Romantic Poets

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immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes!

On what wings dare he aspire!

What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In his two poems aforementioned, William Blake questions the creation of mankind. He seems to ponder over the creation of good and evil who stand in binary opposition to one another;

‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger , tiger burning bright,

In the forests of the night’

Similarly, William Wordsworth’s poetry is very reflective of the Romantic period in that he venerates nature in view of showing the clarity of human emotion. The poets personified nature creating harmony.

Further, Wordsworth sees his poetry as the "real language of men" defining it as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," Thus it can be said that the Romantic period saw the revolution in the world of Art whereby the people discover themselves an autonomous true self that can have ones own opinion; a soul that is theirs and not dictated by anybody or imposed rules.

As for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he was a great revolutionist in that he introduced the German ideology to English literature. He questioned theories of Kant, Locke and Platonism especially about Christianity. He pondered on the relationship between Nature, the human Mind and Soul and claimed the existence of the Supernatural, arguing that the state of going beyond nature in the psychological voyage is what projects the human mind in the supernatural world. One of his

most veneered work is the poem’ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ of which he says: In Biographia Literaria, :

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life...In this idea originated the plan of the ’Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. ... With this view I wrote the ’Ancient Mariner’.[

It is a poem which relates how a ship having passed thelLine was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that happened. The extract below is particularly telling of how Coleridges writing was about religion, the human Mind and the suspension of disbelief.

PART II

“(…)

Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,

The glorious Sun uprist:

Then all averred, I had killed the bird

That brought the fog and mist.

’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,

That bring the fog and mist.

(…) PART IV

looked to heaven, and tried to pray;

But or ever a prayer had gusht,

A wicked whisper came and made

My heart as dry as dust.

I closed my lids, and kept them close,

And the balls like pulses beat;

Forthe sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,

Lay like a load on my weary eye,

And the dead were at my feet.

The cold sweat melted from their limbs,

Nor rot nor reek did they:

The look with which they looked on me

Had never passed away.

An orphan’s curse would drag to hell

A spirit from on high;

But oh! more horrible than that

Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!

Seven days, seven night(…)”

After the killing of the Albatross, Coleridge implies that the mariner had committed a sin and has to be punished; in the act of the other sailors to hang the dead albatross around his neck because of the changes in the weather condition that had changed the course of the ship. The different apparition of