During the renaissance period, it is a generally acceptable norm that women only suitable to do a certain job (most of them related to maintaining household) This norm leave a lot of women with massive talents and intellegence to just sit around and wasting a lot of their youth doing something that below their scope of capabilities, just like what's portrayed in the poem.
D. Transcendentalism (boy what a tongue twister) was a movement in the early 1800's to avoid the mechanized urban society and seek nature. Waldo Emerson and Thoreau both were members.
