Comparison of the Portrayal of Nature in Blake and Wordsworth

The voice in this poem is one of pure happiness and innocence. In this state of joy, the infant is unaware of the world in which he lives and that awaits him. In these opening lines, we see Blake revealing the everyday modeling and structure that categorizes the world, but is absent in the simplicity and purity of childhood. The child has no name because joy needs no other name. Labeling and classification are products of organization and arrangement that the world uses to assimilate innocence into experience. Blake demonstrates that it is through this transition, that the virtue of child’s play is destroyed. Blake utilizes specific emotions such as “happy,” “joy,” “sweet,” “pretty,” “sing,” and “smile” to describe this uncorrupted state of being. There is no danger, darkness, or struggle for the infant. Instead, he exists in a care free state, free of guilt, temptation, and darkness. The birth of a child is celebrated by Blake and it stirs in us powerful emotions of peace, love, and hope.

The first extreme in Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience is innocence. The Songs of Innocence is comprised of poems of young children who have a naïve perspective of the world around them. In The Lamb, the young child is compared to a untainted lamb who has not been corrupted by the world. In The Chimney Sweepers the orphaned child is sold to be a chimneysweeper. The child clearly has no hope for any future, however the naïve child listens to the voice of the angel and makes peace with his situation. He blindly accepts the comfort without coming to the recognition that he will ultimately die. In The Little Black Boy, the child doesn’t recognize the prevalent racism of his time. He believes that he and the white child can sit together in the light of G-d and together they will be like innocent sheep. These children encounter

Another ideal of Romanticism is the valuing of nature as the best habitat rather than the city life. Nature became an important key of inspiration for the Romantics. It was becoming more appreciated by people as it began to appear in art, music, poems, literature, and many other works. Nature was not just a place in the minds of Romantics. Nature meant several

The air was crisp and clean, as it was a mild autumn day. Throughout the forest, the sounds of nature could be heard. Birds chirping, leaves falling off trees in the midday breeze. The calm sounds of the woods gave way to a new sound: the gentle humming of a young female wanderer, on a quest to visit her grandmother. She quite enjoyed the sounds and view of the forest, as it was her favorite thing to surround herself with as she was growing up in the village not far from the forest edge. As she strolled through the winding paths of the forest road, she thought of the wonderful experiences of the day ahead with her grandmother.

Nature represents the world in this poem, saying that the worlds youth is hard to hold on to in the first line, " Natures first green is gold." Dawn going down to day is an example of the world losing its youth, its gold. Eden, like the garden of Eden in the Bible, which is associated with nature, sinking to grief represents the world ending and everything gold going away.

To the Romantics, the imagination was important. It was the core and foundation of everything they thought about, believed in, and even they way they perceived God itself. The leaders of the Romantic Movement were undoubtedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his close friend, William Wordsworth. Both were poets, and both wrote about the imagination. Wordsworth usually wrote about those close to nature, and therefore, in the minds of the Romantics, deeper into the imagination than the ordinary man. Coleridge, however, was to write about the supernatural, how nature extended past the depth of the rational mind.

The romantics wanted to rise above the dull realities to a realm of higher truth (Arpin 142) . The reason it is relevant to each other is having this “imagination” would help the romantics rise above the said “dull realities”. In the text he says “the supernatural realm and the inner world of imagination (Arpin 143). Another thing the author says is “poetry is the highest form of imagination” (Arpin 143) The romantics placed a lot of their ideas and beliefs on or relating to imagination. The author states that the romantics place their faith in inner experience and within the power of imagination (Arpin 143).  With that being said it’s obvious that they find imagination important since they are placing their faith in it. To end off these are the ways that imagination was a big part of the romantics lives.

Finally, the overall tone of both poems is a multitude of negative emotions. Blake is shocked by the drastic changes that have occurred in the garden, and he is dismayed and angered by its restrictions on his ability to express himself. Wordsworth is saddened and depressed about society’s disinterest in and disregard for nature. Feeling saudade, he wishes for visions of a time when nature was more powerful and respected; when religions centered on powerful personifications of the forces of nature dominated society and

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Just like in the rest of the works, Sharon Olds’ poem, Still Life in Landscape, is presented on a confessional note. The speaker, who is the author, is a child. This child narrates about her experience as a witness of an accident caused by recklessness due to drunk driving. It is easy to tell from the line 1, “It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn,” that a terrible accident had happened on the road during that night. The poem presents a truthful meaning of how real reality is, and it can be elucidated and viewed via varying viewpoints by the audience, the child and the reader. The interpretation of the poem by the child is that it is a traumatic exposure to the raw life reality that likely cannot be undone nor can he forget the happenings of the night.

Both romantics used nature in many of their works, but they each viewed it in contrasting ways and used it differently throughout their writing. Blake loved nature, but he thought of it only as a helper to the imagination. He believed nature was meaningless without the imagination to humanize it. Most of

Now let¹s look at Blake¹s The Garden of Love.  This poem serves as a great

How do William Blake and William Wordsworth respond to nature in their poetry? The Romantic Era was an age, which opened during the Industrial (1800-1900) and French Revolution (1789). These ages affected the romantic poets greatly by disrupting and polluting nature. Before the Industrial Revolution, William Blake wrote about Songs of Innocence.

Both ‘A Poison Tree’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)’ present nature in contrasting ways, which, at first, may confuse the reader as to what Blake’s true thoughts on his modern views of nature are. However, one needs only realise that, within ‘A Poison Tree’, Blake shows the poetic voice to be part of the human mind, to tell, by basing an opinion from his Romantic views, that he generally perceived the human mind to be corrupt. The tree, a key part both in ‘A Poison Tree’ and, commonly, in portrayal of nature, has been presented in such a way that it’s purity seems falsified, tarnished, and this may be seen as Blake’s way of showing how nature could only be tainted when thought of by man. This is a drastic change to the message regarding the natural world in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, in which the speaker is assumed to be a child. Children, in Blake’s eyes, had only hope when mixed with the apparent cruelty of the adult world. Proof of this may be found within the dreams of little Tom Dacre, a chimney sweep

How the poet is able to glorify the nature and how he is able to show the reader how educational and inspiring the nature can be is by using literary devices. In the second stanza, lines seven and eight, the poet uses personification to emphasize his appreciation towards the nature. “[...] Through all the long green fields has spread, His [The sun] first sweet evening yellow [...]” (“The Tables Turned”, William Wordsworth). By giving the sun human characteristics, the poet has accomplished to show his appreciation of nature. In line 25 the poet uses words with vibrant positive connotations “[...] Sweet is the lore which Nature brings [...]”. The poet does this to glorify the