LA Home-Learning Day 2

HOME LEARNING #2

This is my lang arts assignment for day 2 of the home-learning week.

muhahahaha.

These are the instructions from Mdm Lim's wiki - Choose a poet by going online to a couple of the internet sites such as Poets.org (Academy of American Poets website) or American Poetry Online. Blog on your favourite poet. Your entry should be approximately 400 words. You should include the following:


•Ask yourself why you chose this particular poet. Why is he/she intriguing? Begin with an interesting fact, quote from a literary critic, an interview with the poet, etc. and move on to a thesis (yes, a thesis) which is not just a statement of fact, such as Sylvia Plath is a deeply disturbed woman. Think about what you feel about the poet’s work after having done the research; create a claim or opinion about him/her and let the reader know in the thesis what exactly you will be covering in the paper.


•Background and historical context. Biographical information is fine, but make sure that it provides insight into the writer and his/her work
.

•Three poems by the poet


•All outside source material or links must be cited.

I'll follow the "head-start" hint in iVLE by choosing "William Wordsworth" for the assignment today.


I am intrigued by Mr. "Wordsworth"for the simplest, most fundamental reasons - that he's a Romantic poet. Frankly speaking, I'm not well- versed with poems, and I really wasn't aware of the existence of "Romantic poems". The cognizance and understanding of his poetry led me to appreciate more sincerely the beauty of language, the meaning it has for different people. For William Wordsworth himself, it was a way of expression. The sincerity everpresent in his simple, lucid writing was easily felt - it was clear that he wrote from his heart, a diminishing, rare quality in the contemporary world.

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic Poet, who, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English Literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Born in England in 1770, William Wordsworth attended Cambridge University and afterwards went on a walking tour of France and Switzerland. When war broke out in 1793 he returned to England, moving in with his sister Dorothy in Dorset. It was during this time he discovered his calling as a poet with a predominant theme of the common man close to nature. In 1798 he was instrumental in the advent of Romantic Poetry, together with Coleridge writing the Lyrical Ballads, as mentioned earlier, which began with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" and ended with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". He spent a year in Germany, then settled down in Dove Cottage, Grasmere with his wife Mary Hutchison in 1802, where he wrote his poetic autobiography The Prelude and two other books of poems. He was selected poet laureate in 1843 and died in 1850.


Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge".

Three Poems



"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"



I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.



LONDON 1802

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.




The speaker of this poem, which takes the form of a dramatic outburst, literally cries out to the soul of John Milton in anger and frustration. (The poem begins with the cry: "Milton!") In the octave, the speaker articulates his wish that Milton would return to earth, and lists the vices ruining the current era. Every venerable institution--the altar (representing religion), the sword (representing the military), the pen (representing literature), and the fireside (representing the home)--has lost touch with "inward happiness," which the speaker identifies as a specifically English birthright, just as Milton is a specifically English poet. (This is one of Wordsworth's few explicitly nationalistic verses--shades, perhaps, of the conservatism that took hold in his old age.)

In the sestet, the speaker describes Milton's character, explaining why he thinks Milton would be well suited to correct England's current waywardness. His soul was as bright as a star, and stood apart from the crowd: he did not need the approval or company of others in order to live his life as he pleased. His voice was as powerful and influential as the sea itself, and though he possessed a kind of moral perfection, he never ceased to act humbly. These virtues are precisely what Wordsworth saw as lacking in the English men and women of his day.

It is important to remember that for all its emphasis on feeling and passion, Wordsworth's poetry is equally concerned with goodness and morality. Unlike later Romantic rebels and sensualists, Wordsworth was concerned that his ideas communicate natural morality to his readers, and he did not oppose his philosophy to society. Wordsworth's ideal vision of life was such that he believed anyone could participate in it, and that everyone would be happier for doing so. The angry moral sonnets of 1802 come from this ethical impulse, and indicate how frustrating it was for Wordsworth to see his poems exerting more aesthetic influence than social or psychological influence.



Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known


And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"

This direct, unadorned lyric is one of the most striking and effective of the many simple lyrics like it, written by Wordsworth in the mid to late 1790s and included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. This little poem, part of a sequence of short lyrics concerning the death of the speaker's beloved Lucy, actually shows extraordinary sophistication and mastery of technique. The sophistication lies in the poet's grasp of human feeling, chronicling the sort of inexplicable, half-fearful, morbid fantasy that strikes everyone from time to time but that, before Wordsworth, was not a subject poetry could easily incorporate. The technique lies in the poet's treatment of his theme: like a storyteller, Wordsworth dramatizes in the first stanza the act of reciting his tale, saying that he will whisper it, but only in the ear of a lover like himself. This act immediately puts the reader in a sympathetic position, and sets the actual events of the poem's story in the past, as opposed to the "present," in which the poet speaks his poem. This sets up the death-fantasy as a subject for observation and analysis--rather than simply portraying the events of the story, Wordsworth essentially says, "This happened to me, and isn't it strange that it did?" But of course it is not really strange; it happens to everyone; and this disjunction underscores the reader's automatic identification with the speaker of the poem.

Also like a storyteller, Wordsworth builds suspense leading up to the climax of his poem by tying his speaker's reverie to two inexorable forces: the slowly sinking moon, and the slowly plodding horse, which travels "hoof after hoof," just as the moon comes "near, and nearer still" to the house where Lucy lies. The recitation of the objects of the familiar landscape through which the speaker travels--the paths he loves, the orchard-plot, the roof of the house--heightens the unfamiliarity of the "strange fit of passion" into which the speaker is plunged by the setting moon.


References:
http://www.poemhunter.com/william-wordsworth/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
http://www.geocities.com/infinitum_poetry/bioswilliamwordsworth.html


Thanks. That's all.

Cheers,
Zhu Cheng