Which bleats articulate monotony, James Kenneth Stephen – A Sonnet
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It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: James Kenneth Stephen – A Sonnet
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Stephens describes the first voice in these lines, and he admires the first voice’s poetic ability.
He uses nature analogies because Wordsworth was a leading figure of the Romantic Movement, which emphasized nature. (See Wordworth’s sonnet The World Is Too Much With Us.)
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These are the same lines that begin Wordsworth’s poem, but this also creates a framework for the sonnet.
First, the speaker spends four lines describing the first voice:
…one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
Then the speaker spends lines 5-8 describing the second voice:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
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Proteus was an early sea god referenced by Homer as “The Old Man of the Sea.”
He can be forced to read the future by anyone who is able to hold him whilst he takes on many frightening forms, as seen in The Odyssey.
The line points to a strange tension between poetry and imagination. Does Wordsworth really believe that if he were a pagan he would actually be able to see Proteus rising from the see? More realistically, mythology provides imaginative resources, ideas and images for reckoning with inhuman powers–resources that Wordsworth, in a large sense, still has: the poetry enacts mythologized vision.
So maybe Wordsworth can “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea” in his imagination. What he regrets, then, is that he can’t endorse his imagination as truth. Thanks to intellectual developments since the time of the Greeks, imagination is severed from the “world,” and Wordsworth is upset about that.
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This paradox summarizes the descriptions of this woman well:
Although she is civil in that she does indeed wear the proper clothing (like a lawn, petticoat etc.) but the way in which she wears them shows that she is wild.
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What is this?
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What is this?
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Pupa is the life stage that some insects go through. It occurs between being a larva and an adult.
This is a time of metamorphosis, of change. And Stevens contrasts it with the September, when the web is woven already.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), was an American essayist and poet who led the Transcendentalist movemnt.
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