To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing. – Raymond Williams
A Marxist reading of “Work Without Hope”
The themes of productivity, alienation, class struggle and hegemony are revealed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Work Without Hope”. The first stanza depicts a natural world busy at work and this work is part of a natural process. “All Nature seems at work”; bees and birds are considered productive organisms and a Marxist reading could view this natural productivity as a working class with organisms that have the sole goal of productivity and that reveal a dominant ideology that “deeply saturat[es] the consciousness of society” (Williams, 1429). The worker “bees are stirring” (2), leaving the hive in search of pollen for the good of the queen bee. The bees can be compared to workers in a hegemonic state “at work”, producing for the good of the dominant class. The speaker …show more content…
In Raymond Williams’ work The Country and the City (1973), he notes: “what we find in the poetry is an idealisation of feudal and immediately post-feudal values; of an order based on settled and reciprocal social and economic relations of an avowedly total kind.” In other words, the lower class is written out of the poetry entirely and only the dominant class matters. The fact that the speaker is writing poetry and brooding about being unproductive highlights his position in society. He is part of the dominant class. A disparity of wealth and power is revealed in the poem through the contrast of the self-focused “sole unbusy thing” (5) and the busy workers. Williams also argues that “most writing...is a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture” (1434). This aspect can also be seen in this poem, whereby the narrator is on the outside looking in or down on the natural world and the work world. The speaker’s voice is part of the effective dominant
A Marxist reading of “Work Without Hope”
The themes of productivity, alienation, class struggle and hegemony are revealed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Work Without Hope”. The first stanza depicts a natural world busy at work and this work is part of a natural process. “All Nature seems at work”; bees and birds are considered productive organisms and a Marxist reading could view this natural productivity as a working class with organisms that have the sole goal of productivity and that reveal a dominant ideology that “deeply saturat[es] the consciousness of society” (Williams, 1429). The worker “bees are stirring” (2), leaving the hive in search of pollen for the good of the queen bee. The bees can be compared to workers in a hegemonic state “at work”, producing for the good of the dominant class. The speaker …show more content…
In Raymond Williams’ work The Country and the City (1973), he notes: “what we find in the poetry is an idealisation of feudal and immediately post-feudal values; of an order based on settled and reciprocal social and economic relations of an avowedly total kind.” In other words, the lower class is written out of the poetry entirely and only the dominant class matters. The fact that the speaker is writing poetry and brooding about being unproductive highlights his position in society. He is part of the dominant class. A disparity of wealth and power is revealed in the poem through the contrast of the self-focused “sole unbusy thing” (5) and the busy workers. Williams also argues that “most writing...is a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture” (1434). This aspect can also be seen in this poem, whereby the narrator is on the outside looking in or down on the natural world and the work world. The speaker’s voice is part of the effective dominant