Ibukunoluwa Imran Ibrahim Professor E. Sharp English Sunday, November 1st 2015 Analysis of The World Is Too Much With Us William Wordsworth was a poet that lived between 1770-1850. He among others were known to be romantic poets who emphasized passion, emotion, and nature And wrote in common everyday language for all to relate this poem is another addition to that collection. The historical context of this poem was during the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization brought about an increase in size and variety of manufactured goods and an improved standard of living for some, it also resulted in often grim employment and living conditions for the poor and working classes. There was a frenzy to see who could make the most efficient factory, …show more content…
The form of this poem helps us to divide it into the two major parts; the octave and the sestet. Typically Petrarchan sonnets use the octave to explain a concern or conflict and after a shift in the first line of the sestet a conclusion is reached. The speaker opens with a complaint about how we are wasting the beauty of the earth by being consumed by our want to gather and spend materialistic things. He then continues by identifying that separation between humans and nature and our lack of deep understanding of nature (line 3,4). The speaker then further explains our alienation by using a metaphor to show how we are now unaffected by the winds and seas (line 5,6). He takes this point even further by telling the audience that they are out of tune with everything in nature. This leads to a shift in the ninth line, the capitalization of Great and God in “It moves us not. Great God!” (line 9) signifies monotheistic religions who only believe in one god and then follows up with his wish to be a pagan who are polytheistic or having multiple gods. After the speaker proclaims his wishes to be a pagan, there is then a play on words in “Pleasant lea” which when said out loud sounds like pleasantly, but in this context lea is a pasture or open field signifying the clearness of the pagans and the pleasantness he is feeling. The last two lines both have allusions to greek mythology. The first is Proteus; who knew all things—past, present, and future, but disliked revealing what he knew. Even when caught he would try to escape by assuming all sorts of shapes. The modern word "protean" meaning variable or changing a lot comes from his name. The second was Triton, Son of Poseidon who owned a seashell, he blew to calm or raise the waves. Both of these are related to the idea of how with multiple gods in different aspects pagans were able to get closer to nature and truly
This is an enjoyable sonnet that uses nature imagery, found extensively in Petrarca, that Shakespeare uses to get his point across. Not much explication is needed, aside the sustained images of nature, to fully understand its intent, but I would like to point out a peculiar allusion. When reading line 3, "the violet past prime" has made me think of Venus and Adonis. In the end, Adonis melts into the earth and a violet sprouts where his body was, which Venus then places in her heart, signifying the love she has for him. Reading this into the poem makes the few following lines more significant. Having Adonis portrayed as the handsome youth, Shakespeare is alluding to the death of youth (in general and to the young man) through the sonnet. In the next line, it is not certain if "sable" is an adjective or a noun and if "curls" is a noun, referring to hair (which is plausible) or a verb modifying "sable." Invoking the allusion to Adonis here, Shakespeare portends that if Adonis did live longer, he too would have greying hair; thus, Shakespeare sees ["behold"] an Adonis figure, the young man, past his youth.
In his poem, 'Lines Written in the Early Spring,' William Wordsworth gives us insight into his views of the destruction of nature. Using personification, he makes nature seem to be full of life and happy to be living. Yet, man still is destroying what he sees as 'Nature's holy plan'; (8).
The sonnet itself is written in iambic pentameter. The first line is a reference to the speaker, "a traveler from an antique land." Imagery and figurative language used at the beginning of the sonnet,(words such as vast, trunkless, and desert) add to the desolate and barren image and tone of the sonnet. Shelley, through the form of the traveler, describes the statue?s face or ?visage? to have a wrinkled lip, and a ?sneer of cold command.? This describes a negative aspect towards the tyrannical figure. Shelley himself was against tyranny, as that is obvious in his poem here (...
Written as a Petrarchan sonnet, "It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free" can be divided into two parts, an octet and a sestet. The octet introduces the reader to Wordsworth's pantheistic view of nature. His reference to "the mighty Being" (6) may be interpreted as: God, nature, or God manifested throughout nature, which exemplifies pantheism. Divinity is evident in God, and in nature through three main qualities: power, eternity and perfection. In "It Is ...
In Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Smith uses nature as a vehicle to express her complex emotions and yearning for a renewal of her spirit. Utilizing the immortal characteristics of spring and the tempestuous nature of the ocean, Smith creates a poetic world that is both a comfort and a hindrance to her tortured soul. Even while spring can provide her with temporary solace and the ocean is a friend in her sorrow, both parts of nature constantly remind her of something that she will never be able to accomplish: the renewal of her anguished spirit and complete happiness in life once more. Through three of her sonnets in this collection, Smith connects with the different parts of nature and displays her sensible temperament with her envy over nature’s ability to easily renew its beauty and vitality.
One of the powerful forms of writing took full form during the industrial revolution; Romanticism. Romanticism in English literature began in the late 18th century with the publication of Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During this era poetry was known as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. The Industrial Revolution was the biggest economic influence on the 19th century. With the rise of factories prompted more and more people to migrate from the countryside to large cities to work in these factories. This move created a human detachment from nature. People left their simple lives of working on farms and hunting, to that of a fast paced, hectic hard manual labor filled life. Romantics did not appreciate this change in lifestyle. They believed that the industrial revolution brought sadness upon the people. Lyrical Ballads is a great example of authors of this period expressed their emotions towards the Industrial revolution through a series of poems. A recurring theme in Lyrical Ballads is one which envisions factory workers reconnecting with the natural world. One of the poems in lyrical ballads is “Lines Witten in Early Spring”. Here are some lines to that
William Wordsworth is a British poet who is associated with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was seven years old, and he was an orphan at 13. This experience shapes much of his later work. Despite Wordsworth’s losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School, where he firmly established his love of poetry. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry.
Biespiel,David. “Sonnet14.” Masterplots II. Philip K. Jason. Vol. 7. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2002. 3521-3522. Print.
Lackluster love is the subject postulated in both sonnets, Petrarch 90 and Shakespeare 130. This is a love that endures even after beauteous love has worn off, or in Petrarch, a love that never was. The Petrarchan sonnet utilizes fantasy to describe love. It depicts love that is exaggerated and unrealistic. Shakespeare’s sonnet, on the other hand, is very sarcastic but it is more realistic as compared to the Petrarch 90. Petrarchan sonnets, also called Italian sonnets were the first sonnets to be written, and they have remained the most common sonnets (Hollander 28). They were named after the Italian poet Petrarch. Its structure takes the form of two stanzas, the first one an octave, in that, it has eight lines, and the next stanza is a sestet, meaning that it has six lines. The rhyme scheme suits the Italian language, which has the feature of being rhyme rich, and it, can take the forms of abbaabba, cdcdcd, or cdecde. These sonnets present an answerable charge in the first stanza, and a turn in the sestet. The sestet is the counter argument of the octave.
During the course of Edmund Spencer’s Amoretti, the “Petrarchan beloved certainly underwent a transformation” (Lever 98); the speaker depicts the beloved as merciless and is not content with being an “unrequited lover” (Roche 1) as present in a Petrarchan sonnet. Throughout Sonnet 37 and Sonnet 54, the speaker provides insight into the beloved not seen within the Petrarchan sonnets; though the speaker does present his uncontrollable love for the beloved, he does so through his dissatisfaction with his position and lack of control. In Sonnet 37, the speaker describes the beloved as an enchantress who artfully captures the lover in her “golden snare” (Spencer, 6) and attempts to warn men of the beloved’s nature. Sonnet 54, the speaker is anguished by the beloved’s ignorance towards his pain and finally denies her humanity. Spencer allows the speaker to display the adversarial nature of his relationship with the beloved through the speaker’s negative description of the beloved, the presentation of hope of escaping from this love, and his discontent with his powerlessness. Spencer presents a power struggle and inverted gender roles between the lover and the beloved causing ultimate frustration for the speaker during his fight for control.
He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images of meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being whatever a person needs to move on, and without those objects, they can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.
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.
The leading major contrast between the two poems is revealed in the difference in structure for their pieces. Petrarch's "Sonnet 292" is composed in the Italian 14-line poem structure comprising an eight-line octave. It also contains six-line sestet. The fundamental characteristics for the Petrarchan poem structure is the two-part structure. To attain this, the author divides the eight-line octave into two four-line stanzas and the sestet into two three-line stanzas. This structure takes into account improvement of two parts of the subject, expanding the point of view of the piece. While some rhyme plot remains after the interpretation of the lyrics from Italian, it does not provide a correct representation of the definitive complexity of Petrarch's work and message found in the original Italian form of the sonnet (McLaughlin). The...
Wordsworth is deeply involved with the complexities of nature and human reaction to it. To Wordsworth nature is the revelation of god through viewing everything that is harmonious or beautiful in nature. Man’s true character is then formed and developed through participation in this balance. Wordsworth had the view that people are at their best when they are closest to nature. Being close creates harmony and order. He thought that the people of his time were getting away from that.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.