3. Theoretical tenets of Romanticism and poetic achievement in S.T.

Coleridge's Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and John Keatss
Ode on a Grecian Urn and the Eve of Saint Agnes.
Romanticism:
A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against
the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries...The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is
given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature
depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." This is as accurate a general definition as
can be accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature" is also apt.
Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any list of
particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an
emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in
society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and
worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the
middle ages.
English poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats
American poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David
Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Summary
Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when one of them is detained by a
grizzled old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily demands that the Mariner let go of him,
and the Mariner obeys. But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariners glittering
eye and can do nothing but sit on a stone and listen to his strange tale. The Mariner says that
he sailed on a ship out of his native harborbelow the kirk, below the hill, / Below the
lighthouse topand into a sunny and cheerful sea. Hearing bassoon music drifting from the
direction of the wedding, the Wedding-Guest imagines that the bride has entered the hall, but
he is still helpless to tear himself from the Mariners story. The Mariner recalls that the
voyage quickly darkened, as a giant storm rose up in the sea and chased the ship southward.
Quickly, the ship came to a frigid land of mist and snow, where ice, mast-high, came
floating by; the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. But then the sailors encountered an
Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew around the ship, the ice cracked and split, and a wind
from the south propelled the ship out of the frigid regions, into a foggy stretch of water. The
Albatross followed behind it, a symbol of good luck to the sailors. A pained look crosses the

Mariners face, and the Wedding-Guest asks him, Why lookst thou so? The Mariner
confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow.
At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner for having killed the bird that made
the breezes blow. But when the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors decided that the bird had
actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they now congratulated the Mariner on his deed.
The wind pushed the ship into a silent sea where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds
died down, and the ship was As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean. The ocean
thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the sea were rotting, slimy creatures
crawled out of it and walked across the surface. At night, the water burned green, blue, and
white with death fire. Some of the sailors dreamed that a spirit, nine fathoms deep, followed
them beneath the ship from the land of mist and snow. The sailors blamed the Mariner for
their plight and hung the corpse of the Albatross around his neck like a cross.
A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their mouths so dry, that they were
unable to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner saw a tiny speck on the horizon.
It resolved into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and inform the
other sailors, the Mariner bit down on his arm; sucking the blood, he was able to moisten his
tongue enough to cry out, A sail! a sail! The sailors smiled, believing they were saved. But
as the ship neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew
included two figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale
woman with golden locks and red lips, and thicks mans blood with cold. Death and Life-inDeath began to throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon she whistled three times, causing
the sun to sink to the horizon, the stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a
single star, the sailors dropped dead one by oneall except the Mariner, whom each sailor
cursed with his eye before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt from their bodies and
rushed by the Mariner.
The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner, with his glittering eye and his skinny
hand. The Mariner reassures the Wedding-Guest that there is no need for dread; he was not
among the men who died, and he is a living man, not a ghost. Alone on the ship, surrounded
by two hundred corpses, the Mariner was surrounded by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures
that crawled across its surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a wicked whisper that
made his heart as dry as dust. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the dead men,

each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse. For seven days and seven
nights the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die. At last the moon rose,
casting the great shadow of the ship across the waters; where the ships shadow touched the
waters, they burned red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery moonlight,
glittering; blue, green, and black, the snakes coiled and swam and became beautiful in the
Mariners eyes. He blessed the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found
himself able to pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking like lead into
the sea.
Form
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is written in loose, short ballad stanzas usually either four
or six lines long but, occasionally, as many as nine lines long. The meter is also somewhat
loose, but odd lines are generally tetrameter, while even lines are generally trimeter. (There
are exceptions: In a five-line stanza, for instance, lines one, three, and four are likely to have
four accented syllablestetrameterwhile lines two and five have three accented syllables.)
The rhymes generally alternate in an ABAB or ABABAB scheme, though again there are
many exceptions; the nine-line stanza in Part III, for instance, rhymes AABCCBDDB. Many
stanzas include couplets in this wayfive-line stanzas, for example, are rhymed ABCCB,
often with an internal rhyme in the first line, or ABAAB, without the internal rhyme.
Commentary
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is unique among Coleridges important works unique in
its intentionally archaic language (Eftsoons his hand drops he), its length, its bizarre moral
narrative, its strange scholarly notes printed in small type in the margins, its thematic
ambiguity, and the long Latin epigraph that begins it, concerning the multitude of
unclassifiable invisible creatures that inhabit the world. Its peculiarities make it quite
atypical of its era; it has little in common with other Romantic works. Rather, the scholarly
notes, the epigraph, and the archaic language combine to produce the impression (intended by
Coleridge, no doubt) that the Rime is a ballad of ancient times (like Sir Patrick Spence,
which appears in Dejection: An Ode), reprinted with explanatory notes for a new audience.
But the explanatory notes complicate, rather than clarify, the poem as a whole; while there are
times that they explain some unarticulated action, there are also times that they interpret the

material of the poem in a way that seems at odds with, or irrelevant to, the poem itself. For
instance, in Part II, we find a note regarding the spirit that followed the ship nine fathoms
deep: one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels;
concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael
Psellus, may be consulted. What might Coleridge mean by introducing such figures as the
Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, into the poem, as marginalia, and by implying
that the verse itself should be interpreted through him?
This is a question that has puzzled scholars since the first publication of the poem in this
form. (Interestingly, the original version of the Rime, in the 1797 edition of Lyrical
Ballads, did not include the side notes.) There is certainly an element of humor in Coleridges
scholarly glossesa bit of parody aimed at the writers of serious glosses of this type; such
phrases as Platonic Constantinopolitan seem consciously silly. It can be argued that the
glosses are simply an amusing irrelevancy designed to make the poem seem archaic and that
the truly important text is the poem itselfin its complicated, often Christian symbolism, in
its moral lesson (that all creatures great and small were created by God and should be loved,
from the Albatross to the slimy snakes in the rotting ocean) and in its characters.
If one accepts this argument, one is faced with the task of discovering the key to Coleridges
symbolism: what does the Albatross represent, what do the spirits represent, and so forth.
Critics have made many ingenious attempts to do just that and have found in the Rime a
number of interesting readings, ranging from Christian parable to political allegory. But these
interpretations are dampened by the fact that none of them (with the possible exception of the
Christian reading, much of which is certainly intended by the poem) seems essential to the
story itself. One can accept these interpretations of the poem only if one disregards the glosses
almost completely.
A more interesting, though still questionable, reading of the poem maintains that Coleridge
intended it as a commentary on the ways in which people interpret the lessons of the past and
the ways in which the past is, to a large extent, simply unknowable. By filling his archaic
ballad with elaborate symbolism that cannot be deciphered in any single, definitive way and
then framing that symbolism with side notes that pick at it and offer a highly theoretical
spiritual-scientific interpretation of its classifications, Coleridge creates tension between the
ambiguous poem and the unambiguous-but-ridiculous notes, exposing a gulf between the

old poem and the new attempt to understand it. The message would be that, though
certain moral lessons from the past are still comprehensiblehe liveth best who loveth best
is not hard to understand other aspects of its narratives are less easily grasped.
In any event, this first segment of the poem takes the Mariner through the worst of his trials
and shows, in action, the lesson that will be explicitly articulated in the second segment. The
Mariner kills the Albatross in bad faith, subjecting himself to the hostility of the forces that
govern the universe (the very un-Christian-seeming spirit beneath the sea and the horrible
Life-in-Death). It is unclear how these forces are meant to relate to one anotherwhether the
Life-in-Death is in league with the submerged spirit or whether their simultaneous appearance
is simply a coincidence.
After earning his curse, the Mariner is able to gain access to the favor of Godable to regain
his ability to prayonly by realizing that the monsters around him are beautiful in Gods eyes
and that he should love them as he should have loved the Albatross. In the final three books of
the poem, the Mariners encounter with a Hermit will spell out this message explicitly, and the
reader will learn why the Mariner has stopped the Wedding-Guest to tell him this story.
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is
preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the still unravishd bride of
quietness, the foster-child of silence and slow time. He also describes the urn as a
historian that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks
what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict
a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: What
mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man
playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the pipers
unheard melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He
tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should
not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees

surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for
the piper because his songs will be for ever new, and happy that the love of the boy and the
girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into breathing human passion and
eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of
villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (To what green
altar, O mysterious priest...) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town,
empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will for evermore be silent, for those who
have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again
addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, doth tease us out of thought. He thinks
that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its
enigmatic lesson: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. The speaker says that that is the only thing
the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.
Form
Ode on a Grecian Urn follows the same ode-stanza structure as the Ode on Melancholy,
though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five
stanzas in Grecian Urn is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter,
and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first
seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of
the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are
rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE,
just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially Autumn and Melancholy), the two-part
rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the
sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly
define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other
odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the
fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)
Themes
If the Ode to a Nightingale portrays Keatss speakers engagement with the fluid
expressiveness of music, the Ode on a Grecian Urn portrays his attempt to engage with the

static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to
the time of the speakers viewing, exists outside of time in the human senseit does not age,
it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speakers meditation, this
creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are
free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging
and death (their love is for ever young), but neither can they have experience (the youth can
never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).
The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks
different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the mad pursuit and
wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: What men or gods are these? What
maidens loth? Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of
the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.
In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover
beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the
urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from
temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the pipers unheard song and the eternally
unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is far above all transient human
passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensitywhen
passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a burning
forehead, and a parching tongue. His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the
speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with
the figures on the urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though
they wereexperiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the little
town) and a destination (the green altar). But all he can think is that the town will forever
be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he
confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and
wheres of the real story in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the
destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage
with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt
identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and
thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the little town with a real and
generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply
because there is nothing more to sayonce the speaker confronts the silence and eternal
emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there
is nothing more the urn can tell him.
In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to
engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its
ability to tease him out of thought / As doth eternity. If human life is a succession of
hungry generations, as the speaker suggests in Nightingale, the urn is a separate and selfcontained world. It can be a friend to man, as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the
kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to
human life.
The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the
Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase Beauty is truth, truth beauty, no one
can say for sure who speaks the conclusion, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need
to know. It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing
mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness
of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and
truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and selfcontained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is
the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as
though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is
that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation
which reading to accept.

The Eve of St. Agnes

Summary
The setting is a medieval castle, the time is January 20, the eve of the Feast of St. Agnes.
Madeline, the daughter of the lord of the castle, is looking forward to midnight, for she has
been assured by "old dames" that, if she performs certain rites, she will have a magical vision
of her lover at midnight in her dreams. Madeline believes in this old superstition and prepares
to do all that is required, such as going supperless to bed.
On this same evening, Porphyro, who is in love with Madeline and whom she loves, manages
to get into the castle unobserved. Madeline's family regards Porphyro as an enemy whom they
are ready to kill on sight. The presence of many guests in the castle helps make it possible for
Porphyro to escape notice. By chance he meets Madeline's old nurse, Angela, who is his
friend; she tells him of Madeline's quaint superstition. At once the idea of making Madeline's
belief become reality by his presence in her bedroom at midnight flashes into his mind. He
assures Angela that he means no harm and she reluctantly agrees to help him. She leads him
to Madeline's chamber where he hides in a closet.
Madeline soon enters and, her mind filled with the thought of the wonderful vision she will
soon have, goes to bed and falls asleep. The ritual she has performed produces the expected
result; her sleep becomes the sleep of enchantment and Porphyro, looking as if immortalized,
fills her dreams.
After Madeline falls asleep, Porphyro leaves the closet and approaches her bed in order to
awaken her. His whispering does not stir her; her sleep is "a midnight charm / Impossible to
melt as iced stream." He picks up her lute and plays it close to her ear. Suddenly her eyes
open wide but she remains in the grip of the magic spell. Then "there was a painful change,
that nigh expell'd / The blisses of her dream so pure and deep." She now sees Porphyro, not
immortal as in her dream, but in his ordinary mortality. The contrast is so great that Madeline
even thinks that the human Porphyro is on the point of death. She wants her visionary
Porphyro back again. Her wish is granted; the operations of magic are powerful enough to
enable Porphyro, "beyond a mortal man impassion'd far," to enter her dream vision and there
they are united in a mystic marriage.
When the magic visionary state comes to an end, Madeline expresses her fear that Porphyro
will abandon her, "a deceived thing; / A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."
Porphyro, who now addresses her as his bride, urges her to leave the castle with him. "Awake!
arise! my love, and fearless be, / For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."
The two leave the castle undetected and go out into the storm. That night the baron and all his
guests have bad dreams, and Angela and the old Beadsman both die.
Analysis
In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats uses the metrical romance or narrative verse form cultivated
extensively by medieval poets and revived by the romantic poets. Scott and Byron became the
most popular writers of verse narrative. Keats' metrical pattern is the iambic nine-line
Spenserian stanza that earlier poets had found suitable for descriptive and meditative poetry.
Because of its length and slow movement, the Spenserian stanza is not well adapted to the

demands of narrative verse. It inhibits rapidity of pace, and the concluding iambic hexameter
line, as one critic has remarked, creates the effect of throwing out an anchor at the end of
every stanza.
Keats clearly was not very interested in writing lively narrative in The Eve of St. Agnes. The
story is trifling and the characters are of no great interest. Porphyro is an idealized knight who
will face any danger whatsoever to see his lady love, and Madeline is reduced to an
exquisitely lovely and loving young lady. Keats is interested in celebrating romantic love;
romantic love is literally a heavenly experience, and for its culmination Keats puts his lovers
temporarily in a heaven that is realized through magic. The Eve of St. Agnes is, in part, a poem
of the supernatural which the romantic poets were so fond of employing.
The Eve of St. Agnes is a heavily descriptive poem; it is like a painting that is filled with
carefully observed and minute detail. In this respect, it was a labor of love for Keats and
provided him with an opportunity to exploit his innate sensuousness. Imagery such as "he
follow'd through a lowly arched way, / Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume," all of
stanzas XXIV and XXV describing the stained glass window in Madeline's room and
Madeline's appearance transformed by moonlight passing through the stained glass, stanza
XXX cataloguing the foods placed on the table in Madeline's room, the lines "the arras, rich
with horseman, haw, and hound, / Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar; / And the long
carpets rose along the gusty floor," show Keats' picture-making mind at work. The poem has
to be read with scrupulous attention; every detail makes a distinctive contribution and even
though much of what is in the poem is there for its own sake, everything at the same time
makes its contribution to the exaltation of romantic love. Some critics view the poem as
Keats' celebration of his first and only experience of romance. It was written not long after
Keats and Fanny Brawne had fallen in love.
Readers have been struck by Keats' use of contrast in The Eve of St.Agnes; it is one of the
chief aesthetic devices employed in the poem. The special effect of contrast is that it draws
attention to all the details so that none are missed. Keats deliberately emphasizes the bitterly
cold weather of St. Agnes' Eve so that ultimately the delightful warmth of happy love is
emphasized. The owl, the hare, and the sheep are all affected by the cold although all three are
particularly well protected by nature against it: "The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold." The
hatred of Madeline's relatives for Porphyro, for whatever reason, highlights the love of
Madeline and Porphyro for each other. Age is contrasted with youth; the poverty and selfdenial of the Beadsman are contrasted with the richness of the feast that Porphyro prepares for
Madeline.
All the senses are appealed to at one time or another throughout the course of the poem, but,
as in most poems, it is the sense of sight that is chiefly appealed to. The most striking example
of Keats' appeal to the sense of sight is to be found in his description of the stained glass
window in Madeline's room. This window was "diamonded with panes of quaint device, /
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes." Madeline is transformed into a "splendid angel" by
the stained glass as the moonlight shines through it:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Keats put a stained glass window in Madeline's room in order to glorify her and put her firmly
at the center of his story.
The concluding stanza of the poem raises a problem. Why does Keats have Angela, who had
helped Porphyro and Madeline achieve a happy issue to their love, and the Beadsman, who
had nothing to do with it, die at the end of the story? Their death does not come as a total
surprise, for earlier in the poem Keats implied that both might die soon. Possibly Keats,
looking beyond the end of his story, saw that Angela would be punished for not reporting the
presence of Porphyro in the castle and for helping him. Death removes her from the reach of
punishment. Keats may have used the death of the Beadsman, to whom he had devoted two
and a half stanzas at the beginning of the poem, to close off his story. And so the Beadsman
"For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold." Keats needed a good concluding stanza to
his poem, whose main characters disappear from the scene in the next to last stanza, and so
the lives of his two minor characters end with the end of the poem.