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British Romantic poets respond
to every change in the weather. Here Reading
University student C.D Lyle takes us on a tour through the works
of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley.
 Sometimes
the Romantic poets celebrate still, mild conditions. John Keats
describes autumn as a "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun." Or, as he might put
it today, "Slight fog in the morning, clearing up later: top
temperatures around 20° Celsius."
Light winds are also welcome.
William Wordsworth, in 'I wandered lonely as a cloud’, comes upon
a host of golden daffodils "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
It is their movement as much as their colour that wins a place in
his memory.
The same weather represents
the divine breath of poetic inspiration at the opening of his autobiographical
epic 'The Prelude'. "Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds."
 But
full self-expression requires more exciting phenomena. Wordsworth’s
'Prelude' culminates with the poet gazing down at moonlit clouds
from the peak of Snowdon. Keats conjures up a hideous winter night,
complete with wind-chill, for 'The Eve of St. Agnes', "Tis
dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat."
Proverbially, worse things
happen at sea! One of the most uncomfortable characters in literature
is ‘The Ancient Mariner’. He suffers fog, snow, storm, calm, drought,
sunstroke, and anything else his vindictive creator Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, can throw at him. The moral of the story is never, ever
kill an albatross.
Even in this company, Percy
Bysshe Shelley is unique. In the first place, weather is no mere
background. It is his subject and maybe refers to himself too. In
‘Ode to the West Wind’ he begs, "Be thou, Spirit fierce, My
spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"
In ‘The Cloud’ he plays a
boisterous game of make-believe: "I wield the flail of the
lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again
I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder."
 And
Shelley expresses his awareness that weather is a coherent global
system. His Cloud takes us systematically through the water cycle:
"I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change,
but I cannot die."
This attention to scientific
detail is typical. Shelley was born too soon to be a professional
meteorologist, but he is certainly in the running for the post of
all-time Weather Centre Laureate.
Related links:
Weather in Literature:
The Modern Novel
Shakespearean Storms
Thomas Hardy
The Romantic Poets
Mark Twain
Daniel Defoe
Oxford University's
English Faculty
Reading University
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