Byron and Shelley.

Byron and Shelley were at the forefront of the Romanticism
era. Like Coleridge and Wordsworth, the two were great friends despite the
differences in their upbringing. Their styles grew and fed off of one another’s,
without a doubt, and some similarities are easily seen between some of their
pieces. For one, the reverence for not just the aesthetic pleasure of nature,
but the unbridled power it can wield when perceived the right way. Byron’s “She
Walks In Beauty” is the first of two good examples of this perception. She
Walks is inspired by the sight of Byron’s cousin by marriage, but upon deeper
inspection it can very easily be seen to have allusions to nature from the
aesthete’s point of view. The less focused-on features of the woman’s face,
like her cheek and her brow, are now discussed so prominently, almost a
testament to the Romanticism writer’s desire to return to the more primal, basic
roots of nature. This is also displayed in the second Byron piece from the
packet. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” depicts the viciousness of the ocean, how
it is almost nature’s revenge force against the crimes mankind has committed upon
it. The ocean tosses ships around and pulls man down to the depths “with
bubbling groan, without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.” It is
this respect of nature’s power that sets Byron apart from the writers in the
previous packet. Shelley also displays this same reverence for nature and
nature’s power, but in a slightly different way than Byron had done. He takes
that concept and places it in hand with the slight instability of humanity, as
seen in “Ozymandias.” His shorter descriptions of the events in the poem (Byron
was a tad long-winded) create the feel that nothing is going to last forever,
adding to the aforementioned frailty of mankind. He writes with an almost
fondness of the feature of the statue, and in the last lines when he mentions
the “level sands” it reminds me of how the building material for the statue had
at one point been a part of nature. This reinforces the Romanticism belief that
everything has its roots in and stems outward from nature.