The "Nature" of Nature Poetry

Of the assigned poets, so many of them focus on man's relationship to nature. William Blake, Percy Shelley and William Wordsworth are Romantic poets. This category of poets are known for having nature themed poems. Their influence is immense because later poets such as Walt Whitman and Robert Frost also explored the affect of nature on man's emotions. Whitman's poem, "A Noiseless Patient Spider," compares the speaker's soul to that of a spider's web. The spider tediously works at its web, in its isolated space in the world. The speaker also feels isolated and that his soul is seeking its bearings, its place in life. Whitman had the ability to look at something common in nature and interpret in a way that reflected what was going on in his own mind and heart. Not all nature poems are optimistic. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" starts out with a pretty description:
"The sea is calm to-night, / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the Straits; - on the French coast, the light / Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay."
The poem takes a turn when it begins to talk of the melancholy sounds in the dark and ends on a very pessimistic note:
"Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain..."
It shows that the beauty of the world can affect people in so many different ways. It can inspire love and hope, or it can remind one that all must die and decay, as Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He states, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." There is no direct statement of unhappiness or suicidal feelings. It is subtly in the poem, as if nature itself can draw that out of a person.
One author we were not assigned wrote a gorgeous nature poem, in which he compares the beauty of his love to that of nature, Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty." He claims her beauty and love is innocent and nature is in harmony with it, for, "all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes: / Thus mellow'd to that tender light / Which heaven to gaudy day denies." He immortalizes his love, just as Whitman does his soul and Frost does his will to live, by embedding them in enduring nature.