Scanty Plot

            In the poem, “Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room,” metonymy is an important motif used throughout the sonnet. Wordsworth uses the location of each of his characters: the nun, hermits, students, maids, weaver, bees, and even himself to signify their importance to his point.  The characters described have no importance without the recognition of their constraints. Metonymy is an indirect way of illustrating a character through the description of their surroundings. Each character has a prison in which they limit themselves.  He describes the rooms of the nun’s convent as “narrow” giving the reader an idea of entrapment and solitude. The workers that Wordsworth uses are “sitting” at their places of labor, which to the reader may seem monotonous and boring. The first few characters described by Wordsworth all seem to be boring and motionless through his use of metonymy; the cells and narrow room of the convent, especially.

Wordsworth’s tone changes at line 5. He brings in the characters, “bees,” which have a very different location. Bees “soar for bloom” and convey such positive and free images for the reader. The metonymy used is a location treasured by Wordsworth, “Furness Fells.” But even then, Wordsworth reminds the reader that the bees are limited to their one location, doing one task. Even the soaring creatures that we see as free are now recognized as another form of confined worker. He uses their location as metonymy to signify that the bee characters are too trapped in their own prison. This particular usage of location is where Wordsworth begins to understand how a person confined to a “prison” can be completely content (as all of his characters are.) He moves from a place of confusion to a place of understanding contentment with entrapment. The metonymy guides the reader through his journey towards recognition of the true comfort that a “prison” provides for its inhabitant. With understanding, Wordsworth applies the same principle to himself. He uses metonymy to describe his own prison: “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” While a sonnet is not usually something concrete, Wordsworth crafts an image to signify the relevance of his own poetic work.