There is a belief system developed by readers in different literary ages. A reader at time forgets the obvious signs of a fundamental skeptical streat that poetry is not always a suggestive conclusion. It is not always message supplying. Auden rightly says that nothing happens in poetry. Romantic poetry is not different if we look at the expectation of readers. We can say that there is interplay between doctrine and skepticis. There are readers who expect the poetry to communicate doctrine. There are poems that may be expected to provide a message the readers take as doctrine. They may expect Keats is telling “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. It is Coleridge who urges “He prayeth well, the loveth well”. A group of readers can have satisfaction about the assumptions, assuming poetry to tell things. They stamp them as “doctrines”. On the other hand there are readers who doubt such doctrines. They are confused because they treat romanticism and romantic poetry alike.
It is partially true that romantic poetry is full of doctrinal elements like poetry of any other period. Some poems can be designed to communicate doctrine, convincing the reader of the truth, value. In such cases doctrine plays the leading role in the poem. In the same way doctrinal way can be found in supporting role in the romantic poetry. We can take few examples -
“O Fret not after knowledge” (keats)
Gentleness, virtue, wisdom and endurance
There are the seals that most Firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destructions strength (Shelly)
There should not be any confuion that the speaker in there lines are not poets. “Self” in Romantic poetry has developed the belief of Doctrinal Perspective. It is one sided belief system. There are poems in this period that can lead skeptics to believe otherwise there are several examples which break the doctrinal point of view. They lead to open-endedness. In context we can say that Romantic poetry embodies two main movements. The first one is an attempt to disrupt a reader’s equilibrium, to break down his sense of order and cast doubts upon the doctrines he holds when he comes to poetry. The effect is to gain a suspension of the reader’s that the cosmos is solidly structured and he has a good grasp of that structure. The movement makes the reader read for a serious consideration of the underlying world of unstructured data. The second movement takes the reader into an exploration of this data. He attempts to grasp the doctrine but the ‘Primal Stuff’ of experience with which one must deal in order to generate doctrine.
There are several ways in shich the first movement works in distributing the readers sense of order. The most important is the technique of direct question posted strikingly, posed to reverberate unanswered in the readers’s mind. To establish this point, we can consider Blake’s ‘Tiger’, Wordsworth’s ‘Mathew’, Keat’s ‘Nightingel’ and Shelly’s ‘Mont Blanc’ the structure of these poems is such as to make question spring from our mind in the final lives, rendering what comes before as uncertain. Shelly’s Mont Blanc closes with a question:
And what were thou, and earth, stare and sea?
If it’s the human mind’s imaginings silent and solitude were vacancy?
Similarly, Wordsworth finds the similar question in his poem “lines written in early spring”
If this belief from heaven be sent
If such be Nature’s holy plan
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Thus, the major difficulty Romantic Poetry presents to many readers is its open-endedness. It offers questions, exposes problems, uncover data. It also casts doubts upon supposed certainties and it suggests possible new directions for thought. I stirs the mind – but then it leaves the mind in that uneasy codition. Often a reader tempted to push the poetry further inorder to arrive at certainties, statements of doctrines. Such temptation results in one of two errors: Either the reader creates his own poem, making it say things it does not say; or the leaves the mind in that uneasy codition. Often a reader tempted to push the poetry further inorder to arrive at certainties, statements of doctrines. Such temptation results in one of two errors: Either the reader creates his own poem, making it say things it does not say; or the reader condemns the poetry for not saying things. The usual temptation in reading the romantic poetry is to ask: What poetry telling us. But usually the reader’s question should rather be “ What is the poetry asking us/ So the reader of romantic poetry contest have a clear notion that the romantic poet’s desire, certainly, was to move toward a poetry of doctrine but the greater desire was to know that his doctrine was well grounded, that it could make claim to certainity. So the Romantic poet moves on a quest ‘downward; daubtly asking questions, exploring data, searching for a solid ground.
Mr. Gyaneshwor Jha Associate professor, Dharan
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