“Life is divided into three terms- that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.” This quote by Williams Wordsworth explains the purpose of his poem “London, 1802”. Although the topic of this poem could vary, one that stands out the most is tradition. Wordsworth used a harsh tone in his poem to explain the current inadequacy of England, though he states his opinion with good intentions. Wordsworth desired for England to reclaim the great values it once had and hoped that pointing out these famous traditions of the past will present the knowledge to salvage this treasure. The first line introduces John Milton, the subject of the poem, and Wordsworth’s …show more content…
He begins in line nine with a simile comparing his soul to a star, meaning he had a bright soul. He goes on to say that, something special about Milton caused him to stand apart from the rest. In the next line, He uses another simile to explain his voice. He claims that Milton’s voice was as powerful and influential as the sea. The reader can infer that many people put their trust in Milton because of his wise words that he spoke. This line also shows that Wordsworth was greatly influenced by Milton’s voice and complements his poetic voice. In line eight, he continues to explain Milton’s voice in his poems, saying it was pure, majestic, and powerful. In the next lines, he explains how Milton was a good man who seemed to possess a form of moral perfection and lived his life worry-free and happy. In the final words of the sestet, Wordsworth concludes his praise by saying that Milton’s heart was humble and was willing to tackle any task regardless of how unglamorous it may be. This section shows Wordsworth’s admiration for Milton and explains his great poetic force as well as his …show more content…
He begins the poem with a pleading tone yelling out “Milton!” This causes the reader to believe Wordsworth is eager for Milton to return. His mood then becomes distressed by the loss of tradition and customs in his country of England. At the end of the poem Wordsworth’s tone changes to admiration of Milton and the man he was. He uses apostrophe in his poem by directly addressing the late John Milton like in line seven when he states “Oh! raise us up, return to us again”. Wordsworth uses similes in his writing when he says in line nine “Thy soul was like a Star”, and in line ten “sound was like the sea”, and again in line eleven “Pure as the naked heavens”. He uses personification in lines two-three when he says “she is a fen of stagnant waters” referring “she” to England. Symbolism is seen in the third and fourth lines, the alter represents religion, the sword represents the military, the pen represents literature, fireside represents the home, and the heroic wealth of hall and bower represents the
Nonetheless, this sonnet greatly relates, as it wonderfully demonstrates, how individuals can change their perspectives. Knowing what one has or what one is capable of, better enables anyone to identify with oneself. Though Milton’s experience in finding himself does not provide him with a new love or appreciation for another individual, it more importantly offers him love for himself and his God. He learns to appreciate the art of patience and what he still has and uses it to make his existence worth while. Milton experiences a world in which half of his days are spent “in this dark world” (line 2), yet he continues to carry out his poetry writing - the “talent” (3) God has given him.
Both London, 1802 by William Wordsworth and Douglass by Paul Laurence Dunbar are poems addressing the changes in conditions among their respective societies, London for Wordsworth and the United States for Dunbar. The poems are reactions to different time periods as both writers look upon the conditions of their societies and reminisce of better times as they long for the glory days of the past. London, 1802 and Douglass are poems that have several similarities among their content, however there are distinct differences between the two that the reader can pick up on as well.
Written on the banks of the Lye, this beautiful lyric has been said by critic Robert Chinchilla to “pose the question of friendship in a way more central, more profound, than any other poem of Wordsworth’s since ‘The Aeolian Harp’ of 1799” (245). Wordsworth is writing the poem to his sister Rebecca as a way of healing their former estrangement.
He uses his gift of words to create poetry to captivate people and bring them closer to the Lord. Milton wrote a poem about losing his eyesight and his dwindling ability to write poetry called, “When I Consider How My Life Is Spent.” There is a sense of religious uncertainty and depression that comes over the poem as it begins. In Milton’s poem he writes, “Ere half my days in this dark world and wide” (2). Milton lost his vision before he was mid-aged. His loss of vision is very devastating to him, because he feels like the only way he can humbly serve God is with his gift of writing powerful poetry. Milton does not see the light of God or living life as much anymore without his vision. He does not understand why God would let this happen to him when he lived for serving God with poetry. This causes his faith and hope to
First to consider is that the poem used in The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an edited version from The Complete Poetry and Major Prose of Milton, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. The poem that will be considered here is the 1673 text printed in The Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan. The decision of Riverside was not to intervene into the text, but to leave as it was written. Hughes’ changes insert punctuation, capitalization and spelling to update it to a modern audience. By modernizing the poem Hughes has effectively changed the meaning to what he as the editor had in mind. Milton wanted good readers, readers that read deeper than surface meanings and by changing the text the art of Milton’s words are compromised for the poem was designed to confuse the reader. Milton as a wordsmith is preparing the reader for a spiritual confusion that leads one to a question. Hughes’ editing reinforces the binary aspects of the poem that sets up one speaker in the octave and one speaker in the sestet, the problem in the octave then the solution in the sestet, if one likes. If one leaves out the editorial changes, the octave speaker and the sestet speaker become erased...
the poem finds Milton in a tough spot: writing an epic poem without an epic hero in
... with Us. Lastly, Wordsworth’s poem London, 1802 also shows his fear of premature mortality of the imagination. All of these works contain his fear of losing imagination and how man should return to nature.
“Solitude sometimes is best society” (Book IX, Line 249), a famous quote in John Milton’s 17th cen. epic poem Paradise Lost, summarizes a separation from Heaven which results in the fall of Lucifer, one of God’s fallen angels. The silent battle between God and Satan, the development of characters and the themes in the epic adds to a better overall understanding of the Milton 's poem. The work is one of literature’s most profound, giving its audience an exclusive look at fate, free will and morality. Paradise Lost contains many elements that consider it an “epic poem.” It is written in blank verse, in other words, the words do not rhyme. Milton often notes and expresses a lack of interest for rhyming poetry saying that “Rhyme is no necessary
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.
Wordsworths “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is his ideas on how he is going to be writing his poetry. In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” The Principal Object of the Poems. Humble and Rustic Life (Wordsworth 434) he discusses how in his poems he wants to create a situation in common life and have all different kinds of people relate them to a personal experience they once had in a common language,“ To throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mid in an unsual way; and ,further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing them truly through not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” by saying this in this stanza one can directly relate it to how he then writes “Tintern Abbey”. In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth uses this imagination to make things like walking through a abbey with your sister can become a magical incident that sends...
Written in 1798, “Above Tintern Abbey” is an account of Wordsworth’s travels “to the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire” ("Lines written a few miles," n.d, para. 1). Five years prior, Wordsworth departed from Calais, France. The remnants of his passion and fervor were abandoned within the small town, in the form of Annette and Caroline Vallon. His return to England left “the fever of the word, hung upon the beatings of (his) heart” (Wordsworth, 1798, lines 53-54). A stodgy England conceived France as a “landscape to a blind man’s eye” (Wordsworth, 1798, line 51), and five years later on the banks of the Wye, Wordsworth chronicles th...
Figurative language is used by William Wordsworth to show the exchange between man and nature. The poet uses various examples of personification throughout the poem. When the poet says:”I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1),”when all at once I saw a crowd” (line 3), and “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6) shows the exchange between the poet and nature since the poet compares himself to a cloud, and compares the daffodils to humans. Moreover, humans connect with God through nature, so the exchange between the speaker and nature led to the connection with God. The pleasant moment of remembering the daffodils does not happen to the poet all time, but he visualizes them only in his “vacant or pensive mode”(line 20). However, the whole poem is full of metaphors describing the isolation of the speaker from society, and experiences the beauty of nature that comforts him. The meta...
Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System, A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe. Cambridge: University Printing House, 1970.
His poem recognizes the ordinary and turns it into a spectacular recollection, whose ordinary characteristics are his principal models for Nature. As Geoffrey H. Hartman notes in his “Wordsworth’s poetry 1787-1814”, “Anything in nature stirs [Wordsworth] and renews in turn his sense of nature” (Hartman 29). “The Poetry of William Wordsworth” recalls a quote from the Prelude to Wordsworth’s 1802 edition of Lyrical ballads where they said “[he] believed his fellow poets should "choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them.in a selection of language really used by men” (Poetry). In the shallowest sense, Wordsworth is using his view of the Tintern Abbey as a platform or recollection, however, this ordinary act of recollection stirs within him a deeper understanding.
In conclusion, Paradise Lost can be seen through a historically contextual lens that allows us to see the parallels between Milton’s life and experiences during the reign of Charles I, and the predominant themes in his epic poem. Many of the themes in Paradise Lost, from the broader situational occurrences to the behavior of individual character’s and their attitudes toward the situations in which they find themselves can be seen as directly influenced by Milton’s time as a Parliamentarian in 17th century England.