A03 Love Through the Ages - Poetry Context

Who So List to Hount (Wyatt)

Petrarch (14th Century) sonnet - idealisation of the unattainable, painful, powerful effect of love.
Hunting was a game, and status symbol of courtiers.
Wyatt translated Petrarchan sonnets into Engish, popular in court of Henry VIII.
Potentially about Anne Boleyn, executed for infidelity, an alleged childhood friend, imprisoned at the same time as Wyatt.
Petrarch's Rime 190, Caesar decrees she be free, Deer has a necklace of diamond (steadfastness) and topaz (chastity), not a hunt, just a chase.

Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare)

Shakepearean sonnet, three sections (develop points) and conclusion couplet.
Classical imagery often mixed with Christian imagery (here rejected).
Develops Petrarch, rejects idealisation and pain of love.
Language is both formal, "Lov's not Times foole" and informal - "O no... upon me proved, / I never writ", more accessible.

The Flea (Donne)

Metaphysical - ingenuity, argument and stylistic obscurity, uses 'conceits' to argue.
Samuel Johnson suggested they lacked feeling, with strange imagery, but they are now considered exciting and skillful.
Religious confusion, manipulated politically.
Shift from romance, to sexuality, without regard for the impact on the female.
Donne's brother died in prison (for Catholicism), he became Prot. Priest.
1633, but thought to be earlier work.
No longer a lament of love, but a method of wooing.

My Coy Mistress (Marvell)

Mocks Petrarchan idealisation of a woman, becoming threatening - one of the last metaphysical poets.
Cavalier idea of 'Carpe Diem', satarised Puritan preaching though Protestant.
Chauser, Miller's Tale, "full prively he caught her by the queinte".
East India Company, more influential from 1650s: "Thou by the Indian Ganges side / Should'st Rubies find: I by the Tide / Of Humber would complain."
Priapus ("vegetable Love should grow") - phallic diety, linked to gardens and vegetables.

The Garden of Love (Blake)

Songs of Innocence and Experience - contrasts childhood with adulthood.
Romantic poetry rejected Enlightenment rationality, and focused on feeling.
Accessible - language less formal, though not yet balladic or colloquial.
Blake viewed church as corrupt and non-biblical.
John Smith's biography refers to him singing his 'Songs'.

Song (Ae Fond Kiss) (Burns)

Agnes Maclehose - final fairwell. Not fictional, deeply personal.
She left for her family, he was already married.
Farmer's son, given education, using dialect ("Ae... nae... ilka) and ballad.
Simplistic - song-like, fresh, and accessible.

She Walks in Beauty (Byron)

Later-Romantic, but criticised earlier Romantics.
Presbyterian Nurse shared her faith with him, which he respected until death.
Poem about Mrs John Wilmont - a cousin-by-marriage - who wore a dress of mourning with spangles, at a party.
"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know"
"speaker of this poem knows things about the woman he would not know if he existed in the real world." - David Kelly.

La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad (Keats)

Looming death - fell in love with Fanny Brawne, while dying of Tuberculosis.
Balladic - in keeping with Wordsworth and Coleridges' Lyrical Ballads. Rejects traditional Balladic structure (alternating tetrameters and trimeters), unfullfilled.
Like Wordsworth, rejected 'cultural intellegentsia', a "vulgar cockney poetaster", John Gibson Lockhart.
Widely-read in Shakespeare, Spencer and classical myth.
Dissapointed with women, who he wanted to be better than men, but found to be equals. Was tempted by women.

At an Inn (Hardy)

Difficult marriage with first wife, Emma, but fell in love with Florence Henniker (a writer), who he invited to a hotel in Winchester. Rumour suggests they were offered a single bed, but there is no evidence of a relationship.
Critical of social hypocricy and defended women's rights.

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae (Dowson)

I am not as I was in the reign of the good Cinara, a poem by Horace, in which the speaker believes himself to old for love, so begs Venus to stop making him fall in love. Cynara \= artichoke (lost love).
Decadence movement - rejected moral codes, and encouraged promiscuity. Artifice was preferred over the natural.
Dowson fell in love with an eleven-year old, who married someone else, four years later.
Archaic and gothic language mixed.