Romulus My Father And Wordsworth Essay

Through the passage of time both within our own lives as well as throughout a broader historical context, our attitudes toward belonging adjust. It is through the embracement or rejection of these adjustments to our relationships with the others, the world and our own self that our experience of belonging is enriched or limited. Thus a sense of belonging or not belonging can determine our attitudes and values throughout the entire course of our lives. This can be seen within Raimond Gaita’s 1998 memoir ‘Romulus my Father’ and William Wordsworth’s 1978 poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ as they search through their past and discover their own individual sense of acceptance to their story and their world.

The 1998 reflective memoir ‘Romulus my Father’ is
This can be seen within the emotive language that portays feelings of longing and pain within the first stanza, stating “Five years have passed … and now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought/With many recognitions dim and faint/though changes, no doubt, from what I was, when first/I came among these hills”. This foregrounds Wordsworth’s bittersweet nostalgia that reflects the pain and separation he feels to the land and his past now that he cannot reconstruct those memories he held so dear. Though his memories have faded, Wordsworth still feels an unwavering connection to the landscape, and explores the complex interaction between man and nature as an inseparate relationship, just as Gaita does within ‘Romulus my Father’ through the metaphor of the landscape. This can be seen through the metaphor which depicts nature as the “anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul. All of my moral being”, foregrounding the link between man and nature, as Wordsworth finds security and harmony in the memory of the Old Abbey, just as Gaita does in the landscape of the Australian