Romantism and nature

Romanticist writers such as Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth focus on imagination, freedom from rules, the past, the love of nature, and emotions. These characteristics are evident in all of their works; nature being one of the more prominent points.

These writers always write about the past. In “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth starts off with where he was five years ago, in the very same spot he stood. In the past, or during his childhood days, nature was dear and close to his heart. He reminiscences about how he felt towards mother nature back then. But he has seen it all before so the “aching joys are new no more.” He still enjoys nature but with a different perspective than before. He feels this way because he used to come visit this wonderful place with his sister. All of his happy memories were made with her but now that she is gone, he registers these experiences in another manner.

In Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” nature is linked with the imagination. As he watches the clouds roll by, he sees a sky-canoe. The animation of the stars twinkling behind the moving clouds is magnified against the moonlit sky. As excitingly as he describes these scenes, he says that he no longer feels the beauty that lies with in them. His “shaping spirit of imagination” was given to him at birth.

Blake’s series of “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” tie in with freedom from rules. He mentions how children are so naïve in “Songs of Innocence.” Their actions are compared to the beauty in nature, such as ideal weathered days and fields full of bloom-age. What they do now is not restricted from the harsh reality that they will face in the future; and that is the beauty of childhood. This restriction of freedom is now depicted in “Songs of Experience.” No longer children, man kind is restricted from the joys of childhood. The cruelty of life is now surfaced and there is no turning back.