The Natural World

After this week’s reading assignments, I discovered how important nature is to Romantics like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. The poems written by the three expressed the feelings of the poets through the use of the natural world. This creates a wonderful effect and a sense of imagery for the reader. The reader can easily grasp what the author is feeling at the time they wrote the poem with the aid of descriptions of nature.

One of my favorites lines (maybe because it stood out the most to me) was a line from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence: Introduction.

“On a cloud I saw a child…”

In the Introduction, Blake describes the innocence and worry-free life of a child. Using a cloud as to where he saw a child, that gives the audience a very joyful sensation. Also, the child is also seen as an angel or in Heaven.

Blake’s Holy Thursday [I.] includes the line

“Gray headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow…”

The last part of the line “as white as snow” illustrates innocence. The color white is best when describing innocence, and snow has a soft texture and gives a very calm, heavenly sense.

Another element of nature enhances the effects of poems tremendously. That is the use of wind. Wind can be used in various ways to express different emotions or feelings. Wind can be calm, carefree, eerie, or gloomy. The two odes by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are fitting examples.

In Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality, the use of wind describes a very calm, relaxed, blissful state.

“The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay”

On the other hand, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode portrays wind in a more negative way, lonely and gloomy.

Since all three of these Romantics see childhood as a time of joy and happiness and their adulthood as pain and suffering, I believe they had many problems in their life. They were probably not happy and content with their life when they wrote these poems. Because of that, they turn to nature as a form of escape and hope.