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Name: Maru Janak J

Roll No: 26

Paper No: (5) The Romantic Literature

Topic: Wordsworth as a nature poet

M.A: Sem-2

Year: 2015-16

Email: marujanak17@gmail.com

Submitted To: Smt.S.B Gardi Department of English M.K.B.U.-Bhavnagar University

v  Introduction

                           Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770 at Cocker mouth, 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 quit an early age when he was yet a student at hawkshed grammer school. Wordsworth was the high priest of nature. In his treatment of natural objects, humble life and comman objects of the ordinary world, we find a touch of wonder and curiosity.

                           Wordsworth published in 1807 two volumes of poem 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 it’s most sublime and sustaining expression in his work. He was rightly considered the greatest poet of the country side 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 manifestation 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.

v      Three stages in Wordsworth’s treatment of nature: 

                               The predominantly spiritual tone of Wordsworth’s appreciation of nature was note a continued process from the day of childhood to the days of maturity and philosophical 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.

v      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.

v     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.

v     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 forestalls 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.’

v     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:

                            

                                

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.

                   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.

                      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.

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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     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.

 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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