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

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.

Eros and Psyche on the Medallions of Silver Bowls from Sadovy Kurgan: New Data

The set of eight silver bowls excavated in Sadovy kurgan at the urban outskirts of Novocherkassk in 1962 includes a pair of bowls with medallions depicting scenes with Eros and Psyche. The detailed analysis of the element of the feathery pattern that covers the entire inner surface of the bowls reveals that it was applied by different craftsmen, though the bowls themselves were no doubt made in the same workshop. The central figures of the scenes on both medallions are tied to the columns decorated with garlands, on which one can see vessels. Both vessels have a spherical shape; each has a low stand and conical cover, and are the type of turibulum. One of the vessels bears a figure detail soldered to the right upper part of the vessel’s body. The second figure, soldered to the left side, is visible less clearly (fig. 2,2). The described figures look like protomes of griffins on a turibulum. A similar vessel was found in Khokhlach kurgan, and belongs to the objects produced in the 2nd – 1st centuries BC. We conclude that the identified similarity on manufacturing medallions on the bowls from Sadovy kurgan and the turibulum from Khokhlach kurgan most likely relates the finds to the workshops of the same region, probably the Eastern Mediterranean.