Wordsworth and Keats: For the birds.
Wordsworth and Keats both wrote poems about birds, and both imbue their birds with a mystical nature, but where Keats sees the bird as a representation of a better life, Wordsworth sees it as a mysterious presence that represents the disembodied spirit of nature.
In Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo” he never sees his cuckoo and had long since stopped looking for it, so the bird had become a spirit that represents the rest of nature, and like the daffodils it transcends itself. In an “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats speaks to the nightingale as the representation of his desire for happiness — Keats feels a “numbing pain” because he is so happy that the bird is happy that it begins to work on him like a drug. He sees the nightengale, at first, as the essence of summer and the chance of a new life.
Wordsworth’s “Prelude”
In the few lines that make up a single scene of Wordsworth’s “Prelude”, the personified Nature encourages the young Wordsworth to steal a boat and admonishes him for failing to resist the urge. Although the young Wordsworth only focused on the method Nature used to correct him, the adult Wordsworth recognized the contradiction and believed that Nature used this event to guide him and help him understand and control his human desires, and, in the process, demonstrate that the relationship between an individual and nature is the same as that of parent and child. Overall, this scene emphasizes the the contrast between the nature of an individual and Nature, the experience and the perception, and the child and the adult. Through these contrasts Wordsworth demonstrates that his perception of his surroundings were influenced by his own emotions and feelings as a child and by what he, as an adult, perceives the emotions he felt or should have felt as a boy.
