Hello and welcome to The Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White filling in for David Kern, and today is Wednesday, October 28th, 2020.

And as everybody knows, we are in the home stretch of a very charged controversial and political election season.

Next Tuesday, November 3rd, we'll close it out. There's a lot at stake,

as we all know. And because of that, I've been reading a lot of political poetry in the last few

days, and we'll be sharing some of that with you. Today's poem is by William Wordsworth, who was one of the fathers of English

Romanticism. He lived from 1770 to 1850 and was in his time and continues to be today one of the

most important and influential figures in English writing of any kind and especially in poetry.

And today's poem is called London, 1802. This is how it goes.

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath the need of. She is a fen of stagnant waters. Altar, sword, and pen. Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower have forfeited their ancient English dower of inward happiness. We are selfish men. Oh, raise us up. Return to us again. And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart. Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. So didst thou travel on life's common way in cheerful godliness,

and yet thy heart, the lowliest duties on herself did lay. This poem is a sonnet, a Petrarchan

sonnet, and it uses one of the crucial formal elements in poetry.

It's not often used today, but it was used quite a lot in romantic poetry.

And that's the technique of apostrophe.

Apostrophe is when you address either an inanimate object or somebody that is dead or absent

and call out to them for intervention

or extol their virtues in some way. And that's exactly what Wordsworth is doing here to John

Milton. And John Milton lived, lived long, long before William Wordsworth. He was part of the English Civil War and a supporter of

Cromwell. And he was a poet. He wrote Paradise Lost and other important works. And he was also a

statesman. He was politically involved in an advisor and a supporter of Oliver Cromwell. And he wrote also one of the great defenses of the freedom of the

press in England. And that was pretty new, actually, at the time of John Milton in the 17th century.

The freedom of the press was not encouraged. Free speech was not a value that England

held dear at the time, and yet Milton defended it. And that is something that was really

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