Critical Introduction for Poetry Anthology based on Religion
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Course
English Literature (Q320)
Institution
University Of Brighton (UoB)
This anthology is an exploration through poetry the idea of intensely strong faith and how the realities of life, and the mortality of that life shakes that faith. Though this idea is applicable to most if not all religion types, the poems in this anthology are specifically focused towards the typi...
This anthology is an exploration through poetry the idea of intensely strong faith and how the
realities of life, and the mortality of that life shakes that faith. Though this idea is applicable to most
if not all religion types, the poems in this anthology are specifically focused towards the typical
Christian God. The anthology is in a specific order in order to express the hypocrisy found in Christian
teachings and the journey a believer might make in discovering those hypocrisies and losing their
faith in protest against them.
It begins with the most overt display of faith in “My god! O let me call thee mine” by Anne Brontë.
This poem is crying out to God and asking to be by His side. Despite the speaker declaring
themselves a sinner and they “cannot say their faith is strong” (line9), they offer all that is left to
them in devotion to God. It possesses unshakeable belief that Anne was known for; the Brontë
sisters were raised by a pastor father and were all Christians, however Anne was always the most
religious out of them and her poems often expressed her love for Christ, including My God! O let me
call thee mine. “She believed in the universal redemption of mankind; that ultimately all people,
whatever their faith or actions in this life, would be redeemed by Christ.”-religiosity in the poetry of
the Brontë sisters. It is first in the anthology to show how intense faith can be for a person, there is
a desperate tone throughout to show how deeply the speaker wants to be close to God. “At the very
end of the twentieth century, things could not be more different. Religion is often seen as a sub-set
of sociology, and clergy are looked on with little understanding.” -religion nature and art
It is followed by “On Another’s Sorrow” by William Blake which has very similar themes to My god! O
let me call thee mine in that it also has an inordinate amount of faith in God. On Another’s Sorrow
specially focuses on the omnipresent side of God. It stipulates that God is always here, and feels the
same as everyone else. He uses imagery of a father’s pain over their child to represent God feeling
that pain for all of His children who are suffering. Blake uses a series of rhetorical questions to asl
, whether God leaves us to our own suffering answering those questions with “Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!” to suggest the absurdity of these questions. This is one example of
anaphora, linking back to the same line being used earlier in the poem, however it is used several
times throughout the poem to more succinctly show that he is answering the rhetorical questions
being asked. The God present in On Another’s Sorrow shares humanities sadness and feels it as if it
is His own.
The next poem takes a little jump out of the obviousness in relation to faith as the last two poems
and is a little more subtle in its expression of the anthology’s theme. Instead “I Wandered Lonely as
a Cloud” by William Wordsworth presents the wonder of God through the beauty of the world he
created. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud contains brilliant imagery of a beautiful field of daffodils as
well as the surrounding land. The poem expresses Wordsworth’s astonishment at discovering such
as beautiful place and it feels like an epiphany, as though he hadn’t truly seen the beauty of the
world until he had found that field of daffodils. Seeing something so beautiful has been the cause of
belief in an otherworldly being for years. It often creates such an ineffable feeling that people
believe it can only be the creation of God.
William Wordsworth continues the anthology on further though the tone of “Lucy Gray” is a
decidedly more grim one than I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. It tells the story of a young girl getting
lost on the way to see her mother and ultimately dying in a harsh storm. Here, the idea that God is
also responsible for the bad things that happen in life and a little questioning of that is brought in.
What is the reason behind the death of a child? Why would God cause such suffering to Lucy and her
parents? It contrasts well with I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud as Lucy is very much connected to
nature the same way the speaker is in that poem. In I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, being close to
nature was a revelation akin to being close to God and meant a clear and free mind. In Lucy Gray,
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