Through her poem, “Some Say Plants Don’t Speak”, Rosalia De Castro stressed the importance of respecting the natural world. She was a Spanish writer and heavily influenced the people of that culture. She believed that for a person o really connect with themselves, they should listen to what nature has to say through its naturalness. For example, she writes that “Stars and fountains and flowers, don’t murmur against my dream; could I delight in you without them, without them, could I live? ” (Line 14-15). She declares that one cannot move through life without this beautiful greenery.
It bothers her that people disregard the aesthetics of the outdoors and can’t see that life coincides with it. Having one and not the other is something so impossible to her to fathom. Nature is an ongoing cycle and Castro states that it’s “the eternal spring of life”. The wildlife has a past and it should be the practicality of life. As she approaches death, she uses the environment to comfort herself and allows her imagination to roam freely in order to think of better things. According to Castro, Nature is not something easy to explain.
However, once one learns to truly appreciate it, he will begin to understand this feeling of endlessness. In William Wordsworth’s poem “The World is Too Much for Us”, he describes in the title alone that society can’t handle the magnitude of nature and therefore ignores it. Wordsworth believed in the beauty and appreciation of nature relative to life. People cannot bear all the world has to offer and therefore contends that there is not enough room in the world for us and nature. Wordsworth says that “[people are] getting and spending” (Line 2).
Humans live like robots; we work ordinary jobs to make a salary so we can pay off debts and mortgages as well as support the family. We are so busy in trying to rise in society that we don’t take under consideration things with aesthetic beauty such as parks, greenery, and landscapes because we do not perceive it as something beneficial which will help us excel. Therefore, it has little significance in our lives. He states sarcastically that “[he] would rather be pagan” and just “have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.
“We have given our hearts away” (Line 4), to jobs, money, and all materialistic things that we believe make us happy. We are too busy worrying about making money that it prevents us from seeing beyond. The value of nature is not something tangible which made it harder for people during the industrial revolution to grasp. Wordsworth says humans have to make the world a better place. In order to achieve this goal, people must get out of their routine lives and make time to themselves.
People should ‘stop and smell the roses’ and understand that there is more to life than money and power. Castro views the cycle of life and the cycle of nature as almost identical. Castro’s poem “I Well Know There is Something,” describes how we are living a simple and dull life, and how we are like “clocks that repeat forever the same” (Lines 7-8). In other words, there is no change in our day to day life. Doing the same thing everyday can depress a person. In “The Ailing Women Felt her Forces Ebb,” a woman speaks about how sick she is and is ready to die.
She says, “In autumn I shall die” (Line 3). In autumn, trees become leafless, the weather is cold, it rain, and it’s very windy. If God listens to the woman, she would die in a horrible season in which she can’t enjoy the beauties of the world or nature. Instead, she survives until spring and sees the attractions of nature, teasing her with new life as she dies. She expected to die in autumn, instead she dies in spring, giving her a last peak of the amazing and beautiful things she is going to miss out on.
Flowers are blooming the same period she is dying which portrays Castro’s depiction of the cycle of life to the cycle of nature. Being in a clock like routine dominates a person’s life and he doesn’t realize how fast the time has gone. Only once he is older he appreciates life in a different way, which in this case is her possibly dying in the fall rather than the spring. However, once spring time arrives and flowers are blooming all around her, she has an even greater epiphany of the glories of nature.
In his poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth is remembering a scene of nature he saw five years earlier and now, as an grown man that understands more about life, realizes the beauty of what he saw. He talks about how he was fascinated as a kid by the brilliance of nature. He remembers almost every detail: the sound of the “mountain springs,” “this dark sycamore,” and the “hedge rows. ” He mentions how he would always reminisce about his experience, which would help keep him keep sane.
When he’s there, he’s thinking about his perception of it in the past, and the way he will reminisce about this experience in the future. His perspective on nature changed. Now, he is not only fascinated by its beauty, rather looks at it in a more detailed form, understanding its place in the world as well as how everything in the world is connected with one another. As he grew older he became more mature and wise, which allowed him to see things differently and have a much more deeper understanding of life in connection with nature.