English 12 / Unit 4: Romantic Poets
4.2 Wordsworth and Coleridge
Notes
William Wordsworth wrote about nature and everyday life in plain language. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote imaginative, supernatural poems.
- Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud": "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils." It uses a simile and the rhyme ABABCC. The memory of the flowers later brings joy to the speaker.
- Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798): a sailor shoots an albatross and brings disaster. Famous lines: "Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink."
- Coleridge described the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief" when accepting supernatural events in a poem.
Practice
In the opening of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the speaker compares himself to a cloud. This is a:
"Lonely as a cloud" uses "as," so it is a simile.
In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the line "Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink" shows:
Surrounded by salt water, the sailors are dying of thirst.
"Willing suspension of disbelief" refers to:
Readers set aside doubt to enter the story world.
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