Author: Benjamin Sherman

The emphasis Bryon placed on education in Don Juan, Canto 1 surprised me and made me think Bryon’s points about education went beyond merely demonstrating the incompatibility of Donna Inez and Don Jose.

Bryon first introduces education early in the story, using it to demonstrate the incompatibility of Donna Inez and Don Jose. Donna Inez is a “learned lady,” whereas Don Jose, on the other hand, is the opposite. The narrator refers to him as a cavalier who never mounted a horse. The narrator, semi-sarcastically, says “ye lords of ladies intellectual, / Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?” The emphasis on Inez’s education sets up the incompatibility between her and Don Jose, but that isn’t the end of education in Canto 1.

After Don Jose’s death, Donna Inez begins educating Don Juan, presumably because she doesn’t want him to end up uneducated like Don Jose. Don Juan, at Inez’s command, learns arts, sciences, and languages: “no branch was made a mystery / To Juan’s eyes, excepting natural history.” This line especially seems to imply Byron dislikes/mocks excessive learning. Don Juan learns all these things Inez wants him to learn, but doesn’t seem to learn anything “useful,” according to the narrator. The narrator points out Don Juan learns “languages, especially the dead” and “sciences, most of all the abstruse.” Byron/the narrator sees Don Juan’s education as useless because he isn’t learning anything that will help him in life.

The emphasis on the pointlessness of Don Juan’s education is obviously Byron digging at overly studied people, but I also think it sets up the rest of the story, especially Don Juan’s interactions with Donna Julia. As Donna Julia falls in love with Don Juan, she understands her feelings have changed from platonic to romantic, whereas Don Juan seems socially inept. Don Juan doesn’t understand the shift in their relationship dynamic—presumably, because he had a very in-depth academic education, but very little social education.

I thought Keats’ “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” was a very interesting take on the sonnet. Sonnets archetypally express love toward something, usually another person, but complicate that love by having a “turn” somewhere within the poem where the tone usually shifts, or the author comes to some sort of epiphany. This poem clearly has themes of love, but I don’t think I’d call it a love poem. It too includes a turn: “No,—yet still steadfast, still changeable.” The poem turns from Keats admiring the star in the night sky to wishing for his “fair love’s ripening breast.” Though Keats admires the star for its steadfastness, he does not want to be isolated from the Earth and his lover the way the star is isolated from the Earth. It’s sort of a paradox: the things Keats envies of the star—its splendor in the night sky, its ability to watch over the beauty of the Earth—are the same reasons he doesn’t want to be like the star, because it would mean he’s away from his lover.

This presents a sort of sad conclusion to the poem. Keats, and there for his love, cannot be eternal and steady like the star is. He cannot lay with his lover forever the way the star can sit in the sky forever, because in order for that steadiness he would need to be separated from his lover. The poem seems to argue the nature of love is fragile: the last line, “And so live ever—or else swoon to death” suggests his embrace with his lover will eventually be ended by death or some other part of life. Thus, the star both represents what Keats wants from love, but also why love is so precious: because it cannot be eternal like the star.

From Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” I think we can affirmatively say there exists a pattern within the Romantic poetry we’ve read of this idea of the “spirit of beauty.” Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelly all write about this idea of a spirit within/having to do with nature—something beyond nature itself that incites joy within humans and teaches them something intangible they cannot learn elsewhere. However, I thought the differences in Shelley’s idea of this spirit were noteworthy: specifically his personification of the spirit and the idea it has a mind of its own that can pick and choose when it wants to show itself.

For Coleridge, the spirit of beauty does not stem from nature, but actually from humans themselves. Though humans may see and feel the spirit of beauty by looking at and interacting with nature, the joy they feel stems from their own minds. For Wordsworth, it’s a bit more complicated, but certainly not the same as Shelley’s idea of the spirit.

Shelly personifies the spirit, addressing it by name. Shelly says the spirit exists beyond humans, though “It visits with inconstant glance / Each human heart and countenance.” The spirit does not exist within the human soul as it does for Coleridge, but instead is its own being. Shelly asks the spirit “where art thou gone?/ Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,/ This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?” In doing so, he gives the spirit agency—it is not about humans feeling the spirit of beauty by finding it within themselves, or even finding it within nature, but instead it is the spirit’s choice of when it wants to visit the human heart. Similarly to Coleridge, he states that feeling the spirit of beauty causes humans to either feel incredible happiness or misery depending on whether or not the spirit is with them.

Shelly also differs from Coleridge and Wordsworth in describing how nature at different times seems to have the spirit of beauty or not: “The day becomes more solemn and serene / When noon is past; there is a harmony / In autumn, and a lustre in its sky / Which through the summer is not heard or seen.” Shelley implies the spirit is around at different times of day, as well at different times of the year—the spirit is more easily felt later in the day, and the sky has a certain luster in autumn. While we see different descriptions of nature depending on the circumstances of the time in other poems, we never get the implication of different levels of that spirit of beauty depending on them, as we do in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”

I would bet a fair amount of money there have been lengthy essays written connecting these two poems, but I’ll still take a crack at forming my own connections between the two in this blog post. Immediately—perhaps because I presented on “Ode: Intimations of Immoratily—”Dejection: An Ode” struck me as very similar to said Wordsworth poem. Both poems deal with the narrator’s struggle with depression and despair, but specifically, that depression as it is shown through the inability to feel the beauty of nature. Though both narrator’s can see the beauty of nature, neither feels an overwhleming joy or happiness from it—both speakers still feel empty and desperate. Coleridge’s narrator states “I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!” with “them” reffering to the beauty of nature. Wordsworth’s narrator can also see the beauty of nature with his eyes, but it does not bring him the same joy as it once did: “That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”

Continuing on similarities, both poems rely heavily on the theme of light—both metaphorical “light” and metaphorical “dark,” as well as literal light, and in both poems, there exists a connection between the two types of light. In Wordsworth’s poem, the light metaphor mostly revolves around the sun, which exists as a larger metaphor within the poem, but whenever the poem uses light in the context of the sun, the light brings joy to the narrator. He describes the earth when he was a child as seemingly “Apparelled in celestial light.” Coleridge uses the light from the moon: “the New-moon winter-bright! / And overspread with phantom light.” Coleridge refernces light again in terms of a metaphorical light—one that drives the human spirit: “from the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud.” In both poems light represents a sort of driving force that pulls the narrator out of their depression. Though neither narrator fully cures their respective sadness, both dwell and think about ways to better deal with their unhappiness and feel the beauty from nature.

I don’t think both poets come to the same conclusion—in fact both poems are increibly cryptic about what their solutions are, though though both narrators seemingly solve their depressions. In Wordsworth’s, as we talked about in class, the narrator accesses the happiness and joy of his childhood through remebering what childhood merriment was like. For Coleridge’s, joy in and of itself solves the problem of depression, because joy is the meaning behind life. To be entirely honest, I was as confused about Coleridge’s solution as we were about Wordsworth’s and would love to adress it more in class. I just thought the similarities were very obvious between the two poems.

Before tonight I had never read any Coleridge, and I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I liked these poems (not to say I was expecting to hate them, but I thought they were very good). I wanted to focus on “The Eolian Harp” because I thought the first four stanzas were so charming and quintessentially Romantic, and the fifth stanza really sort of came out of left field.

The figurative language in the first four stanzas paint a vivid image of Sara, the narrator, and the nature around them. These stanzas have the classic Romantic glimmering language when talking about nature, just like a lot of Wordsworth. Lines like “The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main” and “How exquisite the scents / Snatched from yon bean-field!” really show the scene well, especially by playing on the different senses: the smell of flowers, the glitter of diamonds.

In these stanzas, Coleridge details how the wind causes the lute that sits on his windowsill to make music. The idea of nature—almost entirely on its own—creating music also seems very Romantic, especially Coleridge describing how when the wind gusts intensely, the notes shift in pitch and the music becomes more amazing: “its strings / Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise.” Coleridge goes on to compare nature playing the lute to all things in nature. Just as the harp can be played by gusts of air, all of nature can be “played”—meaning have something beautiful come from it—if the right spirit compels them. Just as air is still, but gusts of wind cause music from the harp, the right surge can cause anything in nature to achieve beauty. I thought this metaphor was both simple yet captivating, and if the poem had ended after the fourth stanza, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.

In the fifth stanza, Coleridge turns to a critique of himself/the narrator for assuming he could understand the world as God understands it. To be honest, the stanza in general sort of perplexed me, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the point was, especially within the context of the poem. It felt really out of place, especially in a Romantic poem, but I suppose I don’t know enough about Coleridge to make that statement.

I know we have alluded to the influence of Wordsworth on many 19th-century American writers and poets, but it especially stood out to me while reading “Lines.” I saw a ton of similarities between “Lines” and “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

For those not familiar with Emerson or “Nature” it was a piece he wrote in the 1830s which became a foundational piece for Transcendentalism. He outlined his dissatisfaction/objections with modern society, stating that people of his age were too reliant on wisdom and knowledge about the world from past generations. Instead of relying on what the people of the past may have thought, people in the present should learn to interpret the world for themselves. They can accomplish this by going into nature. Only by physically going into nature can one develop their own understanding of and wisdom about the world. While likely a large oversimplification of his argument, which was more complex, this is the gist of Emerson’s piece. 

The similarities between it and Wordsworth’s “Lines” are immediately apparent. Just as Emerson believed the wisdom of yesterday was not enough to understand the world, and each person had to go into nature to figure it out for themselves, the world also confused Wordsworth: “In which the heavy and the weary weight \ Of all this unintelligible world, \ Is lightened.” And, just as Emerson solved this problem by going into nature, Wordsworth too seeks answers from nature: “In nature and the language of the sense \ The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, \ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul \ Of all my moral being.” I find the last line of this quote especially interesting—both writers believe answers to moral problems lie within nature. 

 

We have already alluded to the obvious influence of the Romantics on the poetry that came after them. When reading William Blake, I felt the connection was especially clear between him and Whitman. Blake clearly had a large influence on Whitman, as not only are the themes between both authors’ poems the same, but their respective views on the world seem to also be similar. 

Much of Whitman’s poetry centers on the “oneness” of the world—the connection between all men, women, and living things (all of nature): “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman, “Song of Myself”). The theme of oneness, as we talked about in class on Thursday, continued popping up in Blake. We see it in the poem “On Anothers Sorrow,” in which Blake outlines human empathy does not allow us to experience joy while others experience grief. 

We also see Whitman’s insistence on the connection between humans and nature in Blake’s “The Fly.” As Blake states in the poem, “Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?” The connection and oneness between a human being and something as insignificant as a fly, merely because both are living creatures, is very similar to Whitman.

Perhaps entirely a tangent, but just intriguing to note, the similarities between “The Fly” by Blake and “I heard a fly buzz” by Emily Dickinson are very interesting. Both obviously allude to flies, but both also directly deal with flies as harbingers/metaphors/symbols for death, which I thought was worth noting.