Across humanity's long documented existence, members of the human race have developed a range of attitudes to experiences that extend beyond a single generation. Issues surrounding love, dreams, values, race, culture, and gender have been weathered and documented by human beings for centuries. Authors such as William Wordsworth, George Gordon Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurst, and Virginia Woolf have all eloquently spoken of the human condition and all it entails. Each in his or her own way describes the trials and triumphs of being human in accordance with his or her experiences and the state of world affairs.
William Wordsworth's Ode; Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood was published in 1807. This and all of Wordsworth's works were deeply influenced by nature (he is, after all, a naturalist who believed in the power of nature). In the poem, Wordsworth proposes that life on Earth is second to a previous celestial life rich in nature saying, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting" (59-61). Wordsworth asserts that we remember our previous life in childhood as we interact with nature, but it fades from memory as we age. The narrator, possibly Wordsworth himself, mourns his previous life saying, "Now, while the birds/thus sing a joyous song,/And while the young lambs bound/As to the tabor's sound,/To me alone there came a thought of grief" (19-22). Wordsworth appears to reassure his readers that there is more to life than meets the eye. If his pleasant prose about the subject is any indication, oneness with nature is undoubtedly what Wordsworth believes to be the key to a full life.
Unlike Wordsworth's poems that celebrate beauty in nature, George Gordon Lord Byron's She Walks in Beauty (1814) admires a woman-a woman who is widely believed to be his cousin. Byron describes the woman in the poem ...