Andrew's Wiki
Old World Thicket

Content

• It tells the story of someone getting over pain and learning to persevere because ultimately, the worst problem you could ever have is always being the same,
• The speaker may or may not be dreaming: she doesn’t know if she was awake or not
• Journey through woods: birds are wiser than people, beautiful wildlife, flowers, waters, etc
• Despite all this beauty, speaker is afraid and tired!
  • Almost suicidal and angry at himself/herself
  • And the beauty made the feeling worse and worse, not better
• The beautiful woods showed the impossible: nothing will ever be this wonderful
• Then, the woods start to lament, no longer happy
  • The speaker: “my heart then rose, a rebel against light,” the speaker struggles against lot
• Everything passes, pleasure and pain, and you eventually learn to deal with it and go on, rather than fall completely apart
  • It turns into self-pity… She can’t stand staying the same, even in being angry.
  • And then she gets tired, and then she feels comfort.
• Nature: can either be in sympathy or against you, depending on your attitude.

Style

• Thirty-six stanzas
• Aesthetic imagery: coral, emerald, azure, gold, etc
• Repetition (“Ingathering wrath to wrath and night to night”) very powerful and dramatic

Quotes

• “Such birds they seemed as challenged each desire” because they could be anything: “Like anything they seemed, and everything.”
  • Power of metaphor?
  • Endless possibility
• The springs “seemed not her or there or anywhere”
  • Can’t place anything for sure
  • Ambiguity
• “Clear proof of what might never be.”
• “I, trembling, cling to dying life, for how / Face the perpetual Now?”
  • This is a great quote to compare with modernism, which tells you to do exactly that: face it, not cling to dying life, but change
  • For Rossetti, living in the now is “promise even which has no gift to give”
  • But then the speaker learns how to do just that, how to accept change and learning that all things pass