The Problem of Genre in the Hymns by the Lake Poets and Thomas Moore

Abstract

Though there are many seminal works on early Romanticism and Thomas Moore’s poetry, their hymns remain understudied. This article focuses on the genre problem in the hymns by the Lake Poets (S.T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, R. Southey) and Thomas Moore, whose poetry is studied in context of English Literature and German Romanticism. The characteristics of the hymn are emotionality, associative composition, abundance of repetitions and parallelisms, archaic grammatical forms of verbs and pronouns, and the use of verb contractions. The combination of genres in hymns results in such variants as the odic hymn, the idyllic and elegiac hymn, the mythological hymn, and even the satirical hymn, with each of them evolving in its own way in the period under study. The odic hymn is represented in “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802) by S.T. Coleridge and “Hymn. For the Boatmen, as They Approach the Rapids under the Castle of Heidelberg” (1820/1822) and “To the Laborer’s Noon-Day Hymn” (1834/1835) by W. Wordsworth. These poems have such odic features as comparisons and conditional and cause-and-effect syntactic constructions. Coleridge’s hymn going back to the psalms of praise was influenced by German Romanticism, while Wordsworth’s hymns feature religious vocabulary and quotations from the Mass. The mythological hymn comes in two versions – one with idyllic features (“Hymn to the Earth” (1799, publ.1834) by S.T. Coleridge) and the mythological hymn-fragment (“Fragment of a mythological hymn to Love” (1812) by T. Moore). The fist is the translation of Stolberg’s hymn, from which the leitmotif of the Earth as the mother and the nanny of the World is borrowed. The image of the Earth has anthropomorphic features, with the marriage of the Earth and Heaven going back to W. Blake. The myth created by T. Moore is more complex. The creation of the world begins with the marriage of Love and Psyche. Love appears as the masculine principle of the Universe, while Psyche as the feminine one. The plot goes back to the ancient myths of the world creation from the Chaos and marriage of Eros and Psyche. However, T. Moore changed the myth and transformed the heroes into a source of life. “Hymn to the Penates” (1796) by R. Southey combines the idyllic, elegiac, publicistic and hymn features proper. The idyllic features are related to the image of the Penates that turn into a force controlling human lives and the souls of the dead. The childhood memories give rise to the elegiac features. The publicistic features appear in the verses of the people who do not worship the Penates. The composition, repetitions and parallelisms in the satirical “A Hymn of Welcome after the Recess” (1813) by T. Moore go back to the hymn genre; however the main stylistic devices used are irony and metonymy. Summing up, the genre of hymn in the works by the Lake Poets and Thomas Moore undergoes significant transformations, which will be further developed in late Romanism.