Although Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is not considered to be part of the Romantic canon, its first twenty lines do advance some classic Romantic themes. Most notably, the first twenty lines of Gray's poem describe the kind of isolated world of natural beauty favored by most Romantics.
Though the first twenty lines develop this characteristic, it's pretty completely developed in the first stanza:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (1-4)
Already in this first stanza, we can see that Gray is setting his poem within a world of pastoral beauty. With a wandering herd, an open grassland (the definition of a "lea") and a plowman, Gray skillfully develops a world of natural beauty and hard-working farmers. Moreover, since the world is left to the speaker of the poem, it's suggested that he is alone in this picturesque natural setting. A beautiful and isolated natural setting is a typical characteristic of Romantic literature, as it cultivates an ideal place for the Romantic imagination to become manifest. By using the first twenty lines of his poem to develop this setting, Gray also utilizes a feature that was to become a key part of the Romantic aesthetic.
https://www.owleyes.org/text/elegy-written/read/text-poem
Friday, July 20, 2018
What major characteristic of Romanticism is evident in the first 20 lines of the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment