INTRODUCTION
I am going
to compare a Victorian poet, E. B. Browning
with the theme of my team, Love and Worship to Nature, and I am going to
compare this author with a the Romantic poet that I chose in the other paper
also with the theme of my team.
“The literary lull which followed the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and
Byron is a true age of transition, the period of the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
Features of the Victorian age began to appear: liberal legislation, a
triumphant middle class, industrial advance, proletarian unrest, religious
renewal. When Queen
Alexander, Michel. A history of English
literature,
“
Alexander, Michel. A history of English
literature,
“The Victorian poetry does not have a topic on his poems about love and
worship of Nature as the Romantics had in their poetry. It is because the
Romantics loved Nature and this was showed through their poems adoring and
blessing the Nature as if it was God”.
(http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/dm1.html 3/1/07
Section: Victorianism
Home: http://www.victorianweb.org
)
“Barret Borwing was
born at Caxhoe, Co.
Romantic women poets 1770-1838, Volume 1. Edited
by Andrew Ashfield.
I studied Elizabeth Barret Browning, a
Victorian poet and I looked for poems with the theme of my group: “Love and Worship
of nature”. What I found was some poems with features about nature as was the Sonnet
XLIV:
XLIV. Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Beloved, thou hast brought
me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all
the summer through,
And winter,
and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor
missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of
that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts
which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold
days I withdrew
From my heart's ground. Indeed,
those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter
weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet
here's eglantine,
Here's ivy!--take them, as
I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them
where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their
roots are left in mine
http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/sonnets-from-the-portuguese/44/ (4/01/07)
Section: Sonnets from the Portuguese
Home: http://www.online-literature.com/
Some other
poems with this characteristic are from the Seraphin
and other poems:
An island
IV
More like, perhaps, that
mountain piece
Of Dante’s paradise,
Disrupt to an hundred hills
like these,
In falling from the skies;
Bringing within it, all the
roots
Of heavenly trees and
flowers and fruits:
The complete poetical works
of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
The others from Seraphin and other
poems were: The desert garden, Night and the merry man, Earth and her praises and Man and Nature.
The complete poetical works
of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
From the poems of 1844 we
can emphasize Patience taught by Nature:
"O DREARY life," we
cry, "O dreary life !"
And still the generations of
the birds
Sing through our sighing, and
the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are
keeping strife
With Heaven's true purpose in
us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle ! Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards
Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn,
and rife
Meek leaves drop year]y from the forest-trees
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory: O thou God
of old,
Grant me some smaller grace
than comes to these! -
But so much patience as a
blade of grass
Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/POEMS/browning_e.asp
(4/01/07)
Section: Poems and Quotes
http://www.firstscience.com/home/
The complete poetical works
of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
From the poems of 1850 we can emphasize Heaven and Earth and A dead
rose:
A dead rose
I
O rose, who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor
soft nor sweet,
But pale and hard and dry
as stybble wheat,
Kept seven years in a drawen, thy titles shame thee.
The complete poetical works of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
She has some other poems with some quotations about Nature, but she
mention the Nature differently as the romantics had done some years before. That’s
mean that she uses the nature to talk about love, religion… not describe a
thing of the Nature that she is seeing.
“hers was, above all things, a religious
nature, and she had already passed through a deep spiritual experience”
The complete poetical works
of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
CONCLUSION
“Browning is generally considered the greatest of English poetesses. Her
works are full of tender and delicate, but also of strong and deep, thought.
Her own sufferings, combined with her moral and intellectual strength, made her
the champion of the suffering and oppressed wherever she found them. Her gift
was essentially lyrical, though much of her work was not so in form. Her weak
points are the lack of compression, an occasional somewhat obtrusive mannerism,
and frequent failure both in metre and rhyme”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning
(4/01/07)
Section: Elizabeth Barret Browning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
“Empathetic due to her own lifelong physical sufferings but evocative of
profound intellectual thought, Browning’s poems are
considered among the greatest contributions to English poetry for the
nineteenth century. Through her pen, she was passionately outspoken on issues
of social injustice like slavery, child labour, and oppression of women, and
later in life expressed her political opinions of the struggle in
http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/
(04/01/07)
Biography
written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006
Section:
Elizabeth Barret Browning
http://www.online-literature.com/
Apart of the poems mentioned, Barret has got
others with a bit reference about Nature, but the use that she had of the
Nature is very different from the use that romantics had done some years
before.
If we have to compare a poem by Barret such as
A dead rose (for example) with a poem
of a romantic poet such as Ode to West
Wind by Pierce Shelley, we find different grasps between one and the other.
Shelley was a typical romantic poet with love, beauty and nature as themes. He
describe Nature as such, he tell what he is seeing. But Barret
do not the same. She uses the Nature to express another theme that in essential
is more important than the use of the nature. But without this use of the
Nature or the nature vocabulary were not the same effect in the reader or in
who is listening the poem.
In the poem by Shelley, Ode to
West Wind, the feeling of happiness are emphasized, while in the poem A dead rose by Barret
Browning she describes the rose using some Christian features and vocabulary :
“…and mix his glory in thy gorgeous urn…”.
(A dead rose, Paragraph III. Line 3 The complete poetical works of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer books.
I think that in Victorian time the poets use the Nature in different way
that in Romantic time done. The romantics, like its name says, are bound up
with love, nature, views… These themes ever are related (for me). So, in this
way, the poem of Shelley is in the line of romantics and use the Nature as
such, describing that thing that they are looking at the moment. In Victorian
poets, they use the Nature to express his feeling to God or to other thing, but
not describe the Nature as such. An
example of this is A Dead Rose, although the title make reference to a rose, in
the poem what is describing is the death of this rose, not if she is red or
rose, nor if its tale is long or short…
So, the Victorian poets use the Nature to describe another theme, that
is much important in the poem although in a poem maybe can appear the Nature
theme.
Bibliography
-
Alexander, Michel. A history of English literature,
foundations. 2000. (“The Romantics:1790-
- http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/dm1.html (3/1/07)
Section: Victorianism
Home: http://www.victorianweb.org
-
Romantic women poets
1770-1838, Volume 1. Edited by
Andrew Ashfield.
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning
(4/01/07)
Section: Elizabeth Barret Browning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/
(4/01/07)
Biography
written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006
Section:
Elizabeth Barret Browning
http://www.online-literature.com/
-
A dead rose, Paragraph III. Line 3 The
complete poetical works of Elizabeth Barret browning.
Buccaneer books.
- http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/sonnets-from-the-portuguese/44/ (4/01/07)
Section: Sonnets from the Portuguese
Home: http://www.online-literature.com/
- The complete poetical
works of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer
books.
- The complete poetical
works of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer
books.
- http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/POEMS/browning_e.asp
(3/01/07)
Section: Poems and Quotes
http://www.firstscience.com/home/
- The complete poetical works of Elizabeth Barret
Browning. Buccaneer books.
- The complete poetical works of Elizabeth Barret
Browning. Buccaneer books.
- The complete poetical
works of Elizabeth Barret Browning. Buccaneer
books.
Academic year
2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Carmen Mora Vives
mamovi3@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press