Romanticism In My Heart Leaps Up And The World Is Too Much With Us

The romantics were merely worshippers of nature to an extent that nature was a prevalent idea in their poetry and writings. As the Romantic Era, otherwise known as Romanticism, was a movement in art, literature and intellect during the late 18th and early 19th century, it influenced many romantics’ pursuit of meaning and truth through spontaneous thought, feelings and actions. It provided the freedom for the poets to express their emotions through the medium of nature. In William Wordsworth’s My Heart Leaps Up and The World is Too Much With Us, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc, through the notions of man & the natural world, time, and the sublime, the romantics as worshippers of nature is explicitly depicted. It is through the various …show more content…
In William Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us the conflict between man & the natural world is apparent. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” indicates that man is too materialistic due to the fast pace of the Industrialised West as it did not provide an opportunity to appreciate nature. Through the use of a comma the syntax of the phrase is disrupted, creating pauses that instill reflection in the reader’s mind. The reader is obliged to contemplate and immerse with the poem’s message. Likewise, “little we see in nature that is ours” suggests that the industrialisation has hindered the vision of individuals from the possession that they own, which is nature. The collective pronoun of ‘we’ engages the reader and puts them at fault for the lack of appreciation of nature and reinforces the concept of man & the natural world. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that “society is wicked and evil” can be identified in this poem. Furthermore, in Wordsworth’s My Heart Leaps Up, man and natural world is expressed as man’s desire to emulate nature. “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”- indicates through a metaphor that the persona’s relation with nature is optimistic as his ‘heart leaps up’ when beauty of nature is present before him. Similarly, “I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety”- the personal pronoun of ‘I’ demonstrates the persona’s eagerness to appreciate nature and ‘to be bound by natural piety’ is an apparent connotation of nature as something to be revered, just as someone who would revere God. This correlates to Wordsworth being a pantheistic. Man and the natural world is an aspect of romanticism that renders the poets as worshippers of nature through the desire to be part of