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Romanticism was an extensive artistic and intellectual movement, described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred’[1]. Originating in late eighteenth-century Europe, it challenged the Age of Enlightenment’s scientific and rational, objective ideas, and instead promoted the power of individual imagination and subjective experience. Nature was a predominant Romantic theme in the light of the Industrial Revolution, which not only posed a threat to its preservation, but also prompted a rise in local countryside tourism to escape the expanding urban areas. Poets sought to demonstrate this through, as Carl Thompson observes, their ‘appreciation of landscape, and especially of wild or what was often termed “romantic” scenery’[2] in their work. Moreover, natural forces and iconic landmarks were also associated with the ‘sublime’, an aesthetic theory defined by Edmund Burke as ‘whatever is in any sort terrible [...] is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’[3]: fear and awe, which inspire imagination to the greatest degree. Besides this organic sense of nature, Marcel Isnard argues that ‘nature also means the principle or power that animates or even creates the objects of nature’[4], alluding to the idea of pantheism where God or a divine creative force is inherent within nature, or even the creative power of man himself. I will analyse how Percy Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820) and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’[5] (1798) thus explore nature to express their admiration and desire to be at one with its power, as well as to address the social and cultural impacts of man’s creative progress.
In ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Shelley depicts how the wind drives seasonal change, with the persona addressing it as ‘thou breath of Autumn’s being’[6] who blows the dead leaves from the trees ‘like ghosts’ (3). This dark imagery of Autumn bringing death by Winter, is then contrasted with ‘Thine azure sister’ (9), Spring, who revives the fallen seeds, bringing new life. Moreover, the poem’s form – which combines a reworking of the Italian terza rima using four tercets and a Shakespearean sonnet couplet, following the rhyming scheme of aba bcb cdc ded ee – presents an interwoven, cyclical pattern, where the ending of one rhyme brings the next, reflecting on the theme, as Michael O’Neill observes, of ‘rebirth and regeneration’[7]. However, as Ferber notes, ‘Though the annual cycle from autumn to autumn via the renewal of spring consoles us for our losses [...] nature also destroys life on longer and larger scales’[8], and so the focus in the next stanzas is shifted to the temperamental weather and sea. Shelley’s forceful imagery in describing how ‘Black rain and fire and hail will burst’ (28) during a storm, evokes a threatening image of chaos or the end of the world; whilst ‘the Atlantic’s level powers / Cleave themselves into chasms’ (37-38), forming waves powerful enough to submerge ‘palaces and towers’ (33). These imaginative metaphors epitomise Burke’s theory of the sublime, as these destructive natural forces incite terror and awe.
Wordsworth presents a more passive portrayal of nature in ‘Tintern Abbey’, where the persona returns to the country after five years and feels a sense of nostalgia as he beholds ‘These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs’ (3)[9]. The flowing imagery demonstrates how they provide a ‘tranquil restoration’ (30) from ‘the din / Of towns and cities’ (25-26), making the universal experience of visiting the countryside subjective, as it corresponds to the persona’s individual thoughts. Additionally, the poet’s use of blank verse enables him to express this without the rigid poetic structure favoured by neo-classical poets; a freedom that he also wishes to impart upon his readers, inviting them, as Andrew Bennett notes, ‘to identify with [...] this experience [...] and these thoughts’[10], promoting individualism. Nicola Trott observes that ‘Wordsworth’s tourism enacts the principles of return and renewal which are embedded at the heart of his imaginative self-conception and development’[11], for he owes to nature ‘the power / Of harmony’ (47-48); a new perception that enables the persona to detect:
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