Name: Vaishali Hareshbhai Jasoliya
Roll No. : 28
Enrollment
no.: PG14101019
Topic:
Wordsworth as a Nature Poet
Paper
No.: 5 Romantic Literature
Email-Id:
jasoliyavaishali@gmail.com
Submitted
to: MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI
BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
∎Introduction:
Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, a town on the edge of the
Cumberland highlands.
Both father and mother died in his boyhood;
his mother first, his father when he was fourteen. He was a major English
Romantic poet.
WORDSWORTH was, first and foremost,
a philosophical thinker; a man whose intention and purpose of life it was to
think out for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions concerning ‘Man
and Nature and Human Life.’ He was began his career as a poet at quite an early
age when he was yet a student at Hawkshed Grammar School. Wordsworth was the
high priest of nature. In his treatment of natural objects, humble life and
common objects of the ordinary world, we find a touch of wonder and curiosity.
Wordsworth published in 1807 two volumes of
poems which represent the fine flower of his genius. In every poetic form that
he used, with the possible exception of the narrative, Wordsworth is seen here
at the height of his power. His remarkable lyrics included in these two volumes
are: The solitary Reader, The Greek Linnet, I wandered lonely as a cloud.
⋆Wordsworth- the first great poet of Nature:
Wordsworth is the high
priest of Nature and the poetry of Nature finds its most sublime and sustaining
expression in his work. He was rightly considered the greatest poet of the
countryside and of the life of nature in its physical as well as spiritual
aspects. Wordsworth’s delight in nature was not confined like the pre-romantic
poets to mere external manifestation of the varied charms of nature, but he
went a step higher they to represent nature as a mystical force capable to
enlightening and ennobling the human soul and mind. In nature Wordsworth “was
concerned for less with the sensuous manifestations that delight most of our
Nature poets, than with the spiritual that he finds underlying these
manifestations.” His great contribution to the poetry of nature does not lie in
the fact that he could give accurate and closely observed pictures of nature
rich and minute in detail but in the fact that he elevated nature to height of
spiritual glory and made it a better teacher.
⋆Three stages in Wordsworth’s treatment of Nature:
The
predominantly spiritual tone of Wordsworth’s appreciation of nature
was not a continued process from the day of childhood to the days of maturity
and philosophic insight into the heart of things. In the prelude or Growth of a Poet’s
Mind we have a complete picture of the evolution of the various stages of
his appreciation of nature beginning with the physical plane and ending with
the mystical and spiritualistic interpretation of nature. Poet’s attitude
towards nature may be classified under three heads
:
First stage -
The period of the blood:
Wordsworth’s
youth and formative years of life were spent in the midst of nature’s beautiful
surroundings. In the first stage his love for nature was without any mystical
and spiritual touch. In his youth he was attracted by the physical beauty of
nature, and he haunted the hills and the vales for the sake of angling, snaring
birds, hunting and enjoying the lovely spectacles of nature’s varied life. He
cared at this stage for ‘the coarser pleasures of my boyish days, and their glad
animal movements all gone by.” In the first period he loved nature with a
passion which was all physical, without having any tinge of intellectual or
philosophical association.
Second stage
- The period of the senses:
It was the age of sweet sensations. He was
thrilled and enchanted by the sights and sounds of Nature. Referring to the boyish
delights of this period when he viewed nature with a physical passion.
Third stage
- The period of the imagination and the soul:
Wordsworth begins to find in the objects of
nature a soul and a living spirit, and in the later period of his life, his
physical and sensuous appreciation of nature takes the form of a spiritual and
mystical apprehension of the inner spirit of nature. He now starts looking into
the objects of nature:
A spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of
all thought
And rolls through all things.
The poet now feels the presence of God colouring all the objects of --Nature,
investing them with a celestial light- ‘a light that never was on sea or land.’
He finds Him in the shining of the stars, and he marks Him in the flowering of
the fields. This immanence of God in Nature gives him mystic visions. He finds
nature as the physical expression of divine being. Wordsworth endows each and every object of
nature with life. He forestells the modern biological researches that there is
a soul and living principle in all the forms and shapes of nature’s myriad
objects. The poet says:
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the
high way
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel.
⋆William Wordsworth as a poet of Nature:
As a poet of nature, Wordsworth stands
supreme. He is a worshipper of Nature, Nature’s devotee or high-priest. His
love of Nature was probably truer, and more tender, than that of any other
English poet, before or since. Nature comes to occupy in his poem a separate or
independent status and is not treated in a casual or passing manner as by poets
before him. Wordsworth had a full-fledged philosophy, a new and original view
of Nature.
There are three points in his creed of Nature:
Ø
He conceived of Nature as a living personality. He believed that there is
a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature may be termed as mystical
Pantheism and is fully expressed in Tintern
Abbey and in several passages in Book II of The Prelude.
Ø
Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy of the human
heart and he looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on
sorrow-stricken hearts.
Ø
Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He
spiritualised Nature and regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best
mother, guardian and nurse of man, and as an elevating influence. He believed
that between man and Nature there is mutual consciousness, spiritual communion
or ‘mystic intercourse’. He initiates his readers into the secret of the soul’s
communion with Nature.
Wordsworth believed that we
can learn more of man and of moral evil and good from Nature than from all the
philosophies. In his eyes, “Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and
without which any human life is vain and incomplete”. He believed in the
education of man by Nature
.
v Development
of His Love for Nature:
Wordsworth childhood had been spent in
Nature’s lap. Nature was “both law and impulse”. And in earth and heaven, in
glade and bower, Wordsworth was conscious of a spirit which kindled and
restrained. In a variety of exciting ways, which he did not understand, Nature
intruded upon his escapades and pastimes, even when he was indoors, speaking
“memorable things”.
In Tintern
Abbey, Wordsworth traces the development of his love for Nature. In his
boyhood Nature was simply a playground for him. At the second stage he began to
love and seek Nature but he was attracted purely by its sensuous or aesthetic
appeal. Finally his love for Nature acquired a spiritual and intellectual
character, and he realized Nature’s role as a teacher and educator.
In the Immortality
ode he tells us that as a boy his love for Nature was a thoughtless passion
but that when he grew up, the objects of Nature took a sober colouring from his
eyes and gave rise to profound thoughts in his mind because he had witnessed
the sufferings of humanity.
v Spiritual
Meaning in Natural Objects:
Compton
Rickett rightly observes that Wordsworth is far less concerned with the sensuous
manifestations than with the spiritual significance that he finds underlying
these manifestations. To him the primrose and the daffodil are symbols to him
of Nature’s message to man. A sunrise for him is not a pageant of colour; it is
a movement of spiritual consecration.
v Nature
Descriptions:
Wordsworth is sensitive to every subtle
change in the world about him. He can give delicate and subtle expression to
the sheer sensuous delight of the world of Nature. He can feel the elemental
joy of spring:
It
was an April morning, fresh and clear
The
rivulet, delighting in its strength,
Ran
with a young man’s speed, and yet the voice
Of
waters which the river had supplied
Was
softened down into a vernal tone.
He
can take an equally keen pleasure in the tranquil lake:
The
calm
And
dead still water lay upon my mind
Even
with a weight of pleasure
A brief study of his pictures of Nature
reveals his peculiar power in actualizing sound and its converse, silence.
Being the poet of the ear and of the eye, he
is exquisitely felicitous.
No other poet could have written:
A
voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
Breaking
the silence of the seas -
Among
the farthest Hebrides.
Unlike most descriptive poets who are
satisfied if they achieve a static pictorial effect, Wordsworth can direct his
eye and ear and touch to conveying a sense of the energy and movement behind
the workings of the natural world. “Goings on” was a favourite word he applied
to Nature. But he is not interested in mere Nature description.
Wordsworth records his own feelings with
reference to the objects which stimulate him and call forth the description.
His unique apprehension of Nature was determined by his peculiar
sense-endowment. His eye was at once far-reaching and penetrating. He looked
through the visible scene to what he calls its “ideal truth”. He pored over
objects till he fastened their images on his brain and brooded on these in
memory till they acquired the liveliness of dreams. He had a keen ear too for
all natural sounds, the calls of beasts and birds, and the sounds of winds and
waters; and he composed thousands of lines wandering by the side of a stream.
But he was not richly endowed in the less intellectual senses of touch, taste
and temperature.
∎ Affinity between Man and Nature:
It is
the realization of the spirit of God permeating the objects of nature as well
as human beings made of flesh and blood that enables Wordsworth to bring Man
and Nature closer to each other. The poet believes that the same divine spirit
governs and pulsates though human beings and nature and hold out the
possibility of a thorough going communion between man and nature. In fact,
Wordsworth seeks to establish a harmony between man and nature through his
nature poems. He is seldom content to draw beautiful scenes of nature for their
own sake. He unites nature with man. He looks on nature to hear “the still sad
music of humanity” and his portrayal of man seen against a background of nature
gives rise to some of his best known poems such as The Solitary Reaper, Resolution and Independence and Michael. This point
has been beautifully emphasized by Compton- Rickett in the following words_ “In
Nature, the poet is concerned far less with the sensuous manifestations that
delight most of our Nature poets, than with the spiritual that he finds
underlying these manifestations.
Wordsworth believes that man can get lessons
from Nature for his edification if he brings with him ‘a heart that watches and
receives’ and leaves behind his ‘meddling intellect that murders to dissect.’
Nature can be a perfect educator of man and in his Lucy poems the poet represents the education of nature. “To
Wordsworth Nature appeals as formative influence superior to any other, the
educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our feelings and belief. It
speaks to the child in the fleeting emotions of its early years and stirs the
young poet to an ecstasy, the glow of which illuminates all his work and the
rest of his life.” What nature can do for man is represented by the poet in Education of Nature and in Tintern Abbey. In the later poem Wordsworth
emphasizes the educative power of nature and says:
She (nature)
can so inform
The mind that it is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty
That neither evil tongues
Rash judgments nor the sneers of selfish men
Shall ever prevail against us.
Ø Joy in
Nature:
Wordsworth finds joy in Nature. The feeling of pessimism does not oppress the heart
of the poet when he is in the presence of the beautiful and joyful aspects of
nature. The personal dealing with nature in all her moods ‘produces a joy, a
plenteousness of delight and all readers of Wordsworth ‘s nature poems feel
that sense of exultation and joy which the poet himself had experienced in his
life.’ In the words of W.H. Hudson, ‘Wordsworth finds a never failing principle
of joy.’ The hare runs races in her mirth, the flowers enjoy the air they
breathe and the waves dance beside the daffodils:
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare.
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair.
Ø Presentation
of peaceful aspects of Nature:
It is one of the peculiar features of
Wordsworth’s nature poetry that all the attention of the poet is directed to
the representation of calm andtranquil sights and scene of nature. He
never presents nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. He deals only with the trim and
well-dressed nature as it is in the Lack Districts, but he has not one word to
say about the malevolent aspect of nature- nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.
“Wordsworth found in nature what he sought, the peace that was in his soul.”
Wordsworth’s healing balm to festered sores of humanity rises out of this
tranquil and peaceful representation of nature’s objects.
Ø A Great
worshipper of Nature:
Throughout his life Wordsworth remained a
true interpreter of nature to humanity. “Nature not only gave him the matter,”
says Matthew Arnold,” but wrote his poems for him.” He became the worshipper of
nature, her true priest and a revealer of her harmonies to humanity. His
essential attitude towards nature remained that of a devout worshipper
prostrating before the sights and scenes of nature in the spirit of supplication,
reverence and worship.
* Conclusion:
Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature can be
clearly differentiated from that of the other great poets of Nature. He did not
prefer the wild and stormy aspects of Nature like Byron, or the shifting and
changeful aspects of Nature and the scenery of the sea and sky like Shelley, or
the purely sensuous in Nature like Keats. It was his special characteristic to
concern himself, not with the strange and remote aspects of the earth, and sky,
but Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ as Tennyson did. Wordsworth stressed upon
the moral influence of Nature and the need of man’s spiritual discourse with
her.
Thus, we can say that Wordsworth was the high
priest of Nature.
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