Romantic Period Webquest

I work as coal miner. I have to drag sleds of coal up and down the shafts. I have to crawl through the shafts because since the tunnels are only about three or even two feet high, carrying a candle as it is pitch black in the mine; I generally become black with coal by the end of the work day. This is job as dangerous as frequently the shafts collapse, trapping the miners, or candle is lit in a gas pocket causing an explosion; by the time the shaft is clear again the miner may have suffocated. I do this for 12 hours every day except sunday, when I sleep, and during strike riots when I don't have to worry about food since I can easily steal food in the chaos of the riot. I live in an small apartment in the slum, where I generally go home and sleep and keep eat gruel for dinner.

Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty

I like how Byron describes the night as a kind and gentle woman. The night makes up the better part of my day, it is when I can rest and sleep. The darkness of the night isn't dirty like the coal mines, it's warm and clean and restful.

"She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

I like the way the poet writes of the night sky, I never see it now as it is covered in smog, it reminds me of my home before I came to the city.

William Wordsworth - By the Sea

The poet talks of walking by the sea in the evening, with a child. The sea makes the poet sad and silent, but the child is stilly happy and natural, as if they walked by the sea all the time.

"Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine."

This makes me think of when I went to the sea as a child, I was very young. The sea is clean and cool and everlasting, it will still will be after the slum and coalmine and factories are abandoned and gone. I would like to go back there.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - A New World

This poem talks about the buildings and the cities empires of the earth falling away like a bad dream and the world being reborn. If the empires of the earth includes London, I am all for this.

"Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."

After the world is reborn, the old and great beings and heroes of the ancient world will return and be in their youth. I am not a great being or hero, but perhaps I will have a place in this new world also, and I will leave this black hole beneath the ground and live in work in the fields and forest of the world.

"A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore."

John Keats - Robin Hood

This poem is about Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest. The poet talks about his regret at the loss of the wildness and freedom of the forest.

"No! those days are gone away,
And their hours are old and gray,
And their minutes buried all
Under the down-trodden pall
Of the leaves of many years:
Many times have winter's shears,
Frozen North, and chilling East,
Sounded tempests to the feast
Of the forest's whispering fleeces,
Since men knew nor rent nor leases.

I have known rent and leases, and can honestly say I regret both. But theres nothing that can be done, theres nowhere in the world one can go without having someone demanding rent, even the most shriveled of apples is already owned and on its way to market.

"She would weep, and he would craze:
He would swear, for all his oaks,
Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas;
She would weep that her wild bees
Sang not to her--strange! that honey
Can't be got without hard money!"