Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings

William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility” appears at first to argue against revision.

Something in the word spontaneous seems antithetical to revision, or so I thought when I first learned about Wordsworth back in college.

At that time, I imagined he meant he lounged dreamily on a divan until, with a gold nib quill, he set about drafting the lines of a poem.

At that time, I imagined he meant he lounged dreamily on a divan until, with a gold nib quill, he set about drafting the lines of a poem.

Any word I might insert into the phrase “It made me feel ______” is going to be theoretical, as if we are talking about the emotion.

Sometimes beginning writers feel that to take a poem through many drafts is to apply some sort of censorship to it, to tame its spirited individuality and make it conform.

Each revision removes hindrances until the poem’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is released.

For minutes we fought
Standing and falling in
The rivers brown spate,
And I would still fight
Though now I can forgive.

To worship or destroy beauty—
That double edge of impulse
I recognise, by which we live;
But also the bitter paradox
Of betraying love to harm,
Then lungeing, too late,
With fists, to its defence.

Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee.

Say “better”; here comes one of my master's kinsmen.

Amen, amen. But come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.

The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so.

A lover may bestride the gossamers
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall, so light is vanity.

Come you to make confession to his father?

The tears have got small victory by that,
For it was bad enough before their spite.

That is no slander, sir, which is a truth,
And what I spake, I spake it to my face.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds

And so from that time
immemorial,
as the old people say,
rain clouds drift from the west
gift from the ocean.

In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.