IT Home Learning Week: Poem Blog Post (Assignment 2)

(This is a post for the assignment of Day 2 of the IT Home-learning Week.)

This post will be about William Woodsworth. Here is an interesting fact about him: most of his poems are related to nature. There are at least one or two lines in each of his poems that are directly connected to nature.

As mentioned above, a lot of Woodsworth’s poems are related to nature and how beautiful it is. That is why I like his poems. For example, in the poem “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud”, the first stanza is “I wandered lonely as a cloud /That floats on high o'er vales and hills, /When all at once /I saw a crowd, /A host, of golden daffodils; /Beside the lake, beneath the trees, /Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” This first stanza is obviously about nature as the poet saw a field of golden daffodils beside a lake beneath some trees fluttering and dancing in the wind. The poem's main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud--"I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high...", and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and "tossing their heads" in "a crowd, a host." This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth's most basic and effective methods for communicating to the reader what the poet feels. This is just one example of nature in his poems. And that is what I am going to talk about today.

His poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The second stanza “Continuous as the stars that shine /And twinkle on the milky way, /They stretched in never-ending line /Along the margin of a bay: /Ten thousand saw I at a glance, /Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” is all about stars in the sky, twinkling and shining continuously. Reading this stanza will make readers feel as though they can actually see all the beautiful stars and such. It is very obvious that this poem is all about nature, even without reading the rest of the stanzas.

The next poem I am going to talk about is “Written In March” The entire poem is filled with nature, figuratively speaking. The first stanza says “The cock is crowing, /The stream is flowing, /The small birds twitter, /The lake doth glitter /The green field sleeps in the sun; /The oldest and youngest /Are at work with the strongest; /The cattle are grazing, /Their heads never raising; /There are forty feeding like one!” It is very obvious that every line has something got to do with nature. That is what makes that poem so appealing. We can almost imagine the scene happening right in front of us!

The third poem I am talking about is “Lines Written In Early Spring”. In this poem, the mentions of nature are not as obvious as the second poem I discussed, but there is a stanza “Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, /The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; /And 'tis my faith that every flower /Enjoys the air it breathes.” This stanza is all about the flowers he saw. Thus it is about nature too. This stanza may not seem to mean much, but it does have a meaning. The poet is trying to say that even flowers have feelings too.

In conclusion, it is obvious that William Woodsworth is a poet who enjoys nature and likes it. This is reflected in his great works, his poems. Resources I used are http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_wordsworth and http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section7.rhtml.