvest time is a symbol of love’s fertility.

Each image is a mood to explore. If, for example, we close our eyes and picture the “rainbow shell” glimmering beneath the surface of a “halcyon” or utterly becalmed sea, our breath will slow and our mind will clear in response to such intense beauty. Nest, apple and shell are all heart-shaped and for the poet as equally full of delight.

Rossetti’s language is subtly evocative of what it describes. The repetition of “my heart” is like a hyp-notic chant that draws us into her state of mind, while rhyme comes and goes at ease to suggest the casual associations of a daydream. The phrase “thickset fruit” has a tantalizingly robust thickness of sound that seems to materialize a crisp, scented pippin in our mouth.

In the second stanza there is a tremendous shift in tone and imagery. We are transported from the humble to the majestic, from the natural to the art-fully fashioned. This is true to what we know of love, which at first induces a wise receptivity, and then drives us to invest our vision in tangible ob-jects—from presents to an attractive home.

“Raise me a dais” she commands, before deliver-ing a set of imperatives: “hang,” “carve” and “work.” There is a real sense of labor, but what is this “dais,” this platform, that she is crafting?

As a throne, it suggests her love is powerful. As an altar it suggests her love is sacred. And as a bed she decorates with the utmost finery, it suggests her love is of the flesh as well as the soul. We can almost stroke the silk, the feathers and the fur (“vair” refers to a squirrel pelt); see the purple, the silver and the gold; and hear the doves fluttering within this en-chanted castle.

We have stepped into a pre-Raphaelite painting, in which earthly and spiritual power are conjoined. Its purple hue, for instance, has adorned kings and bish-ops ever since it was first produced at great expense 2,000 years ago in the ancient city of Tyre. Likewise, love elevates us from mere serfs to noble savants. As for the pomegranates, they are an abiding symbol of plenty. Split one with a knife and watch the scarlet seeds spill out among the juice and luscious pith.

The white doves and iridescent blue-green pea-cocks brilliantly contrast purity and splendor; and, for me, the “hundred eyes” in the peacock’s tail represent Rossetti’s desire to visualize her passion. Love, above all, is an aesthetic experience. It longs to see.

Stylistically, Rossetti conducts a measured music, in which each line forms a unit of sense. But in the penultimate line, she withholds the main verb and the sentence runs over to the next. This momentum, combined with the repetition of “come” and the al-literation of “life” and “love,” ends the poem on a heart-felt cry of bliss.

This is quite literally a birthday—a rebirth. Love is consummated. The apple is tasted. Language and tone

RepetitionThere is a marked amount of repetition in A Birthday

• Each alternate line in the first verse begins ‘My heart is like’ (lines 1, 3, 5, 7). This emphasises the speaker’s struggle to find the language to describe her emotions and serves as a link between her own subjectivity and the external nature she observes

• The poem ends, ‘Is come, my love is come to me’ (line 16). By drawing attention to the word ‘come’, the speaker expresses her joy at the return of her lover and highlights the arrival of the

fulfilment of the time of waiting that she has undergone. AlliterationThe frequency of alliterated words in A Birthday emphasise its flowing pace and the rhythms of the natural world.Investigating language and tone

• Think about the voice that emerges • Does this voice bring out any particular emotions? • How far are you able to identify with the poetic speaker?

• For ease of reading, a feminine pronoun has been used to discuss the speakers of this poem. • What evidence is there to suggest that either speaker is actually a woman? • Would a difference in gender mean that you read the poems any differently?

• Do you consider that the speaker displays traits traditionally ascribed to a male or female voice? Structure and versificationMetre

The first verse of A Birthday is written in strict iambic tetrameter. This creates a song-like rhythm and means that a stress consistently falls on the word ‘heart’.

In the second verse, 4 out of the 7 lines begin with a trochee. Here, the stress falls on the verbs ‘Raise’, ‘Hang’, ‘Carve’ and ‘Work’ (lines 9, 10, 11, 13). By breaking out of the regular metrical scheme of the first verse, these trochees highlight the urgency of the speaker to create something new to celebrate the return of her love.Investigating structure and versification

• Read the first verse again closely, thinking about its rhythm • Which other words does the poem emphasise through the rhythm that the metre creates? • Which words are linked to one another through the metre?

• Like Song (when I am dead, my dearest), the poem is written in a 16 line form, divided up into 2 stanzas.

• Can you identify any further similarities in form? • Can you identify any differences? • How does the metre in each differ?

• What does the structure contribute to the poem? • Does it affect the tone in which the poems are read?

Imagery and symbolismThe imagery used in the first stanza draws on familiar natural objects but can also be read at

another level in the light of Rossetti’s knowledge of the Bible. In the second verse, the focus is on artificial objects hung, carved and worked by human hands. Various images in this verse demonstrate an awareness of traditional Christian art, as well as reflecting and celebrating human creativity.

A singing bird - To a ‘singing bird’ (line 1), vocal expression is as natural as breathing. By speaking of her ‘heart’ in these terms, the speaker indicates that her song forms a natural part of herself and is an overflow of her identity. The image of the singing bird is one which is often used in Romantic poetry. William Wordsworth emphasised the importance of expressing natural feelings when he argued that it was his intention to create a poetry which was a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. (See Literary context > Romantic poetry).

A watered shoot - By having a ‘nest’ in a ‘watered shoot’ (line 2), the speaker suggests that the sustenance upon which she can live and rest has been provided:

• The word shoot alludes to the first stages of growth of a plant as it emerges from the ground. By describing a shoot as ‘well watered’, the poem conveys ideas of lushness and fertility. However, rather than making a nest in a full grown tree, by making it in a shoot, the singing bird remains in a place of fragility, since it is easy to uproot or destroy a shoot

• The idea of being watered has biblical connotations. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, the believers in Jerusalem are encouraged by God’s promise that he will guide them and provide for their needs:

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs … You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Isaiah 58:11 TNIV

An apple tree - The image of the ‘apple tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit’ (lines 3-4) would be a familiar sight in an age more in touch with its agricultural roots than today

13. It recalls the imagery in Keats’ Ode to Autumn. This begins by describing fruit ripe and ready on apple trees:

Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness /Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun /Conspiring with him how to load and bless /With fruit the vines that round he thatch-eves run; /To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, /And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

9. Mention of apples might also lead Rossetti’s readers to think of the accounts of the first humans in the Garden of Eden before the Fall where they lived in perfect peace with nature and one another. It is also likely that Rossetti is alluding to the biblical concept of the Tree of Life. The writer of the Old Testament book Proverbs, declares that those who ‘lay hold’ of this tree ‘will be blessed’ (Proverbs 3:18). Rainbow … halcyon - By speaking of her heart as a ‘rainbow shell / That paddles in a halcyon sea’

(lines 5-6), the speaker provides an image of exuberant colour drifting at ease in tranquil waters.11. According to the Bible, the image of the rainbow refers to the fulfilment of God’s promises,

when God helped Noah to escape the flood which wiped out the known world. He then set a rainbow in the sky as a promise that never again would such an event occur (Genesis 19:3)

1. It is possible that the speaker perceives that God’s promises are being fulfilled in her life and wants to celebrate this

12. The term ‘halcyon’ comes from the Greek myth of a bird (possibly a kingfisher) which was said to breed about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea. According to ancient writers, it charmed the wind and waves so that the sea was especially calm during the period.

1. For English readers, the phrase ‘halcyon days’ was associated with ideas of joy, prosperity and tranquillity

2. The poem’s speaker uses the image of the halcyon sea to indicate the deep comfort and rest she has found.

By ending the first verse with the declaration that her ‘heart is gladder than all these’ (line 7), the speaker indicates that descriptions of the natural world are incapable of fully expressing her exuberant emotional state.

Pathetic fallacy - The speaker of A Birthday uses the technique of pathetic fallacy when she gives emotions to the ‘apple tree’ full of fruit and the ‘rainbow shell’. This is the treatment of inanimate objects, such as trees and houses, as if they had human feelings, thought or sensations. The term was invented by critic John Ruskin in 1856 when he wrote that the aim of the pathetic fallacy was ‘to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations and emotions’.

The Temple - Rossetti draws on the imagery used in the Old Testament to discuss the Temple which symbolised God’s presence with his people. For the Jews in the Old Testament, the Temple was the place where they met with God. A Birthday mentions purple hangings, carved fruit and statues of animals, which all figure in the descriptions of Solomon’s Temple given in 1 Kings 6:14, 1 Kings 6:18, 1 Kings 6:29 and 2 Chronicles 3:14 and 2 Chronicles 3:16.More on the Temple: In the teachings of the early church, recounted in the New Testament, the idea of God’s Temple shifts in meaning. Christians generally understand this Temple to be a model of an individual’s heart, where God communicates with the human soul. This understanding comes from the New Testament teaching that every Christian believer is understood as a temple in which the Holy Spirit can dwell.

A Dais - The word ‘dais’ (line 9) indicates a raised platform. The speaker seems to envisage a structure built in celebration of the return of her love. The ‘silk and down’ from which it is made are materials of softness and luxury, as well as conveying lightness, which adds to the sense of uplifting that the poem conveys

9. ‘Dais’ is also a word commonly associated with the raised part of a church upon which the altar and communion table are placed. Rossetti attended a high Anglican church (see Religious / philosophical context > Tractarianism) which emphasised the significance and symbolism of the structure of the church building and would have undoubtedly made use of a dais. Royalty and nobility - The imagery of ‘vair’, ‘purple’, ‘gold’, ‘silver’ and ‘fleur-de-lys’ (line 10) is

imagery traditionally associated with royalty and nobility• ‘vair’ is an expensive fur obtained from a variety of squirrel with a grey back and white belly. It

was often used in the 13th and 14th centuries as a trimming or lining for garments and is associated with heraldry

• The dye used to create purple tones was so expensive it was only available to the rich and therefore,

became a colour associated with royalty • Precious metals are associated with crowns and other regalia • The fleur–de-lys is a heraldic symbol derived from the lily. It was often engraved on the armour of

royalty. Birds - Following the description of the singing bird in the first verse, the second alludes to

representation of doves and peacocks on the dais.• Doves are used in the Bible to represent:

• Reconciliation and peace. This arises from the story of Noah, when a dove sent out from the Ark returns with an olive leaf in its beak, signifying that the storm / flood was over (Genesis 8:11)

• The Holy Spirit, as at the baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:16) • The description of ‘peacocks with a hundred eyes’ (line 12) corresponds to a traditional and

mythical understanding of the bird as a symbol of all-seeing God. Investigating imagery and symbolism

• List the imagery the speaker uses throughout the poem• Why do you think that she moves from describing the natural world to objects that have

been man-made? • What ambiguous aspects are there in the imagery described? • Do you think that the symbolism that is drawn upon adequately reflects the speaker’s joy?

• What images would you use to reflect a state of joy you were feeling? • Do these images correspond to any in the poem?

ThemesSelf-expression and the natural worldA Birthday is concerned with natural and spontaneous expression through song or poetry, beginning with the image of the ‘singing bird’ (l.1). Poetry provides a natural outlet for the speaker’s emotions.Memory and forgetfulnessMemory is a sustaining force in this poem. In A Birthday, the speaker’s joy in the arrival in her love is bound up in the memory of what he means or has meant to her. This hints at the notion that identity is founded upon memory and that self-awareness is constructed by the remembrance of a former self.Earthly life and ‘life after life’The images of new life in the natural world in A Birthday can be seen to allude to new life after death.Investigating themes

• List all the allusions to the natural world that the poem makes • How do these allusions correspond to the speaker’s emotional state? • What do they reveal about the purpose of the poem? • What do they reveal about the identity of the speaker?

‘A birthday’ by Christina Rossetti was written to express her emotions ofhappiness and new life after finding her true love. The title ‘A birthday’ is ambiguous, she does this deliberately to mislead thereader and introduce a new idea to the mean of having a birthday. At firstsighting of the title must readers would assume that the poem is based on someone celebrating their birthday; however the actual meaning behind it is shefeels reborn and happy after finding the love of her life. By hiding its messageRossetti was able to create suspense for the reader and only by reading the poemwith in dept was readers able to understand the real meaning of the title.The poem is split into two stanzas, the first stanza talks about how therelationship effects her and her emotions and the second stanza she talks aboutwhat is going to happen now that her love has come to her. The poem splits aftereight lines because she wanted readers to wait for along time before she talksabout her love coming to her, she did this intentionally because she wantedreaders to visualise what it felt like for her to wait and wanted to remind themthat she also had wait a very long time for her love to come.During the Victorian era many writers like Rossetti were forbidden to includeany adultery in their writing so therefore Rossetti used euphemism to implicateher feelings. .In the first stanza, Rossetti expresses happiness by comparingher loveto a number of bright and colourful things in nature that are full oflife.

Rossetti opens ‘A Birthday’ in lines one and two with the comparison of herheart with a ‘singing bird.’ This first analogy suggests pure happiness andenergy because the voice of a bird that uses energy to sing is usually a joyfulsound with which one can feel a sense of happiness. When she compares herself to a “watered shoot,” which is also known as a sprout from a plant, she is implying that she feels as if

she were just born.In line three and four she compares her heart to an ‘apple tree.’ The referenceto the apple tree sugg

ests a happy condition because the branches are so bentwith lifebearing fruit. In theses two lines she is implying that herrelationship is fruitful and sweet, and it also refers to a biblical reference:Adam and Eve. There are two different interpretations to this quotation; bysaying that her relationship is fruitful and sweet, she is able to imply thatshe will have lots of children but because she could not write it so straightforward, she had to use the fruitful imagery as a softer and more appropriatelanguage to get her idea across without being direct. The other interpretationto this quotation is her relationship was a destiny; God planned for them to betogether. Like Adam and Eve, he created her and her partner to be a pair; theyare destining to be with each other. In this quotation she also mentions theword ‘thick’, meaning hard and strong, indicating that her relationship isstrong and is unbreakable.

In lines five and six she compares her heart to a ‘rainbow shell.’ The rainbowshell in the halcyon, or peaceful, sea indicates that all is well with herworld, or her love is like a smooth sailing boat, nothing to cause disruptionfor her relationship. The rainbow shell can represent a miracle, or represent anendless love or happiness because the rainbow is colourful. One other way toanalyse this quotation is that at the end on a rainbow there is always a goldpot, the gold pot that she is referring to could be her lover; her lover is thegold in her life.

In the last two lines of the first stanza Rossetti compares all of the naturalitems listed to her heart all at once. ‘My heart is gladder than all these, because my love is come to me.’These two lines tells us that her heart is, in fact, in an even more happycondition than all three natural things it has been compared with so far. Thefinal line of the first stanza allows the reader to infer that this feeling thatshe is experiencing is not because it is her birthday, it is because the personshe love has come to her.

The WoodspurgeDante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” is a sixteen-line poem divided into four-line stanzas of

iambic tetrameter that describe an unidentified grief-stricken narrator in an outdoor setting, who experiences a vivid heightening of sense perception during a time of intense psychic stress. In his depressed state, the narrator undergoes an unforeseen and unbidden, but clear and intense, visual experience of the woodspurge, a species of weed that has a three-part blossom.The poem’s first stanza presents a countryside that is geographically unspecified—an area of trees and hills—and begins to suggest the narrator’s state of mind. The narrator is not walking toward a specific destination; he moves in the direction the wind is blowing, and, once the wind ceases, he stops and sits in the grass. The fact that his walking and stopping are guided merely by the wind indicates aimlessness, passivity, and apathy.

The narrator’s posture in the second stanza indicates that he feels exceedingly depressed, although there is no explanation given for his emotional state. Sitting on the grass he is hunched over with his head between his knees. His depression is so severe that he cannot even groan aloud or speak a work of grief (“My lips…said not Alas!”). His head is cast down, as is his soul—so much so that his hair is touching the grass. His physical state reflects his psychic paralysis as he remains motionless in this position for an unspecified length of time, but long enough so that he “hear[s] the day pass.”

Although he is not trying to look around and seems oblivious to the country setting as a whole, the narrator remarks in the third stanza that his eyes are “wide open,” and this important fact becomes the inadvertent cause for his ensuing visual experience. From his seated position, he says there are “ten weeds” that his eyes can “fix upon.” Out of that group, a flowering woodspurge captures his complete attention, and he is dramatically impressed by the detail that it flowers as “three cups in one.”

The narrator attributes his depressed state to “perfect grief” in the final stanza, but there is still no elaboration as to its cause. He then comments, first, that grief may not function to bring wisdom or insight and may not even be remembered, and, second, implies that he himself learned nothing from his grief that day and can no longer remember its cause. However, “One thing then learnt remains”: He had been visually overwhelmed by the shape of the woodspurge, and, consequently, its image and the fact that “The woodspurge has a cup of three” have been vividly burned into his memory forever.

Forms and DevicesThe short, simple lyric, focusing on sadness of some kind, was a popular genre for Victorian poets,

as it had been earlier for the Romantic poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Rossetti, it was a genre that suited his ideal of simplicity in poetry.

Rossetti’s choice of imagery, diction, rhythm, and rhyme demonstrates a simplicity that mirrors—

and therefore underscores—the narrator’s state of mind. The images are simple; the tree, hill, grass, weeds, and sun have no descriptors of any kind. There are no metaphors, similes, or other figures of speech; nature is presented in broad brushstrokes without ornamentation. It is only when the narrator accidentally fixes his gaze upon the woodspurge that any specific details come forth, and, even then, it is only the shape of the flower that is of any concern. Rossetti’s use of nature tends to the particular, not the universal; the experience of his narrator, thus, occurs through an interplay with a very narrow, concentrated, and specific part of nature.

Rossetti’s unadorned presentation of nature mutes the setting, forcing it into the background, and causes the narrator’s mental and emotional state to emerge as the central focus. The bare minimum of description functions to signal to the reader that the narrator himself is oblivious to the details of his surroundings because his mind is focused elsewhere. The only record of his awareness of his environment, before his dramatic visual experience of the woodspurge, is that he walked when the wind was blowing and that he sat when that external impetus ceased. His reference in the first stanza to the wind having been “Shaken out dead from tree and hill” introduces the thought of death, establishing a negative tone that suggests that the narrator’s internal state is negative.Another poetic device that maintains simplicity in the poem—and yet functions to express sadness or sorrow—includes Rossetti’s use of monosyllabic words. All but one word in the first stanza are monosyllables, causing the movement to be slowed to a plodding pace to initially signal a rhythmic parallel for the narrator’s inner state. With each of the next three stanzas consisting primarily of monosyllabic words, the poem’s tempo continues to be retarded. This consistently slowed rhythm throughout the poem creates a dirge-like effect that mirrors the narrator’s mood.

There is one common end rhyme in each stanza (aaaa, bbbb, cccc), suggesting a dullness, a lack of variety, or a paralysis in the rhyme that reflects the paralysis in the narrator resulting from his psychic state. The word “wind” is repeated four times in the first stanza, and the end rhyme for the first and fourth lines of this stanza repeats the same word, “still.” This deliberate repetition of words and of simple rhymes also functions to maintain the simplicity of the poem and is consistent with its simple imagery and vocabulary.

Mood throughout the poem• Theme is grief• The mood set in the first stanza is a slightly dark one.• 6 caesuras• ‘shaken out dead’• In the 2nd stanza, mood is changes to grief stricken• Mood changes in stanza 3

Structure of the poem• 4 line stanzas• Unusual rhyme scheme (AAAA,BBBB,CCCC,DDDD)• Generally 8 syllables in each line (with the exception of a few lines)• Structured

Ideas• After Dante’s wife died, he was very depressed. This poem may have been written around the time

of his wife’s death. (before/after)• Poem might reflect his life after wife’s death• Poem could be about what he is doing after his wife’s death• A woodspurge holds its petals close together. Compare this to Rossetti. He might be focusing on

the Woodspurge because he wants to be like it (dear ones close to him) (His sister and wife died)Themes and MeaningsIn September, 1848, Rossetti, along with other fellow painters such as John Everett Millais and

William Holman Hunt, founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, whose goal was a return to simplicity, to a direct presentation of nature, and to faithfulness and accuracy in detail. The name was derived from the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, who was a symbol for them of a departure from the simplicity of presentation and the use of bright colors, which produced a direct emotional effect in pre-Renaissance paintings. The ideals of this group were applied to poetry as well as to painting: simplicity of syntax, imagery, and diction, with themes that concentrated on the experience of sense perception and created emotional resonance.

Although “The Woodspurge” has a plant’s name as its title, the poem does not have nature, or even

the woodspurge itself, as its subject. Nature does play an indirect role in the poem, but it is not the focus here or in other works by Rossetti. Both in his painting and in his poetry, the function of nature is to act as a background for the presentation of human action and emotion. The depiction of details from nature, although precise and accurate, is not meant to draw attention to nature itself but to mirror a psychic state or inner experience.

“The Woodspurge” does not tell a story or embody an ethical or moral lesson; it does not deal with contemporary issues or events. It is removed from any cultural or historical context and—more concerned with emotion than ideology—aims to express a universal human experience, the paradox of intense sense perception during times of emotional numbness.

The possibility that the three-in-one nature of the woodspurge—which could recall the Christian concept of the Trinity or the concept of unity in diversity—might symbolize a higher truth and thus be a consolation for the speaker’s grief is not given any space in the poem. The woodspurge’s shape is a botanical fact, of interest particularly to a painter’s eye, but it points to no significance beyond its sheer existence in the material realm. It functions as an example of a detail or image that can remain vivid after emotional stress has been left behind and forgotten. Rossetti’s tendency to focus on intense sensual experience rather than to illustrate truth or meaning is evident here.

Although the cause of the narrator’s sorrow is never specified, the poem was written in the spring of 1856 when Rossetti was in an anguished state. He was experiencing intense strife with Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Siddal, the chief model he had used for many of his paintings since 1850, over the issue of her desire for marriage. (He eventually married her in 1860.) Rossetti was also tormented at that time about relationships with other women and with what he perceived as lost artistic opportunities. However, nothing in the poem points to these specific issues. By leaving the cause of the narrator’s depression unspecified, Rossetti gives universal expression to the psychological phenomenon of acute mental awareness and heightened sensation simultaneous with mental and emotional distress.

Although Rossetti’s later poetry is more ornate, complex, and difficult both in style and in content, “The Woodspurge” concentrates on sense perception, accuracy of detail (including botanical accuracy), and the use of nature as a framework for the expression of the mental and emotional state of the narrator. Its simplicity in theme and poetic devices makes it a superb demonstration of the tenets of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.Analysis

“The Woodspurge” is a sixteen-line poem divided into four-line stanzas that describe a grief-stricken narrator in an outdoor setting. In his depressed state, the narrator emotionally observes the details of the woodspurge, a species of weed that has a three-part blossom.

The poem’s first stanza presents a countryside and begins to suggest the narrators’s state of mind. The narrator is not walking toward a specific destination; he moves in the direction the wind is blowing and once the wind ceases, he stops and sits in the grass. The fact that his walking and stopping are guided merely by the wind indicates aimlessness and passivity

The narrator’s posture in the second stanza indicates that he feels exceedingly depressed. Sitting on the grass he is hunched over with his head between his knees. This shows that he is insecure. His depression is so severe that he cannot even groan aloud or speak a word of grief. His head is cast down, as is his soul – so much that his hair is touching the grass. He remains in this position for an unknown length of time but long enough that he “heard the day pass”.

In the third stanza, “My eyes, wide open, had the run” let the readers know about the sudden changes in his attitude. He finally accepts what had happened and knows that he has to move on. From his seated position, he says there are “ten weeds” that his eyes can “fix upon”. This reflect that he sees his problem and becomes aware of it. He realises that the “weeds” (his problem) are in his way and the hardiness of the “weeds” tells that the problem that he faced are hard to be rid of. Out of that group, a flowering woodspurge captures his complete attention and he is dramatically impressed by the detail that it flowers as “three cups in one”.

The narrator attributes his depressed state to “perfect grief” in the final stanza. He then comments that grief may not function to bring wisdom and may not even be remembered. He implies that he himself learned nothing from his grief that day and can no longer remember its cause. However, “One thing then learnt remains to me”: He had been visually overwhelmed by the shape of the woodspurge and consequently, its image and the fact that “The woodspurge has a cup of three” have been vividly burned into his memory forever.

-Stanza1: The poems first stanza introduces the reader to a green setting and focuses on the wind

and the narrator’s movement. The narrotors mood can be started to be interperated.‘‘walked on at the wind's will'’ suggests a sense of aimlessness and passivity. 'wind was still' he sat, showing that he was not very aware of his actions and too absorbed in his thoughts . Repetition is also used in this stanza, wind and I are repeated.

-Stanza2: In stanza 2, the narrators posture is described. The way the person sits on the grass, hunched over with its head between its kness close to the ground shows how depressed and insecure it feels.By referring to its lips,hair and ears, explains the mental state its in. ‘Said not Alas\ means that suffering from such mental pain, cannot even groan aloud or speak a word of grief' or how the person cannot find words to express his feelings. The narrator remains in this position for an unknown length of time but long enough that he or she “heard the day pass”. The narrator talks about his or her ears as being 'naked', giving a sense that has feels detached from the world. These sensory details help to place the reader into the scene.

Also in stanza 2, alliteration is used ‘naked ears heard ’ the ‘e’ sound is repeated. Repetition is also used, also continuing to stanza four, 4 lines each start with the word ‘my’.

-Stanza3: In the third stanza, the narrator, finally having a connection with its sorrounding, coming more to his senses, fixes its eyes on a woodspurge. This may show how in a moment of grief and depression the attention of a person can be captured on the smallest thing and its details. An unsignificant detail. The line “My eyes, wide open, had the run” lets the readers know about the sudden changes in the narrators attitude. The narrator notices the woodspurge amongst the other weeds, and remarks that it flowers as “three cups in one”. Unintentionally, the narrator may be relating its situation to the flowers and the weeds. Maybe this can be reflecting that what had been disturbing and was on his way(the weeds) have a woodspurge together with them, and he may now be realizing his problems and seeing how hard they are to overcome.

Stanza4: In the final stanza when Rossetti writes, “From perfect grief there need not be/ Wisdom or even memory/ One thing then learnt remains to me/ — The woodspurge has a cup of three.” the reader recognizes the narrator’s true sadness, and in these lines an importance and significance is given to the woodspurge. He says that grief wont bring wisdom and maybe wont even be very remembered, and there shouldnt be anything learnt from it,and what had visually overwhelmed him would stay in its memory, but alone. I think this sentence summarizes this stanza and the poem greatly:‘Rossetti emphasizes the mundane details that people remember in times of acute emotional pain.’(Caroline Healey)

-Closing Sentence: In conclusion, we can say that this poem shows the psychology of a person experiencing great sadness, mental and emotional distress, acute mental awareness. Even when the emotions started to fade, the memory of the single detail remained. We can also say that nature plays an indirect role, like a background, for the presentation of the persons responses and feelings in certain conditions. Rosetti had used nature for the same purpose, for helping him to portray the state and situations of people, in his other poems and also in his paintings.Themes and Meanings

Although the cause of the narrator’s sorrow is never specified, the poem was written in the spring of 1856 when Rossetti was in an anguished state. He was experiencing intense strife with Elizabeth Siddal over the issue of her desire for marriage. Rossetti was also tormented at that time about relationships with other women and what he perceived as lost of artistic opportunities. However, nothing in the poem points to these specific issues. By leaving the cause of the narrator’s depression unspecified, Rossetti gives universal expression to the psychological phenomenon of acute mental awareness and heightened sensation simultaneously with mental and emotional distress.

Although “The Woodspurge” has a plant’s name as its title, the poem does not have nature, or even the woodspurge itself, as its subject. Nature does play an indirect role in the poem, but it is not the focus here or in other works by Rossetti. Both in his painting and poetry, the function of nature is to act as a background for the presentation of human action and emotion. The depiction of details from nature is not meant to draw attention to nature itself but to mirror an inner experience.

In conclusion, “The Woodspurge” is about the narrator’s grief and that an insignificant detail or image can remain vivid after emotional pain is forgotten. It concentrates on creating emotional effect, accuracy of detail and the use of nature as a framework for the expression of the mental and emotional state of the narrator.

In "The Woodspurge" Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses plain and forceful language to recreate a moment of contemplation and grief. He narrates a basic scene from the perspective of an unknown person in which the individual wanders in a natural setting, sits down, and, in an emotional state, observes the details of a

particular woodspurge — a European herb with greenish yellow flowers.The first stanza focuses on the wind and the narrator's movement, which mimics the wind patterns.

As Rossetti writes, "I had walked on at the wind's will/ — I sat now, for the wind was still." The remainder of the poem echoes this stillness, focusing on the narrator's stationary features and inner emotions. In the second and third stanzas, Rossetti highlights his subject's physical characteristics, including his or her lips, hair, ears, and eyes:My lips, drawn in, said not Alas! /My hair was over in the grass,/My naked ears heard the day pass[.]/My eyes, wide open, had the run/Of some ten weeds to fix upon;

His inclusion of such sensory detail helps place the reader in the scene. Not until the final stanza, however, does the reader recognize the narrator's true inner sadness, when Rossetti writes, "From perfect grief there need not be/ Wisdom or even memory/ One thing then learnt remains to me/ — The woodspurge has a cup of three." Lending such great importance to the woodspurge in the poem's final line, Rossetti emphasizes the mundane details that people remember in times of acute emotional pain.

Questions1. Aside from its role as the narrator's primary visual focus, the woodspurge does not possess an overt symbolic meaning. In fact, the remainder of the poem appears to lack symbolic representations, as well. Why might Rossetti have rejected the notion of symbolism — prevalent in many other poems and paintings of the period — in this poem?2. Some of Rossetti's other sonnets possess elaborate, decriptive language. What effect do you think the simple wording of "The Woodspurge" has on interpretations of this poem? Does it intensify the poem's ultimate message?3. Rossetti's poem, "My Sister's Sleep," describing the death of the narrator's sister on Christmas Eve, entertained similar notions of grief as in "The Woodspurge". In both poems, the narrators seem to be experiencing some sense of loss or sadness; however, "My Sister's Sleep" is much longer. Why did Rossetti make "The Woodspurge" so short? Does its abbreviated length make the narrator's emotions any more acute?4. Did Rossetti set "The Woodspurge" outside for a particular reason? What statement might he be making about the relation between humans and the environment?What lines in "My Sister's Sleep," "The Blessed Damozel," and other poems take the same approach to a non-symbolic reality that David H. Riede describes in "The Woodspurge"?

According to George P. Landow, , this poem embodies in a peculiarly pure form one kind of poetry that may result from a loss of faith in the visionary. It is a poetry of nonstatement. A fact is presented, but the fact suggests nothing, means nothing. The poem's refusal to locate significance anywhere movingly expresses the hopelessness of deep grief, but at the same time it implies a very limited role for poetry. Rossetti's ambition, I think, was not to be satisfied with the terrribly limited poetic position that the facts could speak for themselves it they had anything to say. "The Woodspurge" represents a kind of minimalist poetry that not only abandons the role of the poet as seer, but even brings into question his role as maker, since the poem not only implies that the natural symbol has no special significance, but even that the insignificant symbol is discovered by chance, is a kind of objet trouvé. In fact, of course, "The Woodspurge " is a highly wrought, highly self-conscious work of art, but it is nevertheless a work of art that implies an extremely limited scope for the poet to work in.

How can you reconcile "The Woodspurge" to the ornate language and metaphor found in his sonnets?