How do Blake and Wordsworth respond to nature in their poetry and what other influences effect their work.

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Waseem Hussain 10A

How do Blake and Wordsworth respond to nature in their poetry and what other influences effect their work.

The "Romantic" period was an age of revolution. It produced some of the most important, beautiful, and challenging poems in the English language. Fantasy, imagination, and the supernatural contended with the rise of scientific understanding. "Rights" of individuals were asserted against the state, and social movements such as the French Revolution took place. The era of British Romantic literature around 1780-1830 faced many challenges for supremacy in human nature and the social political arena. Poetry during this era saw experiments with form and language, and developed an emotional sensibility. This period also witnessed some great composition by ‘William Blake’ and ‘William Wordsworth’.  A number of events during this period influenced the ‘Romantic Poets’. The most notable being, the French revolution that was to do with ‘self-determination’. This characteristic is apparent in the poems of Blake and Wordsworth.  Works such as ‘London’ by Blake and ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ best illustrate this point.

The poems below all have a relationship with either youth or innocence. Various poets such as William Blake and William Wordsworth have written these poems from their own perspective.

The ‘Nurse’s Song’, written by William Blake is about naïveté and one in which Blake relates nature to the innocence of children. He describes children as perfect, uncorrupted being. This poem is set in the countryside as the day draws to an end at sundown. ‘Voices of children are heard on the green and laughing is heard on the hill’. The children are seen to be taking pleasure in themselves amongst the beautiful surroundings of Mother Nature, enjoying their childhood oblivious to the problems in the world. The children are made to see perfection, ‘My heart is at rest within my breast and everything else is still’ bringing joy to our hearts and filling the air with love. The nurse is telling the children ‘Come come leave off and let us away till the morning appears in the skies’, that they must return home and go to bed as ‘the sun is gone down’. But as the innocent children request ‘No no let us play, for it is yet day and we cannot go to sleep’. After this line Blake wrote ‘Beside in the sky, the little birds fly and the hills are all covered with sheep’. This particular sentence is associated with nature and informs us how, from the children’s perspective, they use this quote as a license to stay out and play. Blake referred to nature as being alive (personification) and not having gone to bed.

‘The Prelude’ is a legendary piece of work produced by William Wordsworth. It shares many of the themes expressed in Blake’s poem entitled the ‘Nurse’s Song’ and is similar by comparison. The poem the ‘Prelude’ opens with an account of Wordsworth escape from the constraints of a city life into the free country life.  
He is referring to a small rowing boat, which is attached to a tree just near the lake. ‘I pushed, and struck the oars and struck again in cadence, and my little boat moved on’. He set off into the lake drifting slowly away form the bank. Whilst out in the lake ‘The moon was up’ and ‘the lake was shining clear among the hoary mountains’. ‘Of mountains-echoes did my boat move on; leaving behind her still, on either side’. Massive, tall mountains surrounded him from all corners and any sound he produced was echoed directly back to him. Slowly he began to lose sight of the willow tree as ‘a rocky steep arose above him’. Wordsworth describes nature as being alive (Personification) as did Blake in his poem in the ‘Nurse’s Song’. He has created a contrast between terror and nature as the mountains slowly arise above him. When he came to a certain point were he could no longer see the willow tree there were ‘nothing but the stars and the grey sky’. He described it as being an ‘elfin pinnace’ which meant something being magical. He described his boat ‘heaving through the water like a swan;’ as the boat was being pulled away and the mountains kept on rising upon him ‘with voluntary power instinct’. ‘And growing still in stature the huge cliff rose up between me and the stars’. It felt to him as if the mountains were alive because the mountains appeared to follow the direction of the boat in which he traveled. He ‘worked with a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts’. Afterwards he was disturbed by his experience in the boat, but could not offer any explanation as to why this was so. From that moment onwards he had a completely different prospective of the world and had become a changed human being because what he use to see before as being ‘trees’, ‘green fields’, the sea or the sky had know changed to be nothing in front of his eyes as he had become blinded by the incident. Blake has described nature not only to be a peaceful place but also as something, which could give a terrifying experience.         

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Another well-known poem by William Wordsworth is the ‘Daffodils’. This poem defines the inner beauty of something we just see as flowers.
He feels as if he were wandering ‘lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills’ unrestricted to journey anywhere he likes. This specific line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ represents an event that took place in Wordsworth’s life and a personal experience. It appears that he is independent, possessing a free spirit and unbound to do what he likes. While roaming as a cloud he ‘saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils’. He ...

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