English Romantic poetry is the lit that Annisa got after she swapped out of Javanese, and it has about sixty kids, so the swap was definitely worth it even if the class sucks. And she's optimistic, even though none of the sixty kids are anyone she recognizes, and even though the course schedule is kind of brutal - two hour lecture Monday morning, and discussion sections Tuesdays and Thursdays. Poetry usually gets you at least a decent share of spells, and a lot of class time means they'll get through a lot of poetry. 

She arrives ten minutes late, which is the advice that she - and apparently half the class - got about how to make sure you're safe in your first class of the day, so there's not a lot of choice of seats but she's not right under a vent or anything. The lecture is ten minutes on ten minutes off, a grainy projected video that's already running when she gets in; it's on the personal biographies of the Romantic poets, who are apparently a specific set of people. She'd kind of assumed it was a genre thing. In between each lecture segment they're supposed to read one poem from the textbook in silence, which isn't that bad; the poems are short. 

Good things about the class: it goes by quickly. Ten minutes of reading and ten minutes of listening to lecture is a good balance; she feels like she has learned things about various peoples' biographies and also she's gotten through eight poems without it even feeling tedious. Though none of the poems today are spells, and also they're .... she feels like she's missing something? She mostly sets this aside until the last ten minutes of class, where they're encouraged to start on their homework, which is an essay comparing treatment of the gods in five of the poems they read in class or five more they're reading as homework, and so she starts going back through all of the poems to figure out what they have to say about the gods. The Tyger might be about God? It's got 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' which feels suggestive that the Tyger-maker the poem is going on about the creation of actual tigers rather than the tiger being machinery of some kind which was her first interpretation. (The textbook contains endless background on the poets but no aid in interpreting the poems.) Maybe the poem is being strategically ambiguous between whether it's taking about actual tigers, made by God, or, uh, a tigerish sort of thing made by men. Like mals are. That would be cool, if so. But it feels like she's stretching. 

'The Chimney Sweeper' is totally about God so that's great, except that she has to figure out what it's saying about God! Auguries of Innocence is totally about God but it's long and reading it feels slightly like going insane so she's going to skip it for her analysis. 


She gets so distracted by rereading Prometheus she startles when everyone else starts standing up to go to their next class. It's about God - well, it's about the Ancient Greek myth about the god who defied the other gods to give men civilization, and for this was sentenced to be chained to a rock and have his liver pecked out every night.