LEAP English 1302
Mrs. Hardegree
April 17, 2013
Seeing Nature
The Father of the Romantic Period, William Wordsworth, once said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In the Romantic Period poets such as William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, and Wordsworth himself, penned about his/her love for a certain person or object. Wordsworth’s love for nature greatly influenced his poetry. In his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” he displays his deep love for nature while connecting it directly to the overall theme of the Romantic Period. The writers of the Romantic Period aimed to create poems which displayed expressiveness and contained characteristics of his/her own nationality, which they succeeded by using scenes from his/her country’s life and history. Wordsworth spent the majority of his lifetime in the silent, tranquil Glencoe Bay in the Lake District where he wrote most of his poetry about the inspirational countryside. Wordsworth describes the lake where he grew up by saying, “Beside the lake, beneath the trees,” (Line 5). William and his sister roamed around the beautiful countryside a majority of the time as a child, which made the scenery inspire him to write this poem. He describes his adoration for nature in his poem as he states, “A host, of golden daffodils,” (4). This quote justifies Wordsworth’s fondness of the natural, outside world, and portrays that he is admiring the beauty surrounding him. William continues on by stating, “Continuous as the stars that shine /