Friendship Between Wordsworth and Coleridge

The Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were close friends who sought to create a new kind of poem centered on emotions and a sort of conversation between the reader and narrator. Even though many of their poems seem to be addressed to women, they "can be read as 'fragments of an agon', moments of an agonizing struggle between two male rivals apparently friends but locked in a secret and mortal combat for the deadly right to be 'the speaker' of 'the word'," (Lauder, 2001, p. 68). To showcase their works and their new theme, they collaborated on a volume of poetry entitled "Lyrical Ballads".

There are connections that can be found between the different works of the two poets, beginning with their vigorous use of nature in an otherworldly context. In his poem "Kubla Khan", Coleridge includes nature to complete the picture of another world, or another part of the world, the East: "And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills/ Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree/ And here were forests ancient as the hills/ Enfolding sunny spots of greenery," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). 

Similarly, but of course in a contrasting way, Wordsworth's view of nature is less exotic and more tangible. In other words, Coleridge's words made nature part of a fantasy world, but Wordsworth's approach was one that the average reader could relate to. For example, in his poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,", nature is described simply but still in a way that evokes emotion; "I saw a crowd [...] of golden daffodils/ beside the lake, beneath the trees/ fluttering and dancing in the breeze," (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

One last notable connection between the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth would be their use of "I". By using "I", it is as if they are addressing the reader, or what is, more likely, a character within the poem. It is the "I" that connects the reader deeper with the narrator of the poem, creating the illusion of not just a poem, but a conversation.

References:

Greenblatt, S., et al. (Eds.) (2006). The Norton anthology of English literature (8th ed., Vol.2). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.\

Lauder, B. (2001, Winter). Secret(ing) conversations: coleridge and wordsworth. New Literary History, 32 (1), 67-89. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057648

Analysis of Four Different Poems

In the poem, My Last Duchess, Robert Browning constructs a sinister tone by implying murder was committed in such casual tones: "I gave commands/Then all smiles stopped altogether." At first, the narrator in the poem seems to describe a portrait of a woman he loved, but by the poem's end, the reader is well aware that "[the duke] refers to his last duchess as an object, as a possession that has been appropriately added to his prized collection," (DiYanni, 2008, p. 514).

The connotation of the word daffodils differs from its denotation in William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. While a dictionary describes daffodils simply as yellow flowers, in his poem, Wordsworth personifies the daffodils to make the narrator's loneliness apparent to the reader. He does this by describing the daffodils as "a crowd", "a host", and seeing the daffodils "dance".

The effect of Elizabeth Bishop's recurrent use of white imagery in the First Death in Nova Scotia is one that illustrates the finality felt by the narrator over the death of Arthur. She describes his casket as "frosted cake", his countenance as "white, like a doll, and his final resting place: "roads deep in snow".

Shakespeare plays with metaphor and meaning in his two poems, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day and My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. During the poem Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, the reader knows that the narrator is in love because he uses a summer day to describe the object of his affection. He also vows that their love will last forever, an "eternal summer" that "shall not fade". Simile is further employed in My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun with the line, "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head."

References:

DiYanni, R. (2008). Literature approaches to fiction, poetry, and drama [2nd Ed.]. New York: McGraw Hill