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Are the pronouns "Thee" and "Thy" considered archaisms in Romantic poetry? I have La Belle Dame sans Merci by Keats in mind.

Paola
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  • https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Thee%2Cthou%2Cthy&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1550&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2CThee%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthee%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThee%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cthou%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthou%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThou%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cthy%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthy%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThy%3B%2Cc0 is a ngram for thee/thy/thou. – k1eran Dec 27 '17 at 20:26
  • Considered by who, in what context? Opinion-based. – Drew Dec 27 '17 at 21:31
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    Yes, almost certainly, but I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's really more literary than it about English usage. – Rob_Ster Dec 27 '17 at 23:07
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    @Rob_Ster I think this question is properly addressed here--it addresses a matter of linguistic usage within a literary text rather than literary intepretation. – StoneyB on hiatus Dec 28 '17 at 00:46

2 Answers2

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As MikeJRamsey56 says, the second-person singular forms had largely fallen out of ordinary use a hundred and fifty years before Keats wrote. However, in some literary genres—notably religious discourse and lyric poetry—they remained current until the end of the Victorian era.

In the case of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' the archaic singulars are in fact particularly decorous, since Keats is consciously emulating the style of the late-medieval ballad. There weren't a whole lot of knights-errant wandering the Victorian landscape.

StoneyB on hiatus
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I would say yes.

By the 1600s, the singular forms had come to represent familiarity and lack of status, and fell from use except in the case of a few dialects, notably in the north of England. People in Lancashire north of the Rossendale Forest and Yorkshire formerly were noted for use of the singular second person pronouns tha (nom.) and thee (acc.). For religious reasons (Christian equality of persons, but also justified as grammatically correct), the Quakers also retained the familiar forms. Thee

MikeJRamsey56
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    Interesting, but not wholly responsive to OP's question, which specifically focuses on Romantic verse in general and Keats in particular. :-( – Rob_Ster Dec 27 '17 at 23:02
  • True. I was going more on out of date during the 17th century vs. the 19th-century context of the question. By the 19th century "thee" and "thou" were out of date in most usages. "Poetic license" gives the writer "freedom from the conventional rules of language when speaking or writing in order to create an effect." So any use of language in poetry can be appropriate. – MikeJRamsey56 Dec 28 '17 at 00:43