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Week 4 Poems

1. The documents summarize poems and passages that describe natural settings and themes of nature, love, and mortality. 2. The William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge excerpts describe natural imagery of dreams, streams, and rural settings with animals. 3. The Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem tells the myth of the god Pan creating music by cutting reeds from the riverbank.

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72 views

Week 4 Poems

1. The documents summarize poems and passages that describe natural settings and themes of nature, love, and mortality. 2. The William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge excerpts describe natural imagery of dreams, streams, and rural settings with animals. 3. The Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem tells the myth of the god Pan creating music by cutting reeds from the riverbank.

Uploaded by

mardue22196
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1

William Blake, Cradle Song (1789), 1-12


Sweet dreams form a shade,
O'er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams.
Sweet sleep with soft down.
Weave thy brows an infant crown.
Sweet sleep Angel mild,
Hover o'er my happy child.
Sweet smiles in the night,
Hover over my delight.
Sweet smiles Mothers smiles,
All the livelong night beguiles.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel (1816), 1-13


'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu-whit! Tu-whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, moonshine or shower,
Sixteen short howls, not overloud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

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2
A. E. Housman, It nods and curtseys and recovers (1896)
It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.
The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.

Edward FitzGerald, Rubiyt of Omar Khayym (1859; 4th edn. 1879), sts. 35-37
Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn
I leand, the Secret of my life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmurdWhile you live,
Drink!for, once dead, you never shall return.
I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
Articulation answerd, once did live,
And drink; and Ah! the passive Lip I kissd,
How many Kisses might it takeand give!
For I remember stopping by the way
To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay:
And with its all-obliterated Tongue
It murmurdGently, Brother, gently, pray!

3
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590), Book 1, Canto 1, stanza 1
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many a bloody field;
Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bit,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full jolly knight he seemed, and faire did sit,
As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fitt.

spurring, galloping
clad
field of battle, fight
champ at

John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), stanza 1


St. Agnes' EveAh, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers,1 while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

A beadsman was someone who was paid to say prayers for souls in purgatory. He
tells counts off these prayers on his rosary.
1

4
George Herbert, The Collar (1633)2
I struck the board, and cried, No more!
I will abroad.
What! shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays3 to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures;4 leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head5 there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.

table

abundance itself

life-giving
10

15

20

25

30

35

The title suggests that the speaker may be a clergyman (as Herbert was).
A laurel crown, symbolizing success
4
I.e. make up for time lost in sighing by doubling your enjoyments
5
A skull, or memento mori, kept by the pious to remind them of mortality
2
3

5
Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters (1832), 1-27
"Courage!" he6 said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn7, did go;
And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.
The charmed sunset linger'd low adown
In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem'd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

10

15

20
slope
a fragrant plant
25

I.e. Odysseus, who is encouraging his men as they approach the shore of the island of
the lotos eaters.
7
lawn: a very fine cotton fabric
6

6
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Musical Instrument (1860)
What was he doing, the great god Pan,8
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!),
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
This is the way, laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
8

trouble, bad influence


5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Goatlike god of nature, inventor of the flute and the pan-pipes.

7
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

40

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