Presentation of Depression in Fare Thee Well by Lord Byron and The Cold Earth Slept Below by Percy Shelley Anonymous College

For poets writing in the Romantic Era, their work appeared to be a response against the Enlightenment movement which valued logic and reason and rejected emotional and subconscious appeals that the Romantics found to be more favorable. Through the sense of depression that both poems share, it is clear that within Romanticism, all sensations that humans must endure are valued whether they are positive or negative, as indulging in emotion is appreciated due to the importance of feeling. This is initially made clear in Lord Byron’s ‘Fare Thee Well’ where Byron, a second generation poet, is found to be extolling his emotions in an attempt to defend his reputation within society as a result of his separation from his estranged wife and child. Following a similar Romantic viewpoint, Shelley’s ‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’ attempts to actively create an image to display the female impact on his emotions which alludes to the Romantic emphasis on emotions and feelings where the lyric form of poetry was developed. Thus, both poems present a sense of depression through the notion of emotional expression in which feelings of sadness and grief are extended using literary devices.

Throughout ‘Fare Thee Well’, Byron utilizes a semantic field...