![]() Her view on death is imaginative, optimistic, and innocent. Wordsworth portrays death as it appeals to the little girl’s emotions and imagination. “Then did the little Maid reply/ ‘Seven boys and girls are we/ Two of us in the church-yard lie/ Beneath the church-yard tree’.” (Greenblatt, 278). For example, William Wordsworth wrote a beautiful poem called “We are Seven” and it deals with a little girl who has lost two siblings to death. Because death has such a strong impact on the living, Romanticism sought to explore it. Some Romantic poems focus on death’s appeal to people’s emotions and imagination. ![]() The Romantic Era brought new and fascinating views on death. Thus, death is portrayed in a unique way. Rather, because it was such an inventive time, most poems sent messages of hope. This does not necessarily mean that the poems during this period were “light and airy”. These words accurately display the mindset of the Romantic Period, and it sets the stage for Romantic literature. Duncan Wu’s Romanticism says that the word “Romantic” meant “fanciful”, “light”, and “inconsequential” (Wu, xxx). In The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, it says that Romanticism was the most recently largest movement to transform the lives of the Western World (Berlin, 1). And more concepts of life and death were pondered. This is a time when society was exploring more, discovering more, and thinking more. There are many different views on death in Romantic literature especially. Each person-each author-has their own view on death, dying, leaving this world and going onto the next, or maybe just decaying into the dust, cold and forgotten. Death is a unique topic, in that there is no one particular view on death. From the loss of soldiers in Wordsworth’s ballads to Beth’s heartbreaking illness in Little Women, it is a strong, emphatic, impactful subject matter. Throughout literature, death is a commonly used topic.
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