The Natural World

The meaning of the nature or the natural world has been altered many times through out history. Romantics was a period in time when poets viewed the natural world as a symbol of childhood innocence. They believed the natural world was only seen at its best in the early stages of a human life. Many poets, including William Wordsworth and William Blake, believed the natural world was so pure that only a child could feel it rather than just seeing it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that the natural world is what brings humans closer to God and that it is given to humans at birth.

Wordsworth mentions the natural world to show how a child is always ready for creativity and vivid imaginations. As the children get older, everything positive begins to fade and then they are left with nothing but just misery. For example from Wordsworth’s “Ode” he quotes about children and their perception of the natural world:

“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light”

Then he goes on and mentions:

“But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside”

In the first part Wordsworth talks about how nature is so beautiful to a child, but as he/she gets older they seem to forget that beauty. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also believes that the natural world helps only a child’s imagination, but presents his “Dejection: An Ode” in a different way. He believes that nature is given at birth but as one gets older they are robbed oh such imagination:

“And happly by abstruse research to steal

From my own nature all the natural man-”

In “Frost at Midnight”, Coleridge mentions, very early in the poem, how the childhood is so peaceful like the natural world.

The natural world to these poets was a symbol of innocence, childhood, and purity given at birth by God. It represented the how a man loses his imagination as they get older and more involved with the real world. It can be assumed that poets then believed, a human looses his/her ability to feel nature and is left with just memories of a beautiful world they once had in mind.