Wordsworth and Coleridge Essay Example for Free

Wordsworth and Coleridge EssayWordsworth and Coleridge saw themselves as worshippers of disposition. How is this demonstrated in Lyrical Ballads? (an exam-style essay)Themes relating to temper are instrumental in the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads by William Wordworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As part of the Romantic movement, both poets strongly believed in a power and supreme beauty of temper and the education it can impart onto man, and their works in Lyrical Ballads demonstrate this.In The Dungeon, Coleridge demonstrates his view that record has healing properties and that it would be a more effective method of rehabilitating criminals than the usual method of locking them aside in prison would be an elevated view of nature and its power. He justifies this opinion using historied imagery describing nature as he sees it, with the innovation of portraying its complete beauty.Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and eupneic sweets,Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and w aters,Coleridge overly uses a direct contrast and juxtaposition with this and the dark imagery used in the freshman stanza to emphasise the beauty of nature. He also does this to demonstrate that the dark and horrible dungeon and the free and comely nature are polar opposites, and ultimately to come to the remainder that they have same effects on criminals.Circled with evil, till his very soulUnmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformedBy sights of ever more deformity employ this juxtaposition, Coleridge explains that the total beauty of nature go away overcome the criminal and their dark ways. He expresses how nature will appear a jarring and dissonant thing as it is as far-removed from their dark and deceitful ways as is possible. Finally, he reason outs that this will immediately have the effect of healing him and removing all bad intent that he possesses (His angry spirit healed and harmonized / By the benignant touch of love and beauty) This conclusion is very much in keep ing with the Romantic idea of the supreme power and beauty of nature and the pro found impact it can have on man.This is a theme also explored in The Tables Turned, in which Wordsworth argues that there is more to be learnt from nature than there is from books and unoriginal education. To this end, he uses a affable and colloquial style (Up Up My friend, and quit your books) to mimic the emotive encouraging of one man to a nonher to moderate their studying aside and go out into nature. In this conversational style he abandons the pretence and tincture that are commonplace in clean poetry, and tries to persuade the reader of the much greater value of experiencing nature, in contrast to the irrelevance of books, through such passages as Let Nature be your teacher. The personification of nature throughout serves to further emphasise the fact that it can be a superior substitute for conventional education, and has a far greater knowledge to impart than its perceived inanimateness w ould suggest.In the last deuce stanzas, a different tone is adopted as Wordsworth ceases his direct plea and talks of, using emotive language such as murder, how humanitys meddling intellect and study of, amongst other things, nature, has distorted and lessened its beauty. To conclude the poem, he uses the metaphor of books being barren leaves (dead and of little value), in contrast with the previous personification of nature and its rich portrayal of being beautiful and very much alive.This human distortion of nature is also a theme prominent in The Nightingale. In this, Coleridge argues that the classical poets of old who commented on nature did not have a full considering of it, but instead wrote at length about it, intercommunicate their own feelings and opinions onto their depiction of it. He manifests this through the Nightingale, which the speaker cannot believe is portrayed as most melancholy, whilst, he argues in nature there is nothing melancholy.Showing disdain for the poets who wrote like this, he takes a same approach to Wordsworth in The Tables Turned and argues that they had far better stretchd their limbs / Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell / By sun or moonlight, or in other words experience nature and come to understand it fully before writing about it. He further concludes that nature is essentially joyous and should jazz up joy it must not be made to serve simply as a classify upon which our human feelings are indiscriminately projected.Throughout Lyrical Ballads, unsophisticated form and structures are used, such as in The Dungeon, which is written in simple blank verse, a style of writing very similar to normal everyday speech and in The Nightingale, which is subtitled a conversational poem.This form is used to help fill that their poetry can be ordinary and be understood by ordinary people, and that its themes are pertinent to all. In the case of The Dungeon, this idea is then emphasise by the use of a prisoner as the main charac ter elevated and unrealistic characters are not used the likes of whom were prominent in classical poetry, which Wordsworth and Coleridge undoubtedly viewed as out of the reach of the normal person. This shows that the poets wanted their message to reach as umpteen people as possible, and it not bypass some who would be put off by more formal poetry. It is also in keeping with the Romantic belief that wisdom is not to be found in books, sciences and the arts, but in nature itself.