How Blake And Wordsworth Respond To Nature in Their Poetry
This essay will examine how Blake and Wordsworth respond to nature and
other influences in their poetry. The poems that shall be analysed are
A Poison Tree, Holy Thursday, London, Daffodils, Composed Upon
Westminster Bridge and The World Is Too Much With Us. Each poem will
be analysed individually then compared to other poems.
William Blake and William Wordsworth are both Romantic poets. The
Romantic era was a dramatic change in literature. Before the Romantic
era there were the Augustans. The Augustans wrote about the
aristocrats. The Romantic poets chose to write about the wild untamed
nature and "simple unrefined folk". The purpose of their poetry was to
celebrate the imagination and freedom of the common person. During the
Romantic era there were many revolutions taking place. In England the
industrial revolution was taking place. There was also the French
Revolution and the American Revolution. In both Blake's and
Wordsworth's poetry there is an unmistakeable influence form these
revolutions. 1.
In "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" Wordsworth is describing how
beautiful London is when viewed from Westminster Bridge. Wordsworth
never lived in London and was not familiar with the bustling city that
he was passing through. The sonnet describes the tranquillity of the
city before everyone wakes up and goes about their usual daily
routine. He writes how calming it is to look over London in the
morning. "The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,". It emphasizes the
beauty of the city. Wordsworth sees Lo...
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...y". This emphasises that the children should not be so
unhappy in a "fruitful land". The "fruitful land" could be a place or
it could be a metaphor for children born into happy families. At the
end of the second stanza Blake writes " It is a land of poverty!" Form
that line onwards the poem describes the place where the children are.
The place is a horrible "bleak" and "bare", it is "eternal winter
there". In the last stanza Blake is being incredibly naive. He write
about if there is rain and sunshine then people can never be hungry or
depressed. If the "fruitful land" is England, where it does rain and
there is sunshine, there is still poverty and hunger there. This then
implies that "fruitful land" is a metaphor for a feeling. There are
four stanzas and each stanza has four lines. Each line has seven
syllables in it.
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Blake also uses sound to deliver the meaning to the poem. The poem starts off with "My mother groaned! my father wept." You can hear the sounds that the parents make when their child has entered this world. Instead of joyful sounds like cheer or cries of joy, Blake chooses words that give a meaning that it is not such a good thing that this baby was brought into this world. The mother may groan because of the pain of delivery, but she also groans because she knows about horrible things in this world that the child will have to go through. The father also weeps for the same reason, he knows that the child is no longer in the safety of the womb, but now is in the world to face many trials and tribulations.
The definition of children shifts depending on the person. To some the definition is a time without any worry, to others it is a more logical definition such as the period of time between infancy and adolescence. There are many different versions of this definition, and this is seen in the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth. These two authors have very different views on what it means to be a child and how they are portrayed in this era. Compared to now, Children in Blake’s eyes are seen as people that need guidance and need to be taught certain lessons by their parents such as religious, moral, and ethical values. In contrast to Blake’s view, Wordsworth viewed that adults should be more like children. That sometimes
Comparing Coleridge and Wordsworth's Views on People's Relationship to Nature. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge are both romantic poets, they are both a pious describe nature in different ways. Coleridge underlines the tragedy. supernatural and sublime aspect of nature, while Wordsworth uses.
Wordsworth's Poetry A lot of literature has been written about motherhood. Wordsworth is a well known English poet who mentions motherhood and female strength in several of his poems, including the Mad Mother, The Thorn, and The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman. This leads some critics to assume that these poems reflect Wordsworth's view of females. Wordsworth portrays women as dependent on motherhood for happiness, yet he also emphasizes female strength.
When humans and nature come together, they either coexist harmoniously because nature's inhabitants and humans share a mutual respect and understanding for each other, or they clash because humans attempt to control and force their ways of life on nature. The poems, "The Bull Moose" by Alden Nowlan, "The Panther" by Rainer Maria Rilke, "Walking the Dog" by Howard Nemerov, and "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop, describe what happens when humans and nature come together. I believe that when humans and nature come together they either clash and conflict because individuals destroy and attempt to control nature, which is a reflection of their powerful need to control themselves, or humans live peacefully with nature because not only do they admire and respect nature, but also they can see themselves in nature.
Children are always portrayed in books as angelic beings that are the closest to being perfect since they are innocent and pure. Many would suggest that this is not true, that children can be just as finable as adults. They cry when they do not get their way and throw tantrums that are quite obscene. However, the idea of this angelic child did not come into play until the 18th century. The poets William Blake and William Wordsworth are the two poets that coined this idea of the child. In the poems of these two authors, children are portrayed as innocent and pure beings and are closer to God than adults. Although these two poets have very different views of what children are like such as their interactions with adults, their perspective on
We human beings can not separate from nature. No nature, no human beings. As far as poetry is concerned, nature plays a great important role on it, for uncountable poets have been writing lots and lots of great poems on it along the history of human beings. America is not an exceptional. My paper is right to deal with nature in American poetry.
Authors, William Wordsworth and William Blake convey different messages and themes in their poems, “The World is Too Much with Us” and “The Tyger” consecutively by using the different mechanics one needs to create poetry. Both poems are closely related since they portray different aspects of society but the message remains different. Wordsworth’s poem describes a conflict between nature and humanity, while Blake’s poem issues God’s creations of completely different creatures. In “The World is Too Much with Us,” we figure the theme to be exactly what the title suggests: Humans are so self-absorbed with other things such as materialism that there’s no time left for anything else. In “The Tyger” the theme revolves around the question of what the Creator (God) of this creature seems to be like and the nature of good vs. evil. Both poems arise with some problem or question which makes the reader attentive and think logically about the society.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.
The Influence of Nature in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
The poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the poet’s mental journey in nature where he remembers the daffodils that give him joy when he is lonely and bored. The poet is overwhelmed by nature’s beauty where he thought of it while lying alone on his couch. The poem shows the relationship between nature and the poet, and how nature’s motion and beauty influences the poet’s feelings and behaviors for the good. Moreover, the process that the speaker goes through is recollected that shows that he isolated from society, and is mentally in nature while he is physically lying on his couch. Therefore, William Wordsworth uses figurative language and syntax and form throughout the poem to express to the readers the peace and beauty of nature, and to symbolize the adventures that occurred in his mental journey.
Robert Frost is an amazing poet that many admire today. He is an inspiration to many poets today. His themes and ideas are wonderful and are valued by many. His themes are plentiful however a main one used is the theme of nature. Frost uses nature to express his views as well as to make his poetry interesting and easy to imagine in your mind through the detail he supplies.
William Wordsworth was known as the poet of nature. He devoted his life to poetry and used his feeling for nature to express him self and how he evolved.
Many poets are inspired by the impressive persona that exists in nature to influence their style of poetry. The awesome power of nature can bring about thought and provoke certain feelings the poet has towards the natural surroundings.