Literary Analysis of 'The Solitary Reaper' by Coleridge and Related Poets, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

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The Solitary Reaper - 1805 Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis LETTERATURA INGLESE I A.A. 2012/13 Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 based on ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Dramatic beginning- the use of historic present conveys a sense of immediacy to the narrative • Simple syntax SVCA • Alone: thematic marking Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Language • monosyllabic stems • abundance of nouns, mostly concrete, denoting objects that are part of the natural landscape • abstract nouns usually associated with commonly felt emotions • Visual: behold/the/yon- insistence on perception Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Language • verbs usually less forceful than nouns • self-contained sentences • simple coordinate conjunctions • Subordinate with if or when type • Limited syntax Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Positive associations • Spatial dislocation • Sensations reconstructed Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The poet questions the nature of the ‘song’ (interrogatives) • He doesn’t understand- mistery • Temporal dislocation Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Circular structure • Repetition end-beginning (reaper-death-cycle of life) • Memory song-poetry Poetry associated with sorrow, death Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Tintern Abbey (1798) • Stanza I: landscape both naturalistic and symbolic W insists that it is a revisited landscape anticipates the theme of time and memory prompts the poet to reflections on his own inner development Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Upward movement of the cliffs and smoke: preparation for the pattern of spiritual ascent towards spiritual insight that dominates the poem • Internal/external • Presence of the natural (pastoral and wild) • Presence of the human (vagrant, hermit- emblems of suffering mankind) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • communion with nature • The hermit- the divine: contemplation of the mystical truth of exixtence Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Blessed mood- mystical insight into the life of things Dualism: mystical speculation/ ascertained facts • The more he rises above his actual sensory and psychological experience the less assumed the truth of his speculation. So in Stanza III the are more factual considerations. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Stanza III • As he feels in danger of losing his grasp with the actual, he falls back to the matter-of-fact, ascertained inner experience: the relief wrought in him by memory. • He is not certain of what kind of connection there is, if any, between nature anf his mystical experience and he returns to what he knows for certain: the relief of nature Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The mood (we see into the life of things) is a fact but its origin is not clear. • It may be but ‘a vain belief’ • He turns to the Wye, the river Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 3 movements (stanza IV) 1) boyhood sensations sensory 2) love of youth feelings emotional 3) thoughtful maturity sublime mystical Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Man here is included in his animistic, pantheistic vision • The last 12 lines: -sense of the unity in the cosmos -the source of man’s moral and spiritual growth is nature - nature acts upon the whole of man’s personality Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Stanza V • Like Stanza III for anticlimax • Second descending movement he might be cut off from nature he falls back to an ascertained fact: Dorothy Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • All the elements reflecting doubt are left out of the concluding stanza. Last description of nature’s benevolence • W concludes on a note of certainty • Nature as a thing of beauty • The last sentence recalls two of the symbolic features of the Wye landscape: green hue (unity)/ lofty cliffs (ascent) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Valuation of the changes: losses and new gifts which time has wrought in him • Past/present/future are closely interrelated Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Similarity/difference • He has reconstructed the situation of 5 years before • His own inner experience appears all the more different because of the similarity of the setting Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Dorothy remains a silenced auditor in Tintern Abbey, a less conscious being whose function is to mirror and thus to guarantee the truth of the poet’s development and perceptions, even as the poem itself ackowledges the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the poet’s forever- lost past subjectivity and his present self. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • This gap is evident in the difference between • His sister’s ‘wild eyes’ and his own ‘eye made quiet by the power of harmony’. (Mellor) Margaret in the Ruined Cottage is unable to survive without her husband, thus gradual mental and physical decay of home and garden. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • W’s desire is rhetorically to conquer and absorb the female (Marlon Ross). • The objective, natural world – female • W replaces (feminine) nature with the productions of the (masculine) imagination • He susbsitutes for his experiences of the world a linguistically mediated memory of them, his consciousness is confined thus to a solipsistic (male) subjectivity. (Mellor) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Kubla in the centre can hear both • 1) the fountain • 2) the cascading into the dark caves Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Pleasure dome: rounded, complete • Emblem of satisfaction, fulfilment • Man made River: sacred makes the fertility of the plain visible symbol of the abundant god given life in the universe Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Centre of the landscape: point at which the dome and the river join • Conjunction of pleasure (man- man made) and sacredness (nature- god given) • garden/Eden but linked with savage chasm Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Chasm: primeval energy • Gardens: controlled, channelled energy-fertility- ideal world of nature dome: active, social world caves of ice: dark subconscious psychic energy associated with terror/marvellous supernatural Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Relation between the 2 parts • The poem shows the art of poetic creation • ecstasy in imaginative fulfilment • Part 1: the poetic vision, it represents human life as the poetic imagination can create it • Part 2: description of the poetic frenzy of the poet that creates the vision Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 demonic aspect of the poet (‘beware’): his mystical energy and demonic aspect link him to the chasm The poet is a seer, a visionary man/female symbol of procreation Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The first part is a metaphor of the artistic process, how the frenzy of the poet described in the second part issues into the form of art • The energy is both destructive and creative • Wilderness of the poet, whose psychic energy is channelled into artistic creation Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Dome artistic creation • Caves wild energy Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Virginia Woolf • And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Virginia Woolf • In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man- womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. • A Room of One’s Own (1928) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Dorothy Wordsworth all ‘harmonious powers’, including human life, ‘agree’ with Nature • The poem presents a floating island loosed from its hold, passively moved by the wind. • […] this fluid, constantly shifting, circumscribed island is a ‘peopled world’ where birds, insects, flowers all find food, shelter, safety, then death. (Mellor) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Domesticated: ‘in size a tiny room’ the island survives till Nature takes it away, till it is ‘buried’ • but its fragments remain ‘to fertilize some other ground’ • Cycle of nature yet fragility • Natural world as fragile, arbitrary, transitory Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • I see / all might see • this self is constructed in part by the gaze of others • It is profoundly connected to its environment, to those ‘harmonious powers’ of sunshine and storm, of nature and human society that surround it, direct it. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • there is a movement from ‘I’ to ‘you’ to ‘all’: • ‘an expansion of individual subjectivity into visionary community’ (Susan Wolfson) • This self does not name itself as a self. • The metaphor of the foating island as a life or self derives intertextually from William’s poem. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Dorothy’s sense of self is fluid, relational. • She constructs her identity ‘by way of alterity’, in relation to a significant other (man/woman/God/Nature/ community) • Differing modes of subjectivity Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • ‘I gave him the ring-with how deep a blessing! I took it from my finger where I have worn it the whole of the night before - he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently’ Dorothy W, Diary, October 4, 1802 She was emotionally devastated at her brother’s marriage Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Address to a Child • Destructive power of the wind • But it doesn’t affect the happiness of the people living in the cottage • Sense of the danger outside nevertheless Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 In her diary nature is like a home • Difference internal/external, within/without collapses: I never saw such a union of earth, sky, and sea. The clouds beneath our feet spread themselves to the water, and the clouds of the sky almost joined them. Gathered sticks in the woods; a perfect stillness. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The self that is written in the Journals is embodied in a routine of physical labour, […]. It is a subjectivity embedded in the communal life of a village in the English Lake District in the early nineteenth century […]. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • 24 May 1800. walked in the morning to Ambleside. I found a letter from Wm and from Mary Hutchinson and Douglass. Returned on the other side of the lakes- wrote to William after dinner, nailed up the beds, worked in the garden, sate in the evening under the trees. I went to bed soon with a bad head-ache. A fine day. Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Thomas de Quincey • ‘Her face was of Egyptian brown, rarely in a woman of English birth. Her eyes were not soft, as mrs Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassionate intellect apparently burned within her; which being alternatley pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irreprensible instincts of her temperament, Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Keats • Complicates the issue of gender and ideology […] either by occupying the position of the woman in life or in discourse, or by blurring the distinction between genders, between masculinity and femininity. (Mellor) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Orphaned at the age of fourteen, the second son in a family of four children, Keats immediately took on the role of mother to his young siblings. • Tom falls sick of tubercolosis and he becomes his nurse • First choice of a profession: apothecary (combination of pharmacist and lower-level general pratictioner) Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Small in stature • Considered ‘girlish’ • Portrait of Joseph Severn • Lower-class writer, assigned to the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1818 Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Keats • Men of Genius […] have not any individuality, any determined Character. I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power- • To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817 Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Within weeks, he equates the character of this Genius to ‘Negative Capability’. • Shakespeare is the model Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Negative capability [..] at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason […] To George and Tom Keats, 21,27(?) December 1817 Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Ode on a Grecian Urn • Oxymoron a figure of speech which combines incongruous and apparently contradictory words and meanings for a special effect (Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Penguin Books, 1999) • Unravished bride sposa inviolata • Foster-child Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Silence/words • Difference between the language of the urn and the language of the poet • Time of the poet- questions, anxiety. He asks questions about the nature of the urn. If this is only an object of the past then questions make no sense. But the urn is personified. • Time of the urn- slow Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • From sound to spirit • Action is negated, not subject to the ravages of time, passion is preserved • Perfect moment: moment frozen in time • But lacks fulfilment • Consummation-satisfaction-regret-suffering • Difference pleasure/desire Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Attic shape/attitude/cold pastoral (an alien object)- contrast with burning/parching • The urn is no longer asked questions (exclamation mark). It offers itself, its external appearance, the figures on its sides. • Teases us out of thought: the urn disjoins logic • Full of oxymorons: death/life, time/slow movement, time is the future without an ending, eternity. Can anything exist without consummation? Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The urn contains opposite things (our scheme is TAS) sky/earth • Divine: knows more than man • Doesn’t speak but reveals itself. Friend to man • Its beauty is its truth: coincidence of aesthetics /poetry and philosophy • Poetry is not ornament Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Poetry derives from the desire for knowledge • The poet wants to know, asks questions • Dialogue with the urn, an object which is ‘other’, as it comes from another time, from another world Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • The poet can’t identify things around him, only guess, instinct • ‘to take into the air my quiet breath’: ecstasy • To be out of one’s self • The song of the poet/nightingale • But there is a difference: physical body, mortality of the poet • Divorce between the poet and the nightingale Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 • Urn and nightingale allow fellowship with essence, contact with another place and another temporal dimension • For a moment the poet has had a vision, which has disappeared • Poetry starts from loss, desire for reunion Prof.ssa Maria Luisa De Rinaldis – A.A. 2012/13 Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) • Husband in prison for debts • She writes to make a living • Nine children • She gets her husband’s inheritance only a few months before dying • She writes sentimental novels, the Elegiac Sonnets (1784), The Emigrants (blank verse), books for children, histories of England, letters, etc.