(Wordsworth and the French Revolution )

Important Dates:

1770:  Born  1771:  Dorothy Born 1778:  Mother's Death 1783:  Father's Death 1787:  Enters Cambridge 1790:  Tour of France 1791:  Degree from Cambridge 1791-92:  Second Tour of France 1792:  Daughter Anne-Caroline Born 1795:  Bequest from Raisley Calvert

1797:  Moves to Alfoxden 1798:  Lyrical Ballads published 1798-99:  Winter in Germany 1799:  Moves to Grasmere  1802:  Marriage to Mary Hutchinson 1805:  Brother John drowns 1812:  Deaths of children, Catherine and Thomas 1813:  Moves to Rydal Mount  1843:  Becomes Poet Laureate 1850:  Dies

Homework Questions:
452:

• Explain:  "To compose the poem was also to compose the Poet" (452).

• Explain:  "I saw the revolutionary Power / Toss like a Ship at anchor, rock'd by storms" (9.49-50).

• Explain:  "I looked for something which I could not find" (9.70).
• Explain: I "had abruptly pass'd / Into a theatre, of which the stage / Was busy with an action far advanced" (9.93-95).

• Explain:  "Tis against that / Which we are fighting" (9.519-20).

• How does Wordsworth justify the September Massacres?
• Explain:
•  . . . upon these
• And other sights looking as doth a man
• Upon a volume whose contents he knows
• Are memorable, but from him lock'd up,
• Being written in a tongue he cannot read. (10.48-52)

• Explain:
• . . . these are things
• Of which I speak only as they were storm
• Or sunshine to my individual mind,
• No further (10.103-6).

• Explain:  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven" (10.692-93).

• What function do Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth perform here (10.904-29ff)?

• Explain:  The Prelude "emerges as a great, self-conscious testimony to the construction of the past out of the urgent needs of the present" (452).

• Explain his description of himself as
• Tranquil, almost and careless as a flower
• Glass'd in a Green-house, or a Parlour shrub
• When every bush and tree, the country through,
• Is shaking to the roots. (9.88-91)
• Explain:  "All things were to me / Loose and disjointed, and the affections left / Without a vital interest" (9.106-8).

• Explain:  "The soil of common life was at that time / Too hot to tread upon" (9.169-70).
• Why would Wordsworth have been "Shunn'd and not tolerated" (9.197)?

• Who is Michel Beaupuy (1755-1796)?
• Explain:  "He thro' the events / Of that great change wander'd in perfect faith, / As through a Book, an old Romance or Tale" (9.305-7).
• Explain:  "Man he lov'd / As man" (9.313-14).
• Explain:  "Oft in solitude / With him did I discourse about the end / Of civil government" (9.328-30).

• What is a "heartless mood / Of solitude" (9.517-18)?

• Explain:  "All things have second birth; / The earthquake is not satisfied at once" (10.73-74).

Explain:  "I seem'd to hear a voice that cried / To the whole City, 'Sleep no more'" (10.76-77).

• Explain:  "blasts / From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven" (10.313-14).

• What does it mean to have "throned / The human understanding paramount / And made of that their God" (10.317-19)?
• Explain the description of the child and the windmill in 10.337-45 (see also footnote 8).

• Explain:  "The Herculean Commonwealth had put forth her arms / And throttled with an infant Godhead's might / The snakes about her cradle" (10.362-64).
• Explain:
• They who with clumsy desperation brought
• A river of blood, and preach'd that nothing else
• Could cleanse the Augean Stable, by the might
• Of their own helper have been swept away. (10.546-49)

• Explain:  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven" (10.692-93).
• Explain:  "Not favor'd spots alone, but the whole earth / The beauty wore of promise" (10.701-2).

• Why does Wordsworth stick "More firmly to old tenets, and to prove / Their temper, strain'd them more" (10.800-1)?

• Explain Wordsworth's discussion of "Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith / Like culprits to the bar" (10.889-90).

• What is the main point of Wordsworth's Apostrophe to Burke?