SECOND PAPER
Subject : # 14217 Poesia Anglesa
dels segles XIX i XX Grupo C
Student´s name : Sanchis Santacatalina, Francisco Miguel
Title of the paper : Lord Byron in Robert Browning
Author or topic : Lord Byron and Robert Browning
She walks in beauty – Lord Byron
She walks in beauty, like the
night
Of cloudless climes and starry
skies;
And all that's best of dark and
bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that
brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that
glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
She Walks in Beauty -
Lord Byron
First of all, I will start to analyse the contents of both poems, the first one
written by George Gordon Byron, on 12th June in 1814, the day after
of first-seeing his cousin Lady Anne Wilmot Horton, who wore black mourning
clothes, which, when combined with her pale face, seemed him the night and the
stars. And the next morning of this party in which met his cousin, He started to
write this poem that is not necessarily a love poem, but it is a poem which
exalt the subject’s beauty.
The first impression to the reader of this poem is
about a pure innocence, the castity of the beauty of a woman. Is the eye of the
poet who purify the beauty of the woman.
Another important point of view on the poem is the
game that Byron uses between darkness and lightness, bright and Shadows, Lord
Byron proposes a beauty thing where is in the light and in the shadows at the
same time. We can observe it on the three initial lines.
She walks in beauty, like the
night
Of cloudless climes and starry
skies;
And all that's best of dark and
bright
For Byron the idea of one beauty, that it shows us,
and hide us, is present in the first stanza and so we can observe the
comparison over a starry night.
The second stanza,
in the first verse we see a radical change about the first stanza
One shade the more, one ray the
less,
Observe that seems more important the shadow side,
than the bright one and go on with the idea of love like hidden thing in this
stanza the beauty is already imposible of contemplation because is too hidden
and dark to be treated.
In the third stanza, another turn into the
conception of light and dark, darkness disappears and only the light is the
used field in the poem. So the light of the things, show the beauty a little
bit more reachable, because seems more real. The beauty don’t be dark, but
there is a weak blanket of dark that don’t let us show the real light of the
things.
RHYTHM AND METER
This poem have a masculine rhyme, and the structure
is clear have 18 verses structured in the next way.
She walks in beauty, like the
night A
Of cloudless climes and starry
skies; B
And all that's best of dark and
bright A
Meet in her aspect and her eyes: B
Thus mellow'd to that tender light A
Which heaven to gaudy day denies. B
One shade the more, one ray the less, C
Had half impair'd the nameless grace D
Which waves in every raven tress, C
Or softly lightens o'er her face; D
Where thoughts serenely sweet express C
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. D
And on that cheek, and o'er that
brow, E
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, F
The smiles that win, the tints that
glow, E
But tell of days in goodness spent, F
A mind at peace with all below,
E
A heart whose love is innocent. F
Is a composition written in an Iambic tetrameter,
we can oberve it
* / * / * / * /
The / smiles // that / win,// the /
tints // that / glow,//
There are four feet in each line, and each feet is
composed by an unstressed beat follow than and stressed one this is the cause
of that poem is written in an Iambic Tetrameter.
Meeting at night – Robert Browning
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
This poem is a love story
between two lovers, who have decided to gather in the night at some place, The
couple desire to be together and never mind what the difficulties they have to
pass before, the really important here is to end together.
We can observe through this poem, the importance of
the time and the distance, first seemed to won’t be together, there’s a
separation between their.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
Seems that all is more difficult than they want, the
landscape is dark, and there aren’t quite hope. Means that without she his life
is black, dark.
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
The man is arriving to she with his boat, and
the landscape turn to a ray of hope and light, and he looking for his lover. The
fields represent the slow pace in the
relationship, and the farm becames a way of stability. The joys and fears it
refers to the joys when they’re together and the fear of the separation, the
Death.
There’s a change of vocabulary in the timeline
of the poem. At the beginning the adjectives refers to darkness,
loneliness, but as the poem goes on,
the adjectives are more warm, and later on in the final part of the poem is
full of enthusiasm, there are joy.
There are two stanzas, in the first one we can
see how the way to reach the lover is, and the difficulties that they have to
pass in his boat to reach her. In the second one, we can observe the second
part of the way to arrive to her, and finally how the couple meet at the night,
like if someone were commiting a sin, and nobody could see together.
RHYTHM AND METER
The grey sea and the long black land; A
And the yellow half-moon large and low; B
And the startled little waves that leap C
In fiery ringlets from their sleep, C
As I gain the cove with pushing prow, B
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. A
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; D
Three fields to cross till a farm appears; E
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch F
And blue spurt of a lighted match, F
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, E
Than the two hearts beating each to each! D
The poem have two stanzas, each one is composed by six
lines, parallels with a masculine
Rhyme.
Beach-each
Appears-fears
Scratch-match
The poem like Byron’s She walks in beauty, is an Iambic Tetrameter, so
have four feet in each line, and composed each for a first unstressed beat, and
then a stressed one. For example:
* / * / * / * /
Than / the // two / hearts // beating / each //
to / each!//
We can observe mostly in the
early time, in Browning’s poetry how the Romantic poets influenced him
basically Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley due to the library that He
possess in his father’s house.
In those poems that I have
analyzed above, we could stop to observ its lexic, the way to describe all, the
admiration for the dark facts to show the beauty of the things and throughout
the poems, when the poems are reaching the end, sobtly the point of the
adjectives turn radically and change to a aspects that seems to you more light,
bright and things that you believe that the beauty is there, I mean that the
beauty is not as misterious than when the poem begin.
The religion in Robert Browning
is very complicated to define, because his mother who had enourmous ties to the
congregational church, tried to taught his little Robert to the Christian
Religion, but he shows signs of desinterest in the religion in his early
childhood, when he was around fifteen or sixteen years, he discovered the
poetry of Shelley who was an atheist, and this poetry impacted too much in him,
and Robert left the Catholic religion to became Atheist like her model of hero,
whe she reads Shelley Queen Mab who taught Browning to be an
indepent free thinker and rejected his mum world of religion to gain a sense of
liberty and independence. But when he meet his wife Elizabeth Barrett an
extremely religious woman, his faith and his way of see the religion changed
and Robert Browning realize that believe in Shelley had conduced to a life of
self-absortion. So, Robert took the decission of to return to the Christian
faith, perhaps due to the respect of his mother beliefs or the second and most
probable the persuasion of his wife Elizabeth, In his work Pauline we
can observe that the work reveals a return to God. In these says Charles Darwin
published his The Origin of Species and revoke God in the way of
creating the world and the animals, but Robert Browning saw this science
revolution as a bridge connecting God and man, in Paracelsus
Browning the faiths is already evident, He comes
to the realization that through God, everything exists, and also through God,
the poetic talent he possesses was given.
Around 1845 he begin to dislike with the church he was anger with the
church as institution, especially the Catholic Church. In 1855 wrote Fra Lippo Lippi and criticize the
fact of the Christianity was too ideal for humanity, he had strong belief and
faith in the existance of God, but also disdain in the institution that
followed him. In 1849 his mother dies, and he blame himself of his death due to
hurt her in the religion position abandon her principles. When he was getting
older, death became an event present danger and he was confronted with the
thought of hell condemnation and a fear of the existence of God. Robert
Browning turned his heart and his soul toward teh Church and all of its
principles. He was able to accept
Christian dogma and believed in God as part of his life. In his poetry there is
an evidence of God and christianity but in both positive and negative aspects.
Both aspects help him to make faith decisions and come to a conclusion that
could live him in peace.
Bibliography
Poems
in English traduct to Spanish <http://poemaseningles.blogspot.com>
Representative Poetry Online
<http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem365.html>.
Ezine
articles <http://www.ezinearticles.com/?she-walks-in-beauty,-a-discussion-of-the-poem-by-lord-byron&id=80761>
Enotes <http://enotes.com/she-walks>.
British
Council <http://www.britishcouncil.org/poem.doc>
Bartleby
<http://bartleby.com/223/0302.html>
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_byron
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning>
Golden
Essays http://www.goldenessays.com/free_essays/1/biographies/robert-browning.shtml
Academic year 2007/2008
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Francisco Miguel Sanchis Santacatalina
franmi6 @alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press