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Shelley as poet of nature
The theme of nature in I wandered lonely as a cloud wordsworth
William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” essay
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The representation of sublimity in William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Percy Shelley’s “To a Sky-Lark,” and Gerald Hopkins “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is characterized by the beauty and forms of nature, the power of nature, and the use of metaphors in descriptive passages. They use the sublime to express the grandeur of nature and to describe specific objects of nature. The writers also employ the sublime as a way to communicate their imagination and interpretations of nature to the readers.
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hopkins use the sublime in their literary works to interpret and express the aesthetics of nature. Wordsworth expresses the sublime beauty and forms of nature in “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by illustrating the nature scene using daffodils, clouds, stars, and waves. His personification of the daffodils, “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance,” (Wordsworth 12) distinguishes them from being just a simple organic plant to a vivid being that possesses an inner life. His personification of the daffodils creates a vibrant and beautiful illustration.
Shelley uses a sky-lark in his poem“To a Sky-Lark” to express the sublime beauty and forms of nature. The beauty of nature is developed from Shelley’s sublime imagination of the sky-lark’s song. He notes the beauty of the sky-lark’s song by implying that even rainbow clouds are not as beautiful as the melodies of the sky-lark’s song, “From rainbow clouds there flow not” (Shelley 33). Shelley relates the bird’s emotional state to the beauty of nature by regarding the happiness of the bird when the bird soars through the sky. He implies that the beauty and forms of nature contributes to the bird’s happiness, “What objects are the fountains /Of thy happy ...
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...n limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” (Hopkins 12-13).
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hopkins express their gratitude for the sublime of the natural world in their literary works. To accurately portray the sublime in their works, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hopkins selected suitable words and proper arrangements of their language. Their use of striking and beautiful words contributed to the overall sublimity of their poems. Also, their figurative language possessed great natural power, which helped to give their metaphors solid meanings. The poets referred to things that they considered interesting, such as the kingfisher, sky-lark, and daffodils to express their literary sublime. Their literary sublime is important because it helps the readers to visualize the scenes and understand the message of the poem, which also helps the readers to benefit from or enjoy the poem.
4) Marshall, William. From A Review of the Landscape, a Didactic Poem, 1795. in The Sublime: A Reader in British 18th Century Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Ashfield, Andrew and de Bolla, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...
Beauty is always in nature. It is express in many ways. In the poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman express the beauty in the stars. Just looking up in space gave him peace. Walt writes about the fascination of the stars. How the night sky can transform a situation. He writes experiencing this phenomenon first hand is better than having it told. In most cases, the real is better than the copy. The beauty of the experience is needed, and to see the real thing than what is told. Whitman express how the night sky was all he needed and his feelings. In the poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth, the premise is like Whitman poem. It is the beauty in nature, and how people are not looking for nature to inspire. People are just looking less of nature. Both works show the worldly influence in people’s life. In both pieces, Whitman and Wordsworth showing how nature brings true beauty.
In the poem, the speaker, setting, and imagery depict the style of romanticism. First, the speaker of the poem is interpreted as a Romantic poet who is intelligent and lonely, but he is able to keep himself fulfilled by simple beauty. Wordsword accentuates this by writing in the first person. Next, the setting is richly presented to demonstrate the beauty of nature. Wordsword writes, “Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (Wordsword, 5-6). The setting is interpreted to be in the countryside with daylight. Through this use of words and setting, Wo...
What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.
William Wordsworth is easily understood as a main author whom expresses the element of nature within his work. Wordsworth’s writings unravel the combination of the creation of beauty and sublime within the minds of man, as well as the receiver through naturalism. Wordsworth is known to be self-conscious of his immediate surroundings in the natural world, and to create his experience with it through imagination. It is common to point out Wordsworth speaking with, to, and for nature. Wordsworth had a strong sense of passion of finding ourselves as the individuals that we truly are through nature. Three poems which best agree with Wordsworth’s fascination with nature are: I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud, My Heart leaps up, and Composed upon Westminster Bridge. In I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud, Wordsworth claims that he would rather die than be without nature, because life isn’t life without it, and would be without the true happiness and pleasure nature brings to man. “So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me
By reading Wordsworth, one can gain a better grasp of Whitman through this similarity, which D.J. Moores argues. He states, “Although both poets had an intense distrust of language...they nevertheless believed language, particularly their own poetic language, could be a stimulus of consciousness expansion”(“Gangs” 96). In this way as well as in their mutual use of common language, the influence of Wordsworth on Whitman can be seen in the Romantic influence on the American poet. This idea of expanded consciousness is also much like the sublime, as Wordsworth says in his essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful” that the sublime is when the mind attempts“ to grasp at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining” (Waldoff 124). Through the language both Whitman and Wordsworth utilize, the sublime is reachable and the consciousness of the reader expands because of it. Thus, one can further see the influence of Wordsworth on
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."
In conclusion, the sublime and the beautiful are major topics in romantic poems and novels. Different authors bring out the different ways they can be seen and interpreted. In the novel Frankenstein and the poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, the sublime and the beautiful are shown through the feelings and the mind of the main characters. In the poem “Mont Blanc,” the sublime is shown through the complexity of nature and how man will never truly be able to understand it. In order to have something beautiful there must be something sublime, and in order for they’re to be something sublime there must be something beautiful.
“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! (Shelley Line 1)” Shelley takes a little object in nature, the skylark, and transforms it into a mysteriously beautiful thing that represents freedom and passion in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To A Skylark.” The poem, very unique, is used to express his emotions through the characteristics of the bird. The song of this skylark can be seen as a guide about being free from all burdens. Animals are sort of disconnected from certain emotion that effect humans such as sadness and pain. The speaker appears to a micro degree jealous of the liberty of the skylark that travels wherever it pleases. It doesn’t matter once or wherever, whether or not it's dusk (“the sunken sun”) or morning (“the silver sphere”) the speaker feels that the skylark is usually flying high above. Although one tend to not see it, or maybe hear it, “we feel it is there (Shelley Line 25).”
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature:
Nature and God are consistent themes throughout all three poems. Whether it is the calming tone in Wordsworth’s ,“It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”, the abrupt tone in Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” or whether it contains ebb and flow as it does in Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us”, they all showed the connection between Nature and God.
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.
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.
In poetry the speaker describes his feelings of what he sees or feels. When Wordsworth wrote he would take everyday occurrences and then compare what was created by that event to man and its affect on him. Wordsworth loved nature for its own sake alone, and the presence of Nature gives beauty to his mind, again only for mind’s sake (Bloom 95). Nature was the teacher and inspirer of a strong and comprehensive love, a deep and purifying joy, and a high and uplifting thought to Wordsworth (Hudson 158). Wordsworth views everything as living. Everything in the world contributes to and sustains life nature in his view.