Texts and Issues Towards Society in Romantic Era

I. INTRODUCTION

"Reason and the evidence of our senses were important no doubt but they mean nothing to us unless they touch our needs, our feelings, our emotions. Only then do they acquire meaning. This meaning ' is what the Romantic Movement is all about."(Dr. George Boeree)
This may describe the best for Romantic movement. There were many changes that made this movement. The perception that the Enlightenment was destroying the natural human soul and substituting it with the mechanical, artificial heart was becoming prevalent across Europe. Also another thought that was at the wake of romanticism were the words of the French revolution emphasizing liberty, freedom, and individuality as well as the need in England to escape what the industrial revolution was doing to the country. There are many people who expressed their thought that made the romantic period what is was, especially through their literary works.
Literary starting points for the romantic period are difficult to determine; however, the period is often described as covering the years between the 1780s and 1830s.
There are however key people who are involved in cementing certain expressions. By critical consensus the Romantic poets are the six male poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Colleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley , John Keats and Lord Byron. Together, it has been argued, they formed a literary known as ’Romanticism’, which mark a profound shift in sensibility. They demonstrated the creative imagination, a new way of looking nature, the nature of individual self and the value of individual experience.
By Studying some texts from some of famous people mentioned above, we will be able to know what life that was happened in that era. Here, we provide the text as well as issues of general aspects, such as, what class, power, and politics treating them, what they missed from their land and landscape, and even slavery trades issues, as the approaches study of Romantic Era.

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II. DICUSSIONS
TEXT AND ISSUES
1. Class, power, and politics
• Literary texts of the Romantic period were shaped and informed by a number of social and political issues. Many have argued that the work of the Romantics is a response to the disruptive social and economic changes in the normal patterns of life occasioned by the growth of the factory system, the disappearance of whole classes of workers in traditional crafts, and the increasing population in cities. It is often argued that Romantic poetry shows a concern with the dignity of the individual person and a psychological concern for the distressed and alienated state of mind. Many of Romantic believed that the disruptions in the patterns of life occasioned by the commercial and industrial process and its impersonal abstraction of the economics interests of the individual, blunted the mind and made it solitary. Against this sense of social disintegration, the Romantic demonstrated a concern with the whole, with integration, and with unity: “The One Life”, in Coleridge’s phrase.
• William Blake sympathized with the Revolution, which he regarded as an outburst of freedom against the repressive forces of monarchy and established religion. He expressed his radical and free- thinking ideas in a series of visionary poems. In his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he castigated a society which condones the use of children to undertake potentially lethal employment: God and his priest and king Who make up a heaven of the boys misery
• London (William Blake)
The poem ‘London’ presents an apocalyptic vision of the British Empire’s capital city, a place of fear and terror in the grip of political and psychology repression by the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of empiricist philosophy. It presents a searing indictment of the hypocrisies and cruelties of the political and religious establishment:
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LONDON I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man. In every infants cry of fear. In every voice; in every ban. The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every blackening Church appalls, And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
(Norton Anthology,p.94 [A])

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Word to Know :
- Designs : a child leads an old blind man , who leans on sticks , along a drab street . Besides stanza 2 n 3 , child warms himself by a wood fire
- Chartered : Like all ancient cities, London is proud of its charters, through which it holds certain liberties and privileges-, and which once represented its source of freedom. But these charters have not granted liberty or privilege to most of the city’s people. There may also be a hint of the meaning of &charter& as form of 'hire '
- Ban : a public prohibition; here chiefly an angry swear-word
- Mind forage ; suggesting the strength of skilled workmanship , is replaced by this , emphasizing that the fetters are not inevitable , but created in the twisted minds both of the oppressor and the sufferer who accepts the chains.

• Ode to the West Wind (Percy Shelley)
The poets of the second generation of Romantic writers, however, maintained a faith in liberal and reformist politics. Most engaged was Percy Shelley who developed his political ideas in a number of works. His ‘Ode to the West Wind’ :

All day she spun in her poor dwelling,
And then her three hours’ work at night-
Alas, ‘twas hardly worth the telling,
It would not pay for candlelight.

It envisions the autumnal wind as a cleansing force, removing the diseased and corrupt, and transforming the world for a new spring and awakening. His sonnet ‘England in 1819’ (Norton Anthology, p.771 [A]) presents a nation ruled by ‘An old, mad, blind in blood, despised and dying King’. For Shelley, princes are like mud polluting a stream, they are like parasites sucking the blood of their country, ‘Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow’.

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2. Land and Landscape
• Goody Blake and Harry Gill (William Wordsworth)
Changes in the rural and urban landscapes were reflected in the writing of the time. The Ballads take as their subject ‘low and rustic life’ (Norton Anthology, p.264 [A]). They describe the plight of people who are on the very margin of existence: shepherds, rural laborers, the old and infirm, vagrants, beggars, abandoned women, hysterics, the insane and, perhaps most notoriously. Wordsworth draws attention to the industrial process (the spreading of manufactures), the fall in rural earnings and the rising cost in provisions occasioned by the war with France, which led to the sufferings of the rustic people. Goody Blake, in the poem ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, is a victim of the long hours and poor returns of eighteenth-century cottage industry: All day she spun in her poor dwelling, And then her three hours’ work at night-
Alas, ‘twas hardly worth the telling, It would not pay for candlelight.
(Wu, Romanticism, p.363 [A])

During winter Goody Blake must forage for wood for her fire because ‘in that country coals are dear’ (ibid., p.364). The Shepherd in ‘The last of the Flock’ is forced to sell his sheep one by one to pay for food for his children : ‘Ten children, sir, had I to feed Hard labour in a time of need!’
(ibid., p.383).
Wordsworth writes of the break-up of families and of the disappearance of that class of rural worker who owns a small tract of land.
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• The Mores (John Clare)
The poetry of the Northamtonshire rural labourer John Clare is deeply sensitive to the changes in the rural environment, which he writes about from the perspective of an insider. Clare was hostile to ‘improvement’ and enclosure; he was aware of the ecological aspects of the changes in reducing woodlands all over the country as well as destroying breeding grounds.
In ‘The Mores’ Clare bewails the loss of the people’s traditional rights to the enclosure movement:
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now (Clare, Major works, p. 168 [A])
Clare’s poetry protests against such changes and improvements as enclosure, and bewails the loss of both the common lands and the people’s customary rights, which caused numerous laborers to leave the countryside for work elsewhere. For him, enclosure is symptomatic of a new order antithetical to a communitarian view of the world, one which respects the place of wildlife and plants as well as the rights of human beings
• The canonical Romantic writers tended to eschew the picturesque appreciation of nature for the full-bloodied sublime, exemplified by the mountains, crags and torrents of the Lake District and the Alps. Although sharing their appreciation of the topographical sites made famous by picturesque theorist, Romantic poets disliked the notion of nature as framed as in a picture, and as mediated by the practitioner of picturesque beauty. They also objected to the idea that nature could be improved by the addition of formulaic beauties, preferring, instead, a sublime and solitary encounter which became a quasimystical or, even, religious experience.
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• Wordsworth stressed the importance of the sublime natural scenery in developing his spiritual, moral and imaginative nature. For instance, when describing how he borrowed a boat for a night-time adventure, he feels rebuked and threatened by an imagined reciprocity in the world around him:
When, from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. –I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the grim Shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion, like a living Thing
Strode after me.
(Norton Anthology, p.332 [A])
Returning the boat, the young Wordsworth is troubled for many days ‘with a dim and undetermined sense/ Of unknown modes of being’, of ‘huge and mighty Forms’ that moved through his days and troubled his dreams (p.333). Wordsworth argues that as he develops he becomes aware of his self, but also a self or presence apart from himself, that of animated nature. Nature works to purify the mind by stimulating its spiritual and imaginative responses, through intense emotional experience, often those of terror.

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3. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade
• The Little Black Boy (William Blake)
Many Romantic-period writers wrote against the transatlantic slave trade. Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ from his Songs of Innocence (Norton Anthology, p.84 [A]), for instance, raises issues about the representation of slaves and the limits of the abolitionists’ sympathy. His black boy accepts the hierarchies of color which the poem’s readership affirms despite their humanitarian feelings:

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.
The poem concludes with a vision of interracial fraternity round the ‘tent of God with the black boy shading the white English boy from the searing and coruscating radiance of God’s love:
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I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father’s knee.
And then I’ll stand stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
A poem in the spirit of contemporary radical anti-slavery writing. It apparently hints at the commonplace of 'the benighted heathen ' ; but note that the black boy leads the white boy to god , not vice versa.
The boy has assimilated a Eurocentric view of the world, accepting the Christian notion of white male father as God, whom he desires to resemble, to ‘be like him’ and be loved by him.
Blake’s poem represents a speaker in a state of innocence and the poem may function, as other poems in the series, as an ironic rebuttal of the hypocritical Christian evangelicalism the poet so despised.
• Chimney Sweeper (William Blake)
Also, William Blake’s Chimney Sweeper depicted the slavery and trafficking. Unfair and cruel treatment given by their master describes this life did exist at that time :
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “ ‘weep ‘weep ‘weep ‘weep.”
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved, so I said,
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“Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet, and that very night
As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight,
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black
They were often 'apprenticed ' (sold) at the age of above seven; they were brutally and unscrupulously used by their masters , not clothed, fed or washed; when sweeping , in constant danger of suffocation or burning, besides the skin cancer caused by the soot which was literally never washed from their bodies; they were encouraged to steal, and were often turned out in the streets by their masters to 'cry the streets ' on the chance of employment , or for mere begging; their dirt and their reputation for stealing made them social outcasts. line 1-8 were literally true.

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CONCLUSION
From the discussion above, we are now clearly enough that the romantic era is different from the previous era. The individual literary figure plays an important role to build a new period. From the enlightenment, that is which usually called as the age of reason, to the era which considered their individual feeling and emotion against so-called science and logical reason. Also, through literary work existed at the romantic era, we are able to imagine the life of society we deal with.

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REFERENCES

Damrosch, Leopold. 1985. Adventures in English Literature. Florida: Harcourt Jovanovich Inc.
Erdman, David V. 1971. The Blake Complete Poems. London: Longman Group Limited.
Poplawski, Paul. 2008. English Literature in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pers.
Wordsworth, William. 2004. Lyrical Ballads with other poems, Volume One. Pennsylvania : Pennsylvania State University.

References: Damrosch, Leopold. 1985. Adventures in English Literature. Florida: Harcourt Jovanovich Inc. Erdman, David V. 1971. The Blake Complete Poems. London: Longman Group Limited. Poplawski, Paul. 2008. English Literature in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pers. Wordsworth, William. 2004. Lyrical Ballads with other poems, Volume One. Pennsylvania : Pennsylvania State University.