A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Content Warning: This section includes child death and illness.

Literary scholars generally attribute the rise of English Romanticism to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). The poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge reflect the tenets of the literary movement. Reacting to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge stressed the power of nature and individual subjectivity. Romantic poems indicated that humans couldn’t control their own destinies, and what propelled them was nature and the unquantifiable human spirit. Other notable Romantic poets include Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. In his lyric “Mutability” (1816), Shelley puts instability at the center of life. Byron showcases the forcefulness of the human spirit in his autobiographical epic Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). In the lyric “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), Keats presents abstract beauty and truth, not a scientific equation or formula, as the key to life. In this way, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” reflects Romanticism’s fascination with the blurred boundary between life and death, nature and humanity, emphasizing how natural forces shape human experience and emotion beyond rational control.