Samuel Coleridge is an excellent example of a writer that writes wistfully about experiences he both has and creates in his mind to contrast bitterly with his current state of mind. He writes vividly of his own personal tribulations, which can be better understood with the aid of a biography of his life. In “Fears in Solitude,” Coleridge supports his native country of Britain while not being in favor of its current political climate. In the poem’s conclusion, the speaker says, “With light/ And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend,/ Remembering thee,/ O green and silent dell!/ And grateful, that by nature’s quietness/ And solitary musings, all my heart/ Is softened, and made worthy to indulge/ Love, and the thoughts that yearn for humankind” (225-233). Coleridge idealizes nature as utterly perfect and the source of humankind’s best influences. Throughout the poem he juxtaposes the beauty of nature with the corruption of people. For Coleridge, nature holds a power that lives in his mind, whether he is physically experiencing it or not. As Katie says, “He skillfully uses the imagery of undisturbed and pure nature and his love for the countryside...with which Coleridge uses to strike fear into the reader by implying that this idyllic land which they all grew up with might be destroyed forever.” Coleridge seeks to plea to the reader’s nostalgic love for the land in order to incite change in the present.
“Frost at Midnight” is another poem by Coleridge that shows his nostalgic approach to nature. Here, the speaker is remembering his own childhood while he lies next to his son and dreams about the boy’s future. The force in opposition to nature is not politics as in the previous poem, but industry and growing old. As Gary Snyder comments, “It is through nature, Coleridge argues, that this naivety and acceptance can be regained because nature parallels the beauty of a child’s mind. He can return to a more glorious time through his appreciation and emotional connection to nature.” Coleridge reminisces about his youth and then projects the unfulfilled dreams and desires that he felt he could not accomplish by growing up in the city onto his son, who will grow up in the countryside. As Kat explains so well, “In ‘Frost at Midnight,’...the poet has not experienced the sublime, natural transcendence that he dreams his baby will someday experience. Rather, the father seems to hope that the baby will have a more intimate experience with nature and relish moments that he never shared.” Nature is idealized as a perfect, spiritual setting onto which Coleridge transfers nostalgia to his son for a childhood that he has not himself experienced.
The final poem by Coleridge discussed here is “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Here Coleridge writes of a frustrated nostalgia – he has been out in nature and seen everything before, be he is temporarily crippled and cannot experience it with his friends. According to Brandon, “He sees in his mind the wonders that his friends must be experiencing and finds solace in the fact that they will now also have these memories to reflect on.” Again, Coleridge views nature as the quintessential life experience and, even though he cannot personally come into contact with it, the fact that his friends are gives him respite. For Coleridge, nostalgia is a positive force that is inextricably connected with nature that serves to take the reader to a more pleasant state than is offered by what is currently happening. For example, the speaker is stuck in the lime-tree bower, but he reflects on his past experiences of nature and is glad that his friends are enjoying it, so his nostalgia helps him to cope with his present situation.
William Wordsworth is another Romantic author that uses nostalgic elements similarly to Coleridge. In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth writes from an estranged perspective of an experience he had five years prior. He glorifies his memories of nature and the scenery with his sister, “yet despite his anomalies Wordsworth remains captivating and comprehensible because he both describes and conveys nostalgia – the pleasurable impression that something one has never known is in fact merely forgotten” (Gray). The experiences that Wordsworth writes about may have happened, or they may be fictionalized and beautified accounts of what he wished had transpired. The memories and feelings that come with thinking about this natural setting are, to Wordsworth, more important than the physical place itself. As he writes, “These wild ecstasies shall be matured/ Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind/ Shall be a mansion for all for all lovely forms,/ Thy memory be as a dwelling place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonies” (139-143). Memory here is treated as a place to retreat to in order to escape the present. For Coleridge, nostalgia is used as a form of idealizing the past over the present, but Wordsworth uses nostalgia in order to evade the present and hide in past memories that may or may not have even occurred exactly as they are remembered. As Linda Austin explains, “The nostalgic representation of childhood paradoxically seeks through memory to slough off the burden of memory” (Austin). Wordsworth manipulates memories so he can make them more beautiful and nostalgic, therefore making the present look more dreary and less appealing.
While Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s writings glamorize the past to endure the present, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats takes a different approach. This poem presents a knight that is enthralled by the beauty and wiles of a beautiful woman. Though the poem is written in 1830, it is set in medieval times with a penchant for nostalgic remembrances of princes, princesses, kings, and faeries. These characters are so removed from Keats’ reality that they depict his nostalgia for a time and place that he has never seen. The woman is beautiful – she entices him, loves him, and then leaves him. The speaker is as devastated and lonely at the end as he was at the beginning, but throughout the middle he has an incredible experience with this mythical woman. For Keats, his nostalgia for the Middle Ages leads him to use isolated parts of that culture to make a story out of its most romantic pieces. As ElleBea asserts, Keats has a “determination to create ‘art for art’s sake,’” but the mode through which he does it is historical nostalgia of events and characters that he has never physically encountered himself.
Alongside that poem, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” uses the same conceptual understanding of the function of nostalgia. The Grecian urn in question depicts numerous scenes of people that the speaker expounds upon throughout the poem. The nostalgic is evident in every stanza as the speaker imagines hypothetical scenes that the characters on the urn could be experiencing. A young man and woman, a bough of leaves, a sacrificial ceremony, and a general crowd of men and women are the images that comprise the urn. They have no story in and of themselves, so Keats has to fill in the blanks by whimsically imagining the young man to be chasing the woman, the bough to never be able to lose its leaves, the town emptying to sacrifice a heifer, and the crowd of men and women never being able to age. Laura captures this perfectly by writing, “The figures portrayed on the urn exist outside of time yet remain frozen in it. Though Keats argues that this allows them to maintain the felicity of the season and hold on to their youthful beauty, they must bear the pain of considering the consummation of their passion perpetually dangled just outside their grasp.” They can never achieve their perceived goals, but the point is that Keats projects his own nostalgic understanding of what these figures are capable. The urn is essentially Grecian, so this hearkens back to a classical time period that Keats is imagining rather than having had experienced it personally. This is exactly what he does in “La Belle Dame sane Merci” by invoking medieval times. Both poems exist in an idealized past that is totally separate from the present. The issue of time in Keats' work is a complex one, as demonstrated in this article by Jacquelene Zeff. As she shows, Keats uses the past as an imagined and idealized landscape that is largely unrelated to the present.
Charles Lamb is another author that uses nostalgia extensively in his Romantic works. His approach is different from Coleridge and Wordsworth because Lamb does not seek to make the present a better state by constantly living in remembrance of the past. Lamb also does not resemble Keats because his poetry is not set in a distant land with imagined and elegized personas. In “Old Familiar Faces,” Lamb uses his deep and tragic nostalgia for the “familiar faces” of the past, including his mother, his playmates, his love, and his friend, to impart a riveting sense of loss and loneliness. Lamb does not write this poem to beautify the past in order to make the present more bearable – nor does he dwell in the memories to imagine them as more beautiful than they really were. The present is a sad and unfortunate state since he is lonely and has lost all of the familiar ties that he used to have. In Lamb’s case, nostalgia does not serve to elevate, but to depress. C. captures this sentiment perfectly by saying, “Lamb is left a sad and lonely man, tortured by the bitter memories of a life characterized by abandonment and death...Ultimately, Lamb’s work is largely distinguished by his elegiac relationship to memories and people of his embittered past.” These memories are his only tie to a better time, but they leave him devastated and utterly alone.
All four of these authors use nostalgia in different ways in order to achieve different purposes. Whether the intent is to perfect the past so as to survive the present, imagine a past that the author never actually experienced, or to use memories as a means to destroy all hope for both the present and the future, each author steeps his work in nostalgia. Recovering the past is crucial for these writers. Memories are beautiful, horrible, endearing, sad, heart-wrenching, and alluring. They have different meanings to different people at different times in life. Each of these four authors communicates that point with ease and efficiency, while all using unique techniques to do so.
Works Cited
Austin, Linda M. “Chlidren of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy.” Studies in Romanticism 42.1 (2003); 78.
Gray, Erik. “Nostalgia, the Classics, and the Intimations Ode: Wordsworth’s Forgotten Education.” Philological Quarterly 80.2 (2001): 187.
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