Page 145 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes Romantic melancholy, however, is of its own kind. It is the product of moments of depression
inherent in almost every optimistic philosophy or attitude towards life. Few poets can remain
always balanced on the crest of a euphoric certainty that God is in his Heaven:
All is light with the world.
A man like Hardy can be a firm pessimist, but few can be firm optimists. Almost all the romantic
poets were, essentially speaking, optimists. Their fits of melancholy were due mainly to two
factors:
Their occasional (and very painful) awareness of the unbridgeable gulf between the world
of reality and the world of their imagination.
Their recognition of the impossibility of the materialization of their visionary projects.
Melancholy is natural during moments when the infeasibility of pet imaginations comes
to be realised.
Thus romantic melancholy is, pre-eminently, the outcome of a basic dichotomy which at times
gives rise to the feelings of disillusionment. Samuel C. Chew observes in this very context: “The
attempt to find some correspondence between actuality and desire results in joy when for fleeting
moments the vision is approximated but in despondency of despair the realization comes that
such reconciliations are impossible. Thus Byron’s Lucifer tempts Cain to revolt by forcing upon
him an awareness of the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions.’ A sense of this contrast is
expressed by Shelley in those poems in which there is a sudden fall from ecstasy into
disillusionment. The same sense adds a new poignancy to the melancholy strain inherited by the
romantic poets from their predecessors.”
Disillusionment resulting in melancholy is also evident in the political belief of some romantic
poets. Further, as most romantic poets were turbulent characters unable to adjust themselves in
society they ventilated melancholy feeling. They thought the world to be out of step, but the world
threw the opposite charge into their teeth.

Did u know? The feeling of being solitary, especially in the case of Shelley, found melancholy
expression.

18.1 Wordsworth

Wordsworth was the least melancholy of all the romantic poets. It was mainly due to the fact that
he seldom felt himself to be in a state of utter solitariness. There was his sister and there was the
ever-consoling Nature always at his elbow. He believed, and actually felt, that Nature leads one
from joy to joy. He was an incorrigible optimist though he was aware, like Crabbe, of the miseries
of villagers who lived, unlike townsmen, right in the heart of Nature. When Michael finds his son
tost in the ignominious ways of the town, he is shocked. Wordsworth points out that love sustained
Michael, for
There is a comfort in the strength of love
Which makes a thing endurable, which else
Will overset the brain or break the heart
Wordsworth’s optimism finds its way even in the midst of elegiac sentiments. Consider, for
instance, the last of his Elegiac Stanzas:
But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights, of what is to be borne!
Such sights or worse, as are before me here,
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

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