Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent's Narrow Room by William Wordsworth - Summary

According to the narrator, nuns, who dedicated their lives to God, don't complain about their small rooms in the convent. Neither do hermits ask for more than an ordinary cell to stay. It is more than what they ask for. 

A student, who is a devotee of his studies, who is busy in his books in his limited confinement, shuts himself away from distractions in his "citadel" i.e. a solitary place to study and think deeply about it and to arrive at new findings.

Whether one looks at maids who spin wheel or the weaver who works on his loom, they work without making a fuss and remain happy in it. 

Even minute creatures such as bees also take flight as high as the "highest peak of Furness-fells", and then murmur (means working tirelessly) inside the bell-shaped flowers of fox-glove.

A bee going inside fox-glove

He adds that it is us that put ourselves into our own mind-generated prison of a sort. We desire excessive liberty, which is not good for us, in reality. We need rules and regulations to govern us. If there are no regulations, there will be chaos, we will be directionless and working solely on the needs of our instincts. Our own desires and expectations are the source of our anxiety and distress in us. 

Wordsworth now uses this philosophy in realizing that often he gives himself liberty to write in free verse, which has no rules. Because it has no rules, maintaining temperance can be difficult. Also, it doesn't give him contentment, so he returns to the sonnet convention of poetry, which has fixed rules including line and meter. But this limit keeps his writing in shape, as he believes.

Now he shares this philosophy to the readers because he feels that some of us, who cannot handle too much liberty, can find solace in an activity as he has found in the convention of sonnet.

Wordsworth, through this poem, conveys the idea that we must have healthy boundaries and limits to our actions. For instance, some of us think of work as limiting or restrictive, they think of it as a prison, in reality, it isn't a prison, but in fact, it gives a purpose to a person, otherwise, if we give him absolute liberty, there will be a possibility of him misusing this liberty and engage in debauchery endlessly. So too much liberty is not helpful, we have to confine/ immerse ourselves in some purposeful activities to lead a satisfied life.