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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth is a prolific writer. His poetic career covers a period of more

than sixty years; and so far as the bulk of his poetry is concerned, few poets can

challenge comparison with him. Wordsworth’s poetic career may be divided into

four periods; the early period, the period of gloom, the glorious decade, and the

period of decline.

Wordsworth achieves greatness because his private struggle towards

psychic integration has a representative quality. The poems generalize themselves

as they are read into the reactions of the human individual fighting for its spiritual

survival in a society that seems to have no place for it.

Words worth’s poems have the characteristics of a medicine for all the

readers. They seem to be guest of. In them we seem to draw a source of inward

joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure which could be shared in by all

human beings; which had no connection with struggle of imperfection, but would

be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of man

kind, from them we learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when

all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.

Wordsworth is a didactic poet. He had a tendency to generalize his

experiences and to draw moral lessons from them so as to ensure that the reader did

not miss the point. He once wrote to his friend Sir George Beaumont, “Every great

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poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing”. In one

of his letters to Lady Beaumont the poet observed: “There is scarcely one of my

poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment or to

some general principle or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution. He

pointed out that his aim in writing poetry was ‘to console the afflicted, to add

sunshine to day light by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the

gracious of every age to see, to think and feel and, therefore, to become more

actively and securely virtuous’.

A careful study of Wordsworth’s poems shows that he seeks to impart to his

reader a set of moral lessons. The first teaching of Wordsworth is that man should

approach Nature in the right mood, which is defined as a mood of ‘wise

passiveness’ with a ‘heart that watches and receives’. Wisdom, truth, joy and

peace are qualities that exist outside of man and may pass into his life from nature,

if he approaches it in a mood of ‘wise passiveness’ with a ‘heart that watches and

receives’. Wisdom, truth, joy and peace are qualities that exist outside of man and

may pass into his life from Nature, if he approaches it in mood of ‘wise

passiveness’s.

Wordsworth is a philosophical poet, and not a poetical philosopher. This

implies that the poet’s faith was based on intuitions rather than on processes of

reasoning. His friend Coleridge may have defined for him the philosophical

problem; but the solution comes in such flashes as that which fell upon his vision

when he reached the crust of show down, and saw that ‘universal spectacle;

‘shaped’ for his ‘admiration and delight: He was not last in cloudy abstractions.

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He had his feet firmly on the ground, and it was his preference for human contacts,

for’ men as they are men within themselves, which caused him to reject

philosophies which are ‘bottomed on false thought’.

Wordsworth is a great love-poet. His love poetry readily appeals to our

hearts. As a critic puts it: “Spenser made a wonderful fusion between concrete and

abstract love poems; but none of them has reached so near to the chambers of our

heart as the homeliness of words worth’s love poetry. “As a poet of love

Wordsworth’s does not confine himself to the treatment of passions or love

between two young lovers. Most of his love poems are curiously sexless. As

Grierson and Smith put it: Wordsworth is not a love poet in the usual sense. He

was not incapable of passion.

The love which moved Wordsworth to poetry was not sexual passion, but

love of country, family, and friends. In words worth family affection was a

passion, even a tragic passion. The central theme of Wordsworth’s poem of

incidents in human life is love, the working of love, its power to inflict the deepest

wounds and to heal the most irreparable. “Wordsworth we think of principally as a

poet of Nature, but that is an incomplete view. He is at the centre, one of the great

poets of love.

The philosophical content of The Prelude is made up largely of Wordsworth

doctrine of Nature, which is outlined and repeated in other poems also especially in

the ‘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

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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 poetic expression.

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 is

unfortunately the case with the human individual and multitudes.

Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature can be clearly differentiated from that of

the great poets of Nature. 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 which her.

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 a spiritual intercourse. 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.

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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

precedes the picture of the changing pattern of 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.

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.

Wordsworth brings a new and in tenser interest in Nature. Pope looks at

Nature as objectively as possible, naturally 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

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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, Wordsworth liked to represent simple

village folk in the Natural setting, and to describe how in the midst of their sorrows

and wants, they would be consoled by Nature. He glorified village life because the

villager lived so close to Nature and communed with her daily.

“Return to Nature” was Wordsworth’s motto; and since he saw little

distinction between the soul of Nature, and the uncorrupted, unsophisticated soul of

man, Nature, as existing in the heart of man, was an object of his close attention.

He was a realist and dealt boldly with substantial things. “It is by his close and

loving penetration in to the realities and simplicities of human life that he himself

makes his claim on our reverence as a poet. The love of nature led him to the love

of man. It was exactly the reverse order to that of the previous poets.

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CHAPTER – 2

WORDSWORTH’S POETRY OF NATURE

Wordsworth’s passion for Nature is well known. As De Quincy puts it:

“Wordsworth had his passion for Nature fixed in his blood. It was a necessity of

his being, like that of a mulberry leaf to the silk-worm, and through his commerce

with Nature did he lie and breathe.” Wordsworth loves all objects of Nature; but he

is concerned far less with the sensuous manifestations that delight most of the poets

of Nature, than with the spiritual that he finds underlying these manifestations. The

divinization of Nature, which began in the modern world at the Renaissance and

proceeded during the eighteenth century, culminates for English literature in

Wordsworth. “It was Wordsworth’s aim as a poet to seek beauty in meadow,

woodland, and the mountain top, and to interpret this beauty in spiritual terms.”

In poems like ‘ Tintern Abbey’ and ‘ The Prelude’ Wordsworth has shown

how his love of Nature was developed and the various stages through which it

passed.

Wordsworth’s Childhood days were spent in the midst of beautiful sights

and sounds of Nature. The child Wordsworth looked upon Nature as a source of

and scene for animal pleasure like skating, riding, fishing and walking.

Wordsworth’s first love of Nature was a healthy boy’s delight in outdoor life. In

‘Tintern Abbey’ he refers to the ‘glad animal movements’ of his childhood days. In

‘The Prelude’ he says that this early stage Nature was

But secondary to my own pursuits

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And animal activities, and all

Their trivial pleasures.

In the second stage, Wordsworth developed a passion for the sensuous

beauty of Nature. As he grew up, his ‘coarser pleasures’ lost their charm for him,

and Nature was loved with an unreflecting passion altogether untouched by

intellectual interests or associations. Referring to the boyish pleasures of the period

when he viewed Nature with a purely physical passion, he writes in ‘The Prelude’,

The props of my affections were removed,

And yet the building stood, as if sustained

By its own spirit! All that I behold

Was dear, and hence to finer influxes

The mind lay open to a more exact

And close communion.

In ‘ Tintern Abbey’ he describes how during this period Nature became the object

of a passion for the picturesque:

I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

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Unborrowed from the eye.

All these aching joys and dizzy raptures came to an end with his

experiences of human suffering in France. The French Revolution opened his eyes

and made him realize the dignity of the common man. During this period his love

of Nature became linked with the love of man. Now he could hear in Nature.

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.

Referring to this stage of human-heartedness, the poet writes in Ode on Intimations

of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;

Another race hath been; and other palms are won.

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But this stage was soon followed by the final stage of the spiritual

interpretation of Nature. In the poem Nutting Wordsworth describes the

circumstances under which a great change came in his approach to Nature. After

his ‘merciless ravage’, something mysterious touched him, and he felt that ‘there is

a spirit in the woods’. From now onwards he realized a divine principle reigning in

the heart of Nature. As Warwick James puts it: “At this stage the foundation of

Wordsworth’s entire existence was his mode of seeing God in Nature and Nature in

God”. This is known as the stage of Pantheism. This faith of the poet that the

Eternal Spirit pervades all the objects of Nature is forcefully expressed in Tintern

Abbey where he says:

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.

Nature-descriptions

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Innumerable passages of Nature-description are scattered in Wordsworth’s

poems. These passages contain marvelous descriptions of different aspects of

Nature. In ‘The Prelude’ he compares himself to an Aeolian harp which answers

with harmony to every touch of the wind. The figure is very accurate because there

is hardly a sight or a sound from a violet to a mountain and from a bird-note to the

thunder of the cataract that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth’s

poetry. In most of his poems Wordsworth has given 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.

The spirit of enjoyment and desire,

And hopes and wishes, from all living things

Went circling, like a multitude of sounds.

He can take a pleasure fully as keen in the placid lake:

The claim

And dead still water lay upon my mind

Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,

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Never before so beautiful, sank down

Into my heart, and held me like a dream.

He can vividly describe all the little graces and charms of a summer day:

The northern downs

In clearest air ascending, showed far off

A surface dappled o’er with shadows fleecy

From brooding clouds,

And can throw the very spirit of June into a couplet:

Flaunting Summer when he throws

His soul into the briar rose.

A careful study of Wordsworth’s Nature-descriptions shows that his eye and

ear were very sensitive. In this connection Arthur Compton-Rickett observes: “As

the poet of the eye he has many peers, and in richness of effect and subtlety of

appeal must yield the palm to a crowd of singers less great than himself; but when

it comes to the symbolism of sound, Wordsworth is supreme”.

No other poet could have written:

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A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard

In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides,

Or in a very different mood have given us this:

Better than such discourse doth silence long,

Long, barren silence, square with my desire

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,

In the loved presence of my cottage fire,

And listen to the flapping of the flame,

Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

However, it should be noted that there are very few passages in Wordsworth’s

poetry which would justify us in claiming that his senses of touch, taste and smell

were equally acute. ‘Smooth’, ‘luscious’, ‘warm’, ‘fragrant’-these are no epithets

for Wordsworth’s poetry. His world is austere and bleak.

What distinguishes Wordsworth from other poets of Nature is that for him

Nature is a living entity. The indwelling spirit in Nature imparts its own

consciousness to all objects of Nature:

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To every natural form, rock, fruit and flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel.

His faith that every object of Nature is a sentient being is firmly expressed in Lines

Written in Early Spring:

And ‘tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

In The Prelude we find many passages in which Wordsworth strongly expresses his

belief in the inner life of Nature. Once when he had stolen a bird from the trap of

some other boy, he heard among the solitary hills-

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of distinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Similarly, when he had stolen a boat to explore the silent lake in the evening, he

felt as if a huge peak upreared its head.

And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

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And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me.

To reveal the invisible impulses at work behind the outward beauty of Nature was

the mission of Wordsworth’s life. As Stopford Brooke puts it: “He (Wordswworth)

conceived, as poet, 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.”

If we explore the inner life of Nature as Wordsworth conceives it, we find

that one of its characteristics is its joy. To the Daisy speaks of the ‘cheerful flower’

as alert and gay. ‘I wandered Lonely as a Cloud’depicts the jocund daffodils that

outdo the sparkling waves in glee. In ‘Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower’

the poet represents Nature as imparting to Lucy its own ‘vital feelings of delight’.

In all these poems he may be only figurative in expression. But we cannot regard

the following assertion as other then literal:

Yet, whate’er enjoyments dwell

In the impenetrable cell

Of the silent heart which Nature

Furnishes to every creature;

Whatsoe’er we feel and know

Too sedate for outward show,

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Such a light of gladness breaks,

Pretty Kitten! From thy freaks.

“The clearest statement to be found in Wordsworth of his belief in Nature’s

joyous life occurs in ‘ Lines Written in Early Spring’. Herein he states his faith that

every flower enjoys the air it breathes’. In the birds and the budding twigs there is

also enjoyment:

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

In ‘To My Sister’ the poet recognizes ‘a sense of joy’ in nature and a ‘blessed

power’ that rolls through all things about is. These poems deserve a more absolute

acceptance as a record of Wordsworth’s thought that some critics have been

inclined to give to them.”

Like other poets and philosophers, with a religious determination to find

design, order, and harmony everywhere in the universe, and to ignore everything

that seems to contradict this providential interpretation, it was inevitable that

Wordsworth should find that Nature is ‘kind’ and ‘kindly’, that it is ‘fostering

Nature’, ‘holy Nature’, and that it teaches a ‘lesson deep of love’. In Wordsworth

the conviction of the universal presence of love in Nature is equally characteristic

of his writing in phases as distinct from one another as those of ‘The Excursion’

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and ‘ Lyrical Ballads ‘. We find his classic treatment of this theme in the poem ‘

To My Sister’. On the first mild day of March the poet asks his sister to put on her

woodland dress and come out with him for a walk; they will drink in the love

which is abroad in the air, and so prepare their spirits for the whole year that is to

come.

Love, now a universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth:

-It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason:

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

It is “Nature’s law”, Wordsworth says, that “forms created the most vile and

brute” should not “exist divorced from good.” The life of the whole imparts a

pulse of good each fragment. Value is not confined; it spreads outward until it

affects the entire circumambient region. As the poet declares in ‘ The Excursion’,

Whate’er exists hath properties that spread

Beyond itself, communicating good,

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A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;

Spirit that knows no insulated spot,

No chasm, no solitude.

Since every object of Nature impresses itself on others and each reflects its

neighbours, the vice of ever ‘dividing’ falsifies reality.

For all things in this little world of ours

Are in one bosom of close neighbourhood.

Wordsworth’s disposition to regard nature’s objects as neighbourly appears

in poem after poem. The spiritual unity of Nature enters into the design of I

wandered Lonely as a cloud, ‘ Nutting’,’ Hart-Leap Well’, and ‘ Lines Written in

Early Spring’. A suggestion of life and interplay distinguishes many scattered

lines:

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

And all the earth is gay.

‘mid all this mighty sum

Or things for every speaking.

Loud is the Vale! The Voice is up

With which she speaks when storms are gone,

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A mighty unison of streams!

Of all her Voices, One!

These passages bring out the mysterious bonds of unity behind the apparent

disconnection of things. Wordsworth has a kind of primitive sense or intuition.

Of unknown modes of being which on earth,

Or in the heavens, or in the heavens and earth

Exist by might combinations, bound

Together by a link, and with a soul

Which makes all one.

There is a spirit or a pervasive atmosphere that draws things together into a natural

community.

Wordsworth’s approach to Nature is that of a mystic. As his friend Aubrey

De Vere puts it: “Wordsworth looked at nature as the mystics of old perused the

pages of the Holy Writ, making little of the letter, but passing through it to the

spiritual interpretation.” Wordsworth found in the meadows and the woods and

mountains the spiritual stimulus that Blake sought in purely imaginary visions. In

his copy of Wordsworth’s Poems Blake wrote the comment: “Natural objects

always did and now do weaken, deaden and obliterate Imagination in Me.

Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in

Nature.” As the more comprehensive poet, Wordsworth wanted to go beyond but

not away from Nature.

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Wordsworth remained a poet of ‘the mighty world of eye and ear’ till the

end of his life. So his mysticism is grounded and rooted, actually, in the senses.

His Nature mysticism is clearly evident in ‘Tintern Abbey’:

Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owned another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this intelligible world

In The Prelude Book VI the poet speaks of the moments

When the light of sense

Goes out in flashes that have shown to us

The invisible world.

In such moments all visible Nature appears as the manifestation of the one

indwelling spirit:

Were all like workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

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The types; and symbols of Eternity

Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

Spurgeon has rightly observed: “Wordsworth was not only a poet, he was

also a seer and mystic and a practical psychologist with an amazingly subtle mind

and an unusual capacity for feeling. It was not the beauty of Nature which brought

him joy and peace, but the life in Nature. He himself had caught a vision of that

life. He knew it and felt it, and it transformed the whole of existence for him. He

believed that every man could attain this vision which he so fully possessed and his

whole life’s work took a form of minute and careful analysis of the process of

feeling in his own nature.”

In his poetry Wordsworth shows how human beings fit into the midst of the

interplaying forces of Nature. In Three Years she grew in sun and shower Lucy is

taken up into the life of Nature and incorporated with it. The same is true of

‘Michael’, ‘The Leech-gatherer’, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, ‘The Highland Girl’, ‘The

Danish Boy’, and ‘Louisa in the Shade’. They seem made all of a piece with the

world around them, so that they almost have their being in the elemental forms that

pervade their natural domain. Even the rebellious Toussaint L’Ouverture is a

power among other powers in Nature:

Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

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There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies.

Wordsworth believes that there is a pre-existing harmony between the mind

of man and Nature. The individual mind, as he declared in the fragment of the

Recluse, is exquisitely fitted to the external world and no less exquisitely and

external world is fitted to the mind. The mind with him is always the creative

masculine principle; Nature is always the feminine principle. Thus he writes in the

Recluse,

For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

In love and holy passion, shall find these

(Paradise, and groves Elysian, and Fortunate Fields)

A simple produce of the common day.

-I, long before the blissful hour arrives,

Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse

Of this great consummation….

“Man and Nature, Mind and the external world, are geared together and in

unison complete the motive principle of the universe. They act and react upon each

other, ‘so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure’. The exquisite

functioning of this interlocked universe of Mind and Nature is for Wordsworth the

highest theme of poetry; in poetry the process actually receives its final

consummation.”

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Since the individual mind and the external world are exquisitely fitted to

each other, communion between the two is possible. But this communion is

possible only when the soul of man is in harmony with the soul of Nature. In his

poetry Wordsworth shows how human beings, who are separated from all that in

everyday humanity is disturbing or distressing, take on something of

The silence and the calm

Of mute insensate things.

In ‘The Thorn’ the finest passage is that in which the tragic figure comes nearest to

union with the elements

And she is known to every star

And every wind that blows.

Michael owes much of his impressiveness to the statement that

When others heeded not, he heard the South

Make subterraneous music.

The Shepherd in Book VIII of The Prelude, seen against a mountain background, is

Man

Ennobled outwardly before my sight,

And the poet thanks the God of Nature and of Man that

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Men before my inexperienced eyes

Did first present themselves thus purified,

Removed, and to a distance that was fit.

What was amiss with Peter Bell, and made him (in his unregenerate days) a

Moral monster, was that

At noon, when by the forest’s edge

He lay beneath the branches high,

The soft blue sky did never melt

Into his heart; he never felt

The witchery of the soft blue sky!

In any attempt to understand what Nature meant to Wordsworth, due weight

should be given to the healing power of the impersonal over a sick mind. It was

when the ‘fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world’ had long ‘hung upon

the beatings of my heart’ that he turned to Nature, and found ‘for this uneasy heart

of ours a never-failing principle of joy’. He received from the ‘calm oblivious

tendencies of Nature’ both stimulus and anodyne:

I well remember that those very plumes,

Those weeds and the high spear-grass on that wall,

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By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o’er,

As once I passed, into my heart conveyed

So still image of tranquility,

So calm and still, and looked so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,

That what we feel of sorrow and despair

From ruin and from change, and all the grief

That passing shows of Being leave behind,

Appeared an idle dream.

“Thus Nature’s healing power, which for some may be merely an outworn doctrine,

was for him a fact of experience, and the rapture of that experience, which glows

through ‘ Tintern Abbey’ and much of his best poetry, can be caught by any reader,

without reference to the ethical and philosophical theories which Wordsworth

evolved from it.”

A careful reading of The Prelude clearly shows that Wordsworth received

the best part of his education from Nature. In the first two books of this

autobiographical poem we find that Nature has been acting as a sort of glorified

parent or schoolmistress. The poet gives ‘thanks to means which Nature deigned to

employ’-the discipline of fear and joy through which its benign Hartleian

curriculum has been fulfilled. He has given many examples of Nature’s

ministeries’ and ‘interventions’ whereby it reproved his childish delinquencies:

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I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of undistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

The first stage in experience, the beginning of each man’s education, is the

reception of impressions through the avenues of the senses. This stage is

emphasized in two poems of 1798-Expostulation and Reply and Tables Turned. In

Expostulation and Reply Wordsworth’s friend Mathew-a person whom the poet

describes in a note as ‘somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral

philosophy’-reproaches the poet with his neglect of bookish knowledge. And it is

thus Wordsworth defends himself:

They eye-it cannot choose but see:

We cannot bid the ear be still;

Our bodies feel, where’er they be,

Against or with our will.

Nor less we deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.

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In ‘ The Tables Turned’ Wordsworth asks his friend to leave his books and come

out into the open, since he can learn more about man and about moral good and

evil from the spring woods than from all the sages.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can.

We might object that an impulse from a vernal wood cannot in fact teach us

anything at all about good and evil. However, we find the lines that follow more

easily acceptable.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:

We murder to dissect.

Here Wordsworth is not recommending-any more than Rousseau-an abandonment

of books and learning, but is simply urging a restoration of the balance between

book-learning and the direct inspirations of Nature.

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“Beneath a half-playful and even superficial opposition to science and

philosophizing, there is the wholly serious demand, central to Wordsworth’s faith,

for a total response by man’s nature to the non-human nature around him. Those

who are worried by Wordsworth’s habit of finding sermons in stones are free to

give up that side of his work, but they would also be wise to remember the remark

of a later poet, Yeats, extremely unlike Wordsworth, that in the poet’s church there

is an altar but no pulpit; and that morals drawn from the lesser celandine are not the

core of Wordsworth’s belief.”

In “Lines Written in Early Spring” Wordsworth uses the word ‘Nature’ as

signifying the normal course of things, to which it is wise for man to submit as a

matter of hygiene. Nature then is taken as a norm of conduct for man. Science

impartially notes that Nature is full of pleasure and pain; but the means by which

‘fostering’ Nature leads birds to function as birds he finds to be pleasure, the

gratification of their instincts. Seizing on this hopeful aspect of things,

Wordsworth reminds man that he is capable of pleasure in a high degree, and

exhorts him to cultivate to the utmost the capacities with which Nature has

endowed him.

In “The Excursion” we find passages in which Wordsworth lays emphasis

on Nature’s plan for man. The Solitary in this poem is a typical victim of romantic

egoism, melancholy and cynicism. He has retired to a life of solitude, and is

sinking deeper and deeper into the bog of his own dark thoughts. He does not even

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take advantage of the ‘natural’ means of maintaining his physical and mental

health. The poet asks the Solitary not to study so late but to get up early in the

morning and climb the hill daily, and join too in the hunt of the ‘red deer’.

Take courage, and withdraw yourself from ways

That run not parallel to nature’s course.

Here Wordsworth has used the word ‘Nature’ as signifying the laws of health and

the close relation between physical and mental well-being. In the story of poor

Magdalene he uses the word Nature to signify the psychological conditions which,

being violated, may result in bodily harm. Referring to the cruelty of her

employers who do not allow her to visit the graveyard to indulge her feeling of

penitence and grief over the loss of her child, he says,

I failed not to remind them that they erred;

For holy Nature might not thus be crossed,

Thus wronged in woman’s breast: in vain I pleaded-

But the green stalk of Ellen’s life was snapped,

And the flower drooped..

There would be little point in multiplying examples of such use of the word

‘Nature’, since it is not peculiar to Wordsworth or to other poets of Nature.

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In many passages of the later books of The Prelude Wordsworth expresses

some views which strongly resemble Spinoza’s. Stallknecht finds that

Wordsworth’s later conception of the imagination owes much to Spinoza’s

‘intuition’, and that this conception ‘ answers the problems which Wordsworth’s

encounter with Godwinism had summoned to his mind’. As Wordsworth grew

older, however, Stallknecht holds, ‘the Spinozian morality ceased to give him

entire satisfaction’. He then turned to Kant, whose influence is evident in Ode to

Duty and The Excursion. It should be noted that, whether Wordsworth’s later

ethics was Kantian or Spinozistic, or neither of the two, his way of regarding

Nature came to be markedly at odds with his earlier Hartleian views.

In his callow Jacobinical days Wordsworth had written: cataracts and

mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant

companions.” His later life seems to prove the truths of this statement, though he

would never have admitted it. “The Ode on Intimations of Immortality from

Recollections of Early Childhood” registers an almost complete abandonment of

his earlier doctrine of Nature. As Basil Willey puts it: “There is, indeed, a certain

pathos in the circumstance that his most splendidly sustained utterance should have

been a farewell to his own visionary power.” References to Nature continues to be

frequent throughout the later poems of Wordsworth; but, as has been universally

recognized, the heart has gone out of his poetry of Nature. “Wordsworth no longer

calls himself, as in ‘Tintern Abbey’, a ‘worshipper of Nature’. His faith in Nature

seems to maintain itself mechanically on the momentum gained in his youth. It

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yields more and more to a theological faith, which tends to drain it of its strength.

More than once he indulges in reservations and abatements. In ‘The Excursion’,

referring again to the rites of baptism, he reminds us-

….That Man by Nature lies

Bedded for good and evil in a gulf

Fearfully low…

He seems to have quite forgotten the Hartleian psychology which makes so much,

in the building up of the human spirit, of ‘the language of the sense’. The

‘naturalism’ has quite faded out of his concept of nature’.

Wordsworth’s view of Nature has been severely criticized by some well

known critics. “It is sometimes argued that Wordsworth’s belief in the moral value

of the love of the fine scenery is a fallacy; that communion with mountains does

not generate any ‘pure principle of love’, but it is only a form of self-glorification,

leading to an anti-social habit of mind and producing the ‘egotistical sublime’.

Hazlitt remarked with bitterness that Wordsworth himself could sympathize only

with objects that could enter into no sort of competition with him. From another

angle Mr. Aldous Huxley attacks Wordsworth’s Nature-religion as the product of

‘the cosy sublimities of Westmorland’, and reminds us that Nature in the Tropics is

apt to produce worship of the devil rather than of God. And Mr. Empson can

dismiss Wordsworth with the remark that Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration

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other than his own use, when a boy, of the mountains as a totem or father

substitute.”

All these opinions are not acceptable to us; but we must not overlook the

obvious limitations in Wordsworth’s attitude towards Nature. The Nature he

communed with was the Nature of the English Lakes. The burning sirocco, the

overwhelming avalanche, the dreary skeleton-strewn Sahara, the frozen solitudes of

the Pole, the tiger’s cruel beauty, and the death-rattle of the snake-all these sinister

aspects of Nature and such as these, he ignores. Hence arises the tone of

complacent optimism that pervades his poetry. He sits amidst the budding

loveliness of spring, and the only thought that damps his joy is the remembrance of

‘What man has made of man’. How different are the reflections of the hero of

Tennyson’s Maud, seated amid the same beautiful surroundings:

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;

The Mayfly is torn by the Swallow, the sparrow spear’d by

The shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder

And prey.

It is for Tennyson, not for Wordsworth, that Nature ‘red in tooth and claw with

ravine shrieks against his creed’ that love is the ruling power in the universe.

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Wordsworth is, of course, a poet of Nature. But it would not do ignore his

concern with mankind Wordsworth held Nature to be a guide and teacher. His

decision to choose humble classes for the subject matter of his poetry was based

on his belief that these people show the elemental passions and emotions, because

they live close to Nature. Nature’s moral influence is to be seen exemplified in

these simple humble folk. It is thus that Nature and human life are interrelated in

Wordsworth’s poetry. Nature and man seem to be one, as the poet perceives the

leech-gatherer standing beside a pond. He is compared to a stone and a sea-beast

and later to the motionless cloud-all conveying a sense of impervious determination

and freedom of will and courage.

Nature can induce in man an awareness which pierces through the mystery

of the universe and reveals spiritual truth. Nature can induce a mystic mood in man.

The restorative and healing power of Nature was experienced most intensely by

Wordsworth in his personal life. Nature never betrays the heart that loves her-this

was Wordsworth’s firm belief. Nature, Wordsworth feels, is the nurse, the guide,

the guardian of her heart, and soul of all his moral being. The chief of Wordsworth,

namely, his pantheism, is lyrically expressed in this poem. Nature’s visible beauty

is a symbol of a divine and all- pervading spirit which harmonises the manifold

discord of the elements. Man, if he allows himself to live close to nature, can

experience the spiritual truth.

We think of Wordsworth first as a poet of Nature, and rightly; for though

the concordance shows that Nature was less often his theme than man, it is by his

poetry of Nature that he is unique. Wordsworth’s unique apprehension of Nature

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was determined by his peculiar sense-endowment. He is a poet of the mighty

world of eye and ear. He had a keen ear too for all natural sounds, the calls of

beasts and birds, and the sounds of winds and waters; the ‘soughing’ of boughs in a

high wind set his mind working, and he composed thousands of lines wandering

by the side of a stream. However, it should be noted that there are very few

passages in Wordsworth’s poetry which would justify us in claiming that his sense

of touch, taste and smell were equally actual. ‘Smooth’, ‘luscious’, ‘Warm,’

‘Fragrant’ – these are no epithets for Wordsworth’s poetry. His world is austere and

bleak. The indwelling spirit in Nature imparts its own consciousness to all objects

of Nature;

To every natural form, rock, fruit and flower, even the loose stones that

cover the highway I gave a moral like: I saw them feel.

It was words worth’s aim as a poet to reveal the invisible impulses at work

behind the outward beauty of nature, stop ford Brooke rightly observes: “He

(Wordsworth) conceived, as poet, that Nature was alive. It has, he imagined, one

living soul which, entering into flower, stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul

of their own”.

Wordsworth is not merely a poet of Nature, he is a prophet of Nature; he is

concerned less to depict than to explain; less to marvel at Nature’s beauty than to

exult at its inner significance. He is forever spiritualising the moods of Nature and

winning from them moral consolation. “To him nature appears as a formative

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influence superior to any other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in

our hearts of the deep-laid seeds of our feelings and beliefs.

Nature never engrossed all thoughts of Wordsworth. Many were given to

man. He aspired to become a philosophical poet, whose ultimate theme was not

Nature but the heart of man. The leech-gatherer’s account of his way of life

forcefully strikes the poet, who was in a depressed state of mind when he met the

old man. His words were dignified and elegant. In his youth his love of Nature was

characterised by “dizzy raptures” and aching joys which replaced the earlier

“coarser pleasures”. The love for Nature at his stage is purely sensuous though

deep and absorbing. In his maturity Nature invoked in him the consciousness of the

“Still, sad music of humanity”. He has developed a philosophic mind which reads

significance in to the beauties of Nature. He has now become aware of the spiritual

meaning of Nature. He has been led to experience that serene and blessed mood

when he has overcome the flesh to become a ‘living soul’. He now “sees into the

very life of things” and feels the sublime presence in all things- in nature as well as

in man’s mind. Thus Nature exalts his mind.

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CONCLUSION

Wordsworth’s chief originality is, of course, to be sought in his poetry of

Nature. But it is not the mere fail of his being a poet of Nature that makes him

unique. What gives him his uniqueness is the fact that he is, of all English poets,

the one who has given the most impressive and the most emotionally satisfying

account of man’s relation to Nature. He thinks of all created things, human or

inanimate, as parts of one great whole, filling their appointed place, moving in their

established order. He is the greatest Nature poet of England because he is the poet

of more than external Nature; he is in a degree, the poet of man.

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. Three points in his creed of Nature may be

noted:

He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a

divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature. This belief in 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.) Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human

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Heart and he looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-

stricken hearts. 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. According to him, human beings who grow up in the lap of Nature are

perfect in every respect.

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. In this he was

somewhat influenced by Rousseau. This inter-relation of Nature and man is very

important in considering Wordsworth's view of both.

Cazamian says that "To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative

influence superior to any other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in

our hearts of the deep-laden seeds of our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child

in the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the young poet to an ecstasy, the

glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life.".

Wordsworth's childhood had been spent in Nature's lap. A nurse both stern

and kindly, she had planted seeds of sympathy and under-standing in that growing

mind. Natural scenes like the grassy Derwent river bank or the monster shape of

the night-shrouded mountain played a "needful part" in the development of his

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mind. In The Prelude, he records dozens of these natural scenes, not for themselves

but for what his mind could learn through.

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".

He had not sought her; neither was he intellectually aware of her presence. She

riveted his attention by stirring up sensations of fear or joy which were "organic",

affecting him bodily as well as emotionally. With time the sensations were fixed

indelibly in his memory. All the instances in Book I of The Prelude show a kind of

primitive animism at work"; the emotions and psychological disturbances affect

external scenes in such a way that Nature seems to nurture "by beauty and by fear".

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:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too

deep for tears.

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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 moment of spiritual consecration: "v

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me;

bound unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A

dedicated Spirit.

To combine his spiritual ecstasy with a poetic presentment of Nature is the constant

aim of Wordsworth. It is the source of some of his greatest pieces, grand rhapsodies

such as Tintern Abbey.

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

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A brief study of his pictures of Nature reveals his peculiar power in actualising

sound and its converse, silence.

Being the poet of the ear and of the eye, he is exquisitely felicitious. No other poet

could have written:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,

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.

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

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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 in her ordinary, familiar, everyday moods.

He did not recognize the ugly side of 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

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WORKS CITED

Durant, Geoffrey. William Wordsworth. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing

House.1969

Chopra, P.S. William Wordsworth Selected Poems. New Delhi: uniqe

Publishers.2007

Mukherjee, S.K. William Wordsworth Selected Poems. New Delhi:

Rama Brothers India Pvt.Ltd. 2006