Nature is the vehicle that leads him to awareness on a physical and emotional plane, expressed when he realizes that "each faculty of sense... keep[s] the heart/Awake to Love and Beauty" (62-3). Here we see that the poet is open to whatever his experience with nature will teach him.
Another poet that demonstrates the mood and tone of the Romantic era is Percy Shelley. In "Ode to the West Wind," the poet attempts to reach for an experience that is beyond the material world. The poet is aware that the winds of "Autumn's being" (Shelley 1) are ushering in a change, representing the new season. We can see an appreciation for nature when the poet affirms that the winds, "Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing" (4) and the poet's thoughts are like "winged seeds" (7) of each passing season. The winds indicate change in the unalterable change in the natural world. The poet is fully aware that winter is a dormant stage in life, ushering in spring. This hope is all the poet needs to believe in spring.
The Romantic writers might have seemed different in the subjects in which they wrote but a closer inspection reveals that they were all attracted to the same things. Each poet...
They could not have written what they did if they did not first allow themselves to be removed from the trappings of life. In other words, these men allowed their experience to overtake them and they let the experience speak to them through their imagination and through their experience. Keats, Coleridge, and Shelley represent how the Romantics were not about this world but about something bigger and more powerful than anything man could create. Their imagination allowed them to think it and nature allowed them to experience it and, as a result, they capture life through nature and imagination.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel. "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol I.M.H. Abrams, ed. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1986.
Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1967.
Shelley, Percy Blythe. "Ode to the West Wind." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. II. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1986.
