Personification has been used by many poet, authors, and writers alike to catch the attention of their audience by drawing a comparison. This technique of giving immanent objects human like characteristics allows for the readers to better identify with what is portrayed on the page. The romantic era poets, especially the second generation including Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, loved the use of personification to call their readers to attention and make them return to nature and see it’s beauty if they could. The early romantics, Burns, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth began this process through their poetry, “The World is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers: little we see in nature that is ours.”(Wordsworth) These lines of poetry became the foundation for the “young hellion” poets as they strive to return the love of nature to the people of the world through their radical words and the images they create. Shelley was a second generation poet who mastered the art of personification and used it to the best of his ability to make his opinion of thoughts heard by the people around him. His poems Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark each use personification to show the like between nature and the individual’s spirit as his words call for a rebirth of the romantic love of the world in which each person is surrounded.
The poem Ozymandias is a work that is less filled with personification but more the metaphorical example of what is to come. The poem is about a man who has traveled to Egypt to see the ancient ruins and when he returns he tells of a great statue he observed. The statue is of the great Pharaoh Ramses II, also known as Ozymandias, who built massive st...
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... bird in To a Skylark each show the value of nature in their own way. Shelley wish for people to look around and understand that with nature comes so many fantastic and fascinating things, it is powerful and can overcome any work of man yet humans still believe they have total control, it manipulates and allows for beauty in the world and seasons to come about yet many overlook that miracle, and it contains creatures who know nothing but happiness yet most fail to notice and pity themselves anyway. It was Shelley’s goal, through his words, is to call the human race back to nature and for nature to again be a valuable part of the spirit for each individual no matter their circumstance. It may be a difficult though to entertain yet the beauty of nature is all around each and every person and the only thing necessary to access it is an open mind and corporative spirit.
...here are similar aspects to each writer's experience. Engaging the imagination, Ramond, Wordsworth and Shelley have experienced a kind of unity; conscious of the self as the soul they are simultaneously aware of 'freedoms of other men'. I suggested in the introduction that the imagination is a transition place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. For all three writers the nature of the imagination has, amazingly, been communicable. Ramond and Wordsworth are able to come to an articulate conclusion about the effects imagination has on their perceptions of nature. Shelley, however, remains skeptical about the power of the imaginative process. Nonetheless, Shelley's experience is as real, as intense as that of Ramond and Wordsworth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley began life in Horsham, Sussex, England as the oldest child out of seven children. Shelley faced much hardship throughout his life for his controversial views and philosophies. Percy's life however got better after he married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, his second wife, as they were intellectually equal and both wrote.
The naturalistic imagery that pervades Mary Shelley’s Mathilda acts as an underlying theme for the incestuous affair between Mathilda and her father and its unruly consequences. Their relationship is a crime against the laws of Nature and causes Mathilda to become ostracized from the very world that she loved as a child. Shelley’s implementation of naturalistic imagery accentuates the unlawful and subsequent ramifications of the relationship between Mathilda and her father and contrasts the ideals and boundaries of the natural and spiritual worlds.
Nature and civilization have always shared a strong bond and; as seen throughout history, when human interaction challenges this bond a tension between Mother Nature and humankind arises. One job of the poet is to reveal this tension through his or her poetry in an attempt to quell the quarreling. Percy Shelley was one such poet that viewed society as being fractured from nature and throughout his poetry one can find examples of this as well as of the benefits from society becoming synchronized with the world. Timothy Morton’s “Within You Without You”; a section within The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, attempts to summarize Shelley’s argument in his poetry that mankind and Mother Nature are in a state of disagreement and need to reconcile to be harmonious. Although Morton accurately analyses the majority of Shelly’s works, which leads to theories that can apply universally in his poetry, some of the statements Morton presents challenge what the poet wrote.
It is nature that destroys humankind when the sun disappears and the volcano erupts in “Darkness” and in “Ozymandias,” it is the sand and wind that causes the statue to fall. In Byron’s poem, humans lose the fight for their lives, and in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias’s statue is powerless because it is lifeless, emphasizing the importance of the themes of life and death to the shared topic of destruction. Although they explore destruction using different language, they share the use of ideas about the destruction of civilization, and the fall of humankind because of nature, life and
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a gothic science fiction novel written in the romantic era that focuses on the elements of life. The romantic era was sparked by the changing social environment, including the industrial revolution. It was a form of revolt against the scientific revolutions of the era by developing a form of literature that romanticize nature and giving nature godliness. This element of romanticized nature is a recurrent element in Frankenstein and is used to reflect emotions, as a place for relaxation and as foreshadowing. Frankenstein also includes various other elements of romanticism including strong emotions and interest in the common people.
Nature has long been the focus of many an author's work, whether it is expressed through poetry, short stories, or any other type of literary creation. Authors have been given an endless supply of pictures and descriptions because of nature's infinite splendor that can be vividly reproduced through words. It is because of this fact that often a reader is faced with two different approaches to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a more extensive perspective as in William Wordsworth's "I wandered Lonely as a Cloud." While some authors tend to focus more on individual aspects of nature and are able to captivate the reader with their intimate portrayals of nature that bring us right into their imaginations as shown in John Keats' poem, "To Autumn."
Robert Frost’s nature poetry occupies a significant place in the poetic arts; however, it is likely Frost’s use of nature is the most misunderstood aspect of his poetry. While nature is always present in Frost’s writing, it is primarily used in a “pastoral sense” (Lynen 1). This makes sense as Frost did consider himself to be a shepherd.
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thought,” (line 90 pg 893) encompasses Shelley’s views on how humanity cannot find happiness without the experience of pain. Therefore he contrasts the joy of the Skylark as love without ever having been forced to undertake the suffering, which accompanies it. Shelley yearns to learn how to find happiness the way the Skylark does, and he beseeches it to “teach us,” as in humanity the way it does. However as depicted through the first section of the poem, this Skylark is quite different than a normal bird.
par. 1). With clever poetic purpose, Frost‘s poems meld the ebb and flow of nature to convey
Both Shelley, in "Ode to the West Wind," and Wordsworth, in "Intimations of Immortality," are very similar in their use of nature to describe the life and death of the human spirit. As they both describe nature these two poets use the comparison of how the Earth and all its life is the same as our own human life. I feel that Shelley uses the seasons as a way of portraying the human life during reincarnation. Wordsworth seems to concentrate more on the stages that a person goes through during life. Shelley compares himself to such things as clouds, leaves, and waves. He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images like meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being what ever a person needs to move on, and with out those objects can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.
Figurative language is used by William Wordsworth to show the exchange between man and nature. The poet uses various examples of personification throughout the poem. When the poet says:”I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1),”when all at once I saw a crowd” (line 3), and “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6) shows the exchange between the poet and nature since the poet compares himself to a cloud, and compares the daffodils to humans. Moreover, humans connect with God through nature, so the exchange between the speaker and nature led to the connection with God. The pleasant moment of remembering the daffodils does not happen to the poet all time, but he visualizes them only in his “vacant or pensive mode”(line 20). However, the whole poem is full of metaphors describing the isolation of the speaker from society, and experiences the beauty of nature that comforts him. The meta...
But Keats is not only the poet of nature. Infact, all the romantics love and appreciate nature with an equal ardour. The differnce is that Keats's love for nature is purely sensous and he loves the beautiful sights and scenes of nature for their own sake, while other romantics see in nature a deep meaning-ethical, moral or spiritual. For example, Wordsworth claims that nature is a moral guide and universal mentor. Coleridge adds stangeness to the beauty by giving it supernatural touch. Shelley, on the other hand, intellectualizes nature. Byron is interested in the vigorous aspects of nature and he uses nature for the purpose of satire.
The poem “Ode to the West Wind” by PB Shelley is a “highly thought provoking poem” (Rajasekharuni.) that makes the readers think about what makes life pleasant and unpleasant. The speaker in the poem tells that the answer lies “in the attitude of the liver” (Rajasekharuni). As humans, we find the cycle of seasons as natural but complain when we have to endure good and bad times. We do not see the course of the natural world in the same way as we see changes such as revolutions and war. Figuratively, the poet indicates attitudes of people who get depressed when they go through hardships, but little do they know that happiness is better enjoyed after having felt the sadness. Happiness is only a relative experience. PB Shelley treats the poem as an autobiographical note. His life was filled with difficulties but every time he fell, he sprung with rejuvenated spirits. The poem allegorizes the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. Shelley realizes that he cannot in actual life, rise to the height of imaginative perfection, which was his wish.
The second poem I have studied is "Ode on Melancholy." The idea behind this poem is that with any intense feeling of joy and happiness, a sad and melancholy feeling must accompany it. Or to simplify this, what goes up must come down. This poem is an escape from the inevitable pain as to expect a light not to cast shadows. Keats uses personification in this poem. "Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud." And, "Veiled melancholy has her sovran shrine." These two examples use personification to exaggerate the feelings being expressed and to help explain Keat's thoughts. To help explain joys and melancholy's interactions Keats personifies joy to be a male and melancholy to be female. This helps the reader understand how joy and melancholy are contributing factors to each other.