Brit Lit Romantic Exam

"Teach us, Sprite or Bird, / What sweet thoughts are thine; / I have never heard / Praise of love or wine / That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "To a Sky-Lark."

Analyze this passage. "What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp? / Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

William Blake, "The Tyger," Songs of Experience. | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Rhymed lyric from Songs of Experience, largely trochaic tetrameter. The hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil turn creation into an act of dangerous forging; the creator resembles a blacksmith, possibly a divine maker whose power is both terrifying and sublime. The barrage of questions refuses an easy answer about how beauty and violence coexist. Class themes: broken bounds, the terrifying creative imagination, and the relationship between innocence and experience; compare the gentleness of “The Lamb.”

"The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor slave's heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these."

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself."

“this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"A savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan."

Analyze this passage. "I am aware of an obvious inference:--from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;--all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine."

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Feminist philosophical and political prose argument (polemic). Wollstonecraft questions the label “masculine women”: she rejects fashionable masculine pastimes but embraces reason, courage, and virtue as human rather than exclusively male qualities. Her ironic reversal exposes how gender norms constrain women’s intellectual development. Larger themes: universal moral standards, education, and society’s corruption of human potential; like Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles,” conventions limit freedom.

"Mrs. Williams was a kind-hearted good woman, and she treated all her slaves well. She had only one daughter, Miss Betsey, for whom I was purchased, and who was about my own age. I was made quite a pet of by Miss Betsey, and loved her very much. She used to lead me about by the hand, and call me her little nigger. This was the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow."

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself."

“chastity must more universally prevail, and that chastity will never be respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized, when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty, or the interesting simplicity of affection”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"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?"

William Blake, "The Tyger," Songs of Experience.

"Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind."

"It is an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgement the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves."

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

"For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still sad music of humanity"

William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour."

"Upon the moon I fixed my eye, / All over the wide lea; / With quickening pace my horse drew nigh / Those paths so dear to me."

William Wordsworth, "Strange fits of passion have I known."

"Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue...In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God."

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Analyze this passage. "My old master often got drunk, and then he would get in a fury with his daughter, and beat her till she was not fit to be seen. I remember on one occasion, I had gone to fetch water, and when I was coming up the hill I heard a great screaming; I ran as fast as I could to the house, put down the water, and went into the chamber, where I found my master beating Mrs. D-- dreadfully. I strove with all my strength to get her away from him; for she was all black and blue with bruises...He turned round and began to lick me. Then I said, "Sir, this is not Turk's Island.""

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself." | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: First-person autobiographical slave narrative, mediated in its publication but centered on Prince’s testimony. The domestic scene reveals the master’s violence toward his own daughter and Prince’s courageous intervention, undermining any idea that slavery produces benevolent family relationships. “This is not Turk’s Island” challenges his power by invoking a different place and its limits. Larger themes: the brutalization of enslavers and the enslaved, gendered violence, resistance, and the gap between Christian/British self-image and colonial practice.

"And what shoulder, & what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat, / What dread hand? & what dread feet?"

William Blake, "The Tyger," Songs of Experience.

"I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptability of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with the epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt."

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"And that simplest lute, / Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! / How by the desultory breeze caressed, / Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp."

"Do passive indolent women make the best wives?...Do the women, who, by the attainment of a few superficial accomplishments, have strengthened the prevailing prejudice, merely contribute to the happiness of their husbands? Do they display their charms merely to amuse them? And have women, who have early inhibited notions of passive obedience, sufficient character to manage a family or educate children?"

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability."

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Analyze this passage. "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads. | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Critical prose preface / statement of Romantic poetic theory. Wordsworth says poetry begins in powerful feeling but is made through recollection and contemplation during calm: emotion is revived and shaped rather than merely discharged in the moment. The sequence from tranquillity to renewed feeling emphasizes memory and the creative mind. Larger themes: the value of ordinary experiences, inward reflection, emotion, and imagination in Romantic poetry.

"And now we reached the orchard-plot; / And, as we climbed the hill, / The sinking moon to Lucy's cot / Came near, and nearer still"

William Wordsworth, "Strange fits of passion have I known."

"How the Chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackning Church appalls, / And the hapless Soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls."

William Blake, "London," Songs of Experience.

"--A simple Child, / That lightly draws its breath, / And feels its life in every limb, / What should it know of death?"

William Wordsworth, "We Are Seven."

"They were not all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people's hearts towards the blacks; and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud, without regard to our grief-though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts. Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves."

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself."

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove, / A Maid whom there were none to praise / And very few to love."

William Wordsworth, "She dwelt among the untrodden ways."

"Better than all measures / Of delightful sound- / Better than all treasures / That in books are found- / The skill to poet were, thou Scorner of the ground!"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "To a Sky-Lark."

""The first that died was sister Jane; / In bed she moaning lay, / Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away.""

William Wordsworth, "We Are Seven."

"When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears, / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"

William Blake, "The Tyger," Songs of Experience.

"I heard a thousand blended notes, / While in a grove I sate reclined, / In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind."

William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring."

"How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? and are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts? -- and are separated from their mothers, and husbands, and children, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated?"

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself."

"I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie up slaves like hogs-moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged;-and yet they come home and say, and make some good people believe, that slaves don't want to get out of slavery"

Mary Prince, "The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself."

""And where are they? I pray yiou tell." / She answered. "Seven are we; / And two of us at Conway dwell, / And two are gone to see."

William Wordsworth, "We Are Seven."

Analyze this passage. "For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils"

William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud." | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Lyric poem in regular six-line stanzas with an ABABCC rhyme scheme. The “inward eye” names memory/imagination: the speaker can recollect the daffodils when alone and revive the pleasure first experienced in nature. The dancing heart transforms a visual natural scene into continuing spiritual/emotional wealth. Larger themes: nature’s restorative influence, emotion recollected later, and the creative power of the mind, as described in Wordsworth’s Preface.

"Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song, / To such a deep delight 'twould win me"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan."

"I have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; / And passing even into my purer mind, / With tranquil restoration:--feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, / As have no slight or trivial influence / On that best portion of a good man's life"

William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour."

"If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; / If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; / A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind."

Analyze this passage. "For never guiltless may I speak of him, / The Incomprehensible! save when with awe / I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; / Who with his saving mercies healed me, / A sinful and most miserable man, / Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess / Peace, and this cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp." | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Conversation poem in blank verse. After imagining a pervasive, creative presence in nature, the speaker corrects himself and professes faith in a transcendent God; his grateful address to his wife (“thee, heart-honored Maid”) closes on domestic harmony. The shift reveals tension between visionary or pantheistic speculation and orthodox religious/social expectations. Class theme: restoring harmony of marriage may come at the cost of the poem’s more expansive harmony with nature and imagination.

"No motion has she now, no force; / She neither hears nor sees; / Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees."

William Wordsworth, "A slumber did my spirit seal."

"The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much affect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone."

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

""But they are dead; those two are dead! / Their spirits are in heaven!" / 'Twas throwing words away; for still / The little Maid would have her will, / And said, "Nay, we are seven!""

William Wordsworth, "We Are Seven."

"I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe."

William Blake, "London," Songs of Experience.

"Still in thought as free as ever / What are England's rights, I ask, / Me from my delights to sever, / Me to torture, me o ask? / Fleecy locks and black complexion / Cannot forfeit Nature's claim; / Skins may differ, but Affection / Dwells in White and Black the same."

William Cowper, "The Negro's Complaint."

“now that more equitable laws are forming your citizens, marriage may become more sacred: your young men may choose wives from motives of affection, and your maidens allow love to root out vanity”

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"In one of those sweet dreams I slept, / Kind Nature's gentlest boon! / And all the while my eyes I kept / On the descending moon"

William Wordsworth, "Strange fits of passion have I known."

"If this belief from heaven be sent, / If such be Nature's holy plan, / Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of man?"

William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring."

"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"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan."

"Women are, therefore, to be considered either as moral beings, or so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men."

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Analyze this passage. "And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling in the light of setting suns"

William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour." | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Meditative lyric in blank verse, often called a conversation poem. The “presence” that is “far more deeply interfused” makes the natural world seem spiritually interconnected rather than a collection of separate objects; the paradox of being “disturb[ed]” by joy registers awe. Unlike his thoughtless youthful response to scenery, the mature speaker discovers moral and spiritual meaning in nature. Larger themes: the imagination unifying mind and nature, growth through memory, and healing fragmentation.

Analyze this passage. "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."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind." | ANALYSIS — Genre/form: Ode, using terza-rima-linked stanzas and a closing couplet in each section. The simile of seeds lying “like a corpse within its grave” connects apparent death with latent new life, while spring is personified as the west wind’s “azure sister.” The seasonal cycle becomes an image of apocalypse as both destruction and rebirth. Larger themes: poetry’s power to renew the imagination and, potentially, society; Shelley asks the wind to scatter his own “dead thoughts” as seeds of transformation.

"Little Lamb, who made thee?"

William Blake, "The Lamb," Songs of Innocence.

"A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye! / Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky"

William Wordsworth, "She dwelt among the untrodden ways."

"And thus, my love! as on the midway slope / Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, / Whilst through my half-closed eye lids I behold / The sunbeams dance, like diamond, on the main, / And tranquil muse upon tranquility"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp."

"My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, / Knowing that Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, / Through all the years of this our life, to lead, / From joy to joy: for she can so inform / The mind that is within us, so impress / With quietness and beauty, and so feed / With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues."

William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour."

"What fond and wayward thoughts will slide / Into a Lover's head! / "O mercy!" to myself I cried, / "If Lucy should be dead!""

William Wordsworth, "Strange fits of passion have I known."

"The waves beside them danced; but they / Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: / A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company: / I gazed-and gazed-but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought"

William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud."