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.This may bebecause he had seen the evidence in 1809.According to Wordsworth s story, the poets were discussing the green coronalas they met the boys in the Lake District.Coleridge and Southey had little personalexperience of May Day customs, but they were clearly struck by the image whenthey came across it in Wordsworth s poem.Both poets used similar descriptions intheir poetry after 1800.Written in the year he wrote the rst version of Dejection ,Coleridge s To Mathilda Betham from a Stranger (1802) celebrates her talents as apoet and society portrait painter.In high classical mode, Coleridge elaborates on thegreen coronal image, describing Betham s verse as a oral coronal entwined withlaurel, engarlanded with gadding woodbine tendrils , rose-buds, fruit blossoms andpretty weeds, which, with undoubting hand, / I twine around the brows of patriot34 F.N.Robinson, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edn (Boston: Houghton Mif in, 1987), p.45, l.1491.35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bollingen Series, 54, ed.by JamesEngell and W.Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 106.36 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed.by Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849 50), II, 190. 38 The Romantics and the May Day TraditionHOPE! (ll.13 17). Dejection: An Ode and Letter to Sara Hutchinson also alludeto coronals.Coleridge suggests in both poems that when he can dwell with those heloves best in one Happy Home , he will be able to crown himself with a Coronal(l.136).The twining vine of hope is also part of the later version of Dejection(1817, l.80).Southey s Madoc (1805) includes a green coronal in a catalogue of gaudydecorations worn by the Aztecs in time of war:Not half so gaudied, for their May-day mirth,All wreathed and ribanded, our youths and maids,As these stern Aztecas in war attire!The golden glitterance, and the feather-mail,More gay than glittering gold; and round the helmA coronal of high upstanding plumesGreen as the spring grass in a sunny shower.37The warriors clothes, Southey writes, are only slightly less bright than those wornon May Day. The Idle Shepherd-Boys may be a source for Southey s description ofthe way in which the feathers were worn, with the branch-like moss correspondingto the plumes.The green plumes are also part of Tezozomoc s hat in the same poem: the crown of glossy plumage, whose green hue / Vied with his emerald ear-drops.38Southey s notes suggest that the source for the plumes is Conquest of the Weast India.This describes the Tlascalan army as wearing great tuffes of feathers , but mentionsneither the colour of the plumes, nor whether they were worn as hats or coronals.39The comparison with the gaudy clothes of a Medieval Welsh May Day is Southey sown, and may suggest that he believed the hats to be a literary ostentation.It isunclear whether Southey intended, in Madoc, an association with the green coronalsthat Wordsworth observes, or whether the simile is simply a general comparison ofspringtime garishness.Southey, however, makes a rmer association between MayDay and the customs of the Aztecs in the section on Aztec recreational customs:Here round a lofty mast the dancers moveQuick, to quick music; from its top af x d,Each holds a coloured cord, and as they weaveThe complex crossings of the mazy dance,The checquer d network twists around the treeIts intertexture of harmonious hues.40The dance is clearly reminiscent of maypole dancing.Although much of hisdescription of Aztec culture is based on the best sources available to him, Southeyoccasionally presents as Aztec the customs of other cultures.This is simply because37 Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected By Himself, 10 vols(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843), V, 55 6; my italics.38 Ibid., 291.39 Ibid., 160.40 Ibid., 364. Precious rites and customs 39they struck his fancy, or seemed poetic , as one critic puts it.41 The way in whichColeridge and Southey use green coronals as exotic, historical or classical decorationmay explain why they assumed that Wordsworth s use was a literary rather than alocal reference.The Fenwick note may be a later attempt to play down this perceivedliterariness of the reference to the green coronal.There is, however, a contrast withColeridge and Southey.For these latter poets, the fashions serve merely decorativepurposes; for Wordsworth, they are markers of the common sphere.The Intimations Ode and the depreciation of ritual meaningsWordsworth began, in 1802, to articulate his sadness at the wider decline of local MayDay customs.These lamentations take the form of grander classical laments for theerosion of a pagan appreciation of the natural world.Acknowledging the evolutionof May Day from pagan rites, Wordsworth associates the decline of local customswith the disappearance of a pagan spiritual link between nature and humankind, anelement of which these customs seemed to him to retain.Wordsworth s purposeis, nevertheless, to reposition nature as an immortal, revivifying force that outlivescultural signi cance and provides solace to the individual.May Day customs becomeassociated with classical festivals, and their decline signi es the loss of unity withnature.Wordsworth links this with an increasing concern for the loss of childhoodinnocence: it is the child, and not the adult, who retains unity with nature.Strikingly,the later Wordsworth loses all interest in the connection between indigenous customsand the common sphere, and more generally allows his interest in nature to supplanthis interest in the common sphere.In exploring the source of the custom in the laterperiod, Wordsworth is better able to understand the nature of its loss.May Day iselevated, in his classical odes of the 1820s, in order to suggest distance from it (andtherefore its decline), and to highlight the merits of a pagan belief-system based on alove of nature.The continuity, from pagan times to present, of celebrating nature in asimple and instinctive way, is, nevertheless, emphasized in Wordsworth s work fromthe Intimations Ode onwards.Wordsworth s point is that cultural celebrations ofnature are transitory.They are outlived by the self-renewing, self-celebrating naturalworld, and are survived by the instinctive human feelings that form the basis of aprofound love of nature.The Intimations Ode (composed 1802 1804, published 1807) marks thebeginning of Wordsworth s classicization of May Day.The Ode bemoans the lossof the glorious common sight (l.2) that was once bathed in a celestial light (l.4) and is comparable to the experience of the soul in a state of pre-existence.Thisstate of pre-existence is closely allied, in the poem, to an historical past, both in thesense of the personal history of the individual growing to maturity and in the senseof the historical development of culture away from festal celebration.Loss of the celestial light is perceived both as growth into adulthood, when immortality is nolonger assumed, and as the degeneration of past perceptions of the natural world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.This may bebecause he had seen the evidence in 1809.According to Wordsworth s story, the poets were discussing the green coronalas they met the boys in the Lake District.Coleridge and Southey had little personalexperience of May Day customs, but they were clearly struck by the image whenthey came across it in Wordsworth s poem.Both poets used similar descriptions intheir poetry after 1800.Written in the year he wrote the rst version of Dejection ,Coleridge s To Mathilda Betham from a Stranger (1802) celebrates her talents as apoet and society portrait painter.In high classical mode, Coleridge elaborates on thegreen coronal image, describing Betham s verse as a oral coronal entwined withlaurel, engarlanded with gadding woodbine tendrils , rose-buds, fruit blossoms andpretty weeds, which, with undoubting hand, / I twine around the brows of patriot34 F.N.Robinson, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edn (Boston: Houghton Mif in, 1987), p.45, l.1491.35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bollingen Series, 54, ed.by JamesEngell and W.Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 106.36 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed.by Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849 50), II, 190. 38 The Romantics and the May Day TraditionHOPE! (ll.13 17). Dejection: An Ode and Letter to Sara Hutchinson also alludeto coronals.Coleridge suggests in both poems that when he can dwell with those heloves best in one Happy Home , he will be able to crown himself with a Coronal(l.136).The twining vine of hope is also part of the later version of Dejection(1817, l.80).Southey s Madoc (1805) includes a green coronal in a catalogue of gaudydecorations worn by the Aztecs in time of war:Not half so gaudied, for their May-day mirth,All wreathed and ribanded, our youths and maids,As these stern Aztecas in war attire!The golden glitterance, and the feather-mail,More gay than glittering gold; and round the helmA coronal of high upstanding plumesGreen as the spring grass in a sunny shower.37The warriors clothes, Southey writes, are only slightly less bright than those wornon May Day. The Idle Shepherd-Boys may be a source for Southey s description ofthe way in which the feathers were worn, with the branch-like moss correspondingto the plumes.The green plumes are also part of Tezozomoc s hat in the same poem: the crown of glossy plumage, whose green hue / Vied with his emerald ear-drops.38Southey s notes suggest that the source for the plumes is Conquest of the Weast India.This describes the Tlascalan army as wearing great tuffes of feathers , but mentionsneither the colour of the plumes, nor whether they were worn as hats or coronals.39The comparison with the gaudy clothes of a Medieval Welsh May Day is Southey sown, and may suggest that he believed the hats to be a literary ostentation.It isunclear whether Southey intended, in Madoc, an association with the green coronalsthat Wordsworth observes, or whether the simile is simply a general comparison ofspringtime garishness.Southey, however, makes a rmer association between MayDay and the customs of the Aztecs in the section on Aztec recreational customs:Here round a lofty mast the dancers moveQuick, to quick music; from its top af x d,Each holds a coloured cord, and as they weaveThe complex crossings of the mazy dance,The checquer d network twists around the treeIts intertexture of harmonious hues.40The dance is clearly reminiscent of maypole dancing.Although much of hisdescription of Aztec culture is based on the best sources available to him, Southeyoccasionally presents as Aztec the customs of other cultures.This is simply because37 Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected By Himself, 10 vols(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843), V, 55 6; my italics.38 Ibid., 291.39 Ibid., 160.40 Ibid., 364. Precious rites and customs 39they struck his fancy, or seemed poetic , as one critic puts it.41 The way in whichColeridge and Southey use green coronals as exotic, historical or classical decorationmay explain why they assumed that Wordsworth s use was a literary rather than alocal reference.The Fenwick note may be a later attempt to play down this perceivedliterariness of the reference to the green coronal.There is, however, a contrast withColeridge and Southey.For these latter poets, the fashions serve merely decorativepurposes; for Wordsworth, they are markers of the common sphere.The Intimations Ode and the depreciation of ritual meaningsWordsworth began, in 1802, to articulate his sadness at the wider decline of local MayDay customs.These lamentations take the form of grander classical laments for theerosion of a pagan appreciation of the natural world.Acknowledging the evolutionof May Day from pagan rites, Wordsworth associates the decline of local customswith the disappearance of a pagan spiritual link between nature and humankind, anelement of which these customs seemed to him to retain.Wordsworth s purposeis, nevertheless, to reposition nature as an immortal, revivifying force that outlivescultural signi cance and provides solace to the individual.May Day customs becomeassociated with classical festivals, and their decline signi es the loss of unity withnature.Wordsworth links this with an increasing concern for the loss of childhoodinnocence: it is the child, and not the adult, who retains unity with nature.Strikingly,the later Wordsworth loses all interest in the connection between indigenous customsand the common sphere, and more generally allows his interest in nature to supplanthis interest in the common sphere.In exploring the source of the custom in the laterperiod, Wordsworth is better able to understand the nature of its loss.May Day iselevated, in his classical odes of the 1820s, in order to suggest distance from it (andtherefore its decline), and to highlight the merits of a pagan belief-system based on alove of nature.The continuity, from pagan times to present, of celebrating nature in asimple and instinctive way, is, nevertheless, emphasized in Wordsworth s work fromthe Intimations Ode onwards.Wordsworth s point is that cultural celebrations ofnature are transitory.They are outlived by the self-renewing, self-celebrating naturalworld, and are survived by the instinctive human feelings that form the basis of aprofound love of nature.The Intimations Ode (composed 1802 1804, published 1807) marks thebeginning of Wordsworth s classicization of May Day.The Ode bemoans the lossof the glorious common sight (l.2) that was once bathed in a celestial light (l.4) and is comparable to the experience of the soul in a state of pre-existence.Thisstate of pre-existence is closely allied, in the poem, to an historical past, both in thesense of the personal history of the individual growing to maturity and in the senseof the historical development of culture away from festal celebration.Loss of the celestial light is perceived both as growth into adulthood, when immortality is nolonger assumed, and as the degeneration of past perceptions of the natural world [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]