American Literature: Romanticism final exam assignment Student Final Exam Samples 2013

Kristine Vermillion

Contemplating Fathers

I enjoyed the poetry on the syllabus.  It was very insightful in the identification, exploration and analysis of romantic elements.  The amount of poetry was propitious in showing how the romantic traversed the boundaries of period and time.   We were able to analyze poetry from the 1700's to the present to evidence Romanticism's power and longevity.  Without the presence of poetry on the syllabus, we would not have been able to cover as much ground.  I really enjoyed the poetry element, and I think more devotion to the key poets of this period would be a marvelous addition to the syllabus.  I concur with your planned improvements.  I pushed the boundaries a little with the addition of my own poem, and I wonder if you regret assenting to my tweaking the My Poetry Reading presentation in this way.  As a teacher, was this a useful wager and would you ever do it again?

I evaluated the romantic elements of Gerard Manly Hopkins' poem, God's Grandeur in my midterm, and I compared it to Denise Levertov's poem Jacob's Ladder.   In that discussion I talked about the presence of transcendence and the sublime.  I want to return to it again, because I noticed one more point of comparison that I want to use to discuss Romantic elements in two other poems from the syllabus.

God’s Grandeur (1877)

By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God

     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

     And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;

     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

     World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.

(not published till 1918)

The elements that I just recognized in it are desire and loss, though both are just subtly implied.  The desire is to experience the grandeur, and the loss is felt in the cloud of civilization and all the things humanity does to mar the beauty and grandeur.  In the first few lines the desire appears, but then it disappears.  In the second stanza, it reappears again.  The transcendent remains, and the poem leaves us with the expectation of the sublime and transcendence.  It elevates the experience of life over that which disturbs.  If it was a modern poem, the poem would end at the last stanza at the place of loss and despair--in the matter of fact, crushing reality of life.  Yet because it brings us back to the hope and the transcendent, it lifts us out of the clutches of reality.  The reach is beyond the grasp, and man can keep going. 

I saw this same idea in Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel." It starts with a positive view of God and then very quickly turns that view on its head by some powerful lines about the things in this world that are so disturbing and yet at the end there's a positive turn.

Yet Do I Marvel                                                   Catechism Notes:

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,        ← Romantic;

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why           ←Job, God doesn’t stoop to tell why.

The little buried mole continues blind,                   ← a truly sad and ugly little creature

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,    ←made in image of God, yet fallen

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus                [Greek mythological figure tortured by unsatisfied temptation]

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare                     ←fallen because man gave into temptation, ate the fruit

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus            [Greek mythological king condemned to roll stone up hill, rolls ↓ again]

To struggle up a never-ending stair.                   ←The curse = futility and death; life is futile (Eccl.)

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune           ←Not affected by man’s ?’s and lack of understanding    

To catechism by a mind to strewn                           ←Poet’s mind, petty cares?  Ironic because the true ?’s

With petty cares to slightly understand             being asked are the REAL hard questions ...

What awful brain compels his awful hand.    ←Awful: awesome word choice! It can mean extremely

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:                           bad or solemnly impressive and inspiring of awe. 

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!        ←”Yet” = key to the romanticism of the poem—it is where

                                                                         the switch from the Real to the Romantic takes place … all                                                                                this bad, and yet, there’s this reason to wonder, to hope

                                                                         Marvel—something that causes wonder, admiration, or                                                                                     astonishment; a wonderful thing

The last poem I want to discuss is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."  In this poem, the poet is not questioning God, but he is questioning his father.  The reality of the everyday is very present in this poem.  The mornings are cold.  There's hard, cracked and aching hands.  They are the remnants of a hard work week.  There's the splintering and the breaking of the wood, and there's the fear of the child in a house where everything is less than perfect. 

Those Winter Sundays  

(1966)

by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Sundays too my father got up early                         ← too--he got up early everyday

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,                     

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made              ←he was absent because he was working,

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.          it cost him; he did it w/o thanks.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,               ←Something awful dwells there

speaking indifferently to him,                                               ←no appreciation for the father

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know                             ←Here's the "yet," there's the realization that

of love's austere and lonely offices?                                       there's more to the father than realized

The father is viewed throughout the poem as hard, distant and there's an element of fear and anger.  Yet throughout the poem, in the midst of these observations, you see the work that the father is doing for his family.  He works hard throughout the week.  He wakes early to dispel the cold from the house.  He polishes shoes, and he wakes his family on time.  The childhood view that viewed him so indifferently, with age sees him differently. There is a slow revelation that there was more to the father than realized, and it opens up what was once closed and cold.  The broadening of the vision of the father's love and its "austere and lonely offices" is romantic because it revives the picture of what the son once thought he knew and raises it to a higher and more aspiring and praiseworthy level.  It is a beautiful poem.  It actually strikes a deep chord in me concerning my own father and his life.  After he had warmed the house in the morning, he'd wake me and my siblings by saying, "Wakey, wakey."  It was priceless, though I didn't know it at the time, and I sorely miss it.

Though I might not know how articulate the feeling and scope of this poem, my own experience with it, as well as the other two, indicate their worth.  In all three, there's an acknowledgement of the real, yet all of them successfully break free from the clutches of the real to grasp at what is beyond.  This is the source of their power.  This is the heart of Romanticism.