AP Literature: 19th-20th Century Poetry POK Review

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow things, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”

Channel Firing by Thomas Hopkins

“Again the guns disturbs the hour, / Roaring their readiness to avenge, / As far inland as Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.”

London 1802 by William Wordsworth

“altar, sword, pen, / Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, / Have forfeited their ancient English dower.”

Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge

“Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.”

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

“And fare thee weel, my only luve, / And fare thee weel awhile! / And I will come again, my luve, Though it were ten thousand mile.”

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshest deep down things;”

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

“And I will love thee still, my dear, / Till a’ the seas gang dry.”

Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy

“And many a skeleton shook his head. / ‘Instead of preaching forty years,’ / My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, / “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

“And so I dare to hope, / Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first / I came among these hills; when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains.”

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

“And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

“Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss!”

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

“Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?”

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

“Dear God! the very houses’ seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

The Tyger by William Blake

“Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

“Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, / The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”

Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion / Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, / Then reached the caverns measureless to man,”

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“For tho’ from our bourne of Time and Place / The flood may bear me far, / I hope to see my Pilot face to face / When I have cross’d the bar.”

The Lamb by William Blake

“Gave thee clothing of delight, / Softest clothing wooly bright; / Gave thee such a tender voice / Making all the vales rejoice!”

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:”

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

“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!”

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

“He gave to Misery all he had, a tear / He gained from Heaven (‘Twas all he wished) a friend.”

The Lamb by William Blake

“He is meek, and He is mild / He became a little child.”

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move.”

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

“I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; / What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!”

Facing West from California’s Shores by Walt Whitman

“I, a child, very old, over waves towards the house of maternity”

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

“I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union, / An’ justified that i’ll opinion, / Which makes thee startle, / At me…”

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

“I’d rather be / A pagan sucked in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;”

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

“I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Mature’s social union.”

The Tyger by William Blake

“In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes? / On what wings dare he aspire? / What the hand, dare seize the fire?”

Facing West from California’s Shores by Walt Whitman

“Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound / I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, / the land of migrations, look afar,”

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and barely / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley

“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: / What if my leaves are falling like its own! / The turmult of thy mighty harmonies”

London, 1802 by William Wordsworth

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee: she is a fen / Of stagnant waters:”

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

“My favor at her breast, / The dropping of the daylight in the West, / The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule / She rode with round the terrace”

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

“Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read”

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

“Never did the sun more beautifully steep, / In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; / Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!”

Facing West from California’s Shores by Walt Whitman

“Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous / (But where is what I stated for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)”

London 1802 by William Wordsworth

“Oh! raise us up, return to us again; / And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

“Since then—‘this Centuries—and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity—”

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

“Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of humans misery;”

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

“Still, though art blest, compar’d wi’ me! / The present only toucheth thee.”

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Sunset, and evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea,”

Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy

“That night your great guns, unaware, / Shook all our coffins as we laya, / And broke the chancel window-squares, / We thought it was the Judgement-day”

Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

“The Carriage held but just Ourselves— / And Immortality.”

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

“The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) / And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, / How such a glance came there;”

I heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson

“The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— / And Breaths were gathering firm / For that last Onset”

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; / The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep / Moans round with many voices.”

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

“The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colors and their forms, were then to me / An appetite, a feeling, and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm, / by thought supplied,”

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

“The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.”

I heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson

“The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air— / Between the Heaves of Storm—”

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley

“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

“The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, / For this, for everything, we are out of tune;”

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley

“The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, / Each like a corpse within its grave, until / Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow”

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

“These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild”

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

“This city now doth, like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare / Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to they sky;”

• ships = merchant, military

• towers - tower of London (gov)

• domes = cathedrals (religion)

• theaters = art

• temple = religion

  • almost every facet of humanity represented

Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats

“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought, / As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!”

A Noiseless Patient Spider but Walt Whitman

“Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; / Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.”

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Twilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark! / And may there be no sadness of farewell, / When I embark;”

Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

“We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground— / The Roof was scarely visible— / The Cornice—in the Ground—”

Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge

“Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

The Tyger by William Blake

“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy Brian? / What the anvil? what dread grasp / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

Matthew Arnold

• Victorian era poet

• shared inner feelings with great clarity

• important theme: issue of faith and sense of isolation that man can feel without faith

William Blake

• Romantic era poet

• engraver, painter, spiritual visionary

• deeply religious; very consumed in mystical beliefs + withdrawn into own visionary world—many believed he was mad

• worked with wife on artistic creations (engravings + publishing books)

• wasn’t good at business (turned down publishers’ requests) + poetry and paintings not very popular—struggled close to poverty for much of life & depressed

Romantic Period Characteristics

• love of nature (viewed with reverence + awe)

• optimism that humanity could shape its destiny

• emphasis on idvidiaulism

• belief in freedom, liberty, brotherhood of man, and nationalism

• emphasis on emotion, imagination, and intuition

• interest in primitive, archaic, medical, gothic, far away in time and place

• idealization of common man

• idealization of rural life + simple lifestyle

• idealization of childhood + infancy

• interest in supernatural, strange, mysterious

• fascination with horror, death, melancholy

• tendency toward sentimentality

Victorian Period Characteristics

• reclaiming of the past, interest in classical literature and medieval English literature

• pessimism towards religion

• reflects daily life which reflects its practical problems and interest

• moral purpose—art can assert a moral purpose and instruct the world

• considered age of doubt and pessimism, influence of science is felt here, humans’ relation to universe with the idea of evolution

• idealism of truth, justice, love, brotherhood (though society characterized as practical, materialistic)

Modernism Characteristics

• strong intentional break with tradition—strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views

• no connection with history or institutions; experience of alienation, loss, and despair

• experimentation, particularly manipulation of form

• belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; the world is what we say it is

• there is no such thing as absolute truth; all things are relative

• championship of individual and celebration of inner strength

• life is unordered

• concerned with sub-conscious

Pre-Romantic Poets

• Thomas Gray

• Robert Burns

Romantic Era Poets

• William Blake

• William Wordsworth

• Samuel Coleridge

• Percy Shelley

• John Keats

Victorian Era Poets

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• Robert Browning

• Matthew Arnold

Modern Poets

• Emily Dickinson

• Walt Whitman

• Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Thomas Hardy

• W.B. Yeats

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

Structure

• meter: iambic tetrameter (A), iambic dimeter (B)

• rhyme scheme: AAABAB

• sestets (six-lines)

Content

• 2nd stanza has no Scottish dialect, plain English—poet wants everyone to understand that man breaking social union + being unkind is wrong

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

Structure (ballad stanza)

• alternating iambic tetrameter + iambic trimeter

• masculine rhyme (final stressed syllable matches)

• quatrains

The Lamb by William Blake

Structure

• ABAB—nursery rhyme vibes

• quatrains

Content

• gives answers of who created you and the [animal]

The Tyger by William Blake

Structure

• AABB (rhymed couplets)

• six quatrains

• similar structure to earlier poem poet wrote but different tone

Content

• Apostrophe (Tyger not actually there)

• Allusion to Greek God Hephaestus (created weapons + armor) with implication of Tyger being created by blacksmith

  • questioning of Christian God by asking if Greek Gods created Tyger

• Allusion to fall (Icarus + Daedalus, Pegasus + Bellerophon, Lucifer)—ties back into evil concept + asking which God is true by all belonging to different mythologies

• no answers given yet more questions asked

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

Structure (Petrarchan sonnet)

• ABBA CCDD EFEF

• octave + sestet

Content

• “lay waste to powers”—ability to feel beauty + awe with nature

• oxymoron: “sordid boon”

  • sordid = dirtied, boon = blessing/gift

  • humans gave away + dirtied hearts by straying from nature + focusing on humans innovation

• understanding of biological processing = magic + connection to nature taken away

• “getting and spending”—humans focused on material possessions

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

Structure (Petrarchan sonnet)

• ABBAABBA CDCDCD

• octave, sestet

Content

• people asleep, buildings still there—people ruining Earth, not buildings + innovation

• at the moment the city + buildings aren’t being used for burning coal + humans activity, they’re almost a part of nature

London 1802 by William Wordsworth

Structure

• ABBA ABBA CDD ECE

  • ECE is odd, breaks traditional Petrarchan rhyme scheme—-possibly represents society losing way + declining

Content

• metonym

  • fen = swamp

  • altar = religion

  • sword = military, gov

  • pen = poetry

  • fireside = home

Vocab

• bower = upper class woman’s private room

• dower = dowery

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

Structure

• blank verse

• iambic pentameter

Content

• tone: reminiscent, neglected, calm

Vocab

• roe = type of deer (moving very fast trying to escape something)

• cataract = misty waterfall

*REMEMBER WAS WRITTEN IN 1798

Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge

Structure

• iambic pentameter—because sounds like a spell

Content

• don’t disturb him since they want him to keep writing + not lose train of thought

• speaker somewhat built the dome by writing the poem

• juxtaposition with “savage” + “holy”

Vocab

• Abyssinian = modern-day Ethopia

• dulcimer = strong instrument

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

Structure

• ABABA CDC EDEFEF

• octave (description), sestet (irony)

Content

• about statue of Ramas II (pharoah in biblical story of Moses leading Jews out)

• “ye Mighthy” = Christian-Judeo God

  • wreck could have been done by god, Ramas II being vain

  • informal “ye” showing disrespect

• theme: no matter how powerful one is, everything decays

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley

Structure

• terza rima rhyme scheme (think Dante’s Interno)

• each canto has four stanzas of terza rima + rhymed couplet

Content

• canto 2 has violent tone, literally has a lighting storm

• canto 3 is peaceful with ocean

• canto 5; by writing poem he’s basically being the wind’s seeds

Vocab

• sepulcher: tomb

Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Structure

• four quatrains

• ABAB

• alternate between longer iambic pentameter and shorter iambic trimeter/dimeter

Content

• evening bell (2200, end of evening watch on ship)

• sandbar is typically seen as difference between seawater + freshwater

• pilot - harbor pilot who lets ship’s Captain know where + when to come in

Vocab

• bourne = boundary

I heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson

Structure (ballad stanza)

• quatrains

• alternating iambic trimeter + iambic tetrameter

• slant rhyme

Content

• King = God

• windows = speaker’s eyes

• expectation of seeing something grand but it’s just a simply fly

Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Content

• labor and leisure = two major parts of life in adulthood

• school = childhood, field = adulthood, setting sun = old age

• cornice = edge of roof—headstone

• all stanzas in past tense, last stanza in present tense

Facing West from California’s Shores by Walt Whitman

Structure

• free verse

Content

• circle, almost circled = westward movement, eurocentric view + manifest destiny

• child, very old = humanity

• final question unanswered because humanity doesn’t know what they’re looking for

• Asia because thought to be birthplace of humans

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Structure

• anglo-saxon verse

• sprung rhyme???

Content

• ooze of oil refers to anointment (kings)

Vocab

• brood = ponder

• reck = recognize