literature

Lines Written in Late Spring

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Literature Text

There had been a thousand blended notes,

When she had lain in the beautiful grove.

She had been content then, maybe even happy,

Her mind filled only with ease, and peace.

 

That was then, now was now,

Lady Nature had finally conceded defeat,

The long, raging war was over at last.

Now waged a different fight.

 

Petals had been it’s jewels,

Trailing from earthen floor to leafy roof

Brilliant pink and delicate blue,

Now all the same mundane brown gray.

 

Birds once sang in that lovely place,

Trilling the hymns of the seasons,

Spring’s new hope, Summer’s heavy heat,

Autumn’s colored leaves, Winter’s frosty splendor.

 

New branches had fluttered in the gentle breeze,

Leaves fanning the azure skies. Now,

Bricks and pavement lie in their place.

Heavy, silent, indifferent to those that passed.

 

“Woe, woe to the departed Lady,” the woman whispered

As she walked down the lonely street. “Natures gone, and with

Her all joy.”  She paused where the lovely grove had once stood,

A grimy building slouched there now, lifeless and abandoned.

“Have we not reason to lament, what man has created?”

An assignment for my British Lit class; rewrite a romantic poem into a modrenist one.
You can read the orginal peom, "Lines Written in Early Spring" by William Wordsworth here [link]

If you'd like an indepth (and Very long =P) analysis of what it means, here's a quote from my assignment:

In the romantic poem “Lines Written in Early Spring” Wordsworth depicts the beauty and divine qualities of nature and laments the corruptness of man. The formal language and rhyme scheme give the poem an ordered feeling. While the closeness of speaker and poet, and the personification of plants and animals keep the speaker from appearing lonely or alienated. When the speaker is in nature, everything is all right.

With my rewrite I decided to write the poem in informal, unrhymed verses. I focused on the qualities of the old poem and twisted them into opposites of what Wordsworth had written. For example, I changed the speaker into an anonymous character, very distant from the poet, reminiscing about a memory. The distance creates a loneliness echoed by the empty streets she walks as she thinks about the grove she once visited. The grove that the speaker remembers is a symbol for the world of the past. The second stanza right away states that that time is now gone, then talks about the fall of Mother Nature who symbolizes the values and ideas of the people who lived in the past. Nature’s defeat and the reference to fighting is a symbol of World War I and the changes that it has caused to the world.

I decided to use the plants and birds that Wordsworth described to illustrate the changes that have happened. The once vivid colors of the flowers have become the dull brown and gray of buildings. The bird’s songs about the seasons have been silenced, while the delicate, leafy braches of trees have been replaced by heavy bricks and cement that are “indifferent” to the people of the city. The use of the word “hymns” to describe the bird’s chirps is a reference to religion and the past, things that people are increasingly disregarding. The modern city stands in deep contrast to what the world once was; it is not a happy or hopeful place. This is a representation of what the people living there feel. The last stanza depicts the woman walking down the road and, just as Wordsworth did, lamenting what man was done. The grimy building that sits where the beautiful grove once stood is a symbol of what the world is now like, lonely, alienated to the old world, and rundown. In the last line the woman echoes Wordsworth, rhetorically asking whether she has reason to lament what man has created. Her grief can be about the dreary city or the new weapons that were first used in World War I with such devastating effects. Therefore the theme of my rewrite is the effect that World War has had on the world.
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