Module 9 - Part 2: Explorations and Exercises

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 1: Overview  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

Nature and the Self in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature 

To respond to these exercises, it helps to have some appreciation of the cultural assumptions explored in them. Click on Web Resources for further insights into the way social, historical, and religious ideologies color the literary texts that we are studying.

These questions are arranged into three color-coded categories.

Level A invites you to look closely at some specific aspects of individual texts. Answering these questions shows that you have read carefully and understand the significance of important words and ideas as they appear in context.

Level B asks you to think more deeply about the implications of some of the details that you have isolated.

Level C allows you to build on the findings of the first two categories to theorize broadly about the relationship of the text to social and historical forces beyond the work itself.

Topics in this module's Exploration and Exercises section include:

• Focus on "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
• Focus on "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
• Focus on "Ode to a Nightingale"
• Comparing the role of nature and the self in English and continental Romanticism
• Comparing the role of nature and the self in Asian lyrics
• Focus on Texts and Contexts

Focus on "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

Level A 

1. "Tintern Abbey" creates some difficulties for readers seeking to understand the chronology, logistics, and resulting attitudes that motivate the poem, as these questions should indicate.
   
   1. Explain the time scheme of this poem. What is the impact of the repeated use of "five" in the opening lines? What is added to the initial use of "years" by the references to "summers" and "winters"?
   2. How many different aspects of the location are captured in the opening stanza? Is there any way in which they seem contradictory? How wildly secluded is the scene?  How houseless are the woods?
   3. What is the relationship between feelings experienced in the country and the city, according to the second stanza? 
   4. How has the passage of five years changed the speaker's response to the mountains, rivers, and woods described in the poem?
   5. What is the view of solitude in line 135 of "Tintern Abbey"? To whom is it addressed? At what point does the reader realize that there is another person accompanying the poet? 
   6. What contradiction can you discern in linking "solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief" in line 143? What has happened to solitude? 

Level B 

1. Perhaps because the Romantic sensibility so prizes individual experience, poets encode a great deal of personal information in their work. Not surprisingly, then, readers of nineteenth-century lyric poems often discover that considering the influence of the poets' individual biographies greatly enhances our ability to understand them. This is certainly true of "Tintern Abbey."
   
   1. The poem begins with a specific date. How old is the speaker, whom we may assume to be Wordsworth himself?  Does his age seem to fit the emotional concerns raised in the poem? (See the chronology of Wordsworth's life on the Web Resources page.)
   2. How many times does the speaker seem to have visited the banks of the Wye? Try to outline the different relationships he speaks of having with the natural scene in the long fourth stanza of the poem, each linked to a new stage in his emotional and intellectual development. Is he pleased with the progress of these stages?
   3. What role does Wordsworth assign to his sister Dorothy in the concluding stanza of this poem? How does her age contribute to the value he sees in her companionship? How much younger than William was Dorothy? 

Level C 

1. The pressures of the outside world are not enumerated in "Tintern Abbey," but the speaker makes clear that the desire to return to the banks of the Wye is born of his disaffection with "the dreary intercourse of daily life" (line 132).
   1. Where had Wordsworth been in the five years prior to the date of the poem?
   2. Where had he been prior to the visit paid five years earlier?
   3. Looking at the chronology of the poet's life, speculate about the passionate importance he ascribes to the English countryside and the solitary experiences it affords.
   4. Looking at Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals (see pp. 801–811), comment on the ways in which her role in her brother's life affirms the importance he gives her in the conclusion to "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey."

Focus on "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"

Level A

1. When the speaker begins with his emphatic insistence that "Earth has not anything to show more fair," an alternative to "earth" is implied. How does line 4 explain what the alternative is?
2. What is paradoxical about finding majesty touching in line 3?
3. How does the punctuation and enjambment of the line endings in this sonnet typify a Romantic view of poetic rules?  
4. How many meanings can you think of for the last two words of this poem? What might "lying" mean?  And "still"?

Level B

1. Look at the painting of Old Westminster Bridge on the Web Resources page. Where is Westminster Bridge and what does it overlook? 
2. What is the significance of the time of day to the vision of the city being observed in this poem? What would the air quality be like if the poem were recording a late afternoon's view from the bridge (see line 8)? 
3. What would be happening in the institutional buildings and houses later in the day? Would they still seem "touching"?

Level C

1. How is the Industrial Revolution alluded to in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge?
2. The speaker of this poem positions himself above the city. What are the implications of that posture and how do they bespeak Wordsworth's general feelings about city life?  Compare, for example, lines 25ff. of "Tintern Abbey."

Focus on "Ode to a Nightingale"

Level A

1. What kind of bodily state is the speaker in as he begins the Ode to a Nightingale? 
2. What gift do nightingales symbolize? How does the speaker associate himself with the bird in the first stanzas of the poem?
3. What kinds of experience intrude on the speaker's consciousness in stanza III? Why is it hard for a human being to emulate a bird?
4. How many senses are appealed to as the "Ode to a Nightingale" develops? What realization comes to the speaker at the end of stanza VI? What are the connotations of "sod"?
5. What does "alien corn" mean? Why does the speaker think of the biblical Ruth as he thinks of the bird as a timeless being? 
6. Note the repetition of key words throughout this poem. Comment on the psychological state that makes us reiterate words (see, for example, "Away! Away!" in the beginning of stanza IV, and the link from stanza VII to stanza VIII and the voicings of "Adieu" there).

Level C

1. What is the time of day in Keats's ode? Contrast the importance of the hour in Wordsworth's poems on Tintern Abbey and Westminster Bridge.
2. What degree of confidence in his imaginative powers does Keats seem to feel in "Ode to a Nightingale"? Compare the strength of Wordsworth's belief in his "genial powers" in several of his poems. How do we see the empirical tradition in English philosophy, with its emphasis on the importance of sense perception, at work in these poets' concerns? (See the discussion of John Locke's philosophy among the Web Resources assembled for these exercises.)

Comparing the role of nature and the self in English and continental Romanticism

Level A

1. How specific are the visual details in the references to the natural world in "Hyperion's Song of Fate" by Holderlin, "The Lake" by Lamartine, or "To Himself," by Leopardi?
2. How specific are the visual details in Rosalía de Castro's "[Candescent lies the air]"?
3. What relation between the mind and the natural world does Leopardi suggest in "The Infinite"?

Level B

1. How does the degree of specificity in the continental lyrics mentioned above contribute to the attitude they express toward the power of nature? Compare the use of detail in poems by Wordsworth and Keats.
2. What is the role of memory in "The Lake"? For what does the poet pray? Compare the function of memory and prayer in "Tintern Abbey."

Level C

1. For a more extended analysis:  pair any of the Romantic poets, both English and continental, with a work of visual art and discuss their affinities and points of divergence. (Heine and Friedrich, Wordsworth and Constable or Turner would make good choices.)

Comparing the role of nature and the self in Asian lyrics

Level A

1. Discuss the effect of references to the natural world—a spring cloud, a rose—in  "Ghazal V" by Ghalib in Volume E. Is he looking at nature the way that Wordsworth or Keats habitually do?  

Level B

1. Compare and contrast the mysticism of Ghalib's poems with the mysticism of a Wordsworth or a Lamartine.

Level C

1. The ghazal traditionally introduces the poet's "signature" in its concluding couplet. Compare and contrast the idea of the individual self in the poems of Wordsworth and in Ghalib's work. How can we see the difference between their cultural and philosophical inheritances as we try to distinguish the nature and impact of self-awareness in English and Urdu poetics?
2. For a more extended analysis, choose several of the Japanese Kokinshu poems in Volume B of the anthology and discuss their use of natural references. What role do the seasons play in these poems? How closely are natural details described? Compare the way nature conveys traditional meanings in the Kokinshu poems with the role it plays in one of Wordsworth's major poems.

Focus on Texts and Contexts

William Wordsworth, "Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont" (Web Resources)

Level A

1. To whom—or what—is this poem addressed?
2. How is the speaker's view of the natural world implied by his use of words like "smiling" and "angry" to characterize the sea?
3. How convinced are you of the consolation that the speaker claims in the final lines of the poem?

Level B

1. Compare the quatrains in this poem to the stanzas of "Tintern Abbey." How are the poems' forms appropriate to the movement of the poet's mind and the complexities he faces?
2. What is attractive to the poet about the "unfeeling armour of old time" (l. 51)? 
3. How does Wordsworth change his idea of the virtue of solitude in the conclusion he reaches here?

Level C

1. This poem was written in 1806. Consult the chronology of Wordsworth's life on the Web Resources page of these exercises. To what event does this poem refer?
2. Look at the painting of Peele Castle that Wordsworth refers to in this poem. Why is it significant that a representation of the castle is the occasion of these lines? What has happened to the poet's belief in the data of raw nature?

William Hazlitt, "The Spirit of the Age" (Web Resources)

Level A

1. What does Hazlitt mean by saying that Wordsworth "stooped to have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet"? Cite a few lines in Wordsworth's poems that demonstrate this tendency.
2. How does Hazlitt's account of Wordsworth's criticism of Dr. Johnson help us understand the difference between these exemplars of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century?

Level B

1. How would you describe the tone of Hazlitt's essay? What does he imply by saying that Wordsworth "delivers household truths"?
2. What makes Wordsworth "the most original poet now living," according to Hazlitt?

Level C

1. As the short biography of Hazlitt available on the Web Resources page makes clear, he began his career as a painter. Look at the images by Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin in the essay on the poetic landscape. What attitudes toward these painters' work does he ascribe to Wordsworth? How do these opinions help us understand Wordsworth's ambitions as a poet?
2. Explain Hazlitt's comments on Wordsworth's view of Shakespeare. Hazlitt was interested in dramatic as well as lyric poetry; how do his comments help us understand why the major writers of the Romantic era were not involved in theatrical productions?