COMPOSED UPON

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE,
SEPTEMBER 3, 1802 SUMMARY
The speaker declares that he has found the most beautiful scene on earth. You'd have to be someone with no spiritual
sense, no taste for beauty, to pass over the Westminster Bridge that morning without stopping to marvel at the sights.
London is wearing the morning's beauty like a fine shirt or cape. London, you're lookin' good.
The time is so early that all is quiet. The various landmarks visible from the bridge, including St. Paul's Cathedral and
the Tower of London, stand before him in all their grandeur in the morning light. Fortunately, there happens to be no
"London fog" to obscure the view.
The speaker compares the sunlight on the buildings to the light that shines on the countryside, and he seems surprised to
feel more at peace in the bustling city than he has anywhere else. The River Thames moves slowly beneath him. In a burst
of emotion, he pictures the city as blissfully asleep before another busy day.

Resolution and Independence Themes

At the heart of the poem is the question of whether the poet will become a responsible human being,
independent of others for his own happiness. He realizes that his essential quality of mental or spiritual identity
cannot rely upon an external environment for its continuing strength. At first, the speaker feels at one with the
happy springtime setting, but when he falls suddenly into despair, he is puzzled into a crisis of confidence in
himself. Then, when he has most need, the old man appears as if by peculiar grace to serve as an
admonishment.
All that occurs in the poem is a consequence of the poets sense of need, apparently without cause. The
powers of mind, as imagination, usurp the poets consciousness of everything that surrounds him, including the
leech gatherer, making it difficult for the poet to keep hold of the external reality through which both he and the
leech gatherer move. In this is the theme of mental experience transcending physical limitations. Yet the poets
imagination seizes upon the details of the encounter to nourish itself, to create a self-reflecting image for the
poet to study as a lesson in resolution and independence.
The poet needed to feel self-reliant just as he was nearly falling into helpless and mysterious despair. The
leech gatherer supplied what the poet needed, because the poet had the imagination to make use of the
encounter. The meaning of the poem is that the human mind transcends the...

LINES COMPOSED A FEW

MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY,
ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF

THE WYE DURING A TOUR, JULY

13, 1798 SUMMARY
The poem opens with the poet visiting a place called Tintern Abbey on the banks of the River Wye in southeast Wales. He's
visited it before, but not for five years. He remembers almost every detail: the sound of the "mountain-springs," "this dark
sycamore," and the "hedge-rows."
He looks back on the past five years that have gone by since his first visit to the place, and remembers how much the
memory of this scene meant to him when he was cooped up in the city. In fact, he practically relied on his memories of the
beauty of the place to keep him sane while he was living in "the din/ Of towns and cities" (25-6).
Now that he's finally back in the same spot again, he finds himself looking out at the landscape and experiencing an odd
combination of his present impressions, the memory of what he felt before, and the thought of how he'll look back on this
moment in the future. He imagines that he'll change as time goes by from what he was during his first visit: a kid with a
whole lot of energy to "boun[d] o'er the mountains" (68). Back in the day, nature meant everything to him.
Now, though, he's learned how to look at nature with a broader perspective on life. He doesn't just look and say, "Holy cow,
the view from up here is pretty awesome!" and then run "bound[ing] o'er the mountains" again. In other words, he used to
enjoy nature, but he didn't fully understand it. Now he looks and is able to sense a deeper, wider meaning to the beauty in
nature. He sees that everything in nature is interconnected.
It turns out Wordsworth's sister is with him during his present tour of the area, and he says that she still looks at nature in the
same way that he did when he was a kid. He imagines how his sister will go through the same development and
transformation that he did. One day she'll be able to look out at nature and imagine the interconnectedness of things, too.
Then he imagines her coming back to the same spot years in the future, after he's dead, and remembering the time she
came here with her brother.

LONDON, 1802 INTRODUCTION

The poem begins with a plaintive call to John Milton (1608-1674), a much-loved and respected English poet, and one
of Wordsworth's great influences. The speaker laments the fact that Milton isn't around anymore, since, as he sees it,
England needs a guiding voice. The speaker flat-out condemns the state of the nation, saying that it's a stagnant swamp
(gross!), and that the English people have forgotten all the things that used to make them so glorious, including religion,
military might, and literature. The speaker worries that the Englishmen of his day are too selfish and debased, and wishes
Milton could return and give the nation a good old-fashioned pep talk. The poet is certain that Milton could inspire England to
greatness once again, and mold its inhabitants into more noble creatures.
The second half of the poem dwells on Milton's high points; the speaker gets all swoony about Milton's writing, and uses
celestial imagery to show us just how divine it is. Not only is Milton's writing admirable, apparently, so was his character. The
man could do no wrong. The speaker goes gaga over the all-around loveliness that was Milton, and ends the poem by
praising the deceased poet's humility.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

William Wordsworth was a prolific and controversial poet. A major figure in the English Romantic movement, he
was known as the optimistic author of numerous lyrical poems, which were written in a simple language
dedicated to a daffodil, a daisy, or a butterfly, symbols of the splendor of all nature (living and nonliving). The
famous English poet and critic Matthew Arnold thought Wordsworths poetry had healing powers, educating
people to feel again. Wordsworths theory of poetry was based on passion and emotions. He believed that even
the thoughts rest in feelings.

Ode treats the preexistence of human life, using the poets personal life experience combined with a Platonic
concept. Wordsworth first mentioned the lasting importance of childhood memories of nature upon the adult
mind in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798). In addition to Platos famous theory
regarding such memories, another possible influence on the poet may have been the book Silex
Scintillans (1650, 1655) by the Welsh-born religious poet Henry Vaughan.
The main concept of Wordsworths Ode is based on the poets belief that the Child is Father of the Man a
sentiment taken from John Miltons Paradise Regained (1671) and used by Wordsworth in his short poem My
Heart Leaps Up (Complete Poetical Works, 1802). In the Ode, he explains that birth is a sleep and a
forgetting, not the beginning of life. Thus, he believes, children still carry a glorious memory of the imperial
heaven as their home with God. Innocent babies and children see the beauty of the terrestrial world not only
with their physical eyes but also and even more through their hearts and souls, which carry a preexisting sense
of the spiritual presence. With an elegiac and definitely a nostalgic timbre, the Ode starts with the poets own
memory of that blissful place (or state of spirit and mind).
Because of their still recent and fresh memory of the celestial glory, Wordsworth claims, children live in a
dream-like world of pure joy and fascination. Gradually, while growing, they start to forget. The bliss fades into
the light of ordinary day. Their attention becomes self-absorbed, less dedicated to solitary thinking and curious
questioning. They become physically and mentally involved in various activities, in attending school, and in the
distractions of crowds. There are prevalent, pressuring, mundane routines to be learned daily. According to the
poets vision of that stage of life, each individual gradually becomes a prisoner and imitator of other people
and of conventional ways of life. To fill the nagging feeling of innate loneliness, a youth craves to blend in, to be
accepted into something larger, to belong. After losing the celestial freedom and the previously owned
grandeur of peace and harmony, the individual is absorbed in a constant search for the self and the lost
paradise.
The poet laments this loss, but he believes that it is not complete. His acclaimed positivity of outlook is
expressed in numerous poems, especially lyrical poetry, and always with a philosophical, sometimes didactic,
touch. He combines the ancient, pre-Christian Platos view with his own Christian-based theory, adding a
personal twist. Wordsworth believes there is wisdom in maturity and a different,...

Summary and Analysis of Meg Merillies by John

Keats
Beaming Notes: Meg Merillies, John Keats (17951821) John Keats, wrote despairingly in a letter to Fanny
Brawne, when he was consumptive If I should die, I leave no immortal work behind. A year later he died at
only 25. Yet he ranks among now among the greatest poets in English Literature and became one of its mythic
heroes. Obscure in life, Keats in death became the defining symbol of doomed Romantic genius. [Dana Gioia]
Keats was orphaned at 14 and left at the mercy of his emotionally remote guardian. He maintained a close-knit
relationship with his brothers and Sister Fanny as orphans who must depend on one another. His younger
brother Tom died of tuberculosis and Keats nursed him to his deathbed. At this time, he contracted the disease
that would kill him three years later.
Keats had qualified to be a surgeon, but never practiced. He was dedicated to poetry. He consciously strove for
literary greatness but found mostly public indifference and critical hostility. What makes Keatss achievement
particularly astonishing is the terrible brevity and intensity of his literary career.

What made Keatss creative process remarkableas the poet himself understoodwas his ability to shed his
own personality temporarily and passionately identify with his subject. He called this act of imaginative selfannihilation negative capability.

Summary of the poem Meg Merillies by John Keats :

Meg Merilles was a gypsy of the Moors, who slept on the brown heath turf of the wilderness, her house being
out of doors.
She ate frugally, not apples but swart (dark coloured) blackberries, not currants but pods plucked off broom
grass in the wild. And for wine, she had the dew of the wild white rose, a quaint beautiful expression.
She had nothing to read save the epitaphs on the Churchyard gravestones. Simply put, she led a simple
vagrant life. She trusted to Nature, with no thought for what the morrow would bring. And so trusting, she
seemed content with whatever frugal food she could gather, the dew of roses and blackberries. She drifted
among the gravestones, quite unafraid of the sceptre of death.
Her brothers were none other than craggy hills and sisters, larchen trees. This was all the family she had and it
was a great one, and among them she lived with enough space and liberty to do as she pleased.
Admittedly it was a hard life. There were times when she had to skip breakfast, at times dinner at noon and
there were nights when she went without supper, sleepless ones when she would lay staring :
Full hard against the Moon
Yet, she remained undeterred in her daily routine which consisted of making garlands out of twining
honeysuckle with fragrant red and yellow-white flowers, every morning.
Then every night she would weave the needle-like Yew leaves with her hands, singing all the while.
But every morn of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,
And every night the dark glen Yew
She wove, and she would sing.
Meg the gypsy was also of a generous nature and big hearted. With her old fingers, which had become brown,
she plaited mats from rushes, (grass like plants with hollow cylindrical stems) and gave them away to the
cottage dwellers who lived in the wilderness on the heath.
And with her fingers old and brown
She plaited Mats o Rushes,
And gave them to the Cottagers
She met among the Bushes.
In the final stanza we learn that old Meg was as brave and full of valour, as Queen Margaret. In stature she
was as tall as an Amazon. Her dress was an old red blanket cloak and a chip hat. The poet prays that God rest
her aged bones somewhere, as she died a long time ago.
Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen
And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore;
A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere
She died full long agone!

Fancy

INTRODUCTION:
This poem, although so much lighter in spirit, bears a certain relation in thought to Keats's other odes. In the Nightingale the
tragedy of this life made him long to escape, on the wings of imagination, to the ideal world of beauty symbolized by the song of
the bird. Here finding all real things, even the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the fancy, which can escape from reality and
is not tied by place or season in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as the extempore character of the
poetry indicates. We see more of settled conviction in the deeply-meditative Ode to Autumn, where he finds the ideal in the rich
and ever-changing real.
This poem is written in the four-accent metre employed by Milton in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and we can often detect a similarity
of cadence, and a resemblance in the scenes imagined.

To Sleep
'TO SLEEP\' is one of the most beautiful sonnet by john keat\'s . Its basically about
the healing power of sleep when the poet used the words \'embalmer of the still mid
n8\' .stil mid n8 here mens silance of the n8 the lulling effect of sleep is like a
medicine for the depressed brain . The poet personify sleep as having careful
fingers.. The imaginative power of the poet is also highlighted here thts why he is a
true Romantic poet. The poet further says that our eyes that are filled with the hard
ships ,messeries & pain of this world are ready to shut. keat's escapism is also
highlighted here.
The poet wants to have an escape in the realm of UTTER forgetfulness.. The poet
wants to say \'amen\' when sleep
finished his hymn (song or prayer) before he got captivated by the intozicating effect
of sleep working here as poppy . The poet terribly wants to get rid of the difficulties
of life as soon as possible
RABIA SHAFIQ.

TO AUTUMN SUMMARY
Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses autumn as if it were a person. In the first stanza, he notes that autumn and
the sun are like best friends plotting how to make fruit grow and how to ripen crops before the harvest. The ripening will lead
to the dropping of seeds, which sets the stage for spring flowers and the whole process starting over again. He tells us about
the bees that think summer can last forever as they buzz around the flowers. But the speaker knows better.
The second stanza describes the period after the harvest, when autumn just hangs out around the granary where harvested
grains are kept. Most of the hard work has already been done, and autumn can just take a nap in the fields, walk across
brooks, or watch the making of cider.
In the third stanza, the speaker notes that the music of spring is a distant memory, but that autumn's music is pretty cool,

too. This music includes images of clouds and harvested fields at sunset, gnats flying around a river, lambs bleating, crickets
singing, and birds whistling and twittering. All of the sights and sounds produce a veritable symphony of beauty.

On The Grasshopper and the Cricket

John Keats' Sonnet "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket" was written on December 30th 1816. The message of this poem is
foregrounded in these two lines:
"The poetry of earth is never dead" which is the opening line of the octave and the poem; and "The poetry of earth is ceasing
never"which is the first line of the sestet. Keats asserts emphatically that no matter what the season, whether it is the peak of
scorching summer or the bitterly cold winter season the music and 'poetry' of Mother Nature will be omnipresent and add vitality
to the environment.
The octave and the sestet compare and contrast a hot summer day and a bitterly cold and lonely winter evening. It's so hot that
the usually chirpy and active birds have taken shelter amongst the shady trees and the whole countryside seems to be quiet, but
just then one can hear the ever active grasshopper chirping away merrily in the hedges.
Similarly when one is cosily sheltered in the comfort of his home in front of a warm stove from the cold frosty winter and is
beginning to feel lonely, the silence is shattered by the shrill chirpings of the cricket which adds meaning to the lonely winter
evening without filling it up by reminding him of the music of the grasshopper in the summer months.

Summary of the poem In Drear-nighted december by john keats?

synopsis answered 4 years ago
Keats' poem examines the idea that the worst part of suffering is often to remember a time when we were happy.
He would have found this idea in the words of Francesca da Rimini in Dante's Inferno:
Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseri.
(No greater torment thatn to remember happy times in misery)

IN a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches neer remember
Their green felicity:
(Tree, you are happy because in this bleak December you cannot remember what it was like to be green and fresh last Spring)
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
(The cold wind freezes you, and the frost glues your leaves together; but none of this makes you forget the good times of last
Spring).
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings neer remember
Apollos summer look;
(Brook, you are happy because in the cold winter you never remember what it was like to glisten in sunshine)
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,

Never, never petting

About the frozen time.
(You may freeze solid, but you never have to remember what it was like to flow freely in the Summer time).
Ah! would t were so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
(Girls and boys would be lucky to have no memories, but they all feel it when they lose their love).
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.
(Feeling the loss even though there i nothing to make it better, nor any way to forget about it, is not something any poem can talk
about).

John Keats, Bards of Passion

and of Mirth
The bards have left their souls on earth? Usually we say that when a body dies, the soul
separates and goes to another realm.
But whatever is integral to the soul is here on earth for the bards. So the speaker asks if
they also have souls in heaven, and then unhesitatingly answers his own question yes.
One has good reason to be suspicious of the rest of the poem given how quickly that
answer is pronounced.
Still, there is an ordering. The souls of heaven are receptive (commune) to three earthly
things: the visible motions of the heavenly bodies, the noise of water rushing, and all of
human speech. It sounds vaguely Biblical, and it is, in that the end of creation is man. But
the souls of heaven also exist in heaven. In heaven, trees whisper, the fawns explore,
and there are at least three sorts of flowers. Some flowers define the limits of the place;
some are found on earth, but better there; some are completely undefinable with only
earthly experience. Heaven is a realm of knowledge, earth that of myth (no wonder speech
was thundrous). The nightingale sings truth.

So who exactly are these bards of passion and of mirth? Are we talking about poets here?
Regions new the undiscovered country, philosophy as exploration of the New World
looms large. These bards sound awfully hedonistic, but never slumberd, never cloying
points us in the direction of the truest joy. Fine, but isnt Thus ye live on high, and then / On
the earth ye live again pointing at something problematic? Its like their immortality depends
on our half-knowing; the bards deal in things that are sort of true, not entirely true. Why
should we respect their love of knowledge, if theyre in a realm when they know everything?
Why not just appeal directly to that realm?
The answer is that unless you receive direct visions from God every single waking and
sleeping moment in your life, then youre depending on a bard of a sort to get to truth. The
bards are not dishonest, in a sense: theyre somewhere, theyd like you to be that place,
they have souls left who are willing to work with you to get there. Those other souls who
teach are on earth, but are heavenly inspired. There is something heavenly, knowledge of
our condition, that is proclaimed on earth with a bit more clarity, since it is in a sense
beyond our perspective:

The Oven Bird

by Robert Frost

The Oven Bird is an irregular sonnet that explores in various ways the problem of what to make of a
diminished thing. The poet does not refer to the bird directly by its other common name of teacher bird
(based on the resemblance of its reiterated call to the word teacher) but attributes to the bird an instructive
discourse about diminishment, the downward thrust of things. In the middle of summer, this bird reminds one of
the fall (specifically the petal fall) that is already past and of the fall to come.
Like many of Frosts poems, this one is built on paradox. This bird can be said to sing, but it is not particularly
tuneful. Its repeated call in a trochaic, or falling, rhythm does not have the upward lilt that humans generally
consider cheerful or merry. The bird is a twentieth century teachernot the old-fashioned lecturer but the
modern one who contrives to induce the students to teach themselves. Like the teacher, the bird knows, and
in knowing frames the kind of question that is intended to provoke thought, although without any guarantee of
easy resolution. Paradoxically, the process of learning becomes one of discovering that some questions must
be struggled with unendingly. Like the teacher bird, the poem supplies no answers.
Literally, the diminished thing of the poem is the weather and the natural year. The sonnet is full of words and
phrases such as old, early petal-fall, down...
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