Sunday Morning Poetry #7: I Travelled Among Unknown Men - Wordsworth
Jun 9, 2019
auto_awesome
Exploring the emotional depths of Wordsworth's poetry, delving into themes of love and loss. Contrasting Wordsworth with Browning's poetry styles. Analyzing the connections between homesickness, love for England, and introspection in poetry.
I Travelled Among Unknown Men explores homesickness and lost love intertwining emotions with memory.
Poets like Wordsworth aim to elevate human emotions to provide stable and pure compositions of feelings.
Deep dives
Exploring the Definition of a Ballad and the Traditional Troubadour Style
A ballad is a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas, often with unknown authorship. Traditional ballads were sung by troubadours, traveling singers who performed these songs in a concise manner. The troubadour style of storytelling was characterized by short, sung narratives, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition.
Wordsworth's Mission: Rectifying and Elevating Human Emotions Through Poetry
Wordsworth believed that poets should rectify human feelings and elevate them to create new compositions of emotions. By providing words to complex emotions, poets like Wordsworth aim to render feelings more stable and pure. This poetic endeavor aims to help individuals navigate and understand the depth of their emotions, beyond simplistic labels like 'happy' or 'joyful'.
Unraveling the Emotional Landscape in Wordsworth's Poems
In 'I Travelled Among Unknown Men,' Wordsworth delves into the complexities of homesickness and lost love. The poem intertwines the narrator's yearning for England with the memory of a deceased loved one, creating a profound emotional landscape. Through simple language and imagery, Wordsworth crafts a narrative that explores the interconnectedness of memory, love, and sense of place.
Contrasting Wordsworth's Poem with Robert Browning's 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'
While Wordsworth focuses on the emotional depth and psychological complexity of human experiences, Browning's 'Home Thoughts from Abroad' emphasizes vivid nature imagery and evokes a sense of longing for England. Where Wordsworth intricately weaves together themes of love, loss, and memory, Browning's poem celebrates the beauty of English landscapes and the nostalgia for one's homeland. This comparison showcases the different approaches and themes explored by romantic poets.
Sunday Morning Poetry: "I Travelled Among Unknown Men" by William Wordsworth.
This is our next "lucy" poem.
The lucy poems deal with death and the emotions surrounding death. In this poem, Wordsworth connects his homesick feeling about England to his love for a woman who died.
As Wordsworth put it in a letter to a friend "... a great poet out... to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more san pure and permanent."
In this poem and all the Lucy Poems, Wordsworth accomplishes this.
Get the Snipd podcast app
Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
Save any moment
Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways
Share & Export
Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode