The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the factory system. Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested; the textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods.The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and most of the important technological innovations were British.
During the Industrial Revolution an intellectual and artistic hostility towards the new industrialisation developed, associated with the Romantic movement. Romanticism revered the traditionalism of rural life and recoiled against the upheavals caused by industrialization, urbanization and the wretchedness of the working classes. Its major exponents in English included the artist and poet William Blake and poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The movement stressed the importance of "nature" in art and language, in contrast to "monstrous" machines and factories.
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical.
Defining the nature of Romanticism may be approached from the starting point of the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich that "the artist's feeling is his law".
To William Wordsworth, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility," evoking a new but corresponding emotion the poet can then mould into art. To express these feelings, it was considered that the content of the art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules that dictated what a work should consist of.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws that the imagination—at least of a good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration if left alone. As well as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's own imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This idea is often called "romantic originality."
Characteristics of the Romantic Age & Romantic Literature
1.Individuality/Democracy/Personal Freedom
2. Spiritual/Supernatural Elements
3. Nature as a Teacher
4. Interest in Past History/Ancient Greek and Roman Elements
5. Celebration of the Simple Life
6. Interest in the Rustic/Pastoral Life
7. Interest in Folk Traditions
8. Use of Common Language
9. Use of Common Subjects
10. One Sided/Opinionated
11. Idealized Women
12. Frequent Use of Personification
13. Examination of the Poet's Inner Feelings
14. Revolt against artificial classic poetry.
15. Emotional & sensuous poetry rather than logical and reason based.
16. Attracted to rebellion & revolution, concerned with human right, individualism, freedom from oppression.
17. Emphasis on feeling of man.
18. Love, worship of nature, dislike of urban.
19. Abandoned heroic couplet completely.
Famous English romantic poets:-
Ireland: Thomas Moore
Scotland: Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Macpherson
England: Robert Southey, Walter Savage Landor, John Clare, George Crabbe, Thomas Lovell Beddoes
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Balads (1798).
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)
"Simon Lee"
"We are Seven"
"Lines Written in Early Spring"
"Expostulation and Reply"
"The Tables Turned"
"The Thorn"
"Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
"Strange fits of passion have I known"[25]
"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"[25]
"Three years she grew"[25]
"A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"[25]
"I travelled among unknown men"[25]
"Lucy Gray"
"The Two April Mornings"
"Solitary Reaper"
"Nutting"
"The Ruined Cottage"
"Michael"
"The Kitten At Play"
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
"Resolution and Independence"
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
"My Heart Leaps Up"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
"Ode to Duty"
"The Solitary Reaper"
"Elegiac Stanzas"
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
"London, 1802"
"The World Is Too Much with Us"
Guide to the Lakes (1810)
" To the Cuckoo "
The Excursion (1814)
Laodamia (1815, 1845)
The White Doe of Rylstone (1815)
Peter Bell (1819)
The Prelude (1850)
Wordsworth’s Poetic Style
Style is a debatable thing about Wordsworth. Many critics say that he has two styles. A few argue that he has many styles and still some even go to the extent of saying that he has no style at all.
Wordsworth had a belief that poetic style should be as simple and sincere as the language of everyday life, and that the more the poet draws on elemental feelings and primal simplicities the better for his art. He advocated the use of simple language in poetry. He said that poetry should be written in a “language really used by men in humble and rustic’’.
According to Lytton Strachey, Wordsworth was the first poet who fully recognised and deliberately practised the beauties of extreme simplicity; and this achievement constitutes his most obvious claim to fame. Hardly any interested reader misses the beauty of his simplicity.
Wordsworth’s use of the nobly-plain style has something unique and unmatchable. Wordsworth feels his subjects with profound sincerity and, at the same time, his subject itself has a profoundly sincere and natural character. His expression may often be called bald as, for instance, in the poem Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur.
Wordsworth prefers generally to employ an unostentatious, ascetic style. It demands a mature and thoughtful reader to appreciate the power and comprehensiveness.
But many are the occasions when Wordsworth’s simplicity deteriorates into triviality. While the daring simplicity is often highly successful, there is also the other kind of simplicity which has been called the bleat, as of an old, half-witted sheep. This creates a strange inequality in Wordsworth’s verse, an inequality which has been noted and commented upon by almost every critic.
His deficient sense of humour is responsible for many banalities, but the chief reason for this mixture of puerility and grandeur is his poetic theory. According to this theory, Wordsworth was to use “a selection of the language really used by men in humble and rustic life,” while at the same time he was to throw a certain colouring of imagination over his subjects.
Wordsworth’s experiments in a simple style were intended to arouse the ordinary man’s sympathy for his fellow men. He sacrifices the idiomatic order of words to preserve simplicity of diction and the demands of rhyme. He undermines his purpose with amazing effects. Sometimes he offends merely by the use of such metre as—
Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans
Fortunately Wordsworth’s splendid imagination was often too powerful for his theory; and in his best work he unconsciously ignores it altogether.
As Graham Hough points out, in Tintern Abbey Wordsworth is far more willing than his theories would suggest to use the full resources of the English vocabulary. In the more exalted passages of this, as of most of the reflective blank verse poems, the influence of Milton is apparent. We sometimes find Wordsworth using a Latinised and abstract vocabulary, commonly supposed to be most uncharacteristic of his work, and directly due to Miltonic influence.
According to a critic, Wordsworth has not “two voices”, but many; and even relatively short poems such as Resolution and Independence, Yew-Trees, and Fidelity show a considerable range. To hold, as Arnold does, that Wordsworth has no style is a dangerous simplification.
Main characteristics of Wordsworth poetry:- Worship of Nature
♦ He was a poet of nature. He conceived nature as a living personality.
♦He believed that company of nature gives joy to human heart and it heals sorrow-stricken hearts.
♦Nature is a moral teacher, mother, guardian, nurse.
COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPTEMBER 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
In the summer of 1802, William Wordsworth traveled with his sister, Dorothy, to Calais, France. They stopped in London. They left London early on the morning of July 31st, and Dorothy wrote about crossing over the famous Westminster Bridge to get out of town: A beautiful morning. The city, St Paul's, with the river – a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spectacles.
the same scene described by her brother in "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802." But Wordsworth got the date wrong when he published the poem under this title in 1807 – it was the end of July, not the beginning of September.
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" was published 1807, in Poems in Two Volumes.
This poem is a Italian or Petrachan sonnet.
What is sonnet?
A poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line. (Oxford Living Dictionaries)
Italian sonnets:
The sonnet is split in two groups: the "octave" (of 8 lines) and the "sestet" (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines.
The octave (the first 8 lines) typically introduces the theme or problem using a rhyme scheme of abba abba. The sestet (the last 6 lines) provides resolution for the poem and rhymes variously, but usually follows the schemes of cdecde or cdccdc.
The octave and sestet have special functions in a Petrarchan sonnet. The octave's purpose is to introduce a problem, express a desire, reflect on reality, or otherwise present a situation that causes doubt or a conflict within the speaker's soul and inside an animal and object in the story. It usually does this by introducing the problem within its first quatrain (unified four-line section) and developing it in the second. The sestet's purpose as a whole is to make a comment on the problem or to apply a solution to it.
Line 1
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
While crossing over the Westminster Bridge, the speaker makes a bold statement: he has found the most beautiful scene on the planet. At that particular moment, he could not magine anywhere being more beautiful than the place he was standing. It was the reflection of his mood. He can't compare the scene from the bridge with anything except his own memories.
ওয়েস্ট মিনস্টার ব্রীজ পার হওয়ার সময় লন্ডন শহরের যে দৃশ্য তিনি দেখলেন, তার মত সুন্দর দৃশ্য পৃথিবীতে আর নেই। হয়তো এর থেকে অনেক সুন্দর দৃশ্য বাস্তবে রয়েছে। কিন্তু সেই মুহূর্তটি কবিমনে যে ভাব সঞ্চার করেছে, তা কবির স্মৃতিতে থাকা সব সুন্দরকে হার মানিয়েছে।
Line 2-3
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
It is impossible to resist oneself to avoid the call of this beauty. Only a dull, boring person could pass by. Here the poet justifies his decision to stop his coach along the way to look at the view from the bridge.
এমন সৌন্দর্যকে পাশ কাটিয়ে চলে যাওয়া সম্ভব নয়। একমাত্র অনুভূতিহীন, নির্বোধ মানুষই পারে এই টান ছিন্ন করে চলে যেতে। কবি, এখানে তাঁর দাঁড়ানোর সিদ্ধান্ত কতটা সঠিক তা বোঝাতে চেয়েছেন।
The sight from the bridge is "touching in its majesty," It suggests both intimacy and grandeur. "Touching" scenes are often small and intimate, like a kid giving kiss on his mother's cheek. "Majestic" scenes are often large and public, like a deep blue ocean or a green vally in the lap of a snowy mountain. The view from Westminster Bridge combines both this elements.
ব্রীজ থেকে যে দৃশ্য তিনি দেখছেন, তার জাঁকজমক, আড়ম্বরতার মধ্যেও একটা অন্তরঙ্গতা লক্ষ করেছেন তিনি।
Lines 4-5
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning;
We learn what time it is: London "wears" the morning like a nice coat or some other piece of clothing ("garment").
The garment could be so beautiful that it doesn't matter what the person wearing it looks like. Anyone could be wearing it, and you'd be like, "
Similarly, the word "now" shows that the beauty depends on the time of day. When morning will be over, London will change its dress and put on another dress of smoke, noise crowd. It will not be as beautiful as 'the beauty of the morning'.
লন্ডন শহর যেন একটা সুন্দর পোষাক পড়ে সেজেছে। পোষাক বলতে কবি আসলে সকালের সৌন্দর্যকে বুঝিয়েছেন।
এইবাক্যদুটি থেকে আমরা কবিতাটির সময়কাল যে সকাল সেটা জানতে পারি।
Lines 5-7
silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
The city in that morning is silent. There is no noise, no horn of cars, no hue and cry of people.
the speaker describes some of the sights that are visible from Westminster Bridge. From Westminster Bridge in 1802, we could have seen a lot of the highlights of London, including the "ships" of the River Thames; the "dome" of the famous St. Paul's Cathedral, and the iconic Tower of London. London is a crowded city. But, in morning, the city people is still sleeping. They have not left their houses that time. So, the city looked empty, bare (naked). Factories did not start functioning that time. No car on road. Morning City is noise-free, smoke-free. So, the poet found that 'Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky;'
সকালের শহরে গাড়ি ঘোড়া চলাচল শুরু হয়নি। মানুষজন রাস্তায় নামেনি তখনো। কলকারখানা চালু হয়নি। তাই শহর তখন শান্ত, ধোঁয়াহীন। তাই জাহাজ, মিনার, গম্বুজ, রঙ্গমঞ উন্মুক্ত লাগছে। মনে হচ্ছে যেন তারা মিশে যাচ্ছে অাকাশ, সবুজ মাঠের সাথে।
Line 8
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Early morning sunlight makes the buildings "bright and glittering." It is very common in London for for to cover the city throughout in the morning. But the poet was so lucky that the morning was completely fog free. The factory chimneys had not started yet. So the city was smoke-fee. In that fog-free, smoke-free morning fresh morning sunlight makes ships, towers, domes bright and glittering.
শহরের সকালটি কুয়াশামুক্ত, ধোঁয়াহীন। তাই সকালের স্নিগ্ধ রৌদ্রে সবকিছু উজ্জ্বল, চকমকে লাগছে।
Lines 9-10
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
he compares the morning sunlight falling on the city to the sunlight that might cover more remote parts of the countryside, such as a valley, a boulder or mountainous cliff ("rock"), or a hillside.
These sights would have been more familiar to Wordsworth than the scenery of London, who spent most of his life in rural parts of England, such as the picturesque Lake District in the northwest part of the country.
"First splendour" just means morning.
Basically, he's ragging on his hometown, saying even it can't compare with this view of London.
কবি জীবনের অনেকটা সময় কাটিয়েছেন গ্রাম্য পরিবেশে। প্রথম সূর্যের অালোয় ডুবে থাকা উপত্যকা, পাহাড়, পাথরের টিলা তিনি অনেক দেখেছেন। কিন্তু লন্ডন শহরের এি রূপের সাথে কারো তুলনাই চলে না।
Lines 11-12
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
He describes how the vision of London makes him feel calm, which is perhaps surprising because London is a huge, bustling city. Here the river is described as a patient person who takes his time and doesn't allow himself to be rushed. He moves according to "his own sweet will." (Personification)
The river Thames is not a fast-moving river.
সকালের শহর শান্ত। এমন শান্ত রূপ তিনি অাগে দেখেন নি।
নদীটি যেন নিজের খেয়ালে ধীর গতিতে বয়ে চলেছে।
Lines 13-14
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
He cries out to God as if he has just recognized something astonishing he had not noticed before.
He personifies the houses as asleep, when it's actually the people inside the houses who are sleeping at this early hour.
The city looks like one big, peaceful, sleeping body. The "heart" of this body is "lying still" for the moment before the city awakens for a new day. The heart refers to the city's energy or vitality.
শহরের প্রতিটি বাড়ি যেন ঘুমাচ্ছে। অর্থ্যাৎ শহরবাসী ঘুমাচ্ছে। শহরের প্রাণশক্তি যেন ক্ষণিকের জন্য ঘুমিয়ে অাছে।
