Nature, Love, Religion

• To study: make your own quote sheet to memorize - I can't guarantee these quotes are word for word, so please check the primary sources

Nature

- Backdrop in all the literature
- Only thing that changes is how humans interact with it
- Restoration = materialistic (eg. Pepys' diary)
- "To a Mouse" - "I'm truly sorry man's dominion has broken Nature's social union"
- "Apostrophe to the Ocean" - easy to notice the admiration of ocean - good imagery
- Romantic/Victorian - use nature in different ways
- Romantic = "for as I were a child of thee" ("Ocean") - respect and beauty
- Victorian = "the tide recedes" - "Dover Beach"
- Romantic = wanting to be a part of Nature ("Ode to the West Wind")
- "Apostrophe" = sublime aspect of nature - ocean has been around through the ages "time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow" "oak leviathans tossed like toys"
- Pantheism - god is everywhere - Nature is connected to God ("Ode to a Nightingale")
- "Dulce et Decorum Est" - devoid of nature - "sick as sin" "obscene as cancer, bitter as cud" - war is not concerned with nature
- Modern poems "the rocks ignore" - "Disembarking at Quebec"
- Progression in thought - Beowulf - Grendel represents natural forms - must be killed and dealt with
- Shift through time - as we understand more and become more sophisticated, our relationship with nature changes
- Progression of human evolution
- "The world is too much with us late and soon" - we are killing nature: "little we see in Nature that is ours/ we've given our hearts away"
- Victorian - muted references to nature - going away from us
- Modern - nature and we are alienated
- The nature poem? "O Wind!/ If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
- Appreciating nature
- Childhood joy relating to nature "My Heart Leaps Up," "Wind" "Ocean" "The Lamb"
- Freedom - could be a subtheme
- Social conformity - nature helps work against the idea of having to conform (but in Beowulf conformity is necessary)
- Conformity is an interesting subtheme
- Unknown aspect of nature
- Power of nature
- "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" - promising nature as gifts
- "Whoso" = deer = human (unrequited love) - very human
- "gather ye rosebuds as ye may" = about humans and their plight
- Nature = universal symbol
- "Sir Gawain and the Green Night" - tangles of green he has to fight through to meet the Green Knight
- Any nature in The Canterbury Tales?
- "Rime" = lack of respect for nature = retribution
- Albatross significance? Not appreciated
- Nature could be supernatural (outside of human's scope)

Love

-familial love, eternal love, platonic love, friendship, romantic
- Shakespeare's sonnets -
- Unrequited love vs. requited
- "not falter"
- "If God choose I will love thee better after death" (Sonnet 43 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
- "sublunary lovers" - "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" - more than human - conceit of the compass
- "Love alters not with brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom" - Sonnet 116 - the feeling of the unchanging love
- People grow and change -
- Familial love - can wane, but it tends to be unconditional - love between a parent and a child (Hamlet and Gertrude excepted)
- "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" - "curse bless me now" - a child talking to his father about not dying
- Victorian era - "Dover Beach" = "And here we are on this darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight"
- "To the Ladies" - "wife and servant are the same" "Shun, oh! Shun that wretched state/ And all the fawning flatters hate"
- Pride and Prejudice - many different kinds of love - Darcy and Elizabeth = equals; Lydia and Wickham = lust; Mr and Mrs Bennet = lust; Jane and Bingley = friendship; Charlotte and Collins = commerce; the Gardiners = equality and friendship - the custom of the time - commodification of marriage - for the upper class
- Is our perception different now - rather than through the times
- Renaissance = ideal - eternal
- "My Mistress' Eyes" = love you no matter about superficial qualities (Sonnet 130)
- "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" (Sonnet 18) - idealized - better than a summer's day
- Sonnet 29 - "When in Disgrace with Fortune's and Men's Eyes" = "Haply I think on thee, and then my state,/Like to the lark at the break of day arising/"
- "The Hollow Men" - detached - not being loved
- Love of God
- Love of nature
- "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born" - love of God does not seem apparent
- Sonnet 43 (interesting to compare to "My Last Duchess" - the Duke openly admits to killing his first wife because she was too open and loving to the world - boughs of cherry blossoms, her white mule - everyone received the same smile - thinking about the commodification of women and marriage and the tyrannical father - like Elizabeth's)
- "I love you with my childhood faith"/ "the breath,/ Smiles, tears, of all my life!" - loving better after death - like Valediction and Sonnet 116

Religion

- Every single era addresses spirituality of religions
- Rise, peak and downfall
- Beowulf - interjected into an originally a Pagan story
- Great combination - "The Burning of Beowulf's Body"
- "God whose love [Grendel] could not know" - excellent starting point
- Grendel is a symbol of the unknown aspects of nature - but also the unknown aspects of religion
- He also represents the other - or could be the devil (Paradise Lost, "The Tiger")
- Satan "perverting" humankind
- Is Paradise Lost the peak
- Canterbury Tales - pointing out the hypocrisy
- Modern times - hard to find - lots of questioning
- Humans need to believe in something other than themselves
- WW I - loss of faith - "The Second Coming," "Dulce et Decorum Est," "The Hollow Men"
- After WW II - "The Destructors," most of your independent novels, "Pretty," "Disembarking"
- "Tiger"/"Lamb" - how could they both be by the same Creator
- "On His Blindness" - the great Taskmaster - how does this compare to "Dover Beach" - the tide of Faith recedes - Milton finds solace in "they also serve those who stand and wait" "Patience replies"
"where ignorant armies clash at night" - "Dover Beach" - no understanding, only confusion - huddled together on a darkling plain
- What about "The Darkling Thrush" - what does the thrush have to sing about on that bleak, January 1st, 1900
- Greek and Roman gods - "have sight of Proteus rising from the sea/ or hear Triton blow his writhed horn" - Pagan gods and humans at that time had more appreciation and more connection to nature
- [Pagan = not of the worlds's religion]