Extremely detailed A* essay plan page/summary for Shelley's 'The Cold Earth Slept Below'
Contains perceptive and nuanced assertions of high level context, language analysis, arguments and themes.
Undergraduate level analysis for A-Level English Literature Unit 3: Poetry, The Romantic Poets
Topic:
Th cold earth slept below - Shelley
Key Points/Arguments
Shows nature to be desolate and shallow (Gothic) – dealing with the harrowing and disturbing aspects of the Sublime
Nature can be a regenerative force, but is placatory in the face of industrialisation
Dynamism between speaker and environment , a bleak, desolate, inhospitable encivironment
Structure Literary/Dramatic Devices Context
- Unsettling, S1 - Pantheism –
picturesque ‘the/above/and/from/beneath’ – propositions relates things spatially wile the speaker is neither part of humankind and
stillness in the the sky or earth (Romantic poetry is about a man’s connection to nature) nature’s organic
poem ‘cold sky shone’ ‘death did flow’ – incompatible elements ideas held together connection
‘ice/snow/flow/sinking’ – ethereal movement set against stasis - The Gothic
S2 - Gender
‘hedge/bound’ – boundaries, oppressive, enveloping stasis of nature Dynamics,
‘black/crack’ – nature is hostile (onomatopoeia) – masculine rhyme creates a simplicity aestheticizing and
‘was not seen’ – negative phrase, failure of the senses eroticising of dead
S3 – emotion excites the senses rather than nature… Gothic woman, excitingly sexualises women in 19th
female figure century, a woman
‘glare’ – will-o-wisp can be possessed in
‘glowed/ dying’ – she rejuvenates while nature is dormant death and art in a
‘thine eyes’ – direct adress, general tone of poem is deeply impersonal, (just way she cannot in
thine/beloved/dear), only a few markers of intimacy life
S4
‘the’ x3 – parallel syntax, almost bombarded with relentless exposure
‘lips/bosom/head’ – anatomy, female body is deconstructed
‘shed/head’ – internal rhyme – she is exposed and consumed by the cold power of nature
‘bitter breath of the naked sky’ – plosives add to assault
‘Might visit thee at will.’ – violation of female body
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