Ecco per voi, il riassunto della vita e delle opere di due noti autori inglesi scritti di mio pugno. Anche se i diritti sono riservati, sarò contento se qualche alunno li usi. Sono le storie di William Wordsworth e Coleridge. Mi raccomando, copiateli ma cercate anche di studiarli; prima o poi vi verranno chiesti.
Un abbraccio da Francesco 😀
William Wordsworth
He was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, in the Lake District, an area of supreme natural beauty. Its sights sounds and smells, provided the inspiration of his later poetry. In 1797 he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is an important moment for the development of Romantic poetry. Together wrote “Lyrical Ballad”. The two poets had agreed to divide the task of composing the volume: Wordsworth producing poems based on ordinary subjects and Coleridge those of an exotic or fantastic nature.
We have read together the Lyrical Ballad, the poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.
The first is made up in four stanza, six line per stanza with regular rhyme scheme. There are frequent references to cosmos where every single element seems to have own place. The only one to have no proper place is the poet that are wandering alone and aimless. In the third stanza we can find a lot of this component and moreover we can study his language, style and language. In this stanza the subject changes “a poet is the one to have a greater sensibility and can find himself in a state of creative joy. The subject “I” may refer to either the poet who is writing or the reader who reads it aloud. The impersonal subject appeared, marks a sense of detachment from the others. The verb to see of the previous stanzas has now become the verbs “to gays” as if the poet was so struck by a natural vision.
The second poem is a Petharcan sonnet and it conveys some of the emotions felt by Wordsworth while crossing Westminster Bridge on an early September morning.
If poems take origin from real experiences, the aspects of this poem witch make the reader feel that the poet refers to real experiences are: the precise date of the event shown in the title; in line four the adverb “now” suggests that the poet is watching the scene while writing (which is false); in line 9 and 11 “never did sun. never saw I…never felt…” convey the sense of an intense emotional experience, reinforced by he use of inversion. Frequent are the examples of personification we can find in the poem for example the houses are sleeping. This made an idea of stillness. there is a single example of metaphor refers to the powerful London city centre. The language used by the poet is plain, undecorated and spear. The only exceptions are some examples of personification, similitude, inversion, and metaphor.
London has became part of nature itself. In the first splendour of the mourning it is even more beautiful than valley rock or hills. The words the poet uses to describe London suit natural setting rather than anurban on. However we should remember that London at the time who’s far closer to the country than it is today. For this reason, the reference to the fields can be justified. The city of London witch whose usually noisy, overcrowded and with a lot of smoke has become to the eyes of poet silent, calm, surround by smokeless air.Coleridge and the lyrical ballads
Most of the poem contains four line stanza. The ballad is full repetition either single words or threaten (example in v. 9-13-18). The ballad tells a dramatic story in verse. It is often written using archaism and a mixture of narration and dialogue.
The length of the story (the rhyme is divided into seven different part). There is by the end of store a moral drawn. In the rhyme there are long description of natural landscape.
In the part we have read there is the story of an ancient Mariner who was punished for killing an albatross the atmosphere of whole poem is strange more similar to a dream then to real life.
The ship, the mariner, the southern hemisphere. But it was blown off course by storm which carried it to the south pole. The mariner then tells about the strange things that happened there before explaining how he came back to his country.
In the first stanzas of part one the people speaking are the mariner and the wedding guest. What does the mariner look like? The mariner is described as an old man with a long grey beard and description makes the mariner similar to a madmen.
He has a ghostly appearance and he exerts a hypnotic power with hos glittering eye. The wedding guest reacts badly and he gets annoyed asking the mariner to hold him of immediately. He calls the mariner a crazy old man.
The end of part one reveals much about the sense of guilt that the ancient mariner fills. By telling the wedding guest that it was responsible for the killing of the Albatross, He admitted the crime committed which was not simply that killing a sea-bird but doing so he committed a crime against God and a natural creature created by him. The albatross which was sent by god to help the mariners who are stuck in the meddle of the ice is killed by the ancient mariners who fed and who liked playing with him. Coleridge decided to talk about the albatross because it is a big sea-beard which lives over the oceans; it has got long big wings. Its flight is marvellous but when it stops it looks clumsy. The Albatross is the symbol of the poet like Coleridge and stands for the duality of man who is nailed to the ground but who aspires to the infinite.
