Age of Reason/The Enlightenment 1650s to 1750s * Emphasis on logic, science and reason * Continued rise of industrialisation * No poems from this era |
Romanticism * 1750s to 1850 * Reaction against Industrial Revolution, science and rationalism. * Revolt against social and political hierarchies (French Revolution) * Rediscovery of the mythology, folk stories and occult * Prizing of emotion over reason * Artist is god-like * Rebellion and non-conformity * Finding beauty and inspiration in nature * Good and evil two sides of same coin – both embraced * Below, poems 3 and 5 are typically Romantic. 3 sees that God/artist creates both the tiger and the lamb. 5 finds comfort in nature. | | 3. The Tyger - William Blake | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | The artist, blacksmith, God create things both gentle (lamb) and violent (tiger) | Strong use of trochaic metre; 4-line stanzas; lines 1 and 2, 3 and 4 rhyme; quite regular syllables (7-8) | Rhetorical questions | The role of the artist and God; the origin of violence; embrace of the dark and the light side of life as one source | 4. Ozymandias of Egypt - Percy Bysshe Shelley | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | The speaker tells the story of a traveller who saw the a statue of Ozy, who ordered and built mighty works but those works have now disappeared into the desert | Petrarchan or Italian sonnet | Alliteration; irony of great works no longer visible | Change and time; power and powerlessness; arrogance | 5. Ode to Autumn - John Keats | content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | The abundance of autumn | An ode; three-stanza; variable rhyme scheme; stanzas are eleven lines long; iambic pentameter | Personification of autumn; sound devices; look out for long vowel sounds evoking gentle mellowness | Beauty and comfort of nature |
Victorian and Gothic PoemsVictorian * During reign of Queen Victoria 1837-1901 * Reaction against Romanticism? * Increase of industrialisation and urbanisation * Emphasis on nationalism, clear cut right and wrong * World is governed by God’s will * Moral absolutism: right is right and wrong is wrong; there are savages and civilised peopleGothic [a sub-category within Victorian period] * Mid-1800s * medieval or medieval-type setting * gloomy landscape and * woman in distress needing to be rescued * Evil, dominating, lustful * Supernatural events and omens and nightmares * Below, 7 and 8 are by poets going against the Victorian absolutism: about loss: loss of faith in 7 and loss of nature in 8. Both pessimistic and critical of Victorian ideas. * 6 is a Gothic poem. How do Gothic ideas fit in to Victorianism? | | 6. Remembrance - Emily Brontë | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | Remembering and almost enjoying the bitter sweet pain of a woman’s loss of her lover | An elegy. Gothic like poem; 4-line stanzas where lines 1 and 3 and 2 and 4 rhyhme | Personification and intense imagery | Loss; pain, pity and self-pity | 7. Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | Man rises and the withdraw of the tidal sea reminds him of the loss of religion; the rising tide of violence and war; but at least he has his love | Could be called a lyric poem, an elegy or a dramatic monologue | Look out for long vowel sounds; harsh sound images; enjambment | Loss of faith and meaning; rise of violence; but the enduring comfort of love | 8. Binsey Poplars - Gerard Manley Hopkins | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | Nature via trees is erased by felling and progress | NB! Look up sprung rhythm! | Sound device of assonance and alliteration through sprung rhythm | Loss of nature that cannot be reclaimed |
Modernism (and then Post-Modernism) * Emerged after WWI; many people questioned the slaughter and insanity of it all * Old truths questioned eg faith, authority * Rise of Humanism (focus on people, not God) * Slavery and imperialism questioned * There is no absolute moral meaning (eg God); you must find your own meaning and its relative * The old ways (eg realistic paintings and novels) questioned and experimented with * Below, poems 10, 11 and 13 are typically modernist in their pessimistic themes of war, loss, and decay. * Poem 12 is modernist in structure (free verse, experimental, not confined to conventional poetic structure) * Poem 9 goes against the grain | | 9. The Song of Wandering Aengus - William Butler Yeats | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | Like the myth, the speaker finds a love and then spends the rest of his life finding her; even to death | Iambic tetrameter; lyric poem | Allusion to myth; imagery of magic and romance | Pursuit of the ideal, obsession | 10. Will it be so again? - Cecil Day-Lewis | Content | Form/structure | Techniques | Themes | Will it recur that the young and the good and the brave die in wars while the ‘scheming’ profit; we must try as the ‘living’ to not let it be so again | 5 line-stanzas; series of questions | Rhetorical questions; metaphor of seeds and dead | War is pointless | Content | Form/structure | techniques | themes | 11. Refugee Blues - WH Auden | Refugees who are welcome nowhere; they are less welcome than animals; they could be Jews in Nazi times, or any refugees | 3-line stanzas (blues music has rhythm of 3); lines 1 and 2 always rhyme | Rhetorical questions; repetition | Demonisation and indifference to ‘the other’ | 12. Constantly Risking Absurdity - Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Comparing a poet to an acrobat; both must perform and risk failure and embarrassment | Free verse poem; note the poem’s layout, irreverent or like a high wire line | Extended metaphor of poet and acrobat; pun of ‘gravity’; some simile and assobance | Risk; creativity; failure | 13. Mirror - Sylvia Plath | Written from the mirror’s perspective (the mirror as our cold, truth-telling self?), the mirror objectively sees the age and decay of the woman. The mirror and the lake swallow youth and give back old age | Free verse poem in two stanzas | The personification of the mirror and of the lake | Change; aging; truth; loss of youth |
South African Poems during Apartheid * Common themes: intrusion of politics into poetry * Poem 14 can be seen as the emotional experience of a man sent to an apartheid jail | | 14. Touch - Hugh Lewin | When the prisoner is released there will be the irony of touch (abuse in prison) and touch he longs for, the human comfort | Free verse with lots of enjambment | irony | Loss of love; abuse; desire for comfort; imprisonment |
South African Post-Apartheid Poems * Return to less political, more personal and universal themes such as poverty and class difference (15), AIDS (16) and family inheritance and generational differences (17) | Content | Form/structure | techniques | themes | 15. Trespasser - Tatamkhulu Afrika | A man wanders under a bridge in the rain and sees a fearful image of a beggar family but then a moment of beauty and grace | Free verse poem | Imagery both ugly and beautiful | The surprise of grace amidst ugliness and poverty | 16. Crossing over - Chris Mann | Speaker meets two people with AIDS, in church, and wonders how they are doing as they cross over toward death | 4-line stanzas, 8-10 syllables per line; free verse | Some enjambment; a plain almost prose-like poem | How do you reach out to a person suffering; how can you understand their experience? | 17. I have my Father’s Voice - Chris van Wyk | A man looks back at his life and sees that his father was like him; the one difference is that the man has poetry unlike his father | Free verse | | |
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