To My Sister

• Romantic era


  Period in literature (roughly 1700-1800s) where writers celebrated nature and saw it as tied to higher ideals of innocence and the sublime
• William Wordsworth was a Romantic poet
• Romantic poets


  • Saw nature as representing innocence and having a healing force, but also a dark and scary side
• When the poem "To My Sister" was written


  1798
• William Wordsworth


  Was recovering from depression when he wrote this poem
• Dorothy Wordsworth


  William Wordsworth's sister, who the poem is addressed to
• The poem describes a wish to walk in the woods, which Wordsworth saw as teaching something important about life and human nature
• Poem analysis


  1. Read through the poem

  2. Analyze the poem's message, themes, and poetic techniques
• Poem structure


  • Written in quatrains (4-line stanzas) with a consistent ABAB rhyme scheme
• Poem's message


  The speaker (likely Wordsworth) invites his sister to go on a walk in nature, seeing it as a way to find peace, happiness, and escape from the mundanity of everyday life
• Poetic techniques used


  • Pathetic fallacy, alliteration, sibilance, semantic field of nature, personification, hyperbole, syntactic parallelism, assonance
• The poem reflects Wordsworth's Romantic beliefs about the power and importance of nature
• The poem suggests nature can provide profound lessons and transform one's soul