The poem I picked was “The Indian Serenade” by Shelley. (http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/the_indian_serenade.html) This poem appeals to me because of the name. Was Shelley in love with an Indian and is trying to serenade her? I have no idea, im a little confused but I liked the title. I would like to learn more about this poem. I found this information on this poem ...
"his charming short lyric is one of Shelley’s finest, simplest, and most exemplary love poems. It tells a simple story of a speaker who wakes, walks through the beautiful Indian night to his beloved’s window, then falls to the ground, fainting and overcome with emotion. The lush sensual language of the poem evokes an atmosphere of nineteenth-century exoticism and Orientalism, with the “Champak odours” failing as “The wandering airs they faint / On the dark, the silent stream,” as “the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright.” The poet employs a subtle tension between the speaker’s world of inner feeling and the beautiful outside world; this tension serves to motivate the poem, as the inner dream gives way to the journey, imbuing “a spirit in my feet”; then the outer world becomes a mold or model for the speaker’s inner feeling (“The nightingale’s complaint / It dies upon her heart, / As I must die on thine...”), and at that moment the speaker is overwhelmed by his powerful emotions, which overcome his body: “My cheek is cold and white, alas! / My heart beats loud and fast...”
In this sense “The Indian Serenade” mixes the sensuous, rapturous aestheticism of a certain kind of Romantic love poem (of Keats, for example) with the transcendental emotionalism of another kind of Romantic love poem (often represented by Coleridge). The beautiful landscape of fainting airs and low-breathing winds acts upon the poet’s agitated, dreamy emotions to overwhelm him in both the aesthetic and emotional realm—both the physical, outer world and the spiritual, inner world—and his body is helpless to resist the resultant thunderclap: “I die! I faint! I fail!”"
Love the pictures of Tinturn Alley and Colorado, the Spark Notes, not so much. You should look at Yeats poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" Same idea as Tinturn Alley, but more condensed and lyrical. Try it!
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