Evaluating the Evidence 21.2: English Romantic Poets
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English Romantic Poets
These poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats stand as sublime examples of literary Romanticism.
OZYMANDIAS
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
BRIGHT STAR
John Keats, 1819
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
EVALUATE THE EVIDENCE
- How do these poems express some of the basic tenets of Romanticism? How, for example, do they explore notions of decline and death?
- Are the powerful emotions described in and evoked by these poems incompatible with Enlightenment rationalism?
Source: George Edward Woodberry, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1892), p. 201; H. Buxton Forman, ed., The Complete Works of John Keats, vol. 3 (Glasgow: Gowars and Gray, 1901), p. 224.