Responding to Romantic Poetry

Read all of the poems on the handout.  The poems below are to be read more carefully.  Choose two poet/poem selections and give short answers to the questions given.

Blake – “The Chimney Sweeper” (both poems)

·         Discuss the contrasts of the two poems.

·         What ideas of injustice are presented in the individual poems?

·         What images or symbols are given?

Wordsworth – “Tintern Abbey”

·         What effects do the objects of nature have on the poet

·         What part does memory play in the poem?

·         What is the tone of the poem?

Coleridge – “The Aeolian Harp”

·         An Aeolian (or wind) harp is symbolic of both order and wildness in nature.  How is this expressed in the poem?

·         What conflicts of faith or philosophy present themselves in this poem?

·         What analogy is Coleridge making with the harp?

Byron –“ She Walks in Beauty”

·         To what aspects of nature is the woman’s beauty compared?

·         What opposites are mentioned?

·         How does the poet express ideas of purity and innocence?

Shelley – “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

·         What qualities of beauty does the poem explore?

·         What effect does the intellectual idea of beauty (“spirit of beauty”) have on mankind?

·         What hints does the poem give that Shelley is an atheist?

Keats – “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

·         How does the urn exist outside of time constraints?

·         How does the poet try to engage with the stories on the urn?

·         What aspects of the permanent nature of the scenes on the urn are positive and what are negative?