Romanticism
Christina Lupton
Department of
English and Comp.
Literature
Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” 1818
wordsworth
William Wordsworth
1770-1850
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834
…I began
To think with fervour upon management
Of Nations, what it is and ought to be,
And how their worth depended on their Laws
And on the Constitution of the State.
0 pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love;
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven; 0 times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a Country in Romance;
When Reason seem'd the most to assert her rights
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchanter to assist the work,
Which then was going forwards in her name,
Not favour'd spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets,
To take an image which was felt, no doubt,
Among the bowers of paradise itself,
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of!
Heard’st thou yon universal cry,
And dost thou linger still on Gallia’s shore?
Go, Tyranny! Beneath some barbarous sky
Thy terrors lost, and ruin’d power deplore!
What tho’ through many a groaning age
Was felt thy keen suspicious rage,
Yet Freedom rous’d by fierce Disdain
Has wildly broke thy triple chain,
And like the storm which Earth’s deep entrails hide,
At length has burst its way and spread the ruins wide.
Shall France alone a Despot spurn?
Shall she alone, O Freedom, boast thy care?
Lo, round thy standard Belgia’s heroes burn,
Tho’ Power’s blood-stain’d streamers fire the air,
And wider yet thy influence spread,
Nor e’er recline thy weary head,
Till every land from pole to pole
Shall boast one independent soul!
And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be
First ever of the first and freest of the free!
The nations not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall:
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."
…
Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame:
All their attempts to bend thee down,
Will but arouse thy generous flame;
But work their woe, and thy renown.
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish and with fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
TB picture
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
‘I love thee true.’
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
The story of Prometheus… has never been
satisfactorily explained. Prometheus stole fire from
heaven, and was chained for this crime to Mount
Caucasus, where a vulture continually devoured his
liver, that grew to meet its hunger. Hesiod says that
before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt
from suffering; that they enjoyed a vigorous youth, and
that death, when at last it came, approached like sleep
and gently closed their eyes…Prometheus, (who
represents the human race) effected some great
change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire
to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for
screening from his disgust the horrors of the
shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured
by the vulture of disease. It consumed his being in
every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety,
inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and
violent death. All vice arose from the ruin of healthful
innocence.
Who will assert that, had the population of Paris drank at the
pure source of the Seine, and satisfied their hunger at the
ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, that they would
have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of
Robespierre?...Is it to be believed that a being of gentle
feelings, rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in
sports of blood?...It is impossible, had Buonaparte
descended from a race of vegetable feeders, that he could
have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the
throne of the Bourbons.