Romantic poets and Robinson Crusoe notes

Byron’s lyric is a short Romantic compliment in three stanzas, not a satire. The paper names him G. C. Byron. A woman walks; night of cloudless climes and starry skies is the comparison. All that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. The method is simile first (“like the night”), then a balance of shade and ray. One shade the more, one ray the less, would have half impaired the nameless grace. That is not Collins’s personified Evening. Night is the measure of a face; Night is not asked to lead the poet across a heath.

The last stanza turns from face to mind: so soft, so calm, yet eloquent; smiles that win; tints that glow; a mind at peace with all below; a heart whose love is innocent. Beauty here is moral weather as well as colour. Beside Wordsworth’s wasted powers and Shelley’s unpremeditated art, this lyric is social and poised — still Romantic in the Norton-D decades, still a lyric “I” looking, but without the solitary reaper’s vale or the skylark’s sky. Keep the three stanzas and the meeting of dark and bright. Do not drag Gray’s graves into this lyric.

The syllabus prints the lyric as Ode to Autumn; Keats’s 1820 volume titles it To Autumn. Bate’s life places the ode in September 1819: three equal stanzas, a season praised without a general and without a lament for the self. Unit 1 already used it as a map of imagery and of personification. Walk it now as a whole poem. Stanza 1 is ripeness. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun: they conspire to load vines, to bend trees with apples, to swell gourds, to plump hazels, to set budding more flowers for the bees — until the bees think warm days will never cease, for summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells. Taste, touch, swell: the stanza will not hurry toward winter.

Stanza 2 asks who has not seen Autumn personified. She sits careless on a granary floor, her hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; or sleeps on a half-reaped furrow, drowsed with poppies, the hook spared the next swath; or like a gleaner keeps a steady head across a brook; or watches a cider-press, hour by hour, the last oozings. Four poses, one body of the season. This is not Collins’s modest Eve of air; it is labour and rest in a farmyard. Stanza 3 refuses spring-envy: “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” Barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day; gnats mourn in a wailful choir, borne aloft or sinking; full-grown lambs bleat; hedge-crickets sing; the red-breast whistles; gathering swallows twitter. The close is music, not a funeral. Bate’s Keats accepts the season. Do not call the ode an elegy because the day dies. Seasonal close is not Gray’s churchyard.

Shelley’s lyric, in the Reiman–Fraistat text the paper names, is a high song of address, not the two poems this list calls odes. Hail to thee, blithe Spirit — bird thou never wert — that from heaven, or near it, pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. The skylark is seen as a flight and heard as a flood. It is compared, then the comparisons fail, which is the poem’s method: each simile tries to say what the song is, and each is less than the song.

A poet hidden in the light of thought; a high-born maiden in a palace-tower soothing her love-laden soul; a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew; a rose embowered in its own green leaves: the list is famous because it keeps missing. We look before and after, and pine for what is not; our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. The bird has never known love’s sad satiety. Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know, the speaker says, and such harmonious madness would flow from my lips that the world should listen then, as I am listening now. Beside Keats’s earthly granary, this is vertical joy. Beside Wordsworth’s reaper, the song is not in an unknown human tongue; it is more than human. Curran’s Romantic imagination is the power that hears a spirit in a bird. Keep “unpremeditated art,” the failed similes, and the last plea to be taught gladness. Do not retitle the poem an ode unless a question compares height of style with Collins or Keats.

This is a Petrarchan sonnet (octave + sestet), fourteen lines on getting and spending. Gill’s life and Hartman’s study of the poetry sit behind the voice: a mind that wants nature as teacher and finds the commercial world too loud. The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in Nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. The sea that bares her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours and are now gathered up like sleeping flowers — for these, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not.

The volta wishes a pagan creed. Great God! I’d rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, so that I might, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn — see Proteus rising from the sea, hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. The sonnet does not convert England to Greece. It uses Greek sea-gods as a shock: even an outworn myth would still see the water. Beside Blake’s Tyger, the Maker is not a smith; the loss is attention. Beside the Solitary Reaper, this lyric has no song filling a vale — only a complaint that we no longer hear the world. Form reminder: sonnet, not ode, not elegy. Proteus and Triton are images in this sonnet, not extra set poems.

The second Wordsworth lyric is a song of overhearing, in four stanzas, closer to a ballad than to a sonnet. Behold her, single in the field, yon solitary Highland lass, reaping and singing by herself. Stop here, or gently pass. She cuts and binds the grain, and sings a melancholy strain. The vale profound is overflowing with the sound. Hartman would say the mind is filled by a voice more than by a face: we see her “single,” but the poem’s work is the song in the air.

No nightingale among Arabian sands ever chanted so welcome a note to weary bands of travellers. A cuckoo-bird in spring among the farthest Hebrides never broke the silence of the seas with a voice so thrilling. The comparisons, like Shelley’s, exalt the human song by failing to match it — yet here the singer is a working girl, not a spirit-bird. Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps unhappy, far-off things, battles long ago; perhaps some familiar matter of today, sorrow, loss, or pain that has been and may be again. The tune is in a tongue the speaker does not have. He does not need the words. The music stays: “The music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more.” Gill’s Wordsworth makes memory a second hearing. Beside “The World Is Too Much with Us,” this poem is the repair: not Triton on a lea, but a Highland voice that the heart can keep. Stay with these two lyrics.

The official limit is lines 1–55. Do not tell the rest of the fragment, the bedroom, or a second woman’s full tale. What is set is the haunted approach. Midnight by the castle clock; owls wake the crowing cock; Sir Leoline’s toothless mastiff answers the hour with short howls — some say she sees my lady’s shroud. The night is chilly but not dark: a thin gray cloud covers, but does not hide, the sky; the moon is full and still looks small and dull. It is a month before May; spring comes slowly. That weather is the contract of Unit 1’s willing suspension of disbelief: you are not asked for a magistrate’s proof that a dog sees a shroud.

The lovely lady Christabel, whom her father loves so well, is a furlong from the castle gate in the wood. She had dreams of her betrothed knight; at midnight she will pray for the weal of her lover far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke; the oak has little green but moss and mistletoe. She kneels and prays in silence. Then a moan, as near as near can be, on the other side of the huge oak. Is it the wind? There is not wind enough to move a ringlet from her cheek, nor to twirl the one red leaf, the last of its clan, that dances on the topmost twig. Common numbering closes the set extract on the hushed heart and the prayer: Jesu, Maria, shield her well. Do not go on to name the stranger on the far side of the oak. The supernatural is granted as weather and sound, not as a second woman’s story. Curran and Wu’s Romantic night is this wood, not Gray’s moral churchyard. Crusoe, next, will ask for the opposite faith — dates and tools.

Richetti’s critical biography is the paper’s named book for Defoe. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is earlier than Gray and earlier than the Romantic lyrics; Unit 1 already placed it under realism as a mode. It is not a picaresque string of rogues, not an epistolary novel of letters, not a textbook bildungsroman. It is a first-person story that imitates a true journal: dates, storms, tools, the labour of staying alive. Crusoe, of York, is bred to the middle station of life. His father warns him to stay there. He will not. The sea calls. That restlessness is the first fact — not yet an island.

He goes to sea, knows terror in a storm, still sails again. He is taken by a Sallee rover and lives as a slave; he escapes with the boy Xury; a Portuguese captain lands him in Brazil, where he becomes a planter. Profit tempts a slave-trading voyage to Africa. The ship is wrecked. He alone is cast on an island near the mouth of the Orinoco. Before the wreck is a chain of refusals: home, advice, the middle station. After the wreck the book becomes inventory. Richetti’s Defoe makes economic man and spiritual man share one notebook. You do not need every port. You need: York, the father’s warning, slavery and Brazil, the wreck, one survivor. The island lessons follow.

Realism on this paper is the claim that circumstance is enough for art. Crusoe swims to the wreck as long as it holds, and ferries out biscuit, tools, guns, seed, ink, a Bible. He builds a habitation against a rock, keeps a calendar by cuts on a post, sows barley and rice, tames goats, makes a canoe too heavy to launch, learns to bake bread. Illness brings a dream and a turning: he opens the Bible; deliverance becomes a spiritual word as well as a ship. The island is not a romance garden. It is work. Detail is how the world is said to be there.

Then the shock that is not a tool: a footprint in the sand. Fear of cannibals. He fortifies. He watches from a height. Years pass in that weather of dread and husbandry — the book gives him about twenty-eight years on the island. Friday arrives later — a man saved from death, named for the day, taught English and Crusoe’s God, companion and servant in one. Mutineers, an English captain, the voyage home, wealth waiting in Brazil: the book returns him to money and law. Hold the method more than a mere plot-list. Inventory, journal-voice, labour, conversion, footprint, Friday, return. Coleridge asked you to grant a haunted oak; Defoe asks you to grant a ledger. Both are faith. They are not the same contract. Do not call Crusoe Gothic: the island is work and fear, not a castle-romance.