EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Kandidat-ID: 4313 Oppgaver Oppgavetype Vurdering Status 1 EN-214 11/12-2015 Flervalg Automatisk poengsum Levert 2 EN-214 11.12.15 Section one Skriveoppgave Manuell poengsum Levert 3 EN-214 11.12.15 Section two Skriveoppgave Manuell poengsum Levert EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Emnekode EN-214 Vurderingsform EN-214 Starttidspunkt: 11.12.2015 09:00 Sluttidspunkt: 11.12.2015 13:00 Sensurfrist 201601080000 PDF opprettet 28.01.2016 15:13 Opprettet av Kristina Andersen Antall sider 8 Oppgaver inkludert Ja Skriv ut automatisk rettede Ja 1
Seksjon 1 1 OPPGAVE EN-214 11/12-2015 Course code: EN-214 Course name: British Romanticism in Context Date: 11 December 2015 Duration: 4 hours Resources allowed: English-English dictionary Notes: ----------------------------- Sometimes professors ask for exam answers that can be used for teaching purposes, but in order for this to take place, the university needs your consent. Do you grant the University of Agder permission to use your exam answer for teaching purposes? Yes No EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 2 av 8
2 OPPGAVE EN-214 11.12.15 Section one Section One This section counts for a total of 50% of your grade. Please write one-two paragraph responses to four of the following five questions. Make sure you support your answers with specific references to curriculum texts, where this is relevant. 1. What was the Peterloo Massacre, and when and where did it take place? 2. How and by whom is Mary Shelley s novel Frankenstein narrated? 3. On what basis did Samuel Taylor Coleridge distinguish between the primary imagination, the secondary imagination, and fancy? 4. On what grounds can John Clare be described as an ecological poet? 5. Identify the author and title of the poem from which the following excerpt is taken, and describe how the excerpt reflects the overarching theme of the poem in question: Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss Though winning near the goal - yet do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Skriv ditt svar her... BESVARELSE 1. The Peterloo masacre took place in Manchester in 1819, A group of around 60.000 people had gathered in the centre of the town for a peaceful protest. They wanted democracy and a poor act, reducing poverty in England. Slogans like: 'Equal suffrage' and even 'Love' were amongst the banners presented. Only 2% of the population had the right to vote.the magistrates in town read the riot act and sent in the infantry and the police to calm down the masses. The soldiers used sabres to try and split the masses. 18 people, even a child, died of sabre cuts and 700 people were injured. It was called 'Peterloo' in a response to mock the soldiers when they attacked unarmed people, in order to hail the heroes of Waterloo. After this demonstration, one saw the growth of trade unions and more equal rights for the working class people. Another note is that the newspaper; The Manchester Guardian, was founded after this massacre by a businessman who witnessed the massacre. 2. In the novel Frankenstein there are three narrators. EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 3 av 8
At the start of the novel we are presented with letters written by the explorer of the arctic, Mr. Walton. In his letters to his sister, he tells about his scientific aims and his struggle up in the icy arctic surroundings. The next narrator is Victor Frankenstein, who, I would say, is the main person in the novel. He tells about his aim to go beyond the scientific "boundaries" which were considered appropriate after having read several scientific books. We get to hear about how he is planning this making of a man and how he finds body parts in order to do so. When he is finished making this man, which eventually becomes the Monster, we also get to hear the Monster's side of the story. He flees up in the mountains where he lives alone, but learns about life and litterature while he is sneaking around a cottage where he gets to know the people living there. 3. The supernatural is what differs Coleridge from his good friend, William Wordsworth. In his fragment, Kubla Khan, this is something which is rather notable. Under the influence of laudanum he produced some of the best poetry of the period. It was shame that someone (we don't know who) interrupted him after he woke up from this dream, so he didn't get to finish the poem. Anyway, Coleridge used the words: fancy, primary imagination and the secondary imagination to describe the difference between how the production and the flow of words come into the poet's mind. Just like Kant, who talked about the reproductive, the productive and the aestetic imagination, we see similarities when it comes to Coleridge's way of describing the imagination. The fancy is the lowest degree. It just reproduces fixities. The primary imagination is what all people possess. The secondary imagination is the highest degree. Told in Coleridge's words: "It dissolves, diffuses and dissipates in order to recreate". This only applies to a few artists. Coleridge has been misunderstood when we talk about these terms. Some critics have believed that the primary imagination was the highest degree. 4. I would say that John Clare's poems can be regarded as highly ecological (without having read all of his poems). The first one which comes to mind is the one called To the Snipe where he sits out in the wetlands somewhere just listening to this bird. Clare is more describing what he sees and hears in this poem. It is not very much "Wordsworthian". There is always a treat from the outside world throughout the poem ("the trembling grass"). It's like we know something is approacing amidst this deserted wetland where his only companion is the bird and nature itself. And, yes, there is even danger out in the wetland. Snipers are approaching with their guns, ruining the idyllic impression that the narrator has, sitting there all alone. The poem is a critique of the way men interupts in nature, even at the remotest and most desolated wilderness where one would think it was possible to find peace and quiet. When we read romatic poetry 'greenly', we surely see traces of human interaction with nature. The pastorals are, perhaps, what would fit into the ecological poems. We also see poets like William Blake with his huge critique of the industrialisation when he took his daily walk from Lambeth and passed the Blacfriars bridge, looking at the "Satanic Mill" standing there ("luckily" for Blake, it burned down). EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 4 av 8
Back to John Clare, it is clear to see the way the poem To the Snipe is relevant to ecological movements, even nowadays. This was way before one had created national parks, free from hunting and building factories. Back in the 18th century, even the wasteland would be explored by people for economical purposes. EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 5 av 8
3 OPPGAVE EN-214 11.12.15 Section two Section Two This section counts for 50% of your grade. Please write an essay in response to one of the following two questions: 1. Explain the meaning of the concept of the sublime. How is the sublime important for our understanding of British Romanticism? Distinguish between different uses of, or stances towards, the sublime in British Romanticism, making reference to a minimum of two literary texts on your curriculum. 2. Identify the title and the author of the excerpt from which the following stanza is taken. Account for the stanza s form, and place it within the context of the whole poem. Go subsequently on to discuss how important traits of the excerpt and/or the poem from which it is taken are characteristic of British Romanticism in general. At all times of the day and night This wretched woman thither goes, And she is known to every star And every wind that blows; And there beside the thorn she sits When the blue daylight s in the skies, And when the whirlwind s on the hill, Or frosty air is keen and still, And to herself she cries, Oh misery! Oh misery! Oh woe is me! Oh misery! Skriv ditt svar her... BESVARELSE 2. In my essay, I will start by identifying the title of the poem and the author. Secondly, I will move on to look at the form of the poem, before trying to look at the poem as a whole. I will also look at similar poems, written by the same author, to see similarities between them. In the end, I will try to mention what is characteristic of the period and how this can be related to this exact poem. This poem, The Thorn, was written by William Wordsworth. Together with S.T.Coleridge and W.Blake, he was regarded as one of the first generation of romantic poets. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron were also EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 6 av 8
referred to as the "Lake Poets", since they moved on to live up in the Lake district, in order to be closer to nature. In his preface to Lyrical ballads, Wordsworth says that these poems are mostly "experiments", but the content of the poems are based on ordinary people living in rural areas. The language is "the language of men". The enclosed stanza has 11 lines, but it is possible to dived the stanza into three parts. In the first quatrain we clearly see the ballad form being used (xbxb), where the second and fourth line rhyme. If we go on to the next septet there is a pattern of rhyming couplets in line seven and eight, and in the last two lines (line ten and eleven). The last rhyming couplet is more like a refrain, as what the woman utters is something which is repeated at several occasions in the poem. The last septet has this rhyming pattern: cdeedff. If we take away the last two rhyming couplet, we are left with 9 lines (the Spenzerian stanza). But, I will look at the poem as a whole. The metre in the poem is mostly iambic tetrameter, with an iambic trimeter in line 4 and 9. Wordsworth (and other romantic poets) rejected the neo-classical poetic diction where everything had to fit in into predescribed forms. Therefore, they took the more folkly ballad form and made poetry more readable for the common man. Looking at the poem as a whole, the narrator of the poem is a former sailor/seaman who lives alone in a small village somewhere on the countryside telling about what he has heard about this poor woman. We don't get to know much about the narrator. One might think that he could be a former sailor fighting in the Anglo-French war. I will come back to this in the last part of my essay. Everything he depicts is based on rumours. Even though he knows she walks up to the top of the hill each night, he doesn't know much about her. What we get to know during the poem is that this woman has been abandoned by the man who she was supposed to marry. She got pregnant, and he left her just prior to their marriage. We don't get to know the reason why he left her. Every night she goes to the top of the hill, sitting there by the thorn, crying. She puts on her red cloak every night and walks up the hillside. The narrator lets us know that by the thorn there is a beautiful spot of moss. He has measured the spot. It is about the size where one could bury a small baby. That is what we get to think. The woman has actually buried her baby up at that hill, and she comes there to mourn every night. What exactly happened to the baby is a mystery. Did it die a natural death when it was born, or did something else happen to the baby? We might get to think that the woman actually killed the baby, but, as said, we don't know. All we know is the pain and misery that haunts this poor woman every night. There are several other examples of poems, written by William Wordsworth, where similar topics are being elaborated. As in his preface, his aim was to depict "common people in rural areas" we see similarities in poems like The Female Vagrant, The Last of the flock, Simon Lee- the huntsman and Goody Blake.These poems are stained with the poverty and misery of people in rural areas. Their struggle is to survive in a society which has abandoned them. They are left with nothing. Either they have to sell all their animals in order to survive (The Last of the flock) or they have to steal from their neighbour (Goody Blake).Some of these people think about happier times when the wealthy mansion owner, whom they worked for, paid them for the work they did EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 7 av 8
(Simon Lee). But as a result of the industrialization, people have moved into more urban areas, so they are left alone out on the countryside. The poem, The Thorn, is mostly about motherhood. The longing for the child she was supposed to have. There are other examples of poems depicting motherhood, such as The forsaken Indian mother, The Mad mother and The Idiot boy, all written by W.Wordsworth. Whether or not these women have lost their child or not, we clearly see the desperacy where these women try to survive in a world alone. The only hope they have left is their child (I don't think The idiot boy would fit into that description). Why are these poems characteristic of British Romaticism? Well, as I have mentioned, they all depict the struggle of poor people living in rural areas. Why so much poverty at this time? And why did so many women struggle? Some of the answer lies partly in what happened in the aftermath of the French revolution. The Anglo-French war, from 1793-1815, drew many a husband away from his wife having to take part in the war. The sailor, in the poem, might be a survival fighting on the sea (England was a naval nation when it came to fighting wars). As a result of the war, there was a lack of men on English soil. There was a shortage of food and poverty was widespread. The women had to work in order to feed the family. We can imagine that times were hard if there were 6 mouths to feed, and the woman at home had to work at a factory 12 hours a day. Many of these poets stood up for these women's rights. Not just William Wordsworth. Also the more controversial figure, Lord Byron, debated for the rights of the weavers when he was in parliament. William Blake, mentioned earlier in another task, also noticed the downfall as a result of the industrial revolution. People like Mary Wollstonecraft stood up for both men and women in her Vindication of rights of men/women. Several other prominent figures of this period did the same.thomas Paine, in his pamphlet The rights of men, also campaigned for democracy and equal rights. The parliament and King George the 3rd were afraid of these radicals and liberals, so they introduced the 'Habeas Corpus' and other acts banning people and groups like the LCS to express their views. Quite a few people (12, i think) were brought in for treason and some lived abroad in abcentia (Paine fled to Paris). This poem clearly depicts the rights of women. Had there been a system to take care of them, they would not had to struggle they way we see it in the poems mentioned. Being left all alone, either because of their men joining the Anglo-French war, or because their men passed away, resulted in poverty and misery. Had the system given them the opportunity to take care of their family, with social benefits providing them with an income enough to feed them, these individuals would not have had to struggle the way that William Wordsworth depicts them in several of his poems. EN-214 1 Britisk romantikk i kontekst Page 8 av 8