Romantic poetry was initially a reaction against the Neo-classicist form of poetry, which was strongly rooted in the structure laid down by the Greeks and Romans in Classic or Classicist poetry. Romantic poets disliked this tendency of looking to the past, they were well aware of industrial world growing around them and they tended to look to the world of nature for there inspiration. It is nature's splendour and our relationship with it that is the main theme in both the poems I am to explore, Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Wordsworth's Lines. .
Ode to a Nightingale sees the speaker observing a nightingale sing in his garden, the presence of nature is immediately apparent by the presence of the birds name in the title. There is, I believe, envy in the words of the speaker in the opening stanza, his claim of "heart aches" and a "drowsy numbness" that holds him contrasts strongly with the lively, vivacious picture of the "light-winged Dryad of the trees" that is the nightingale. I feel that the speaker is implying that he is somehow less alive than the bird; he states that he has "sunk" toward the mythical river of death "Lethe", and sits in admiration and jealousy at the nightingale's ability to celebrate the presence of summer with a song sang with "full-throated ease".
Wine is desired by the speaker in the second stanza as he weaves images of the sunny Mediterranean with the bleak reality of his surroundings.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been.
Cool"d for a long age in the deep-delved earth,.
Tasting of Flora and the country green,.
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!.
The isolated "O" and the exclamation put upon the call for the wine suggests a real desperation for any relief from the real world in which he inhabits. This is linked with his wish to 'fade away' into the forest. He wishes to follow the birds song into the forest and become one with nature. The wine, in his eyes, seems to represent a means of correcting his present state of detachment and allow him to join nature; it is initially seen as the only tool capable of dissolving the "weariness", "fever" and "fret" apparent in the world of men.
