Victorian poetry
Sep. 15th, 2011 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWhy did I choose a subject area where we spend half our time reading about suicidal blithering idiots?
Be it Mariana or the Charge of the Light Brigade, they're all terribly depressing.
It's entirely possible to write poems about being alive and not miserable, but you wouldn't know it from this lot.
Of all the many and varied things I dislike about 'The Lady of Shalott' the rhyme scheme manages to be very high on the list. Any given rhyme rather thoroughly outstays its welcome. :-p
The one with the goblin fruits is fine if you don't mind reading about mind withering addiction and subsequent depression.
the one that starts 'Glory be to God for dappled things' is merely odd. I think I approve. Poetry in praise of spots, brindles, and 'Pied Beauty' is not going to have much competition. Or depression. Win.
the one about 'Lord Walter's Wife' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning I quite like. It starts off with some dude being all 'oh, you are too fair!' and then when it looks like she might be okay with that he goes right off her and calls her 'ugly and hateful', so she has a go at him, and says blokes are always doing that, like women are being pretty just to make men's lives hard when really it's nothing to do with them, and then they call them ugly names when they act like it is about men, and they can't win. Tells him right off.
So they're not all as depressing.
Just, you know, extensively.
Victorian Poetry Anthology 2011
Alfred Tennyson
‘Mariana’
‘The Lady of Shalott’
‘The Epic/Morte d’Arthur’
‘Ulysses’
‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
Robert Browning
‘Porphyria’s Lover’
‘My Last Duchess’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From Sonnets from the Portuguese
‘Lord Walter’s Wife’
Christina Rossetti
‘In an Artist’s Studio’
Goblin Market
Matthew Arnold
‘Dover Beach’
Thomas Hardy
‘Drummer Hodge’
‘The Darkling Thrush’
Gerald Manley Hopkins
‘Pied Beauty’
‘The Windhover’
Rudyard Kipling
‘Gunga Din’
... I strongly suspect I prefer the Renaissance. Or the Romantics, from the Revolution and Reaction unit last year.
On the plus side, it's not modernism.
Be it Mariana or the Charge of the Light Brigade, they're all terribly depressing.
It's entirely possible to write poems about being alive and not miserable, but you wouldn't know it from this lot.
Of all the many and varied things I dislike about 'The Lady of Shalott' the rhyme scheme manages to be very high on the list. Any given rhyme rather thoroughly outstays its welcome. :-p
The one with the goblin fruits is fine if you don't mind reading about mind withering addiction and subsequent depression.
the one that starts 'Glory be to God for dappled things' is merely odd. I think I approve. Poetry in praise of spots, brindles, and 'Pied Beauty' is not going to have much competition. Or depression. Win.
the one about 'Lord Walter's Wife' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning I quite like. It starts off with some dude being all 'oh, you are too fair!' and then when it looks like she might be okay with that he goes right off her and calls her 'ugly and hateful', so she has a go at him, and says blokes are always doing that, like women are being pretty just to make men's lives hard when really it's nothing to do with them, and then they call them ugly names when they act like it is about men, and they can't win. Tells him right off.
So they're not all as depressing.
Just, you know, extensively.
Victorian Poetry Anthology 2011
Alfred Tennyson
‘Mariana’
‘The Lady of Shalott’
‘The Epic/Morte d’Arthur’
‘Ulysses’
‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
Robert Browning
‘Porphyria’s Lover’
‘My Last Duchess’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
From Sonnets from the Portuguese
‘Lord Walter’s Wife’
Christina Rossetti
‘In an Artist’s Studio’
Goblin Market
Matthew Arnold
‘Dover Beach’
Thomas Hardy
‘Drummer Hodge’
‘The Darkling Thrush’
Gerald Manley Hopkins
‘Pied Beauty’
‘The Windhover’
Rudyard Kipling
‘Gunga Din’
... I strongly suspect I prefer the Renaissance. Or the Romantics, from the Revolution and Reaction unit last year.
On the plus side, it's not modernism.