Taylor Swift and William Wordsworth

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• Middelbare school
• havo
• Leerjaar 5

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Taylor Swift - The Lakes

William Wordsworth - I wandered lonely as a cloud

List with literary works on SOM!

Goals

You can:

• define the Romantic movement in English literature;
• discuss Swift's and Wordsworth's contexts 
• analyse their poems;
• describe at least 3 literary devices/tools in each poem.

Romanticism

• focus on personal, unique experience;
• focus on individual and their feelings.

Wordsworth: poetry is 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling'

Romanticism

• Emphasis on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive, unspoilt view of the world, nature.
• Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, Keats, Byron

Paintings: William Turner

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Friedrich (1818)

The idea that there was some kind of ultimate truth in nature. By being in nature you could get to ‘the heart of things’ as nature was thought to be capable of generating the strongest sensations in the people experiencing it. 

The Romantic Sublime

The idea that there is some kind of ultimate truth in nature. By being in nature you could get to ‘the heart of things’ as nature was thought to be capable of generating the strongest sensations in the people experiencing it. 

The poems

starts at 0.54

I wandered lonely as a cloud A

That floats on high o'er vales and hills, B

When all at once I saw a crowd, A

A host, of golden daffodils;B

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, C

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. C

Continuous as the stars that shine D

And twinkle on the milky way, E

They stretched in never-ending line D

Along the margin of a bay: E

Ten thousand saw I at a glance, F

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. F

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

I wandered lonely as a cloud - simile

daffodils are fluttering and dancing - personification

enjambement 

what wealth - alliteration

assonance - Ten thousand saw I at a glance and They stretched in never-ending

metaphor: inward eye - metaphor for memory of the daffodils. 

The Lakes

Jack Antonoff & Taylor Swift, 2020 (Folkore)

Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?

I'm not cut out for all these cynical clones

These hunters with cell phones

Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you

Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

I'm setting off, but not without my muse

What should be over burrowed under my skin?

In heart-stopping waves of hurt

I've come too far to watch some name-dropping sleaze

Tell me what are my words worth

elegies - eulogise = assonance

rhetorical question: Is it romantic ....me?

Romantic - homophone for Romantics (the poets), romantic as in having feelings of love for someone else, romantic as in having an idealised view of the past.

alliteration: peaks, perfect, place

words worth = allusion to Wordsworth, the man himself.

heart-stopping waves of hurt =metaphor

rhyme: clones, phones, cry, die, hurt, worth

simile: Windemere peaks look like the perfect place to cry.

anaphora: I want ... I want .. I want

Strands

https://www.nytimes.com/games/strands

Wordle

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

Squaredle

https://squaredle.app/