Music and Poetry Essay -- Musical Poet Poem Poems Music essays

Music and Poetry The poetry of William Wordsworth initiated the Romantic Era by emphasizing emotion, intuition, and pleasure rather than form and affectation. His poems set the stage for John Keats, a central figure in early 19th century Romanticism. The fundamental themes in the works of both poets include: the beauty of nature; the consanguinity of dreams/visions and reality and yet the tendency of dreams to mask reality; the intense emotions brought about by beauty and/or suffering; and the transience of both sensation and human life. Although William Wordsworth and John Keats wrote poetry with entirely different senses of purpose, they came together in the worship of a song that each found in nature. Both Wordsworth and Keats were able to internalize their own experience and then re-externalize it in a piece of poetry – â€Å"The Solitary Reaper† and â€Å"Ode to a Nightingale† respectively – describing the effect of a stirring song each encountered in a natural se tting. William Wordsworth’s poem â€Å"The Solitary Reaper† reveres the song of a young Highland lass who is â€Å"reaping and singing by herself† (3). The poem is written in four stanzas of eight lines each, with a steady iambic tetrameter as its meter. The poem has a fairly steady rhyme scheme of ababccdd, though it varies in the first and third rhymes of the first and last stanzas. The poem has only eight enjambed lines. By making twenty-four of the thirty-two lines of the poem endstopped, Wordsworth allows the reader to read each line slowly. This consequently works to relieve any sense of suspense or moments of tension within the poem. As seen in Wordsworth’s â€Å"Nutting,† a lack of endstopped lines can allow emotion to build and inspire a sense of frenzied passi... ... Keats’ â€Å"Ode to a Nightingale† in crucial aspects. Both poems preserve a moment of intense beauty, allowing readers to experience the impact of deeply beautiful music within the rustic, natural setting beloved by both poets. Wordsworth and Keats preserve the beauty this music, using unforced and expressive language – vox audita perit, litera scripta manet . Thus, each poet’s experience becomes one that is lastingly present in his mind, inspiring a sense of rustic, melodic tranquility. The â€Å"spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings† - which Wordsworth saw as the heart of poetry – stimulated by each poet’s experience, allowed them to pen powerful poems. Both Keats and Wordsworth convey and then amplify the intense emotion that each encountered in his experience, as each poem combines, arguably, the two most powerful forms of communication: music and poetic verse.