Coleridge fantastical posts

Hello Romanticists,

We venture now into the stranger, creepier, and fantastical works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poems that are more like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” than the philosophical or conversation poems.  Like the story of the cursed mariner, “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Pains of Sleep” all challenge comprehension by presenting strange lands, supernatural creatures, and altered states of consciousness.  They have baffled readers since their first appearance.

It may not surprise us to learn that folklore and fairytales were a genre of interest to Coleridge and that they were much on his mind in the period when he was writing his fantastical poems.  A month before composing “Kubla Kahn,” Coleridge recalled in a letter to a friend the profound effect that reading fairytales had had on his young mind:

I remember that at eight years old I walked with [my father] one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery, and he told me the names of the stars and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them.  And when I came home he showed me how they rolled round.  I heard him with a profound delight and admiration, but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity.  For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief.  I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age.

Fantastical tales thus habituated Coleridge to the idea that there might be worlds or realities beyond his own experience. 

I propose we take our cue from this letter, and use our knowledge of fairytales and folklore as a lens through which to analyze the three poems for Thursday.  For your post, identify one aspect of fairytales/folklore to trace as it appears in one of the poems.  This might be one of the structures we talked about (supernatural creatures, quests, dichotomies, morals, etc.).  It might be a psychoanalytic element (symbols or archetypes, subconscious desires, primal fears and traumas).  Or you might take a historicist approach (examining what poem borrows from earlier cultures, or what it suggests about things like gender or class in Coleridge’s own moment). 

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

Andrew Lang's illustration of the walls and domes of "Kubla Kahn"

Andrew Lang's illustration of Christabel

William and Dorothy Wordsworth posts

Hello, Romanticists.

On Thursday we will continue our study of William Wordsworth by expanding on the theme of absence in his works.  We have an eclectic array of readings on the table that address various forms of absence: death, disappearance, erasure, illegibility, etc. 

First, you’ll find a mountain-sized whole at the center of “Crossing the Alps,” a passage from Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude.  The speaker and his friend realize that their anticipation of the Alpine summit was far greater than the reality.  Yet amazingly, their disappointment becomes a way to access the sublime.

Caspar David Friedrich's iconic depiction of the Romantic sublime, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.

Moving on from missed mountains, “Strange fits of passion” and “Song [She dwelt among th’untrodden ways]” mourn the loss of a mysterious woman known only as Lucy.  Though readers and critics have debated extensively over her identity, there is no clear biographical precedent for Lucy.  More to the point, in the poems themselves, she is a complete cypher: all we know of her is that we do not know her. 

The two sonnets, “It is a beauteous evening” and “Surprised by joy” also center on women, but these women are very real.  “Surprised by joy” mourns the loss of Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine or, more precisely, mourns the fact that he could have forgotten her loss.  “It is a beauteous evening” is cheery enough in tone, but it also represents an absent daughter: the illegitimate daughter Wordsworth fathered and did not raise.  The poem recounts the first time they met: Caroline was nine and Wordsworth had travelled to France to tell her mother than he would be marrying another woman.

Finally, in the extracts from The Grasmere Journal, we fill in an absence by meeting Dorothy Wordsworth, sister and confidant of William.  She has been simultaneously present and absent in much of her brother’s poetry (she is addressed in “Tintern Abbey” but does not speak; her account inspired “Daffodils”). 

Pages of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal

Choose one text and consider both what is absent and how that absent thing is defined or made palpable.  What formal techniques does the poem use to convey the sense of something that isn’t there?  Or, choose one of the passages from The Grasmere Journal and consider how it is similar to or different from William’s poetry.  

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

Coleridge Lyrical Ballads posts

Engraving of a Nightingale by Thomas Bewick, The History of British Birds, 1797.

Hello Romanticists,

On Thursday we will continue our discussion of Lyrical Ballads by looking at some of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s contributions.  The two poems we’ll examine will feel very different.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner might remind you of fairytales: it is a tale of adventure with supernatural elements, set in a quasi-fantastic land.  In addition, in the frame narrative, the poem is transmitted orally by the mariner in ballad stanza (quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, or variations thereof), and its artificially archaic language gestures toward the distant origins of folklore.  By contrast, “The Nightingale” is domestic rather than fantastical, conversational (as the subtitle indicates) rather than narrative, and spoken by a version of Coleridge himself in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter).

Nonetheless, both poems focus on the problems of communication.  The speaker in each is in some way isolated, struggling to express ideas or connect with others.  The mariner is certainly a more extreme case, but you might consider the ways in which the speaker of “Nightingale” similarly imposes his words on the people and world around him.

You might also wish to pursue links between one or other poem and the works we have already read.  In what ways does “Nightingale” embody the poetic theories of the “Preface”?  Does it speak “the real language of men”?  Or merge intense emotion with meditation?

Or you might pursue the links between Mariner and the folklore we have read.  What do your studies of fairytales allow you to recognize about the poem?  How, for example, do series and repetition work in the poem?


Please enjoy the embedded avian images.  Also feel free to check out the edition of Mariner engraved by Gustave Doré; a link is in the sidebar.

Happy reading,

Prof. M.

Gustav Dore's engraving of the albatross, 1877. 

Blake posts

Hello Romanticists,

On Thursday we will be discussing William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a famous collection of poems accompanied by the author's own illustrations.  Trained as an engraver, Blake made the plates for his books himself, printed a very small number of editions, and watercolored the illustrations by hand.  To get the full experience, poke around on the Blake Archive's page of digitized copies of the work.  If you do not yet have your textbook, a much more readable version of the text of Songs can be found here.

I encourage you to read all the poems in the volume, but at least make sure you read the following:
from Songs of Innocence: Introduction, The Ecchoing Green, The Lamb, The Little Black Boy, The Chimney Sweeper, Holy Thursday, and Nurse's Song; from Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday, The Chimney Sweeper, Nurse's Song, The Tyger, London, and Infant Sorrow.

For your response, you might consider how Blake's work relates to the genre of fairytales: what motifs or structures are familiar from the fairytales we read?  Does his work address itself to the unconscious?  Does it articulate a national or cultural identity?  Or, you might choose to consider the relation between the poems in each of the volumes.  In many cases, a poem bearing a given title appears in each volume.  Are these paired poems oppositional or is their relationship more complicated?  What formal elements repeat and differ?

Choose one poem or one pair of poems to focus on in your analysis, and publish your analysis as a response to this post.

Happy reading,
Prof. M.