EssayBay - Buy custom term papers and custom essays direct from writers! Bookmark and Share

Buy Custom Term Papers Cheap Essay Writers

Free Term Papers - English Term Papers

Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the following, Romantic poem and extract from a Romantic poem: Mary Alcock's 'Instructions' Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England and lines 38-82 of Book Tenth of 'The Prelude' by William Wordsworth (Romantic Writings: An Anthology p.1 and pp. 153-4 respectively.)

Compare both poems addressing the different ways in which using particular poetic techniques they make their meaning, and also the different ways in which they approach their theme, the french Revolution.

Mary Alcock's poem Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England (1799, 1989) and William Wordsworth's The Prelude Book Ten (1994) deal with the same socio-political period but in remarkably different ways. Each poet concentrates on the ethics arising from political insurrection, more particularly during the early years of the French Revolution, but each draws differing inferences as to the moral validity of the violence used in the name of socio-political freedom.

Helpful Links: Free Papers - Term Paper Help - How To Write A Term Paper - Sample Term Paper Topics

Did you find this free English term paper useful?

Imagine how much a custom English term paper would help!

Click Here And Post Your English Project Today!

Free plagiarism scanner - Viper

The notion of revolution, as Stephen Bygrave asserts in his Romantic Writings (1996: 9), was of vital importance to the formation of the Romantic poetic vision:

(The Romantic) period encompasses the American Revolution (independence having been declared in 1776), the French Revolution (from 1789), and wars of national independence in Poland, Spain, Greece and elsewhere. (Bygrave, 1996: 9)

More than anything, then, the Romantic period has been seen as one of polarity and contrast and this is certainly reflected in the two poems by Alcock and Wordsworth that, not only reflect the personal ideologies of the individual writers but are, to some extent at least, representative of the divisions in the society at large.

In this essay I would like to look at the ways that the Romantic ideology is facilitated in a textual manner; how each poet betrays their socio-political affiliations through the very language and poetic structures they employ and what that says about our notions of the political in the Romantic era.

The tone of Mary Alcock's poem is markedly different to many of the Romantic voices at the turn of the eighteenth century. Whereas poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth and, later Shelley and Byron, extolled the virtues of the French Revolution, claiming that it represented the highest achievement of Enlightenment thinking on the relationship between freedom and politics, Alcock paints another, perhaps more conservative picture of the events of 1789:

Of Liberty, Reforms and Rights I sing,

Freedom, I mean, without or church or King;

Freedom to seize and keep whate'er I can,

And boldly claim my right - The Rights of Man.

(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

Here the poet not only provides us with a contrary view to the accepted revolutionary fervour of the eighteenth century Romantic writer but also usurps the conventions of revolution for her own ends; reversing poetic and cultural leitmotifs in order to question notions of morality and ethics.

The first line of Alcock's poem reflects not only Virgil's opening in the Aeneid (Of arms and the man I sing[Virgil, 1972: 103]) but also an early broadside ballad that concerns itself with the Jacobin uprising of 1746. The poem's structure, rhythm and cadence reflects many of the popular ballads of the eighteen century that would have been used as revolutionary propaganda (Shepard, 1962).

Alcock compounds this ironic use of structure with an overt reference to Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (1994), an important text in the formation of the revolutionary ideal and also references a number of the key cultural motifs of revolutionary America and France: liberty, taxes, reform and the judiciary. In Alcock's poem, the term 'liberty' serves as a mechanism through which the idealism of the French Revolution is questioned. She employs the word as not only meaning freedom to be but also freedom to do as one chooses, irrespective of law and order:

Such is the blessed liberty in vogue,

The envied liberty to be a rogue;

The right to pay no taxes, thithes or dues;

The liberty to do whate'er I choose.

(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

As Stephen Bygrave asserts in his essay Versions of British Romantic Writing (1996: 69) the women writers of the Romantic movement, to a great extent, represented a far more personal and pragmatic vision of the changing face of both society and psychology than their male counterparts. Whereas, as Bygrave also states, writers such as Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron sought to transcend the everyday experience with the imagination, female poets and novelists such as Alcock, Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson (Bygrave, 1996: 69) displayed a far more practical assessment of the turbulence of their times.

This notion is more than adequately highlighted in Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England, where the overriding sense is not one of the Kantian 'categorical imperative' of the revolution but the pragmatism of daily ethical thinking, as displayed in these lines:

There shall not long remain one British peer;

Nor shall the criminal appalled stand

Before the mighty judges of the land;

Nor judge nor jury shall there longer be,

Nor any jail, but every prisoner free.

(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

The largely conservative subtext of Alcock's poem is clear: if the social order is broken through revolution who upholds the law and who draws distinctions between the legal and the criminal? We can see how the poet deliberately usurps and questions the political ideology of the Romantic movement, highlighting what she sees as the inherent paradoxes in Rousseauian logic; on the one hand expounding the primacy of individual freedom and on the other the imperative for society and law.

The last quatrain of the poem provides us with a succinct precise of the poem's intent and the author's political position:

All law abolished and, with sword in hand,

We'll seize the property of the land.

The hail to Liberty, Reform and Riot!

Adieu, Contentment, Safety, Peace and Quiet!

(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

Here the poet underlines her allusion to the French Revolution by employing the word adieu and adds the final indictment to her summation. Mary Alcock's poem resounds with terms and motifs of the Romantic writer's involvement with politics and revolution however they are used in a noticeably different way, to attack and question the very theoretical foundations upon which it was based.

The structure and timbre of Wordsworth's The Prelude, of course, evokes not the low culture of the broadside ballad but the blank verse of the philosophical epic. The extract dealing with the ethical position of the French Revolution (Book Ten, lines 38-82) centres the issue within the framework of the poet's life, asking us to appreciate not only the national and global importance of this seminal event but how it affected and shaped the minds of those that witnessed it.

The language Wordsworth employs is a mixture of registers, terms such as 'lamentable' (line 41), 'ephemeral monsters' (line 46), 'Remembrance and dim admonishments' (line 77) and 'The spacious city' (line 50) add a rhythmic lightness that lifts the textual sonority of the subject matter, creating in the reader's mind the ambiguity that is mimetic with the ethical and moral ambiguity of the revolution itself.

Thematically, Wordsworth deals with almost exactly the same concerns and motifs as Alcock, however we can see that Wordsworth treats them in a manner that is far more psychologically complex, centring the issues within the poet's own moral and ethical reasoning, as Lisa Plummer Crafton states in her book The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture:

the individual mind makes purely rational moral choices, without reference to any emotional or contractual ties that might compromise its absolute independence; as Wordsworth puts it, for Godwin moral choice depends on "One guide--the light of circumstances, flashed / Upon an independent intellect". (Plummer Crafton, 1997: 59)

What we see in this extract of The Prelude is this process is praxis, unlike the pragmatic approach of Mary Alcock, Wordsworth attempts to reconcile the horrors and violence of the revolution with the higher, objective tenants of its philosophers:

Lamentable crimes,

'Tis true, had gone before this hour, dire work

Of massacre, in which the senseless sword

Was prayed to as a judge; but these were past,

Earth free from them for ever (Wordsworth, 1994: 719)

Here the poet places the crimes of the revolution within the larger framework of the progression of time, the violence abating in the wider context of social and political change. These events are translated through the poet's mind and the temporal flow, as he revisits the scenes of revolution a month after they have occurred:

I thought of those September massacres,

Divided from me by one little month,

Saw them and touched: the rest was conjured up

From tragic fictions or true history. (Wordsworth, 1994: 719)

Unlike Alcock, Wordsworth struggles with the ethical position of the French Revolution itself, for him the political ends of the uprising can be seen to justify the violent means, however, as Plummer Crafton suggests, this position is unstable, it begins to unravel as the human cost of fighting makes itself felt.

As we have already mentioned with reference to Stephen Bygrave's book Romantic Writings, the Romantic sensibility valued the freedom of the individual above all other things and this manifested itself in politics and social theory. The Romantics based such theory largely on the philosophies of Locke, Rousseau, Thomas Paine and others (Bygrave, 1996: 25). The natural right to Liberty transcended notions of ethical imperatives because one arose out of the other, ethics being to some extent a product of the freedom to choose.

We see this reflected in Wordsworth's poem, the idealistic over the pragmatic, the notion of freedom and Liberty above that of ethical consideration for one's neighbour, the concept of revolution over that of law and order. In a poet such as Shelley or Byron we detect none of the self-conscious consideration of the Wordsworth of The Prelude and it was, perhaps, this same facet that provided the impetus for Robert Browning's poem The Lost Leader, the lament for the Wordsworthian revolutionary zeal:

We shall march prospering, - not thro' his presence;

Songs may inspire us, - not from his lyre;

Deeds will done, - while he boats his quiescence,

Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire.

(Browning, 1978: 14)

We glean two main things, I think, from a comparison of these two poems: firstly we are presented with a complex picture of the English relationship to the French Revolution, each poem highlighting the ambiguity of contemporary feeling within the country. Whereas Alcock allows us glimpses into the mind of the late eighteenth century conservative, Wordsworth paints a picture of a moral system that is constantly seen in relation to the larger context of a priori freedom and national Liberty.

These two poems also, I think, allow us appreciate the ways that such ideology permeates the very structures and language a poet uses. In neither of the works is the philosophical position overtly stated yet their respective stances are patently clear. This is also the same with other writers of the same era.

As I stated in my introduction, the Romantic period has been thought of as a time of polarity and division and this will, obviously, manifest itself in its works of art and literature. However, through exegesis of such poems as Wordsworth's and Alcock's we can detect an infinitely more complex socio-political position with a variety of differing opinions and concerns filtered through both contemporary morality and personal psychology.

References

Back To English Term Papers?

We would like to thank the student who submitted this work to help others writing English term papers

sociology Why should you buy a English term paper using EssayBay?

The best way to improve your grade is to buy a 100% original custom term paper, written just for you.

But using a standard term paper company to find you a writer is like playing roulette

Sometimes you'll get a great writer - but more often, you'll get a poor one.

EssayBay lets YOU CHOOSE YOUR OWN WRITER, based on:

  • The university they attended

  • Their qualifications

  • Feedback from other customers

Recruit the help you need for a great result today - click here to sign up and post a project!