William Blake Research Paper

Romanticism was a popular era for poets and authors. Many ideas were being discussed at this time leading poems to have similar content in terms of topics and purposes. The most common topics of poetry during this time was a fascination with innocence, questioning authority, or adaptation to change. Romantic English poets such as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats used nature in their poems to convey their purposes. William Blake used nature in his poetry to show and compare innocence to experience. His works in Songs of Innocence and of Experience , explores the differences between good and evil. In The Lamb, he describes the timidness of a lamb saying, “Softest clothing, wooly bright; gave thee such a tender voice”. This

Keats used nature to convey his feelings about death. In Ode to Nightingale, Keats wrote, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim” and later “But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows the grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild.” In the first part of the poem Keats explains how challenging life can be and discusses how people drink to leave the harsh reality of the world. Along with this he explains how he would like to drink to leave the world and go into nature to die, because he feels as though surrounded by nature is the best place to die. In the next part of the poem he explains what about nature makes it such a great place to be by showing the beauty and serenity of it. Keats discusses death in relation to nature again in his poem La Belle Dame sans Merci, when he writes about a beautiful woman he meets in a meadow, “And there she lulled me asleep, and there I dreamed - Ah! Woe betide! The latest dream I ever dreamed on the cold hillside.” In his dreams he dreamt of death and came to terms with the changing world that inevitably leads to death. Keats uses nature throughout his poems to come to terms with the concept of