Clear and Gentle Stream — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Clear and Gentle Stream
The poems
What you need to know
Clear and Gentle Stream by Robert Bridges (c.1873): a man returns to the stream he loved as a boy, sits in his old seat and sings his old song before leaving again.
Bridges as a Victorian poet, the short-lined stanzas, intricate rhymes and refrain, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Clear and gentle stream!', 'Known and loved so long', 'And the idle dream / Of my boyish day', 'While I once again / Down thy margin stray', 'Where my old seat was / Here again I sit', 'Where back eddies play / Shipwreck with the leaves', 'Many an afternoon / Of the summer day / Dreaming here I lay', 'First the deep bell hums / From the minster tower', 'Ere again I go / Where thou dost not flow', 'Be as I content / With my old lament'.
Form: four twelve-line stanzas of very short lines, each rhyming ABBACDCD and ending in two couplets, an address to the stream as 'thou', and the refrain 'Clear and gentle stream!' that frames the first and last stanzas.
Structure: the return to the stream, the scene around his old seat, the boyhood afternoons remembered, and a farewell, so the poem circles back to its first words like the speaker's return.
Context: Bridges (1844 to 1930), educated at Eton and trained as a doctor, published his first poems in 1873 and was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930.
Compares well with I Remember, I Remember (memories of boyhood, met with contentment here and despair there), Captain Cook (To My Brother) (a childhood place unchanged against one destroyed) and To My Sister (nature, song and feeling).
