The Problem of Genre in the Hymns by the Lake Poets and Thomas Moore

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Alexandra D. Zhuk ◽  

Though there are many seminal works on early Romanticism and Thomas Moore’s poetry, their hymns remain understudied. This article focuses on the genre problem in the hymns by the Lake Poets (S.T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, R. Southey) and Thomas Moore, whose poetry is studied in context of English Literature and German Romanticism. The characteristics of the hymn are emotionality, associative composition, abundance of repetitions and parallelisms, archaic grammatical forms of verbs and pronouns, and the use of verb contractions. The combination of genres in hymns results in such variants as the odic hymn, the idyllic and elegiac hymn, the mythological hymn, and even the satirical hymn, with each of them evolving in its own way in the period under study. The odic hymn is represented in “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802) by S.T. Coleridge and “Hymn. For the Boatmen, as They Approach the Rapids under the Castle of Heidelberg” (1820/1822) and “To the Laborer’s Noon-Day Hymn” (1834/1835) by W. Wordsworth. These poems have such odic features as comparisons and conditional and cause-and-effect syntactic constructions. Coleridge’s hymn going back to the psalms of praise was influenced by German Romanticism, while Wordsworth’s hymns feature religious vocabulary and quotations from the Mass. The mythological hymn comes in two versions – one with idyllic features (“Hymn to the Earth” (1799, publ.1834) by S.T. Coleridge) and the mythological hymn-fragment (“Fragment of a mythological hymn to Love” (1812) by T. Moore). The fist is the translation of Stolberg’s hymn, from which the leitmotif of the Earth as the mother and the nanny of the World is borrowed. The image of the Earth has anthropomorphic features, with the marriage of the Earth and Heaven going back to W. Blake. The myth created by T. Moore is more complex. The creation of the world begins with the marriage of Love and Psyche. Love appears as the masculine principle of the Universe, while Psyche as the feminine one. The plot goes back to the ancient myths of the world creation from the Chaos and marriage of Eros and Psyche. However, T. Moore changed the myth and transformed the heroes into a source of life. “Hymn to the Penates” (1796) by R. Southey combines the idyllic, elegiac, publicistic and hymn features proper. The idyllic features are related to the image of the Penates that turn into a force controlling human lives and the souls of the dead. The childhood memories give rise to the elegiac features. The publicistic features appear in the verses of the people who do not worship the Penates. The composition, repetitions and parallelisms in the satirical “A Hymn of Welcome after the Recess” (1813) by T. Moore go back to the hymn genre; however the main stylistic devices used are irony and metonymy. Summing up, the genre of hymn in the works by the Lake Poets and Thomas Moore undergoes significant transformations, which will be further developed in late Romanism.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


Among the celestial bodies the sun is certainly the first which should attract our notice. It is a fountain of light that illuminates the world! it is the cause of that heat which main­tains the productive power of nature, and makes the earth a fit habitation for man! it is the central body of the planetary system; and what renders a knowledge of its nature still more interesting to us is, that the numberless stars which compose the universe, appear, by the strictest analogy, to be similar bodies. Their innate light is so intense, that it reaches the eye of the observer from the remotest regions of space, and forcibly claims his notice. Now, if we are convinced that an inquiry into the nature and properties of the sun is highly worthy of our notice, we may also with great satisfaction reflect on the considerable progress that has already been made in our knowledge of this eminent body. It would require a long detail to enumerate all the various discoveries which have been made on this subject; I shall, therefore, content myself with giving only the most capital of them.


Author(s):  
Syahrin Harahap

Globalization in the world has given the huge impact on the people, as the new condition of the world has brought the world to the globalism- a consciousness and understanding that the world is one. Globalization has also unified the people in a global village that covers all aspects of life such as economic, political, cultural, religious aspects. This paper will explore the concept of wa¡a¯iyyah which stresses on the moderation and accommodative way and its implementation in Southeast Asia. The main idea of the wa¡a¯iyyah or moderation in religious life is that it offers the importance of realizing the concept of Islamic blessing for all the Universe (Islam; Ra¥matan lil ±lam³n). Therefore, the main offer of the Muslim wa¡a¯iyyah movement is to focus on developing civilization, freedom, justice, prosperity and better future for all the people. It is the main capital of the Wa¡a¯iyyah in Southeast Asia to give the significant contribution to the globalization of the world.


2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2 (5)) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
Gayane Petrosyan

The poetry of the world-renowned poetess Emily Dickenson received general acclaim in the fifties of the previous century, 70 years after her death. This country-dwelling lady who had locked herself from the surrounding world, created one of the most precious examples of the 19th century American poetry and became one of the most celebrated poets of all time without leaving her own garden.Her soul was her universe and the mission of Dickenson’s sole was to open the universe to let the people see it. Interestingly, most of her poems lack a title, are short and symbolic. The poetess managed to disclose the dark side of the human brain which symbolizes death and eternity.


Impact! ◽  
1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit L. Verschuur

Just what happened to the dinosaurs? In the mind’s eye, travel back to the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. First, land in a region of the world that will someday be called Oklahoma. You are in the era of dinosaurs, although there are no longer as many species about, worldwide, as there were ten million or so years before. In all, 23 species roam their individual parts of the planet. It is their lack of spatial diversity that will make them vulnerable to the catastrophe that is about to befall the earth. So imagine you are there, together with triceratops, stegosaurus, velociraptors, and tyrannosaurus rex. Mostly they live off the land, and some of them live off each other. On this day none of the animals on earth can possibly have any awareness that they are about to disappear. Such a luxury will only be granted to a conscious species that has learned to explore the universe. For those who survive the initial impact explosion and its immediate consequences, the coming months will mark a terrible example of one of Cuvier’s “brief periods of terror.” In rapid succession, all life will be subject to a holocaust of staggering proportion, horrendous blast waves, searing winds, showers of molten matter from the sky, earthquakes, a terrible darkness that will cut out sunlight for a year, and freezing weather that will last a decade. The ozone layer will be destroyed, and acid rain will make life intolerable for species that survived the first few months after the impact. You are there and you have been observing an odd phenomenon in the sky. For thousands of years a great comet has loomed, repeatedly lighting up the heavens with its glorious tail and then fading away to reappear a few years later. Long ago it was seen to break into fragments, each of which was a spectacular sight in its own right. Sometimes one of those fragments seemed to loom ever so close to the earth. For thousands of years, spectacular meteor showers have been seen whenever the earth passed through the tail of one of those comets, and sometimes dust drifted down into the atmosphere and disturbed the climate.


Author(s):  
Roald Hoffmann

There are sound spiritual reasons for the ecological and environmentalist perspective—for minimizing pollution and harm to ourselves, to future generations, to the earth. Are these consistent with the material reality and aspirations of chemistry and chemical industry? One would like to think they are. But what of the realities? I want to take a hard, personal look at this fundamental tension. And also search for what is special about Green or Sustainable Chemistry, facing up to the obstacles confronting the field. And, while reaching for a measure of transformation, a multifaceted Green Index, to come back to a moral perspective on our creative activities. Chemists and chemical engineers are prone to believe that the general public does not recognize the contributions that chemistry has made to our health and our standard of living. And we often cringe at the perception that others blame us (and the great industries that employ us) for fouling our own nest, the infinity of ways we have found of affecting adversely our bodies and the earth by producing on the megaton scale the unnatural. Each of these adverse opinions can be productively discussed—both with the people whose adversarial or anguished arguments chemists react to, and with the chemists’ exaggerated and defensive response to them. The facts remain that the industries that transform matter (to which chemistry is central) have flourished to an extent that is staggering. They’ve played an essential material role in prolonging life, and while not making people any happier, they have provided spiritual value. The value I’m thinking of is not in creating the materials for CDs and books, ancillary tools to spiritual satisfaction, but in providing partial, yet unprecedented knowledge of the world. And the transformative industries are also responsible for an immense quantity of hazardous waste. The scale of their fecund creative enterprise is such that the major cycles of the world are perturbed. More than half the N and S atoms in our bodies have seen the inside of a chemical factory. And C, O, and H atoms too, through agriculture, food preparation, and sewage treatment.


1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-250
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Torrance

Everything about us today tells us that we live in a world which will be increasingly dominated by empirical and theoretic science. This is the world in which the Church lives and proclaims its message about Jesus Christ. It is not an alien world, for it is in this world of space and time that God has planted us. He made the universe and endowed man with gifts to investigate and understand it. Just as he made life to produce itself, so he has made the universe with man as an essential constituent in it, that it may bring forth and articulate knowledge of itself. Regarded in this light the pursuit of science is one of the ways in which man exercises the dominion in the earth which he was given at his creation. That is how, for example, Francis Bacon understood the work of human science, as man's obedience to God. Science is a religious duty, while man as scientist can be spoken of as the priest of creation, whose task it is to interpret the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structures and harmonies, and to bring it all into orderly articulation, so that it fulfils its proper end as the vast theatre of glory in which the creator is worshipped and praised. Nature itself is dumb, but it is man's part to bring it to word, to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God.


2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. i-iv
Author(s):  
Katherine Bullock

Just as the world united in grief after the tragic carnage of 9/11, so too hasthe world become one after the cataclysmic tsunami that has claimed,according to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald (February 8, 2005),295,608 lives, and has affected 11 countries in the Indian Ocean region.The tsunami destroyed entire villages and families. Long after thehouses have been rebuilt and the people have returned to a kind of normalcyin their lives, the effects of this catastrophe will continue to be felt.Local economies and the infrastructures needed to support them will haveto be rebuilt, and there will be the continuing psychological impact on thesurvivors, who will always feel guilty for having survived and who willnever be free of the pain of losing their loved ones.No one has been unaffected by the tsunami, although some of us, bythe grace of God (swt), have not felt its devastation. As the English adagegoes, every cloud has a silver lining. And in the face of such an awesomenatural calamity, we have seen the best side of humanity, as people rush toprovide aid and assistance to the survivors.The tsunami has also allowed those working in poverty relief and aidprograms elsewhere to turn the spotlight on their efforts to avert othercalamities that are of the same magnitude but occur at a much slower pace.Among such people is Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General’s SpecialEnvoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, who pointed out during an interview on CBCradio (January 12, 2005) that more than 2 million people in Africa die eachyear of AIDS. And then there is Rabbi Michael Lerner, who reminded us inhis essay in Tikkun (January 5, 2005) of a recent UN report that 29,000 childrendie every day from avoidable diseases and malnutrition.Calamities and their accompanying suffering and struggles are tests forhumanity. They remind us that we are not in control of the universe, andthus are a lesson in humility. They remind us that life is fragile and can betaken from us at a time and in a way that we do not expect, and thus are alesson in priorities and perspective, a check against the materialism andhedonism that is overtaking our consumer capitalist lives. Who wouldreally care that they do not own the latest iPod if they knew that they wereto die tomorrow? ...


1985 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 465-475
Author(s):  
Eric M. Jones

Some of my more strident space-enthusiast friends wear T-shirts that say, “The meek shall inherit the Earth…the rest of us are going to the stars!” That may strike some as being overly optimistic at best, but I believe there is a grain of truth to it. Whenever I talk about space colonization or one-way voyages to the stars someone usually asks, “Who would want to go?” Usually someone else will the chime in, “I'll go!” Not only do people come in various sizes and shapes and colors, they look at the world in many different ways. I grew up in the suburbs of New York and knew people who had literally never been west of the Hudson River and had no intention of ever going. New York was comfortable. There is nothing wrong with that attitude. It is just that for many people such a life is not right for them. I went west as soon as I had the chance. I do not regret having left and am much more comfortable where I am now. As I have gotten older, I have found myself settling in and, although I like to travel, I am beginning to understand how those sedentary New Yorkers felt. The only difference is that I settled down a little later in life and in a different place from where I started. But some people never lose that need for adventure, that wanderlust, that need for a radical change, and new places. These are the people who will blaze the trail to the stars.


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