Romantic Poetry Consolidation

Year 11 ATAR Literature • Combined revision • Romantic Poetry

The Romantic Poetry unit is best revised by returning to the poems, not by memorising a list of features. Use the public source pack to reread; use this page to organise what you notice.

Rights note. The fifteen poems are public domain and are reproduced in the source pack. This page quotes only short phrases. Read the whole poem before using a phrase as evidence.

The fifteen poems

Poem	Poet	Form	One thing to retrieve
Lines Written in Early Spring	William Wordsworth	Short ballad-like quatrains	The contrast between nature's pleasure and "what man has made of man".
Composed upon Westminster Bridge	William Wordsworth	Petrarchan sonnet	The city seen as a calm, almost natural body.
The World Is Too Much with Us	William Wordsworth	Petrarchan sonnet	"Getting and spending" against a lost openness to nature.
I wandered lonely as a cloud	William Wordsworth	Four six-line stanzas	Memory, solitude and the "inward eye".
Kubla Khan	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Fragment; irregular stanzas	Imagination, imperial command and the poem as a "dome in air".
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Ballad	Guilt, penance and the compulsion to tell the story.
Ozymandias	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Sonnet	Empire, time and the irony of a surviving inscription.
Ode to the West Wind	Percy Bysshe Shelley	Ode in terza rima	Destruction and regeneration; the poet as prophet.
Ode on a Grecian Urn	John Keats	Ode	Art, time, desire and the riddle "Beauty is truth".
Ode to a Nightingale	John Keats	Ode	Mortality, escape and the return of the "sole self".
La Belle Dame sans Merci	John Keats	Ballad	Enchantment, entrapment and the circular return.
She Walks in Beauty	Lord Byron	Lyric stanzas	Balance, beauty and the moral life of appearance.
London	William Blake	Quatrains	Institutions, suffering and the "mind-forg'd manacles".
The Tyger	William Blake	Quatrains	Creation, terror and the question of the creator.
The Lamb	William Blake	Two ten-line stanzas	Innocence, creation and the chain of names.

Forms to know

Form	What to notice
Sonnet	Fourteen lines, usually a turn or shift in argument. A Petrarchan sonnet divides into an octave and a sestet.
Ode	An elevated lyric addressing a subject. Look for shifts in address, stanza shape and the poet's relation to what is addressed.
Ballad	Narrative stanzas, often song-like, with repetition, refrain and a strong story. The Rime and La Belle Dame both use ballad resources.
Terza rima	Interlocking three-line stanzas, often with a linked rhyme scheme. Shelley uses it for forward movement and return.
Quatrains and lyric stanzas	Four-line or song-like stanzas. Notice repetition, refrain and the relation between line and sentence.
Irregular or fragmentary form	Kubla Khan is presented as a fragment with irregular stanzas. The form itself raises questions about completeness and imagination.

Three comparative pairings

Pairing	Shared question	What a strong comparison does
Wordsworth and Blake	Is nature a source of consolation or a measure of what has been lost?	Explains how each poet's form and imagery produce a different relation between the speaker and the world.
Shelley and Keats	How do art and time shape desire?	Compares the movement of the ode, not just the theme of transience.
Coleridge and Keats	What does enchantment cost the person who is enchanted?	Compares ballad repetition, narrative circularity and the position of the listener.

Context to use carefully

Revolution, industrialisation and the changing relation between city and country.
Nature, the sublime and the imagination as sources of value.
Childhood, innocence and experience.
Empire, travel and the classical past.
The poet's role: prophet, wanderer, observer or divided self.

Use a context detail only when it changes the reading of a specific line or stanza. A paragraph of historical background is not analysis.

Common errors

Treating the speaker as the poet without checking the poem's situation.
Naming a device without explaining its effect.
Ignoring form and writing about the poem as if it were a prose message.
Using context as a substitute for close reading.
Quoting a phrase without checking it against the source pack.

Retrieval questions

Which poems use a sonnet, and what does the turn allow each poet to do?
How does repetition work in the two ballads?
What changes when a poem moves from nature to the city, or from the city to nature?
How does an ode's address to an object or person shape its argument?
Which poem makes the strongest claim about art or imagination, and how is that claim built?
What does a comparison of two poems reveal that a single-poem reading cannot?

Read the poems and poets guide, form and metre and comparing poems pages for more detail.