Lyrical Ballads - Pantheism and a Return to Nature

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The Romantic Period was a time of revolutionary thinking and great shifts in established paradigms and ideologies. This shift was captured by philosophers and poets of the time, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The intensity and the power of nature is glorified through Romantic texts, as the poets strive to return to the natural world of God’s workings. Nature is perceived as the source of emotion and ideas, contrasted with the emerging industrialised world, in which emotion and the individual were oppressed. Romantic poetry reflects the ideology of Pantheism, where the forces of nature are displayed as a manifestation of God, both brutal and life-giving. This ability of nature to display in physical reality the power of the divine, encompasses the Romantic breakaway from institutionalised religion, to a more natural state. In Coleridge’s The Lime Tree Bower My Prison, the “veil [of] the Almighty Spirit,” depicts God as a “veil” over or within all of nature, this presence drawing power into the natural world. where the personification of “Nature” through capitalisation, denotes its separate entity, which explores the way in which nature converts his spirit and imagination. From “This Lime-tree bower my prison!” in which he is captured in “blindness” contrasted with “though glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!” Images of light, colour and beauty and the exclamatory devices depict the transformative power of nature. Through all experiences, positive and negative, “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;” within nature, the “veil [of] the Almighty Spirit” depicting God as “veil” over or within nature and always present. This realisation “awake[n‘s him] to love and beauty” through “each faculty of sense.” This tactile, sensory connection with Nature’s extremes in
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