The Importance of the Natural World

The Importance of the Natural World.

This essay address the interpretations of the concept of nature as presented by the three romantics’ poets Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nature is essentially portrayed here as an example of God’s providential design. In the songs of innocence, Blake explains that children are naturally born with their packages of innocence, which guide them during the explorations of their childhood experiences. For example, the first stanza of “Holy Thursday I”, reads:

Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children, walking two and two, in red and blue and green,
Grey-headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.

Blake stresses the importance of this childhood innocence as God given because as the children grow older and navigate through the adulthood life experience (what he calls songs of experience), they have already lost their initial natural innocence. The dramatic loss of the human’s natural design is equally captured and described by the other romantic poets. For example , in the sonnet “London”, William Wordsworth describes how the childhood pure innocence is lost over the ages and replaced by the adult’s flawy aggressivity, and criminal behavior.

In “London” we read:

“…Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

The importance of the nature is clearly felt during the adulthood, after the loss of innocence and its replacement by bitter acts.