Romantic poets – The Watchful Scribe

07/01/202407/01/2024The Scribe's Scribblings

Wordsworth and the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

As a fan of the Hunger Games series, I was pleased to find that Suzanne Collins has reached a similar level of quality with ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’. As an English graduate, I was not expecting to find in the book a relationship to the Romantic poets substantial enough to sink my teeth into. Here, I do exactly that— I consider the true significance of the fraught relationship between Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird, a journey that will take us via Rousseau, Hobbes and Wordsworth.

13/11/202313/11/2023The Scribe's Scribblings

Fantasies Fleeting in the Murk of Modernity: John Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?

07/08/202305/09/2023The Scribe's Scribblings

Lord Byron’s revelry in impermanence: ‘lines inscribed upon a cup formed from a skull’

It is rare in modern media to see anyone other than the most theatrical of villains drinking wine from a cup fashioned out of a human skull. But whilst we may shudder at the idea, Lord Byron insists that we should find solace in disregarding the supposed sanctity of our human remains.

08/07/202305/09/2023The Scribe's Scribblings

Percy Shelley’s Everlasting Universe of Things: ‘Mont Blanc’

Political activism was not rare amongst the Romantic poets, and perhaps burned most strongly in the heart of Percy Shelley. More than any other of his contemporaries, he believed that the poet had a moral duty to share their understanding of beautiful truth with the rest of humanity- an understanding that derived from the spiritual and soaring power of the natural world.