Sallust - "Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War"

Jules Verne - "Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Begum"

Various - "The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasglow Chamber of Commerce Battalion)"

John Mavrogordato - "The World in Chains"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I.

W >> William Wordsworth >> Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I.




[Footnote 7: This line has a close resemblance to an admirable
line of Young, the exact expression of which I cannot recollect.]

Nor, perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay?
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor perchance,
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.







_NOTES_

NOTE to THE THORN--This Poem ought to have been preceded by an
introductory Poem, which I have been prevented from writing by never
having felt myself in a mood when it was probable that I should
write it well.--The character which I have here introduced speaking
is sufficiently common. The Reader will perhaps have a general
notion of it, if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small
trading vessel for example, who being past the middle age of life,
had retired upon an annuity or small independent income to some
village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he
had not been accustomed to live. Such men having little to do become
credulous and talkative from indolence; and from the same cause, and
other predisposing causes by which it is probable that such men may
have been affected, they are prone to superstition. On which account
it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit
some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind.
Superstitious men are almost always men of slow faculties and deep
feelings; their minds are not loose but adhesive; they have a
reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty
which produces impressive effects out of simple elements; but they
are utterly destitute of fancy, the power by which pleasure and
surprize are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by
accumulated imagery.

It was my wish in this poem to shew the manner in which such men
cleave to the same ideas; and to follow the turns of passion, always
different, yet not palpably different, by which their conversation
is swayed. I had two objects to attain; first, to represent a
picture which should not be unimpressive yet consistent with the
character that should describe it, secondly, while I adhered to the
style in which such persons describe, to take care that words, which
in their minds are impregnated with passion, should likewise convey
passion to Readers who are not accustomed to sympathize with men
feeling in that manner or using such language. It seemed to me that
this might be done by calling in the assistance of Lyrical and rapid
Metre. It was necessary that the Poem, to be natural, should in
reality move slowly; yet I hoped, that, by the aid of the metre, to
those who should at all enter into the spirit of the Poem, it would
appear to move quickly. The Reader will have the kindness to excuse
this note as I am sensible that an introductory Poem is necessary to
give this Poem its full effect.

Upon this occasion I will request permission to add a few words
closely connected with THE THORN and many other Poems in these
Volumes. There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the
same words cannot be repeated without tautology: this is a great
error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different
words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet's words
more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling and
not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper. For the
Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is
the history or science of feelings: now every man must know that an
attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without
something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of
our own powers, or the deficiencies of language. During such efforts
there will be a craving in the mind, and as long as it is
unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of
the same character. There are also various other reasons why
repetition and apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the
highest kind. Among the chief of these reasons is the interest which
the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but
as _things_, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of
the passion. And further, from a spirit of fondness, exultation, and
gratitude, the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which
appear successfully to communicate its feelings. The truth of these
remarks might be shewn by innumerable passages from the Bible and
from the impassioned poetry of every nation.


"Awake, awake Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song:"

"Arise Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou Son of Abinoam."

"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet be bowed,
he fell; where he bowed there he fell down dead."

"Why is his Chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the Wheels of his
Chariot?"--Judges, Chap. 5th. Verses 12th, 27th, and part of 28th.
--See also the whole of that tumultuous and wonderful Poem.

NOTE to the ANCIENT MARINER, p. 155.--I cannot refuse myself the
gratification of informing such Readers as may have been pleased
with this Poem, or with any part of it, that they owe their pleasure
in some sort to me; as the Author was himself very desirous that it
should be suppressed. This wish had arisen from a consciousness of
the defects of the Poem, and from a knowledge that many persons had
been much displeased with it. The Poem of my Friend has indeed great
defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character,
either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having
been long under the controul of supernatural impressions might be
supposed himself to partake of something supernatural: secondly,
that he does not act, but is continually acted upon: thirdly, that
the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other;
and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated.
Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed
the passion is every where true to nature; a great number of the
stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual
felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is
itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied,
exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of
which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several
merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the
highest kind,) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed
by better Poems. On this account I requested of my Friend to permit
me to republish it.

NOTE to the Poem ON REVISITING THE WYE, p. 201.--I have not ventured
to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the
transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be
found the principal requisites of that species of composition.

END OF VOL. I.

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