WORDSWORTH Analysis

Wordsworths monumental poetic legacy rests on a large number of important poems, varying in length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworths poetry, and the language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered poetic. He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feelingfor all human sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is the naked and native dignity of man. Recovering the naked and native dignity of man makes up a significant part of Wordsworths poetic project, and he follows his own advice from the 1802 preface. Wordsworths style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworths poems (including masterpieces such as Tintern Abbey and the Intimations of Immortality ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhoods lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory. Wordsworths images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism (as in the sonnet It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, in which the evening is described as being quiet as a nun), and the relics of the poets rustic childhoodcottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature. Wordsworths poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave expression to inchoate human emotion; his lyric Strange fits of passion have I known, in which the speaker describes an inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have been written by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward the future, many of Wordsworths important works are preoccupied with the lost glory of the past not only of the lost dreams of childhood but also of the historical past, as in the powerful sonnet London, 1802, in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead poet John Milton to teach the modern world a better way to live.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes
The Beneficial Influence of Nature

Throughout Wordsworths work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on the human mind. All manifestations of the natural worldfrom the highest mountain to the simplest flowerelicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the people who observe these manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature to an individuals intellectual and spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect to both the spiritual and the social worlds. As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as The World Is Too Much with Us (1807) and London, 1802 (1807) people become selfish and immoral when they distance themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanitys innate empathy and nobility of spirit becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the squalor of city life. In contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their souls.
The Power of the Human Mind

Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and imagination, individuals could overcome difficulty and pain. For instance, the speaker in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798) relieves his loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech gatherer in Resolution and Independence (1807) perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty by the exertion of his own will. The transformative powers of the mind are available to all, regardless of an individuals class or background. This democratic view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness. Throughout his work, Wordsworth showed strong support for the political, religious, and artistic rights of the individual, including the power of his or her mind. In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained the relationship between the mind and poetry. Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquilitythat is, the mind transforms the raw emotion of experience into poetry capable of giving pleasure. Later poems, such as Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1807), imagine nature as the source of the inspiring material that nourishes the active, creative mind.
The Splendor of Childhood

In Wordsworths poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence. Children form an intense bond with nature, so much so that they appear to be a part of the natural world, rather than a part of the human, social world. Their relationship to nature is passionate and extreme: children feel joy at seeing a rainbow but great terror at seeing desolation or decay. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote several poems about a girl named Lucy who died at a young age. These poems, including She dwelt among the untrodden ways (1800) and Strange fits of passion have I known (1800), praise her beauty and lament her untimely death. In death, Lucy retains the innocence and splendor of childhood, unlike the children who grow up, lose their connection to nature, and lead unfulfilling lives. The speaker in Ode: Intimations of Immortality believes that children delight in nature because they have access to a divine, immortal world. As children age and reach maturity, they lose this connection but gain an ability to feel emotions, both good and bad. Through the power of the human mind, particularly memory, adults can recollect the devoted connection to nature of their youth. Motifs

Wandering and Wanderers

The speakers of Wordsworths poems are inveterate wanderers: they roam solitarily, they travel over the moors, they take private walks through the highlands of Scotland. Active wandering allows the characters to experience and participate in the vastness and beauty of the natural world. Moving from place to place also allows the wanderer to make discoveries about himself. In I travelled among unknown men (1807), the speaker discovers his patriotism only after he has traveled far from England. While wandering, speakers uncover the visionary powers of the mind and understand the influence of nature, as in I wandered lonely as a cloud (1807). The speaker of this poem takes comfort in a walk he once took after he has returned to the grit and desolation of city life. Recollecting his wanderings allows him to transcend his present circumstances. Wordsworths poetry itself often wanders, roaming from one subject or experience to another, as in The Prelude. In this long poem, the speaker moves from idea to idea through digressions and distractions that mimic the natural progression of thought within the mind.
Memory

Memory allows Wordsworths speakers to overcome the harshness of the contemporary world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to reconnect with the visionary power and intense relationship they had with nature as children. In turn, these memories encourage adults to re-cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and despair. The act of remembering also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the calm remembrance of passionate emotional experiences. Poems cannot be composed at the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead, the initial emotion must be combined with other thoughts and feelings from the poets past experiences using memory and imagination. The poem produced by this timeconsuming process will allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers and will permit the readers to remember similar emotional experiences of their own.
Vision and Sight

Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the vehicles through which individuals are transformed. As speakers move through the world, they see visions of great natural loveliness, which they capture in their memories. Later, in moments of darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in I wandered lonely as a cloud. Here, the speaker daydreams of former jaunts through nature, which flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude (2122). The power of sight captured by our minds eye enables us to find comfort even in our darkest, loneliest moments. Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes the connection between seeing and experiencing emotion, as in My heart leaps up (1807), in which the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across the sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworths poems, including descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be seen, rather than touched, heard, or felt. In Book Fourteenth of The Prelude, climbing to the top of a mountain in Wales allows the speaker to have a prophetic vision of the workings of the mind as it thinks, reasons, and feels. Symbols

Light

Light often symbolizes truth and knowledge. In The Tables Turned (1798), Wordsworth contrasts the barren light of reason available in books with the sweet (11) and freshening (6) light of the knowledge nature brings. Sunlight literally helps people see, and sunlight also helps speakers and characters begin to glimpse the wonders of the world. In Expostulation and Reply (1798), the presence of light, or knowledge, within an individual prevents dullness and helps the individual to see, or experience. Generally, the light in Wordsworths poems represents immortal truths that cant be entirely grasped by human reason. In Ode: Imitations of Immortality, the speaker remembers looking at a meadow as a child and imagining it gleaming in celestial light (4). As the speaker grows and matures, the light of his youth fades into the light of common day (78) of adulthood. But the speaker also imagines his remembrances of the past as a kind of light, which illuminate his soul and give him the strength to live.
The Leech Gatherer

In Resolution and Independence, the ancient leech gatherer who spends his days wandering the moors looking for leeches represents the strong-minded poet who perseveres in the face of poverty, obscurity, and solitude. As the poem begins, a wanderer travels along a moor, feeling elated and taking great pleasure in the sights of nature around him but also remembering that despair is the twin of happiness. Eventually he comes upon an old man looking for leeches, even though the work is dangerous and the leeches have become increasingly hard to find. As the speaker chats with the old man, he realizes the similarities between leech gathering and writing poetry. Like a leech gather, a poet continues to search his or her mind and the landscape of the natural world for poems, even though such intense emotions can damage ones psyche, the work pays poorly and poverty is dangerous to ones health, and inspiration sometimes seems increasingly hard to find. The speaker resolves to think of the leech gatherer whenever his enthusiasm for poetry or belief in himself begins to wane.

W. BLAKE

Analysis
Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such poems as The Lamb represent a meek virtue, poems like The Tyger exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramaticthat is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human beings.

The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposesover the heads, as it were, of the innocentChristianitys capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty. The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective (The Tyger, for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness. The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others, like The Sick Rose and The Divine Image, make their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blakes favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blakes perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior.

Coleridges Poetry
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Analysis
Samuel Taylor Coleridges place in the canon of English poetry rests on a comparatively small body of achievement: a few poems from the late 1790s and early 1800s and his participation in the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797. Unlike Wordsworth, his work cannot be understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that book; though it does resemble Wordsworths in its idealization of nature and its emphasis on human joy, Coleridges poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional archaisms of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the hypnotic drone of Kubla Khan do not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect. Further, Coleridges poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adults reconnection with nature through memories of

childhood; in poems such as Frost at Midnight, Coleridge indicates the fragility of the childs innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as Dejection: An Ode and Nightingale, he stresses the division between his own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally, Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the thousand thousand slimy things that crawl upon the rotting sea in the Rime would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem. If Wordsworth represents the central pillar of early Romanticism, Coleridge is nevertheless an important structural support. His emphasis on the imagination, its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those found in the Rime, exerted a profound influence on later writers such as Shelley; his depiction of feelings of alienation and numbness helped to define more sharply the Romantics idealized contrast between the emptiness of the citywhere such feelings are experiencedand the joys of nature. The heightened understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for Coleridge in his poetry. His portrayal of the mind as it moves, whether in silence (Frost at Midnight) or in frenzy (Kubla Khan) also helped to define the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism; while much of poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquility, the origin of Coleridges poems often seems to be emotion recollected in emotion. But (unlike Wordsworth, it could be argued) Coleridge maintains not only an emotional intensity but also a legitimate intellectual presence throughout his oeuvre and applies constant philosophical pressure to his ideas. In his later years, Coleridge worked a great deal on metaphysics and politics, and a philosophical consciousness infuses much of his verseparticularly poems such as The Nightingale and Dejection: An Ode, in which the relationship between mind and nature is defined via the specific rejection of fallacious versions of it. The mind, to Coleridge, cannot take its feeling from nature and cannot falsely imbue nature with its own feeling; rather, the mind must be so suffused with its own joy that it opens up to the real, independent, immortal joy of nature.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes
The Transformative Power of the Imagination

Coleridge believed that a strong, active imagination could become a vehicle for transcending unpleasant circumstances. Many of his poems are powered exclusively by imaginative flights, wherein the speaker temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings, exchanging them for an entirely new and completely fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this way is both empowering and surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the confines of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded. Perhaps Coleridges most famous use of imagination occurs in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797), in which the speaker employs a keen poetic mind that allows him to take part in a journey that he cannot physically make. When he returns to the bower, after having imagined himself on a fantastic stroll through the countryside, the speaker discovers, as a reward, plenty of

things to enjoy from inside the bower itself, including the leaves, the trees, and the shadows. The power of imagination transforms the prison into a perfectly pleasant spot.
The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry

Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues in philosophy and religious piety. Some critics argue that Coleridges interest in philosophy was simply his attempt to understand the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry. To support the claim that his imaginative and intellectual forces were, in fact, organic and derived from the natural world, Coleridge linked them to God, spirituality, and worship. In his work, however, poetry, philosophy, and piety clashed, creating friction and disorder for Coleridge, both on and off the page. In The Eolian Harp (1795), Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the speakers philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an intellectual breeze (47) brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness, collide with those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and urges him to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker agonizes over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique, individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends by discounting the pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by privileging God and Christ over nature and praising them for having healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox views.
Nature and the Development of the Individual

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other romantic poets praised the unencumbered, imaginative soul of youth, finding images in nature with which to describe it. According to their formulation, experiencing nature was an integral part of the development of a complete soul and sense of personhood. The death of his father forced Coleridge to attend school in London, far away from the rural idylls of his youth, and he lamented the missed opportunities of his sheltered, citybound adolescence in many poems, including Frost at Midnight (1798). Here, the speaker sits quietly by a fire, musing on his life, while his infant son sleeps nearby. He recalls his boarding school days, during which he would both daydream and lull himself to sleep by remembering his home far away from the city, and he tells his son that he shall never be removed from nature, the way the speaker once was. Unlike the speaker, the son shall experience the seasons and shall learn about God by discovering the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity denied to both the speaker and Coleridge himself. For Coleridge, nature had the capacity to teach joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed individual. Motifs
Conversation Poems

Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his poetry. Many of his poems openly address a single figurethe speakers wife, son, friend, and so onwho listens silently to the simple, straightforward language of the speaker. Unlike the descriptive, long, digressive poems of Coleridges classicist predecessors, Coleridges so-called conversation poems are short, self-contained, and often without a discernable poetic form. Colloquial,

spontaneous, and friendly, Coleridges conversation poetry is also highly personal, frequently incorporating events and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen the scope of possible poetic content. Although he sometimes wrote in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, he adapted this metrical form to suit a more colloquial rhythm. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that everyday language and speech rhythms would help broaden poetrys audience to include the middle and lower classes, who might have felt excluded or put off by the form and content of neoclassicists, such as Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Dryden.
Delight in the Natural World

Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized poetrys capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. Nearly all of Coleridges poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty. Close observation, great attention to detail, and precise descriptions of color aptly demonstrate Coleridges respect and delight. Some poems, such as This LimeTree Bower My Prison, Youth and Age (1834), and Frost at Midnight, mourn the speakers physical isolation from the outside world. Others, including The Eolian Harp, use images of nature to explore philosophical and analytical ideas. Still other poems, including The Nightingale (ca. 1798), simply praise natures beauty. Even poems that dont directly deal with nature, including Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, derive some symbols and images from nature. Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded against the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling to the natural world. To Coleridge, nature contained an innate, constant joyousness wholly separate from the ups and downs of human experience.
Prayer

Although Coleridges prose reveals more of his religious philosophizing than his poetry, God, Christianity, and the act of prayer appear in some form in nearly all of his poems. The son of an Anglican vicar, Coleridge vacillated from supporting to criticizing Christian tenets and the Church of England. Despite his criticisms, Coleridge remained defiantly supportive of prayer, praising it in his notebooks and repeatedly referencing it in his poems. He once told the novelist Thomas de Quincey that prayer demanded such close attention that it was the one of the hardest actions of which human hearts were capable. The conclusion to Part 1 of Christabel portrays Christabel in prayer, a lovely sight to see (279). In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is stripped of his ability to speak as part of his extreme punishment and, consequently, left incapable of praying. The Pains of Sleep (1803) contrasts the speaker at restful prayer, in which he prays silently, with the speaker at passionate prayer, in which he battles imaginary demons to pray aloud. In the sad poem, Epitaph (1833), Coleridge composes an epitaph for himself, which urges people to pray for him after he dies. Rather than recommend a manner or method of prayer, Coleridges poems reflect a wide variety, which emphasizes his belief in the importance of individuality. Symbols
The Sun

Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of expressing deep religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge compares the sun to Gods own head (97) and, later, attributes the first phase of the mariners punishment to the sun, as it dehydrates the crew. All told, this poem contains eleven references to the sun, many of which signify the Christian conception of a wrathful, vengeful God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the day, while smooth sailing and calm weather occur at night, by the light of the moon. Frequently, the sun stands in for Gods influence and power, as well as a symbol of his authority. The setting sun spurs philosophical musings, as in The Eolian Harp, and the dancing rays of sunlight represent a pinnacle of natures beauty, as in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.
The Moon

Like the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive connotations than the sun. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the sun and the moon represent two sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the angry, wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent, repentant God. All told, the moon appears fourteen times in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors that occur during the day. For example, the mariners curse lifts and he returns home by moonlight. Dejection: An Ode (1802) begins with an epitaph about the new moon and goes on to describe the beauty of a moonlit night, contrasting its beauty with the speakers sorrowful soul. Similarly, Frost at Midnight also praises the moon as it illuminates icicles on a winter evening and spurs the speaker to great thought.
Dreams and Dreaming

Coleridge explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate the power of the imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision. Kubla Khan is subtitled A Vision in a Dream. According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while reading and dreamed of a marvelous pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon awakening, he began transcribing the dream-vision but was soon called away; when he returned, he wrote out the fragments that now comprise Kubla Khan. Some critics doubt Coleridges story, attributing it to an attempt at increasing the poems dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the poem speaks to the imaginative possibilities of the subconscious. Dreams usually have a pleasurable connotation, as in Frost at Midnight. There, the speaker, lonely and insomniac as a child at boarding school, comforts himself by imagining and then dreaming of his rural home. In his real life, however, Coleridge suffered from nightmares so terrible that sometimes his own screams would wake him, a phenomenon he details in The Pains of Sleep. Opium probably gave Coleridge a sense of well-being that allowed him to sleep without the threat of nightmares.

SHELLEY

Analysis
The central thematic concerns of Shelleys poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelleys era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelleys treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matterwhich was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworthand his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelleys intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark, in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes, A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of arts sensual pleasures to improve society. Byrons pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes
The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet

In Shelleys poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem To Wordsworth (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude (1816). He has the powerand the dutyto translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelleys poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets in Shelleys work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.
The Power of Nature

Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to natures power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheismthe belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the spirit of beauty in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in Mont Blanc. This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that natures power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelleys delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side.
The Power of the Human Mind

Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (1819) and Ode to the West Wind, Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for natures beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imaginationor our ability to form sensory perceptionsthat allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute natures power to God: the

human role in shaping nature damages Shelleys ability to believe that natures beauty comes solely from a divine source. Motifs
Autumn

Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn, including Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Ode to the West Wind. Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it shows both the creative and destructive powers of nature, a favorite Shelley theme. As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelleys vision of political and social revolution. In Ode to the West Wind, autumns brilliant colors and violent winds emphasize the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay and death inherent in the season suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-like poet.
Ghosts and Spirits

Shelleys interest in the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live. In Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, the speaker searches for ghosts and explains that ghosts are one of the ways men have tried to interpret the world beyond. The speaker of Mont Blanc encounters ghosts and shadows of real natural objects in the cave of Poesy. Ghosts are inadequate in both poems: the speaker finds no ghosts in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the ghosts of Poesy in Mont Blanc are not the real thing, a discovery that emphasizes the elusiveness and mystery of supernatural forces.
Christ

From his days at Oxford, Shelley felt deeply doubtful about organized religion, particularly Christianity. Yet, in his poetry, he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the poet up as a secular replacement for Christ. Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions over the earth. Shelley further separates his Christ figures from traditional Christian values in Adonais, in which he compares the same character to Christ, as well as Cain, whom the Bible portrays as the worlds first murderer. For Shelley, Christ and Cain are both outcasts and rebels, like romantic poets and like himself. Symbols
Mont Blanc

For Shelley, Mont Blancthe highest peak in the Alpsrepresents the eternal power of nature. Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an idea he explores in Mont Blanc. The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying.

Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders if the mountains power might be meaningless, an invention of the more powerful human imagination.
The West Wind

Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as Ode to the West Wind. While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change. Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.
The Statue of Ozymandias

In Shelleys work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias, symbolizes political tyranny. In Ozymandias, (1817) the statue is broken into pieces and stranded in an empty desert, which suggests that tyranny is temporary and also that no political leader, particularly an unjust one, can hope to have lasting power or real influence. The broken monument also represents the decay of civilization and culture: the statue is, after all, a human construction, a piece of art made by a creator, and now itand its creatorhave been destroyed, as all living things are eventually destroyed Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he was fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually he went to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty, he abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential magazine, and his second book attracted comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keatss brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in Hampstead. In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During this time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he died. His health and his finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death brought to an untimely end one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth centuryindeed, one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ on water), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among the English poets when he had died. Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keatss great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern

for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupationsthough at the same time, they are all uniquely Keatss. Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a storythere is no unifying plot and no recurring charactersand there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and develop the same themes, partake of many of the same approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way, exhibit an unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do not stand on their ownthey do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of the sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed wholly or partially from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to read. There has been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat the voices that speak the poemsare they meant to be read as though a single person speaks them all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode? There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question itself is wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is unmistakably Keatss own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it is unlikely that all the events really happened to Keats), but given their sincerity and their shared frame of thematic reference, there is no reason to think that they do not come from the same part of Keatss mindthat is to say, that they are not all told by the same part of Keatss reflected self. In that sense, there is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same voice. The psychological progress from Ode on Indolence to To Autumn is intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to imagine that the odes are spoken by a sequence of fictional characters. When you think of the speaker of these poems, think of Keats as he would have imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speakers trajectory from the numb drowsiness of Indolence to the quiet wisdom of Autumn, try to hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of Keatss extraordinary language.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes
The Inevitability of Death

Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lovers embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumnall of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. Examples of great beauty and art also caused Keats to ponder mortality, as in On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817). As a writer, Keats hoped he would live long enough to achieve his poetic dream of becoming as great as Shakespeare or John Milton: in Sleep and Poetry (1817), Keats outlined a plan of poetic achievement that required him to read poetry for a decade in order to understand and surpassthe work of his predecessors. Hovering near this dream, however, was a morbid sense that death might intervene and terminate his projects; he expresses these concerns in the mournful 1818 sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be.

The Contemplation of Beauty

In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Keatss speakers contemplate urns (Ode on a Grecian Urn), books (On First Looking into Chapmans Homer [1816], On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again [1818]), birds (Ode to a Nightingale), and stars (Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art [1819]). Unlike mortal beings, beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keats explores this idea in the first book of Endymion (1818). The speaker in Ode on a Grecian Urn envies the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed their leaves. He reassures young lovers by telling them that even though they shall never catch their mistresses, these women shall always stay beautiful. The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and eventually dies. Motifs
Departures and Reveries

In many of Keatss poems, the speaker leaves the real world to explore a transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a new understanding. Often the appearance or contemplation of a beautiful object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or rationality, is part of Keatss concept of negative capability. In Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, the speaker imagines a state of sweet unrest (12) in which he will remain half-conscious on his lovers breast forever. As speakers depart this world for an imaginative world, they have experiences and insights that they can then impart into poetry once theyve returned to conscious life. Keats explored the relationship between visions and poetry in Ode to Psyche and Ode to a Nightingale.
The Five Senses and Art

Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected with various types of art. The speaker in Ode on a Grecian Urn describes the pictures depicted on the urn, including lovers chasing one another, musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding still. All the figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the vessel. Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear the music. Similarly, the speaker in On First Looking into Chapmans Homer compares hearing Homers words to pure serene (7) air so that reading, or seeing, becomes associating with breathing, or smelling. In Ode to a Nightingale, the speaker longs for a drink of crystalclear water or wine so that he might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five senses must be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art.

The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker

In Keatss theory of negative capability, the poet disappears from the workthat is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention or explanation of the poet. Keatss speakers become so enraptured with an object that they erase themselves and their thoughts from their depiction of that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth, which is enclosed in quotation marks. Since the poems publication in 1820, critics have theorized about who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The erasure of the speaker and the poet is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are jarring and troubling. Symbols
Music and Musicians

Music and musicians appear throughout Keatss work as symbols of poetry and poets. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, for instance, the speaker describes musicians playing their pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus hear music. The speaker of To Autumn reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to sing. Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season of flowers and rejuvenation. Ode to a Nightingale uses the birds music to contrast the mortality of humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself capable of using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the birds music represents the ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.
Nature

Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to create extended meditations and thoughtful odes about aspects of the human condition. For example, in Ode to a Nightingale, hearing the birds song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans. The speaker of Ode on Melancholy compares a bout of depression to a weeping cloud (12), then goes on to list specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his psychological state. In Ode to Psyche, the speaker mines the night sky to find ways to worship the Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an amorous glow-worm (27), and the moon rests amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from which to ponder, but he also discovers in nature similes, symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he seeks to describe.
The Ancient World

Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a mythical world not unlike that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to populate poems, such as Ode to Psyche and To Homer (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life. In ancient cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from Keatss time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator. This achievement was one of Keatss great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats quietly prophesied: I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.