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NARRATIVE POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC

PERIOD

MUCH admirable narrative poetry was written during the romantic period but most of it came from poets whose genius was essentially lyrical. Sir Walter Scott was the one story-teller of the group who did not intrude his own personality between the reader and the narrative; with him the story is the thing and we are scarcely conscious of him who relates it. In the narratives by other poets of the century, however, the poet himself is felt constantly. Byron is identified with his own hero; Wordsworth uses the story as a medium for interpreting life as he sees it, illustrating the power of nature over man; in Keats we are conscious of the poet's individualities of style and treatment.

The narratives here represented comprehend very different types of story. The Cotter's Saturday Night by Robert Burns is an idyll, a quiet tale of country life, as is Michael by William Wordsworth. Both are pictorial and reflective, the poet commenting upon what the story suggests to him. Byron's Prisoner of Chillon is not so much a story as it is a representation of the prisoner's emotions in different situations. The pictures are graphic, but most of all we are conscious of Byron's fiery love of liberty.

Christabel by S. T. Coleridge and The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats take us away into the indefinite, picturesque past, with the lure of the atmosphere that spells romance. The narrative thread is just enough to bind together the series of highly colored pictures. The appeal is to the imagination through the senses. There is something of symbolism, or allegory, in Christabel, the two young women representing innocence and guilt respectively, but the story was never finished and the beauty, as is usual in romantic art, lies in the exquisite details rather than in the whole. Keats's poem is remarkable for the impression of purity it leaves, in spite of the warmth of its colorful imagery.

Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel is closer to the old epic. Scott is the great. improviser of stories in verse and unfolds his tale with ease and charm. He writes, as Homer did, of men who achieved things, and recreates the past as a world of reality, not a beautiful shadowland. Although he lacked command of the subtleties of artistic versification, there is compensation in the vigor and sweep of his narrative, in his ability to make the past live again, and in his emphasis upon the qualities of good and gallant manhood.

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