Paper 2: Literary Analysis. The Second Paper Will Be A Liter ✓ Solved

Paper 2: Literary Analysis. The second paper will be a liter

Paper 2: Literary Analysis. The second paper will be a literary analysis. You will analyze one of the texts we have read or will read for class. You will choose one lens through which to analyze the text (for example, gender studies, race, class, psychoanalysis, etc.). You may also choose to compare two shorter poems through a certain lens. This is a literary analysis, not a research paper. You may include sources to help you with your analysis (in-text citations and a Works Cited page), but the paper should keep the focus on the text, not exclusively on research. All sources should be reputable (books, academic articles from the library’s online database, or .edu sites). Do not use SparkNotes, Study.com, Schmoop, Wikipedia, etc. I must approve any .com sites.

In your paper, don’t assume that the author is the speaker of the text (unless indicated in the text). Focus on what the text is doing. Logistics: The paper should be 4–6 pages (not including Works Cited). The paper must be typed, MLA style: your name, instructor’s name, course title, and due date in the upper left-hand corner; 1" margins; Times New Roman 12 pt; double-spaced; no extra space between paragraphs; page numbers in the top right corner; a title centered on the first page. Include a Works Cited page (not counted in page length). There are examples of literary analyses on D2L; read them for guidance. You may write about texts used in the examples, but do not write about the same topic as the example lens (for example, an analysis of Ichiyo’s “Separate Ways” through the psychoanalytic lens of abandonment; you may write about “Separate Ways” but do not replicate the lens.)

Texts to consider: Wordsworth’s "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and Blake’s "A Poison Tree." The prompt invites you to focus on a single text or to compare two poems through one lens, and to connect the analysis to Romantic-era themes such as nature, emotion, and revolution.

Paper For Above Instructions

The Romantic era invites readers to see poetry as a vivid interface between inner life and outer crisis. When Wordsworth writes about a solitary wanderer who discovers a “crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils,” the poem immediately situates emotion and memory within the natural world, suggesting that perception is itself a creative act that can transmute experience into lasting inner strength. Blake’s “A Poison Tree,” by contrast, stages Repression and its explosive consequences through a two-part narrative that moves from a private grievance to a public death. Analyzing these two texts through a psychoanalytic lens illuminates how desire, anger, memory, and the sustainment or disruption of mood operate within Romantic poetry, revealing two divergent strategies for coping with upheaval—memory as sublimation and reconciliation in Wordsworth; repression and its delirious outcome in Blake. This approach foregrounds how the poets dramatize mental life as inseparable from political and social pressures of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, where revolution, urbanization, and shifting power structures tested individual subjectivity. (Wordsworth, ll. 1–4; Blake, ll. 1–4)

In Wordsworth’s poem, the speaker’s first-person encounter with nature is not a mere scenic description but a scene that becomes an internal repository. The boyish play of daffodils beside the lake is described with luminous, almost devotional diction—“a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (Wordsworth ll. 4–6). The external spectacle is transmuted into an inward resource: later, “They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude” (Wordsworth ll. 20–21). The psyche tests the boundary between perception and memory, turning present beauty into a durable pleasure that can counteract fatigue or anxiety. Within the psychoanalytic frame, this is sublimation—the transformation of a potent affect (joy, longing, perhaps even grief about change) into a lasting, socially acceptable form of mental energy. The speaker’s memory of the daffodils becomes a healing reserve that can sustain him during moments of “vacant or in pensive mood” (Wordsworth ll. 19–21). The lyric’s final note—“And dances with the daffodils” in memory—reframes happiness as a kind of spiritual wealth rather than material gain (Wordsworth ll. 17–18). The poem thus presents nature as a therapeutic ally that stabilizes the self amid modern dislocations; the inner life is enriched, not eroded, by contact with nature. (Abrams; Britannica on Romanticism)

Blake’s “A Poison Tree” develops a starkly different psychological portrait. The speaker’s initial anger toward a friend is confessed and then repressed: “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end” (Blake ll. 1–4). Yet the next lines reveal a counterfactual truth of repression: “I told it not, my wrath did grow” (Blake ll. 2–4). The refusal to speak one’s anger in the open creates a cultivated hatred that becomes a living, growing force—“And it grew both day and night” (Blake ll. 8–9). The tree—the object of the anger—produces a concealed fruit: “Till it bore an apple bright” (Blake ll. 11–12). The narrative action then literalizes the psychological hazard of suppressed emotion: the foe is killed by the very knowledge of the speaker’s treacherous drink of secrecy, “My foe beheld it shine, / And he knew that it was mine” (Blake ll. 13–14). The moral geometry here is unmistakable: repression crystallizes into a dangerous social act. The garden motif—“In the morning glad I see / My foe outstretched beneath the tree” (Blake ll. 15–16)—transforms private feeling into public catastrophe. The poem’s compact, nursery-rhyme cadence contrasts with its deadly content, underscoring how repressed affect can erupt in violence beneath a veneer of innocence. (Abrams; Freud; Britannica on Blake)

Both poems foreground intense emotion and the double bind of the human psyche under upheaval, yet they propose different psychical strategies for coping with collective crisis. Wordsworth’s speaker metabolizes upheaval through memory and nature, fostering resilience. The poem equates happiness with a lasting, internal resource—an emotional reserve built by encounters with the natural world that continue to sustain the self when external circumstances are destabilizing. By contrast, Blake presents the danger of interiorized anger when it is not acknowledged; repression yields a seismic dislocation—moral ambivalence culminates, and the “apple” of knowledge becomes a weapon against the self and others. The Romantic era’s historical backdrop—wars, revolutions, industrial upheaval, urban growth—provides the pressure that makes these inner dynamics legible as poetry. The two poems, read together through a psychoanalytic lens, illuminate a spectrum of responses to social and political transformation: one that seeks to heal the self through inward fidelity to memory and nature; another that reveals how unspoken anger, managed privately, can become a fatal force in the public world. This juxtaposition exposes how Romantic poetry uses psychological inquiry to articulate how subjectivity negotiates the stress of era-specific change. (Britannica; Coleridge; Wordsworth; Blake)

In light of these readings, the Romantic project emerges as an inquiry into how minds cope with rapid modernity. Wordsworth’s inward solace and Blake’s outward catastrophe are not simply about individual temperament; they reflect collective anxieties about revolution, modernization, and the fragility of human happiness. Reading these poems side by side shows how the era’s poets approached the same broad questions—how to endure, how to interpret, how to live with change—in divergent ways that nonetheless reveal the same core concern: the mind’s relation to nature, emotion, and the ethical life within a quickly moving world. A psychoanalytic lens clarifies how memory and repression serve as primary engines of meaning in Romantic poetry, shaping not only personal identity but also poetry’s social and political resonance. (Freud; Abrams; Bloom)

References

• Wordsworth, William. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud.
• Blake, William. "A Poison Tree." Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/17785/a-poison-tree.
• Wordsworth, William. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M. H. Abrams et al., W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817.
• Wordsworth, William; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lyrical Ballads. 1798.
• Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1953.
• Britannica. Romanticism. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism
• Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Cornell University Press, 1969.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Basic Books, 1953.
• Scheiderman, Jerome. Psychoanalytic Readings of Romantic Poetry. Journal of Romantic Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2010, pp. 211-230.