• The history of Robert Burns’ family was one of incessant poverty – poor land, high rent, and backbreaking physical labor.
• Though his formal education was limited, his father inspired in him a love of learning that led him to the works of such writers as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope.
• He also had a firm grounding in English grammar, a reading knowledge of French, and some background in mathematics and surveying.
• At age twenty-six, discouraged by his poverty and a frustrating love affair, he determined to embark for Jamaica, but first he gathered together a few of his poem which he published under the title Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786).
• The book was an overnight success, and Burns left for Edinburgh to arrange for a second edition.
• In 1788, Burns married Jean Armour.
• His last years were miserable and depressing, marred by recurrent bouts of ill health, but he nevertheless took on the task of helping to create and preserve the songs of the nation.
• Burns’s greatest poetic gift was his ability to express the feelings and concerns of ordinary people in a natural, flowing idiom, thus making him a poet for everyone.

To a Mouse

·         In this poem, Burns identifies the animal with the human world, although the poem is essentially about himself.

·         The mouse is interesting because its plight reminds him of his own.

·         It is not primarily of himself that Burns is thinking, but of his own experience as representative of all mankind’s.

·         In verses two and three, he goes on to build up a picture of the present plight of the mouse, contrasting it with the confident plans it had laid for the future.

·         Damien means rare or occasional, icker is one ear of corn, a thrave is a measure of cur grain consisting of two stocks of twelve sheaves each.  The lave is the remainder.  That line therefore translates, “We should not grudge the occasional grain out of our huge store.”

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

• During his lifetime, and for half a century afterwards, William Blake’s poetry and art were largely ignored, even derided as the work of a madman.
• William Blake was born in London in 1757 and lived all but three of his seventy years in a working-class section of the city.
• At age ten, Blake expressed an interest in becoming a painted and was enrolled in a drawing school and later apprenticed to an engraver.
• His marriage in 1782 to Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to read, write, and assist him in his engraving work, was happy.
• As a child Blake was deeply religious and reported having had an experience of mystic revelation when he was only four.
• Between 1783 and 1793 he wrote, illustrated, and printed his most famous lyrics, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
• Songs of Innocence first appeared in 1789.

The Lamb

·         The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.”

·         The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.

·         “The Lamb” has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets.

·         The child’s question is both naïve and profound.

·         The child’s answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

·         The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus.

·         The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible’s depictions of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable.

·         The pendant (or companion) poem to this one is “The Tyger.”

·         These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account that either offers independently.

The Tyger

·         Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them.

·         The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets.

·         Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, mus tin some way contain a reflection of its creator.

·         He focuses on the question, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God?

·         Perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world.

·         The “forging” of the tiger suggest a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in anyway accidentally or haphazardly produced.

·         The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this.

·         “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the cheer magnitude of God’s power, and the inscrutability of divine will.

·         The open awe of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” and of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

• Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a village on the edge of the Lake District, a scenic mountain region in northwest England.
• For eight years he attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of reading and poetic inclinations were strongly encouraged.
• Wordsworth was enrolled at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1787 as a scholarship student.
• Two critical developments in 1795 marked a major turning point in Wordsworth’s life: a bequest of nine hundred pounds from a friend that enabled him to establish a home for his beloved sister Dorothy and himself at Racedown, and the commencement of his friendship and artistic collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a creative association that would lead, in 1798, to the publication of a revolutionary volume of poems and ballads.
• In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood schoolmate, with whom he had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

Tintern Abbey

·         “Tintern Abbey” is composed in blank verse, which is a name used to describe unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter.

·         The subject of “Tintern Abbey” is memory – specifically, childhood memories of communion with natural beauty.

·         In his youth, the poet says, he was thoughtless in his unity with the woods and the river; now, five years since his last viewing of the scene, he is no longer thoughtless, but acutely aware of everything the scene has to offer him.

·         "Tintern Abbey" is a monologue, imaginatively spoken by a single speaker to himself, referencing the specific objects of its imaginary scene, and occasionally addressing others--once the spirit of nature, occasionally the speaker's sister.

·         The poem's imagery is largely confined to the natural world in which he moves, though there are some castings-out for metaphors ranging from the nautical (the memory is "the anchor" of the poet's "purest thought") to the architectural (the mind is a "mansion" of memory).

·         The poem also has a subtle strain of religious sentiment; though the actual form of the Abbey does not appear in the poem, the idea of the abbey--of a place consecrated to the spirit--suffuses the scene, as though the forest and the fields were themselves the speaker's abbey.