Introduction
Romanticism is an artistic movement that united various creators from different epochs and determined the characteristic peculiarities of creative thought of the time. Originated at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, Romanticism influenced the development of art in its many forms throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Contrary to the preceding era of classicism and rationalism, “romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental” (“Romanticism”). More specifically, romantic artists, including poets and writers, were preoccupied with appreciating nature, focusing on feelings and passions, seeking out the exotic and mysterious, and singling out the exceptional individual among the crowd. However, shared ideas did not prevent individual peculiarities from emerging: whether we talk about some particular country, trend, or the poet’s personality. This paper contrasts and compares the three poems written by Romantic poets to see the common points and differences.
This essay will deal with three poems written by three British poets: William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper, Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment, and John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. The choice is made due to their temporal and spatial closeness that would allow the comparison to be valid. The poems will be reviewed separately, and then the conclusions will be drawn. Several aspects will be focused on in the analysis: themes, location, imagery, and some other poetic devices.
William Blake’s Chimney Sweeper
An artist, poet, painter, and printmaker, William Blake is considered to be one of Britain’s early romantic artists. His art dealt with mystical symbolism, issues of religion and faith, and human ideal. However, his visionary outlook did not prevent him from being concerned with social and political issues. The poem Chimney Sweeper – written by Blake and published in two parts in two poetry collections – “Songs of Innocence” 1789 and “Songs of Experience” 1794 – is an example of this combination.
The social criticism of the poem is quite apparent. William Blake presents the gloomy picture of contemporary Britain, where child labor was widely used during the industrial revolution. In the first part, a chimney sweeper recounts a dream of another sweeper in which an angel rescues the boys from coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the second part, a young chimney sweeper is abandoned in the snow. In addition to the criticism of this social inequality, Blake is also very critical of the church that provides a false promise to solving this disparity.
What makes the poem belonging to a romanticism tradition is the romantic dichotomy where this world is opposed to some transcendental space. The world of chimney sweepers is dark and cold, where the action takes place at night. The colors that are associated with it are black and white – colors of soot and snow. Moreover, this reality has no sounds but weeping and working: this effect is created by using the word “silence”, assonance in “weep, weep, weep!” line and alliteration “sweep, in soot I sleep” – similar to the sounds made when sweeping.
The second world that is opposed to the dark reality is heaven that a boy sees in his dream. It is filled with the sun, bright colors – green, blue, white – and laughter. However, this contrast does not propose the solution of the child labor problem in religion as the heaven of the church is built upon false promises. According to Blake, the official religion makes up a heaven of children’s misery, and the only escape from the harsh reality is death.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
The second poem Kubla Khan was written in 1797 and published in 1816 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is deemed to be a founder of the Romantic movement in England, together with William Wordsworth. The poem itself is considered to be one of the most influential romanticist poems. It presents some very peculiar characteristics of the romanticism tradition.
The main romanticist feature of the poem is the world that the poet is presenting. The narrator of the poem is longing for the magical country with capital Xanadu in its center. This world – both magical and dangerous – is supposed to be opposed to the narrator’s everyday reality, which he does not describe at all, concentrating solely on Xanadu. It is his only focus and primary goal that can be reached with some particular song’s help. One can guess that this song is a symbol of the artistic expression capable of setting an individual free.
The poem presents very vivid imagery by using expressive language. The exotic country has the river, sea, caves and gardens, forests, walls, a geyser erupting from a canyon. It is filled with colors of greenery, water, earth, rocks, ice. Moreover, Coleridge uses a very peculiar rhyme scheme and variable line lengths that express the liveliness and mobility of the world. The alliteration also helps it: the poet repeats a, e, u sounds throughout the poem as if to hypnotize the reader and make the text alive, the ultimate song that transports the reader into the magical world.
John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats is one of the leading figures of the second generation of Romantic poets. What differed them from their predecessors was their disillusionment, belief in fate, and dramatic overview. Concerns about human existence and philosophical conflict between pleasure and pain, life and death, and art and life are especially characteristic of Keats’ poetry.
Ode to a Nightingale was written and published in 1819. It develops the conflicting contrast between two worlds: reality and Romantic ideal world – with the nightingale’s song becoming the main image and “voice” of the poem. It allows the poet to move from one world to another and contemplate the nature of this transition.
The nightingale’s song becomes a means of escaping reality with its heartache, pain, fever, weariness, and a way to connect to nature. It is significant that as in other poems, the intellectual world is associated with summer, the color green, and happiness. It is filled with sun, music, flowers, and promises of immortality, while the real world can only offer decay and disillusion.
Keats contrasts the two worlds and meditates on time, death, beauty, nature. He is enjoying the beautiful singing and enjoys the relief that it provides. However, this longing for a better world, a world of nature, is tragic. According to the poet, a human can connect to this world by listening to a nightingale’s song or writing poetry but would never be fully immersed in it. Humans are mortal, their lives are full of unhappiness, and any escape is just temporary.
Keats uses a wide variety of literary devices that express the vividness of the world of nature and the poet’s feelings. Anaphora (multiple lines starting with the same word “where”) and repetitions (“Away! away!”) show the hero’s tragic state of mind, tiredness, and longing for relief. The use of allusions to the ancient Greek mythology and personifications (Death, Love) helps create the eternal image of the nightingale’s world.
Comparison of the three poems
The three poems written in the period between the 1780s and 1810s present the three stages of the development of Romanticism in Britain. While having certain elements and ideas in common, the three poems offer different views on Romanticism ideas.
All three poems’ imagery is used to present two worlds: a world of reality and a world of transcendent beauty, truth, and immortality. However, for William Blake, this dichotomy was more of a religious nature, and for Coleridge and Keats, this contrast becomes more of a question of artistic liberation. However, while Coleridge is confident in the possibility of escape, Keats is pessimistic and tragic. These differences reflect the development of moods and ideas within the Romantic movement.
Another exciting conclusion can be drawn from the ways of how the dichotomy of the two worlds is presented. For Coleridge, it seems, the reality does not play any significant role: for the poet, there is only one reality – the world of the exotic far-away country – that is worthy of considering. For Blake and Keats, this contrast is very harsh: it is supported by the imagery, colors, and sounds associated with the world of reality or with the world of escape. However, while Blake criticizes the particular social and political phenomena, Keats has a more existential attitude in his negativity.
Conclusion
The analysis of the three poems representing the English Romanticism showed that shared principles of the artistic movement unite them. However, each of the poems is determined by a particular trend or philosophy significant for a specific poet. It allows us to state that Romanticism provided a specific framework that poets filled in according to their own artistic choices.
Works Cited
“Romanticism.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. 2020. Web.