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    Romantic Poetry

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    This document discusses a poem by Pope and provides analysis of its rhyme, meter, and subject matter. It then provides information about alliteration and analyzes an excerpt from another poem, discussing the imagery and effects of the alliteration.

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    Romantic Poetry

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    India Represents
    17 views1 page
    This document discusses a poem by Pope and provides analysis of its rhyme, meter, and subject matter. It then provides information about alliteration and analyzes an excerpt from another poem, discussing the imagery and effects of the alliteration.

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    Of Keats

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    This document discusses a poem by Pope and provides analysis of its rhyme, meter, and subject matter. It then provides information about alliteration and analyzes an excerpt from another poem, discussing the imagery and effects of the alliteration.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    17 views1 page

    Romantic Poetry

    Uploaded by

    India Represents
    This document discusses a poem by Pope and provides analysis of its rhyme, meter, and subject matter. It then provides information about alliteration and analyzes an excerpt from another poem, discussing the imagery and effects of the alliteration.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    This extract from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, like the whole poem, is written in

    rhyming couplets (lines rhyming in pairs). They confer a formal, regular quality to the
    verse. The punctuation helps to control the way in which we read: notice that there is a
    pause at the end of each line, either a comma, a semi-colon, or a full stop. This use of the
    end-stopped line is characteristic of eighteenth-century heroic couplets (iambic
    pentameter lines rhyming in pairs), where the aim was to reproduce classical qualities of
    balance, harmony, and proportion.
    Get into the habit of looking at rhyme words. Are any of Pope’s rhymes particularly
    interesting here? One thing I noticed was what is known as poetic inversion. The rhyme
    ‘shore’/‘roar’is clearly important to the sound sense of the verse, but the more natural
    word order (were this ordinary speech) would be ‘The hoarse rough verse should roar like
    the torrent’. Had he written this, Pope would have lost the sound qualities of the rhyme
    ‘shore’/‘roar’. He would have had to find a word such as ‘abhorrent’ to rhyme with
    ‘torrent’ and the couplet would have had a very different meaning. He would also have
    lost the rhythm of the line, in spite of the fact that the words are exactly the same."
    Before we leave An Essay on Criticism, did you notice that Pope’s subject in this poem is
    really poetry itself? Like Wordsworth, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, all of whom
    I’ve quoted earlier, Pope too was concerned with poetry as a craft.

    Alliteration
    Alliteration is the term used to describe successive words beginning with the same sound
    – usually, then, with the same letter.
    Read the following stanza from Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem, ‘Natura naturans’.
    There is not enough space to quote the whole poem, but to give you some idea of the
    context of this stanza so that you can more fully appreciate what Clough is doing, it is
    worth explaining that ‘Natura naturans’ describes the sexual tension between a young
    man and woman who sit next to each other in a railway carriage. They have not been
    introduced, and they neither speak nor exchange so much as a glance. The subject matter
    and its treatment is unusual and also extraordinarily frank for the time of writing (about
    1849), but you need to know what is being described in order to appreciate the physicality
    of the lines I quote.
    What is the single most striking technique used, and what are the effects?
    Flashed flickering forth fantastic flies,
    Big bees their burly bodies swung,
    Rooks roused with civic dim the elms,
    And lark its wild reveillez rung;
    In Libyan dell the light gazelle,
    The leopard lithe in Indian glade,
    And dolphin, brightening tropic seas,
    In us were living, leapt and played:
    (Clough, 1890, p.262)
    Visually the use of alliteration is striking, particularly in the first line and almost equally
    so in the second. If you took the advice above about paying attention to the physical
    business of articulating the words too, you should be in a good position to discriminate
    between the rapidity of the flies and the heavier movement of the bees, and to notice how
    tactile the language is. The effect is actually to create sensuality in the stanza."
    How would you describe the imagery, and what does it contribute to the overall
    effect? Notice that though we begin with flies, bees and rooks, all of which are fairly
    common flying creatures, we move to the more romantic lark with its ‘wild’ song, and
    then to the positively exotic gazelle, leopard, and dolphin. From the rather homely
    English air (flies, bees, birds), we move to foreign locations ‘Libyan dell’ and ‘Indian
    glade’, and from there to ‘tropic seas’. (Cod in the North Sea would have very different

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