Romantic poetry and the standardization of English She doth not tack from side to side – Hither to work us weal Withouten wind, withouten tide She steddies with upright keel See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! Hither to work us weal; Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel!19 Removing the quaintness of the earlier version increases the stanza’s emotional intensity as well, as if the veil of archaism keeping the poem’s events at a safe distance from the reader had been suddenly removed The neutral formality of “She doth not tack from side to side” becomes the more immediate, personal, and urgent, “See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more,” an urgency so great that Coleridge even sacrifices to it the “side/tide” rhyme in his first version He modernizes the faux-archaic “withouten wind, withouten tide” to the more pointed and concrete “without a breeze, without a tide.” Chatterton’s excitement came from sustaining his weird fake Middle English; Coleridge’s, from stripping away his pseudo-Gothic vocabulary On the whole, a distinguishing mark of Romantic English is its counterrebellion against an earlier, late eighteenth-century search for pseudo-archaic alternatives to standardized English Coleridge is not alone in cleaning up his poetry to make its English look less strange When Wordsworth wrote a romance set in the sixteenth century, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), he did little to create a mock-Tudor English; the poem’s English is for the most part that of his other poetry Although Byron began Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage with a sprinkling of faux Spenserianisms (imitations of the English used by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene [1590–6]), these fade by the end of the 1812 version, and he did not return to them in Canto III (1816) or Canto IV (1818); Percy Shelley’s Adonais (1821) uses the Spenserian stanza (a nine-line stanza rhyming ababbcbcc, in which the first eight lines are in iambic pentameter and the last in iambic hexameter) but pointedly does not employ pseudo-archaic English For all Scott’s interest in Scottish balladry, romance, and history, little of his poetry uses Scots vocabulary, as opposed to its extensive presence in his novels Even Keats, despite his admiration for Chatterton, follows a similar pattern; although he died quite young in his career, the language of his later poems like The Fall of Hyperion (1819) and Lamia (1820) is far less aggressively experimental than that of his earlier work 85 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008