English 12 - Mr. RinkaLesson #39

William Wordsworth&

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

William Wordsworth

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Lyrical Ballads - Advertisement

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“Tintern Abbey”

"Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" (often abbreviated to "Tintern Abbey", or simply "Lines") is a poem by William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is located in the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire, and was abandoned in 1536. The poem is of

particular interest in that Wordsworth's descriptions of the banks of the River Wye outline his general philosophies on nature. "I cannot paint/ What then I was," Wordsworth writes, reflecting and almost puzzling over his "boyish days" when the natural world of Tintern Abbey was to him an unmixed "passion" and a "feeling"

that had no need of "any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." Yet the poet insists that age compensates for this loss of thoughtless passion by giving him instead a sense of the sublimity of nature, of "something far more deeply interfused," and here the poem seems in a sense to grope for God, invoking a "spirit" that "rolls through all things."

The poem has its roots in history. Accompanied by his sister Dorothy (whom he addresses warmly in the final paragraph as "thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend"), Wordsworth did indeed revisit the abbey on the date stipulated after half a decade's absence. His previous visit had been on a solitary walking tour as a twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. His life had

since taken a considerable turn: he had split with his French lover and their illegitimate daughter, while on a broader note Anglo-French tensions had escalated to such an extent that Britain would declare war later that year. The Wye, on the other hand, had remained much the same, affording the poet opportunity for contrast. A large portion of the poem explores the

impact of the passing of time, contrasting the obviousness of it in the visitor with its seamlessness in the visited. This theme is emphasized from the start in the line "Five years have passed...“ Although written in 1798, the poem is in large part a recollection of Wordsworth's visit of 1793. It also harks back in the imagination to a

time when the abbey was not in ruins and dwells occasionally on the present and the future as well. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years. Notably, the abbey itself is nowhere described. Poems which considered nature and the countryside were an

established part of eighteenth-century verse, and works such as James Thomson's “The Seasons” remained popular in the 1790s. However, in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth employs a much more intellectual and philosophical engagement with nature than his predecessors. Wordsworth claimed to have

composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and crossing the Wye, and not jotting so much as a line until he reached Bristol by which time it had just reached mental completion. In all, it took him four to five days' rambling about with his sister. Although Lyrical Ballads was by then already in publication, he was so pleased with this offering that he

had it inserted at the eleventh hour as the concluding poem. It is unknown whether this placement was intentional, but scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that followed.

Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic. Wordsworth styles himself as a "worshipper of Nature" with a "far deeper zeal / Of holier love", seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mystical intuition of the divine.

“Tintern Abbey”

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm#poem23

#39 LA 12 LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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“Kubla Kahn”

#39 LA 12 Kubla Khan

“Kubla Khan”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan

“Kubla Khan” is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's “Preface to Kubla Khan,” the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work

describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and

kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, on the prompting by George Gordon Byron, it was published. Some of Coleridge's contemporaries denounced the poem and questioned his story about its origin. It was not until years later that critics began to openly admire the poem. Most modern

critics now view “Kubla Khan” as one of Coleridge's three great poems, with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.” The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry. A copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London. The poem is different in style and

form from other poems composed by Coleridge. While incomplete and subtitled a "fragment", its language is highly stylized with a strong emphasis on sound devices that change between the poem's original two stanzas. The first stanza of the poem describes Khan's pleasure dome built alongside a sacred river fed by a powerful fountain. The second stanza of the

poem is the narrator's response to the power and effects of an Abyssinian maid's song which enraptures him but leaves him unable to act on her inspiration unless he could hear her once again. Together, they form a comparison of creative power that does not work with nature and creative power that is harmonious with nature.

The poem according to Coleridge is a fragment of what it should have been, amounting to what he was able to jot down from memory: 54 lines. Originally, his dream included between 200 and 300 lines, but he was only able to compose the first 30 before he was interrupted. The second stanza is not necessarily part of the original dream and refers to the dream in the past tense

Awesome Reading of“Kubla Kahn”

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One Theoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan

One theory says that Kubla Khan is about poetry and the two sections discuss two types of poems. The power of the imagination is an important component to this theme. The poem celebrates creativity and how the poet is able to experience a connection to the universe

through inspiration. As a poet, Coleridge places himself in an uncertain position as either master over his creative powers or a slave to it. The dome city represents the imagination and the second stanza represents the relationship between a poet and the rest of society. The poet is separated from the rest of humanity after he is exposed to the

power to create and is able to witness visions of truth. This separation causes a combative relationship between the poet and the audience as the poet seeks to control his listener through a mesmerizing technique. The poem's emphasis on imagination as subject of a poem, on the contrasts within the paradisal setting, and its

discussion of the role of poet as either being blessed or cursed by imagination, has influenced many works, including Alfred Tennyson's "Palace of Art" and William Butler Yeats's “Byzantium” based poems. There is also a strong connection between the idea of retreating into the imagination found within Keats's “Lamia” and in Tennyson's "Palace of Art".

Assignment #1

Discuss among yourselves the meaning of the poem, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” by William Wordsworth. Then write your own personal response to the poem. What does it mean to you and how does it affect you?

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.

Assignment #2 Read and listen to the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm

http://ia600409.us.archive.org/7/items/rime_ancient_mariner_librivox/ancient_mariner_coleridge_kll_64kb.mp3

English 12 - Mr. RinkaLesson #39

William Wordsworth&

Samuel Taylor Coleridge