![]() ![]() Like a sailor following the north star to guide them in the right direction, Wordsworth's poetry showed Shelley the way. In the simile, Shelley is the ship and the journey can be considered that of life. ![]() In the first simile, Wordsworth is like a star that guides a small ship ("bark") through a difficult journey in a winter storm at night. In these lines, Shelley constructs two complicated similes, which create evocative imagery, to express two different sides, or views, of what Wordsworth's poetry meant to him. Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stoodĪbove the blind and battling multitude Speaker On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine While Wordsworth embraces a new set of conservative political values, Shelley criticizes the older poet's decision to diverge from his earlier work. The "one loss" refers to the change in Wordsworth, and Shelley knows that Wordsworth must also feel the difference in himself. However, not everyone turns away from their values to cope with this loss. Everyone-not just Wordsworth -experiences the loss of childhood dreams, youth, friendship, and first love. But then Shelley introduces a breach between himself and Wordsworth: we're not told what particular "loss" is felt, and it isn't until later that we realize that the loss that is so deplorable-a very strong word to use-to Shelley is the loss of the Wordsworth who wrote poetry dedicated to "truth and liberty." The word "common" could also refer to the universal nature of the themes Shelley identifies. He's expressing a shared solidarity with "the Commons"-everyday working people. This in itself was a radical move to make in a book of poetry, and one that Shelley admired. Wordsworth and Coleridge had in their major work of 1798, the Lyrical Ballads, attempted to write in "the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society" to express "a natural delineation of human passions." That is, they used ordinary language to try to express ordinary feelings of ordinary people. The use of the word "common" here is a conscious choice by Shelley, and carries with it particular associations. Shelley, in the kind of plain, unadorned language that Wordsworth made famous in his work, expresses his sympathy with the sentiments expressed in Wordsworth's poetry, such as the "Intimations" ode. Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore. "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" Wordsworth had asked in "Intimations." Shelley echoes the metaphor of the dream that Wordsworth himself used in the Intimations Ode, by likening the passing away of the wonder and innocence of childhood to waking up from a nice dream into a more mundane reality. ![]() These ideas show up consistently as recurring motifs throughout much of Wordsworth's poetry. Shelley remarkably manages to boil down the essential themes of Wordsworth’s major and most well-known output into a single line. Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These opening lines clearly allude to Wordsworth's great poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," where Wordsworth reflects on and mourns the loss of his childlike relation to Nature: "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream."Ĭhildhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, For Shelley, such poetry was a powerful testament to the inherent goodness of Nature and hence provided support for the view that a moral life didn't require religious belief. ![]() Wordsworth wrote much about Nature and its importance to the development of human sensibility and morality. God was no longer a separate, personal being that controlled nature from above, but merely the force or energy of the universe itself. In the thought of the Enlightenment, which preceded the Romantics and exerted a deep influence on them, Nature had come to replace God at the center of the universe. The speaker of the poem introduces the reader to William Wordsworth by referring to him as a poet of nature: Wordsworth’s verse is well-known for dealing with the relationship of the poet to the natural world around him."Nature," with a capital N, was a very important key term for the Romantics. The poem begins with a rhetorical figure known as apostrophe, an address to a person or thing not present, a figure that Shelley utilizes frequently. That things depart which never may return Speaker ![]()
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