Phenomenology of the childhood in English romantic poetry

Abstract

Childhood is not only an age-related period from infancy to grown-up age. Modern humanities consider a childhood as a special psychological and cultural phenomenon that has evaluated and formed as a cultural myth in a romantic literature. This myth has appeared in English romantic poetry for the first time where it has been revealed as a personfied idyll that correlates its structural and semantical components with a myth of a golden age and determines the past as an ideal condition and shows such motives as motive of harmony, happiness, insouciance, freedom, the motive of a native connection of a child with a nature. The myth of a child also finds its personification in pastoral and bucolic images that are rethought in a context of such Christian symbols as Jesus Chris and the Mother of God who are considered to be patronesses of serene childhood. The motives of harmony, happiness, insouciance can be met in such poems as «A Cradle Song», «Spring», «Infant Joy» written by W. Blake; the motive of freedom can be met in a poem «I would I were a careless child…» written by G. G. Byron; the motive of a native connection of a child with a nature can be revealed in such poems as «Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798», «We are Seven», «To a Butterfly», «There Was a Boy» written by W. Wordsworth and others. And the most ancient pastoral and bucolic images can be discovered in a poem «Lamb» written by W. Blake.