William Wordsworth: A Master of Nature

 William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. His boyhood was happy; he could roam among the fields of his beloved countryside, in company with Nature and the books he loved (see The Prelude). Both Wordsworth's parents died before he was 15, and he and his four siblings were left in the care of different relatives. Sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, 1787. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems.

While studying at Cambridge University, Wordsworth spent a summer holiday on a walking tour in Switzerland and France. He became an enthusiast for the ideals of the French Revolution. He began writing poetry while at school, but none was published until 1793.

In 1795, Wordsworth received a legacy from a close relative, and he and his sister, Dorothy, went to live in Dorset. Two years later, they moved again, this time to Somerset, to live near the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an admirer of Wordsworth's work. They collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798. This collection of poems, mostly by Wordsworth but with Coleridge contributing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic movement in English poetry. The poems were greeted with hostility by most critics.

In 1799, after a visit to Germany with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District. Coleridge lived nearby with his family. Wordsworth's famous poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," was written at Dove Cottage in 1804.

In 1802, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. The next few years were personally difficult for Wordsworth. Two of his children died, his brother drowned at sea, and Dorothy suffered a mental breakdown. His political views underwent a transformation around the turn of the century, and he became increasingly conservative, disillusioned by events in France culminating in Napoleon Bonaparte taking power.

In 1813, Wordsworth moved from Grasmere to nearby Ambleside. He continued to write poetry, but it was never as great as his early works. After 1835, he wrote little more. In 1842, he was given a government pension and the following year became poet laureate. Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. His great autobiographical poem, 'The Prelude', which he had worked on since 1798, was published after his death.

1798: "Lyrical Ballads."

This contained not only the noble Tintern Abbey lines (one of Wordsworth's noblest efforts), but also Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. In 1800, a second and enlarged edition of the book was published, with a valuable preface, containing an outline of his "poetical theory". Among the new poems were "Lucy", "The Fountain", "Matthew", and "Nutting", all characteristic of Wordsworth's genius.

1807: Poems in two Volumes.

This contains ballads, short poems, sonnets, the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, one of the very greatest poems of the century, the Ode to Duty, and the Happy Warrior lines. In these two volumes, we have Wordsworth at the zenith of his powers.

1814: "The Excursion".

Wordsworth's longest poem (largely autobiographical) is full of discussion on man, on nature, and on human life. The Recluse and The Prelude were published after the poet's death. To this year belongs the fine classical study Laodamia.

Many of his Sonnets were written during these years, but his magnificent patriotic sonnets belong to the period 1802-11.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S POETRY

WORDSWORTH'S TREATMENT OF NATURE

As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is "a worshipper of Nature" : Nature's devotee or high-priest. Nature occupies in his poems a separate or independent status and is not treated in a casual or passing manner. Tintern Abbey is a poem with Nature as its theme.

Wordsworth pursues Nature in a way different from that of Pope. Unlike Pope, Wordsworth sincerely believed that in town life and its distractions, men had forgotten nature and that they had been punished for it. 'Constant social intercourse had dissipated their energy and talents and impaired the susceptibility of their hearts to simple and pure impression. One of his sonnets is eloquent of this idea :

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we waste our powers;

Little do we see in Nature that is ours;

Wordsworth brings a new and intense interest in Nature. Pope looks at Nature as objectively as possible; his view is hardly coloured by his 'hyper-individualism'. It has been stated that the antithesis to Pope's idea of Nature is hyper-individualism. Interestingly enough, Wordsworth's explorations of what Nature had to say to him spring from his 'hyper-individualism'. Thus, with Wordsworth the poetry of Nature took on a new range, passing beyond sensuous presentation and description to vision and interpretation. Under the influence of Nature, he experiences a mystic mood. a transcendental feeling.

FOUR STAGES OF WORDSWORTH'S LOVE OF NATURE

First Stage

He loved the outward appearances of Nature, her grandeur in color and beauty, her form and external features like many other poets of his own and subsequent ages; and with the precision and faithfulness of a lover, he described her form, and experienced a child-like joy in simply describing the details of the features of Nature with wonderful accuracy; 'the periwinkle trails its wreaths' through primrose tufts; the celandine is muffled up in close self-shelter'; the green linnet 'is a brother of the dancing leaves'; the tuft of hazel trees 'twinkles to the gusty breeze'; he heard the two fold song of the cuckoo, he saw the beauty of the 'moon that bares her bosom to the sea'.

Second Stage

But the external features of the land, the sea, the sky, the sun, and the moon were not all the sources of joy to him. "Wordsworth is one of the world's most loving, penetrative, and thoughtful poets of Nature. He found much of his greater joy in the presence of her calm, her beauty, her external revelations of a Divine hand. For Nature possesses a soul, a conscious existence, an ability to feel joy and love". In the Lines Written in Early Spring, he says :

"And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes".

In the Immortality Ode, he incorporates this belief in the lines.

"The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare".

Third Stage

But what was more, he not only conceived that Nature was alive; "it had, he imagined, one living soul, which entering into flower, stream or mountain, gave them each a soul of their own. Between this spirit in nature and the mind of man, there was pre-arranged harmony which enabled nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union between them was established."

And it was his belief that man makes himself miserable by tearing himself away from the heart of Nature,-by waging a foolish strife with Nature :

But we are pressed by heavy laws-The Fountain.

Fourth Stage

This brooding communion with Nature brought him much wealth of moral illustration, and this he communicated in poetic language for the benefit of the spiritual side in human nature. The poet-philosopher considered it a mission of his life to be a teacher of mankind. Many of the smaller poems were written with the object of teaching mankind the truth that his subjective contemplation revealed to his own mind; such are the Lenser Celandine, The Fountain, and Two April Mornings.

Main Aspects of Wordsworth in the Treatment of Nature

Wordsworth had a complete philosophy of Nature. Four points in his creed of Nature may be noted :

 (a) He conceived of Nature as a living personality. He believed that there is a divine spirit persuading all the objects of Nature. This belief finds a complete expression in Tintern Abbey when he tells us that he has felt the presence of a sublime spirit in the setting sun, the round ocean, the living air, the blue sky, the mind of man, etc. This spirit, he says,

rolls through all things :

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things ....

The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul

Of all my moral being.

This belief in a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature is called Pantheism.

(b) Next, Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human heart. In Tintern Abbey he expresses the joy he feels on revisiting a scene of Nature. Not only is the actual sight of this scene pleasing. The very memory of this scene has, in the past, soothed and comforted his mind; he gained "Sweet sensations” from these objects of Nature in hours of weariness. Nature has a healing influence on troubled minds, as he tells his sister. Wordsworth looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow.

(c) Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He spiritualized Nature and regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best mother, guardian, and nurse of man, as an elevating influence. He believed that between Man and Nature there is spiritual intercourse. According to him, Nature deeply influences human character. In Tintern Abbey, he tells his sister Dorothy that "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her", that Nature can impress the human mind with quietness and beauty; that Nature

gives human beings lofty thoughts. He advises Dorothy to let the moon shine on her and the winds blow on her, i.e., to put herself under Nature's influence.

In his eyes, "Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn if we will, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete." He believed in the education of Man by Nature. In this, he was somewhat influenced by Rousseau. This interrelation of Nature and Man is very important in considering Wordsworth's view of both. In Tintern Abbey, he also distinguishes his love for Nature as a boy from his love for her as a man. As a boy, his love for Nature was a physical passion; as a grown-up man, his love for Nature is intellectual or spiritual. As a boy, Nature was an "appetite, with its aching joys and dizzy raptures;" as a man, his love is thoughtful because of the still, sad music of humanity which he has heard.

In the Immortality Ode, he also tells us that as a boy, his love for Nature was a thoughtless passion, but now the objects of Nature take "a sober coloring" from his eyes and give rise to profound thoughts in his mind because he had witnessed the sufferings of humanity :

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that lie too deep for tears.

(d) 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 with Nature in her ordinary, familiar, everyday moods. Nor did he recognize the ugly side of Nature; Nature 'red in tooth and claw' as Tennyson did. Wordsworth is to be distinguished from the other poets by the stress he places upon the moral influence of Nature and the need of man's spiritual intercourse with her.

 WORDSWORTH'S PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE OF NATURE

The philosophical content of The Prelude is made up largely of Wordsworth's doctrine of Nature, which is outlined and repeated in other poems, especially in Tintern Abbey and Lucy's education of nature. It has been rightly pointed out the Wordsworthian philosophy of Nature, with its emphasis upon the divinity of Nature, Nature's holy plan, the one life in the Universe and in Man, the joy in the widest commonalty spread and Nature as a source of wisdom and moral health etc., was derived from the current speculations of the day, to which poets, philosophers and scientists had contributed alike. Wordsworth took these tenets from the deep-rooted convictions of the day and gave them the authenticity of personal experience and the vitality of the poetic expression. Keats has rightly stated that the conventional proverbs, precepts, and dogmas of religion are meaningless to us until they are tested on our pulse, come home to our business and bosom, and have become the formative influences in our moral and spiritual life. This is actually what Wordsworth has confessed in so many words, on so many occasions. There is, therefore, little force in the observation of Arnold and others, including Morley and Raleigh, that the philosophy or doctrine of Nature in the poetry of Wordsworth is an illusion. As a matter of fact, Wordsworth regarded himself with Coleridge as a philosophical poet, and his philosophy, according to his own confessions, was hewn out of his own experiences and entitled him to the position of the teacher of society, which he was anxious to achieve and maintain.

The basic principle of this doctrine is the unity of man and Nature as partakers in the one and the same life, which meant a preordained harmony between the two. Nature was animated by a soul which was the 'Eternity of thought', wisdom, love, joy, and the central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.' Every object in Nature was alive and full of joy and energy, subsisting in perfect love and concord and waging no strife with other objects, as unfortunately is the case with the human individual and multitudes.

Nature, thus, is best fitted for the position of man's teacher; she brings 'sweet love' as contrasted with the bookish knowledge which is an 'endless strife'. Hence, Wordsworth stresses the necessity of wise passiveness, the attuning of the mind to the mood of nature so that the whole scene may sink into it, or the mind may drink in the influence like a child at the breast of the mother. Thus, it follows that influences of 'deeper birth' are likely to come in solitude.

Nature was 'both law and impulse' with powers to kindle and restrain so that her beauty and fear were equally necessary for the growth of the poet's mind. The Prelude in its early part, is mostly occupied with the growth of the moral sense affected by Nature's ministration of fear in the young poet. But as the story proceeds, the picture of the changing pattern of the relationship between the poet's mind and Nature is clearly unrolled. The four stages distinctly marked in Tintern Abbey are present in The Prelude also, and have been described by Prof. Dowden as those of blood, senses, heart, or imagination and spirit. The first is the stage of childhood when he either ‘bounded as a fawn', unmindful of Nature, or received suggestions through fear inspired by her. The second stage covers boyhood and youth when his heart awakened to the loveliness of nature and 'sounding cataracts haunted him' like a passion, and the form and color of the objects absorbed his whole heart. But as he advanced in life and came face to face with the suffering of humanity, especially during his stay in France, the 'wild joys and giddy raptures of youth mingled with the melancholy note of experience :

The still sad music of humanity

Nor harsh, nor grating, but with ample

Power to chasten and subdue.

It is a Being which pervades the universe, as described in the Tintern Abbey in the grand but well-known passage, as something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of the setting sun and the wide ocean, and the living air and in the mind of man, a spirit and motion which moves all thinking things and all objects of all thought, and 'rolls through all things'. This was Pantheism, the identification of God with Nature, which was anti-Christian. As Wordsworth advanced in age and his revolutionary fervor declined into the sober light of orthodoxy, he began to re-examine the early version of The Prelude (1806) in order to make its doctrine more conformable to the Christian sentiment. The pantheistic passage in The Prelude, therefore, is immediately followed by verses which place God, the Uncreated, above and beyond His creation, so that the objects of Nature are made to look up to Him and sing the one song of thanks and glorification of His mercy and might.

The final position reached in The Prelude is a further modification of Pantheism. Growth of mind means the growth of Imagination, which is at once 'the amplitude of mind, and Reason in her most exalted mood' and an aspect of Love and intellectual sympathy of thought soaked in feeling. The great mind with its full-grown imagination faces Nature, a reservoir of beauty, power, and energy, and the exquisite 'wedding' of the two is productive of the best and greatest of poetry.

This partnership between Mind and Nature is based upon 'mutual domination which means that sometimes the mind can change and transfigure nature by its own energy and imagination, but on other occasions it is caught by the spontaneous beauty and grandeur on the face of Nature, as angels are caught by the higher harmony of heaven as they enter the celestial domain after their journey through the other regions in the sky.

The difference from the transcendental philosophy finally adopted by Coleridge is quite apparent. In this philosophy, nature is made alive by the mind of man, and the 'object' becomes one with the subject; it is a philosophic 'monism', while the Wordsworthian doctrine is based on 'dualism'; the entities of mind and Nature are wedded together but not fully identified, each retaining its separate strength to modify and color the other.               

To be continued......