In the poems of Shakespeare, nature is used instrumentally as a means to an end. It provides a rich store of metaphor on which Shakespeare can draw to express certain emotions, especially those relating to romantic love. In the sonnets, it's often the case that features of the natural world are compared to the beauty of the speaker's beloved and found wanting. As well as the example of "Sonnet 18" mentioned by the previous educator, we also have "Sonnet 130," where it seems that the speaker, in saying that his mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun, is being derogatory toward her. However, it becomes clear that this comparison is made to illustrate the fact that the love the speaker has for his beloved is far more beautiful and enduring than any feature of the natural world.

Wordsworth, on the other hand (in common with many Romantic poets), sees nature as something with its own unique identity that is to be valued in its own right. He conceives of the natural world as a gigantic organism with a life all of its own and to which each and every one of us is related to as part of a cosmic unity. Nature isn't just something pretty to look at for Wordsworth; it is a transcendent force, filling us with a sense of being related to something bigger than ourselves, inspiring us with the very deepest thoughts. As he puts it in one of his most famous poems, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey":

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.