The Victorians

"'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfills himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world'" (ll.408-10).
Alfred Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur" (1833-69; 1869)

Points of Reflection

1. Tennyson's allegorical piece on the passing of Arthur was first conceived in 1833; the version given us by the Norton was published in 1869. What different societal and cultural changes might the poem have evoked in the late Victorian reader, as opposed to the late Romantic reader?

2. Is the narrator of Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" (1834; 1836, 1842) insane or criminal in action and motivation?

3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" (1846; 1850) alters the traditional Christian understanding of the afterlife. Explain.

4. Matthew Arnold's "The Buried Life" (1852) upends the Romantic notion of . . . well . . . romance in what ways? Also, what does this poem suggest about the scope of individual self-knowledge?

5. Consider both the central and closing paradoxes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Mother and Poet" (1861; 1862).

6. What does Christina Rossetti's poem "In an Artist's Studio" (1856; 1896) imply about the uses of visual art?

7. Discuss the rationale behind the value John Ruskin places on imperfection and stylistic variation in Gothic architecture.

"Iron and Coal" (1861)
William Bell Scott

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu