The Wistful, Nostalgic, Romantic Heart

The Wistful, Nostalgic, Romantic Heart

Emotion plays an integral role within the Romantic Period. It ranges from the wistful nostalgia of times past where the authors’ meaning behind the work is sentimental and introspective to relating emotion to the ever evolving natural world. Writers from this time often opted for a personal testament of life and the analysis thereof within their work as opposed to more logical themes, such as those from the 18th Century. The 18th Century writer Voltaire, for instance used tactics to incite emotion as opposed to basing his writing on emotion. In this sense, the Romantic writers could delve deeper into the heart and capture the reader’s attention by using images and symbols, focused on those of nature to harness the understanding of themselves. This also enabled the readers to connect emotionally to the work as well as the ability to appreciate the work.

Connectivity to the natural world is in essence the most dominant trait within the Romantic Period. One of William Wordsworth’s most achieved poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798” focuses upon the scene in which he is familiar from childhood and the wistful sentimentality of how he remarks the scene as he views it in adulthood. Recollecting the feelings and connections to a place, whether it is in the natural world, a city, or simply a home can elicit emotions for as with the writers of these poems can recollect particular images of their past just by a mere glimpse of that familiarity of childhood and perhaps the foreshadowing of the future pleasure attained from this sentimentality, so can the reader.

In lines 49-67, Wordsworth speaks of how he would view this vividly descriptive scene in the future, and he wistfully describes it with as much fervor as he had from his childhood. As often as one returns to a childhood home, the mind flooded with memories of it. The subtle nuances that made this particular scene or the specific emotional ties that one has to a place unfolds within the mind the memories of the past. The scene as Wordsworth presents it is an eternal bond that Wordsworth had held on to throughout his life. He was content in the idea that although there would be subtle differences within this scene as the years past, there would always remain that sentimental bond with it that would initiate the onslaught of memories of his youth.

“If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! How oft-

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-

How