Romantic Poets: Another Postscript

I was just thinking about that first movement of the Beethoven 5th: do you remember the long, elaborate coda, and how it actually ended up being longer than the exposition segment of the movment? It's almost as if there's a hysteria to affirm something at the end, or a kind of desperation to forestall the conclusion, which perhaps helps us to think about the speaker's similar sort of desperation in "Ode to a Nightingale" ... before, finally, those crushing lines: "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" Being "tolled back" probably resonates (or will resonate) in terms of many our literary works this semester. And maybe this also helps illuminate the importance of the grace and acceptance at the end of "To Autumn"; it's no longer about the desperate attempt at prolongation, nor does it it suggest a simple resignation to loss. It's something far more complicated and consoling.

There's maybe a kind of overly solicitous aspect to that speaker's strategies regarding the aesthetic experience in Nightingale, too. It makes me think of the moment in Wordsworth's Prelude when he refers to vision as "the most despotic of the senses." The more feverishly Wordsworth pursues the dictates of his eyes, the more what he's hoping to achieve seems to elude him. No wonder, then, that his heightened state in "Tintern Abbey" is triggered by the sense of hearing and that "soft inland murmur"?

OK, back to Joyce and Woolf!