General Notes on Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads
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Romanticism and Victorian Literature (EN5200)
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University Of St Andrews
This document contains general thoughts and observations on Wordsworth and Coleridge's 'Lyrical Ballads'. It focuses on the key terms and the frequency of their use within the collection as well as some considerations for the ordering of the collection.
This references both editions of Lyrical ...
When I read Lyrical Ballads again, I was specifically paying attention to recurring
words and phrases in the volume.
So, there were of course the obvious themes that were highlighted through this. So,
words such as ‘nature’, ‘sun’, ‘moon’, very typical of Romantic poetry. But, there
were two words in particular which I noticed cropped up significantly more than any
others, and these were ‘man’ and ‘eye’.
So, for context, this was when ‘man’ was either written as an individual word or was
part of ‘human’/’humanity’, and ‘man’ in these forms is repeated 73 times and seen in
19 out of the 23 poems – so, almost all of them.
And then there is the word ‘eye’ – so, for example, in the ‘Foster Mother’s Tale’…’Till
lost in inward vision, with wet eye she gazes idly’. Another example is ‘The Thorn’
‘But then the beauteous hill of moss / Before their eyes began to stir’.
The word ‘eye’ in this way is in the volume a total of 49 times and is again found in
over half of the poems.
So, a kind of focus on the common man, perception and vision.
So, in many cases, I found that these two words often work together to denotes
explicit sensory descriptions (so, the way the narrator describes the physicality of the
thorn, for example). But, these words also address moments of perception – which I
think was quite unique at the time of lyrical ballads – I believe Wordsworth would say
are experienced through the ‘inward eye’. So, things like memory, imagination,
internal thoughts. So I believe that is quite prevalent in ‘Tintern Abbey’ for instance.
So, ultimately, by identifying these patterns, we do get a sense of the essence of
Lyrical Ballads, which is this Romantic fascination with the individual and our
relationship to the natural world. John E. Jordon writes that the fundamental
experiment of Lyrical Ballads was to ‘charge the commonplace with feeling’ and I
think we can certainly see this just by identifying recurring themes in the volume. So
we might say for example that in Wordsworth’s poems in particular, the observing
eye is the centrepiece of the poems, and man’s ability to attach grandeur and feeling
to this is often what the poems are showcasing.
As a side note, I did also look into whether there was anything to be said for the
actual arrangement of these poems in terms of whether the way in which they were
ordered served as a message of its own. I decided that given a) the 1798 collection
is thought to have been published quickly due to financial need and b) that
Wordsworth took time to re-order every poem from the volume for its second
publication two years later, there perhaps wasn’t any intricate order to the poems
themselves. I think there is, however, certainly something to be said in the framing of
the volume between ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner’ at the start and ‘Tintern
Abbey’ at the end.
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