Course Introduction

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"
William Wordworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" (1802-04; 1807)

Points of Reflection

1. consider each of the following acronyms for "A.I.": the autonomy illusion; artificial intelligence; authorial intersections; anxiety of influence.

2. Yeats' enigmatic, symbol-laden poem "The Second Coming" (1919; 1920, 1921) has earned itself many different interpretations over the last century. What various elements of society and the human condition might the narrator be lamenting in the opening, eight-line stanza?

3. in "London, 1802" (Sept. 1802; 1807), Wordsworth disparages the England of his own time too, claiming that its "altar, sword, and pen, / Fireside" have all been recently abused. What contemporary institutions and trends might each of these synecdochical and metonymic images represent for the poet?

4. what thematic threads do Yeats's "The Folly of Being Comforted" (1902, 1903) and Shelley's "Mutability" (below) share?

5. discussion of tone in Punch article.

"Mutability"

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
(ca.1814-15; 1816)

"Shade and Darkness" (1843)
J. M. W. Turner

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu