Storia, letteratura inglese e letteratura: un'analisi comparativa, Sbobinature di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Storia, letteratura inglese e letteratura: un'analisi comparativa e più Sbobinature in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Cap. 1: History, English and Literature HISTORY We understand literature through a certain chronology. It can be understand in two ways: 1) Italian way: through Benedetto Croce and Francesco De Santis; the latter wrote History of Italian literature and he narrated the Italian literature as it was a History. Before him in the 16th century Vasari did the same with Italian art. So the idea is a kind of evolution, for instance Italian literature starts with Celo d’Alcamo and Sicilian school and there is an evolution; there is a certain similarity with English literature, for example the theatre was in the churches and he moved out and started to be performed in villages and in the courts and then went out and there were wandering companies who established a whole theatre. An example to understand the history of English literature with English novel: at first romances novels were without a direct speech, with an omniscient narrator, then they made experiments such as epistolary novels with more direct speech, then again other experiments with more free speeches, then the stream of consciousness that is an evolution of free speech. Every generation built a better novel/style than the previous one, this is a way of understanding history of literature, so we understand every generation as long as we know what comes before and as longs as we see an evolution to what has come before, but it’s not necessarily so because we don’t know what Dickens thought/read in Great expectations, even if in his novels there’s a lot of autobiographical material, a lot of journalism, social reflection and they don’t come from previous literature, so we may say that Dickens is an evolution of Jane Austen just because she came before him, but that does not explain why Dickens was a novelist. So history of literature is a construction, but it’s one way to study literature. 2) New historicism: that is a kind of historical approach to literature, that was developed in the 1990, and new historicism said that historical approach in literature is a construction, it’s just a narration (we take a certain number of facts and we linked them together > post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this and therefore because of this, which is not necessarily through, because if something happens after id doesn’t necessary depends on what comes before), so it claims that there is a very deeply link with history and it must not be sought within the history of the discipline, so with the history of literature, and it must be sought in the link between literature and political history and societal history, so in this way, if we consider Dickens, we don’t say he wrote like that because Jane Austen wrote that differently, Dickens write in that way because he is a Victorian, and there are some forces in the society which shape his way of thinking and in which he reacts, so this is why he writes in this particular way. When we talk about history of literature we understand history both ways; we understand that literature has a kind of development. Wherever we see a quotation or a citation (the difference between the two terms is that citation is mentioning something that happens in the past), we understand a kind of history and we have to go back into history and understand it, sometimes we have authors that are unsatisfied with previous generations and they try to write back, this happens especially in modernism, between the last decade of 1890 and 1900, where looking of literature has an enormous impact on how we study literature today, with the idea of writing something new it’s in contrast with other authors and generations, for example Shakespeare who had never wrote something new, he was always copying things here and there trying to give a story to old things. History is not the only way to approach literature. ENGLISH In the 19th century everyone wrote in English and not necessarily come form UK, for example when we say history of Italian literature, it’s an exception if something come from outside Italy. Regarding English literature, we must understand if it should be considered something that comes from outside of England, and the answer is that if we really want to understand a text, we may have to consider it. For example when we study Dickens we consider it an American author, but if we study Dickens as a Victorian author, that responds to a certain Victorian times, responding to the problem of warehouses, responding to the problem of working and how to educate children, this are all ways that portrait London, mirroring the urban development of London. But what has America with all this? Dickens was a keen reader of Edgar Allan Poe, and in a way he was influenced by him, especially in his later novels when he introduces Detective plots. So when we study the 19th century, we cannot think of England alone, but we have to consider all the anglosphere, so everyone that wrote in English, from Australia to South Africa, Canada and so on. So who we say English, it is a shifty notion, we are referring the Tudor time that is in England, but when we say “English” in the Victorian time we are referring to the British islands, and when we say the 19th century we are referring to the all anglosphere including America. of 1 56 LITERATURE It’s a shifty notion and it’s almost impossible to give a comprehensive definition, because it’s either too comprehensive, and anything goes, or always leaves out something which should be included in literature. So we will not define Literature, but we can say a few things about literature: 1) Is something that usually is written down, but there is also a notion called Orature/oral literature, which is literature but only oral and it’s oral spoken, and it was almost forgotten at the beginning of the 20th century, because any oral literature wasn’t produced or written down, but things have changed with the invention of the radio and the television (even know there are a lot of songs that are meant to be sung and not written down, nowadays we also have poets in the anglosphere — that comes from the margins, so from South Africa, Asia , who record their poems but they don’t publish them, because they consider the performance/voice of the poem it has the same importance as it is written down). When we listen to a poem we activate a different part of the brain than the one we activate while we are reading, and that’s what poets want from the public. 2) Literature is proses, verses and theatre (and when it comes to the last years it’s also cinema and radio). 3) It usually has an author, this notion has been challenged over the last decades, that there’s an author of every literary piece, this is the idea that has been sent from a patriarchal society, the idea that everything that exists must have a father, and that father is more important than the child. So for centuries the idea of the author was incredibly important, and so they used to study literature always starting from the author. For example, if we want to read Great expectations, we have to study Charles Dickens first, and the notion about Dickens’s life casts a very important shadow of our reading, and this is a Victorian idea. Previously many poems were anonymous because the author was not so important as it came in the 19th century, work itself was more important than the author. If we can know anything about the author then we can understand everything he writes. Every piece of writing is the product of a different person that person that is writing, and it is a much better product, because the author is not pouring himself into the world, he invests a better version of himself or a public persona that is writing. Sometimes the public persona it is more outspoken, because there are thinks you cannot speak about in a certain society, but it’s in the writing, and when you are asked by an interviewer about it the author denies it. So the opposite idea that the author thinks something but he doesn’t want the writing to be impeded by what he writes, so he says some kind of censorship about what he writes. There is a connection between work and author but they are not interchangeable. In the ‘15s, another school of thinking (new criticism) developed in the US, decided to “kill” the author and the motto was “the author is dead”, and they proposed to read the book without their author, they also produced anthology and the author’s name was not given, and people was supposed to read it and react to it without knowing the author, and that’s just to show how literary critics has considered literature in another point of view, and this makes us think that sometimes the author was important and sometimes he wasn’t, but every work of art has an author. 4) The reader In order to create an affective communication it is important to have: someone who sends the message, a message and someone who receive the message, because literature is a kind of communication. The reader is important, because every act of reading is also an act of interpretation, interpreting doesn’t mean only giving an original idea but it also means giving our own rendition of a text. Within a text we have some hints how a text should be interpreted, so one of the very important theoretical idea, in the 20th century at the beginning of the seventies, was by two German guys (Iser, expert of English literature, and Jauss, expert of German literature) working in the University of Constance, came up with this idea of aesthetic of reception, and they thought of writing/thinking of all history of literature as the history of reception of works rather than the history of works. The idea was to look at how the work of art was made, and they understood that every text creates his ideal reader, so the text it’s creating his own interpreter, so when we study a text we also understand how the interpreter should be, what should know in order to make the text work. We always have a kind of reader described in a literary text, and there are two ideas: then first one is “what the reader should know in order to understand, what the reader should be aware of in term of knowledge”, and the second is “the reader must be able to connect things”. THIS IS JUST TO SAY Williams Carol Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which of 2 56 This is also the time when England is expanding all over the world, they are creating colonies, and English colonies weren’t exactly like Spanish colonies, that wanted to create a new Spain in new territories, but in some territories like Australia and partly North America (but mostly defectors went in North America because they didn’t like English colonies) English colonies were like Spanish colonies, on the other hands in Australia they sent convicts that they didn’t want, as for Asia they had commercial interest but they didn’t want to settle in Asia; because people who went to Asia in order to work they eventually came back to England and that made English colonisation different than the other States, such as Spain. In the 18th century there wasn’t the same idea that there was in France, or because of philosopher’s theories. There are some new things that are happening in England as well, possibly because neighbouring France, but the idea was to be super nationals, so without any national boundaries because philosopher’s idea which established that they didn’t belong to any particular nation (French idea). However there were people like Newton who applied rationalistic principles to optic and physics and he describes nature through mathematics. Because of the political situation in England we have philosophers like Hobbes and Locke who systematised political idea; Locke was important because he was the first who said that the king was elected by a contract by the population and not by a divine right, so people couldn’t ruled themselves and they decided to make a contract in order to elect the king as long as he behaves well and as long as he does the people’s interest, so there’s the idea that they could that because George III broke the contract, so the monarchy is a deal between the people and the monarch. Then there was Ashley-Cooper/Shaftesbury, who was a divulger of Hobbes’s ideas and Locke’s ideas, and even if he didn’t have many ideas he was very influential in divulging Hobbes and Locke’s ideas, and he had this notion regarding the perfection of nature and the idea of balance (the keystone idea of the 18th century, everything must be balanced, everything ideal must be balanced, for example in politics, social life). Together with the idea of moderation there is the idea of common sense; so whatever is felt or approved by commons sent must be true, and whatever goes against common sense should be rejected. Shaftesbury wrote a book about manners and opinions of his time, “characteristics of men, manners, opinions” published in 1732/40. He was responding in a way to Bernard Mandeville, who was polish but he wrote in English because the police situation in England encouraged discourses about the best form of government and he wrote this apologue/fable called “the bees” (or “private vices, public benefits”), in which he said that the middle way didn’t work, because his idea was that the modern state should work on different principles and actually his ideas were taken by modern economists as being more sound than shakespearenism because he was inventing consumerism, his idea was as a bee-hive where only a few bees should have work as high as they did in the past and they should not not proceed more honey than they actually need, they should be content of what they have and everyone should be working, and this bee-hive is ruined by who doesn’t want to work. So the idea is that we need people who spend money and rich people who pay people for expensive luxuries, so we need to consume more than we actually need, because if everyone is content for what he have we have a few less prosper. With this idea Mandeville invented modern consumerism, but Shaftesbury was against his idea because he thought that consumerism drive people unhappy because they want more than they have, because every time people achieved something they want something else, so they live all their lives without having any satisfaction. On the contrary he advocated this middle way, and this debate his found also in “The rape of the lock”. Christofer Wren, who was connected with Baroque style as an architect, and he was fired because the government didn’t want his style but wanted a minor classic style. So it is connected with the idea of rationalism and good sense. Cap. 2: Pope - The rape of the lock CAP. 2.1: ALEXANDER POPE Pope was catholic, and he was an aristocrat and a lure person. He had to work for a living so he translated the Classics, such as Homer and Virgil. He also wrote several epistles (they are essays on man or criticism), and giving the basic ideas of 18th century classicism, this age was also called Augustan Age, because they felt that after wars with France and the problems with the king, they felt that they were at peace. He was the friend of Sir Caryl, and he was somehow involved in a fight between two families: the Petres and the Fermors; they were to catholic families, and the Petres kept locked Arabella Fermors, this is how he wrote the poem. The two families started a “war” to defend on one hand (the Fermors) the honour of the daughter Arabella and to defend the gentleman who kept her. This was becoming dangerous so Caryl, who was friend of both families and of Pope, asked him to do something about it. Pope, who was famous for his satires, decided to wrote a heroic-comic poem called “the captive of the lock” who was the first version of of 5 56 “the rape of the lock” and tried to make light from a poor thing (fare una commedia), he had written this short poem/occasional poem for himself and the families, so for a private circulation, but it was somehow published. Pope didn’t like how the poem was published so he decided to publish it himself, but he added two cantos. He wrote an heroic-comical poem, that is a poem which of a hero, and comical because it’s supposed to be comical, because of the idea to features lower classes and to make people laugh. So on one hand the poem reach aristocratic people because of the “heroic” features, but on the other it reaches lower classes because it’s a comedy. So he is using all the literary devices, which are usually connected with heroic poems so with epic poems (so he used devices from Homer, so he writes the same way he used to when he translated Homer). He started the poem with an epigraphy from Martial, he was a latin poet, and he was famous for his satires (so is a kind of inspiration for Pope) and he paraphrased one of Martial’s epigraph about a man who had captured a woman’s hair even if he did’t want to, states these two line as an epigraph because of the idea and the style of the 18th century, in which it was usual to start with a Latin epigraph, so something passive. He is talking directly to Arabella, saying that he didn’t want Belinda to violate Arabella’s hair, but it’s nice that Pope had given this poem according to Arabella’s prayers. He is writing a dedicatory epistle at the beginning of the poem, and he is talking directly to Arabella Fermor, the dedicatee, the one whose hair has been cut off. This book was intended for a limited audience, for a young lady who has a good sense of humour and can laugh, the first version was intended for a limited audience and a limited circulation and this young lady had good sense and humour. There are different meanings coming together, so when we read the rape of the lock we have several layers of the meaning. The deepest level of meaning is hardly ever noticed. Every line of this poem can be read through this level. This is what makes the poem interesting, because if this poem had stop at the first and second level it would be less interesting today, but if we go to a deeper level there are these that interest us even today. All the levels of layers: 1. Face value: that is to say we believe everything the narrator says (we believe that Belinda is wonderful, pure, the Machinery exist). We find that the face value is often ironic. 2. Irony/overt irony: which every reader is supposed to consider. But how does the author makes this two levels readable? Through exaggeration and intertextuality (it’s a metaphor, a thread/filo which is more into the new fabric, so we intertwined the old thread into the new fabric > presence of older text that is present because of a situation into a new text) that creates an ironic feeling, and there is a proportion between the language used and the irony. A more expert reader can go to level two, a naif reader will stay on level one. 3. Caricature/satire: often mentioned when we read history of literature, when women are targeted. A reference of this level can be found in the dedicatoree. 4. Social level: a kind of satire but it’s a critic of his own society, so it’s a safe satire, he is criticising the society of 18th century, the consumerism and the values of the 18th century > more conscious of his own time. The difference between the third and the fourth level is that in the third level only women are being criticised. 5. Lyrical level: the word lyrical is used when we talk about poetry, and it describes the inner feelings of the poet. In this case Pope was similar to Leopardi, so he destroyed his back by studying too much or staying too much bent on his book, so he suffers from migraine. So he was completely excluded by the seduction game he is describing, for instance he is jealous because people can play this game that he can’t play. LITERATURE There are different ways of looking at literature: 1. Distant reading, which implies to step back and try to contemplate, and it may work on a single word or many different words that share something, so reading history implies a distant reading. 2. Close reading in which we read each line and we try to make sense to each line, and possibly connect each line with the next. We have to pay attention to every single word in order to understand exactly how that word works and the different shades of meaning that every single word may carry. Usually close reading implies a theoretical frame work. of 6 56 If we consider the poem, we have a level in which objects don’t have any particular reason to be there, but they are there because they are instances of realism. If we are writing a novel we have to describe a certain scenario and we described objects that are linked to the scenario, but when we write poetry every words become heavier, every word goes beyond the first level of reality and becomes metaphorical and symbolical. So if we write a novel and we mention about an objects in a scenario we are just stating a fact of what is there, while in poetry an object may be symbolical or metaphorical. That’s how “The rape of the lock” is both realistic and satyrical as well as comical; it is realistic because it wasn’t common for literature to portray contemporary society, so this is one of the first experiments in the description of society > this was very successful because the readers wanted to read this poem by themselves, the rising bourgeois was eager to see itself portray somehow and also through words to establish some kind of ethics of the middle class. So this is what they were particularly eager about, and this text brings together different lives (that is common in English literature): we have a highbrow kind of mind which comes form the renaissance and the neoclassical, and then there is a much lower level with the description of contemporary society and all the sexual level that we can find in the text. The parody is a kind of critique itself; this is the so called English augustan age, when people is no longer at war, when everything seems to be easy to reach, people are reaching out to colonies and they are living in peace. And this people are the same age of Homer’s heroes, but they no longer fight epic battles. So the irony of the classic is a way to ironically point out the new stage of things. So the Lock is a symbol for every object of desire, material or immaterial, however this new society is not as crystal as it used to be, from faith in supernatural to rationalism (and in a way rationalism/science was the God of 18th century). So we have this new hidden power, that is power of economic, power of the market and this is new rational power that we can’t rule and they had to follow it, even though they weren’t feeling safe and sure, and this is a way to portray this feeling of instability that lives in people’s lives. In “The rape of the lock” we can see all the forces that protect Belinda as economic forces that is a metaphors of this mysterious forces for new economy, this material entities are neither things or objects, neither natural given or man made, they are substitute for reputation/money/power/safety, if we have may objects we can selle them and we are protected from economic disasters, so this compulsive accumulation of things is necessary to show off, to feel safer in this unstable world. So there is a convergence between objects and animals, because they are all considered for their value, even women are used to be assessed and sold to the better possible price, men are assessed accord to how much they own. Pope is downsizing the importance of his own age, and he is the great translator of Homer and he is giving us a parody of Homer, so he is downsizing Homer and taking importance of classic education in homer, and he shows how rhetoric is giving an epic dimension to trivial things. Rationalism has tried to overthrow that. According to rationalism everything that is inherited must be an object. Difference between the object and the thing 1. Object is something which implies a subject, something we can possess and having control over. In literature used to be nameless unless they are necessary to to do something. (In the rape of the lock we have many objects and they are not only to be mention because they acquires some literary meaning). 2. Thing is something of which we are not in control. Cap 3: Hogarth - Harlot’s progress He was a particular man, he came from a poor family and later he become famous for portraits and he become a sergeant painter > so a painter for the British court. He lived his life in the first half the 18th century, he is famous not for his paintings but for the stories he painted, not only he offered the painting himself but also stories within the cycle of paintings. The Harlot’s progress, came form the “pilgrim progress” that is the story of a pilgrim, christian, who let the city to reach the Holy city, and the novel tells his progress about how he reached salvation, the Harlot’s progress is how a women became a prostitute, so he is bringing together a new morality and a new ethos by his tableaux. Originally this was a painting but it was lost in a fire, because of his popularity engravings were made out of it. Some critics argue that things are more complex than this and this is another literary characteristic of Hogarth. First of all there is the word Harlot, that is common but possibly not so common back then; whore could have been more common than Harlot, in the bible (King Jame’s bible, the official English bible) for instance, the word prostitute never appear, is only use as a verb, however the word “Harlot” appears as something worse than simple whore. Whore is simply a sex worker, who has a low social of 7 56 PLATE VI In the final plate, Moll is dead and all of the scavengers are present at her wake. A note on the coffin lid shows that she died aged 23 on 2 September 1731. The apron spills his brandy as he has his hand up the skirt of the girl next to him, and she appears pleased. A woman who has placed drinks on Moll’s coffin looks on in disapproval. Moll’s son plays ignorantly. Moll’s son is innocent but he sits playing with his topo underneath his mother’s body, unable to understand, and figuratively fated to death himself. Moll’s madam drunkenly mound on the right with a ghastly grinning jug of “Nants” (Brandy). She is the only one who is upset at the treatment of the dead girl, whose coffin is being used as a tavern bar. A mourning girl (another prostitute) steals the undertaker’s handkerchief. Another prostitute shows her injured finger to her fellow whore, while a woman adjusts her appearance in the mirror in the background, even though she shows a syphilitic sore on her forehead. The house holding the coffin has an ironic coat of arms on the wall displaying a chevron with three spigots, reminiscent of the “spill” of the parson, the flowing alcohol, and the expiration of Moll. The white hat hanging on the wall by the coat of arms is the one Moll wore in the first plate, referring back to beginning of her end. Cap 3.1: Gin lane & Beer Street Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer. On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; but, as with so many of Hogarth's works, closer inspection uncovers other targets of his satire, and reveals that the poverty of Gin Lane and the prosperity of Beer Street are more intimately connected than they at first appear. Gin Lane shows shocking scenes of infanticide, starvation, madness, decay, and suicide, while Beer Street depicts industry, health, bonhomie, and thriving commerce; but there are contrasts and subtle details that some critics believe allude to the prosperity of Beer Street as the cause of the misery found in Gin Lane. The gin crisis was severe. From 1689 onward the English government encouraged the industry of distilling, as it helped prop up grain prices, which were then low, and increase trade, particularly with England's colonial possessions. Imports of French wine and spirits were banned to encourage the industry at home. Indeed, Daniel Defoe and Charles Davenant, among others, particularly Whig economists, had seen distilling as one of the pillars of British prosperity in the balance of trade. (Both later changed their minds — by 1703 Davenant was warning that, "Tis a growing fad among the common people and may in time prevail as much as opium with the Turks!” while by 1727 Defoe was arguing in support of anti-gin legislation) In the heyday of the industry there was no quality control whatsoever; gin was frequently mixed with turpentine, and licences for distilling required only the application. When it became apparent that copious gin consumption was causing social problems, efforts were made to control the production of the spirit. The Gin Act 1736 imposed high taxes on sales of gin, forbade the sale of the spirit in quantities of less than two gallons and required an annual payment of £50 for a retail licence. These measures had little effect beyond increasing smuggling and driving the distilling trade underground. Various loopholes were exploited to avoid the taxes, including selling gin under pseudonyms such as Ladies' Delight, Bob, Cuckold's Delight, and the none-too-subtle Parliament gin. The prohibitive duty was gradually reduced and finally abolished in 1743. Francis Place later wrote that enjoyments for the poor of this time were limited: They had often had only two: "sexual intercourse and drinking," and that "drunkenness is by far the most desired" as it was cheaper and its effects more enduring. By 1750 over a quarter of all residences in St Giles parish in London were gin shops, and most of these also operated as receivers of stolen goods and co-ordinating spots for prostitution. The two prints were issued a month after Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding published his contribution to the debate on gin: An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers, and of 10 56 they aim at the same targets, though Hogarth's work lays more blame for the gin craze on oppression by the governing class and focuses less on the choice of crime as a ticket to a life of ease. CAP. 3.1-1: GIN LANE Set in the parish of St Giles — a notorious slum district that Hogarth depicted in several works around this time — Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish serve the gin industry: gin sellers; a distiller (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit — as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs — lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff. This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old daughter, Mary, from the workhouse where she had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled the girl and left her body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin. In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor. Such cases provided a focus for anti-gin campaigners such as Thomas Wilson, and the image of the neglectful and/or abusive mother became increasingly central to anti-gin propaganda. Sir John Gonson, featured in Hogarth's earlier A Harlot's Progress, turned his attention from prostitution to gin and began prosecuting gin-related crimes with severity. The gin cellar Gin Royal below advertises its wares with the slogan: - Drunk for a penny - Dead drunk for twopence - Clean straw for nothing Other images of despair and madness fill the scene: a disturbed man cavorts in the street, beating himself over the head with a pair of bellows while holding a baby impaled on a spike — the dead child's mother rushes from the house screaming in horror; a barber has taken his own life in the dilapidated attic of his barber-shop, ruined because nobody can afford a haircut or shave; on the steps, below the woman who has let her baby fall, a skeletal pamphlet-seller rests, perhaps dead of starvation, as the unsold moralising pamphlet on the evils of gin-drinking The Downfall of Mrs Gin slips from his basket. An ex-soldier, he has pawned most of his clothes to buy the gin in his basket, next to the pamphlet that denounces it. Next to him sits a black dog, a symbol of despair and depression. Outside the distiller a fight has broken out, and a crazed cripple raises his crutch to strike his blind compatriot. Images of children on the path to destruction also litter the scene: aside from the dead baby on the spike and the child falling to its death, a baby is quieted by its mother with a cup of gin, and in the background of the scene an orphaned infant bawls naked on the floor as the body of its mother is loaded into a coffin on orders of the beadle. Two young girls who are wards of the parish of St Giles — indicated by the badge on the arm of one of the girls — each take a glass. CAP. 3.1-2: BEER STREET In comparison to the sickly hopeless denizens of Gin Lane, the happy people of Beer Street sparkle with robust health and bonhomie. "Here all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand". The only business that is in trouble is the pawnbroker: Mr. Pinch lives in the one poorly maintained, crumbling building in the picture. In contrast to his Gin Lane counterpart, the prosperous Gripe, who displays expensive-looking cups in his upper window (a sign of his flourishing business), Pinch displays only a wooden contraption, perhaps a mousetrap, in his upper window, while he is forced to take his beer through a window in the door, which suggests his business is so unprofitable as to put the man in fear of being seized of 11 56 for debt. The sign-painter is also shown in rags, but his role in the image is unclear. The rest of the scene is populated with doughty and good- humoured English workers. It is George II's birthday (30 October) (indicated by the flag flying on the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in the background) and the inhabitants of the scene are no doubt toasting his health. Under the sign of the Barley Mow, a blacksmith or cooper sits with a foaming tankard in one hand and a leg of beef in the other. Together with a butcher — his steel hangs at his side — they laugh with the pavior (sometimes identified as a drayman) as he courts a housemaid (the key she holds is a symbol of domesticity). The inhabitants of both Beer Street and Gin Lane are drinking rather than working, but in Beer Street the workers are resting after their labours — all those depicted are in their place of work, or have their wares or the tools of their trade about them — while in Gin Lane the people drink instead of working. Exceptions to this rule come, most obviously, in the form of those who profit from the vice in Gin Lane, but in Beer Street Hogarth takes the opportunity to make another satirical statement. Aside from the enigmatic sign-painter, the only others engaged in work in the scene are the tailors in an attic. The wages of journeyman tailors were the subject of an ongoing dispute, which was finally settled by arbitration at the 1751 July Quarter sessions (in the journeymen's favour). Some believe that the tailors serve another purpose, in that Hogarth shows them continuing to toil while all the other inhabitants of the street, including their master, pause to refresh themselves. Much as the tailors are ignored by their master and left to continue working, the occupants of Beer Street are oblivious to the suffering on Gin Lane. The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane — Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking — but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer. No foreign influences pollute what is a fiercely nationalistic image. An early impression showed a scrawny Frenchman being ejected from the scene by the burly blacksmith who in later prints holds aloft a leg of mutton or ham. Cap. 4: 18th century novel The word “novel” means new; but what’s new about novel? Is the 18th century novel the same as 19th century novel, or is it different? The novel was not a particularly well-received literary genre, it was consider rather vulgar and it was too easy to read, to be really engaging for loftier minds. Besides it was written by women who didn’t have access to higher education and so all this was not looking back to high traditions and classics (which was the mark of high literature). Women could not possibly belong to this higher traditions because they were excluded from higher education, so the things they were writing were not worthy of educate people, they were too easy to read. But still the literary genre was so much connected with women that there were men who pretend to be a woman, for example Defoe. Originally a novel simply is a non fictional literary genre which is made out, so we have a diary, a collection of letters, a long book of sheet or biography; and when this things were made out they are taken as novels, so there was no literary technic, no formal research behind the novel. For instance Robinson Crusoe when it was first published it was considered a fictional work and not a novel, in fact the readers were convinced that the story was true, and actually there was something true behind the story because Defoe copied the idea from something that really happen, so a real man who went to an island and survived for years, and give to Robinson Crusoe this religious background (typically Protestant, with the idea that God selected just him to be saved). An important literary genre was the journal/diary. Because they were puritans and one of the very important features of puritans is that a person must find in itself the signs of election > in fact according to puritanism/ protestantism a person (man/woman) can’t do anything to save itself, because you can only be saved if God, form the start, has selected you to be saved, if you are elected, if you are not there is nothing you can do. Salvation came only with faith so only your faith could save you, but faith was a gift of God, either you have or not, so there is not much you can do to get it; so it was very important to find out whether God has selected you or not. But how do you do that? By observing your own life, your own feelings, by scrutinising of 12 56 Why Italy? The most chronicles where happening in the middle-ages or the 17th century, and the setting was usually Italy or Spain, and there is a religious reason for this choice: Roman Catholic had a bad reputation in England, so whatever was roman catholic was considered to be popish, so related to the Pope, and it was somehow superstitious to have a different kind of religion that the English considered heathenish, so that’s why they chose Italy and Spain for these kind of stories. But why this genre becomes popular? that’s because the Gothic brings back those elements of the supernatural in which people had always lived before the enlightened, so this kind of narrative was an antidote to the rational explanations that were popular in the spirits of the time and, in a way, it was better to live in a world inhabited by ghosts and supernatural forces than living in a world that is explained world/ formal world, or in a rational world, when you are governed by economic forces. Sometimes Gothic novels were called anti-novels because they go against the realism, which was the essence of the novel, so Gothic novel should not be considered a novel if the novel is realistic. There are some interesting insights; sometimes gothic novels become interesting because they are linked to a fascination with the horrid, and the horrid, especially in the second part of the 18th century, and in the first half of the 19th century, is connected to the sublime. The sublime is now considered as something only natural or beautiful, but it was not felt like this in the 18th century; in fact it had to do with the extreme fear or extreme emotions, especially negative emotions (so we don’t consider fear as sublime today, but it was considered so in the 18th century). The Gothic is also a return to the Romance, that had always been a target of the Neoclassic critiques, because Romances are not describing nature the way it is, because they are creating characters that are unlikely, because they are not describing the society (like Hogarth was doing). Because they are simply too simply written (the plot is too simple, there is no resolution of the story or an explanation). But at the end of the 17th century the time turned and Pseudo Longinus, who was a greek philosopher and aesthetician, who wrote a very famous piece called “on the sublime”, he was considering the sublime as an alternative to the classic (known for the concepts of balance). Cap. 5: Walpole - The castle of Otranto CAP. 5.1: WALPOLE He was a rich guy, and a sophisticate but also strange person, in fact he lived in Strawberry hill, London, and he had a house who wanted to be more similar to a castle, so it was kind of a mock-gothic castle, and he had this wooden frame in front of the house so the appearance of the castle was actually painted on the ordinary house he was living, and the inside of the house was painted like a castle. CAP. 5.2: THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO There are two editions and two preface, one for each edition. In the first edition, when people bought the novel they didn’t know it was a novel, so they were led to believe that this wasn’t a novel but a fund manuscript, so this means that they thought that everything that was written in this novel. CAP. 5.2-1: THE TWO PREFACES 1. Preface of the first edition: is similar to Manzoni’s introduction with the manuscript, so he described how he came in possession of this manuscript and why he decided to translate it, so it’s completely fictional. • He disguised himself as a philologist, giving us details to make it look more credible, talking about how he find the manuscript in the library. He uses the style of philologist and historian of his time. • He is supposing that this is the word of some catholic who has invented the story or he reward some older source. • The problem is the horizon of expectation: is created by a work of art because it looks like our work of art and in this way we imagine/expect that something happen and we know how to read that particular story, now when you set up a new literary genre we have no expectation, so how should we read that story? By reading the introduction where he just said to read it as a matter of entertainment and not as an historical document > so he is suggesting how to approach the text. 2. Preface of the second edition: it’s not fictional at all, he is talking about himself and the poetics of his novels. It’s significant the fact that he is not blaming that critics or other intellectuals like his work, but he is talking directly to the readers, so he is not claiming the literary value according to some literary critics, but according to the favour of the public. • Ancient and modern: the ancient is the French romance, the incredible stories where incredible things happens, and the modern is the novel. So he wants to write a non kind of romance, with the literary techniques usually employed by the novel, and this is unusual. of 15 56 • He says that all romances were improbable and unnatural, instead new romances —novels— were more natural but somehow fantasy. So he is trying to give to the reader ordinary people, and how the ordinary people react in that natural and supernatural situation. • Probability: in the 18th century there were the great mathematicians, a century when the English were expanding their empire, trying to have statistics of everything, and the probabilities were studied mathematically and scientifically for the first time. So probability is a key word of the 18th century, and it’s also interesting how this author links realism and probability, because probable doesn’t mean possible and the other way around, and also improbable doesn’t mean impossibile. So realism is connected with probability. • He is dissociating himself, and this is one of the basic narratology technique in which the author and the narrator are not the same person, the narrator is the person who tells the story, the narrator may be internal (like Robinson Crusoe, in which the narrator is “the first person narrator” is Robinson himself because he is telling is own story) or external (like Sherlock Holmes, in which the narrator is Dr. Watson, who is the observer of the hero that is Sherlock Holmes). Whenever we have a novel told inn the third person, we somehow think that the author and the narrator are one and the same person, even when there is an omniscient narrator the narrator and the author should never be confused. The author is the one who invents the story, besides he has some values that the narrator does not share, while the narrator is someone who narrate the story. • He wants to be as natural in his writings as a novelist. He is describing his own poetics (as if it wasn’t his), and he is also describing the characterisation by considering minor characters that are an interesting features because they add more to the realistic fiction. He is justifying himself because of the way he is using the character in this particular way. • He is not saying what is the moral of the novel, but he presents the moral of the narrator. • There are tow words that are difficult to comprehend: “but” > it covers a number of different meaning:it means “except/no doubt”, and “why” > when it is found in affermative statements it means “on the contrary”. • The last paragraph: he is again talking about his poetics, by saying that he is describing real places (even though, the castle was an ordinary house painted and decorated as if it was a castle), because he knows how the spaces were (they were familiar to him). He is telling us something about realism and in fact this is called reality effect > whenever we have something that is not necessarily for the plot, it’s not giving any particular information but it’s telling us something that might happen in the reality, that’s an effect of the reality (the reader is attracted by this unnecessary “details”). CAP. 5.2-2: SONNET TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LADY MARY COKE In the sonnet the author is talking to the person he is dedicating the novel to. He mentions reason, he says that you don’t have to read the text expecting to be able to critique it through rationality, it’s interesting that he is telling this from the start. (SCHEMA METRICO: ABABCDCD) Traduzione: la dolce fanciulla, il cui triste racconto queste melanconiche pagine descrivono; dimmi nobile signora potrà lei non far caderle lacrime pre la tua guancia? No, mai il petto empatico è insensibile ai dolori umani: tenero, sebbene indeciso si scioglie rattristato. Per la debolezza che non ha mai conosciuto. CAP 5.2-3: FIRST CHAPTER It’s interesting that the first character that it is introduced is Conrad, that is not an important character. It is important to mention that the beginning is not very different from the style of Saint James’s Bible, especially the parable of the prodigal son, in which it begins with a man who had two sons > the very first sentence introduce the who situation, so there’s a father who had two sons and then he tells the story. So we can notice that the parable of James’s Bible is similar to the introduction of The castle of Otranto, in which the introduction doesn’t start in “medias res”, but he is introducing the characters. It was not possible to begin a story in medias res, you need something to introduce the story first, the novel needed an introductory frame. > Isabella is the third important character, then there is Ippolita who is the fourth character, and it’s interesting who Ippolita is consistent through out the novel which makes the novel realistic, because in romances that would not be present, so here we have princess Ippolita who is hurt and Manfred who becomes angry and he asks imperiously what was the matter (the son killed by a gigantic helmet is the matter in question). There are different techniques of narratology; in this introduction we can notice that it’s a summary, because it’s summarising what has been going on for some time, so we can catch out and we are not unaware when of 16 56 the story actually begins. There are important points in the story that are expressed like he is just mentioning them, but they are actually fundamental, an example is the sterility of Ippolita, which is given as an oblique information, but this is actually a major point in the novel. There is one major mystery which is what the prophecy means, and this mystery is being explained through the novel > this techniques add curiosity to the reader. Then there is another mystery, that is smaller, which compels us to read on. Cap. 6: William Blake William Blake is the archetype of the revolutionary poet/man; he is not, unlike Coleridge, a very lured person, he doesn’t speak German for instance, he is not interested in the philosophical debate that was going on in Europe in this period, he was in fact a painter and a printer and for him art was something that comes through the eye before coming through the spoken/written word. This is why his collection, which is “Song of innocence” and “Son of experience” was originally printed, and he painted each page of the collection; for him the page itself and the painting was not less important than the poet. His first encounter with art was with painting, although he was a printer. CAP. 6.1 THE SONG OF INNOCENCE AND THE SONG OF EXPERIENCE He wrote “Song of innocence” and later he wrote “Song of experience", so he didn’t wrote them at the same time, although eventually it became one single collection. In “Song of innocence” his spirit he was in a period of his life in which he was more inclined to write “Song of innocence”, and later on his spirit was more inclined to write “Song of experience”. What is Innocence and what is Experience? Actually they are to be understood as one contrary of the other, but it doesn’t mean that Innocence is positive and Experience is negative, you also think of “Song of innocence” as a lack of experience, and “song of experience” as a lack of innocence, so they are two different ways of looking at the world. Very often we have parallel poems, a poem who has the same title and appears in “Song of innocence” and “Song of experience”, but there are also poems such as “The lamb” and “The tyger” who asks the same questions but they are offering completely different view point. The innocence let some ability into insight, but experience is problematic somehow for other reason, and the world of experience is often tempted with selfishness, cruelty and injustice, but is only through experience that we can see this features, without experience we simply do not notice that, we don’t even know that they are there. “Song of innocence” and “Song of experience” they are not devoted to subjects who are innocent or experienced, it’s a different way of looking at humanity, and the difference between the two collection is not the subject but the observer; it’s the observer who is innocence or experienced, not the subject. Although there is a contradiction, because by publishing this two collections together implies that both views are necessary, that one complements the other, neither is better than the other. In the introduction of “Song of innocence” he says he was walking through the valley with a flute, and he met a child who asked him to play the flute, so he plays a couple of songs, and the child asks him to sing, and he sang a song and then the child suggested that he wrote down his songs, so he did, and this collection he wrote is for children, for innocents, assuming an innocent point of view. CAP. 6.2 BLAKE’S MYTHICAL WORLD PICTURE Blake’s has a particular thinking of the world; he was a visionary, although Coleridge was a lure persone while Blake was not, his world was philosophical and mystical. So he created a theological system which changed all over the times. Initially he started not with a transcendental God but with a universal man; at the beginning of times we have this universal man but then the man fell — the fall is the typical fall of grace of Adam and Eve, but this is a fall in a different way; it’s not a fall of divine grace, but is a fall into selfhood/ selfishness, so humans who lived in a kind of Arcadia, fell into selfhood, so at a certain point discovered they own self, thinking of their own self above anything else — and this was the attempt of one part of the universal man; because in this mythical time there wasn’t any difference between one man and the next, because all them participated in this universality of humanity, and then they kind of fell apart as they thought of selfhood as more important. Ever since human suffer some kind of alienation or dis-integration, alienation caused by humanity and dis-integration because each of us fells that we are not part of a whole, a unity. The society fell that they weren’t part of a unity of man, but a mere some of disembodied parts. Humanity is thus a kind of apocalypse which histories society, but it’s positive in a way because it restores the initial unity. of 17 56 the best translation of Endecasillabo, by taking in consideration the metric asset, and historic function, the blank verse it’s the most similar to the Italian “endecasillabo”. We have to keep in mind the difference between the rhythm and the meter. They are not the same thing because meter is an abstract pattern, when we read the poem we decide that the poem is written, for example in Tintern Abbey, in iambic pentameter, because we find that the pattern of five items arranged in the line in the poem is predominant through the poem > decido qual è il metro in base all predominanza nel componimento, however this is not the same from the performance of the poem. So the meter is different from rhythm because we don’t have to invent feet the actually are just “patches” to substitute a feet when it doesn’t seem to connect the meter with the rhythm, so there is a metric tension that is used in these cases, and there are different ways in order to use the metric tension; for example the “Trochaic inversion/substitution”, that is the substitution of a trochaic foot (or trochee, when the first syllable is tonic) for an iambic foot (or iamb) in a line of iambic verse. Cap. 8: Romanticism The period that we usually associate with the word Romanticism goes from 1680-1730, is also a time of economic and scientific development and a time of great expansion of the English empire, so this things actually go together although Coleridge and Wordsworth do not think of the Empire or the industrial revolution they are very much there and to which Wordsworth and Coleridge and other poets react, if only by not mentioning them. This is also a time when many people were moving from the countryside to the city because of the new factories that were built in the cities, and this is also a time were British cities specialised in financial service, or cities in the North that were specialised in the industries or in the mining (called: industrial cities or mining cities), and in the south of Britain mostly specialised in the agricolture. This is also a time were the differences between the emerging middle-class and the working class become bigger, and somehow the tension rises between the different classes; so much so sometime in England they were afraid that there might be a revolution like the one they witnessed in France. Basically when we talk about Romanticism in history literature, we don’t talk about hysteria but about literature and intellectuals. And when we talk about intellectuals, or romantic intellectuals, were reacting both against the present development of the society, which they felt unjust (what we have found in “The chimney-sweeper” or “London” in Blake), and against the philosophy of the 18th century, which was rationalism. Romanticism is often described as being created against something rather than offering something positive, and actually there is a common ground because industrialisation was actually felt by romantic thinkers as the embodiment of rationalism in philosophy, so the philosophical idea that we should pursue happiness through money, and we should be able to pursue wealth, and the rationalistic idea that greed is after all something positive, but all of this actually creates industrialisation as it was known in England in the 18th century. And there was also colonisation that is yet another side of this rationalism, and of this capitalism because colonisation has the idea that we should be free to pursue as much wealth as we can, because we are supposed to be entitled to exploit not only our own land but also other lands and other people; and the idea that this is not a greedy and therefore negative idea, but on the contrary this is about evolution of humankind. Also, another thing about colonisation is that brought the English in contact with other people, and helped the English themselves to create their own identity, because by interacting with different societies and people, the English found their own identity. In the 18th century one of the most prominent philosopher (not a romantic philosopher, but he shows the passage from empiricism to idealism) was John Locke, who actually systematised the thought of the 18th century. Locke rejected the philosophical position of the Neoplatonist, who believed that humans have some kind of knowledge “a priori”. The idea is that people know something even before they experience that, on the contrary Locke, as the empiricists, thinks that humans are similar to a “tabula rasa” > black slate, and we only have two kinds of experiences: sensation and reflection. Sensation is what comes with our senses, the sensation can be made into an idea, and reflection comes, this is the possibility to organise our sensations in order to create more complex ideas (ES: if I touch something that is hot, I have the idea that the water is hot > basic sensation, when I put them tighter I have the idea of “heat”) > from sensation to reflection. Knowledge comes from the dialogue between different perceptions, and the superior ideas comes only after we have some experiences, and even superior or more complex ideas may come from discussion between different people. We do not know things as they are, we have to understand me through out discussion. of 20 56 Another important philosopher in the 18th century is Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, he started speculation by asking himself a simple question, “Why are humans so much attracted to the idea of infinity and transcendent?” > this is why he wrote the “Critic of reason”, and give himself a complex answer. He blames that all knowledge comes from experience, and yet it depends on some kind of structures which are innate. There are some faculties that we have that are innate, such as space and time; we do not lure the idea of space and time from any experience, but that’s an innate idea, and by the way this is one of the reasons because why in narratology space and time are so important. We can only experience the “phenomena” (ETM: faino > to show, to appear), that are not the things themselves but how they appear, how they look to us. The contrary of phenomena is the thing itself, regardless how we perceive it, and it is called “noumeno” (nous > mind, idea). According to Kant we can only experience the phenomena, but in our mind we are aspired to understand things and therefore to enter the noumeno, to understand the noumeno of things, which we cannot grasp only with our mind and faculties, it’s something that we cannot perceive. When we consider Southey and Coleridge, he was not exactly a philosopher but he interested in philosophy, but he wrote a prose work called “Bibliographia literaria” which it was a philosophical treaty which started from German philosophy. In this work he distinguish between fancy and imagination, basically he takes from Kant the idea which we have different ways of working with fancy and imagination, we can either bring to our mind something that exists or create something that never existed before. This is also a time of rationalism and the development of capitalism one hand, so we have romanticists that intellectually reacts to that movement, but we also have something similar at a lower social level, a number of new religious sects, such as methodism or evangelism, a number of new christian professions which are no longer the old calvinism or protestantism professions, they are older but behind this professions. Why does it happen? Because the church of England endorsed the capitalist idea and this people who were not capable of understanding German, who were not connected to European ideas, still they felt uneasy with the rationalism that is behind capitalism and the church of England, so they try new ways. Basically methodism and evangelism are the romanticism of the poor, it’s a way of upholding romantic ideas for those who had not the possibility to study German or philosophy, but still is the same reaction that Coleridge and Wordsworth had. The word romantic si connected to the word romance, and romance is the literary genre of middle ages (the romantic novel), however it is important in the romantic movement, the relationship between the romantics and the middle ages, because they considered that middle ages were attired, and their mind was innocent (they considered the middle-ages so pure because, in their mind they felt in a way that they had grown up, they felt themselves as adults of civilisation so they look at middle-ages as children, and in a way children are more pure and innocent than adults, but also they consider that philosophy has been tempted by empiricism so modern men were actually after money, greed and capitalism, whereas in the middle-ages this was not the real interest, middle ages were a biocentric society, humans died’t believes themselves so important as it happened in the Renaissance. They saw so many things that there were wrong, for example in the middle-ages greed was considered a sin, and they were less rational, so they considered rationalism as a problem and in fact the romantic poetry is basically based on feelings, emotions rather than ideas and rationalism) so medieval poetry comes back and becomes fashionable, and we also have people who write fake medieval poetry (such as Ossian’s legends, he pretends he had found a manuscript and he translated it. This work became so important through out Europe, and is important to mention that he almost wrote it by himself because he take inspiration from true medieval poems, so it is a fake only up to a point and this explains why he was so convincing at first). During the 18th century he middle-ages were considered dark ages because there wasn’t anything valuable from a literary point of view. CAP. 8.2: SUBLIME One other important concept which is connected with English, but not only English romanticism, is the concept of the sublime. It is particularly connected with the romantic idea of emotion, is something that connects directly the human feelings, so the most inner part of human being with nature, and somehow the sublime is a response to a stimulus coming from the natural work. In England the most important book of the sublime is by Edmond Burke, and it is called “Philosophical enquire into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful” (1757), he defines the sublime by contrasting it with the idea of the beauty, so they are not one and the same, the beautiful is something that is well-done, an artefact, something that does not disturbed our mind, that we learn to appreciate, something well balanced. Whereas the sublime, may be ugly and it is disturbing, is something that disturbed our inner most self, something that we are afraid of. And there is a passage where he said: “the days beautiful, the of 21 56 night sublime” and the reason is that during the day we can rationalise everything we see, we understand everything because everything is clear, the night is fear, we don’t know what happens during the night, we have to guess what is happening but we feel that we are at the mercy of nature. The beautiful depends on technique, on the artist, on our education of the beholder, the sublime does not depends on this. So romantic poetry aims at representing the sublime, recreating the sublime experience as of those to the beautiful which was the object of Neoclassic poetry. We fell the sublime when he is trying to comprehend something and cannot quite understand everything, this non understanding is part of the sublime’s experience. But Broke said that there are two kind of sublime: one sublime is the horrific/dangerous one, when we have a storm, we are in a forest, and the other one is created by things which are not horrific and dangerous but that blows our mind, such as infinity in any form (For example the sequenze of infinte numbers). And Immanuel Kant gives a name to this two different kind of sublime; there is the mathematical sublime which we feel when we consider something which is mathematically very need but extremely complex to grasp with our mind (for example the mountains), and the dynamic sublime > storm, wind, the shier energy of nature (the most frequently used by romantic poets). Romantic poetry aims at telling us that creating in ourselves this reaction, which is not an intellectual reaction, in front of romantic poetry we react like “this is disturbing, makes me creepy” (this is there reaction they are after). CAP. 8.3: PICTURESQUE There is another origin for sublime, which is the picturesque. In the 18th century picturesque referred to a particular kind of subject, a particular technique, originated in landscape paintings. We have something that is not balanced, a strong chiaro-scuro, and usually there is a front ground, a middle ground (we may have ruins of something, such as a church) and a background, we have different lights. The picturesque was theorised by William Gilpin, he was a very important theorist, he emphasized all these traits, and the idea that desolate landscapes are picturesque, whereas—he says—Salvador Rosa creates sublime art. It is also important to mention the idea of landscapes gardens > in the 18century the architectures for the first time designed gardens. So the English gardens of the 18th century were created from this idea of picturesque. Therefore we have fake ruins, grotto, water, and the idea is that we must not have need lights or flowers, in the English gardens we must have contrasts (so if we have some flowers on our right hands we must have completely different flowers in the other hand). Cap. 9: Samuel Coleridge CAP. 9.1: BIOGRAPHY Coleridge was born in 1772 in a small town near Nether shire, but actually he is two years younger than Wordsworth, so Wordsworth has learnt more from Coleridge than the other way around. When he was nine his father died and he was sent to London to attend a school, and he suffered not only for the loss of his father but also because he was sent away from his countryside where he used to live. Even when he was at school he was very diffident, he was a voracious reader, and he liked writing and also speaking so he was a very remarkable boy because he was gifted in a way. After school he went to Oxford where his life declined, because in a way he was inapt for life in general, even though he was a genius. In Oxford he became an idol, and he had enough money to ran away and listed into the army. Predictably he was completely alien to military life, he was possibly one of the best soldiers that the army could have, fortunately for him he has been bough out from the army (if you have money you can be enlisted in the army, and if you wanted to leave the army you have to pay some money to the army itself). He went back to Oxford but he never took the final degree. In 1794 he made an important friendship with Robert Southey, another romantic poet, and he was important because Coleridge had good the fortune of having many intellectuals and poets as friends, such as the Wordsworths (the sister and the poet), or Southey. He set up a strange plan; he was enthusiastic about everything especially the French Revolution, he was a “leftist”, and he thought it would be possibile establish a utopian community in America somewhere, they studied the matter and they would have been called it Pantisocracy that means “the govern for everyone, the kind of something which is between democratic and anarchic”, and eventually they thought that Pennsylvania would be the land adapt to set up this community. Coleridge decided to be engaged to the sister of Southey’s wife, they actually tried their plan in American but it didn’t work so all the program collapsed, but nonetheless he got married. Is interesting that from this moment on his radical attitude began to change, until at the end of his life he became conservative, an a very stone believer in church which he was not at the beginning, on the contrary he was becoming a unitarian (one go the new religious sects, the least theological of the sects) > they believed in a kind of unity between creation and God, nature and God, and also they believe in the unity of souls, of 22 56 accadimenti della vita, tutto questo è silenzioso come solo. Nel mio fuoco che prima nel ventre era più abbondante rimane soltanto una fiammella sottile che non si muove neanche, solo quel velo sottile, che tremava sulla grata, ancora trema lì, l’unica cosa inquieta. Penso che il suo movimento in questo silenzio della natura gli dà/offre una forma di empatia con me che invece sono vivo, facendo di esso una forma compagna, e interpreta lo spirito pigro con i suoi piccoli movimenti imprevedibili (e fa eco ai miei pensieri muovendosi in questo modo). Ogni momento questo echeggia o rispecchia cercando se stesso e rende il mio pensiero una specie di giocattolo/soprammobile. Quante volte a scuola quando la mia mente mi faceva creare a più cose, pieno di presagi ho guardato sulle sbarre per guardare quel pezzo di fuliggine, e spessissimo quegli occhi aperti, già io sognavo nel mio dolce luogo natale. Il vecchio campanile le cui campane che sono l’unica musica dei poveri suonavano dalla mattina alla sera nei giorni di fiera così dolcemente che in me muovevano e mi riempivano di un caldo piacere che cadeva sul mio vecchio come i suoni più articolati delle cose che sarebbero successe dopo. Così guardavo, fin quando le cose confortanti, che io sognavo, mi cullavano per addormentarmi, ed il sonno prolungata i miei sogni! E così pensavo tutto il mattino seguente, intimorito dal volto severo del maestro, con l’occhio fisso facendo finta di studiare sul mio libro che “galleggiava/si muoveva come se stesse galleggiando”: l’unica cosa che facevo mentre sognavo ad occhi aperti fingendo di leggere il libro era che ogni tanto lanciavo uno sguardo furtivo alla porta per vedere se per caso non potesse entrare, quando la porta si apriva, qualche mio parente, qualcuno a cui ero particolarmente legato, e potesse essere qualcuno della mia città, una zia o la mia amatissima sorella, la mia compagna di giochi quando ancora eravamo vestiti uguali (> a quell’epoca i ragazzi e ragazze smettevano di avere gli stessi vestiti dai 9/10 anni, e le bambine mettevano le gonne mentre gli uomini i pantaloni). Caro bimbo, che dormi nella culla al mio fianco, il cui gentile respiro, udito in questa calma profonda, riempie i vuoti sparsi e le momentanee pause del pensiero! Bambino mio così bello! Il mio cuore si riempie di felicità e di tenera contentezza a guardarti, e a pensare che imparerai tante altre nozioni e in tante altre scene! Perché io sono cresciuto nella grande città, rinchiuso in oscuri chiostri, e non ho visto nulla di bello all’infuori del cielo e delle stelle. Ma tu bambino mio! Vagherai come una brezza presso laghi e rive sabbiose, tra i dirupi di montagne antiche e oltre le nuvole, che riempiono di sé la loro grandezza sia nei laghi che nelle rive, che montagne sporgenti; e così tu vedrai ed ascolterai le forme armoniose ed i suoi intellegibili di una lingua eterna (lingua della natura), che il tuo Dio pronuncia, colui che dall’eternità insegna se stesso in tutte le cose, e tutte le cose in se stesso. Grande maestra universale (la natura)! Egli modellerà il tuo spirito e dando delle cose farà in modo che ti ponga delle domande (dandoti delle conoscenze fa in modo che lo spirito possa porsi delle domande). Così tutte le stagioni saranno dolci per te sia che l’estate rivesta tutta la terra di verde, o il pettirosso si posi e canti tra i fiocchi di neve sui rami spogli del melo ricoperto di muschio, mentre il vicino tetto di paglia fuma nel sole che disgela, sia che cadano gocce di grondaia udite solo nelle pause delle raffiche di vento, o se il lavoro segreto del gelo le blocca (le gocce) in silenziosi ghiaccioli/stalattiti di ghiaccio che brillano silenziose di fronte alla quieta luna (ritorna al presente, che in realtà è il futuro perché parla del figlio che potrà imparare dalla natura, e imparerà il movimento delle stagioni, affinché possa vedere ciò che vede il narratore, cioè il gelo che immobilizza le gocce in stalattiti di ghiaccio. Cap. 10: Wordsworth He was a close friend of Coleridge and the two of the, published the Lyrical Ballads, after this masterpiece was published in the 1798, while in the second edition, that was published five years later —in 1800—, Wordsworth added a preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which explained a few things about the structure of the Lyrical ballads. It’s important to mention that by doing this he kinda takes centre of the stage, but there is one thing that is always quoted that is ho he considered poetry. He considers poetry as an emotion recollected in tranquillity that means that poetry flows form a strong emotion, but that emotion cannot just be written down when we are feeling it, there must interview some time between the time of the emotion and the time of writing. Whatever we remember of the emotion we have had, we can write. He says that if we are strongly in love with someone and we write a love poem that would be bad poetry, but, if we were used to be in love with someone and we are no longer in love with that someone, then we write a poem about that, and that would be good poetry. “The Daffodils” simplifies this concept, it’s a good example of this technique because in the poem he says that he was walking and he found himself in the mids of this flowers, and they gave me great joy, and whenever he is at home and he is sitting in his sofa he thinks back of all this flowers and his spirits is happy again in the remembrance of this flower. CAP. 10.1: BIOGRAPHY He was born in north Cumberland, he lived outside the city; in romantic time since we have the industrial revolution, the cities are becoming different from the countryside, and most poets mourn for the loss of the countryside and the contact with nature. Wordsworth, even more that Coleridge, is the poet of nature, because nature is a key-word/a key concept for Wordsworth. Since he was living in the countryside his of 25 56 education was very unconventional, it was the kind of education that Coleridge promoted for his son in “Frost at Midnight”, and this education as a child in the nature together with his studies of classics made him the poet is known as > All this informations are provided by his auto-biography “The Prelude”, that should have been a philosophical poem, where Wordsworth expounds his philosophy of nature but it’s “The Prelude” because it was meant to have more parts and this was the first part of the masterpiece, in which he explains why he is the one person who can write a poem about the philosophy of nature, he was fortunate enough as a kid to live always outdoor but also to study the classics and philosophy, so he knew both sides whereas most people who studied living in the city, and those who on the contrary live in the countryside do not have an easy access to culture. As he grew up he mad a very important journey to the Alps, and he wrote a few poems about the Alps, but also, for the first time he experienced the strength of nature, the sublimity of nature in a different way. The Alps were very important for many romantic poets such as Byron or Goethe, and in general they were important through out romanticism. In 1796 he met Coleridge and starts their project the “Lyrical Ballads”; and in fact the first version of “Tintern Abbey” originally was in the “Lyrical Ballads” although it’s not a lyrical ballad at all, it’s a contemplative/speculative poem. His idea of nature is similar to the unitarian idea of nature, so the idea is that he was considering nature as one superior force, which is manifested through outdoor nature as wells as through the spirit of animals and humans. To be in contact with nature means to bring that part of spirit which belongs to ones person in contact with the rest, that’s why he felt that it was so important to be outdoor, to be close whatever is natural. He lived in a place near Lake District and he wrote several poems, and several poems were directed to Lake District. All of his best poems were written until 1807-1810, then somehow the same thing that happened to Coleridge happened to him; he was no longer able to write anything interesting and new apart from his “Prelude” that he kept writing through out his life. For him the role of the poet is that of an interpreter, someone who stands between natural world and humanity, transcended forces and finite human mind. He says that not everyone can be a poet, but those who are gifted with this gift of poetry they have a duty to perform, they have to bring humans in contact with natural world, and to do this he believed that the best way was not to use a poetical language, he thought that they had to use the natural language of man, but slightly polish of the grossness of the everyday language > without dialect or vulgar expressions. CAP. 10.2: THREE YEARS SHE GREW Is a companion piece to “A slumber did my spirit seal”, and it’s part of a collection of four poems called “Lucy poems”, and they are dedicated to a young girl called Lucy, about who we know nothing, maybe someone known to the poet. Her story is very simple; she was the daughter of some peasants, a farmer who lived in a cottage, and she lived in harmony with the nature around her and she died very young and somehow the poet was in love with her, but he never described great passion, but a very simple love, and because he wrote all this poems after she dies so therefore he has a very wistful tone when he wrote about her. This poem is about the story of Lucy since she was a child and thesis interesting because he talks about the relationship between this girl and father nature. After she turned three she was so charming and so full of care and ability to nature that nature decided to adopt her, nature decides to adopt this child and to provide for her education > and this is what Wordsworth happened to him, but the difference is that she remained almost illiterate. When she came of age, nature decided to take her from the earth. This poem is connected to Wordsworth idea fo education; for the poet education must occured outdoor and those who are in contact with nature are more beautiful, stronger and spiritually more developed. Traduzione: io stesso sarò per la mia cara, sia legge che impulso: tra le rocce e sulla pianura, sulla terra e nel cielo, nel boschetto e nella pergola. Lei sarà giocosa come il capriolo che libero e selvatico/felice, salta attraverso il prato o sulle montagne; l’aria balsamica e i suoi saranno il silenzio e la calma delle cose mute e prive di sensi. “Le nubi che galleggiano nell’aria le presteranno il loro status pre lei si piegherà il salice, e non mancherà di vedere persino nei movimenti dei temporali la grazia che modella/plasma la forma (fisica e psicologica) di una of 26 56 fanciulla con una silenziosa simpatia. Le stelle della mezzanotte le saranno care e lei presterà orecchio in molti luoghi segreti laddove ruscelletti danzano i loro vortici attorno e la bellezza che nasce da questo mormorio delle acque passerà nel suo volto, e sentimenti pieni di vita di delizia nutriranno la sua forma fino a una altezza ragguardevole/quasi nobile. Il suo petto si gonfierà/crescerà tali pensieri io darò a Lucy mentre io e lei viviamo insieme questa valle (con alberi). Così la natura parlò il suo lavoro fu fatto sula natura quanto presto il corso della vita di Lucy trascorse, lei morì e mi lasciò questa brughiera, questa calma e questa scena quieta; la memoria di ciò che è stato e mai chiusa. CAP. 10.3: TINTERN ABBEY The poem is influenced by Coleridge’s “Frost at midnight”, even if there are different chronicles because the poem starts with “five years have past”, which means the now he is back herein the valley to the first he was here five years and past. So he rivets not only the place but also the teas he had back then, this is a way to talk about his education, his natural education. He thinks that nature is kind of teacher, and there are different stages of natural education: 1. Boy: who plays in the nature because he doesn’t know or understand where he is, and he enjoys that without realising he is enjoying nature, 2. Adult teenager who is enchanted by the sublimity of nature and particularly he is enchanted by the strength of nature (tall mountains, storms and so on and so forth). 3. Adult: One has grown up and the dynamic sublime gives space t the mathematical sublime. Again one is enchanted by nature and on the other hand one has a more contemplative less enthusiastic point of view. In his first visit to Tintern Abbey he was alone while in the second visit he is with his sister, who is not mentioned until the end of the poem. His sister is younger, she must have been a very intelligent person and she didn’t published poetry like his brother. This poem is ambivalent because on one hand nature makes him grow as an adult, on the other hand he deplores that he has lost the spontaneity of his younger days, and there is a kind of sadness through out the poem. There is another issue about this poems and it regards “solitude”; that it can be seen also in “Michael” (another poem). At the end of the poem he brings back the memory of his sister and he speaks to his sister and he says that whenever he dies he wanted his sister to think of him in these environment and not everywhere else. Why does he mention “Tintern abbey” if “abbey” is not in the poem? He wanted the idea of abbey to be in the poem even if is not mentioned. The abbey is a ruin, that connects the kind of poetics called picturesque, and he wanted intern abbey because it was picturesque and he wanted the picturesque of his own world. Also he talks about nature and nature as a kind of God, so the abbey is a religious symbol he wanted to put in the picture, as an idea of the presence of the divine. Traduzione: cinque anni sono passati; cinque estati con la lunghezza di cinque lunghi inverni! E ancora sento queste acque che rotolano dalle sorgenti di montagna con un mormorio soffice del retroterra. Ancora una volta vedo queste montagne scoscese e alte, che su questa scena solitaria imprime pensieri di una solitudine più profonda; e connette il paesaggio con la quiete del cielo. Il giorno è giunto/venuto quando di nuovo riposo qui, sotto questo oscuro sicomoro, ed osservo questi treni di casette di campagna, questi grappoli di frutteti, che in questa stagione, con i loro frutti acerbi, fra i boschi e le macchie si perdono, né con il loro verde e semplice colore, contrastano con il paesaggio verde selvatico. Ancora una volta vedo queste siepi appena siepi, piccole linee di rigoglioso bosco diventato selvatico; queste fattorie pastorali, verdi fino alla propria porta; e ghirlande di fumo mandate su, in silenzio, fra gli alberi, con qualche incerto indizio, come potrebbe sembrare, di abitanti nomadi nei boschi senza case, o di qualche grotta di eremita dove accanto al suo fuoco l’eremita siede solo. Queste belle forme, sebbene assunto da lungo tempo (NB: sono passati cinque anni dall’ultima volta che era qui e adesso è tornato dopo lungo tempo), non sono state per me come lo è un paesaggio all’occhio di un cieco: ma molto spesso mi trovavo in stanze solitarie, e nel clamore delle città (he lived in London for two years) io sono stato debitore a questi paesaggi nelle ore di stanchezza le sensazioni dolci sentite nel sangue e sentite nel cuore, e passavano persino nella mia mente più pura come un tranquillo ristoro (anche se lui non si ricorda i dettagli whatever he lived through the mountains remains even if he doesn’t remember). Tali questi piaceri non ricordati forse hanno un’influenza non poca sulla parte migliore della vita di un bravo uomo; e ha qualcosa a che vedere con quei suoi piccoli atti senza nome normalmente non ricordati di gentilezza e di amore. E io devo a loro anche un altro dono di aspetto ancora più sublime; in qualche modo la natura dissipa i dubbi/difficoltà, lo stato d’animo beato nel quale il peso del mistero in cui il peso pesante e stancante del mondo che no nei riesce ad alleggerire viene alleggerito; sullo of 27 56 seems to help his parents, along with the two sheepdogs they had. The trio, together, showcases hard work among the villagers. Even after they retire from the day’s work, Michael and Luke work on repairing plow or sickle or cleaning wool. Altogether, the speaker elaborates on how they live in dependence on nature. In the lines from 110 to 139, Wordsworth shares a vivid description of the house and their life around it. The cottage they lived in stood on a huge projected piece of land. When the sunset, Isabella being a housewife, lights a lamp which was an old piece hanging from the ceiling. The light in the house symbolizes the labor the family engages in after the sunset also as a name meaning for the house. The house came to be called the ‘Evening Star’ for when the fellow villagers retire to work; the trio continues to work in their cottage by their respective types of equipment. Wordsworth in these lines between 140 and 176 of ‘Michael’ illustrates the bonding between the father and son. The shepherd loved his wife Isabel, but when Luke entered their life, he came to love his son more. He loved his son more than a father for he has seen the hope for his future in Luke. A son in old age by Michael is considered as a gift if a man ‘by the tendency of nature needs must fail.’ Thus, when the boy was a baby, he tended him with the care of a mother more than a father who takes care of his child as a pastime. Also, Wordsworth clearly portrays the father and son bonding in the work field at a very young age. Michael seems to take the boy to the field at a very young age and under the oak tree known as clip tree, he will ensure the boy getting along with the sheep at the same time checking on him from throwing any tantrums that would scare the sheep off. In these lines between 177 and 206 of the poem ‘Michael’, the poet shares a glimpse of how Luke grows into a young man of eighteen under the care and guidance of his father. From the time Luke turned five, Michael gave him the shepherd’s staff and started training the boy in guarding the sheep. Though, at that young age, his works were more of a hindrance than a help. But, as he grew up he becomes a bold boy who is not afraid of any hard work. Thus, he became a companion to his father as he grew up to a healthy young man of eighteen. Lines 207- 303. Wordsworth brings in the twist into this happy tale in line 207, when a distressful event happens, where Michael was called to clear out the debt of his nephew. Michael realizes that the repayment would cost him half his wealth. At this point, he gets an idea and decides to send Luke away to the city to work under a wealthy Kinsman. For he has witnessed many young boys become rich who go into the city. He hopes the same would help him to clear out the debt without selling his property. Isabel works on arranging the required things for her journey at the same time worried about her husband’s situation. Knowing her heart Luke reassures her and decides to leave for the city. lines 304-360. These lines capture the excitement of sending the boy to the city and the emotional transactions between the father and son. The family spends the week preparing for his journey. And, the day before his departure, Michael takes him to the valley, where he has planned to build a sheepfold. He recollects all those days he has spent with young Luke and tells him of his love for the boy. This emotional side of the father makes the son sob. Lines 361- 418. In these lines, Michael further speaks about his father and how they worked in the field. Moreover, he tells the boy about the reason for sending him away against his own interest in keeping him. Also, he suggests the boy lay the cornerstone believing that it would help the boy to remember the hard works of his parents and him. He then tells Luke, how he would love him to his last. Lines 419-448. Wordsworth elaborates on how the boy who goes with the goodwill of his parents and the neighbors’ turn the evil way to bring shame upon him. Initially, he seems to work hard, earning a good name for himself that makes the old couple happy. But as time passes, he is taken over by the evil claws of the city life and driven away by ignominy. Lines 420- 483. In these concluding lines, the poet details how the parents, especially, Michael receives the news of his son’s haphazard life. The old man bore the news with unusual strength and love went about his work happily. Despite the disappointment, he went on building the sheepfold, until he could no longer work on it. Still, he seems to be found around the sheepfold with his dog often until seven years later. He dies a lonely death with his son, who used to be his helpmate and companion. Another three Isabel too dies leaving the land in the hands of a stranger. In the place where they lived nothing remains now except for the half- finished sheepfold that stands to testify the story of Michael. of 30 56 Cap. 11: John Claire He is the real thing when it come to nature writing, he became so prominent because there is a big movement witch tales literature from a view point that consider nature. He was mentally disturbed, a solitary person, he learned to read and write and in fact he read a lot of poetry from Milton to Coleridge and Roberts. One of the reason why Claire was hardly ever read is because his poems were full of grammatical errors and no punctuation, with some strange lines very often he used iambic pentameters (7 feet). He had the possibility to do long walks and writing poems when he was staying in the asylum, and the best poems were written during his time in an asylum. Claire is much closer to nature than this poets who possibly studied more, they had so much literature in their mind than Claire. CAP. 11.1: TO A NIGHTINGALE’S NEST He speaks as a kind of expert, a bird watcher, and he loves the bird singing as much as he loves the contest. He is talking about a particular place he has known since he was a child, and no-one else knows. There is a poetic “I” which is speaking to a poetic “you”, if usually the poetic “I” is speaking to a reader, in this poem the poetic “i” is speaking in a sort of monologue and to someone who is there, even if there is no dialogue because it0s just a monologue, we have two actors on the scene and the bird. Also the poetic “I” here is a sort of guide who is guiding the other person to see the bird and his nest. It’s important to remember that the poem is dedicated to the nest and not the nightingale because it would be too obvious in a certain way, instead the nest implies the place where it is collocated so the environment is important as the bird itself. In this poem we hear an act of respect of nature, and this is one of Clare’s faces, but there’s also a political face that surfaces in another poem “To a fallen elm”. Traduzione: andiamo su questo sentiero del bosco che camminiamo piano e ascoltiamo il canto dell’usignolo, lei sta qui. Piano chiudi il cancelletto del bosco per timore che il rumore possa scacciarla dalla sua casa d’amore, perché qui io l’ho sentita per molti anni felici, mattina e sera, anzi per tutto il giorno come se lei vivesse cantando. Esattamente in questo punto il levante ricopre tutto selvaggiamente, dove rudemente si scopre/adagia sopra la strada e ci impedisce il cammino, e dove quel bambino ha preso le sue campanule, ridendo e strusciando attraverso la staccionata (coperta di muschio). Li ho cacciato come un vero ragazzo camminando a quattro zampe attraverso le spine dense pre trovare il suo nido e vederla che nutriva i piccoli. E io ho obbligato molte ore vanamente nascosto come un pensiero mai nato. E dove queste foglie di felce ricciolute salgono su all’improvviso attraverso un fitto bosco di noccioli, io mi sono nascosto lì e la guardavo mentre cantava. E la sua fama mi ha fatto meravigliare che un uccello cosi famoso non avesse una livrea migliore di un uccello ammazza banane marrone. Le sue ali tremavano tutte nella sua estasi e le penne stavano come se fosse stato per gioia, e con la bocca spalancata per dare scopo al suo cuore dei suoi canti come dei singhiozzi. Lei condivideva con chi l’ascoltava la parte più felice della fama dell’estate perché così a me sembrava che lei impiegasse con felici fantasie le sue giornate. Ma se io per caso toccavo un cespuglio o mi muovevo anche di poco, tutto in un attimo si fermava. Guardavo invano: l’uccello timido aveva lasciato il nocciolo e si nascondeva lontano per cantare. Perso nella selvaggia natura di foglie che ascoltano dava scopo alla sua ricca estasi e l’abbondante catena di suono, fino a che l’invidia spronava il tordo che la puntava per cominciare con il suo canto meno selvaggio però appena appena inferiore. Le fatiche rimangono con lui per il periodo in cui canta (il tordo) per calmare l’ardore del suo petto piazzato mentre invece l’usignolo appartiene alla vita dell’estate e gli alberi spogli dell’ inverno e i torti pungenti dell’inverno sono estranei alla sua musica e al suo riposo, le sue gioie sono sempre verdi, il suo mondo aperto. Ecco ascolta, eccola lì, dobbiamo fare silenzio perché in questa macchia di prugno se ho indovinato bene si trova la sua strada casa, discosta i rami del nocciolo piano piano (per poter camminare) e chinati piano sotto i rami che frusciano (per non spaventare l’uccello) faremo un’altra ricerca oggi, e andremo alla ricerca intorno a questo cespuglio di spine coperte dalle foglie di felce, e dove si china pigramente ci passiamo attraverso, è un luogo cantuccio dove è possibile trovare l’usignolo: in posti come questi e molto spesso per terra e non in cima agli alberi loro costruiscono dove i ragazzacci monelli non pensano neanche di guardare. Ecco vero come vero che sono vivo ecco infatti che c’è qua il suo nido segreto sopra questo ceppo di biancospino! L’ho cercato invano per ore. Ecco scosta quel ramo molto sottile, anzi no meglio se cammini sui suoi rami e ti avvicini. Com’è astuto questo uccello! Si è spaventato e ha emesso una nota piangente di pericolo imminente ancora prima che noi avessimo passato quei ramoscelli e ora vicino al suo nido si ferma improvvisamente, come se la paura la soffocasse di tradire/mostrare il luogo dove si trova la sua casa e allora la cosa migliore che possiamo fare è lasciarlo esattamente come lo abbiamo trovato (non solo il nido ma anche il sentiero deve of 31 56 essere messo a posto affinché nessuno lo possa seguire pensando che porti in qualche luogo interessante). La guardia di sicurezza di una solitudine senza sentiero lo terrà fermo nel silenzio, guarda adesso è appollaiata sul ramo di quella vecchia quercia in silenzio per la paura: la nostra presenza ritarda la sua gioia (non sta ancora cantando perché loro sono ancora lì) e il dubbio raffredda/gela il suo rapimento. Continua a cantare dolce uccellino che nulla di peggio possa accadere alle tue visioni poetiche (cantate dall’usignolo) che la paura che adesso ti inganna (nel senso che loro non hanno intenzioni di fargli del male, solo di ascoltarlo). Non abbiamo nessuna intenzione di rapinare la musica del suo dono o del suo erede/della sua dote, né abbiamo intenzione di rovinare questo luogo di gioia. Non abbiamo intenzione neanche di rovinare il luogo perché la melodia sembra nascosta in ogni fiore che fiorisce vicino alla tua casa. Queste campanule tutte sembra che si inchinino alla bellezza che c’è nel tuo canto. E il fiore (cuckoo, fiore che sembra sia a bocca aperta) con le foglie maculate sembra che arrossisca al canto che ha sentito. Come curioso il nido, nessun altro uccello utilizza dei materiali così laschi o intesse la propria dimora in posti come questo, foglie di morte di quercia sono messe fuori e dentro è un muschio di velluto e piccoli strappature d’erba qui e là di quello che sembra materiale scarso/prezioso, piume e pelo perché sembra che non prenda invece nulla dai luoghi frequentati dagli uomini. Eppure la costruttrice è la natura e costruisce/concepisce case per il conforto dei suoi figli persino in questo posto dove i discepoli della solitudine trascorrono le loro vite non visti salvo quando un viandante che ama tali posti passa da queste parti. In fondo il nido è come la cella muschio di un eremita. Le sue 5 uova strane giacciono comode, di un marrone olivastro, e il vecchio cespuglio spinoso che punge le sorveglia bene. E qui le lasciamo, ancora non hanno conosciuto il male come eredità canora del vecchio bosco (la canzone è sia quella dell’usignolo che del poeta). CAP. 11.2: TO A FALLEN ELM What is an enclosure? It goes trough out English history until 19th century when it stops, more specifically it started at the end middle-ages but this phenomenon witch went one till the 18th century were the economy changed somehow and became a capitalistic economy and because of the new farms that were built in the city, so as many land owners as possibile would actually try to use their lands to make money and also people were attracted to the city, basically in feudal times, where England was divided in different territories, the baron/landlord was given certain amount of land but that land included woods and other things, and he was considered like a king because the idea was that there were smaller kings in all England’s territory. For instance the king of England/Scotland is not the owner of every piece of land in his kingdom, so this was the kind of misunderstanding behind the idea of enclosure. Initially when the territory was divided between this smaller kings, each landlord was the owner of a big extension of land, but that doesn’t mean he could use it all for himself because that extension of land was occupied by other people who were living there, peasants and animals, it was just his territory to administer and to put taxes on, but of course the real owner was the king, the baron was just an administrator. This lands were initially called “commons”, so the opposite of enclosure > close land that is private, common is a land that is used by everyone who wishes to use it, usually commons are pastors (specifically sheep) and whoever has animals sent them to the common for pastor. When this lands became close/enclosure smaller farmers non longer had any land to use for themselves so they went bankrupt and usually they move to the city in search of a job. Claire has written many poems about enclosures and he describes them as a sort of crime against humans. This poem is very modern because it is also a poem about the ideological propaganda, so it’s something quite common today but absolutely new Bach then. So he is just describing this elm, that he reminds him of when he was a child, and that was felt by someone and if someone could felt the tree could do that and dig it in the name of liberty/freedom of trait. From the elm that is being held he talks about the enclosure. — Today we don’t talk about enclosures but about land grabbing (phenomena that is typical in Africa), is similar but it can be done in name of trait/democracy > big industries or richer people which sees the land that is used to be of no-one, buy it from the governor and turn it for their own use, so they close it and the people who were living there no longer can stay there — Something that possibly has never been understood, the idea that the tree is not inanimate, the idea that the tree may have birth right and of course the political idea that things are always made in the name of freedom, this is very rare at the time. Traduzione: vecchio olmo che mormoravi sulla cima del camino i più dolci inni che l’autunno abbia mai scritto dentro i momenti di calma maturi e sussurranti, (a tal punto eri maturato) che le foglie cominciavano a ingiallire e cadevano come frutti maturi con le prime piogge, quando le piogge cadevano sulle tue ombre molto colorate, e quando delle scure tempeste imitavano i tuoni mentre il buio veniva come se volesse strangolare la luce con la tempesta nera di una notte invernale che ti cullava come una culla sulla tua radice. of 32 56 feels he is writing like Milton. The subject matter of the poem is about greek mythology: in fact he talks about, according to the greek myth, the Olympian gods that had won a battle against the Titans, masters of the universe). Endymion was criticise by contemporary lyrics because of his affiliation to the wick party, and Leigh Hunt in particular. His best work was written after 1819: La madame sans merci, the evil of syntagmas, Lamya, Isabella or the pot of Basil (rewriting of a short story by Boccaccio). In 1820 he contracts tuberculosis so he decides to spend some times in Italy were the climate is supposed to be better, he goes to Rome and he dies there in 1821. When he died he had written much more than Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton at that age (25). CAP 12.1: ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE Keats is incredibile well read and learn so any emotion for him sets in motion all his learning and background and a number of thoughts that are not directly connected. This poem is about life and death, life and immortality of nature and the sadness and predicament of the individual vis a vis nature, so a kind of topic which is very romantic, but this is a topic we also find in Leopardi, so the fact that nature does not care about the individual, just goes on and the individual thrive indifferent. He was living in Hampstead, London 1819, with a friend called Charles Brown and a nightingale has built a nest next to their house, so they heard the nightingale’s song all day long. Actually all day long Keats disappears and eventually he came upon with this sheet covers verses he had written about the nightingale. Traduzione: il mio cuore duole e una apatia sonnolenta addolora i miei sensi, come se avessi bevuto della cicuta o se avessi bevuto qualche bevanda a base di oppiaceo che stordisce fino alla fine un minuto fa e che io sia sprofondato verso il Lete: e non è a causa dell’invidia per la tua sorte felice ma perché sono troppo felice per la tua felicità, la tua felicità perché tu driade (ninfa dei boschi) dalle ali leggere in qualche macchia di alberi melodiosa di betulacee verdi, e innumerevoli ombre, canti dell’estate con una libertà/facilità (senza costrizioni) a squarciagola. Vorrei tanto un bicchiere di vino d’annata che sia stato rinfrescato per un lungo tempo nella terra scavata (cantina) e che abbia il sapore di flora (Dea romana della vegetazione) e il verde della campagna delle danze dei canti provenzali e delle gioie bruciate dal sole. Vorrei tanto un bicchiere pieno del caldo sud, pieno del veritiero con delle bollicine che sembrano perle le quali si affollano sul bordo del calice e la bocca sporca di rosso, cosi che io possa bere e lasciare il mondo non visto e con te sparire nella parte oscura della foresta. Sparire, dissolvermi e dimenticare completamente quello che tu tra le foglie non hai mai conosciuto, la stanchezza, la febbre, il lavorare incessantemente/lo stress dove gli uomini siedono e si sentono gemere l’un ò’altro, dove la paralisi fa tremare alcuni tristi ultimi capelli grigi, dove la gioventù diventa pallida e sottile come uno spettro e muore; dove anche solo il gesto di pensare significa essere pieni di dolore, e disperazioni dagli ogni pesanti/occhi di piombo, dove la bellezza non può tenere aperti i suoi occhi scintillanti e dove un nuovo amore non può struggersi per questi occhi oltre il domani. Via via perché io voglio volare, non portato sul carro di Bacco e dai suoi amici, ma dalle ali invisibili della poesia, anche se il mio cervello offuscato è perplesso e reagisce lentamente, sono già con te la notte è tenera, e magari la regina luna è nel suo trono con intorno a sé le sue fate stellate; tranne quel poco che viene dal cielo quando l’ebrezze spingono attraverso il buio di foglie verdi e nei sentieri serpeggianti e pieni di muschio. Non posso vedere quali fiori sono ai miei piedi, neppure quale profumo sia attaccato ai rami sopra di me ma nel buio profumato io indovino ogni dolcezza con cui il mese propizio adorna il prato, il folto del bosco e l’albero di frutti selvatico, il bianco biancospino e la pastorale rosa selvatica; e violette che presto fioriscono tutte coperte di foglie e il figlio maggiore del maggio, la foglia muschiata che sta per fiorire, piena di vino rugiadoso, il …(haunt) che mormora di insetti nelle sere d’estate. Ascolto al buio e per molte volte sono stato mezzo innamorato della morte privo di restrizioni sulla morte, e l’ho chiamato con dei nomi carezzevoli in molte rime, affinché prendesse il mio quieto respiro nell’aria. Ora più che mai mi sembra una cosa ricca morire, smettere di esistere verso mezzanotte senza dolore mentre tu stai versando la tua anima in un canto così estatico, e tu, anche se io morissi, continueresti a cantare e io invano avrei orecchie per ascoltare il tuo alto requiem una volta diventato una zolla di terra. Tu invece non sei nato per morire, o uccello immortale, non ci sono generazioni affamate che ti abbatteranno, e la voce che io sento in questa notte che sta per passare (idea: una notte come tante) è stata ascoltata nei tempi antichi dall’imperatore così come dal villano: magari la stessa canzone che ha trovato un sentiero nel triste cuore di Ruth, quando, in mancanza di casa si è trovata in lacrime in terra straniera, lo stesso canto che ha incantato vetrate magiche ad aprirsi sulla schiuma di mari perigliosi perduti in terre di fate. Abbandonato! Questa sola parola è un campanello che mi riporta indietro dal pensare a te a me stesso e basta. Addio! la fantasia non può imbrogliare cosi bene come ha fama di saper fare o elfo imbroglione. Addio! Addio! Il tuo inno piangente of 35 56 svanisce oltre i prati vicini, oltre il ruscello silenzioso e su per il fianco della collina e adesso è sepolto nel profondo della valle di fianco, ma è apparsa come una visione mistica o stavo pensando e il mio pensiero si è creato il sottofondo musicale del canto dell’usignolo? la musica è fuggita e io sono sveglia oppure dormo? CAP. 12.2: ODE TO AUTUMN It is written in 1819, another one of his famous odes, with ode to a greek urn and ode to a nightingale. This ode to autumn is different than the ode to a nightingale, not so much because of the images but because the way he reacts to nature is different; in the ode to nightingale he thinks about himself and starts thinking about his own image and his own culture, basically it becomes a meditation upon life and death and he even wishes to die, while in the ode to autumn is different because even though is personified, and the autumn is the addressee, basically he is offering three different watercolour images of autumn: late summer, human work, actual autumn and to the end of whatever summer was. Traduzione: stagione di nebbie e pieno di frutti maturi, stretto amico fraterno del sole che fa maturare: che cospiri con il sole come caricare e benedire con la frutta le viti che corrono intorno al cornicione dei tetti coperto di paglia (parla di case povere), e a piegare con le mele gli alberi dei cottage coperti di muschio e riempire ogni frutto di maturità fino al nocciolo, fai gonfiare la zucca e rendi soffice il guscio della nocciola con un seme dolce, e cospiri con il sole a far nascere altri boccioli e ancora di più, ultimi fiori per le api fino a che non si convincono che i giorni caldi non cesseranno mai, perché l’estate ha riempito oltre le loro celle (delle api). Chi non ti ha mai visto spesso nel tuo negozio? Qualche volta chi cerca lontano potrebbe trovarti seduto senza cure/problemi su un pavimento di un granaio con i capelli lievemente sollevati dal vento che trebbia. Oppure addormentato su un solco che è stato mietuto solo per metà, intossicato/addormentato con i fumi dei papaveri mentre la tua falce risparmia il prossimo gruppo di fiori e tutti i loro fiori messi a due per due, e qualche volta come una spigolatrice tu tieni fissa la testa carica con un cesto sopra, attraversando un ruscello o vicino a una presa per fare il sidro, con uno sguardo paziente osservi le ultime gocce che cadono ora dopo ora. Dove sono le canzoni della primavera? Dove sono? Non pensare ad esse, anche tu hai la tua musica, mentre nubi striate fanno fiorire il giorno che muore lentamente, e toccano le pianure di stoppie (il grano tagliato) con colori rosacei; poi in un triste coro i piccoli moscerini piangono tra i salici del fiume, portati verso l’alto o che sprofondano a seconda che il vento leggero vive o muore (lett: soffia o smette di soffiare); e agnelli ormai cresciuti belano forte da regioni collinose e i grilli sulle siepi cantano, adesso con una voce alta (lett: soprano, voce alta femminile), il pettirosso fischia dal recinto di un giardino/orto, e le rondini che si uniscono, garriscono nei cieli. Cap 13: Lord Byron Byron in his own lifetime was the most popular English writer and certainly the most cosmopolitan, because he spent most of his time outside reading and writing, specially because he had some problems, for example the incest with his half-sister that obliged him to leave Great Britain. He was an aristocrat, so he came form a wealthy and aristocratic family just like Shelley. In Europe his works were immediately translated, they were well known everywhere and he was admired by most of the europeans, he was seen as a representative of the prometheus romanticism (Prometheus is the titan who in some stories created the human race, in other stories he is the grandfather. He was so much love in humankind that he decided to steal fire from the Olympus in order to give it to the humankind and for this reason he was severely punished from the Gods) > romanticismo prometeico. Great intellectuals openly professed their admiration for Byron and many of them were influenced by his works and they openly admitted that they were influenced by this, for example Pûskin in Russia, Delacroix, Beethoven, therefore he was more famous in Europe than in Great Britain because he was very aristocratic and his aristocratic attitude was the contrary of the rising middle-class in England, and is scandalous life linked to the valedictorian idea that made him hardly to be accepted in England, therefore his influence in English literature is less than European literature. Byron itself did not liked others romantic poets, in fact in Mister Don Juan there are caricatures of Wordsworth, which he calls “nervoso”, and Keats (that defines “un marmocchio trasandato”), so obviously he could not particularly liked in his country. Above other English writers, Byron wanted to imitate Poe. Byron, unlike Coleridge and Wordsworth, wasn’t philosophical so he wasn’t into that philosophical romanticism that is found in Germany, he was a man of action as he was (he fought in Greek), and his most important contribution to romanticism is the creation of the byronic hero. of 36 56 The byronic hero is a sort of Ubermensch ante-litteram, that has extraordinary energy, and extraordinary intellectual power, who feels superior from the middle-class people because he was superior to their morality and ethic, he thinks very high of himself and endowed with witt and culture. There arre three works in which he sketches the byronic hero: 1) the child’s Herald pilgrimage (il pellegrinaggio del giovane Eroldo) > child does not mean “bambino” but is the title that in the middle-ages that refers to the “cavalierato”, so this is the story of this herald in which he describes his attitude, for example he goes around looking for a cause to fight for, he published two cantos of this work and he became very famous because they were successful, and throughout his life he wrote another two cantos; so in total there are four cantos but the most famous were the first twos. 2) Don Juan > he gives his own representation of this Spanish character, is a long poem with 17 cantos and he only completed only 16 out of 17 because he died, he tells the story of Don Juan who was born in Spain, he is so beautiful that he is a victim of all the women that exploited him, he is cosmopolitan because it starts in Spain but then he moved around because he had some problems with certain women, eventually he is capture by Turkish tyrants and he has some adventures there. And from there he ends up in Russia were he becomes a diplomat and he goes to England where the poem ends. The last cantos are dedicated to describing the English aristocracy through Don Juan’s eye > in this moment he is a cosmopolite hero. 3) Manfred > a byronic version of Ghœte’s Faust. Manfred is set in Switzerland where Byron spent some time. Manfred is a sourcherer, someone who is at the end of his life but still very strong and he devoted his life to study big cult, in fact he is able to evoke demons. He committed a sin when he was younger that was related to a young woman but it is not specify, and she is the only one who understood him, but she die very young and he feel guilty for that, throughout the story he tries to evoke her spirit. He is completely outside the human society. CAP. 13.1: DARKNESS Written in 1816: this year is known as the year without summer because a Vulcan erupted in Indonesia that leads to purple rain, crisis, caresty and epidemics. This poem is the description of an apocalyptic view, linked to the year without summer, as it is told like a dream. Traduzione: ho fatto un sogno che di fatto non era un sogno, le stelle vagavano nel buio, senza raggi, senza luce e senza un corso specifico, e la terra ghiacciata si muoveva cieca e nera nell’aria senza luna. La mattina veniva e se ne andava e veniva e non portava alcun giorno, e tutte le passioni umane vengono dimenticate nella paura della loro desolazione, i cuori agghiacciarono pregando in se stessi per avere luce. Si viveva tutti intorno ai bivacchi: troni e palazzi di re coronati, capanne e abitazioni d’ogni genere vennero bruciate per fare luce, intere città consumate; gli uomini si stringevano attorno ai roghi delle case per guardarsi ancora in faccia. Felici coloro che dimoravano nell’occhio dei vulcani e dei loro picchi ardenti: un’atterrita speranza era ciò che restava al mondo. Le foreste date al fuoco, d’ora in ora cadendo incenerite sparivano; i tronchi crepitando si schiantavano e spegnevano e tutto era nero. I volti degli uomini in quella luce disperante, se la fiamma guizzando li colpiva, avevano un aspetto spettrale. Alcuni si sdraiavano, chiudevano gli occhi e piangevano, altri invece appoggiavano il mento sulle loro mani incrociando le dita e sorridevano. Le loro pire funebri con la legna e guardavano verso l’alto con una folle inquietudine sul cielo offuscato, tovaglia di un mondo passato (SENSO: quando il mondo era ancora bello e luminoso e il cielo era la sua coperta), e ancora li abbassano verso la polvere, digrignano i denti e gridano “gli uccelli selvaggi gridano, e terrorizzati, finivano a sbattere le ali per terra; le belve più feroci diventavano docili e spaurite; le vipere strisciavano e si attorcigliavano tra turbe di animali sibilando ma senza veleno (LETT: pungiglione), venivano uccise per essere mangiate. E anche la guerra, che per un momento era cessata, la gola ricomincia a divorare al buio, ogni pranzo era pagato col sangue e ciascuno sedeva tristemente lontano dagli altri, ingozzandosi al buio. Tutta la terra non aveva che un pensiero e quello era la morte, immediata e priva di gloria, e il morso della fame si nutriva di tutte le interiora, gli uomini morivano le loro ossa restavano senza tomba così come la loro carne, colui che era già magro veniva divorato da qualcun altro altrettanto magro e persino i cani assalivano i loro padroni, tutti tranne uno che era rimasto fedele al cadavere e teneva gli uccelli lontani dalle bestie e gli uomini affamati lontani fino a che la fame li rinsecchiva, o cadendo morti aprivano le loro fauci, lui stesso (SOGG: cane) non cercava del cibo ma un mormorio pietoso a sentirsi e perpetuo e un pianto veloce e desolato leccando la mano che non rispondeva più a una carezza, moriva. Tutta l’umanità/folla morì di fame ma due persone in una città enorme sopravvissero ed erano nemici, e si incontrarono presso le braci morenti di un bosco dove ‘era l’altare e dove erano stati ammucchiati una massa di cose sacre per un uso non sacro, rastrellarono e racimolarono con le loro mani fredde e scheletriche le ceneri deboli e il loro respiro debole soffiò cercando di avere un po’ di luce, e fecero una luce che era una presa in giro, e a quel chiarore alzarono gli occhi videro l’aspetto dell'altro, si videro, gridarono e morirono, persino della loro bruttezza senza sapere chi era colui sulla cui fronte la sorte/carestia aveva scritto “nemico” (SENSO: l’uno muore non solo per la of 37 56 monster is giving the most poetic part of the novel, the novel is entitled Frankenstein, after the name of the scientist but interestingly the monster is much more interesting. 5) Mary Shelley was in front of a philosophical choice, at the Botton the man was a good man but also she had the idea of Locke in front of her, Locke was born as a tabula rasa so he knew nothing and he has no innate knowledge but he can distinguish things and appreciate nature. 6) Friends: concept that relates also to relationship, to family. 7) He was creature before, now he is a human creature. 4) Chapter XX: the creature suffers from solitudine, so he want to destroy Victor’s family if the scientist will not make another female companion for the creature. Here there is an eco of Paradise Lost (the protagonist asked God to create another female companion). Victor asks himself if he has the right to do this > ethical problem with no solution, it is left to the reader what it would if it was in Frankenstein shoes. Nothing feels right anymore. 1) The chapter is set in Scotland because Victor before marring Elisabeth wants to see the world. 2) Science is justified because of discovery. 3) We can draw a line between a thing and an object: a thing has an existence of his own, while an object is the object of one subject, usually a human mind. What is the creature? The creature was created as an object but turned out to be a thing. What about the second creature? Both Victor and the main creature considers the second creature as an object. In the novel the thing is science and the ethic of science, because the thing is as concept. 4) He is preoccupied not for the human race but for the human race to curse him, to hate him > this is a strange reason to be worried about, a bit egoistic. 5) He creates an object > he is afraid that the object may become a thing > and he destroys that. 6) The plot twists in the story: from now on the creature would be bent on destroying everything that Victor loves, and they will be bound in hate and Victor could be following his creature, but the creature itself would make itself following by hurting his friends. 7) This novel becomes an exploration of hate and evil. Cap. 15: Percy Shelley Mary Shelley devoted all her life after the death of Percy, by preserving his memory and publishing all his manuscripts, then she preferred to be called Mary Shelley rather than Mary Godwin. Shelley came from a rich family, his father and his grand-father were the richest man in the region. They were a conservative high society family, and he was next in line for succession, there fore he was educated to become a baionette, but he was a rebel. His character grow forward his physical appearance because he was very weak, so he wasn’t a strong english man he wanted to become. He studied at Eatons (one of the most important school), mostly conservative, he was buried by everyone because he was small and weak, but here is where he starts hating power and also his teachers (because they never defended him, because it was educational for the kids, so they never acted in order to defend him). Many literary man suffered from this, there are several letters where the authors talk about the trama they had experienced in schools. Later on he went to Oxford where he stayed for 6 month to study philosophy, and he became friend with another guy and they decided to write a pamphlet called “The necessity of atheism” > this pamphlet was trying to prove philosophically that is impossibile the existence of God. They decided to give this pamphlet to everyone in the school, even to the masters and the rector, in fact they got expelled because of this action. This brought the first real fracture between himself and his father. He went to London, and he fell in love with the daughter of an hotel keeper, he writes to a friend about this “relationship” by saying that he has to save her because her father wants her to go to school, so that’s how they fell in love, but then they go to Edinburgh, and get married and they lived there. He considered himself not as a poet but more of a political philosopher, and for this reason he got in touch with Mary Godwin’s father, he was fascinated by this theory > marriage was a kind of major tragedy that could happen to humanity, so they consider that people should not get married, and they thought that people could have several partners at the same time. At this moment he realised he wasn’t in love with Harriet (her wife) anymore, he said that it was immoral and decided to leave with Mary Godwin instead because he loved her, they decided to run away in France. They asked Harriet to come with them, and with them another persone went that is Mary half-sister (sister on her mother’s side), eventually the sister became Percy’s lover while Mary was pregnant. Mary was not happy with this predicament, but then she found another lover so that equalise things. At this point Harriet commits suicide and so Mary and Percy are free to get married. At that point he returned to of 40 56 England but he found out that is not welcome there because he is seen as a liberty, he is not even allowed to see his children (that he had from Harriet) that were in Harriet’s parents custody. He went away from Britain because he felt like an exile. Then, Mary and Percy go to Italy. First they go to Rome but eventually they set elsewhere. They actually have two children and they both die when they arrive in itali; she will have another child but she suffered from a mental breakdown. In Italy Shelley brought some of his most important works, what is interesting is Prometheus’s story which is an allegory. At that point he had developed original ideas, he has no trust in power, only the working class has me kind of energy and some kind of innocence which can reform England and Europe in general > the ruling classes were too compromised, the only salvation the politically would make the difference was through the force of love and the force of working class > philosophically speaking he is neoplatonic. In Italy he wrote “Proserphine” “Ode to the west wind” > a note to the revolution he feels is coming, “the mask of anarchy” > anarchy has a very negative connotation, how the English power are the mask of anarchy. Anarchy means that there are no laws, no rules. Most of his poems are actually political. CAP. 15.1: SONG TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND Written for the workers, and it’s very simple regarding the prose and the technique. This is a union song, he was working philosophically in order to convince, but he was also doing practical work in order to educate the proletariate. Traduzione: uomini di Inghilterra, perché vi arate per dei signori che vi sfruttano? perché tessete con fatica e cura i ricchi vestiti che i vostri tiranni indossano? Perché nutrite, vestite e salvate dalla culla alla tomba, quegli ingrati fuchi (maschio delle api: non ha pungiglione e non lavora, serve solo a fecondare l’ape regina, tanto’è vero che una volta che l’ape regina ha deposto le uova uccidono i maschi ape perché non servono) che prosciugherebbero il vostro sudore, anzi berrebbero il vostro sangue? Perché cosa, api d’Inghilterra, forgiati armi, catene e scudi che questi droni/fuchi possano spogliare/possano appropriarsi della produzione forzata delle vostre fatiche? Ma forse avete tempo libero, conforto, tranquillità, un rifugio, il balsamo gentile e nobile dell’amore? O che cos’è che comprate a così caro prezzo con la vostra sofferenza e la vostra paura? I semi che voi seminate li miete qualcun altro, le ricchezze che voi trovate le tiene qualcun altro, le vesti che voi tessete le indossa qualcun altro, le armi che voi forgiate le porta qualcun altro. Seminate dei semi ma non lasciateli mietere da un tiranno, trovate delle ricchezze e fate in mot oche nessun impostore possa accumularle, tessete delle stoffe ma che non sia un altro che non lavora a indossare, forgiate le armi, da portare in vostra difesa. Voi vi ritirate nei vostri buchi e celle, e invece voi nascondete nelle sale che voi decorate ci abita un altro. Perché scuotere le catene che voi avete costruito? Voi vedete l’acciaio che voi avete temprato vi guarda. Con l’aratro e con la pala, con la zappa e il telaio, tracciate la vostra scossa e costudite al vostra tomba, e tessete il vostro sudario finche la bella Inghilterra sarà il vostro sepolcro. CAP. 15.2: ON A FADED VIOLET Possibly the most personal poem that Shelley ever wrote, certainly is a desperate sonnet. Traduzione: il profumo del fiore se n’è andato, come i tuoi baci respiravano su di me, il dolore del fiore è il giglio che un tempo rosseggiava di te, e solo te. Una forma avvizzita, prima di vita, vuota, giace sul mio petto abbandonato, e si prende gioco del cuore che invece è ancora caldo. Con un riposo freddo e silenzioso. Piango, e le mie lacrime non lo fanno rivivere, sospiro e lei non respira più su di me/non emana più il suo profumo, la sua situazione muta e che non si lamenta è un po’ come dovrebbe essere il mio, anche io sono nella stessa situazione. CAP. 15.3: OZYMANDIAS One of his best work, a completely different poet because for his complexity, this is technically a song but it’s rather complex because it brings together: the present, his political views, subtle irony. He offers us a kind of perception of the time, he goes back hundred of centuries because of this story. Ozymandias was a greek historian from an Hellenistic period, he lived in the third century before Christ. He was one of the emperor who brought together all Egypts into one single population and put statues of himself everywhere, his name was Ramses II. The story is like Frankenstein, a story in a story. It’s a prophecy for the English empire. But hey should the mighty despair? Why Ozymandias decided this statement? Because by seeing what remains of the greatest emperor, therefore nothing, so it’s completely useless. This is a kind of statement and prophecy, we must remember the English empire through out the of 41 56 19th century was very strong, another empire is the French empire, so both of them are connected to this poem. The thing (in the thing/object conception) is the impermanence of the empires, the political of the story, but we also have the loneliness and the sand that keeps returning > the motive of sand is used to descrive the political theme of the story and it donates a cohesion because we have the same motive at the beginning and at the end, therefore it creates a better understanding of the poem. it’s interesting how even the king of kings is shuttered, so no amount of power can avoid the passage time. Because time didn’t just ruined the statue but it also erased the whole kingdom. The king’s words are empty because he thought the even after his death, his kingdom would prosper while in fact it was completely destroyed. It’s important to remember that throughout history there are several rises and falls of empires, no matter how much power or how omniscient the ruler might was, nothing is permanent (this concept is present also in “ode to a nightingale”). The only thing that withstood time is art, and this is probable the most enduring tool in preserving human’s legacy. Art is capable of picturing someone’s emotions and character, and this two things can be seen even after decades. Art can preserve people, objects, cities and empires, giving them some sort of immortality. Traduzione: ho incontrato un viaggiatore che veniva da una terra antica (Egitto, con il congresso di Vienna l’Inghilterra diventa padrona dell’Egitto. Egypt mania: a lot of people go to Egypt in order to find treasures, they bring it back, and he wrote this poem during this period, so he was talking about an Egyptian for sure). Due enormi gambe di pietra senza tronco stavano erette nel deserto. Vicino a queste due gambe mezzo coperto dalla sabbia un viso mezzo distrutto giace questo viso, il cui ciglio e il labbro corrucciato e il ghigno di freddo comando ci dice che il suo scultore aveva letto bene quelle passioni (senso: aveva interpretato bene nel leggere il volto, lo aveva capito ed era riuscito a riprodurre lo spirito di quell’uomo nella pietra), che ancora sopravvivono, impresse su queste cose senza vita; la mano che le aveva forgiate e il cuore che le aveva nutrite; sul piedistallo appaiono queste parole: “il mio nome è Ozymandia, re dei re, guarda le mie opere, tu potente, e dispera. A parte questo non rimane nient altro. Intorno alla decadenza di questa statua colossale, sconfinata e nuda, le sabbie solitarie e piatte si dispiegano in lontananza”. CAP. 15.4: TO A SKYLARK Shelley is using a religious lexic even though he is atheist. The poem tries to answer the question “what is a skylark if not a bird?” Traduzione: salute a te o spirito beato, tu non sei mai stato un uccello che dal cielo/paradiso o lì vicino, svuoti la pienezza del tuo cuore, in generose melodie di un’arte non premeditata. Sempre più alto dalla terra tu sali come una nuvola di fumo, tu voli il profondo blu (solchi volando il cielo) e cantando ancora, ed elevandoti sempre più canti. Nella luce dorata del sole sprofondato (il tramonto) sopra al quale le nubi si stanno illuminando, tu galleggi e corri, come una gioia senza corpo (tutta l’ode si rivolge intorno alla domanda, c’è una sottrazione di peso dell’elemento dell’uccello, e anche questo ha un elemento di religiosità profondo perché l’idea religiosa è che il corpo sia un accidente dell’anima, un’abitazione temporanea che poi l’anima lascia. Come se l’essenza dell’anima dell’allodola lasciasse il corpo, questo nella percezione profonda, nella visione poetica è perché o è controluce o è lontano e quindi descrive solo ciò che vede) la cui corsa è appena cominciata. La pallida sera rossa si sceglie intorno al tuo volo come una stella del cielo nella luce del giorno, così tu rimani non visto eppure io sento la tua acuta delizia, penetranti come sono le frecce di quella sfera argentea, la cui lampada intensa si sfoca nel bianco chiarore dell’alba fino a che non la vediamo più, pure sapendo dove si trova. Tutta la terra e l’aria risuolano della tua voce come quando la notte è nuda (senza stelle) per colpa di una nuvola solitaria, e la luna fa cadere i suoi raggi e il cielo ne è riempito (il cielo è in parte nuvoloso perché non vediamo le stelle ma vediamo la luce della luna). Noi non sappiamo cosa sei; a che cosa assomigli? dalle nuvole che fanno gli arcobaleni non cadono gocce così brillanti alla vista come la tua presenza piove in uno scroscio di melodie. Come un poeta nascosto nella luce del pensiero che canta inni non richiesti, fino a che il mondo è spinto a empatizzare con speranze e paure alle quali non dà retta. Come una donzella d’alto rango in una torre, che consola la sua anima greve di amore in un’ora segreta (significa: solitario) a suonare con una musica dolce come l’amore che fa risuonare la sua dimora. Come una lucciola dorata in una dimora di rugiada che scaglia non vista il suo colore aereo tra i fiori e l’erba che la coprono alla vista. Come una rosa protetta nelle sue foglie verdi, violata dai venti caldi, finché il suo profumo diviene debole con troppa dolcezza quei ladri dalle ali pesanti (venti che hanno strappato i petali); suono di piogge primaverili sull’erba che traballa sotto il peso delle goccioline di pioggia/suono della goccia di pioggia che cade sul filo d’erba (TWINKLE; ha due significati: 1 traballare della luce, 2 suono simile a una campanella), fiori risvegliati dalla pioggia, tutto quello che mai è stato gioioso, chiaro e fresco come una pioggia di of 42 56 nessuno è stato risparmiato di quelli che cullavano un’ombra con i sandali che nuotava o sprofondava nel prato del fiume o sulla rive del fiume e fatto vagare dal vento che si snodava tra le erbacce. Se sapessimo che cosa facciamo quando noi scappiamo oppure quando abbattiamo e torriamo il verde che ne esce. La campagna è così tenera da toccare, ed è così debole che come questo bulbo lucido che serve a vedere, solo con un piccolo pizzicotto può essere distrutto (cioè questa palla lucida che vede, basta darle un pizzicotto e toglie la usa attenzione visiva), e anche dove cerchiamo di metterla in realtà la finiamo, tutte le volte che tagliamo o scaviamo. Quelli che verranno dopo di noi non potranno indovinare la bellezza che c’è stata. Dieci o dodici, soltanto dieci o dodici colpi di distruzione possono uccidere l’essenza di questa scena speciale e dolce, questa scena rurale, questa dolce e speciale rurale scena. CAP. 16.3: GOD’S GRANDEUR It’s a sonnet and it’s the opposite of the windhover, he starts from the region and he eventually lands on nature. By looking at the rhyme there is a regular image, and it’s a sestina >> la strofa inizia con ABBA e tecnicamente dovremmo aspettarci un CDDC, ma se il pattern è lo stesso, quindi ABBA-ABBA è difficile dire se sono due quartine, c’è inoltre una terzina finale che è una terza rima, in cui il primo verso rima con il terzo che a sua volta rima con il secondo della rima successiva. It’s the other way around: in the Windhover he saw God with the bird, and here he sees the bird in the holy Ghost, often represented as a bird. There is no place on earth where you don’t feel the smell of human enterprise, although they made the soil bear (unproducted), in spire of this he still have a hope because whenever the sun springs on the West, soon after is also coming out in hate Est, and somehow nature will ever grow. There is an ecologic point of view, and this makes Hopkins more enlightened today. Traduzione: il mondo è pieno della grandezza di Dio, fiammeggerà come il brillare che viene da una lastra di metallo agitata, e in questo modo si accumula fino a una grandezza così come il succo dell’olio viene schiacciato. Perché gli uomini oggi non considerano la croce? Le generazioni sono passate, e adesso tutto è bruciato e macchiato a causa del commercio offuscato, tutto il mondo porta la macchia dell’uomo (non c’è nulla, non la natura incontaminata) e dappertutto si sente l’odore dell’uomo, il suolo adesso è spoglio, e non c’è neanche un piede che possa sentire il suolo che è stato reso sterile e spoglio perché tutti quanti adesso sono calzati (nessuno cammina più a piedi nudi). E nonostante tutto, la natura non è mai spenta; lì ancora vive la freschezza dell’essenza delle cose (all’interno della profondità delle creazioni della natura), e anche se le ultime luci nell’Ovest nero se ne sono andate, oh mattina, sull’orlo bruno verso est (quindi un po’ più luminoso), la mattina sorge, e perché lo spirito santo sopra il mondo piegato cova con il petto caldo e anche con ali brillanti. Cap. 17: Victorian Age Victorian age takes his name from queen Victoria, she promoted some changes and reforms for elementary school, Victorian age is name after not so much for what she did but for what she was fighting for, she was a model monarch and she embodied the nation. But the victorian age is an age where everything changed because of the rising middle-class, impressingly Victoria was more the queen of middle-class than the queen of the aristocracy. This age begin when she became queen, and this was the period of economic and cultural influence of England over the world, London became the cultural capital of Europe, so the city expanded in terms of population. During this time four new bridges were built in London. The victorians themselves were aware they were living in a transition between the modern time and what was coming. English colonies were 25 percent of the lands on earth, and queen Victoria wasn’t the engine of this economic expansion. Three period: 1. The early victorian age: 1830-1845 2. The mid-victorian age: 1845-1870 3. Late victorian age: The railway was invented, the first reform (1832), and the second reform. The middle-class is supplanting the old aristocracy and the middle-class is becoming land-owners so the economy was changing because there weren’t only rich land-owners, now there were also middle-class owners. of 45 56 There were children working in factories and cold mines, there were trade unions trying to organise themselves, and there were people who could not read or write, the city was so dirty that people had to go out with boots. THOMAS ROBERT MALTHEUS He is a theorist, he was concerned that the population was moving at too high at rate, especially the lower classes they had too many children, in fact he thought that they shouldn’t improve lower classes’s condition because that would led to produce too many children and that could have created a famine in England. Also they thought that the wage of labours should not be much above the poverty line because otherwise labours would stop working and producing, they believed in social classes as something strong, there were people belonging to social classes that were basically different form the people in the upper classes, so it was not a matter of education but more a sort of racism. People in the lower classes were basically lazy, they wouldn’t work if they were not forced to, and hunger was the only thing that would compelled people to work. For this reason for so long the wages were kept so low, but basically the puritanical capitalistic idea is that if you are poor you deserve it. In 1833 a new poor law was made; now, the poor law that existed before this year was made by queen Elisabeth I. How it worked? All the kingdom was divided into parishes (a district), and every parish had to take care of their own poor, but that created a number of problems because there were parishes who would treat their own poor in a bad way than other, but that depend on how rich the parishes were because there was no central control, therefore there were people moving from a parish to another; and than there was a law that stopped it, if you were poor and you went out from the parish you were born you could be arrested for vagrancy (vagabondaggio). This new law (1833), had a philosophy behind was that the poor were responsible for their poverty and should not encouraged to apply for any relief from the government or any institution because otherwise they would not work, so they invented the “workhouse” > it was organised as a prison, once you enter the house they gave you a uniform and you had to work there for a minimal salary, they would gave an accommodation. You could not live there with your family, because they divided men from women, and children were supposed to stay with their mom until a certain age, then they would be divided in the men- women subdivision. They were given poor food and they could not speak during meals, they could not smoke or anything, the reason was that people should not enjoy themselves in the workhouses, because these places should be worse. People were not sentenced to the workhouse, it was a free choice, but usually you go to a workhouse if it’s your only choice, even if it is depressing. From the mid section a few man/guards would be able to watch anything. From the outside the workhouses were nice, but the reason is that the government was trying to reassure the middle-class that the poor were taken care of, the middle-class would not enter the institute, that was ugly on the inside. In this way the government would reassure the voters that everything was taken care of. Some parties came up with reforms but they were unsuccessful. The most important movement that demand was the charters, they grew up this bill of rights called “the charter of rights”, the only thing they could obtain was one: they obtained the abolition of the corn laws > this laws prohibited to import corn from outside England, and that kept the price of corn high. With the abolition of the corn they permitted to import corn from outside of England, by doing this they made corn available for the poor, and generally for everyone because the prices got lower. The reason why they obtain a success is ideological, after all they were asking for free market, and free market was very much in line with the ideology of the government, and this was one of the few instances that really helped the poor. The charters movement lost much all his power but it remains as a sort of ghost that somehow was feared by the middle-class, this idea can be seen in some novel such as “Hard times” were there is the trade union that is treated by dickens as a monster. The 1840s were called “the times of troubles”, in fact when you are reading victorian poetry is all hidden behind a kind of decorum or different narration. But even though there were all this problems, England was becoming richer and richer through out the period, and even unemployment improved automatically; there were much less unemployed people in the 1850s than in the 1830s, and a lot of money was also coming from the colonies. On the other hand it was a time of religious freedom, for instance Poe being a catholic could not live in London or even go to London (he had to live in the countryside) because he was considered dangerous, and others poets could not express themselves at all. But again, the 19th century was a kind of religious freedom, of course within the christian tradition and many different confessions and churches are considered to influence the political life of England. The children of the puritans were active and promoted a lot of charities, also they tried to influence the political life of the country, and to a certain extend they were of 46 56 responsible for the abolition of slavery of the English empire, and this was a very popular movement that was divided in low church (popular church) and high church (theologician/archbishop). In the evangelical, theologically speaking they were closer to the catholics than the protestants, especially in their valuing good action as a way to achieve the kingdom of God. One of the most important thing that happened in 1845 is that a Cardinal, member of the high church, announced that he had turned Roman Catholic, and this shocked England. So the church even more than the leftists or anarchist movements, was the major opposition to the utilitarians or to the economic ideology. Rationalism would challenge the establishment and the church, so we have darwinism and the elements of geology of Lyell (a book that says that the earth is way older than it is said in the bible) which are really shaking the ideas about the creation of the world. Cap. 18: Alfred lord Tennyson CAP. 18.1: IN MEMORIAM His father and his brothers were alcoholics, so it was a difficult family, but nevertheless his father had enough money to send him to Cambridge, and there he met Arthur Hallam > Tennyson devoted to him one of his best masterpiece “In memoriam A.H.H” and he was a literary critic, he died when he was in his early twenties. He was the fiancé of Tennyson’s sister. They talked about science, politics and religion because they liked to discuss about this problems/thematics. In this poem he transcribed all the conversations they had, and this is important because we get to know what was Tennyson’s point of view about different topics. He had this terribile grief and he reacted by writing this huge analogy: usually analogy is like this > you miss the person so much, you remember a few things about this person (and you talk about how great this person was) and eventually you close by finding consolation in the memory of the person you lost. He honoured the memory of this man by talking about the issues they were used to care for when they were together. This analogy is also a poem about the doubts and the values of the victorian time, this is why is so powerful and famous. CAP. 18.2: BREAK, BREAK, BREAK “Break, break, break” is an interesting poem to read, because it’s a bridge between romantic and victorian poetry. Tennyson is considered to be the most victorian of English poets, when we talks about victorian times we also called it “Tennyson times”, because it’s the most important poet of the Victorian age. For some time he was considered an enemy because other poets wanted to do something different, but in modernist time he has been red by others. This poem is in memory of Arthur Hallam. The rhythm of the poem should be the same as the rhythm of the sea, this is an analogy > he doesn’t say that Hallam is there but he says that “the day is dead”, so the time he spent with him is gone but this poem is universal because he is not talking about Hallam directly, it could be dedicated to anyone like a lover. This poem is about missing something, he misses this person physically and morally, he misses is voice, so the conversation they had together. Anything else just goes on as it is used to. This is a romantic poem, he talks about nature and the sea, he is speaking about the boy and the sailor who are playing with is picturesque in a qua and he speaks about someone who is dead, and the sea symbolises nature. There is historically a difference between the 18th century and the 19th century, and the way people were feeling in the 19th century was different, the way English people think of themselves in the world, the British empire, all of this was different. But there is still a very romantic sentiment which is romantic and remains romantic even after the death of Wordsworth and the other poets. In this poem there is the sailor’s lad who is singing and on the other hand there are the stately ships, and this is how the spirit of the age enters the poem; he is writing a poem that is an analogy about someone who is dead, and how sad he was because of this, but he is also referring to the government. When he is talking about himself there is all of this which is behind it, so for instance there are the ships trading, the poor (fisherman and sailor) that seems happy because they are singing but in reality there is a difficult condition behind it there is much sadder. Traduzione: rompiti, rompiti, rompiti sulle tue pietre grigie fredde, o mare. E io vorrei che la mia lingua potessero esprimere i pensieri che salgono alla mia mente. Oh, tutto va bene per il ragazzo pescatore che grida con sua sorella per giocare, Oh, tutto va bene per il ragazzo marinaio, che cantatala sua barca sulla of 47 56 the beginning with a sexual language such as “kiss me”. Probably Cristina was not so conscious of this, because it’s difficult not to see this erotic overtone, but it is possible that she didn’t see it, or maybe, if she was conscious of this images, she was sure that it would not stand out as it stands out today. The taste of the unforbidden pleasure displays and denied and the pleasure itself is displayed and denied, when Laura kisses and sucks her sister she does it out of love but she feels bad, she feels guilty eventually > strong emotion. 3) Allegory with oppium addiction, followed by people as Coleridge or Dickens (in a novel he could not finished because he died). Addition was something tasty at the beginning, it makes you feel better at the beginning and then there is a sort of crisis. Allegory/metaphor for any kind of sinful addiction, even gambling works in the same way. Only one that sacrifices for you helps you out of it. 4) Symbol: the difference between allegory and symbol, is that the allegory is explained right from the start together with the text and it never changes, while a symbol is more dynamic because it may change. Symbol lede itself to different interpretations. What is happening in the poem is that if you read it as an allegory it would just like any other non-Victorian poem, it’s not a victorian poem because she is actually using different type of symbols, you may follow one or another, much more poetical and less didactic, and more modern. Even though it looks like a simple story it’s actually a very difficult poem. Traduzione: mattino e sera le fanciulle sentivano le grida dei folletti: “vieni a comprare i frutti del nostro frutteto, vieni a comprare, vieni a comprare: mele cotogne, limoni, arance, ciliegie, meloni e lamponi, buone pesche mature e sugose, more scure paffute e gustare, e more prugnole non coltivate, mele selvatiche, more abbrunate, ananas splendide, more di rovo, soavi fragole ed albicocche, dan tutte all’ugola, fûr maturare. Dalla fruttifera, gioconda estate. Ah!fuggono rapide, l’albe rosate, fuggono le placide, sere stellate, su v’affrettate, su comprate. Pigne da giovani, viti staccate, deliziosissime, melegranate, dorati datteri, pungenti prugnole, pere rarissime, prugne verdognole, susine piccole, more piccine. Presto assaggiatele, provate un poco. Ci sono ribes splendidi, ed uve spine, ci sono questi berberi, sembrano di fuoco: fichi che saziano, cedri odorosi, dolci buonissimi scelti e polposi. Avvicinatevi, su guardate, su comprate, su comprate. Sera dopo sera tra i fiori lungo il ruscello, Laura chinava la sua testa per ascoltare mentre Lizzie velava il suo rossore, abbracciandosi nell’aria fresca, con le braccia che si afferrano e con le labbra che si ammoniscono, con le guance attaccate, e con la punta delle dita. “stammi vicina” Laura disse sollevando la sua testa dorata ,”non dobbiamo guardare i folletti, non dobbiamo comprare la loro frutta, chissà che in suolo loro hanno nutrito le loro radici affamate e assetate”, “Venite a comprare” chiamano i folletti, ballonzolando per la valle. “Oh” esclama Lizzie “non devi guardare di nascosto i folletti”, Lizzie copre i suoi occhi, e li copre per bene per timore che potessero guardarla. Laura sollevò la sua testa lucida e invece sussurrò come il ruscello senza pace, “Guarda Lizzie, guarda, lungo la valle vengono saltellando i piccoli uomini”. Uno porta un cesto, uno trasporta un piatto, uno trascina un piatto d’oro che pesa parecchie lire. Come deve essere bella la vite i cui grappoli sono così lussureggianti, come deve soffiare caldo il vento attraverso i cespugli di quei frutti. “No” disse Lizzie “no, no, no: le loro offerte non ci devono incantare, i loro doni maligni ci farebbero del male”. Si mette un dito affusolato per ogni orecchio, chiude gli occhi e corre: invece curiosa Laura decise di soffermarsi guardando con meraviglia ciascuno di questi mercati. Uno aveva la faccia di gatto, uno muoveva molto velocemente la coda, uno correva a passo di un ratto, un altro strusciava come una lumaca, uno come uno bombato camminava in modi aggressivo, ottuso e peloso, un altro come un tasso del miele cadeva/rotolava velocissimo. Sentì una voce che era come la voce delle colombe che tubavano insieme: il loro suono era gentile e pieno di amore nel clima piacevole. Laura stende il suo collo luccicante, come un cigno nella vegetazione, come una ninfea nel fiume, come l’albero di pioppo illuminato dalla luna (il pioppo ha le foglie argentate che si muovo sempre), come un vascello al palo quando l’ultima corda è stata tagliata. Indietro, super la valle coperta di muschio si sono volgato e si muovono insieme i folletti con il loro grido acuto e ripetuto “venite a comprare, venite a comprare”. Quando arrivano nel punto dove c’era Laura si fermano immobili sul muschio, ridacchiando l’uno con l’altro, ciascun fratello con un altro fratello, che si fanno dei segni d’intesa, tra fratello e fratello furtivo. Uno appoggia il cesto, uno invece solleva un piatto, uno inizia a intrecciare una corona di foglie e noci selvatiche, che nessun uomo vende in città, uno sollevò il peso dorato del piatto e della frutta per offrirgliela: “venite a comprare, venite a compare”. Laura osserva ma non si muove, desidera acquistare ma non ha soldi; il mercante batteva la coda offrendole di assaggiare con toni dolci come il miele, quello con la faccia da gatto faceva le fusa, quello con la faccia da ratto disse una parola di benvenuto, e quello che camminava come una lumaca si sentì; quello con la voce da pappagallo cantò “bel folletto” e ancora “pretty polly”, uno fischiò come un uccello. Frettolosa, rispose e avidamente Laura “ma non ho soldi, cari folletti, e il prendere sarebbe un bel furare: né spiccioli, né argento, né un quatrino non ho nel borsellino; e il mio oro è nella ginestra che è esposta al tempestare dei venti”. “Hai molto oro sulla tua testa” risposero tutti insieme, “compra da noi con una ciocca d’oro”. Lei prese un prezioso ricciolo d’oro, le scese una lacrima più rara di una perla, poi mangiò quei frutti molto gustosi, più dolce del miele proveniente dalla roccia, più forte del vino che rallegra l’uomo, più chiaro dell’acqua era il succo; non of 50 56 aveva mai provato quel gusto prima, come stanca sarebbe di mangiarle? Lei iniziò a succhiare e succhiare più frutti che venivano da un campo sconosciuto, succhiò fino a che le sue labbra non diventarono gonfie; poi gettò via le bucce ma raccolse un nocciolo, e senza sapere se fosse notte o giorno, andò verso casa da sola. Lizzie l’aspettava al cancello, e pena di saggi rimproveri: “cara, non dovresti stare fuori così tardi, la notte non è sicura per le fanciulle: non dovresti gironzolare per la valle, nei campi dei folletti. Ti sei dimenticata Jeanie li incontrò nella notte, prese i loro regali scegliendone tanti, mangiò i loro frutti e indossò i loro fiori raccolti dai pergolati, dove l’estate matura a tutte le ore? Ma sempre dal mezzogiorno si struggeva cercandoli giorno e notte, non trovandoli più, poscia egra e canuta parve, e al tornar della neve, disparve! E ora non cresce l’erba dove lei giace, dove riposa in pace, un anno fa sopra quel suolo piantai le margherite e non fiorirono mai. Non stare fra loro che fai male. “Taci” rispose Laura “taci sorella mia, mangiai tanti frutti preziosi, a tal punto che ancora adesso ho la bocca piena, domani sera tornerò e ne comprerò ancora” e la baciò, “smettila di sconsolarti, domani ti porterò le prugne fresche dal ramoscello della loro madre, ciliegie che meritano di essere prese; non puoi credere che fichi passarono tra i miei denti, che meloni freddi ghiacciati impilati su un piatto d’oro, così pesante da reggere per me, che pesce con le bucce vellutate! Che grappoli d’uva senza nemmeno un seme: certamente fragrante saranno i campi dove crescono, e acque pure bevono con ninfee sull’orlo del ruscello, e dolci come lo zucchero il loro sapore” bionde chiome con bionde chiome, sul letto chiuso da padiglioni come due uccelli in un nido, coperti dalle ali dell’altro, stanno sdraiati nei loro letti racchiusi nelle tende; come due fiori su uno stelo, come due fiocchi nella neve che cade, come due scettri d’avorio terso, contornato di oro per re terribili. La luna e le stelle stanno a mirarle, sonori venti vanno a cullarle, i gufi arrestano il volo pesante, anche la nottola incerta ed errante, non sbatte le ali sopra al loro tetto. Guancia su guancia, petto su petto dormono insieme in un solo letto. Di mattina presto quando il primo uccello canta il suo avviso, che come industriose api vivaci Laura e lisa balzarono fuori dal letto. Munsero le vacche, cercarono il miele, ventura la casa ed assettarono le cose, e impastarono focacce deliziose, fatte per bocche ghiotte, prepararono burro e crema per nutrire i polli e poi si misero a cucire. E parlavano fra loro modestamente, lisa con un cuore franco e affettuoso, ma Laura assorta e fuori di sé, una contenta e l’altra egra e languente. L’una del chiaro dì, desiderosa l’altra della lontana notte ansiosa. E lentamente giunse la sera; andarono con le brocche al ruscello, Lisa era calma e d’aspetto placido ma Laura era tutta avvampata. Attinsero l’acqua dal rivo gorgogliante, lisa colse delle iridi stellate e voltandosi disse: “andiamo sulle rupi elevate, del sol già fugge il raggio errante, non fare la restia, vieni!, il creato già tace, ogni animale si è addormentato, lo scoiattolo ancor si è rintanato”. Ma Laura rimase tra i rovi, mostrava il molle poggio e a lei diceva che non era poi tardi, e non si sente né la rugiada né il freddo pungente. E stava tutta orecchi ad ascoltare ma non sentendo il grido dei folletti “venite a comprare, venite a comprare” se quello strano tintinnio sentisse, quel cinguettio di voci dolce e care. Ma per quanto ella andasse spiando non più i folletti, correndo, ruzzolando, strisciando, e giungono alla valle affollati, molti a torme, altri soli e veloci, tutti attivi, spigliati e facendo risuonar la vallea d’alte voci. Lisa sollecita, rispose: “andiamo dai fruttivendoli, già ascolto il grido, non oso guardare il loro volto, deh lascia il rivolo, su ritorniamo, gli astri già splendono, la luna brilla, spande la lucciola, la sua favilla, le nere tenebre, non aspettiamo talora d’un subito, l’aria si oscura; potrebbe un nuvolo trovarci quaggiù, potrebbe piovere, potremmo bagnarci, potremo perdere la via sicura”. Laura sentì che un gelo l’aveva uccisa. Dunque soltanto Lisa udito aveva il solito vociare: “comperate, venite a comperare?”. Dunque gustar mai più, mai più doveva quei frutti! Ella sol, quella romita sorda era al grido e cieca al rimirare? Ahi lassa, si sentiva mancare la vita. Muta con il cuore straziato andava a casa, e per il tremore che tutta l’agitava, la brocca nel suo capo gocciolava. Entrò nel letto e giacque silenziosa sino a che vide Lisa addormentata. Poi si sedette e con un’anima desiderosa corse alla frutta con ansia e dolore, pianse e sentì nel seno rompersi il cuore. E giorno e notte Laura si sedeva silenziosa vigile ed immota, era intenta e l’angoscia la rodeva, era intenta e non più sentì vociare “comprate, venite a comprare”. Né vedeva i folletti riportare nella valle i loro frutti saporiti, ma nell’ora che il sole vie più riluce, mostrò radi i capelli e incanutiti, languì la sua beltà, siccome suole la Luna divorarsi quella luce che le ha donato il sole. Rammentò che un nocciolo ancor serbava e presso un muro esposto al mezzogiorno, lo piantò e con il suo pianto l’inaffiava ed un germoglio almeno ne sperava, ma non spuntò la pianta, e i dolci rai del sol non vide mai, né quell’umore vitale gocciolò giammai. Mentre con gli occhi scavati e con la bocca sognava angurie, come un viaggiatore quando vede false onde nella siccità del deserto con l’ombra di un albero coperto di foglie, e brucia ancora più assetato per questa visione nella brezza piena di sabbia. Non volle più spazzare casa Susa, non volle più badare ai buoi o ai polli, non ebbe più diletto nel fare focacce e miele, non attinse più l’acqua al ruscelletto, ma immobile stava sotto al caminetto, né volle più mangiare. Tenera Lizzie non poteva sopportare di guardare le sue ansie malate e non poterla condividere. E giorno e notte sentiva la voce usata dai folletti “venite a comprare i nostri frutti, venite a comprare, venite a comprare”. Lungo la valle e vicino al ruscello, lei sente il passo pesante dei folletti e il movimento che la povera Laura non poteva ascoltare. E avrebbe anche desiderato di comprare della frutta per confortare la sorella ma temeva di pagarla troppo cara. Penso a Jeanie nella sua bara, che sarebbe dovuta diventare una sposa, si sentì male e morì mentre la sua vita incominciava, mentre l’inverno appena si mostrava, mentre la of 51 56 brina appena si agghiacciava, mentre il primo inverno pungente arrivava. Fino a che Laura stava diventando sempre più sottile, come se bussasse alle porte della morte, a questo punto Lizzie smette di soppesare i propri contro, bacia Laura, attraversa la brughiera con ciuffi di ginestra al tramonto e si ferma al ruscello e per la prima volta nella sua vita cominciò a guardare. Tutti i folletti ridevano quando la stavano spiando, le si fanno tutti incontro, saltellando, volando, correndo, saltando, ansimando, soffiando, ridacchiando, battendo le mali, gracchiando, chioccando, deglutendo, spazzando e pulendo il terreno, pieni di arie e di grazia facendo delle boccacce, contegnosi e schivi, faccia da gatto e faccia da ratto, quello che camminava come una lumaca di corsa, quello con la voce da pappagallo e quello che fischiava di corsa, chiacchierando come gazze, svolazzando come piccioni o scivolando come pesci, le mettono le mani addosso, schiacciandola e accarezzandola, le sollevano verso di lei i loro piatti, vassoi e panieri: “guarda le nostre mele rugine e scure, pesca tra le nostre ciliegie, tra le nostre pesche, i limoni, i datteri, l’uva che basta chiederla, pere rosse stanno nel sole, delle susine ancora attaccate al ramo, prendile e mangiale, melograni, fichi”. “Brava gente” disse Lizzie, pensando a Jeanie, “datemi un po’ e un po’, prende il grembiule e lo tiene aperto di fronte a sé per darle la frutta, prende le monete dalla tasca e gliele lancia. “Ma no, fermati, prendi posto e onoraci e mangia con noi” le rispondono ridacchiando, “il nostro banchetto non è che all’inizio, la notte è ancora giovane, calda e dotata di gocce/perle di rugiada, una notte in cui si sta svegli e piena di stelle, frutti come questi nessuno li può trasportare, metà della loro se ne andrebbe, metà del loro succo si seccherebbe, metà del loro sapore se ne andrebbe. Siediti con noi, sii la nostra ospite benvenuta, divertiti e riposati qui con noi”. “grazie” disse Lizzie: “ma c’è qualcuno che mi aspetta a casa da sola e così senza aggiungere altre parole se nessuno vuole vendermi la vostra frutta, che è tanta e parecchia, ridatemi il mio penny d’argento che vi ho appena lanciato come pagamento”. Cominciarono a grattarsi la testa senza più muovere il capo, le code, senza più fare le fusa ma visibilmente fermandosi, digrignando i denti e soffiando. Uno le dice che è superba, di cattivo carattere, incivile, e i loro toni divennero alti, i loro aspetti erano malvagi. Muovendo le code loro si avvicinarono e la circondarono, al presero a gomitate, la spintonarono, e la graffiarono/afferrarono con le loro unghie abbaiando, miagolando, fischiando/sibilando, prendendosi gioco di lei, le strappano la gonna, e le sporcano le calze, le strappano i capelli fino alle radici, pestano i piedi teneri, le legano le mani e le schiacciano i frutti sulla bocca per farla mangiare. Bianca e dorata Lizzie restava immobile come una ninfea nell’inondazione, come una roccia con una pietra venata di blu, bagnata dalla corrente turbolenta. Si erge come un faro/palo lasciato da solo in un mare bianco che spumeggia (metafora per indicare i goblin), da cui emana un fuoco dorato (capelli di lizzie), come un albero di arance coronato di fiori dolci come il miele (>> lizzie è più alta dei goblin, infatti le sporcano le calze perché non ci arrivano), che però è aggredito e malato perché pieno di vespe e api, come una città vergine reale la cui parte più alta vetta una cupola dorata e anche una guglia assediata da una flotta che accecata dalla volontà di far cadere il suo stendardo. Per quanto facessero i folletti non riuscivano nel loro intento, sebbene le bloccassero le mani con le manette, e la tenessero ferma, la inducessero e la combattessero, la bullizzassero e la pregassero la graffiassero, la pizzicassero lasciandole dei lividi neri come l’inchiostro, sebbene la prendessero a calci e pugni, la picchiassero, e la schernissero, Lizzie non pronunciò una sola parola, non apriva il labbro superiore dall’inferiore per timore che loro potessero forzare dentro un boccone, ma nel suo cuore rideva a sentire le gocce di questo succo che scendevano come sciroppo giù per la sua faccia e si fermano nelle fossette del suo mente e le rigavano il collo, che tremava come il siero dell’albero. A questo punto loro sfiancati dalla sua resistenza le tirarono dietro la sua moneta, presero a calci la frutta senza lasciare alcuna radice o seme o germoglio, e scompaiono nei modi più disparati; qualcuno contorcendosi entra sottoterra, qualcuno si tuffò nel ruscello lasciando dei cerchi dove si era buttato, alcuni fuggirono nell’aria senza un suono e alcuni svanirono in distanza. Con un dolore fisico, con un fremito, Lizzie prese la strada di casa, non sapeva più se fosse giorno o notte, saltò sulla riva, si gettò attraverso la ginestra, camminò attraverso il bosco e la valletta e intanto sentiva il suo penny suonare saltellando nel suo portafoglio, il suo suono per lei era musica, e corse a perdifiato, come se temesse che qualche goblin la seguisse ostinatamente come un segugio, con insulti o prese in giro o maledizioni, ma nessun goblin le correva appresso né lei era davvero in preda della paura, era il suo cuore gentile che le metteva le ali ai piedi/che la rendeva passo-ventosa, che la faceva correre a casa, ormai assolutamente a perdifiato con fretta e con un sorriso interiore. Dal giardino gridò: “Laura, ti sono mancata? Vieni e baciami. Non ti preoccupare dei mie lividi, abbracciami, baciami, bevi i succhi strizzati dei frutti dei folletti per te, polpa e succo dei folletti. Mangiami, bevimi e amami; Laura fai tesoro di me, per amore tuo io ho affrontato il bosco e ho avuto a che fare con i folletti”. Laura si alza dalla sedia, alza le braccia al cielo e grida con le mani tra i capelli: “Lizzie, Lizzie, hai assaggiato per amor mio i frutti proibiti? Ora anche la tua luce sarà nascosta come la mia, ora la tua giovane vita sarà sprecata come la mia, distrutta per colpa della mia distruzione e rovinata anella mia rovina, sarai assetata, malata e ossessionata dai folletti” abbraccia la sorella e la bacia, lacrime di nuovo rinfrescano i suoi occhi scavati. Cadendo come pioggia dopo una lunga e terribile siccità, tremando per l’angoscia, la paura e il dolore, la bacia e la bacia con una bocca affamata. Le sue labbra bruciano, quel succo era assenzio per la sua lingua, odiava questo banchetto, contorcendosi come una posseduta saltò e cantò, si strappa di dosso i suoi vestiti e si strofina le mani in una of 52 56 and social statues, and how he pursued his best friends in order to pursue his idea of money and respectability, that are the most important achievements in the victorian age. So there are only two people that are completely good, they are Joe and Wemmick, eventually Pip understands that he loses the possibility of deserving their love. They will love him to the end of the novel, but he understand he lost something that he will never regain. This kind of novel is called “coming of age”, because it’s the story of an hero from his infancy to his coming of age, to becoming an adult. So the interest of this novel is how is a certain character form, what kind of experiences are making a character in a certain form/shape. CAP. 20.1-1: CHAPTER I It’s the very beginning. 1) It’s very articulated the way he write, but there are very long and complicate sentences. When we write in the first person, you always have two different view points: the writing I and the narrated I. Here there is a sort of tension between what the child sees and understand and what the adult that is writing remembers and has understood. Between this two there is an ironic space filled with language. For example, when he says “Also Georgiana Wife of the above” there is an infantile emotion. 2) There is a kind of irony because you distance yourself from the child but you also empathise with the child, so it’s impossible to distance and empathise and at the same time, and it’s kind of ironic. 3) Dickens is separating the situation and the words he is using, from an infantile to a higher register. 4) He is fixed about the way he was born. 5) The author is the one who decides what’s going to happen in the novel, eh gets to decide that Pip’s parents are dead. Then there is an internal narrator, that gets to decide wether telling or not telling something in the story and he rearrange thinks in whatever order he thinks best. There is an agency that belongs to the narrator and one to character. 6) There are a number of words throughout the novel who are associated with the semantic field of fear, there is always someone that is in fear or threatened by someone else. Why he is writing a novel where everyone is in fear? Then you can ask the narrator why he is phrasing the story so that he underlines he himself was in fear as a young man, or other people in fear? Because this novels takes part in his sad and depressive production we find this type of emotion. At the beginning dickens was enthusiastic about victorian age, new achievement and so on, while now he has grown rather skeptical about the victorian spirit. The very idea of start the novel in a cemetery is unusual, and to start the biography in a cemetery is the least unusual. 7) He tells the epiphany, the first time he remembers when he had a keen perspective of how he was, what he was doing, what he wanted to do, and this happened in a graveyard. This is sad but certainly Dickens made it in a certain way “light” he is able to do that, because of a very sophisticated language, the all sentences are mixing: language of a child, of a learned writer, language of the epigraphs on the tombstones (Wife of the above), so this language is so layered because he mix all the types of language he is using together. Actually all of his novels are layered because he has different narrative trends coming together. 8) There is a kind of melodramatic vibe that si the narrative’s trend, and then there’s the child alone in the graveyard with the myst all around. And this vibe is the most popular in the narrative’s trend used by Dickens. Then there is another way of writing, which is the gothic; the graveyard is a typical gothic sign, but there are also other elements throughout the novel, for example Miss Havisham that is the quintessential symbol of gothic. As you read on there are other gothic situations such as Pip who is made prisoner and they almost killed him. Then there is the realistic-dramatic mood: so deep descriptions of London, of London’s life, and then there are insights into the collective psychic of the victorian age. So all of this things are somehow combined and this is what makes this novel particularly rich. Almost every page is layered, in a sense that we find all the different way of writing together. 9) “Hold your noise” […] “I’ll cut your throat” > try gothic because we are in a cemetery and all of a sudden someone comes out and starts controlling you. Also it may look like a ghost, because of description made later on. This is almost the same description that we have in the creature of Frankenstein. 10) “Pint out”: is not a grammatical error but it’s a way of Dickens to use the dialect of lower classes. And again this novel takes in consideration different types of language in order to mix them together, from the language of a child, to a language of an adult, to the language of the narrator, of the convict (coming form the lower stratus of the society), language of the tombstone used by the narrator. And the language of the narrator is versatile enough to take itself other languages. of 55 56 11) Pip commits a sin, that is typical of the age; he does not recognise the good people around him and he wishes to follow negatives models; such as money, his sexual orientation rather than following his heart, so he lose his good friends. And because of this reason he gets punished, and the punishment does not come in a shape of prison, because he didn’t commit any crime but he commits a sin, and he will be morally punished. Another mistake he does is that he is unable to read his situation; so he believes that he is the protagonist of a completely different story, written by someone else for him, and he behaves as he is in a different story, he is unable to read his own story. This is something that eventually will make him very unhappy. CAP. 20.1-2: CHAPTER 8 When he goes to miss Havinsham’s house, we have another gothic moment; he is asked by a lady who lives in his neighbourhood to go to her place, maybe to do some kind of manual work in exchange of money. He is entering this house were everything is fallen down, number of things are no longer in use and then there is an old lady sit in the dark even though there was daylight outside. The one virtue appreciated by Dickens is generosity or selflessness, in fact his most important characters are characterised by this virtue, and miss Havinsham is the very opposite of a selflessness woman, although when she was younger she was a generous person, but somehow she had been abused and therefore she became this kind of ghost and vicious person. And she is transformed in a moral monster. This leads us to the last level of reading that is symbols; miss Havinsham and her daughter’s house are symbolic and so is the convict, at the beginning of the novel. So is Wemmick, and the house on a river on an island were a character live, and he is a completely different man than he is in town >> sort of dualism; because he changes his character from the town to the house. A symbol is not an allegory, because the allegory is precise and schematical in a way, whereas a symbol is something that we cannot exactly grasp and it may change during the course of the group, a symbol stands for a concept that we cannot actually put a name on, while the allegory is the opposite. Therefore the symbol leads the reader to something he cannot name. It’s also interesting why does Pip have three names in the novel? Philip (biological name), Pip (infantile name) and Handel a name given by his friend. Is there any pattern of this name throughout the novel? Because having this different names may be symbolical, it’s a very complex novel, written by someone who as grown a professionalism in writing. Some people believe that is earliest novel were manneristic, however this is definitely the prose of someone who knows how to write. of 56 56