Fireside poet- reflection

For my fireside poet, I chose to read a poem by William Cullen Bryant.  I did not choose him for any specific reason.  The poem that I read is titled A Dream  by William Cullen Bryant.  In this poem, William Cullen Bryant talks about a dream that someone had. In this dream, nature plays the biggest role.  Along with nature comes with growing old, which also plays a role in the poem, but not as great as nature in general.  I guess they can both be considered parts of nature.  Either way, the dream is about life.  The dreamer describes the dream as sunny, warm, and beautiful in the summer.  Everything was happy, colorful, and buzzing of life.  One particular part of the poem, I found especially nice.

"Fast climbed the sun: the flowers were flown,
There played no children in the glen;
For some were gone, and some were grown
To blooming dames and bearded men." (PoemHunter).

I think I liked this passage because of the description.  I picture lovely ladies in old fashion, pretty dresses and classy looking men in old fashion, business-casual suits.  Pretty much, I get a scene from the movie Gone With the Wind in my head.  I also liked how nature is described in this passage.  I am an individual who really enjoys and appreciates the outdoors, so the vision of the warm, shining sun and a meadow of flowers added to the detailed description.

If I were to compare a fireside poet like William Cullen Bryant and his writing style to the style of a Puritan, I would argue that they are very different.  The Puritan style of writing was pretty much solely based on God and religion.  As you can read from at least ten of my other blogs from this class, I have done a lot of work on the Puritan's and their form of writing.  The Puritan writers are known for including their religion and how God was relative in their lives.  God and religion were always the main focus of the entire written piece.  On the contrary, the fireside writers were different.  They were from the Romanticism period.  During the Romanticism period, their focus was more on intuition, emotion, and based on feeling.  Nature was included in this because it is pure and not man made.  Obviously, the example from A Dream by William Cullen Bryant shows that perfectly.  The fireside writers did not include religion because it was not as important to them.  The Puritans thought that God controlled every single thing that happened in their lives, and they were either destined to go to Heaven or destined to go to Hell.  The people of the Romanticism period were not as worried about it as the Puritans.  They believed in having faith, but it was a much more open faith.  The people during the Romanticism period basically sat back and enjoyed life for what it was.  This included the good and the bad, which is reflected in many fireside poet's poems.  They did not have the rules and regulations like the Puritans did.

PoemHunter.com. N.p., 5 Apr. 2010. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. <http://poemhunter.com/poem/ 

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