Chapter 2 The English Romanticism (1798 - 1832)

IV. Typical Authors and Their Works

IV.1. William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850): The Interpreter of Nature

The life of William Wordsworth was quiet

and eventful. He was born in Cockermouth,
Cumberland in 1770 and spent the great
part of his life in the mountains of the Lake
District, where he was very deeply
influenced by the natural beauty of the
country and was always in sympathy with
the humble people.

The first influence upon Wordsworth’s life

as a poet came not from his parents or
schools, but from NATURE. In his poem
“The Prelude”, an autobiography of
spiritual development published after his
death in 1850, he left a full account of his
boyhood in the Cumberland hills. His love of outdoor life as a boy deepened and
matured until he became the great interpreter of nature. More than any poets up
to his days, he studied the thoughts, feelings and reactions of children and he
traced the part played by childhood in the total development of a person’s life:
“The Child is Father of the Man” is one of his most famous lines.

In 1788 Wordsworth went to St John’s College, Cambridge, but no professor he

met in his University classes as much impressed on him as did the sky and the trees
and the wild flowers of his native region: he prefered devoting most of his time to
the admiration of Nature to cramming for any exams at Cambridge University; and
he was more interested in reading books than in listening to the lectures.

On leaving the University, he spent a few months in London, then crossed over to
France (1790). He found this country “mad with joy” and was ready to give what
aid he could to the French Republicans. He resided in France three years. There he
met 2 persons who did change his life: Captain Michel Beaupuy, who propagated
and explained the noble aims of the French Revolution to him; and Miss Annette
Vallon, with whom he fell in love and gave birth to a daughter, Caroline. Attracted
by the fresh air of the Revolution and the first sweet flavour of love, he intended
to devote his whole life to France and his whole heart to the French woman, but,

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 unfortunately, he was compelled to return to England because his relatives
stopped his supplies of money. However, he still hoped that he would return to
France some day to live with his beloved wife. But the war between England and
France started in 1793 broke his heart and his hope. He did not meet his wife until
1802. No sooner had they lived with each other in the same roof than they had to
say goodbye to each other, because there appeared some gloomy clouds in their
happy sky. He was by this time experiencing a severe intellectual crisis: continuous
bloody events in France left him disillusioned and pessimistic, his dreams of
brotherhood were shattered.

With a broken heart for love and with a disillusioned and pessimistic soul for the
development of the French Revolution, he came back to his own inwards, leading
a secluded life in the valley of Grasmere, the heart of his beloved Lake District. He
asked Nature and Poetry to give him the peaceful joys for which his mind was
thirsting. From then on, he withdrew from urban civilization and sought
consolation in country life.

Wordsworth’s Poetry

Wordsworth was always connected with two things: Nature and

Man.

Wordsworth on Nature

Nature is an unfinished treasure of romantic souls. To Wordsworth, Nature is the

most valuable and beloved source of living. He blames people who spend so much
of their energy in the materialistic life that their lives become senseless and sordid:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.”

Wordsworth’s aim as a poet was to search for beauty in Nature - in mountains,

woods, and streams - and to explain this beauty to the soul of man. All the sights
and sounds of Nature attracted him, and he was always looking for an idea behind
or under the beauty. As for him, Nature had a soul. The soul of man had been
corrupted by town civilization, but the soul of Nature was not. So, the best way
for man was to enter into communication with Nature’s soul and Nature would
lift him out of himself and place him in a higher state in which the soul of Nature
and the soul of man were united in a single harmony. The belief led him to the
conclusion that nature was man’s best moral teacher:

“Let Nature be your teacher.”

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 Nature, to Wordsworth, has a message to Man. And in order to find out such a
message, he tried to “see into the life of things”. A wonderful sunset, with its
glorious colours, meant more to him than just the end of another day. It seemed
to him to be full of “The light that never was on sea or land”. He felt more than he
saw or heard, and it was this feeling, which came to him direct from Nature or
God, that he tried to describe in his poetry.

Flowers, especially wild flowers such as the primrose and the daffodil, gave him
Nature’s message to man. Most of us can see how beautiful even a common
flower is and admire its loveliness and its scent. We may even feel the beauty in
our hearts as well as see it with our eyes. But how many can describe, or make
clear to others, what this feeling is? Wordsworth could, at any rate, make us
realize that what we feel at the sight of a beautiful flower is the flower’s way of
speaking to us. Or it is Nature speaking to us through the flower.

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

To Wordsworth, poetry meant experience of this kind - moments of deep feeling

- which he could remember later when his mind was at rest. Then was the time to
write them down. He did not forget what he heard or seen.

“The music in my heart I bore

Long after it was heard no more.”

In short, more than any other poets of his time, Wordsworth clearly realized the
relation and interaction between the inward life of Man and the outdoor life of
the objective world. Nature, no wonder, was his religion; and he himself was
“Nature’s high priest”.

Wordsworth on Man

Wordsworth’s love of Nature is seen not only in his admiration of natural beauty
but also in his understanding of the simple men and women of the valleys and hills
of the Lake District, humble people with ordinary joys and sorrows. He understood
the character of the poor, believed in them and admired them. He saw their
courage, strength and hope:

“Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

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 The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

Many of his poems are about these neighbours of his, the men, women, and
children among whom he lived, people about whom little real poetry had been
written in the past. In his poems on Nature, when dealing with the source of
Goodness (and especially when expressing the significance of Goodness),
Wordsworth always established his absolute belief in the noble value of the
commoners. In his poems on Man, he dealt with the primal qualities where Man
and Nature touch and blend. Thus, his love for Nature was transferred to the
shepherd, the reaper, and to other farmers and cottagers with their ordinary joys
and sorrows. Other poets had neglected them. But to Wordsworth everybody, rich
or poor, was a human being. And his ears were ever open to listen to what he
called “the still, sad music of humanity.”

The choice of men and women in “humble and rustic life” as the objects for
description in his poetry resulted from his love for them, but more basically from
his conception associated with Rousseau’s name, of the “noble savage”, with its
implication that men are better when closer to their “natural state”, uncorrupted
by the artificiality of civilization.



In 1843, on Southey’s death, William Wordsworth accepted Laureatship. As a

poet, he made a great deal of poetry. His first poems: “The Evening Walk” and
“Descriptive Sketches” appeared in 1793. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge
published a joint volume of verse: “Lyrical Ballads”, beginning with “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner” and ending with “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern
Abbey”, which, for sure, marked the age of Romanticism. Thereafter Wordsworth
wrote a great deal of poetry, but they are rather dull. Roughly speaking, one may
say that the decline of his poetic inspiration and the decline of the revolutionary
enthusiasm synchronized. Wordsworth’s best works were done between 1796 -
1804, although he lived until 1850 and was writing up to the very last.

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IV.2. Wordsworth’s Typical Poems

The Daffodils (1804)

This poem was written in 1804, while Wordsworth was living in the Lake District at
Dove Cottage, Grasmere. The flowers which he mentions here were seen about 2
years earlier on a walk which the poet took with his sister Dorothy through the
wood below Gowbarrow Park. Dorothory Wordsworth wrote in her diary, April 15,
1802: “When we were in the wood below Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils
close to the water-side. As we went along there were more, and yet more; and at
last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along
the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones
about them; some rested their heads on the stones as on a pillow; the rest tossed,
and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily danced with the wind, they
looked so gay and glancing.”

We will notice that Wordsworth has changed the fact slightly. He was not alone
but he probably thought that the poem would be stronger if he made a contrast
between the lonely traveller and the gay flowers. It is very simple, but it seems to
take hold upon us so that whenever we read it we can see with the poet that “host
of golden daffodils” and enjoy their brightness.

The Daffodils
I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
That stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought

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 What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Questions for Discussion

1. What is the subject matter of the poem?

2. Picture the scene in your own words as it appears to Wordsworth.

3. What figure of speech is used in the first line? Is it a good one? Why or why not?
What S.Ds are employed by Wordsworth in the second stanza?

4. Why does he make a contrast between the lonely traveller and the gay flowers?

The Rainbow (1802)

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Questions for Discussion

1. What is there in the rainbow, besides its beauty, that would appeal to a poet?

2. How do you understand Wordsworth’s famous line, “The Child is father of the
Man”?

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3. Comment on the meter and rhyme scheme of this poem. (Are all lines written in
iambic meter? Why do they vary from dimeter to pentameter? Is the rhyme scheme
abccabcdd usual or unusual? Does the sound help to interpret the sense? Why is line 6
the shortest, and line 9 the longest? etc.)

The Solitary Reaper (1805)

This poem is a picture in words. After reading it, one can almost see that solitary figure in
the field and hear the wild sweet song. The reaper was singing in the language of the
Gaelic Highlanders; therefore, she could not be understood.

This poem is introduced here to justify the idea that among human beings, Wordsworth
preferred, on the whole, who were closest to Nature. He had drawn attention to their
finest qualities of mind and character.

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the vale profound
Is over-flowing with the sound.

No nightingale did ever chant

More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
No sweeter voice was ever heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of today?

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 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate’er the theme, the maiden sang.

As if her song could have no ending:
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;
I listen’d, till I had my fill;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.
Questions for Discussion

1. What is the subject-matter of the poem?

2. What is the reaper’s song about? Is it about the past? Is it about the present? Or is it
about the future? Which words or phrases suggest these ideas?

3. What brings about the cottage girl’s worth?

4. Is the poet’s attention fixed on the reaper?

5. Compare the last two lines of The Solitary Reaper with the last two lines of The Daffodils.
What characteristic of the poet do they show?

IV.3. George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824): A Singer of Love and Freedom

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 Byron was born in London in 1788, into an
aristocratic family. He was the descendant of
an old Norse family which emigrated from
Scandinavia and came to settle in Normandy.
The Byrons were, throughout the history of the
English monarchy, staunch royalists.

John, the poet’s grandfather, “foul-weather

Jack” as he was called by his men, was tossed
from storm to storm and had very thrilling
experiences in the course of his numerous
voyages; his eldest son, John Byron, was a very
unruly sort of man, who lived so wild and
reckless a life that his friends called him “Mad
Jack”. Barely one year after the death of his
first wife, he married Miss Catherine Gordon of
Gight, who was of Scotch extraction. In 1788,
she gave birth to George Byron. Miss Gordon of Gight was a woman of most passionate
extremes whom his father married for her money, therefore as soon as he had spent it,
he left her. Two years after their marriage, she obtained a divorce and returned with her
child to Aberdeen, Scotland.

In 1798, the boy’s great uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, died with no direct issue. The young
Byron, then 10 years old, inherited the title and the estates of Newstead Abbey, near
Nottingham. He afterwards went to Harrow school at the age of 13 and to the University
of Cambridge at the age of 17. Byron was a rough student, but his emotional and genial
heart won him many friends. Although he was lame in one leg, he delighted in shooting,
fishing, swimming and other sports. In 1808, he left the University with an M.A. degree.

In 1808, Byron produced his first work: “Hours of Idleness”, a collection of poems of
unequal merit, which was sharply criticized by the editor of the “Edinburgh Review”.
Byron revenged himself by a spirited satire: “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”. He
came of age in 1809, took his seat in the House of Lords, and almost immediately set out
for a long journey in the East. He sailed first to Lisbon, journeyed from there through
Portugal and Spain, and proceeded to Turkey and Greece. In the following year he visited
Asia Minor. In the summer of 1811, we found him again in England. Soon after his return
were published the first two cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, a poetical description
on the travels of a young “Romantic”, whom everybody understood to be none else than
Byron himself. Only three days after the publication, all copies were sold out. The poem
was immediately popular, and Byron was hailed as the greatest poet of the day. Byron
wrote in his diary, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous”. “Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage” was succeeded by the “Oriental Tales”, the “Giaour”, the “Bride of Abydos”,
the “Corsair”, “Lara”, tales in verse the scene of which is laid in Turkey or in Greece, which
raised him to a still higher level in the esteem of the public.

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 In January 1815 Byron, who had spent in travelling expenses a good deal of his fortune,
married a rich heiress, the daughter of a Baronet in Northumberland. In December of the
same year a daughter was born to them. Soon after, lady Byron fled from her husband’s
house and in January 1816 the couple separated.

Byron’s popularity had by this time greatly decreased, and on the 25th of April 1816, he
once more set sail from England, this time never to return. He journeyed through Belgium
and Western Germany to Switzerland. During the summer of 1816 he stayed at Geneva
and at various places in the vicinity of that town, spending a part of his time in the
company of Shelley. In the course of a few months, he then composed the third canto of
“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, “The Prisoner of Chillon”, “The Dream”, and “Manfred”. In
October 1816 he left for Italy, where he resided several years, changing his abode
successively to Venice, Ravenna, Rome, Pisa, and Genoa. In Rome he completed his
“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, and in the few years that followed he wrote: “Beppo”,
“Mazeppa”, “Cain”, “Sardanapalus”, and the poem “Don Juan”. His participation in the
“Carbonari movement” having made him somewhat “undesirable” in Italy, he resolved to
go to Greece and help that country then fighting for its independence. Everywhere he
came, he was received by the Greeks in the midst of a great enthusiasm, but he was soon
overcome with fever: he died on the 19th of April, being only in his 36.

A poet of great facility and considerable power in narrative and description, Byron is the
most conspicuous representative of a kind of Romanticism which was at one time highly
fashionable in England and on the Continent. He was a man who has been summarized
by his biographers as one of “the most splendid examples we have of the struggling,
winning and losing, enjoying and scorning, aspiring and falling, loving and hating human
spirits”.

Byron’s Themes

Byron’s works are closely associated with freedom, love, and realism.

Byron as a poet of freedom

Much more than Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, after their first enthusiasm for the
French Revolution, surrendered to caution and scepticism, more even than Keats, whose
love of liberty was hardly developed to its full range, Byron was all through his life a poet
of freedom.

The struggle for freedom was clearly shown in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, in “The
Oriental Tales”, and in “Don Juan”.

* In the first canto of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Byron describes the struggle of
Spanish people against Napoleon. The poet shows his deep sympathy for Spanish people

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 in their fighting for independence and freedom. At the same time he blames the ruling
classes who betray the interest of the country. In the second canto, he is indignant at the
servitude of Greek people under the yoke of the Turkish. He reminds the Greeks of their
glorious past and appeals to them to rise in arms against the oppressors. In the third
canto, Byron voices his opinions on Napoleon’s failure: Napoleon was defeated because
he was a dictator. Byron was always hostile to all forms of oppression. In the fourth canto,
Byron expresses his belief in the inevitable triumph of freedom in the future in spite of
the reactionary forces’ attempts to cut “the tree of freedom” down

* In the “Oriental Tales”, Byron has found his hero: he is a proud and solitary rebel against
governments, religious and social conventions. The most important characteristics of the
heroes in these poems are their indestructible will, their fearless independence and
uncompromising attitude. They never stop half-way, never feel satisfied with the partial
realization of their desire. They demand either all or none. It is impossible for them to
reconcile with the society they have denied. They would rather die in an unfavourable
and unbalanced fighting than give up their aims and surrender to their enemy. Through
this work, Byron shows his radical revolutionary spirit.

* And once again, the digressions in “Don Juan” show that Byron always wishes to be free
and insists that other men must be free too. He wishes to stir people to revolt, to make
them get rid of their monarchs. He says frankly:

“I will teach, if possible, the stones

to rise against earth’s tyrants ... “

During his life-time, Byron was on the side of liberty against the Holly Aliance and
tyrannical authorities. That was the reason why he found no place for him in the House
of Lords and why he was expelled from England, never to return.

Byron as a poet of love

Byron’s second theme is love. In the subject of love, he seems to have been haunted by
the dream of an ideal first love, tender and natural, and not at all like what he had felt for
the women whom he thought to have loved. This theme is shown in Byron’s “The Oriental
Tales” and “Don Juan”.

* As mentioned above, Byron has found a hero for himself in each of “The Oriental Tales”.
And in the life of each of the heroes, there is always a great love. Each hero has a lover.
The women in these love affairs are sweet and gentle and great: they are ready to be
tortured by love and to sacrifice their lives for their lovers.

* The ideal first love is clearly presented in the love of Juan and Haidee on a Greek island.
Haidee is the beloved daughter of a Greek pirate but she proves herself a child of Nature,

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 not to be corrupted by society or civilization. She has a noble heart and a noble style. She
finds Don Juan, the survivor of a shipwreck, on the shore of the island which is her father’s
home and base. She saves Juan from death and later becomes his lover. Such a love comes
suddenly and naturally and there is nothing to say against it, because it is pure and
sincere. In addition, their love is encouraged and supported by the beautiful natural
surroundings which make their first love a dream, but it is a dream enhanced by authentic
emotions and an ideal of what first love ought to be.

Byron as a realist

In the great appeals for liberty which ring through Don Juan, and in the attacks which
Byron makes on its enemies, the fundamental purpose of his poem is seen: Byron set out
to tell the truth. He was never tired of insisting that the chief merit of his poem was in
their truthfulness. Like his hero, he had seen the world and known that it was “very much
unlike what people write”. Therefore, in Don Juan, Byron declares: “I mean to show things
really as they are, not as they ought to be: for I avow that till we see what’s what in fact,
we’re far from much improvement.” And Byron believed that by fastening upon the truth,
he would improve the world. And this belief distinguishes Byron from the other
romantics: with Keats, it is the past; with Shelley, the future; with Byron, it is the present
that really interests him. Byron is always a man of the world; and Don Juan is the record
of his personality, the personality of a poet and of a man of action.

IV.4. Byron’s Typical Poems

When We Two Parted (1808)

Byron is at his best in poems glorifying freedom and voicing tragic and conflicting passions.
“When We Two Parted” is one of Byron’s early poems, derived from “Hours of Idleness”,
published in 1808, representative of the latter. This is a poem of love and grief, a welter
of contradiction that shows Byron’s uncertainty of sentiment.

This poem, “When We Two Parted”, might have been written after the separation with
Mary Charworth, who had fallen in love with him in the last year at Harrow School (when
he was 16), and who had given him up to get married to another man. This first love
brought him much sorrow and grief which was clearly expressed in this poem, and later,
in “The Dream”.

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 When we two parted
in silence and tears
Half broken hearted
to sever for years
Pale grew thy cheek and cold
colder thy kiss
Truly that hour foretold
sorrow to this
The dew of the morning
sunk chill on my brow
It felt like the warning
of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken

and light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken
and share in its shame.
They name thee before me
a knell to my ear;
Shudder comes o’er me -
why were thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee
who knew thee too well:-
Long, long shall I rue thee
too deeply to tell.
In secret we met
in silence I grieved
That thy heart could forget
thy spirit deceived

If I should meet thee

after long years
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

Questions for Discussion

1. How does Byron create the impression of sadness and grief after the parting?

2. Divide the poem into logical parts and give a brief summary of each part.

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3. Which lines show the climax of the poet’s bitterness?

4. Translate the poem above into Vietnamese.

Song for the Luddites (1816)

In Byron’s political satires, he directly touches upon the political events of his time. Among
these, Byron’s speech read on December 27, 1812 in the House of Lords should be first and
foremost mentioned, “I have traversed the seat of war in the peninsula, I have been in
some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic
government did I behold such a squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the
very heart of a Christian country.” This speech was followed by Byron’s “Ode on the
Framers of the Frame Bill” (1812). In 1816, Byron once again returned to the theme of the
workers’ struggle for their rights and wrote “Song for the Luddites” where he urged the
workers to use violence as a means of fighting tyrants.

As the liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting or live free.
And down with all kings, but king Ludd

When the web that we weave is complete

And the shuttle exchanged for the sword
We will fling the winding sheet
O’er the despot at out feet
And dye it deep in the gore he has poured

Though black as his heart its hue

Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
of Liberty, planted by Ludd!
Questions for Discussion

1. How is Byron’s political attitude conveyed in this song? On whose side does he
stand?

2. Who are “the liberty lads over the sea”? How does Byron think of the value of
liberty? Which word(s) in the first stanza show(s) that liberty is more precious than
anything, even blood?

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3. Which words in which lines show that Byron recognizes violence as the only way
of fighting tyrants?

4. Think of the image described in the first stanza. Why does Byron create this image?
What does it show?

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