English blogging assignment #2

In Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room, the theme of confinement is explored in many different ways. In the first 3 lines of the poem, Wordsworth describes small, restrictive places such as “[the] Convent’s narrow room” (Line 1), the “Hermits’ cells,” (Line 2), and the “students’ citadels” (Line 3) very negatively, as places of physical confinement. In Line 4, the tone changes slightly to describe “maids at the wheel” and “weavers at their looms,” now describing a type of confinement by work and by necessity, but not quite physical restriction. Lines 6 and 7 describe bees that are free to soar however high they please, but end up limiting themselves “by the hour in Foxglove bells” (Line 7), once again confined by work, necessity, and arguably also by the comfort of food.

In contrast to the first half of the poem which describes physical locations of confinement, the second half describes abstract places within which people choose to close themselves. In lines 7-8 of the poem, Wordsworth says, “… the prison unto which we doom ourselves, no prison is,” claiming that those limitations which we place upon ourselves are not true limitations, but simply the decisions by we choose to live our lives. He later describes a sonnet as a physical place, or a “scanty plot of ground” (Line 11) in which one can choose to reside, especially those who “have felt the weight of too much liberty” (Line 13). By this, he means to say that those who lack important responsibilities, or those who lack enough restraint in their lives, can find relief within the limitations of a sonnet. This contrast between the physical, almost forcible confinement in the first half of the poem and the chosen confinement in the second half of the poem demonstrates how the concept of confinement is not necessarily negative, but can lead to many constructive events as well.