One of the most influential writers of the Romantic era, William Cullen Bryant aided in the transformation of American poems into a new form of poetry still used today. Bryant was born on November 3, 1794, and grew up in the seclude forests of Cummington, Massachusetts. Bryant had birth defects causing him to have a larger, prolonged head and was prone to illnesses. His parents did not believe he would live past his first year. From a young age, Bryant was fascinated with how nature worked together to create a beautiful scenery around him. Bryant would wander in the forest with a botany book to memorize the names of all the plants. As a child, Bryant was always fascinated with his father’s extensive book collection; he would spend hours reading …show more content…
Bryant took advantage of the freedom given through the Romantic era that allowing him to be creative reasoning and expressed deep emotion through his writings. According to Muller, “Bryant combined simplicity and emotion with careful observation of the world of nature.” (110) Greatly influenced by the British writer Wordsworth, Bryant’s poems established simplicity and literary smoothness into a flawless and effortlessly communicated theme of nature. Bryant’s poem, To a Waterfowl, follows the guidelines of romanticism depicting the relationship between man and nature with simple language and imagery. The poem displays the graceful flight of a waterfowl making a journey through the wetlands to arrive at a predetermined destination before the seasons change. Bryant describes a beautiful scenery using imagery throughout the poem. “Whither, 'midst falling dew, while glow the heavens with the last steps of day, far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue, thy solitary way?” (Sturges, 26) The first stanza introduces the setting of the poem around some sort of body of water and gives detail of the approaching sunset. Bryant’s extensive use of imagery shows his eye for detail and love and respect to the environment around him. Also prominent in the poem is the fragile relationship between man and nature. The speaker in the poem goes …show more content…
Bryant would write plentiful, persuasive poetry, with prevalent faith to his God and God’s connection to nature. “Nature was never very far from God, whose bounty was evident in all his work.” (“William Cullen Bryant”, 34). Bryant understood that something as complex as nature could not be made by the hands of man, but by an omnipotent God. Bryant uses the concept of God’s involvement in nature through his literature. This idea is consistent throughout Bryant’s, The Prairies, as he describes the American prairies’ beauty and prosperity. “The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name— The Prairies.” (“William Cullen Bryant”, 78). Bryant uses imagery to place the reader in the beautiful, bountiful Great American and is unable to compare such a place to anything in Europe. Bryant’s poetic voice evokes a sense of peace and pride of the vast frontier almost as if he is comparing the prairies to a paradise on Earth. Bryant gives all praise to God for creating such a beautiful landscape. “Man hath no power in all this glorious work: the hand that built the firmament hath heaved…” (“William Cullen Bryant”, 78). Bryant explains that man has no influence in the construction of nature. The hands that built the heavens lifted and haul were used to build the nature elements to create beautiful scenery. This further shows Bryant’s belief of a connection between God and nature.
Bryant explicitly shows the reader his love for nature through the poem. Lines 15-22 demonstrate this love: “The thick roof of green and stirring branches is alive and musical with birds, that sing and sport in
William C. Bryant unable to support himself as a poet, opened a law partnership in 1816 into the the 1820s as a lawyer. In 1821, he was wedded to Frances Fairchild and fathered two daughters. Within the same year, the reading of his poem, “The Ages,” on the progress of liberty at Harvard College, stimulated him to publish his “Poems” later that year. In addition to being a lawyer, he was also the editor of the New York Review and Atheneum Magazine in New York City. In the peak of his success, Bryant traveled within the country and abroad, writing essays on his experience traveling and also published a number of volumes of poetry between 1832 and 1876. The publication of his collected of his poems in 1876 placed a crown on his career. In 1878, Bryant died after giving...
Scott Momaday's and Dee Brown's descriptive essays of the Oklahoma plains clearly contain opposing views. This is evident in their different uses of tone and imagery. Momaday reveals his personal satisfaction with the hidden beauty in the land, while Brown means to curse the land by showing its desolation and lack of life.
Heffernan, James A. W. The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner. Hanover: UP of New England, 1985.
John Muir and William Wordsworth use diction and tone to define nature as doing a necessary extensile of life. Throughout Muir’s and William’s works of literature they both describe nature as being a necessary element in life that brings happiness, joy, and peace. Both authors use certain writing techniques within their poems and essays to show their love and appreciation of nature. This shows the audience how fond both authors are about nature. That is why Wordsworth and Muir express their codependent relationship with nature using diction and tone.
From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.
The mid 1800’s was a time of continued physical exploration of the landscape of America, and an era of opportunity for an intimate inspection of the land; areas sometimes found by the traveler with the assistance of Travel Journals and maps. These detailed records, reflected a destination, and also allowed an intellectual travel of the mind. In Margaret Fuller’s, “Summer on the Lake,” and Henry David Thoreau, “Cape Cod,” we experience both their physical, and internal travels, and how each author relates, both physically and mentally, to the natural landscape; the similarities, the differences, and what elucidated each, to seek their journeys. The observed, physical differences of the natural landscapes will be compared, followed by a deeper encounter with Thoreau, as to why, and to whom, his more desolate and dark descriptions of the natural landscape, reached a distinctive, psychological appeal, and how these two views relate to contemporary America.
In his poem, 'Lines Written in the Early Spring,' William Wordsworth gives us insight into his views of the destruction of nature. Using personification, he makes nature seem to be full of life and happy to be living. Yet, man still is destroying what he sees as 'Nature's holy plan'; (8).
In these poems and many others, Dylan Thomas expresses God’s presence and unconditional love for everyone. He has conventional spiritual views, occasionally alluding to the Bible, but his images are unique. He describes heaven with the stars and the wind, and connects God with thunder, rainbows, and gravel. Using the motion and life on the earth, Dylan Thomas facilitates these concrete ideas to describe his abstract spiritual beliefs. Nature is an ideal way to describe God because He is present everywhere on our earth. Whether it be the soul’s redemption into heaven with God and the earth or God’s great force that creates all motion on the planet, His presence is the theme that Dylan Thomas expresses best of all of his poetry.
William Cullen Bryant can very easily be linked to the Transcendentalists. Most of his themes in his writings are concerning the nature of life and the nature of nature. "The Yellow Violet" is an example of a poem about the nature of life. "The Prairies," on the other hand, is an example of the nature of nature. Though these two poems of Bryant's are both about the beautiful world of trees, flowers, and fields, they take on a different perspective of nature itself.
Wordsworth and Hopkins both present the reader with a poem conveying the theme of nature. Nature in its variety be it from something as simple as streaked or multicolored skies, long fields and valleys, to things more complex like animals, are all gifts we take for granted. Some never realize the truth of what they are missing by keeping themselves indoors fixating on the loneliness and vacancy of their lives and not on what beauty currently surrounds them. Others tend to relate themselves more to the fact that these lovely gifts are from God and should be praised because of the way his gifts have uplifted our human spirit. Each writer gives us their own ideals as how to find and appreciate nature’s true gifts.
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.
To conclude, William Wordsworth uses form and syntax and figurative language to stress on his mental journey, and to symbolize the importance of the beauty and peace of nature. In my opinion, the poet might have written this poem to show his appreciation towards nature. The poem has a happy mood especially when the poet is discussing the daffodils. In this poem the daffodils are characterized as more than flowers, but as humans “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6). In addition, the poet mentioned himself to be part of nature since nature inspires him to write and think. Therefore, the reason that the poet wrote this poem was to express the feeling of happiness in his mental journey in nature.
Through the poems of Blake and Wordsworth, the meaning of nature expands far beyond the earlier century's definition of nature. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The passion and imagination portrayal manifest this period unquestionably, as the Romantic Era. Nature is a place of solace where the imagination is free to roam. Wordsworth contrasts the material world to the innocent beauty of nature that is easily forgotten, or overlooked due to our insensitivities by our complete devotion to the trivial world. “But yet I know, where’er I go, that there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
“A Bird came down the Walk,” was written in c. 1862 by Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. This easy to understand and timeless poem provides readers with an understanding of the author’s appreciation for nature. Although the poem continues to be read over one hundred years after it was written, there is little sense of the time period within which it was composed. The title and first line, “A Bird came down the Walk,” describes a common familiar observation, but even more so, it demonstrates how its author’s creative ability and artistic use of words are able to transform this everyday event into a picture that results in an awareness of how the beauty in nature can be found in simple observations. In a step like narrative, the poet illustrates the direct relationship between nature and humans. The verse consists of five stanzas that can be broken up into two sections. In the first section, the bird is eating a worm, takes notice of a human in close proximity and essentially becomes frightened. These three stanzas can easily be swapped around because they, for all intents and purposes, describe three events that are able to occur in any order. Dickinson uses these first three stanzas to establish the tone; the tone is established from the poet’s literal description and her interpretive expression of the bird’s actions. The second section describes the narrator feeding the bird some crumbs, the bird’s response and its departure, which Dickinson uses to elaborately illustrate the bird’s immediate escape. The last two stanzas demonstrate the effect of human interaction on nature and more specifically, this little bird, so these stanzas must remain in the specific order they are presented. Whereas most ...