GOVERNMENT ARTS COLLEGE [AUTONOMOUS],
SALEM-7


MAJOR : I M.A.ENGLISH


SEMESTER : II


COURSE : CORE-V THE ROMANTIC AGE


COURSE CODE : PELCC05









Tintern Abbey (poem):
"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye Valley during a tour, July 13, 1798"[1] (often abbreviated to "Tintern Abbey", "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" or simply "Lines") is a poem by William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is a real-life abbey abandoned in 1536 and located in the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire. The poem is of particular interest in that Wordsworth's descriptions of the Banks of Wye outline his general philosophies on nature.
It also has significance as the terminal poem of Lyrical Ballads, although it does not fit well into the titular category, being more protracted and elaborate than its predecessors. It was, however, the only poem in Wordsworth's oeuvre of which he did not revise even a word for later publications, saying of it that he never wrote under circumstances more congenial.
Themes and context
"Tintern Abbey" is a poem of re-visitation, both to the central themes of the Advertisement, and to nature itself. Wordsworth returns to the abbey after a five-year absence, having changed so much that "I cannot paint / What then I was",[2] having then had no knowledge of the sublime, and no "feeling" towards nature. To emphasize the reminiscent quality of the poem, he uses the word "again" repeatedly.
The poem has its roots in history. Accompanied by his sister Dorothy (whom he addresses warmly in the final paragraph as "thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend"[3]), Wordsworth did indeed revisit the abbey on the date stipulated after half a decade's absence. His previous visit had been on a solitary walking tour as a twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. His life had since taken a considerable turn: he had split with his French lover and their bastard daughter, while on a broader note Anglo-French tensions had escalated to such an extent that Britain would declare war later that year. The Wye, on the other hand, had remained much the same, according the poet opportunity for contrast. A large portion of the poem explores the impact of preterition, contrasting the obviousness of it in the visitor with its seamlessness in the visited. This theme is emphasized from the start in the line "Five years have passed..."[4]
Although written in 1798, the poem is in large part a recollection of Wordsworth's visit of 1793. It also harks back in the imagination to a time when the abbey was not in ruins, and dwells occasionally on the present and the future as well. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years. Notably, the abbey itself is nowhere described.
Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and crossing the Wye, and not jotting so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. In all, it took him four to five days' rambling about with his sister.[5] Although Lyrical Ballads was by then already in publication, he was so pleased with this offering that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour, as the concluding poem. It is unknown whether this placement was intentional, but scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that followed.
Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic. Wordsworth styles himself as a "worshipper of Nature" with a "far deeper zeal / Of holier love",[6] seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mystical intuition of the divine.
Style and structure
The poem is written in tightly-structured blank verse and comprises verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas. It is unrhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains elements of all of the ode, the dramatic monologue and the conversation poem. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted:
I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition.
At its beginning, it may well be dubbed an Eighteenth-Century "landscape-poem", but it is commonly agreed that the best designation would be the conversation poem.[7]
Lines 1-24
Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye fills the poet with a sense of "tranquil restoration".
Line 38
By the "sublime", Wordsworth means a type of divine creativity or inspiration. This was a theme much in vogue during the Romantic period.
Lines 35-49
Wordsworth says that the gifts given him by the abbey (such as "tranquil restoration") have in so doing accorded him yet another, still more sublime: it has relieved him of a giant burden -- his doubts about God, religion and the meaning of life.
Lines 88-103
After contemplating the few changes in scenery since last he visited, Wordsworth is overcome with "a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns".[8] He is met with the divine as "a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things".[9] These are perhaps the most telling lines in Wordsworth's connection of the "sublime" with "divine creativity", the result of allowing nature to become "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being".[10]
Lines 114-160
In the final stanza, Wordsworth addresses his sister, who did not accompany him on his original visit to the abbey, and perceives in the delight she shows at the resplendence and serenity of their environs a poignant echo of his former self.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality:
GENERAL INTRODUCTION:
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood" is a long ode in eleven sections by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. It is a deeply philosophical work, with themes ranging from the Platonic belief in pre-existence, to Wordsworth's belief that children have an instinctive wisdom that adults lack. Composed at Grasmere, in the English Lake District, between 1802 and 1804, "Intimations of Immortality" was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). Arranged in eleven stanzas of anywhere from eight to forty lines each, the poem is written in anisometric verse, with lines of varied iambic stresses.
INTRODUCTION TO THE POEM:
Wordsworth applies memories of his early childhood to his adult philosophy of life. According to the author's prose introduction, "Intimations of Immortality" was inspired in part by Platonic philosophy. Plato taught pre-existence, meaning that the soul dwelled in an ideal alternate state prior to its present occupation of the body, and the soul will return to that ideal previous state after the body's death. The immortality the title refers to is the immortality of the soul, which Wordsworth maintains is felt or intimated during early childhood. Hence Wordsworth's famous line: "The Child is Father of the Man."
SUMMARY OF THE POEM:
1."Intimations of Immortality" begins with the speaker recalling how nature and "every common sight" once seemed divine to him.
2.In Stanza II, he reminds himself that rainbows and the like are still "beautiful and fair" to him, but nevertheless he feels "there hath past [passed] away a glory from the earth."
3.In Stanza III, he feels that no private grief can diminish the joyous quality of nature.
4.He feels nature's joy in the fourth stanza, but the feeling quickly fades.
5.In Stanza V, Wordsworth begins to philosophize in earnest. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," he says, for our souls originate in a purer, more glorious realm: heaven itself.
6.Small children retain some memory of paradise, which glorifies their experiences on earth, but youths begin to lose it, and adults, distracted by earthly concerns, entirely forget it .
7.Next, the speaker observes a six-year-old boy mimicking adult behavior in his play, "as if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation."
8.In Stanza VIII, the speaker addresses the child, wondering why he, "thou best Philosopher" and "Mighty Prophet," imitates adult behavior as though he were eager to hasten "the inevitable yoke" of earthly cares and customs ("freight").
9.In the ninth stanza, the speaker rejoices that his memories of childhood ("those shadowy recollections" that "are yet a master light of all our seeing") remain to inspire him.
10. In the tenth stanza, he calls on the birds to sing and the lambs to bound, to share his joy. Instead of mourning the loss of childhood innocence and wisdom, the speaker vows to "find / Strength in what remains behind" and to develop a mature "philosophic mind", 'which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the child's feeling of immortality.'
11.Wordsworth sums up his philosophy in the final stanza (XI). His mature mind, he says, 'enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature's objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can raise in him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."'
CONCLUSION:
Stirringly written with 'linguistic strategies [that] are extraordinarily sophisticated and complex', "Intimations of Immortality" is Wordsworth's 'mature masterpiece' reflecting his belief that 'life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up.'

Ode to a Nightingale:
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London. According to Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem that describes Keats' journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems, and it explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats.
The nightingale described within the poem experiences a type of death but it does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. The presence of weather is noticeable in the poem, as spring came early in 1819, which brought nightingales all over the heath. Many critics favor "Ode to a Nightingale" for its themes but some believe that it is structurally flawed because the poem sometimes strayed from its main idea.
Contents
1 Background
2 Structure
3 Poem
4 Themes
5 Critical reception
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links
Background
Of Keats's six major odes of 1819, "Ode to Psyche" was probably written first and "To Autumn" written last. Somewhere between writing these two, Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale".[1] According to Keats's friend Brown, Keats composed the Ode in just one morning: "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale."[2]
The exact date of "Ode to a Nightingale" as well as "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is unknown, as Keats himself only dated the poems as 'May 1819'. However, he worked on the four poems together and there is a unity in both their stanza forms and their themes. The exact order the poems were written in is also unknown, but they form a sequence within their structures. While Keats was writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and the other poems, Brown transcribed copies of the poems and submitted them to Richard Woodhouse.[3] During this time, Benjamin Haydon, Keats's friend, was given a copy of "Ode to a Nightingale", and he shared the poem with the editor of the Annals of the Fine Arts, James Elmes. Elmes paid Keats a small sum of money, and the poem was published in the July issue.[4]
Structure
"Ode to Nightingale" was probably the first of the middle set of four odes that Keats wrote following "Ode to Psyche" as implied by Brown. There is further evidence in the structure of the poems because Keats combines two different types of lyrical in an experimental way: the odal hymn and the lyric of questioning voice that responds to the odal hymn. This combination of structures is similar to that in "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and, in both poems, the dual form creates a sort of dramatic element within the poem. The stanza forms of the poem is a combination of elements from Pretrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets.[5]
When it came to vowel forms, Keats incorporated pattern of alternating historically "short" and "long" vowel sounds in his ode. In particular, line 18 ("And purple-stained mouth") has the historical pattern of "short" followed by "long" followed by "short" and followed by "long". This alteration is continued in longer lines, including line 31 ("Away! away! for I will fly to thee") which has five pairs of alternations. However, other lines, such as line 3 ("Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains") rely on a pattern of five "short" vowels followed by "long" vowel and "short" vowel pairings until it ends with a "long" vowel. These are not the only combination patterns present, and there are patterns of two "short" vowels followed by a "long" vowel in other lines, including 12, 22, and 59, which are repeated twice and then followed up with two sets of "short" vowel and then "long" vowel pairs. This reliance on vowel sounds is not unique to this ode, but is common to Keats's other 1819 odes and his Eve of St. Agnes.[6]
The poem also incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, a repetition of vowel sounds, in a conscious pattern as found in many of his poems. Such a reliance on assonance found in very few English poems. Within "Ode to a Nightingale", an example of this pattern can be found in line 35 ("Already with thee! tender is the night") where the "ea" of "Already" connects with the "e" of "tender" and the "i" of "with" connects with the "i" of "is". This same pattern is found again in line 41 )"I cannot see what flowers are at my feet") with the "a" of "cannot" linking with the "a" of "at" and the "ee" of "see" linking with the "ee" of "feet". This system of assonance can be found in approximately a tenth of the lines of Keats's later poetry.[7]
When it came to other sound patterns, Keats relied on double or triple caesuras within approximately 6% throughout the 1819 odes. An example from "Ode to a Nightingale" can be found within line 45 ("The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild") as the pauses after the commas are a "masculine" pause. Furthermore, Keats began to reduce the amount of Latin based words and syntax that he relied on in his poetry, which in turn shortened the length of the words that dominate the poem. There is also an emphasis on words beginning with consonants, especially those that begin with "b", "p" or "v". These three consonants are relied on heavily in the first stanza, and they are used syzygially to add a musical tone within the poem.[8]
In terms of poetic meter, Keats relies on spondee throughout his 1819 odes and in just over 8% of his lines within "Ode to a Nightingale", including line 12:[9]
/
˘
/
/
˘
˘
/
/
˘
/
Cool'd
a
long
age
in
the
deep
delv
ed
earth
and line 25:
˘
/
˘
/
˘
/
/
/
/
/
Where
pals
y
shakes
a
few,
sad,
last,
gray
hairs
To Walter Jackson Bate, the use of spondees in lines 31–34 creates a feeling of slow flight, and "in the final stanza . . . the distinctive use of scattered spondees, together with initial inversion, lend[s] an approximate phonetic suggestion of the peculiar spring and bounce of the bird in its flight."[10]
Poem
The poem begins suddenly, marked by use of heavy sounding syllables ("My heart aches" line 1), as it introduces the song of a hidden bird. Immediately, the narrator is overcome with such a feeling that he believes he has either been poisoned or is influenced by a drug. It is soon revealed that the source of this feeling is a nightingale's song, which the narrator empathises with[11] and has paralyzed his mind:[12]
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (lines 5–10)
The song encourages the narrator to give up his own sense of self and embrace the feelings that are evoked by the nightingale. No longer a poison, the narrator wants to experience more of the feeling and escape from reality:[13]
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
* * * * *
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (lines 11–13, 19–20)
The narrator uses metaphorical wings to join the nightingale. It is at this moment that the poem moves into a deep, imaginative state, and the narrator cries out:[14]
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! (lines 31–35)
The state that the narrator wants is seemingly a state of death, but it is one that is full of life. The paradox expands to encompass the night, a tender presence that allows some light to shine through:[15]
tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (lines 35–40)
In the new state, the narrator's senses change. He loses his sense of sight, but his ability to smell, taste, and hear allow him to experience the new world, the new paradise that he has entered:[16]
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;(lines 41–45)
The narrator describes a world of potential, and empathizes with the creatures of that world. He is soon called to the sounds of insects just as he heard the nightingale before. This is then replaced by a new sound:[17]
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath; (lines 51–54)
The narrator has blinded himself to better connect to the nightingale. This theme appears before, in the blind John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, where Book III describes the nightingale's song coming out of darkness. the world is no longer present in the poem, as the imagination has taken over. What separates life and death, self and nothingness, are removed:[18]
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. (lines 55–60)
Death serves as a muse within the poem. It is, to the narrator, soft and comes upon the narrator as he composes the poem. The narrator seeks death, wants to die, and wants to be with the nightingale because he is currently experienced the height of life and anything else would not be worth experiencing. To live after that point would be a living death to the narrator. He desires to like the narrator, able to constantly give himself up in song and transcend life and death. However, he soon realizes that he is different from the nightingale:[19]
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: (lines 61–64)
The world of imagination are not a place that a man could ever live in.[20] This knowledge causes the narrator to become disheartened as the imaginary world is destroyed. The narrator cannot have the imaginary land. He is not just separate from the bird, but from poetry and imagination in general. The narrator mourns in the final lines of the poem as he realizes that he has been abandoned by his art:[21]
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? (lines 71–80)
Themes
"Ode to a Nightingale" describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature. In the words of Richard Fogle, "The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and commonsense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream."[22] Of course, the nightingale's song is the dominant image and dominant "voice" within the ode. The nightingale is also the object of empathy and praise within the poem. However, the nightingale and the discussion of the nightingale is not simply about the bird or the song, but about human experience in general. This is not to say that the song is a simple metaphor, but it is a complex image that is formed through the interaction of the conflict voices of praise and questioning.[23]
On this theme, David Perkins summarizes the way "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" perform this when he says, "we are dealing with a talent, indeed an entire approach to poetry, in which symbol, however necessary, may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry, any more than it could with Shakespeare, but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".[24] However, there is a difference between an urn and a nightingale in that the nightingale is not an eternal entity. Furthermore, in creating any aspect of the nightingale immortal during the poem the narrator separates any union that he can have with the nightingale.[25]
The poem relies heavily on the process of sleeping and discusses both dreams and the act of awaking. Such uses are not unique to Keats's poetry, and "Ode to a Nightingale" shares many of the same themes as Keats's Sleep and Poetry and Eve of St. Agnes. This further separates the image of the nightingale's song from its closest comparative image, the urn as represented in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The nightingale is distant and mysterious, and even disappears at the end of the poem. The dream image emphasizes the shadowiness and elusiveness of the poem. These elements make it impossible for there to be a complete self identification with the nightingale, but it also allows for self-awareness to permeate throughout the poem, albeit in an altered state.[26]
Midway through the poem, there is a split between the two actions of the poem: the first attempts to identify with the nightingale and its song, and the second discusses the convergence of the past with the future while experiencing the present. This second theme is reminiscent of Keats's view of human progression through the Mansion of Many Apartments and how man develops from experiencing and wanting only pleasure to understanding truth as a mixture of both pleasure and pain. The Elysian fields and the nightingale's song in the first half of the poem represent the pleasurable moments that overwhelm the individual like a drug. However, the experience does not last forever, and the body is left desiring it until the narrator feels helpless without the pleasure. Instead of embracing the coming truth, the narrator clings to poetry to hide from the loss of pleasure. Poetry does not bring about the pleasure that the narrator original asks for, but it does liberate him from his desire for only pleasure.[27]
Responding to this emphasis on pleasure, Albert Guerard, Jr. argues that the poem contains a "longing not for art but a free reverie of any kind. The form of the poem is that of progression by association, so that the movement of feeling is at the mercy of words evoked by chance, such words as fade and forlorn, the very words that, like a bell, toll the dreamer back to his sole self."[28] However, Fogle points out that the terms Guerard emphasizes are "associational translations" and that Guerard misunderstands Keats's aesthetic.[29] After all, the acceptance of the loss of pleasure by the end of the poem is an acceptance of life and, in turn, of death. Death was a constant theme that permeated aspects of Keats poetry because he was exposed to death of his family members throughout his life.[30] Within the poem, there are many images of death. The nightingale experiences a sort of death and even the god Apollo experiences death, but his death reveals his own divine state. As Perkins explains, "But, of coure, the nightingale is not thought to be literally dying. The point is that the deity or the nightingale can sing without dying. But, as the ode makes clear, man cannot – or at least not in a visionary way."[31]
With this theme of a loss of pleasure and inevitable death, the poem, according to Claude Finney, describes "the inadequacy of the romantic escape from the world of reality to the world of ideal beauty".[32] Earl Wasserman essentially agrees with Finney, but he extended his summation of the poem to incorporate the themes of Keats's Mansion of Many Apartments when he says, "the core of the poem is the search for the mystery, the unsuccessful quest for light within its darkness" and this "leads only to an increasing darkness, or a growing recognition of how impenetrable the mystery is to mortals."[33] With these views in mind, the poem recalls Keats's earlier view of pleasure and an optimistic view of poetry found within his earlier poems, especially Sleep and Poetry, and rejects them.[34]
This loss of pleasure and incorporation of death imagery lends the poem a dark air, which connects "Ode to a Nightingale" with Keats' other poems that discuss the demonic nature of poetic imagination, including Lamia.[35] In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—he uses an abrupt, almost brutal word for it—as a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination.[36]


Ode on a Grecian Urn:
The English poet John Keats wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in 1819, and like his other "Great Odes of 1819", the poem ignored several of the accepted conventions of theme, content, and style. Keats regarded the more commonly used forms of lyric poetry as unsatisfactory for his purposes and he experimented with the odal hymn to re-imagine the ode form.
Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the Ode reflects on the images on a Grecian urn of Keats' imagination, to which the narrator addresses his discourse. The poetic discourse revolves on two central themes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfillment, and another of a villager about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". These last lines have been the main focus of criticism, and critics are divided in their opinions on the poem, placing particular emphasis on whether the last two lines either increase or diminish the over-all beauty of the poem.
A visit to the Elgin Marbles sparked an intense emotional response in Keats, which stimulated him to reflect upon the nature of beauty and art. Inspired by the Marbles, and informed by the aesthetic theories of his friend, the painter Benjamin Haydon, as well as Haydon's print collection of Grecian art, Keats explored themes of beauty and truth in "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Keats and several literary critics have discussed various themes contained in the poem, including the role of the audience, inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the world the poem creates and the one in which the reader resides. Like the other Great Odes of 1819, referred to as "great" to distinguish them from other poetry Keats wrote that year, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" remains a controversial example of English Romantic poetry.
Contents
1 Background
2 Structure
3 Poem
4 Themes
Background
During the spring of 1819, John Keats (1795–1821) left his surgeon's job at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, London, to devote himself entirely to the composition of poetry. Living in the home of his friend Charles Brown, the twenty-three-year-old Keats was burdened with money problems and despaired when his brother George sought his financial assistance. While these real-world difficulties may have given Keats some pause for thought about a career in poetry, he did manage to complete four odes (including "Grecian Urn"),[1] with Brown transcribing and providing copies to the publisher Richard Woodhouse. The poem's exact date of composition is unknown; Keats simply dated it May 1819, as he did its companion odes on indolence, melancholy, and the nightingale. All four poems display a unity in stanza forms and themes, but their precise order of composition is uncertain. The structures form a set that binds them together but without one particular order.[2]
The odes, especially "Ode on a Nightingale", were Keats's attempt at discussing the relationship between the soul, eternity, nature, and art, which he was busy contemplating throughout 1819. His idea of using Greek art as a metaphor originated in his reading Benjamin Haydon's Examiner articles of 2 May and 9 May 1819.[3] In the first article, Haydon describes Greek sacrifice and worship,[4] and, in the second article, he contrasts the artistic styles of Raphael and Michelangelo in conjunction with a discussion of medieval sculptures.[5] Additionally, Keats had access to prints of Greek urns at Haydon's office.[6] He was also familiar with Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae and made a tracing from an engraving of the so-called "Sosibios Vase" in this publication.[7][8]
Keats's inspiration for the topic was not limited to Haydon, but embraced many contemporary sources.[9] He may have recalled his experience with the Elgin Marbles[6] and their influence on his sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles".[10] Additionally, Keats was exposed to the Townley, Borghese, and Holland House vases and to the classical treatment of subjects in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that Greek art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues. Although he was influenced by these ideas on classical art, his poem is unique; the urn that he describes as the subject of the poem is based on no known original, and is of his own creation.[11]
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was first printed in January 1820 Annals of Fine Art, an art magazine that promoted similar views on art to those that Keats held.[12] Following the initial publication, the Examiner published Keats's ode along with reprinting Haydon's articles.[13] Keats also included the poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.[14]
Structure
In 1819, Keats attempted to write sonnets but found that the form did not satisfy his purpose because the pattern of rhyme worked against the tone that he wished to achieve. When he turned to the ode form, he found that the standard Pindaric form used by poets such as John Dryden would be inadequate to properly discuss philosophy.[15] Keats developed his own type of ode in "Ode to Psyche", which preceded "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and other odes written by Keats in 1819. Keats's creation established a new poetic tone that accorded with his aesthetic ideas about poetry. He further altered this new form in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by adding a secondary voice within the ode, creating a dialogue between two subjects.[16]
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" relies on ten line stanzas with a rhyme scheme that begins with a Shakespearian quatrain (ABAB) and ends with a Miltonic sestet (CDECDE). This pattern is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale", which makes the poems unified in structure as well as theme.[2] The word "ode" itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung". While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. Keats's odes seek to find a "classical balance" between two extremes, and in the structure of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and the asymmetry of Romantic poetry. The use of the ABAB structure in the beginning lines of each stanza represents a clear example of structure found in classical literature, and the remaining six lines appear to break free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes.[17]
His metre reflects a conscious development within his poetic style. Within the poem, there is only a single instance of medial inversion of an accent, which was heavily found in his earlier works. However, Keats incorporates spondees in 37 feet, approximately 14.8% of the time. Caesurae are never placed before the fourth syllable in a line. The word choice represents a shift from Keats's early reliance on Latinate polysyllabic words to shorter, Germanic words. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" also reveals a consonantal syzygy within the second stanza with its emphasis on "p", "b", and "v" sounds, but the unity only appears in that stanza. The poem also incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, which is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode on a Grecian", an example of this pattern can be found in line 13 ("Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd") where the "e" of "sensual" connects with the "e" of "endear'd" and the "ea" of "ear" connects with the "ea" of "endear'd". A more complex form is found in line 11 ("Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard") with the "ea" of "Heard" connecting to the "ea" of "unheard", the "o" of "melodies" connecting to the "o" of "those" and the "u" of "but" connecting to the "u" of "unheard".[18]
Poem

The poem begins with the narrator silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.[19] The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1–2)
The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it is created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and aging is such a slow process that it is capable of being seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside of the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells:[20]
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4–10)
The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.[21] The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[22]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–14)
There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[22]
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,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:[22]
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.[23] In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.[23] The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice to Apollo, and Raphael's "The Sacrifice at Lystra":[24]
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. (lines 31–40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures up the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real.[25] The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:[26]
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41–45)
There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes:[26]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–50)
Themes
"Ode on a Grecian Urn", like many of Keats's odes, discusses art and art's audience. In earlier poems, he relied on depictions of natural music, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" appeal to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual. Keats reverses this when describing an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in order to focus on artifice. The image of an urn was also used in "Ode on Indolence", with Keats depicting an urn with the figures Love, Ambition and Poesy. Of these three, Love and Poesy are discussed again within a focus on representational art, and Keats's emphasis is on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth". The images of the urn described within the poem are intended as obvious depictions of standard forms, and they describe an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite. The figures are supposed to be beautiful, and the urn itself is supposed to be realistic.[27] Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images.[28] Furthermore, the lyrical basis of the poem contains bits of narration that further create an audience for the poem. As is common to Keats's odes in general, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" relies on a narrator that believes that the urn does not depict a story while the poem describes his searching for the background to the urn's events. This creates a response to art in general in a manner similar to how a critic would respond to the poem itself. This twofold narrative structure culminates in the poem's final lines. The ambiguous nature of the ending causes the reader to question who is speaking, to whom they are speaking, and what is being meant, encouraging the reader to interact with the poem in an interrogative manner.[29]
As representing art, an urn cannot completely represent poetry, but it does serve as one component in describing the relationship between art and humanity.[30] The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is separated from humanity and does not have human concerns. The urn, as a piece of art, requires an audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to participate with humanity, to put forth a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. Also, the symbol of the urn enables the narrator to ask questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate. This interaction and use of the imagination is part of a greater tradition called ut pictura poesis – the contemplation of art by a poet – which serves as a meditation upon art itself.[31] In this meditation, the narrator dwells on the aesthetic and mimetic features of art. The beginning of the poem posits that the role of art is to describe a specific story about those the audience is unfamiliar with, and the narrator wishes to know the identity of the figures in a manner similar to "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode to Psyche". The figures on the urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" do not have identities, but the first section ends with the narrator believing that if he knew the story, he would know the names. The second section of the poem, describing the piper and the lovers, meditates on the possibility that the role of art is not to describe specifics but universal characters, which falls under the term "Truth". The three figures would represent how Love, Beauty, and Art are unified together in an idealised world. Since the urn would depict an idealised scene in which the three figures are immortalised, the narrator is implying that art represents the feelings of the audience. The audience is not supposed to question the events but instead to rejoice in the happy aspects of the scene in a manner that reverses the claims about art in "Ode to a Nightingale". Similarly, the response in the second section is not compatible with the response to the first.[32]
The two contradictory responses found in the first and second part of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inadequate for completely describing art, because Keats believes that art is not to provide history or ideals. Instead, both are replaced with a philosophical tone that dominates the mediation on art. The sensual aspects are replaced with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects, and the last scene describes a world contained unto itself. The relationship of the audience to the world is not to learn facts or to benefit itself, but merely to emphatically connect to the scene. The narrator contemplates in the scene where the boundaries of art lie and how much an artist can represent on an urn. The questions the narrator asks reveal a yearning to understand the scene, but the urn is too limited to allow such answers. Furthermore, the narrator is drawn into the scene in a manner that allows him to visualise more than what actually exists as he enters into a cooperative state with art. This conclusion on art is both satisfying, in that it allows the audience to actually connect with the art, and alienating, as it does not provide the audience the benefit of instruction or narcissistic fulfillment.[33] Besides the contradictions between the various desires within the poem, there are other paradoxes that emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a "bride of quietness", which serves to contrast the urn with the structure of the ode, a type of poem originally intended to be sung. Another paradox arises when the narrator finds that immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.[34]

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822; pronounced /ˈpɜrsi ˈbɪʃ ˈʃɛli/)[2] was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam, and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. He also wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) and the short works The Assassins (1814) and The Coliseum (1817).
Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife.
Shelley never lived to see the extent of his success and influence in generations to come. Some of his works were published, but they were often suppressed upon publication. Up until his death, with approximately 50 readers as his audience, it is said that he made no more than 40 pounds from his writings. In 1813, at age 21 Shelley "printed" his first major poem, Queen Mab. He set the press and ran 150 copies of this radical and revolutionary tract. Queen Mab was infused with scientific language and naturalizing moral prescriptions for an oppressed humanity in an industrializing world. He intended the poem to be private and distributed it among his close friends and acquaintances. 70 sets of the signatures were bound and distributed personally by Shelley and 80 were stored at William Clark's bookshop in London. A year before his death, in 1821, one of the shopkeepers caught sight of the remaining signatures. The shopkeeper bound the remaining signatures, printed an expurgated edition, and distributed the pirated editions through the black market. The copies were–in the words of Richard Carlisle– "pounced upon," by the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Shelley was dismayed upon discovering the piracy of what he considered to be not just a juvenile production but a work that could potentially "injure rather than serve the cause of freedom." He sought an injunction against the shopkeeper, but since the poem was considered illegal, he was not entitled to the copyright. William Clark was imprisoned for 4 months for publishing and distributing Queen Mab. Between 1821 and the 1830s over a dozen pirated editions of Queen Mab were produced and distributed among and by the laboring classes fueling, and becoming a bible for, Chartism.[3]
Ode to the West Wind:
Percy Bysshe Shelley composed the poem Ode to the West Wind in 1819 near Florence, Italy; it was published in 1820. Some have interpreted the poem as the speaker lamenting his inability to directly help those in England owing to his being in Italy; at the same time, the poem expresses the hope that its words will inspire and influence those who read or hear it.[citation needed] More than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. Some also believe that the poem is due to the loss of his son, William in 1819 (to Mary Shelley), his son Charles (to Harriet Shelley) died in 1826, after "Ode to the West Wind" was written and published. The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorises the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution; at the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. His other poems written at the same time—"The Mask of Anarchy," "Prometheus Unbound," and "England in 1819"—take up these same problems of political change, revolution, and role of the poet.

Contents
1 Structure
2 Interpretation of the poem
2.1 First Canto
2.2 Second Canto
2.3 Third Canto
2.4 Fourth Canto
2.5 Fifth Canto
3 Conclusion

Structure
The poem Ode to the West Wind consists of five cantos written in terza rima. Each canto consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter.
The poem begins with three cantos describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two cantos are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloud or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas.
Interpretation of the poem
The poem Ode to the West Wind can be divided in two parts: the first three cantos are about the qualities of the ‘Wind’ and end each with the invocation ‘Oh hear!’. The last two cantos give a relation between the ‘Wind’ and the speaker.
First Canto
The first stanza begins with the alliteration ‘wild West Wind’(1.1). The form of the apostrophe makes the wind also a personification. However, one must not think of this ‘Ode’ as an optimistic praise of the wind; it is clearly associated with autumn. The first few lines contain sinister elements, such as ‘leaves dead’ (l. 2), the aspect of death being highlighted by the inversion which puts ‘dead’ (l. 2) at the end of the line. These leaves haunt as ‘ghosts’ (l. 3) that flee from something that panics them.
‘chariotest’ (l. 6) is the second person singular. The ‘corpse within its grave’ (l. 8) in the next line is in contrast to the ‘azure sister of the Spring’ (l. 9) – a reference to the east wind – whose ‘living hues and odours’ (l.12) evoke a strong contrast to the colors of the fourth line of the poem that evoke death. In the last line of this canto the west wind is considered the ‘Destroyer’ (l. 14) because it drives the last signs of life from the trees, and the ‘Preserver’ (l.14) for scattering the seeds which will come to life in the spring.
Second Canto
The second canto of the poem is much more fluid than the first one. The sky’s ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘like earth’s decaying leaves’ (l. 16). They are a reference to the second line of the first canto (‘leaves dead’, l. 2).They also are numerous in number like the dead leaves Through this reference the landscape is recalled again. The ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean’ (l. 17). This probably refers to the fact that the line between the sky and the stormy sea is indistinguishable and the whole space from the horizon to the zenith is covered with trailing storm clouds. The ‘clouds’ can also be seen as ‘Angels of rain’ (l. 18). In a biblical way, they may be messengers that bring a message from heaven down to earth through rain and lightning. These two natural phenomena with their “fertilizing and illuminating power” bring a change.
Line 21 begins with ‘Of some fierce Maenad ...’ (l. 21) and again the west wind is part of the second canto of the poem; here he is two things at once: first he is ‘dirge/Of the dying year’ (l. 23f) and second he is “a prophet of tumult whose prediction is decisive”; a prophet who does not only bring ‘black rain, and fire, and hail’ (l. 28), but who ‘will burst’ (l. 28) it. The ‘locks of the approaching storm’ (l. 23) are the messengers of this bursting: the ‘clouds’.
Shelley in this canto “expands his vision from the earthly scene with the leaves before him to take in the vaster commotion of the skies”. This means that the wind is now no longer at the horizon and therefore far away, but he is exactly above us. The clouds now reflect the image of the swirling leaves; this is a parallelism that gives evidence that we lifted “our attention from the finite world into the macrocosm”. The ‘clouds’ can also be compared with the leaves; but the clouds are more unstable and bigger than the leaves and they can be seen as messengers of rain and lightning as it was mentioned above.
Third Canto
This refers to the effect of west wind in water. The question that comes up when reading the third canto at first is what the subject of the verb ‘saw’ (l. 33) could be. On the one hand there is the ‘blue Mediterranean’ (l. 30). With the ‘Mediterranean’ as subject of the canto, the “syntactical movement” is continued and there is no break in the fluency of the poem; it is said that ‘he lay, / Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,/Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, / And saw in sleep old palaces and towers’ (l. 30–33). On the other hand it is also possible that the lines of this canto refer to the ‘wind’ again. Then the verb that belongs to the ‘wind’ as subject is not ‘lay’, but the previous line of this canto, that says ‘Thou who didst waken ... And saw’ (l. 29, 33). But whoever – the ‘Mediterranean’ or the ‘wind’ – ‘saw’ (l. 33) the question remains whether the city one of them saw, is real and therefore a reflection on the water of a city that really exists on the coast; or the city is just an illusion. Pirie is not sure of that either. He says that it might be “a creative you interpretation of the billowing seaweed; or of the glimmering sky reflected on the heaving surface”. Both possibilities seem to be logical. To explain the appearance of an underwater world, it might be easier to explain it by something that is realistic; and that might be that the wind is able to produce illusions on the water. With its pressure, the wind “would waken the appearance of a city”. From what is known of the ‘wind’ from the last two cantos, it became clear that the ‘wind’ is something that plays the role of a Creator. Whether the wind creates real things or illusions does not seem to be that important.
Baiae's bay (at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples) actually contains visible Roman ruins underwater (that have been shifted due to earthquakes.) Obviously the moss and flowers are seaweed.
It appears as if the third canto shows – in comparison with the previous cantos – a turning-point. Whereas Shelley had accepted death and changes in life in the first and second canto, he now turns to “wistful reminiscence [, recalls] an alternative possibility of transcendence”. From line 26 to line 36 he gives an image of nature. But if we look closer at line 36, we realise that the sentence is not what it appears to be at first sight, because it obviously means ‘so sweet that one feels faint in describing them’. This shows that the idyllic picture is not what it seems to be and that the harmony will certainly soon be destroyed. A few lines later, Shelley suddenly talks about ‘fear’ (l. 41). This again shows the influence of the west wind which announces the change of the season.
Fourth Canto
Whereas the cantos one to three began with ‘O wild West Wind’ (l. 1) and ‘Thou...’ (l. 15, 29) and were clearly directed to the wind, there is a change in the fourth canto. The focus is no more on the ‘wind’, but on the speaker who says ‘If I...’ (l. 43f). Until this part, the poem has appeared very anonymous and was only concentrated on the ‘wind’ and its forces so that the author of the poem was more or less forgotten. Pirie calls this “the suppression of personality” which finally vanishes at that part of the poem. It becomes more and more clear that what the author talks about now is himself. That this must be true, shows the frequency of the author’s use of the first-person pronouns ‘I’ (l. 43, 44, 48, 51, 54), ‘my’ (l. 48, 52) and ‘me’ (l. 53). These pronouns appear nine times in the fourth canto. Certainly the author wants to dramatise the atmosphere so that the reader recalls the situation of canto one to three. He achieves this by using the same pictures of the previous cantos in this one. Whereas these pictures, such as ‘leaf’, ‘cloud’ and ‘wave’ have existed only together with the ‘wind’, they are now existing with the author. The author thinks about being one of them and says ‘If I were a ...’ (l. 43ff). Shelley here identifies himself with the wind, although he knows that he cannot do that, because it is impossible for someone to put all the things he has learned from life aside and enter a “world of innocence”. That Shelley is deeply aware of his closedness in life and his identity shows his command in line 53. There he says ‘Oh, lift me up as a wave, a leaf, a cloud’ (l. 53). He knows that this is something impossible to achieve, but he does not stop praying for it. The only chance Shelley sees to make his prayer and wish for a new identity with the Wind come true is by pain or death, as death leads to rebirth. So, he wants to ‘fall upon the thorns of life’ and ‘bleed’ (l. 54).
At the end of the canto the poet tells us that ‘a heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d’ (l. 55). This may be a reference to the years that have passed and ‘chained and bowed’ (l. 55) the hope of the people who fought for freedom and were literally imprisoned. With this knowledge, the West Wind becomes a different meaning. The wind is the ‘uncontrollable’ (l. 47) who is ‘tameless’ (l. 56).
One more thing that one should mention is that this canto sounds like a kind of prayer or confession of the poet. This confession does not address God and therefore sounds very impersonal.
Shelley also changes his use of metaphors in this canto. In the first cantos the wind was a metaphor explained at full length. Now the metaphors are only weakly presented – ‘the thorns of life’ (l. 54). Shelley also leaves out the fourth element: the fire. In the previous cantos he wrote about the earth, the air and the water. The reader now expects the fire – but it is not there. This leads to a break in the symmetry of the poem because the reader does not meet the fire until the fifth canto.
Fifth Canto
Again the wind is very important in this last canto. At the beginning of the poem the ‘wind’ was only capable of blowing the leaves from the trees. In the previous canto the poet identified himself with the leaves. In this canto the ‘wind’ is now capable of using both of these things mentioned before.
Everything that had been said before was part of the elements – wind, earth and water. Now the fourth element comes in: the fire.
There is also a confrontation in this canto: whereas in line 57 Shelley writes ‘me thy’, there is ‘thou me’ in line 62. This “signals a restored confidence, if not in the poet’s own abilities, at least in his capacity to communicate with [...] the Wind”.
It is also necessary to mention that the first-person pronouns again appear in a great frequency; but the possessive pronoun ‘my’ predominates. Unlike the frequent use of the ‘I’ in the previous canto that made the canto sound self-conscious, this canto might now sound self-possessed. The canto is no more a request or a prayer as it had been in the fourth canto – it is a demand. The poet becomes the wind’s instrument – his ‘lyre’ (l. 57). This is a symbol of the poet’s own passivity towards the wind; he becomes his musician and the wind’s breath becomes his breath. The poet’s attitude towards the wind has changed: in the first canto the wind has been an ‘enchanter’ (l. 3), now the wind has become an ‘incantation’ (l. 65).
And there is another contrast between the two last cantos: in the fourth canto the poet had articulated himself in singular: ‘a leaf’ (l. 43, 53), ‘a cloud’ (l. 44, 53), ‘A wave’ (l. 45, 53) and ‘One too like thee’ (l. 56). In this canto, the “sense of personality as vulnerably individualised led to self-doubt” and the greatest fear was that what was ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’ (l. 56) will stay ‘chain’d and bow’d’ (l. 55). The last canto differs from that. The poet in this canto uses plural forms, for example, ‘my leaves’ (l. 58, 64), ‘thy harmonies’ (l. 59), ‘my thoughts’ (l. 63), ‘ashes and sparks’ (l. 67) and ‘my lips’ (l. 68). By the use of the plural, the poet is able to show that there is some kind of peace and pride in his words. It even seems as if he has redefined himself because the uncertainty of the previous canto has been blown away. The ‘leaves’ merge with those of an entire forest and ‘Will’ become components in a whole tumult of mighty harmonies. The use of this ‘Will’ (l. 60) is certainly a reference to the future. Through the future meaning, the poem itself does not only sound as something that might have happened in the past, but it may even be a kind of ‘prophecy’ (l. 69) for what might come – the future.
At last, Shelley again calls the Wind in a kind of prayer and even wants him to be ‘his’ Spirit: he says: ‘My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (l. 62). Like the leaves of the trees in a forest, his leaves will fall and decay and will perhaps soon flourish again when the spring comes. That may be why he is looking forward to the spring and asks at the end of the last canto ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ (l. 70). This is of course a rhetorical question because spring does come after winter, but the "if" suggests that it might not come if the rebirth is strong and extensive enough, and if it is not, another renewal---spring---will come anyway. Thus the question has a deeper meaning and does not only mean the change of seasons, but is a reference to death and rebirth as well. It also indicates that after the struggles and problems in life, there would always be a solution. It shows us the optimistic view of the poet about life which he would like the world to know. It is an interpretation of his saying 'If you are suffering now, there will be good times ahead.' But the most powerful call to the Wind are the lines: "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!" Here Shelley is imploring---or really chanting to---the Wind to blow away all of his useless thoughts so that he can be a vessel for the Wind and, as a result, awaken the Earth.
Conclusion
This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English pronunciation: /ˈkoʊlrɪdʒ/) (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.
Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression (neuralgia); it has been speculated that Coleridge suffered from bipolar disorder, a mental disorder which was unknown during his life.[1] Coleridge chose to treat these episodes with opium, becoming an addict in the process.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (see 1798 in poetry). The modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry, and the beginning of British Romantic literature.
Contents
1 Plot summary
2 Background
3 Coleridge's comments
4 Wordsworth's comments
5 The gloss

Plot summary

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the events experienced by a mariner who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony, and begins to recite a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience and fear to fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create either a sense of danger, of the supernatural or serenity, depending on the mood of each of the different parts of the poem.
The Mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south off course by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctica. An albatross(compared as christian soul) appears and leads them out of the Antarctic, but even as the albatross is praised by the ship's crew, the Mariner shoots the bird - (with my cross-bow / I shot the albatross). The crew is angry with the Mariner, believing the albatross brought the South Wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears: ('Twas right, said they, such birds to slay / that bring the fog and mist). The crime arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from the land of mist and snow"; the south wind which had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Here, however, the sailors change their minds again and blame the Mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the Mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret (Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the albatross / About my neck was hung). Eventually, in an eerie passage, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death" (a deathly-pale woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the Mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue as to the Mariner's fate; he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross.
One by one all of the crew members die, but the Mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, the Mariner's curse is lifted when he sees sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem (Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea), he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them (a spring of love gush'd from my heart and I bless'd them unaware); suddenly, as he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the Mariner behind. A hermit on the mainland had seen the approaching ship, and had come to meet it with a pilot and the pilot's boy in a boat. This hermit may have been a priest who took a vow of isolation. When they pull him from the water, they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth, the pilot has a fit. The hermit prays, and the Mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the Mariner is the devil, and says "The Devil knows how to row." As penance for shooting the albatross, the Mariner is forced to wander the earth and tell his story, and teach a lesson to those he meets:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The agony returns and his heart burns until he tells his story.
Background
The poem may have been inspired by James Cook's second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) of the South Seas and the Pacific Ocean; Coleridge's tutor, William Wales, was the astronomer on Cook's flagship and had a strong relationship with Cook. On his second voyage Cook plunged repeatedly below the Antarctic Circle to determine whether the fabled great southern continent existed.[citation needed] Critics have also opined that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of Thomas James into the Arctic. "Some critics think that Coleridge drew upon James's account of hardship and lamentation in writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."[1]
According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset in the spring of 1798.[2] The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726), by Captain George Shelvocke. In the book, a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross:
We all observed, that we had not the sight of one fish of any kind, since we were come to the Southward of the streights of le Mair, nor one sea-bird, except a disconsolate black Albatross, who accompanied us for several days ..., till Hattley, (my second Captain) observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin'd, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen. ... He, after some fruitless attempts, at length, shot the Albatross, not doubting we should have a fair wind after it.
As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference to tutelary spirits: "Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime."[3] By the time the trio finished their walk, the poem had taken shape.
Bernard Martin argues in The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative that Coleridge was also influenced by the life of Anglican clergyman John Newton, who had a near-death experience aboard a slave ship.
The poem may also have been inspired[original research?] by the legends of the Wandering Jew, who was forced to wander the Earth until Judgement Day for taunting Jesus on the day of the Crucifixion, and of the Flying Dutchman.
The poem received mixed reviews from critics, and Coleridge was once told by the publisher that most of the book's sales were to sailors who thought it was a naval songbook. Coleridge made several modifications to the poem over the years. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800 (see 1800 in poetry), he replaced many of the archaic words.
Coleridge's comments
In Biographia Literaria XIV, Coleridge writes:
The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life...In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. ... With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner'.
In Table Talk, 1830–32, Coleridge wrote:
Mrs Barbauld tole me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii’s son.
Wordsworth's comments
Wordsworth wrote to Joseph Cottle in 1799:
From what I can gather it seems that the Ancient Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to a second Edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.
However, when Lyrical Ballads was reprinted, Wordsworth included it despite Coleridge's objections, writing:
The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.
The gloss
Upon its release the poem was criticised for being obscure and difficult to read. It was also criticised for using archaic words, not in keeping with Romanticism, the genre Coleridge was helping to define. In 1815–16 Coleridge added to the poem marginal notes (still deliberately written in an archaic style) that gloss the text, ostensibly explaining the meaning of verses. While the poem was originally published in the collection of Lyrical Ballads, the 1817 version was published in his collection entitled Sibylline Leaves[4] (see 1817 in poetry).
The gloss describes the poem as an account of sin and restoration. While some critics see the gloss as spelling out clearly the moral of the tale, others point to the inaccuracies and illogicalities of the gloss and interpret it as the voice of a dramatized character that only serves to highlight the poem's cruel meaninglessness.[5] In particular, Charles Lamb, who had deeply admired the original for its attention to "Human Feeling," claimed that the gloss distanced the audience from the narrative, weakening the poem's effect.

Adonaïs:
Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. (Adonaies) (pronounced /ˌædɵˈneɪ.ɨs/) is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after April 11, when Shelley heard of Keats' death seven weeks earlier. It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's Lycidas. Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is likely a merging of the Greek "Adonis", the god of fertility, and the Hebrew "Adonai" (meaning "Lord"). Most critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in praise of Cornelius Gallus, as a model.
It was published by Charles Ollier in July 1821 with a preface in which Shelley made the mistaken assertion that Keats had died from a rupture of the lung induced by rage at the unfairly harsh reviews of his verse in the Quarterly Review and other journals. He also thanked Joseph Severn for caring for Keats in Rome. This praise increased literary interest in Severn's works.
Shelley was introduced to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816 by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, who was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley. Shelley's huge admiration of Keats was not entirely reciprocated. Keats had reservations about Shelley's dissolute behaviour, and found some of Shelley's advice patronising (the suggestion, for example, that Keats should not publish his early work). It is also possible that Keats resented Hunt's transferred allegiance. Despite this, the two poets exchanged letters when Shelley and his wife moved to Italy. When Keats fell ill, the Shelleys invited him to stay with them in Pisa but Keats elected to travel with Severn. Despite this rebuff, Shelley's affection for Keats remained undimmed until his death in 1822 when a copy of Keats' works was found in a pocket on his drowned body. Shelley said of Keats, after inviting him to stay with him in Pisa after Keats fell ill: "I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure."
Shelley regarded Adonais the "least imperfect" of his works.

Synopsis:
Stanzas 1-35
Adonais begins with the announcement of his death and the mourning that followed: "I weep for Adonais—he is dead!" In Stanzas 2 through 35 a series of mourners lament the death of Adonais. The mother of Adonais, Urania, is invoked to arise to conduct the ceremony at his bier. The allusion is to Urania, the goddess of astronomy, and to the goddess Venus, who is also known as Venus Urania.
The overriding theme is one of despair. Mourners are implored to "weep for Adonais—he is dead!" In Stanza 9 the "flocks" of the deceased appear, representing his dreams and inspirations. In Stanza 13, the personifications of the thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and skills of the deceased appear. In Stanza 22, Urania is awakened by the grief of Misery and the poet. The lament is invoked: "He will awake no more, oh, never more!" Urania pleads in vain for Adonais to awake and to arise.
In Stanzas 30 through 34 a series of human mourners appears. The "Pilgrim of Eternity" is Lord Byron, George Gordon, who had met and was a friend of Shelley's but who had never met Keats. The Irish poet Thomas Moore then appears who laments the sadness and loss that time causes. Shelley himself and Leigh Hunt are also part of the "procession of mourners". In Stanzas 31 through 34 the mourner is described as "one frail Form" who has "fled astray," "his branded and ensanguined brow," a brow "like Cain’s or Christ’s." Stanzas 36-55
The sense of despair and hopelessness continues. In Stanza 37 the poet muses over a just punishment for the "nameless worm" and "noteless blot" who is the anonymous (now known to be John Wilson Croker) and highly critical reviewer of Keats’s Endymion (1818), who, in Shelley’s opinion, traumatized John Keats, worsening his condition. The worst punishment that Shelley can contrive is that such a scoundrel should live: "Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame!/ Live!" Faced with the contradiction that he would wish a long life upon the miscreant who took his hero’s life, in stanza 38 the poet bursts open the gates of consolation that are required of the pastoral elegy: "Nor let us weep that our delight is fled/ Far from these carrion kites." In stanzas 35 and 36, Shelley laments that—like Thomas Chatterton, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lucan—Keats died young and did not live to develop as a poet . Keats transcends human life and has been unified with the immortal: "He has outsoared the shadow of our night;/Envy and calumny and hate and pain,/ ... Can touch him not and torture not again.... He is made one with Nature." Keats is as one with Nature, the Power, the One, and the one Spirit.
Adonais "is not dead …/ He hath awakened from the dream of life." Shelley turns his grief from Adonais to "we" who must live on and "decay/ Like corpses in a charnel," and after a series of stanzas (39–49) in which he celebrates the richer and fuller life that Adonais must now be experiencing, the poet becomes mindful that he is in Rome, itself a city rife with visible records of loss and decay. Moreover, he is in the Protestant cemetery there, where Shelley’s three-year-old son is buried as well; and yet, as if mocking all despair, a "light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread." Nature does not abhor death and decay, he sees; it is humans, who fear and hate in the midst of life, who do. "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" he asks in stanza 51.
The reversal of attitude is completed, and in stanza 52 Shelley makes one of the most profound professions of faith in the everlasting and transcendent to be found in all English poetry. It is life’s worldly cares—that obscuring and distracting "dome of many-coloured glass"—not Death that is the enemy and the source of human despair. "Follow where all is fled," he urges, and he goads his own heart into having the courage to face not extinction but "that Light whose smile kindles the Universe." The poem concludes by imagining Adonais to be a part of "the white radiance of Eternity." At the end of the elegy, "like a star," the soul of the dead poet "Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
John Keats:
John Keats (pronounced /ˈkiːts/, "keets") (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet, who became one of the key figures of the Romantic movement. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats was one of the second generation Romantic poets. During his short life his work was not well received by critics, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen was significant. The poetry of Keats was characterised by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery, most notably in a series of odes which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. The letters of Keats, which include the development of his aesthetic theory of negative capability,[1] are among the most celebrated by any English poet.
The Eve of St. Agnes:
"The Eve of St. Agnes" is a long poem (42 stanzas) by John Keats, written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature.
The title comes from the day (or evening) before the feast of Saint Agnes (or St. Agnes' Eve). St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, died a martyr in fourth century Rome. The eve falls on January 20; the feast day on the 21. The divinations referred to by Keats in this poem are referred to by John Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696) as being associated with St. Agnes' night.
Background
Keats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes; that is she would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.
In the original version of this poem, Keats emphasized the young lovers' sexuality, but his publishers, who feared public reaction, forced him to tone down the eroticism.
Plot
The flight of Madeline and Porphyro, painting by William Holman Hunt
On a bitterly chill night, an ancient beadsman performs his penances while in the castle of Madeline's warlike family, a bibulous revel has begun. Madeline pines for the love of Porphyro, sworn enemy to her kin. The old dames have told her she may receive sweet dreams of love from him if on this night, St. Agnes' Eve, she retires to bed under the proper ritual of silence and supine receptiveness.
As we might expect, Porphyro makes his way to the castle and braves entry, seeking out Angela, an elderly woman friendly to his family, and importuning her to lead him to Madeline's room at night where he may but gaze upon her sleeping form. Angela is persuaded only with difficulty, saying she fears damnation if Porphyro does not afterward marry the girl.
Concealed in an ornate carven closet in Madeline's room, Porphyro watches as Madeline makes ready for bed, and then, beholding her full beauty in the moonlight, creeps forth to prepare for her a feast of rare delicacies. Madeline wakes and sees before her the same image she has seen in her dream, and thinking Porphyro part of it, receives him into her bed. Awakening in full and realizing her mistake, she tells Porphyro she cannot hate him for his deception since her heart is so much in his, but that if he goes now he leaves behind "A dove forlorn and lost / With sick unpruned wing".
Porphyro declares his love for Madeline and promises her a home with him over the southern moors. They escape the castle past insensate revelers, and flee into the night. The beadsman, "His thousand Aves told / For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold"
The Cenci:
The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1819) is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the Cencis (in particular, Beatrice Cenci, pronounced CHEN-chee). Shelley composed the play at Rome and at Villa Valsovano near Livorno, from May to August 5, 1819, and it was published by Charles and James Ollier, in London in 1819, with a second edition appearing in 1821, his only published work to go into a second edition during his lifetime. The play was not considered performable in its day due to its themes of incest and parricide, and was not performed in public in London until 1922. In 1886 the Shelley Society sponsored a private production at the Grand Theatre, Islington, before an audience that included Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, and George Bernard Shaw. Though there has been much debate over the play's stageability, it has been produced in many countries including France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. It was included in the Harvard Classics as one of the most important and representative works of the western canon.
Plot
The horrific tragedy, set in 1599 in Rome, of a young woman executed for pre-meditated murder of her tyrannical father, was a well-known true story handed down orally and documented in the Annali d'Italia, a twelve-volume chronicle of Italian history written by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1749. The events occurred during the Pontificate of Pope Clement III.
Shelley was first drawn to dramatize the tale after viewing Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a painting that intrigued Shelley's poetic imagination.
Act I
The play opens with Cardinal Camillo discussing with Count Francesco Cenci a murder in which Cenci is implicated. Camillo tells Cenci that the matter will be hushed up if Cenci will relinquish a third of his possessions, his property beyond the Pincian gate, to the Church. Count Cenci has sent two of his sons to Salamanca, Spain in the expectation that they will die of starvation. The Count's virtuous daughter, Beatrice, and Orsino, a prelate in love with Beatrice, discuss petitioning the Pope to relieve the Cenci family from the Count's brutal rule. Orsino withholds the petition, however, revealing himself to be disingenuous, lustful for Beatrice, and greedy. After he hears the news that his sons, Rocco and Cristofano, have been brutally killed in Salamanca, the Count holds a feast in celebration of their deaths, commanding his guests to revel with him. Cenci drinks wine which he imagines as "my children's blood" which he "did thirst to drink!" During the feast, Beatrice pleads with the guests to protect her family from her sadistic father, but the guests refuse, in fear of Cenci's brutality and retribution.
Act II
Count Cenci torments Beatrice and her stepmother, Lucretia, and announces his plan to imprison them in his castle in Petrella. A servant returns Beatrice's petition to the Pope, unopened, and Beatrice and Lucretia despair over the last hope of salvation from the Count. Orsino encourages Cenci's son, Giacomo, upset over Cenci's appropriation of Giacomo's wife's dowry, to murder Cenci.
Act III
Beatrice reveals to Lucretia that the Count has committed an unnameable act against her and expresses feelings of spiritual and physical contamination, implying Cenci's incestuous rape of his daughter. Orsino and Lucretia agree with Beatrice's suggestion that the Count must be murdered. After the first attempt at parricide fails because Cenci arrives early, Orsino conspires with Beatrice, Lucretia, and Giacomo, in a second assassination plot. Orsino proposes that two of Cenci's ill-treated servants, Marzio and Olimpio, carry out the murder.
Act IV
The scene shifts to the Petrella Castle in the Apulian Apennines. Olimpio and Marzio enter Cenci's bedchamber to murder him, but hesitate to kill the sleeping Count and return to the conspirators with the deed undone. Threatening to kill Cenci herself, Beatrice shames the servants into action, and Olimpio and Marzio strangle the Count and throw his body out of the room off the balcony, which is entangled in a pine. Shortly thereafter, Savella, a papal legate, arrives with a murder charge and execution order against Cenci. Upon finding the Count's dead body, the legate arrests the conspirators, with the exception of Orsino, who escapes in disguise.
Act V
The suspects are taken for trial for murder in Rome. Marzio is tortured and confesses to the murder, implicating Cenci's family members. Despite learning that Lucretia and Giacomo have also confessed, Beatrice refuses to do so, steadfastly insisting on her innocence. At the trial, all of the conspirators are found guilty and sentenced to death. Bernardo attempts a futile last-minute appeal to the Pope to have mercy on his family. The Pope is reported to have declared: "They must die." The play concludes with Beatrice walking stoically to her execution for murder. Her final words are: "We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well."
Major Characters
Count Francesco Cenci, head of the Cenci household and family
Beatrice, his daughter
Lucretia, the wife of Francesco Cenci and the stepmother of his children
Cardinal Camillo
Orsini, a Prelate
Savella, the Pope's Legate
Andrea, a servant to Francesco Cenci
Marzio, an assassin
Olimpio, an assassin
Giacomo, son of Francesco Cenci
Bernardo, son of Francesco Cenci
1935 Production at the Newcastle People's Theatre
In February, 1935, Shelley's play The Cenci was staged by the Newcastle People's Theatre, Rye Hill, Newcastle on the Tyne, in the UK, directed by Cecil McGivern. The role of Cenci was played by McGivern, while William Wilson played Orsino, Louise Smith played Beatrice, Winifred Eddy was Lucretia, and R. J. Perring was Savella. In 2001, the play was again staged by the People's Theatre in a version directed by Christopher Goulding.


Walter Scott:
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet, popular throughout Europe during his time. Scott was particularly associated with Toryism.
Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of The Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.
Kenilworth :
Kenilworth. A Romance is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, first published on 8 January 1821.
Contents
1 Plot introduction
1.1 Explanation of the novel's title
2 Plot summary
3 Characters
4 Themes
5 Historical inaccuracies
6 References in other works, etc
Plot introduction
Set apparently in 1575, Kenilworth centers on the secret marriage of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, and Amy Robsart, daughter of Sir Hugh Robsart. The tragic series of events begins when Amy flees her father and her betrothed, Tressilian, to marry the Earl. Amy passionately loves her husband, and the Earl loves her back, but he is driven by ambition. He is courting the favour of Queen Elizabeth I, and only by keeping his marriage to Amy secret can he hope to rise to the height of power he desires. At the end of the book, the queen finally discovers the truth, to the shame of the Earl. But the disclosure has come too late, for Amy has been murdered by the Earl's even more ambitious steward, Varney.
Explanation of the novel's title
The title refers to Dudley's Kenilworth Castle in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The novel opens however at Cumnor Place, near Abingdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire).
Plot summary
Giles Gosling, the innkeeper, had just welcomed his scape-grace nephew Michael Lambourne on his return from Flanders. He invited the Cornishman, Tressilian, and other guests to drink with them. Lambourne made a wager he would obtain an introduction to a certain young lady under the steward Foster's charge at Cumnor Place, seat of the Earl of Leicester, and the Cornish stranger begged permission to accompany him. On arriving there Tressilian found that this lady was his former lady-love, Amy. He would have carried back to her home, but she refused; and as he was leaving he quarrelled with Richard Varney, the earl's squire, and might have taken his life had not Lambourne intervened. Amy was soothed in her seclusion by costly presents from the earl, and during his next visit she pleaded that she might inform her father of their secret marriage, but he was afraid of Elizabeth's resentment.
Warned by his host against the squire, and having confided to him how Amy had been entrapped, Tressilian left Cumnor by night, and, after several adventures by the way, reached the residence of Sir Hugh Robsart, Amy's father, to assist him in laying his daughter's case before the queen. Returning to London, Tressilian's servant, Wayland Smith, cured the Earl of Sussex of a dangerous illness. On hearing about this from Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth at once set out to visit Leicester's rival, and it was in this way that Tressilian's petition, in Amy's behalf, was handed to her. The queen was agitated to learn of this secret marriage. Varney was accordingly summoned to the royal presence, but he boldly declared that Amy was his wife, and Leicester was restored to the queen's favour.
Tressilian's servant then gained access to the secret countess Amy as a pedlar, and, having hinted that Elizabeth would shortly marry the earl, sold her a cure for the heartache, warning her attendant Janet at the same time that there might be an attempt to poison her mistress. Meanwhile Leicester was preparing to entertain the queen at Kenilworth, where she had commanded that Amy should be introduced to her, and Varney was, accordingly, despatched with a letter begging the countess to appear at the revels pretending to be Varney's bride. Having indignantly refused to do so, and having recovered from the effects of a cordial which had been prepared for her by the astrologer Alasco, she escaped, with the help of her maid, from Cumnor, and started for Kenilworth, escorted by Wayland Smith.
Travelling thither as brother and sister, they joined a party of mummers, and then, to avoid the crowd of people thronging the principal approaches, proceeded by circuitous by-paths to the castle. Having, with Dickie Sludge's help, passed into the courtyard, they were shown into a room, where Amy was waiting while her attendant carried a note to the earl, when she was startled by the entrance of Tressilian, whom she entreated not to interfere until after the expiration of twenty-four hours. On entering the park, Elizabeth was received by her favourite attended by a numerous cavalcade bearing waxen torches, and a variety of entertainments followed. During the evening she enquired for Varney's wife, and was told she was too ill to be present. Tressilian offered to lose his head if within twenty-four hours he did not prove the statement to be false. Nevertheless, the ostensible bridegroom was knighted by the queen.
Receiving no reply to her note, which Wayland had lost, Amy found her way the next morning to a grotto in the gardens, where she was discovered by Elizabeth, who had just told her host that "she must be the wife and mother of England alone." Falling on her knees the countess besought protection against Varney, who she declared was not her husband, and added that the Earl of Leicester knew all. The earl was instantly summoned to the royal presence, and would have been committed to the Tower, had not Amy recalled her words, when she was consigned to Lord Hundson's care as bereft of her reason, Varney coming forward and pretending that she had just escaped from a special treatment for her madness. Leicester insisted on an interview with her, when she implored him to confess their marriage to Elizabeth, and then, with a broken heart, she would not long darken his brighter prospects. Varney, however, succeeded in persuading him that Amy had acted in connivance with Tressilian, and in obtaining medical sanction for her custody as mentally disordered, asking only for the earl's signet-ring as his authority. The next day a duel between Tressilian and the earl was interrupted by Dickie, who produced the countess's note, and, convinced of her innocence, Leicester confessed that she was his wife. With the queen's permission he at once deputed his rival and Sir Walter Raleigh to proceed to Cumnor, whither he had already despatched Lambourne, to stay his squire's further proceedings.
Varney, however, had shot the messenger on receiving his instructions, and had caused Amy to be conducted by Foster to an apartment reached by a long flight of stairs and a narrow wooden bridge. The following evening the tread of a horse was heard in the courtyard, and a whistle like the earl's signal, upon which she rushed from the room, and the instant she stepped on the bridge, it parted in the middle, and she fell to her death. Her murderer poisoned himself, and the skeleton of his accomplice was found, many years afterwards, in a cell where he secreted his money. The news of the countess's fate put an end to the revels at Kenilworth, Leicester retired for a time from Court, and Sir Hugh Robsart, who died very soon after his daughter, settled his estate on Tressilian.
Characters
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1560
Giles Gosling, host of the "Black Bess" at Cumnor
Michael Lambourne, his nephew
Edmund Tressilian, a Cornish gentleman, Amy's former lover
Wayland Smith, his servant
Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex
Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester
Richard Varney, his squire
Anthony Foster, steward of Cumnor Place
Master Erasmus Holiday, a village pedagogue
Dickie Sludge, alias Flibbertigibbet, one of his pupils
Doctor Doboobie, alias Alasco, an astrologer
Sir Hugh Robsart, of Lidcote Hall, Devonshire
Amy Robsart, his daughter
Janet Foster, her attendant at Cumnor
Queen Elizabeth, at Kenilworth
In attendance on the Queen
Lord Hunsdon
Lord Burleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh
Themes
Kenilworth is a novel of selfishness versus selflessness and ambition versus love. Amy and the Earl both struggle internally with selfishness and love, while Varney and Tressilian each typify the extremes of the two qualities. Perhaps the finest point of this work is its characterization. The Earl is shown as an ambition-driven man who will stoop to deceit and almost anything else in order to attain his goals, but with one saving grace—he loves Amy, and in the end gives up his pride and ambition to confess their marriage. Amy Robsart is a pretty, spoiled child whose tragic circumstances teach her maturity and determination, although such lessons come too late to save her. Tressilian is the serious, steadfast lover of Amy, and continues to try to save her from herself throughout the book and finally dies of a broken heart. Varney is the chief villain of the work. His greed and ambition know no bounds. It is he that pushes the Earl beyond what he would normally do to secure power, and it is he that finally murders Amy Robsart.
Historical inaccuracies
Whilst much of the novel gives a fair depiction of the Elizabethan court, the circumstances of Amy Robsart's death from a fall are greatly altered, and also many other events are a product of Scott's imagination. It should be noted that the death of Amy Robsart had been the subject of speculation for more than 200 years, and in 1810 Cumnor Place was pulled down, it was said, solely in order to lay her ghost.
The reception at Kenilworth which provides the backdrop to the novel took place in 1575, and frequent references to how many years have passed since other events such as the Queen's accession, the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots, and so forth, indicate that the novel is set in that year—but Amy Robsart died on 8 September 1560. Leicester's first marriage was not, in fact, a closely guarded secret; it was his secret marriage in September 1578 to Lettice Knollys (with whom he had flirted in 1565) that caused the Queen's anger in 1579.
William Shakespeare, who was not even born until 1564, is in Chapter 17 an adult and known at court, rubbing elbows with Edmund Spenser, whose first major work The Shepheardes Calender was not published until 1579; and in Chapter 16, Queen Elizabeth even quotes from Troilus and Cressida, which was written around 1602.
References in other works, etc
In keeping with its many Walter Scott references, Rose Street in Edinburgh has a bar called the Kenilworth.
Jane Austen:
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist, whose realism, biting social commentary and use of free indirect speech have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature.[1]
Austen lived her entire life as part of a small and close-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry.[2] She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer.[3] Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.[B] From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.
Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism.[4][C] Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic,[5] highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.[6] Like those of Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, her works are concerned with moral issues.[7]
During Austen's lifetime, because she chose to publish anonymously, her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired only by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s, Austen was widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical. In popular culture, a Janeite fan culture has developed, centered on Austen's life, her works, and the various film and television adaptations of them.

Emma:
Emma, by Jane Austen, is a comic novel about the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively 'comedy of manners' among her characters.
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like."[1] In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." Emma, however, is also rather spoiled; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; and she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives and is often mistaken about the meanings of others' actions.
Plot summary
Emma Woodhouse, aged 20 at the start of the novel, is a young, beautiful, witty, and privileged woman in Regency England. She lives on the fictional estate of Hartfield in Surrey in the village of Highbury with her elderly widowed father, a hypochondriac who is excessively concerned for the health and safety of his loved ones. Emma's friend and only critic is the gentlemanly George Knightley, her neighbour from the adjacent estate of Donwell, and the brother of her elder sister Isabella's husband. As the novel opens, Emma has just attended the wedding of Miss Taylor, her best friend and former governess. Having introduced Miss Taylor to her future husband, Mr Weston, Emma takes credit for their marriage, and decides that she rather likes matchmaking.
Against Mr Knightley's advice, Emma forges ahead with her new interest, and tries to match her new friend Harriet Smith, a sweet but none-too-bright parlour boarder of seventeen —described as "the natural daughter of somebody"— to Mr Elton, the local vicar. Emma becomes convinced that Mr Elton's constant attentions are a result of his attraction and growing love for Harriet.
But before events can unfold as she plans, Emma must first persuade Harriet to refuse an advantageous marriage proposal. Her suitor is a respectable young gentleman farmer, Mr Martin, but Emma wrongly and snobbily decides he isn't good enough for Harriet. Against her own wishes, the easily-influenced Harriet rejects Mr Martin.
Emma's schemes go awry when Mr Elton, a social climber, proposes to Emma herself. Emma's friends had understood that Mr Elton's attentions were the result of his attraction to Emma and his ambition in marrying her, although she had not. Emma, rather shocked, tells Mr Elton that she had thought him attached to Harriet; however Elton is outraged at the very idea of marrying the socially inferior Harriet. After Emma rejects Mr Elton, he leaves for a while for a sojourn in Bath, and Harriet fancies herself heartbroken. Emma now tries to convince Harriet that Mr Elton is beneath her after all.
An interesting development is the arrival in the neighbourhood of Frank Churchill, Mr Weston's son who had been given to his deceased wife's relatives to bring up. Frank is of course also Mrs Weston's stepson, and Emma has never met him, but she has a long-standing interest in doing so.
Mr Elton, as Emma's misconceptions of his character melt away, reveals himself to be more and more arrogant and pompous; he had snubbed Harriet at a dance. He soon returns from Bath with another newcomer, a vulgar but rich wife who becomes part of Emma's social circle, though the two women soon loathe each other.
A third new character is the orphaned Jane Fairfax, the reserved but beautiful and elegant niece of Emma's impoverished neighbour, the talkative Miss Bates who lives with her deaf, widowed mother. Miss Bates is an ageing spinster, well-meaning but increasingly poor; Emma strives to be polite and kind to her, but is irritated by her dull and incessant chattering. Jane, very accomplished musically, is Miss Bates' pride and joy; Emma envies her talent and initially dislikes her for her apparent coldness and reserve. Jane had lived with Miss Bates until she was nine, but Colonel Campbell, a friend indebted to her father for seeing him through a life-threatening illness, welcomed her into his own home where she became fast friends with his unfortunately plain daughter and received a first-rate education. On the marriage of Miss Campbell, Jane returned to her Bates relations, ostensibly to regain her health and prepare to earn her living as a governess.
In her eagerness to find some sort of fault with Jane — and also to find something to amuse her in her pleasant but dull village — Emma indulges in the fantasy, apparently shared by Frank, that Jane was an object of admiration for Miss Campbell's husband, Mr Dixon, and that it is for this reason she has returned home instead of going to Ireland to visit them. This suspicion is further fueled by the arrival of a piano for Jane from a mysterious anonymous benefactor.
Emma tries to make herself fall in love with Frank largely because everyone says they make a handsome couple. Frank seems to everyone to have Emma as his object, and the two flirt together in public, at the evening piano and on a day-trip to Box Hill, a local beauty spot. Emma ultimately decides, however, that Frank would suit Harriet better after an episode where Frank 'saves' Harriet from a band of Gypsies. At this time, Mrs Weston wonders if Emma's old friend Mr Knightley might have taken a fancy to Jane. Emma promptly decides that she does not want Mr Knightley to marry anyone, but rather than further explore these feelings, she claims that this is because she wants her little nephew Henry to inherit the family property.
When Mr Knightley scolds her for a thoughtless insult to Miss Bates, Emma is privately ashamed and tries to atone by going to visit Miss Bates. Mr Knightley is surprised but deeply impressed by Emma's recognition of her wrongdoing and attempt to make amends; this leads to a more meaningful affection for Emma. Meanwhile, Jane reportedly becomes ill, but refuses to see Emma or accept her gifts. Emma thinks Jane's behaviour stems from Emma's previous neglect of and coldness towards Jane. Jane also suddenly accepts an offer for a governess position from a friend of Mrs Elton's.
Soon thereafter, Emma learns why Jane had behaved strangely: it's because Jane and Frank have been secretly engaged for almost a year. Why Frank pretended to admire Emma was to disguise his clandestine relationship with Jane. Jane's distress had been because she and Frank had quarrelled over his behaviour with Emma and his unguarded behaviour towards herself, something Jane believes could put them at risk of discovery. Then Frank's overbearing aunt, whose opposition to the engagement Frank had feared, dies, and so Frank's and Jane's engagement becomes public.
When Harriet confides that she thinks Mr Knightley is in love with her, jealousy makes Emma realize she loves him herself. Mr Knightley has been in love with Emma all along, and after the engagement of Jane and Frank is revealed, he proposes to her, and she joyfully accepts.
Shortly thereafter, Harriet reconciles with her young farmer, Mr Martin, and they marry. Jane and Emma reconcile before Jane and Frank go to live in Yorkshire. Finally, Emma and Mr Knightley decide that after their marriage they will spare Emma's father loneliness and distress by living with him at Hartfield, instead of settling at the Knightley estate, Donwell.
Principal characters
Emma Woodhouse, the protagonist of the story, is a beautiful, high-spirited, intellectual, and 'slightly' spoiled woman of 21. Her mother died when she was very young, and she has been mistress of the house ever since, certainly since her older sister got married. While she is in many ways mature for her age, Emma makes some serious mistakes, mainly due to her conviction that she is always right and her lack of real world experience. Although she has vowed she will never ever marry, she delights in making matches for others. She seems unable to fall in love, until jealousy makes her realize that she has loved Mr Knightley all along.
George Knightley
George Knightley is a protagonist in Jane Austen's novel Emma written in 1816. He is a friend of Emma's, although the disparity in age is nearly seventeen years. He enjoys correcting Emma, as Emma observes in chapter 1.
Mr George Knightley, is about 37 or 38. He is a close friend of Emma, and her only critic, though he cares deeply for her. Mr Knightley is the owner of the neighbouring estate of Donwell, which includes extensive grounds and a farm. He is the elder brother of Mr John Knightley – the husband of Emma's elder sister Isabella. Mr Knightley is very annoyed with Emma for persuading Harriet to turn down Mr Martin, thinking that the advantage is all on Harriet's side; he also warns Emma against matchmaking Harriet with Mr Elton, correctly guessing that Mr Elton has a much higher opinion of himself. He is suspicious of Frank Churchill and his motives; although his suspicion turns out to be based mainly on jealousy of the younger man, his instincts are proven correct by the revelation that Frank Churchill is not all that he seems.

Character
Mr. Knightley, while wealthy, is a very kind and compassionate person. One incident which displays this is his disappointment when he sees Emma insult Miss Bates, a spinster of modest means. Mr. Knightley's later reprimand of Emma also demonstrates his affection and esteem for her as a friend. Another incident which shows his quality is his anger with Emma for persuading Harriet Smith to refuse Robert Martin's proposal of marriage, Martin being in Knightley's eyes an eminently suitable mate for Harriet.
Mr. Knightley's Envy
In the course of the story, Emma falls briefly in love with a young, handsome man named Frank Churchill. Mr. Knightley's jealousy is implied, and he makes several negative remarks about Churchill. We later find out that Mr. Knightley was afraid that Frank has had a negative influence on Emma. However, Frank Churchill's guardian – his aunt – dies, and he is now free to publicize his engagement to Jane Fairfax, which had been kept secret to avoid his aunt's disapproval. Emma is shocked, but realizes she had never really had romantic sentiments towards Frank Churchill. Nevertheless, she worries that Harriet has feelings for Frank, but then Emma discovers that Harriet has become infatuated with Mr. Knightley.
Emma is very unhappy, for she realizes that she has always unconsciously loved Mr. Knightley, and she does not want him to marry Harriet. At the end, when Mr. Knightley is apprised of Mr. Churchill's clandestine engagement, he becomes bold and hopeful and declares his enormous affection and admiration for Emma, who becomes speechless with happiness. They marry, and Mr. Knightley moves in with Emma and her father at their estate of Hartfield because Mr. Woodhouse can't face life without his daughter. Harriet marries Robert Martin at the end, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Mr Frank Churchill, Mr Weston's son by his previous marriage, an amiable young man who manages to be liked by everyone except for Mr Knightley, who considers him quite immature, although this partially results from his jealously of Frank's supposed 'pursuit' of Emma. After his mother's death he was raised by his wealthy aunt and uncle, whose last name he took. Frank thoroughly enjoys dancing and music and likes to live life to the fullest. Frank may be viewed as a careless but less villainous version of characters from other Austen novels, such as Mr Wickham from Pride and Prejudice or Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility.
Jane Fairfax, an orphan whose only family consists of an aunt, Miss Bates, and a grandmother, Mrs Bates. She is regarded as a very beautiful, clever, and elegant woman, with the best of manners, and is also very well-educated and exceptionally talented at singing and playing the piano; in fact, she is the sole person that Emma envies. She has little fortune, however, and seems destined to become a governess – a prospect she dislikes.
Harriet Smith, a young friend of Emma's, is a very pretty but unsophisticated girl who is too easily led by others, especially Emma; she has been educated at a nearby school. The illegitimate daughter of initially unknown parents, she is revealed in the last chapter to be the daughter of a fairly rich and decent tradesman, although not a "gentleman". Emma takes Harriet under her wing early in the novel, and she becomes the subject of some of Emma's misguided matchmaking attempts. Harriet initially rebuffs a marriage proposal from farmer Robert Martin because of Emma's belief that he is beneath her, despite Harriet's own doubtful origins. She then develops a passion for Mr Knightley, which is the catalyst for Emma realising her own feelings. Ultimately, Harriet and Mr Martin are wed, despite Emma's meddling.
Philip Elton is a good-looking, well mannered and ambitious young vicar. Emma wants him to marry Harriet; he wants to marry Emma. Mr Elton displays his mercenary nature by quickly marrying another woman of means after Emma's rejection.
Augusta Elton, formerly Miss Hawkins, is Mr Elton's moneyed but obnoxious wife. She is a boasting, domineering, pretentious woman who likes to be the centre of attention and is generally disliked by Emma and her circle. She patronizes Jane, which earns Jane the sympathy of others.
Mrs Anne Weston, formerly Miss Taylor, was Emma's governess for sixteen years and remains her closest friend and confidante after she marries Mr Weston in the opening chapter. She is a sensible woman who adores Emma. Mrs Weston acts as a surrogate mother to her former charge and, occasionally, as a voice of moderation and reason.
Mr Weston, a recently wealthy man living in the vicinity of Hartfield. He marries Emma's former governess, Miss Taylor, and by his first marriage is father to Frank Churchill, who was adopted and raised by his late wife's brother and sister-in-law. Mr Weston is a sanguine, optimistic man, who enjoys socializing.
Miss Bates, a friendly, garrulous spinster whose mother, Mrs Bates, is a friend of Mr Woodhouse. Her accomplished niece, Jane Fairfax, is the light of her life. One day, Emma humiliates her on a day out in the country, when she pointedly alludes to her tiresome prolixity. Afterward, Mr Knightley sternly rebukes her and Emma, shamed, tries to make amends.
Mr Henry Woodhouse, Emma's father, is always concerned for his own health and that of his friends, to the point of trying to deny his visitors foods he thinks too rich. He laments that "poor Isabella" and "poor Miss Taylor" shouldn't have married and been taken away from him.
Criticism and themes
Emma Woodhouse is the first Austen heroine with no financial concerns, which, she declares to the naïve Miss Smith, is the reason that she has no inducement to marry. This is a great departure from Austen's other novels, in which the quest for marriage and financial security are two of several themes in the stories. Emma's ample financial resources are one of the factors that make this novel much lighter than Austen's earlier works, such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Jane Fairfax's prospects, in contrast, are bleak.
Emma also proves surprisingly immune to romantic attraction and sexual desire. In contrast to Austen heroine Marianne Dashwood, who is attracted to the wrong man before she settles on the right one, Emma shows no romantic interest in the men she meets. She is genuinely surprised and somewhat disgusted when Mr Elton declares his love for her much like the way Elizabeth Bennet reacts upon Mr Collins' proposal. Her fancy for Frank Churchill represents more of a longing for a little drama in her life than a longing for romantic love. Notably, too, Emma utterly fails to understand Harriet Smith and Robert Martin's budding affection for each other; she interprets the prospective match solely in terms of financial settlements and social ambition. Only after Harriet Smith reveals her interest in Mr Knightley does Emma realize her own feelings for him. Although never outright stated as such, it may be postulated that the reason for Emma's inability to fall in love with another man is that she has been unconsciously in love with Mr Knightley for years.
While Emma differs strikingly from Austen's other heroines in these two respects, she resembles Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot, among others, in another way: she is an intelligent young woman with too little to do and no ability to change her location or everyday routine. Though her family is loving and her economic circumstances comfortable, her everyday life is dull indeed, and she has few companions of her own age when the novel begins. Emma's determined and inept matchmaking may represent a muted protest against the narrow scope of a wealthy woman's life, especially that of a woman who is single and childless.