ROMANCING ROMANTICISM: SECOND CANTO

(1816 – 1836)

11.1. Второе поколение английских романтиков. Джордж Байрон как поэт радикального революционного романтизма. Четыре периода в творчестве поэта. Политические мотивы в поэмах Байрона. Жанровые особенности «Дон Жуана», сатирический пафос поэмы.

Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), known as Lord Byron, English poet, who was one of the most important and versatile writers of the Romantic Movement.

Byron was born in London on January 22, 1788, and educated at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. He succeeded to the title and estates of his granduncle William.

In 1807 a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. An adverse review of this work in the Edinburgh Review prompted a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). That same year Byron took his seat in the House of Lords. He also began two years of travel in Portugal, Spain, and Greece.

The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem narrating travels in Europe, brought Byron fame. The hero of the poem, Childe Harold, was the first example of what came to be known as the Byronic hero, the young man of stormy emotions who shuns humanity and roams through life weighed down by a sense of guilt for mysterious sins of his past. The Byronic hero is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself. The type recurs in his narrative poems of the following two years.

The Destruction of Sennacherib

I

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

II

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

III

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved – and for ever grew still!

IV

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

V

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:

And the tents were all silent – the banners alone –

The lances unlifted – the trumpet unblown.

VI

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

In 1815 his Hebrew Melodies was published, and in the same year Byron was married to Anna Isabella Milbanke. After giving birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, Byron's only legitimate child, Lady Byron left her husband. Byron agreed to legal separation from his wife. Rumors about his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta and doubts about his sanity led to his being ostracized by society. Deeply embittered, Byron left England in 1816 and never returned.

In Geneva, Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon. He next established residence in Venice, where he produced, among other works, the verse drama Manfred, the first two cantos of Don Juan, and the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold. For two years Byron traveled around Italy. Don Juan, a mock epic in 16 cantos, encompasses a brilliant satire on contemporary English society. Often regarded as Byron's greatest work, it was completed in 1823.

* * *

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,

Let him combat for that of his neighbours;

Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,

And get knocked on his head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is a chivalrous plan,

And is always as nobly requited;

Then battle for freedom wherever you can,

And, if not shot or hanged, you'll get knighted

At the news of the revolt of the Greeks against the Turks Byron, disregarding his weakened physical condition, joined the Greek insurgents at Mesolуngion (Missolonghi). He not only recruited a regiment for the cause of Greek independence but contributed large sums of money to it. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in January 1824. The poet died at Mesolуngion three months later.

11.2. Своеобразие творческой манеры Перси Б. Шелли. Становление эстетических взглядов («Защита поэзии»). Тираноборческие мотивы его поэзии. Метафоричность, символика в его произведениях.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), English poet, considered by many to be among the greatest, and one of the most influential leaders of the Romantic Movement. Throughout his life, Shelley lived by a radically nonconformist moral code. His beliefs concerning love, marriage, revolution, and politics caused him to be considered a dangerous immoralist by some.

He was educated at Eton College and, until his expulsion at the end of one year, the University of Oxford. With another student, Shelley had written and circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, of which the university authorities disapproved.

Shortly after his expulsion, the 19-year-old Shelley married his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, and moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later, he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem.

The poem was one result of Shelley's friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, expressing Godwin's freethinking Socialist philosophy. Another result of their friendship was Shelley's relationship with Godwin's daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft. After separating from his wife, Shelley briefly toured Europe with Mary. During another brief visit to the Continent in the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary met the British poet Lord Byron.

SONG TO THE MEN OF ENGLAND

I

Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear?

II

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,

From the cradle to the grave,

Those ungrateful drones who would

Drain your sweat – nay, drink your blood?

III

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge

Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,

That these stingless drones may spoil

The forced produce of your toil?

(…)

VI

Sow seed, – but let no tyrant reap;

Find wealth, – let no impostor heap;

Weave robes, – let not the idle wear;

Forge arms, – in your defence to bear.

(…)

During the last four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works. Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with Byron. Shortly before his 30th birthday, Shelley was drowned (July 8, 1822) in a storm. Ten days later, his body was washed ashore.

Many critics regard Shelley as one of the greatest of all English poets. They point especially to his lyrics, including the familiar short odes “To a Skylark”, “To the West Wind”, and “The Cloud”. Also greatly admired are the shorter love lyrics, as well as the sonnet “Ozymandias”; and “Adonais”, an elegy for the British poet John Keats, written in formal Spenserian stanzas.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

»My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!«

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The effortless lyricism of these works is also evident in Shelley's verse dramas; these remain, however, profound but unproduceable closet dramas. His prose, including a translation from Plato and the unfinished critical work A Defence of Poetry are equally skillful.

LINES

When the lamp is shattered

The light in the dust lies dead —

When the cloud is scattered

The rainbow's glory is shed.

When the lute is broken,

Sweet tones are remembered not;

When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendour

Survive not the lamp and the lute,

The heart's echoes render

No song when the spirit is mute: —

No song but sad dirges,

Like the wind through a ruined cell,

Or the mournful surges

That ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled

Love first leaves the well-built nest;

The weak one is singled

To endure what it once possessed.

0 Love! who bewaileth

The frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailest

For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee

As the storms rock the ravens on high;

Bright reason will mock thee,

Like the sun from a wintry sky.

From thy nest every rafter

Will rot, and thine eagle home

Leave thee naked to laughter,

When leaves fall and cold winds come.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851), English novelist. Daughter of the British philosopher William Godwin and the British author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, she was privately educated. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in May 1814, and two months later left England with him. When Shelley's first wife died, he married Mary. In 1818 her first and most important work, the novel Frankenstein, was published. A remarkable accomplishment for a 20-year-old, the work was an immediate critical and popular success. Repeatedly dramatized for both the theater and motion pictures, this tale of Frankenstein, a student of the occult, and the subhuman monster he assembles from parts of human corpses added a new word to the English language: A “Frankenstein” is any creation that ultimately destroys its creator.

11.3. Жизнь и творчество Джона Китса. Поздние оды («Ода греческой вазе») как воспевание богатства чувств и полноты жизни.

Keats, John (1795-1821), major English poet, despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Keats’s poetry describes the beauty of the natural world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination. His skill with poetic imagery and sound reproduces this sensuous experience for his reader. Keats’s poetry evolves over his brief career from this love of nature and art into a deep compassion for humanity. He gave voice to the spirit of Romanticism in literature when he wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

Keats was born in north London, England. At 21 Keats published his first poem, the sonnet "O Solitude," marking the beginning of his poetic career. In writing a sonnet, a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, Keats sought to take his place in the tradition established by great classical, European, and British epic poets.

The speaker of this poem first expresses hope that, if he is to be alone, it will be in “Nature’s Observatory”; he then imagines the “highest bliss” to be writing poetry in nature rather than simply observing nature. In another sonnet published the same year, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," Keats compares reading translations of poetry to awe-inspiring experiences such as an astronomer discovering a new planet or explorers first seeing the Pacific Ocean.

TO LORD BYRON

Byron, how sweetly sad thy melody,

Attuning still the soul to tenderness,

As if soft Pity with unusual stress

Had touch'd her plaintive lute; and thou, being by,

Hadst caught the tones, nor suffered them to die.

O'ershading sorrow doth not make thee less

Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress

With a bright halo, shining beamily;

As when a cloud a golden moon doth veil,

Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow,

Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,

And like fair veins in sable marble flow.

Still warble, dying swan, – still tell the tale,

The enchanting tale – the tale of pleasing woe.

“Endymion,” written between April and November 1817 and published the following year, is thought to be Keats's richest although most unpolished poem. In the poem, the mortal hero Endymion's quest for the goddess Cynthia serves as a metaphor for imaginative longing—the poet’s quest for a muse, or divine inspiration. Unfortunately “Endymion,” published in April, received negative reviews by the leading literary magazines.

Keats’s great creative outpouring came in April and May of 1819, when he composed a group of five odes. The loose formal requirements of the ode—a regular metrical pattern and a shift in perspective from stanza to stanza—allowed Keats to follow his mind’s associations. Literary critics rank these works among the greatest short poems in the English language. Each ode begins with the speaker focusing on something—a nightingale, an urn, the goddess Psyche, the mood of melancholy, the season of autumn—and arrives at his greater insight into what he values.

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale’s song symbolizes the beauty of nature and art. Keats was fascinated by the difference between life and art: Human beings die, but the art they make lives on. The speaker in the poem tries repeatedly to use his imagination to go with the bird’s song, but each time he fails to completely forget himself. In the sixth stanza he suddenly remembers what death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his own humanity.

After September 1819, Keats produced little poetry. His money troubles, always pressing, became severe. In February 1820, Keats had a severe hemorrhage and coughed up blood, beginning a year that he called his “posthumous existence.” He did manage to prepare a third volume of poems for the press. In September 1820, Keats sailed to Italy, accompanied by a close friend. He died in Italy several months later.

TO KOSCIUSKO

Good Kosciusko, thy great name alone

Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling;

It comes upon us like the glorious pealing

Of the wide spheres – an everlasting tone.

And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown,

The names of heroes, burst from clouds concealing,

Are changed to harmonies, for ever stealing

Through cloudless blue, and round each silver throne.

It tells me too, that on a happy day,

When some good spirit walks upon the earth,

Thy name with Alfred's and the great of yore

Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth

To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away

To where the great God lives for evermore.

11.4. Вальтер Скотт как создатель исторического романа. Романтизм и реализм в его книгах.

Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), Scottish novelist and poet, whose work as a translator, editor, biographer, and critic, together with his novels and poems, made him one of the most prominent figures in English romanticism. He was born in Edinburgh. Trained as a lawyer, he became a legal official, an occupation that allowed him to write.

A love of ballads and legends helped direct Scott's literary activity. His translations of German Gothic romances gained him some note, but he first achieved eminence with his edition of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in 1802-1803. His first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, brought him huge popularity. Following this success, he wrote a series of romantic narrative poems.

Later Scott's declining popularity as a poet, in part caused by the competition of Lord Byron, led him to turn to the novel. Waverley (1814) began a new series of triumphs. More than 20 novels followed in rapid succession, including Guy Mannering, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward and The Fair Maid of Perth. Although he published this fiction anonymously, his identity became an open secret. Scott used his enormous profits to construct a baronial mansion called Abbotsford.

Scott was entangled with the printing firm of James Ballantyne and the publishing house of Archibald Constable, which both failed in the economic crisis. Refusing the easy recourse of bankruptcy, Scott strove for the rest of his life to repay a debt of more than 120,000 pounds. He wrote several new novels. After a series of strokes, he died at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832.

Scott is the first major historical novelist. In his portraits of Scotland, England, and the Continent from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense of political and traditional forces and of their influence on the individual. Although his plots are sometimes hastily constructed and his characters sometimes stilted, these works remain valuable for their compelling atmosphere, occasional epic dignity, and clear understanding of human nature. Many writers learned from Scott's panoramic studies of the interplay between social trends and individual character. In Great Britain, he created an enduring interest in Scottish traditions, and throughout the Western world he encouraged the cult of the Middle Ages, which strongly characterized romanticism.