Anna Letitia Barbauld's Imagination Essay

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s A Summer Evening’s Meditation is a poem that shows the extraordinary power of the imaginative mind. Barbauld’s masterpiece was once neglected from the rest of the Romantic writers that were after her time, but her vivid and descriptive voice shone through the poem and into the minds of readers around the world. Imagination, one of the characteristics of Romanticism, is the key component that made this poem one of the most amazing pieces of literature in the Romantic era. It creates a different world separate from reality, like a divine vision that taps into the soul of the writer and assists with removing whatever troubles are in the writer’s life.
The beginning of the poem starts out with the sun setting in the east. “Tis past!,” the narrator shouts with
(53-56)

This gives the narrator a look into her immortal soul, that small part of herself that shows God’s glory. The narrator becomes so awed with this vision that she calls the heavens filled with stars and planets named after gods her “future home” (62). The last few paragraph of the poem has the narrator turn her eyes from the breathtaking creation of God’s to God Himself. She feels unworthy yet she wants to be in His presence as she cries out, “O look with pity down / on erring guilty man” (105-106). The narrator imagines God having a “gentler voice,” different from the voice that dominated the Old Testament (109). She longs to “behold her Maker,” mostly likely that she can not imagine the full gloriousness of God (111). But Anna Barbauld ends her poem with words that show her faith merging with her imagination: Wait the appointed time
And ripen for the skies: the hour will come
When all these splendours bursting on my sight
Shall stand unveiled, and to my ravished sense
Unlock the glories of the world unknown.