A prison is a place where a person is completely removed from the outside world, and all connections are severed.  A prisoner is forced into ignorance; they have to let the world outside pass by without really know what is happening.  Some people are imprisoned, and some people imprison themselves by limiting their lives to only focus on what makes them comfortable or content.  William Wordsworth portrays in "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room" that the prisons living things put themselves into aren't really prisons at all, but rather comfortable bubbles where those living things are content to stay in.  By looking at the "prisons" Wordsworth refers to, we can see the true dangers in living in one's self-made prison, which most readers don't see; this is important because it exposes the ignorance that comes with all happiness.

There is something very temporary about Wordsworth's poem.  He seems to be aware of these self-made prisons, but he does not speak out against them.  He does, however, hint that perhaps these prisons tend to only last for a time, and they are not satisfactory forever.  Wordsworth writes, "Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) / Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, / Should find brief solace there, as I have found" (Wordsworth lines 12-14, 21).  He says the self-made prisons are brief solaces.  He is saying that people lock themselves into something that briefly brings them comfort with the expectation that the comfort and solace will last, but in reality, it is all very brief.  In the real world, a literal prison serves the purpose of keeping someone who is harmful to society off of the streets, in hopes of helping the community become more safe.  They are put in prison for an amount of time that correlates with how bad the crime they committed was.  For most, prison is temporary.  The same is true for the self-made prisons that people lock themselves into in hopes to keep themselves content.  They are almost always temporary, because it is rare that anyone or anything can find something that satisfies them for an entire lifetime.  At some point, they get tired or bored of what they've enveloped themselves in, and eventually they have to leave the bubble they've become used to and comfortable in.  They have limited themselves, and they have been ignorant, because they thought what they had would last forever.  But in an instant everything can change unexpectedly, and those who have imprisoned themselves and invested their entire lives in only one entity are lost, because their ignorance and complete disregard to the outside world has finally caught up to them.  This is the danger in staying in a bubble that makes someone or something happy.  The feeling of happiness is temporary, and what makes an individual happy is temporary.  Living beings are constantly changing: changing their minds, their interests, their goals; so what makes them happy changes along with them. 

Prisons inarguably have a negative connotation to them, however Wordsworth seems to make "prisons" and "happiness" synonyms.  Prisons are gray, sad, barred, and helplessly depressing.  They seem to represent anything but hope and happiness.  However, Wordsworth turns the meaning of prison and uses it paradoxically.  He describes personal preferences and desires to constantly do what one loves as a prison.  He says, "In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;" (Wordsworth Lines 10-11, 21) as a way of putting the image of a lackluster and unsatisfactory life in the readers mind.  He is suggesting that there is a parallel between a hopeless, isolated prison and a happy pastime. These are two seemingly unrelated states that are being compared, but the underlying issue in both of them comes back to ignorance.  The common phrase, "ignorance is bliss", plays directly into what Wordsworth is trying to say.  Prisons force ignorance upon its prisoners, and happiness forces ignorance upon its prisoners.  While the two states of mind are completely opposite, they can still have the same effect.  On the surface, Wordsworth's imagery seems to being saying the opposite of what he has written in his poem, but the meaning is in the similarities between the imagery and his writing.  

Wordsworth's poem throws individuality completely out the window by not distinguishing between all of the living things he describes.  He levels the playing field for all of them; no matter their place or preconceived ranking in the world when he says, "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells; / And students with their pensive citadels;" (Wordsworth 1-3, 21).  There is nothing different about each of them because they all do and accomplish the same things, relative to their abilities.  What they do is not relevant, and no one is ultimately more supreme than anyone else.  When looking at these self-made prisons, the person or thing in the prison is utterly moot.  Nothing about them matters; what matters is that they all have made the same decision to limit themselves to one particular preoccupation.  Wordsworth essentially reduces living things of all kinds down to one state, where there are no rankings or hierarchies.  Just like real life prisons, it does not matter who the people in the prison used to be, what matters is that they all became prisoners.  They are all living the same life, despite their backgrounds and how they each got there.  The same is true for figurative prisons that living beings sentence themselves to, everyone ends up in a prison of their own making, the difference is in how long they stay unaware.  All of them have made the choice to sentence themselves to lives of limitations and ignorance all for the desire of being content and comfortable all the time.  The mutual goal in the end is to live a happy life.  Some think that the way to achieving happiness is money, for others it's compassion; it doesn't matter.  Wordsworth's point in this Sonnet is that a living being's acute desire to achieve a happy life actually leads to a prisoning and narrow-minded life.  They all hone in on what's going to make them happy while the world around them continues to turn; introducing new ideas and opportunities, while the prisoners are too busy focusing on their prison to pay them any attention, which leads to even more ignorance.

Wordsworth uses the parallel he draws between happiness and imprisonment throughout the poem.  In drawing parallels between two seemingly disconnected things, he is describing the ignorance that is so frustrating.  If the reader were ignorant and did not even look for the depth in this poem, it would only prove his point about how content living beings are with merely scraping the surface.  His poem challenges the reader to change their pace and look at their own lives, and the general lives around them, in a different light.  He is perhaps encouraging them to reconsider their habits and tendencies, and to agree or disagree with what he is proposing; not just to ignore it.  

