Scanty Plot, Revisited

In the poem, “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room,” Wordsworth utilizes metonymy and illustrates several characters but focuses only on their locations and conditions; in doing so, he removes the individual identities of the characters and instead illuminates their commonalities.  In my original blog post, I supported this idea by recognizing that the characters themselves would be insignificant without Wordsworth’s statement of their constraints. He goes through each character and informs the listener of their unique “prison.” The location of each character is very important and Wordsworth uses only location to define the characters, which I would consider metonymy. Instead of describing the characters, he describes their solitude or repetitious lifestyle through location.

In the second paragraph of my blog, I describe that he uses metonymy again but in a different way. He describes the beautiful location, Furness Fells, but fills this location with the same condition of life. As the poem progresses, so does the complexity of context. I pointed out how Wordsworth begins to apply the same principles of contentment with repetition to his own identity. At this point, he again uses metonymy and describes himself on the “Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” It is an abstract location, which provides significance to his identity. He shows some defensiveness of his own life’s task being a writer, but describes his surroundings in such a way to convince the reader otherwise. Metonymy is used very productively in Wordsworth’s description of himself. He precedes his own description with that of the free soaring bees of Furness Fells in an effort to protect his own identity.