To My Sister — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
To My Sister
The poems
What you need to know
To My Sister by William Wordsworth (1798): a brother urges his sister to leave her chores and books and spend the first mild day of spring outdoors, feeling love pass between people and nature.
Wordsworth's Romanticism and Lyrical Ballads, the quatrains and the invitation repeated at the end, 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: 'It is the first mild day of March', 'There is a blessing in the air', 'Make haste, your morning task resign', 'Come forth and feel the sun', 'And bring no book: for this one day / We'll give to idleness', 'No joyless forms shall regulate / Our living calendar', 'From heart to heart is stealing', 'It is the hour of feeling', 'Than years of toiling reason', 'They shall be tuned to love'.
Form: ten rhyming quatrains in short, songlike lines, spoken as a direct invitation full of imperatives and exclamations, with the last stanza repeating the fourth almost word for word.
Structure: from the March morning, to the invitation, to the feelings the day will bring, and back to the invitation, so the poem ends where the outing begins.
Context: written while Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy at Alfoxton House in Somerset, and printed in Lyrical Ballads (1798), the book he made with Coleridge that began the Romantic movement, under the title 'Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed'; Romantic ideas of nature, feeling over reason and everyday language.
Compares well with Sunday Dip (the joy of a free day outdoors), Clear and Gentle Stream (nature and the speaker's feelings, and a repeated refrain) and Us (belonging together, 'we' and 'us').
