It reminds me so much of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," except his poem doesn't seem to propose human love as an alternative to ruthless ambition...

Zoe helps us see here that the plant metaphor makes sense for deep, enduring anger.

"Watering" your anger changes the metaphorical model of how anger works. Usually, anger is modeled by metaphorical language as fire: "He really burns me up." Here, it is modeled as a plant that you have to water with tears.

John Wilson Croker attacks this line in particular, calling it ridiculous -- nobody tries to create famines! he says. He objects to "ladies" mixing with politics.

From the Honor's Thesis: In his Quarterly Review article, John Wilson Croker snidely commented, “Our old acquaintance Mrs. Barbauld turned satirist! The last thing we should have expected, and, now that we have seen her satire, the last thing that we could have desired” before mockingly referring to her as “a lady-author” who has “dash[ed] down her shagreen spectacles and her knitting needles” (emphasis added).

"We think that she has wandered from the course in which she was respectable and useful, and miserably mistaken both her powers and her duty, in exchanging the birchen for the satiric rod, and abandoning the superintendance of the 'ovilla' of the nursery, to wage war on the 'reluctantes dracones', statesmen, and warriors, whose misdoings have aroused her indignant muse."

John Wilson Croker, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem. By Anna Letitia Barbauld’, The Quarterly Review, 7 (June 1812).

"Opening with a denunciatory account of England’s involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven alarmed audiences with its vivid depictions of a fallen British empire that functions merely as a “pilgrimage” destination for American tourists." (Swarthmore College Honor's Thesis, https://courses.swarthmore.edu/spring2013/romanticism/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2013/04/Honors-Paper-2.pdf)

https://diged.org/RomanticsTextBook/Barbauld/Mandell-ThoseLimbsDisjointed-1998.pdf

https://poetessarchive.org/barbauld/govt.html

The spirit of art and commerce?

John Locke

repeated from pp. 30-31

Aristotelian

as vs the dramatist

denial of sadism; here and note 2.

The despairing mourner makes a contradictory statement, saying both that she has "no motion" and that she is "Rolled round": of course the latter is passive -- she is BEING rolled around. Is it possible though that Wordsworth's use of the word "Rolled" here echoes the panteheism in "Tintern Abbey" which describes divinity as "a motion and a spirit" (l. 101) that "rolls through all things" (l. 103)?

"William Platoe" could be him or "his cousin"

Bolingbroke's pen name

Here I think the poem is really asking us to examine the ideology of "improvement": why are we so hell bent on getting better? Isn't "good" good enough?

I don't think "I" is what this metaphor is about.

I don't think this is a metaphor for the "I" of the poem -- what makes you think that?

Even though this woman doesn't know it, she is clearly completely devastated by her loss.

Milton is godlike in the sublime pathetic. In Demons, fallen Angels, and Monsters the delicacies of passion living in and from their immortality, is of the most softening and dissolving nature. It is carried to the utmost here.

This same Sin, a female, and with a feminine instinct for the showy & martial is in pain lest death should sully Satan's bright arms.

nothing can express the sensation one feels at 'Their song was partial &[c]. Examples of this nature are divine to the utmost in other poets—in Caliban 'Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments' &c[.] In Theocritus'———Polyphemus—and Homers Hym to Pan where Mercury is represented as taking his 'homely fac'd' to heaven. There are numerous other instances in Milton— 'Tears such as Angels weep'.

Satan's progeny [not highlighted by Keats, but stated in margin pp. 44-5]

divine to the utmost

Blake's interpretation of this scene

[Note in Keats's Hand Text circles around the outside margins (top, bottom, left, right) of the two pages, 44 and 45]

Unconscious knowledge of human character described by Joanna Baillie, Introductory Discourse

Barbauld points to a work by Horace Walpole that was popular when circulated as a manuscript but "neglected" after it was published. It isn't pornographic, but it is about maternal incest.

sentimental, narrative painting

sentimentalism defined

sentimentalilsm figured as "tak[ing] strong aim at the heart of the reader" (i)

Yes, annotations should open up discussion, not close it down.