After last class, I walked away thinking about Wordsworth’s relationship to his sister and to childhood. With his sister, Wordsworth had an intimate companion to bounce ideas off of and to make the subject of much of his poetry. They were equally matched in intelligence and experience. I find their relationship incredibly interesting and would love to look deeper into their letters to see more of this. It makes me wonder, what would Wordsworth have been without his sister? Like many men that came before him and will/have come after, he is the product of the women around him. What would these men be, if anything, without their female supporters?

Wordsworth’s poetry took a keen view on the subject of childhood and used children as the main characters. Children, we discussed, showed a level of innocence that allows them to see deeper and more tellingly into the heart of a matter. For example, We Are Seven, the child is the one who is able to see into the situation for what it is. She is able to view death in a way that seems simplistic on the surface but as you look deeper, you can see the poignant view that she has. To her, her siblings are not dead in spirit, only body. They are as much of the family as her living siblings. The adult is unable to see this, he has become so ingrained in his way of life that he cannot look outside. This leads him to ignorance and pride, while the child is spared for her sense of wonder about the world and ability to see outside the two-dimensional.

Today, I present on William Wordsworth. For my presentation I chose to focus on Tintern Abbey and his Preface. I am most intrigued by his Preface because of its ability to create a critical view around his poetry that is solely in his control. He is setting a standard for how his poetry will be viewed, before anyone else. It is redefining author control over one’s work once it is published.

We Are Seven was the other piece of his poetry that I really enjoyed within this section. I wish I would have included it more in my presentation because I see it as really defining Wordsworth’s use of memory and narrative. In this poem, Wordsworth’s narrative runs through the poem like prose, making it more accessible to a wider audience. The content of the poem is not an unknown story, as child birth and child death were at times synonymous to one another. These two aspects, along with the absence of proper names, generalize the poem. Allowing any Reader to insert themselves into the poem.

I walked away from our last class period, thinking about language and how it functions. We are constantly either praising an author for their language authenticity, or lack thereof, or castigating them for using a language separate from the formal. In education studies, so much of the conversation can be centered around the teaching process of either formal English or the English that students use in their daily lives. I would argue that Burns represents an important piece of evidence to prove that teaching, writings, and spoken word in one’s colloquial language has immense value.

Burns’s use of Scots English, as I will call it, brings poetry to his community. When, in the past, poetry had been reserved for a “highly” educated class. His poetry is class based because of his ability to not exclude, but include individuals in writings that represent their daily lives and traditions. The poetry is not far fetched to them because it is them, as much as it is Burns. By creating poetry in this language, he immortalizes and prioritizes its use. We have to study the cadence and vocabulary of the poetry in order to understand it, keeping the language alive. I had read about this dynamic within Irish poetry and literature, but had never transferred it to the Scottish. Seeing it within the Scottish, creates a bind between the two nations as a educational revolution that is fighting for autonomy in their culture.

After reading Robert Burn’s poetry and realizing that he’s the reason why we wing that one song at the start of each new year, I am thoroughly intrigued. For such a seemingly harmless song, he represents a less than benign person. He was sexually active outside of marriage, he wrote using his home dialect, he was present in the history and politics of his time, etc. He was involved. He had opinions and used the language closest to him to voice them, he seems unafraid.

The thing I am most interested about Burns is the actual publication, distribution, and reception of his poetry. I could not imagine that all his personal protests against the strictures of marriage and the church went over well with everyone in his community. He seems to use his poetry to make a stand against these large entities and does it very intentionally. Burns uses a rhyme scheme and can easily code-switch between the Scottish dialect and the English. He shows his intelligence through his allusions to history and Greek mythology.

Burns’s verses can be funny and poignant at the same time as they can be awful for women. While he was clearly the ladies’s man, he did not view them as much more than a body waiting for his calls. This problematizes his poetry and his persona as both a citizen in that era (when talking of a woman’s body was taboo) and in this one.

Romanticism uses nature and sublimity to represent overwhelming emotions. I believe that this word overwhelming would help to address Beachy Head because of its use of large images intermixed with small preludes. The poem moves like a wave; it ebbs and flows and it rises and crashes. The poem opens with a “concussion” (Line 6) like the crashing of a wave. Smith uses nature in this scene to convey an overwhelming emotions of awe and fear coming together under the creation of this landmark.

Smith almost makes us forget of the human presence in these scenes because she leaves such a small window for the human to inhabit. Then suddenly, she is there, in deep contemplation and thought. She shows the female mind’s power to create and remember without male guidance. Smith shows that she is not entirely ignorant to the world around her but is able to witness and think abstractly. She is able to take a huge scene of nature and transition it to politics, gender studies, the individual, the general, and so much more.

Charlotte Smith’s poetry was an interesting read to me, it is full of symbolism and also well-defined images of the world she experiences. I believe that the crux of Smith’s poetry is the fact that it is her who is behind all the images and the speech presented. She is found in each of her poems because of her use of self-reflection in the Romantic tradition.

I found Smith’s biography intriguing because of how powerful it was, she went through so much strife and pain. But she shows how she has triumphed in Beachy Head and shows her control in her modulated verses and attention given to the Muses in the Elegiac Sonnets. It was surprising to me that more of her poetry doesn’t directly reflect the economic and domestic issues that ran throughout most of her life. I would attempt to answer this by saying that she somewhat avoids these topics because her writing was a self-reflective escape for her. Within poetry, she had control. Smith made a living off of her work, even though the property ultimately went to her husband, she still had that ownership for however long.

As a woman and a scholar, Smith is empowering. She set a precedent that we’ve seen acted on in the other poetry we have read and I believe we will continue to she her style as we read throughout the course.

The largest takeaway from our last class that I had was the use of the pro-abolitionists own feelings. A lot of their arguments were not discursive but emotional. Yes, the discursive was there, however; it was not always the crux of the argument. In particular, the argument that slavery was detrimental to the whole of society was very interesting to me. They were not saying that slavery’s effects would harm only the Africans but that the British would also be hurt morally and emotionally. I found that their pulling at the heart strings of their readership to be a powerful message. It pulls the reader into the story beyond simple human compassion to the horrors that other humans are being forced in to.

Hannah More’s poem Slavery was powerful in her use of capitalization and italics to draw attention. More demands that her work be noticed and uses styles of text to enforce this. I found her use of religion impactful in this piece.

“For he has learned to dread the Christian’s trust:

To him what mercy can that God display,

Whose servants murder, and whose sons betray?” (More).

In this section, More is blatantly asking for the “Christian” slave owners and proponents to look into their own doings before trying to push “morality” onto others. She is powerfully arguing that it makes sense why the African slaves would be hesitant to Christianity. The only sense of white religion that they may have encountered is one that believes that it is alright to enslave and torture another group of people. Why would they ever want to be apart of that?

What was most interesting to me about these passages was the complete variance in sides during this time when it came to slavery. Further, I found the tones used by either side to discuss their opinions very interesting. They used ironies, compassion, sympathy, and unapologetic statement of facts to convey their opinion. Each side found themselves entirely rational in their beliefs, unwavering and right. Now, we can look back and see the holes in their arguments and see where their privilege as the ruling class comes into play.

One element in particular that I found interesting was the romantic love that was displayed in Mary Robinson’s “The African” (1798) and John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s “The Dying Negro, A Poem” (1775. These poets show stories of romantic love including these African people, they allow them to have the sense of humanity that is so often taken away from them. They are not barbaric, they are loving and capable of being loved in return. The Africans are humanized through their romantic love and when that love is stripped from them, we the reader, sympathize. In this, these poets create an argument for the abolition with the base of emotion, not fact. It is the emotion that makes their poetry so compelling.

In this set of poetry, William Blake takes on the dualities of mind, self, good and bad, and religion to prove that there will always be a meeting point between two opposites. Even more bluntly, that there is no such thing as a separation of body and soul or evil and good, there is only a person who is a representation of their experience and knowledge. Blake makes it clear that there is not a thing in the world that is truly evil or truly good, there are dynamics in everything that call on us to learn about them to develop our minds/souls further.

In particular, I loved the line in The Argument:

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction

and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are

necessary to Human existence” (Lines 29-31)

I felt that this line really encapsulated all that Blake is trying to accomplish in this section, his thesis (if you will). I believe in what he’s saying because it is so plainly true but so often unsaid. Words like this seem revolutionary to me in 2019, to think that we need all these experiences (good and bad) in order to live a full (Godly) life is completely new. Growing up in the church there are separations between everything and Blake shows the falsehoods in this action. It makes me wonder about how this was received during his time, when even now it comes across somewhat evolved?

In this collection of poetry, Blake shows his readers the pains of growing up disguised by the beauty of his poetry. Throughout the collection, there is a clear aging of the subject of the poetry. Starting out as a young, “innocent” child moving through life, learning of the temptations and darkness that one must face in reality. Songs of Innocence shows more idealized images of beautiful open fields, where seemingly, no harm could come to the subject of the poetry. The children are clothed in light and white and there is a clear religious element running throughout the poems.

However, in Songs of Experience, there is more of a lovesickness. It is painful, while also unavoidable, which is perhaps the message Blake is conveying to his reader. “The Sick Rose,” “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” all describe female virginity and purity. Women in these poems are marked by their lack of intimate moments and then their sudden introduction to those moments. Blake displays the images of fear that surround these moments for every woman. Not to say that I believe these are in a fully progressively feminist/womanist form, but in ways that sexuality may have not been discussed by men at this time. in “The Sick Rose,” while he describes an illness brought on the girl as she enters into her sexuality (her loss of purity=sickness). He does show her sexual desire “Of crimson joy” (Line 6). She is both hurt and fulfilled by this exposure and she is given narrative to her sexual experiences. Instead of the solely male perspective on the encounter.