Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Thinking about

the vague possibility (which would seem heretical given my non-expertise, but which has been prompted by teaching bits of Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron this week) of possibly, in future, teaching a class on Romantic poetry...

My two favorite lines from Shelley: first, of course, "Hell is a city much like London"; second, the famous stanza from "Adonais":
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

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