An essay of 1,500 words compare and contrast the depiction of the ‘interior life’ in the passages below from Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Extract from Home at Grasmere Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms, and dizzy crags – I loved to look in them, to stand and read Their looks forbidding, read and disobey, 920 Sometimes in act, and evermore in thought. With impulses which only were by these Surpassed in strength, I heard of danger met Or sought with courage, enterprize forlorn, By one, sole keeper of his own intent, 925 Or by a resolute few, who for the sake Of glory fronted multitudes in arms. Yea, to this day I swell with like desire; I cannot at this moment read a tale Of two brave Vessels matched in deadly fight 930 And fighting to the death, but I am pleased More than a wise Man ought to be; I wish, I burn, I struggle, and in soul am there. But me hath Nature tamed and bade me seek For other agitations or be calm, 935 Hath dealt with me as with a turbulent stream – Some Nurseling of the Mountains which she leads Through quiet meadows after it has learned Its strength and had its triumph and its joy, Its desperate course of tumult and of glee. 940 That which in stealth by nature was performed Hath Reason sanctioned. Her deliberate Voice Hath said, ‘Be mild and love all gentle things; Thy glory and thy happiness be there. Yet fear (though thou confide in me) no want 945 Of aspirations which have been – of foes To wrestle with and victory to complete, Bounds to be leapt and darkness to explore. That which enflamed thy infant heart – the love, The longing, the contempt, the undaunted quest – 950 These shall survive, though changed their office, these Shall live; it is not in their power to die.’ Then farewell to the Warrior’s deeds, farewell All hope, which once and long was mine, to fill The heroic trumpet with the muse’s breath! 955 Yet in this peaceful Vale we will not spend Unheard-of days, though loving peaceful thoughts; A Voice shall speak, and what will be the Theme? On Man, on Nature, and on human Life, Thinking in solitude, from time to time 960 I feel sweet passions traversing my Soul Like Music; unto these, where’er I may, I would give utterance in numerous verse. Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope – Hope for this earth and hope beyond the grave – 965 Of virtue and of intellectual power, Of blessed consolations in distress, Of joy in widest commonalty spread, Of the individual mind that keeps its own Inviolate retirement, and consists 970 With being limitless the one great Life – I sing; fit audience let me find though few! (From Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, Book II, pp. 174–5) The pains of opium – as when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. Shelley’s Revolt of Islam Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention to a brief explanatory note on three points: 1.For several reasons, I have not been able to compose the notes for this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from memory. Some of them point to their own date: some I have dated; and some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy; as the impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the whole burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly I plead in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance; and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform for me the offices of an amanuensis. 2.You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and communicative of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing to those who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have some record of a time, the entire history of which no one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable of making, because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it again. 3.It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from the horrors of opium, by leaving it off, or diminishing it? To this I must answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me to desist. But could not I have reduced it a drop a day, or by adding water, have dissected or trisected a drop? A thousand drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce; and that way would certainly not have answered. But this is a common mistake of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain point it can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that, after that point, further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, no; there is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits are uncommonly raised: the pulse is improved: the health is better. It is not there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not attempt to describe without more space at my command. I shall now enter ‘in medias res,’ and shall anticipate, from a time when my opium pains might be said to be at the acmé, an account of their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties. (From De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, pp. 288–90) Guidance notes 2 Essay In preparing your answer, you should read Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere (Reading 1.4 in Romantics and Victorians) and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Reading 3.1). You should also read the relevant study material in Chapters 1 and 3 of Romantics and Victorians, listen to the audio recordings ‘The Romantic I’ and ‘Style and the Romantic self’, and complete the relevant sections of the online skills tutorials in poetry and prose. You might also find the discussion of ‘Romantic lives’ in the introduction to Part 1 of Romantics and Victorians useful. Before you start, read the subsection on ‘Textual analysis’ in Section 4.2 of this Assessment Guide, which will remind you of what your tutor will expect from this assignment. The question asks you to compare and contrast the depiction of the ‘interior life’ in extracts from texts by Wordsworth and De Quincey. You will therefore need to read the extracts closely in order to identify similarities and differences between them. Remember that in each case, you are being asked to discuss passages that have been excerpted from longer texts. Once you have examined the passages, you will need to decide on the best way to structure your answer in an essay. For both extracts, you need to consider how the interior life is depicted and what this tells us about the attitudes of Wordsworth and De Quincey to it. You will need to base your discussion on the way that Wordsworth and De Quincey use language and you should refer to some of the forms and techniques discussed in the online skills tutorials on poetry and prose. In each case, be careful to show how such techniques inform the meaning of the passage and the depiction of the interior life. You might find the audio recording ‘Style and the Romantic self’, in which Bill Greenwell transposes the writing styles of De Quincey and Wordsworth, a useful starting point for thinking about the similarities and differences between them.
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