Ageing Essay

Thesis Point

Both poets reflect on ageing as a transformative force. Byron’s ‘So We’ll Go No More a Roving’ serves as a wistful farewell to youthful hedonism, expressing a regretful acceptance of ageing, whereas Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’ serves as an acceptance of childhood as a unique state of being, where it’s innocence inevitably becomes unattainable.

Para 1 = Thesis Point

• both poems lament the ageing process and equate ageing to loss

Para 1 = Evidence from Byron

• ‘the heart must pause to breath’

  • signifies the need for rest and reflection, even in matters of the heart and passion.

  • suggests that even intense emotions and desires, like those associated with youthful pursuits, cannot be sustained indefinitely

• ‘so we’ll go no more a roving’

  • the opening conjunction ‘so’ implies the speaker’s reluctance and regret to renounce his youthful pleasure seeking

  • further emphasised by the use of assonance in the first line (‘so’, ‘go’, ‘no’) which creates a mournful and melancholy sighing in the poem

• ABAB structure + anapest

  • the use of the ABAB rhyme scheme creates a sense of finality to the speaker’s decision to renounce his hedonistic ways

  • also reflects the rigidness of growing older

  • the lilting rhythm caused by the anapest reflects the inner desire for freedom that the ageing process denies

• ‘the day returns too soon’

  • The speaker acknowledges the passage of time and the diminishing allure of past pleasures, indicating a transition into a more mature or settled phase of life

• context

  • childe Harold = ‘The faculty is chained and tortured – cabin’d, cribb’ed, confined’

  • Rousseau = ‘man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’ - Byron’s mind roams free but his body is in chains – the inability to satiate his sexual desires

Para 1 = Evidence from Wordsworth

• ‘at length the Man perceives it die away’

  • describes the the fading of the child’s initial, vibrant perception of the world and a sense of connection to something greater

  • the individual grows into adulthood and experiences ‘the light of the common day’

  • This fading is associated with the loss of an initial, intuitive understanding of immortality and a connection to a pre-earthly existence

• ‘the Youth’ ‘growing boy’ ‘nature’s priest’

  • deeply connects with and feels a sense of reverence for the natural world

  • priest symbolizes a bridge or intermediary between the divine and the human realm

  • links to pantheism

• ‘Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’

  • again searching for the innocence lost through experience

• ‘new born bliss’

• ‘to me alone there came a thought of grief’

• ‘the clouds that gather round the setting sun do take a sober colouring from the eye’

  • could be a metaphor for the effects of experience and adulthood

• plato’s realm of forms = that souls remember a divine past – that the physical world is a realm of imperfect copies that exist in a separate higher realm

Para 2 = Thesis Point

• wordsworth = decay in the soul

• byron = physical decay

Para 2 = Evidence from Byron

• Rousseau = ‘man is born free but everywhere else he is in chains’ - Byron’s mind roams free but his body is in chains – the inability to satiate his sexual desires – and in chains by societal pressures

• childe Harold

• Byron subverts romantic poets who find solace in in nature

• ‘the soul wears out the breast’

• ‘the sword outwears its sheath’

  • phallic imagery = metaphor is saying that the “sword” is still sharp, but the sheath in which it is kept is worn out

  • can be interpreted that the desire (the sword) is still keen, but the speaker’s body has grown tired

  • the original line in a letter to Thomas Moore ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard’

  • scabbard = more commonly represents lineage and honour vs sheath = practicality

• ‘roving’

  • the verb ‘roving’ which in Old Scots means ‘wandering’, in this poem symbolises youthful pleasures and the speaker’s hedonistic night time pursuits of partying and sex

• ‘the night was made for loving’

Para 2 = Evidence from Wordsworth

• Childhood as a state of instinctive connection to the divine

• ‘our birth is but a sleep and forgetting’

  • Wordsworth proposes pre-existence of the soul, a platonic idea suggesting that children retain memories of the divine realm before birth

• ‘forget the glories he hath known’

• ‘whither is fled the visionary gleam’

  • he can still appreciate the natural beauty but the ‘visionary gleam’ of childhood is lost forever

• ‘apparelled in celestial light’

  • ‘celestial’ = connotations of divinity, beauty and otherworldliness

• ‘prison house’ ‘inmate man’

  • imagery of imprisonment = shows the limitations and entrapment within experience and adulthood

  • with imprisonment also comes the end of the sentencing, suggest

• Rousseau = ‘man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’ - We are all born with the capacity for freedom, it’s the external pressures that keep us in chains

• Platonism = innocence, as understood in a platonic context, can be seen as a state of original wholeness or a return to a higher purer form of being – often associated with lack corruption or worldly knowledge

Para 3 = Thesis Point

• wordsworth = acceptance

• byron = resistance

Para 3 = Evidence from Byron

• ‘the heart must pause to breath’ = resistance to slowing down, yet forced by time

  • the use of the verb ‘pause’ instead of stop could imply that this is a momentary/short term resolution for his problems, and that there is a likely continuation of his previous lifestyles

• ‘the day returns too soon’

• Enjambment after roving = juxtaposition between what he says and what he is going to do in actuality

• Juxtaposition between night and day = parallels internal conflict between mind vs body

• ABAB = implies continuity - duplicity in what he is saying to what he means

• ‘yet we’ll go no more a roving by the light of the moon’

  • there is a suggestion of impermanence in the last line

  • the moon has a troupe of inconsistency with its training

  • the ‘moon’ in Greek mythology is associated with the goddess Selene who drives her chariot across the sky until she meets the dawn

Para 3 = Evidence from Wordsworth

• ‘though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass’

  • the lyrical beauty underscores the irreversibility of time

  • the ‘splendour in the grass’ metaphor highlights the fleeting nature of childhood joy

  • Wordsworth acknowledges loss but also finds solace in memory and reflection

• ‘a faith that looks like death’

  • Wordsworth finds a "faith that looks through death" not in denying its reality, but in recognizing the enduring presence of the soul's innate wisdom and its capacity for profound connection with nature and the human heart

• ‘we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind’

  • the speaker concedes that he will never be able to regain the joy and innocence felt during childhood

• ‘the thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction’

  • could be religiously alluding to in Christianity, particularly Catholicism, where ‘benediction’ is the the utterance of a blessing upon the eucharistic sacrament

  • ‘perpetual benediction’ = suggests a continuous, lasting blessing or grace that the speaker receives from contemplating the past.

  • ‘breed’

• A Romantic philosophy of consolation through nature and memory, finding solace in the permanence of the spiritual and natural world despite physical decay