I am immersed in the world of the nineteenth century at the moment and I have been studying the Victorian age in relation to poetry, prose and drama, especially Victorian poetry. Something that interests me greatly is contrasting poems written in the Victorian age with poems written in modern times (i.e. late twentieth – early twenty-first century). Much Victorian poetry was written not only for the enjoyment of an audience but also with a strong purpose in mind…. Here I am thinking of poems such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children (which is still an incredibly moving poem, it nearly brought tears to my eyes as I read it) in which she protests against child labour and also her Aurora Leigh, which is about the Victorian views of women in society and their status: “they [must] keep quiet by the fire/And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay’” (Aurora Leigh, Book 1).
It’s fascinating to see how much art and careful attention to detail was put into poems such as these and I think that we have lost this art to a certain extent. I find it much easier to analyse and enjoy a Victorian poem than I do a twenty-first century one, but perhaps that is because I am more interested in the past than in the present!
The poets that are my primary studies include Elizabeth Barrett Browning and also Tennyson. I am not a fan of all of Tennyson’s poems but I think he writes in such a beautiful way. Here is one of my most favourite Tennyson quotes and even though its subject is death, it has a certain kind of beauty around it:
“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan” (Tithonus).
Isabella. x
