Perception

My English professor for Brit Lit II gave us a list of Romantic Elements. As I was reading the Wordsworth assignments for this week, I ran across the line “In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind”. It reminded me a lot of a line from one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows: “The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings” from “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”. After pondering it for awhile, it seems to me that the Counting Crows body of work fits Dr. Akers 7 elements of Romanticism. I will have to dig her list out and fully compare.
The other thing that struck me while reading Wordsworth was an area where he and Blake seemed to diverge. I have serious issues with Blake’s “where man is not, nature is barren” as I don’t believe that nature is devoid of inherent value removed from humanity. Wordsworth doesn’t seem to believe that, either, as in lines like “their thoughts I cannot measure” concerning birds. The line points to the birds having some experience outside of humanity. This contradicts Blake’s notion of man essentially creating nature through his imagining of it. If nature is man’s imagination, it cannot exist outside of humanity. Wordsworth, however, puts nature in the position of having something to teach man, a wisdom beyond man’s knowledge aquired through books and manmade things. Despite this difference, Blake and Wordsworth seem to agree on the way the human mind can warp man’s perception of nature. The speaker in “The Tables Turned” expresses that thoughts turn the beauty of nature to hideousness and one’s heart must be open in order to learn from nature. This line of thinking is similar to Blake’s idea that most people’s perception of nature is corrupted and dark, which taints nature, and if their imagination was purged of this corruption, their entire relation to nature and life around them would change for the better. It is interesting that they can share this point, but differ on their fundamental ideas of the purpose of nature.