ROMANTICISM AND WORDSWORTH
I.
I.
I.
INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC CONTEXT
II.
II.
II.
BEFORE AND AFTER: NEOCLASSICISM AND REALISM
II.1. NEOCLASSICISM
II.2. REALISM
I.
III.
III.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S BIOGRAPHY AND WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH’S POETRY
II.
IV.
IV.
THE ROLE OF POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC ERA
III.
V.
V.
COMMENTARY ON “TINTERN ABBEY”
IV.
VI.
VI.
RELATION OF THE POEM WITH TODAY
---------WORDSWORTH AND THE ROMANTIC
POETRY----------
I. INTRODUCTION:
ROMANTIC CONTEXT.
Emerging in
At a time when the concept of nation was defined and identification of national
roots charged emotional resonances, the exploration of the origins in literary
and cultural medieval context assumed a great importance.
G. MAYOS SOLSONA,
Ilustración y romanticismo: Introducción a la polémica entre Kant y Herder,
Barcelona, 2004; page 16.
Besides all that, Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual
movement that originated around the middle of the XVIIIth century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution
and the French Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social,
and political norms of the Enlightenment
period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of
nature in art and literature. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as
trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed
nature. It elevated folk art, nature and
custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included
human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.
The ideologies and
events of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution are thought to
have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it
perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society.
It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which
permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.
In a general sense,
the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social
thinkers of the late XVIII and early XIX centuries.. Despite this
general usage of the term, many attempts have been made to describe what
Romanticism and the term “romantic” refer to: for some Romanticism had its
beginnings in the English XVII century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_era
These differing
versions of the age and lineage of Romanticism are matched with a corresponding
diversity in the descriptions offered by those of our time who have given
special care to the observation of it. Romanticism was a fairy way of writing;
it implies reminiscence, the romantic schools have always depended more or less
on the past.
Among
those for whom the word implies a social or political ideology and temper,
Romanticism spells anarchy in every domain. The Romantic mind tends to be
affected by an inferiority-complex.
The function of the
human mind that is to be regarded as peculiarly romantic is for some the heart
as opposed to the head; for others, the Imagination, as contrasted with Reason
and the Sense of Fact.
Typical
manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously
conceived to be a passion for moonlight, red waistcoasts like Théophile
Gautier’s, for Gothic churches, talking exclusively about oneself, heroship,
for losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature.
It is by different
historians supposed to have begotten the French Revolution and the Oxford
movement, the Return to
The result of all
these samples is confusion of terms, and of ideas. The word Romantic has come
to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. Victor Hugo testified
there were those who preferred to leave à
ce mot de romantique un certain vague fantastique et indefinissable qui en
redouble l’horreur. Identifying Romanticism with the essential spirit of
the French Revolution, finds the chief cause of our woes in that movement’s
breach with the past, in its discarding of the ancient traditions of European
civilization and seeks the cure in a return to an older faith and an older and
political and social order and abandonment of the optimistic fatalism generated
by the idea of progress.
For one of the few
certain things about Romanticism is that the name of it offers one of the most
complicated, fascinating and instructive of all problems in semantic.
Not to get confused
with its meaning, we should learn to use the word ”Romanticism” in the plural.
Historians recognize that “Romanticism” of one country may have little in
common with that of another, and that all events should be defined in
distinctive terms.
A student of
literature must set out from the simple and obvious fact that there are various
historic events, episodes or movements, to which different historians have
given the name.
Broadly speaking,
we can divide early Romantic theory into two parts: the first associated with
Coleridge and Wordsworth in
The first one
stresses the sublime and vital function of man’s imagination, which gives order
and meaning to his surroundings, and of poetry, the imaginations chief’s
instrument of expression. This great power seemed solitary, the great “I am”,
the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self, the most potent embodiment of the
individual self-consciousness.
When certain of
these Romanticisms have in truth significant elements in common, there are not
necessarily the same elements. Each of these Romanticisms should be resolved by
a more thorough and discerning analysis into its elements. Many intellectual
historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers
of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive
reason,
Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination,
and feeling,
to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford
University Press,
In visual art and
literature, "Romanticism" typically refers to the late 18th century
through the mid 19th century. Recurring themes found in Romantic literature are
the criticism of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for
nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on
the supernatural/occult and
human psychology,
which they were fascinated with.
Romanticism in British literature
developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored
book Lyrical
Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan
poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions.
Both poets were also involved in Utopian social thought in the wake of the French
Revolution.
The
poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of
the Romantic sensibility in
One of Romanticism's key
ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became
a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest
parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages
and folklore,
and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which
would redraw the map of
The general theme
of Joseph Warton’s poem The lover of
Nature is one which had been a
commonplace for several centuries: the superiority of Nature to art. The
Natural in contrast with the artificial meant that which is not man-made; and
within man’s life, it was supposed to consist in those expressions of human
nature which are most spontaneous, unpremeditated, untouched by inflexion or
design and free from the bondage of social convention. “Ce n’est pas raison,
cried Montaigne, que l’art gagne le point d’honneur sur notre grande et puissante
mere Nature. Nous avons tant recharge la beauté et richesse de ses ouvrages par
nos inventions que nous l’avons tout à fait étouffée”. While the ‘natural’ was,
on the one hand, conceived as the wild and spontaneous and irregular, it also
was conceived as the simple, the naïve, the unsophisticated. Consequently, the
idea of preferring nature to custom and art usually carried with it the
suggestion of a program of simplification, it implied primitivism. The
‘natural’ was a thing you reached by going back and by leaving out.
The idea of the
sublime is a very important one in the Romantics. Is has been described as “the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” the sublime is related
to the concepts of vasteness, inifinity, astonishment, when for instance we are
contemplating nature and its elements of natural and supernatural ( enraged
sea, immense mountains; when contemplating ruins of cathedrals, medieval
architecture), maybe even evoking the battlements of a fortress.
Another characteristic
of the Romantic is ethical dualism, a conviction that there are in a man’s
constitution two natures ceaselessly at war (the inwardness, of Christianity
and its preoccupation with the heart as distinguished from the outward act, its
tendency to introspection.
ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets, Oxford
University Press,
II. BEFORE AND AFTER:
NEOCLASSICISM AND REALISM.
II. 1.NEOCLASSICISM
Order, logic,
balance, propriety, reason and mastery of the emotions were the salient
characteristics of this literary movement emerged in Europe in the XVIII
eighteenth century as a result of French classicism of XVII. Of objectives
moralizing and didactic, followed patterns formal study of Greco-Roman culture.
By the second decade of the XIXth nineteenth century, neoclassical became
visibly moved by the romance.
In the neoclassical theory, poetry was a genre of second order; the most
important one was theater. The neoclassical have their source in the seminal
work of Aristotle, Poetics, which, as
we know, deals primarily with tragedy.
Theater was the literary genre of more popular impact until the XIXth century,
since it reached the illiterate through sight and hearing. Its main objective
was didactismo, ie. theater was intended to teach useful things from a moral
standpoint. Didactics, serenity, balance decorum, the notion of beauty, the
imitation of nature, and how it should be Man) were the major aesthetic features
of this period.
But in Romanticism what matters is the authenticity staff, the expression of
feelings under a semblance tormented, troubled, inner reflection, the truth of
feelings, confessions from them. Romanticism supposed confront existential problems,
to reflect on topics such as death.
Romanticism had its
first roots in
RULL, E. La poesía y el teatro en el siglo XVIII:
Neoclasicismo, Taurus, Madrid, 1987
II.2.REALISM.
In the mid-XIXth century, several European writers show a dramatic rejection of
the fantasies and passions of Romanticism. The effort to write again about the
reality of human social life, which begins to dominate the literary activity,
gives rise to the movement known as Realism. The birth of sociology, the
emergence of chronic journalistic and the emergence of photography influenced
the development of this new aesthetic, which revalued the ordinary man and his
present everyday activities as central themes in literature and arts. The
objectivity, observation, the detailed description, clarity and stylistic trial
dispassionate appear among the core values of a new literature that is devoted
to recording the daily lives of ordinary people, and gives them dignity.
Unlike the
aristocratic heroes of Romanticism, the actors in realistic works belong to the
middle class and the broad popular and proletarian sectors of societies of the time. The social concern
and careful psychological analysis of these characters, hitherto excluded from
the XIXth century literary universe, appear as the fundamental characteristics
of realistic fiction.
RULL, E. La
poesía y el teatro en el siglo XVIII: Neoclasicismo, Taurus, Madrid, 1987
III. WORDSWORTH’S
BIOGRAPHY AND POETRY
William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in Cumberland. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all
his life was born one year later. After the death of their mother in 1778, she
and William did not meet again for another nine years. In 1783 their father
died.
Although many aspects of
his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took
him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and
his separation from his siblings. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary
France
and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from
The source of
Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and
in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern
Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate. While it
had long been supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for
philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that Wordsworth's
ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the
mid 1790s.
For
a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the
latter's opium addiction. Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine,
died in
Some
modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline
was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the
issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation,
abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success
accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier
works. By 1828, Wordsworth had become fully reconciled to Coleridge, and the
two toured the
ABRAMS, H. M. English Romantic Poets,
THE ROLE OF POETRY AND WORDSWORTH.
The poetry exists
to make understandable a set of abstract notions, and these abstract notions
have been taken over as truth from the natural philosophers such as Descartes,
Wordsworth, amongst
others, was intent on transforming the place of poetry in society: from a
specialised, agreeable, but not from very high-ranking pursuit and taste, it
was to be given sherry, as Wordsworth scornfully put it. Poetry was to be no
longer a relaxation, and a plaything separated from reason; now the poet’s
purpose was to reconcile man with his surroundings, and his imagination with
what it fed on in the external world.
Wordsworth had
written in the letter to Lady Beaumont that ‘to be incapable of a feeling of
poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and
reverence for God’. The poet might indeed feel that the cares of the world were
on his shoulders. Worthwords intends to choose everyday subjects and
‘situations from common life’ and to throw over them a certain colouring of the
imagination in order to present them in an unusual aspect.
Halfway through the
XVIII century, poetry was exploring the world of external nature, and with
ever-increasing delicacy and detail. Indeed, as fiction became more fantastic,
poetry tended to become more exact, and to fix its eye more and more closely on
the object. Romantic poetry was in danger of becoming a purely contemplative
and exploratory power which might penetrate the individual mind with the same
acuteness as it penetrated the external objects, but which has none the less
lost the art of representing dramatically the conflicts between man as an
individual and as a social being; between his illusions about his environment
and the reality about it. A poem like The
Prelude is sensitive and tentacular: the poet’s mind is reaching out into
the mystery of itself and its surroundings, and the process cannot but be an
exceedingly undramatic one. The essence of drama is clash; the essence of
poetry is synthetic and healing, tending always towards harmony and similarity,
not division and difference. Romantics believed that in so writing they were
representing the nature of Reality.
BAYLEY, J. The Romantic Survival, Chatto &
Windus,
POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC ERA.
It is arguable that
the novelists more than the poets of the XIX century are the real beneficiaries
of the great Romantic endowment. Certainly the novel and not the long poem was
to become the dominating literary form of the century, and the novel went on to
success in a field in which poetry virtually ceased to compete- the
relationship between the individual imagination and the problems and
complications of society.
The technical
requirements made verse more exacting, and the forms and technique of verse
were not equal to the inmense expansion of the imagination into regions which
it would take prose fiction to settle and colonise.
One can hardly
emphasize how little the early Romantic theories deserve such epithets such as
dreamy, exotic, eccentric, private, escapist, devitalised-all the adjectives
which have come by association to cling to the word Romantic- nor how much they
require such terms as practical, sensible, unifying, all-embracing, morally
aware and so on. The sensitive point in the structure of early Romantic theory
is the relationship between the poet’s mind and the world which it
contemplates. In the course of the XIX century the Romantic preoccupation with
the relationship between the creator and his material took every possible form
and carried every implication to its most explicit conclusions.
All slogans,
explanations and critical catchphrases by poets and their critics suffer from
being almost impossible to relate to the actuality of poetry itself. Thus, such
terms as “imagination”, “sensibility”, poetic truth’ can shed very little light
on what we get out of poetry or on the reasons why poetry affects us; what they
can do is to show us why at certain periods certain poets and their readers
thought about poetry as they did. The feeling that poetry should deal with
morally acceptable ideas is one that finds expression in many periods of
criticism, usually in the argument that intellect and tradition are sounder
guides in the making of poetry than are instinct and imagination. The argument
may also take the form that poetry has no transmutative power over ideas that
are wrong, foolish or unacceptable to the reader; that what the imagination
seizes on as beauty is not necessarily truth. The antithesis thus presents itself
between the worth of ideas and the worth of poetry, and it was one that greatly
occupied the Romantic theorists. Can philosophical and poetic truth be made
synonymous, or is there an inevitable gap between them? Coleridge thought there
was not; and he hoped that Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude would demonstrate their compatibility, by being the
first philosophical poem. The reality sadly disappointed him. It became natural
for the later Romantics to make the separation between the meaning and the
ideas in a poem and the imaginative power with which it makes its impact on the
reader. Such a separation would not have seemed possible for Wordsworth, who
never conceived his imagination as functioning apart from the full authority of
abstract ideas, and who never attempted to liberate his imagination from their
service. Poetry and geometric truth are for him close allies, and he tells us
how in his childhood he was never able to keep the symbols of geometry and
algebra out of his mind, apart from the living spectacle of nature.
Worthwords was a
poet who could only have appeared in the XVIII, when mythologies were exploited
and a belief in the visible universe as the body of which God was the soul
alone remained. His beliefs can be viewed as data furnished to him by a
tradition. He, as well as Dante, may be said to have employed his sensibility
within a framework of received beliefs.
His most positive beliefs,
these by which he appears in reaction against the scientific tradition, were
built up by him representative of the modern situation; the situation in which
beliefs are made out of poetry rather than poetry out of beliefs.
To animise the real
world, the universe of death, that the mechanical system of philosophy had
produced, but to do this without using an exploded mythology or fabricating a
new one; that was the special task and mission of Wordsworth. It was the visible world what Worthwords
sought, and he felt that mechanical materialism had substituted a universe of
death for that which moves with light and life instinct, actual, divine, true.
Worthword’s poetic activity was largely conditioned by the reality standards of
his time, which left him alone with the universe. But his creative sensibility
had taught him that he was not alone with an inanimate cold world, but with an
active universe, a universe capable of being moulded and modified by he plastic
power which abode within himself. Poetry becomes with Wordsworth the record of
moments of ennobling interchange of action from within and from without; it
takes on a psychological aspect. There’s scarcely one of my poems which does
not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment or to some general
principle, or law or thought or of our intellectual constitution. Wordsworth’s
aloneness with the universe marks his position in the history of poetry and
beliefs; it seems to determine the quality of much of his work.
He believed in the
capacity of the mind co-operate with this active universe, to contribute
something to its own to it in perceiving it; and it was that belief which
encouraged him to hope that poetry might be delivered from the fetters of the
mechanical tradition without being allowed to fall into disrepute as ‘unreal’
or fanciful.
E. LEGOUIS, Choix de Poésies, , 1961, Préface
pages 1-10; BAYLEY, J. The Romantic
Survival, Chatto & Windus,
V. COMMENTARY ON “TINTERN
ABBEY”
FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 20
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too 30
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed 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 unintelligible world, 40
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft-- 50
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart--
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man 70
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--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, 80
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 90
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. 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 100
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 110
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once, 120
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 130
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 140
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance--
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence--wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream 150
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love--oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html
The full title of
the poem tells us readers many things: W could notice the date, which is the
eve of Bastille Day. Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 and was 28 when he
wrote this poem.
Wordsworth sets the
action in the ‘humble and rustic’ life because in that condition ‘the essential
passions of the heart find a better soul, in which they can attain their
maturity’ and ‘because they ‘speak a plainer and more emphatic language’.
SANDERS, A. The Short Oxford History of
English literature, Oxford University Press,
We can see as we
read through the poem that five years (“five summers with the length/ Of five
long winters”) have passed since he visited the place he is talking about. He
says aloud from memory a place where maybe he went to when he was younger (“the
steep and lofty cliffs”) that has now become for the poet a place of
retirement, a place where he can think, a place of introspection. He describes
also the effects produced on his mind, on his feelings; this place is now one
of “thoughts of more deep seclusion; he describes also a beautiful landscape
with the quiet of the sky”. He is resting under a “dark sycamore” contemplating
“cottage-grounds” and “the orchard trees”, whose fruits are not ripe yet.
I would say that
Wordsworth suggests the contemplation of this landscape through the eyes of
someone who is taking a walk (“I again repose here under”…) and in an evening
fireside (“Or of some Hermit's cave,
where by his fire/ The Hermit sits alone.”)
Then the poet describes what his feelings were towards “these beatous
forms” after some time away from them, alone in the cities or in towns, crowded
and ugly places. Let us not forget that Wordsworth is against the industrialization
and social background of a developing
Worthwords is aware
that this loss of bodily awareness is accompanied by a "mystical communion
with the life-force of the universe", "the life of things", a
similar communion that is to be found in Coleridge's earlier poem This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. But for Coleridge the life-force is more
specifically referred to as the Unitarian God, the one Life, "the Almighty
Spirit". (A. SANDERS, The Short Oxford
History of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 1994, page 87 )
He
was someone different back then, when he used to “bound o'er the mountains” and
the “sides of the rivers”. In those days nature was everything for him. Now
time has gone (“And all its aching joys
are now no more”) by and he doesn’t “mourn” because he has gained more
than he has lost. He’s gained, and I have to be honest on this one and say I
don’t know what he is actually talking about: he has learned how to "look on nature, not as in the
hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of
humanity." Wordsworth makes it clear that he does not "mourn or
murmur" for this loss because the heightened experience that follows is
"abundant recompense"; more has been gained than lost in the passing
of time. And he can now sense the presence of something far more subtle,
powerful, and fundamental in the light of the setting suns, the ocean, the air
itself, and even in the mind of man; this energy seems to him "a motion
and a spirit that impels / All thinking thoughts....” he still does love
nature. The whole poem is It like an internal monologue that in the end
involves the sister, Dorothy, who turns out to be the one to whom the poem is
addressed.
The lyrical voice tells us that even if he hadn’t
felt the way he had, or if he wasn’t to understand these things, everything
would have bee perfect since Dorothy, (“Dear, dear friend”) is with him. Her
voice and her manners remind him of when he was younger (“what I once was”).
Later on, he states
that either when Dorothy grows older (when (“thy mind /Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,”) “Thy memory be as a
dwelling place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies”) or when she feels alone,
sad or sick (“If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,/ Should be thy
portion”), she can always remember what this place, this living place of
positive feelings, experiences, sensations, and joyful recollections meant to
him , and she can always remember this journey back into the past.
The experience
Wordsworth is describing is one between the poet's mind and the external world.
The poet loves Nature for its own sake alone, and the presence of Nature gives
beauty to the poet's mind. When Wordsworth sees into "the life of things"
he sees things not for their potential use but for themselves.
The poem strikingly
avoids any localizing detail. It opens with the evocation of a particular place
"these steep and lofty cliffs", "these plots of
cottage-ground". The most striking absent detail is any mention of the
actual ruins themselves.
The biggest
difference between Tintern and the conversation poems before it is
that this feeling is associated with the human capacity to learn from
experience. Coleridge's earlier conversation poems: The Eolian Harp, Frost
at Midnight and This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison come as a direct
response to the beauty of the objects perceived before him but WW experiences
this "serene and blessed mood" via the visual memories that the
objects have impressed in his mind.
Wordsworth finally turns to his sister
Dorothy who accompanied him in his second visit to the Wye in 1798 but never
been there previously and Wordsworth sees in her the figure of himself when he
first visited the area (we can see that in Wordsworth description of Dorothy as
having "wild eyes"). Dorothy's new experience not only benefits
herself but William as well for the landscape is made "more dear"
since Dorothy now treasures it.
The subject o “Tintern Abbey” is memory; to
be more accurate, childhood memories involving natural beauty. Wordsworth emphasizes the
reciprocity of nature. Dorothy echoes this last line in a poem of her own
written over 30 years later, expressing the feelings that William had hoped the
experience of the Wye would bestow upon her. Dorothy's memory is not only
reciprocal with Nature itself but with her brother William as well. The final
conclusion of the poem is one that values reciprocal experience between man,
woman and Nature. (The Short
; http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/section1.html)
VI. RELATION OF THE POEM WITH
TODAY
Wordsworth sees nature as a place of introspection, a place where he can be at peace; we have seen that Wordsworth loves nature for its own sake alone, and that for him it’s the most pleasurable view; he’s extremely happy to be in contact with Nature. Natural landscapes are full of deep pleasure, because he recalls a pastime paradise; so in a way Nature itself brings time back (the time when he was younger). Wordsworth actually admires the beauty of Nature, he loves everything that nature produces , everything he is genuinely describing. Nature actually does cool things down (like, for instance this sort stress, of not being quite comfortable, this bad feeling that Wordsworth talks about in the poem when he is the city or in a town, disappears the minute he sits down and contemplates the marvellous wondrous that is before him).
Wordsworth probably saw the destruction of his loved nature coming because of the Industrial Revolution. So, in a way he was doing some kind of an ecological manifesto. He was not the first in the last nor the last to do such a thing.
Before him there was Chief Seattle (1784-1866), a Native American who in January 1855 ceded his lands in Washington State . He wrote a letter to the American President at that time, Franklin Pierce stating that for the white man, “one portion of land is the same to him as the next; the earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He kidnaps the earth from his children and he does not care; his appetite will devour the earth and leave behind a desert; the earth does not belong to the man, man belongs to the earth. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of the life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself”. (M. LOVRIC. The World’s Greatest Letters, Past times; Oxford 2002 pages 146-147).
Nowadays we have the Global warming problem all over the place. We have got world leaders aiming at assessing the impact and extent of climate change, there are many scientists in various countries who say that the evidence of global worsening is overwhelming. So strong is the evidence linking the warming climate of human actions that only the most irresponsible world leaders can turn their back on global warming and its causes. Nature is an issue of great importance in these days, and it is a responsibility that we have to take seriously.
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