Lecture notes
Notes on various poems from the Romantic period
- Institution
- University Of St Andrews
Notes on the following poems: Fears in Solitudes The Emigrants France: An Ode These are about 10-15 bullets points each.
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Romanticism Poems• Some critics see the turn towards nature is often seen as a retreat away from the political
sphere, but others see nature as inherently political.
• The French Constitution is thinking about what is natural and the natural disposition of man.
• Employing nature for political ends. Seen in The Prelude.
• Edmund Burke ‘Second Nature’, instinctively evolving a feeling for our kinship, we feel close
to our country. Nature employed by both spectrums of the political world.
• Both Coleridge and Smith are interested in finding a better social structure through nature.
• Moral education and advancements may come through, for someone like Coleridge, the
natural world.
• Smith frames her sympathy for others through her own experiences, intense subjectivity.
• Can nature offer a form of restoration?
The Emigrants Charlotte Smith
• Nature is a barricade from the conflict, it is a sanctuary. Britain has historically felt protected
and safe from the body of water surrounding it. The sea offers a kind of passage.
• Fluid movement from thought to thought. Peruses the meanderings of her mind. Places
demands on the readers to follow the dense verse.
• Eb and flow of thought is natural within its self.
• The external is thought of through the impact on her internal landscape, subjectivity.
• Ominous beginning to the poem, sense of being on the cusp of something unknown. Smith
inverts the idea of light imagery, represents turbulence and change.
• Despondent scene setting: ‘the struggling light… the troubled waves’.
• Book 1 set in November, book 2 set in April, changing of the season. Winter is often
associated with melancholy ‘tis the winter of our discontent’.
• Smith doesn’t view nature in the same philosophical way as Wordsworth does.
• Nature can take you away from the troubles and turbulence of the human world.
• Sense of a higher being having created this natural world: ‘Yet He whose spirit into being
called’. An understanding of God, a kindly, benevolent figure, reflected in a reciprocal
natural world. Suggests a kind of sympathy and understanding.
• A sovereignty at play in the natural world, what does it mean to be a good ruler? Political.
• ‘Speaks to them in thunder’, there may be another side to God, a more violent one, links to
the Old Testament.
• Christian orthodoxy underpins Smith’s approach to nature.
• Sadness and melancholy as a root to understanding. I am suffering because others are, and
this brings you closer to people: ‘When my swoln heart was busting with its sorrows/ From
the sad thought that others like myself.’
• Catholic priests were one of the groups of people that fled France. Sense of universal
acceptance and understanding, she might not agree with them but still sympathises for
them. Powerful yet foolish figures.
• In the eyes of nature, status and money are irrelevant. These people who have lived
comfortable lives are full of self-sympathy. Smith is keen for their suffering to be educative.
• Smith seems to believe the divine right of kings is unnatural and actually everyone is born
regal. Redefining what is noble, play on the noble savage idea and inherited idea of nobility.
• She questions aristocratic sensibility, that don’t relate to nature.
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