MEANING BEHIND THE POEM: AN ANALYSIS OF TRANSITIVITY OF POEMS IN ROMANTICISM PERIOD

Abstract

Romanticism period is the period of poem. The themes of poems in romantic era are dominated with nature, freedom, equality and confraternity. To get the meaning of the poem, the readers have to interpret the intention in the poem. One of the ways to convey the meaning is by analyzing the transitivity pattern in the poem. Transitivity is represented the experiential meaning that are meanings about the world, experience and what is going on in the clauses. The purpose of this research was to figure out the ideas contained within the three poems in romantic period. The data were three poems in romantic era entitled I wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth,The Battle of Blenheim by Robert Southey, and London by William Blake. Descriptive qualitative method of transitivity technique was employed in analyzing the process types occurred in the three poems. The process types were then calculated and cultivated to reveal the meaning behind them. The findings showed that there were 7 material processes, 2 mental processes, 9 behavioral processes, and 2 relational attributive in the poem entitled I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Then in The Battle of Blenheim, the processes that found were 9 relational attributive, 10 behavioral, 4 mental, 24 material, 1 existential, and 9 verbal processes. Meanwhile in London, the processes were 6 material and 3 mental. The finding result of transitivity has a relationship on the idea of poet at the romantic period.

Keywords: transitivity, type of processes, experiential meaning, poem, romanticism period