2. W. Wordsworth & S.T. Coleridge

Nature and Industrial Revolution in "The World is too Much with Us" and "Frost at Midnight"

Read "The World is too Much with Us" and "Frost at Midnight".

1. Introduction

Romantics were very fond of nature and abhorred the radical urbanization brought about by industrialism. Many poets who had written about nature in their youth wrote nostalgic poems lamenting people’s apathy towards it. This second paper uses the sonnet "The World is too Much with Us" by Wordsworth and a fragment of Coleridge’s "Frost at Midnight" to exemplify their attitude against the motivations of that time.

2. About the Poet

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland. Having lost his parents as a child, Wordsworth and his three brothers were sent to a school situated in the Lake District, while his sister Dorothy, with whom she was close all his life, was sent to another town. In 1787 Wordsworth enrolled at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and graduated four years later, in 1791. During these years he developed a passion for nature derived from his long walking tours across the country. He travelled to France and showed great enthusiasm for the Girondists. It was during his stay that he fell in love with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter, Anne-Caroline, in 1792. But Wordsworth was too poor to marry and returned to England when the Anglo-French war broke out. Back in England, he reunited with Dorothy and settled down at Racedown, Dorset, His first work, "Descriptive Sketches", came out in 1793.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October, 1772 in Ottery St Mary, Devon. He was a lonely child who spent most of his time reading all kind of books, especially after his father’s death in 1781. The next year, Coleridge enrolled at Christ’s Hospital school in London and nine years later at Cambridge University, where his already republican opinions grew radical. Coleridge started visiting prostitutes and developed a heavy addiction to alcohol and opium, which led him to financial hardships. He tried to change his lifestyle by enlisting in the army but was soon discharged after alleging insanity. In 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey, with whom he planned to establish an utopian community in America. That plan never made it through and now Coleridge was married to Sara Fricker due to the plan’s conditions. Coleridge began writing poetry and was sponsored by the Wedgwood’s.

In 1795 Wordsworth and Coleridge met and two years later Wordsworth and his sister moved to Alforden, Somerset, to be near Coleridge. Both poets met daily to talk about poetry and in 1798 they co-published a book called "Lyrical Ballads". Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson in 1802 and Coleridge, whose marriage was unhappy, fell in love with Mary’s sister. Wordsworth earned popularity and published "Poems in Two Volumes" in 1807. This book contained well-known poems such as "London 1802", "The World is Too Much with Us" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Financial and marital problems led Coleridge to depression and lack of creativity; his addiction to opium grew worse and he set sail to Malta and Sicily. He returned in 1806, separated from his wife in 1808 and quarreled with Wordsworth in 1810. Coleridge took residence in Dr. Gilman’s house in Highgate, London, where he remained until his death in 1834. Coleridge’s latest successful works were the poems "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan", published in 1816, and "Biographia Literae", published the next year. The last great work from Wordsworth is "The Prelude", which he began to plan in his 20s, a long poem written in blank verse about his growth as a poet. "The Prelude" was intended to be part of a trilogy, but Wordsworth died in 1850 and didn’t manage to finish it.

3. Nature and Industrial Revolution in Romanticism

Industrial Revolution had already taken roots in England by the time Wordsworth and Coleridge co-authored "Lyrical Ballads". One of the causes of the Romantic movement was the opposition to the scientific rationalization of the world typical of the Age of Enlightenment, which made industrialization possible.

Industrialization brought many changes in society, such as an important rural flight of people who wanted to take the opportunity to work in the city. This way, cities grew overpopulated and deindividualized. The Augustan Age took pleasure in civilized elements even in nature, which they preferred to be tamed rather than wild. Untamed aspects or individuals were feared.

Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had spent many years by the countryside, lamented this turn of events. Nature was often considered a source of imagination, and the wild urbanization and the inevitable depersonalization were hence disastrous for the Romantic ideals.

However, even if both Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed that nature was the best teacher for their children, their ideas about poetry on nature differed slightly. Wordsworth’s poetry was spontaneous and simple, he wrote about daily scenes of the common man; whereas Coleridge defended the use of refined language and more complex themes, as seen in his epic poem "Kubla Khan".

For Wordsworth, nature was a living force that influenced humans positively. He personifies nature (pathetic fallacy) and dotes it with divine qualities. On the other hand, Coleridge thought that man’s relationship with nature was not always harmonious because he didn’t find relief in it when he was depressed. But God is the creator of the world and nature can act as a channel to deliver God’s creative power.

4. Style

"The World is too Much with Us" is a Petrarchan sonnet. This type of composition consists of fourteen lines divided into two parts, an octave and a sestet. Its rhyming scheme is ABBAABBA CDCDCD and it employs iambic pentameter for the most part. Being an ode to nature, it employs vivid imagery of natural elements such as the sea or the wind, which he describes by means of personifications, metaphors an similes.

"Frost at Midnight" is part of the eight "conversation" poems written by Coleridge. The reason for this name is the conversational language in which they are written, they’re addressed to people he knows, like his son Hatley, and talk about nature, imagination, society and religion in a personal tone. Like the whole group of conversational poems, "Frost at Midnight" is a monologue written in blank verse and iambic pentameter.

5. Summary

"The World is too Much with Us" is a poem that shows Wordsworth’s anger and desperation over a materialistic society that has tossed nature away and is only preoccupied with worldly possessions.

In "Frost at Midnight", the speaker is sitting alone at night, everyone else in the cottage is asleep and he takes the opportunity to contemplate nature, reflecting on his childhood experiences, spent in the dull city. He is relieved to know that his son will be able to grow up in the countryside.

6. Analysis

6.1. "The World is too Much with Us"

Wordsworth expresses his discontentment with people’s disregard for nature in this poem. The first line implies that this situation is not new: humans have abandoned nature before, are abandoning it now and will probably abandon it again in the future ("late and soon"). The reason for their lack of care is the blooming materialism of the Industrial Age; people are too busy "getting and spending" (2) to care about spiritual powers or something greater than mindless consumerism, which is what his contemporaries are occupied with. For Wordsworth, mankind is not necessarily a threat to nature, one can find peace and inspiration from contemplating the natural world but, unfortunately, it’s being ignored and people are thus wasting their "powers" in something mundane (2).

We have become so oblivious to nature that "little we see in Nature that is ours" (3), we do not feel connected to it and just leave it aside. Instead, "we have given our hearts away" as a "sordid boon", which is an oxymoron that denotes irony, a "boon" is a reward but Wordsworth describes it as "sordid", which means vulgar and dirty.

Lines 5-7 depict images from the natural world. The "Sea" is personified as a woman who "bares her bosom to the moon" (5); the "wind" is personified as well, it is "howling at all hours" (6) like a wolf, and is also compared to "sleeping flowers" that are "up-gathered" (7). All of these comparisons show the beauty of nature which doesn’t seem to matter to people, they are "out of tune" (8) and "it moves us not" (9).

The ninth line of the Petrarchan sonnet is called the "volta", since it introduces the sestet, which acts as a commentary of the theme exposed in the octave. The change in this poem is easy to spot: Wordsworth writes about Paganism with a melancholic tone. Appealing to the Christian God ("Great God!"), he says that he "would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" (10). With that sentence, he is aware of Paganism being an outdated religion, but he finds it superior to the current situation of being blind to the great beauty of nature. He knows that very few people would agree with him, he is "standing on this pleasant lea" (11) as a lonely, desperate and "forlorn" (12) hero, but he wouldn’t mind that loneliness if it meant being able to watch the Greek gods "Proteus raising from the sea" and "Triton blow his wreathed horn".

6.2. "Frost at Midnight"

The speaker of this poem, Coleridge, looks tenderly towards the sleeping form of his child and admires his beauty. He addresses him and expresses his relief that his son will be raised up in the countryside, unlike him, who spent his childhood "reared/ in the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,/ and saw nought lovely but the sky and stars" (51-53). Coleridge felt trapped in the city, in fact he had compared his school to a prison that separated him from the spiritual in the previous stanza when he wrote "I gazed upon the bars" (25). Having grown up by the countryside, Coleridge missed the natural world as it couldn’t provide him comfort in the city.

His son won’t learn from such a reclusive ambient, instead he will be able to "wander like a breeze" (54) amidst the "lakes", "shores", "ancient mountains" and "clouds" (55-58), that is, he will be connected to nature and it will fuel his imagination. Moreover, his child will be also connected to God and will "see" and "hear" (58) God’s "eternal language" (60), for God resides in nature and learning from him directly is better than learning from men in the city. This way his child will be free and will grow to appreciate nature, education and imagination, he will "make it ask" (64).

7. Conclusion

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s neoplatonic philosophy that attributed divine and pantheistic qualities to nature wasn’t shared by his contemporary citizens, who became engrossed in materialism and kept on supporting the industrial revolution that reached its peak during the Victorian era.

Since then, more poets have been fascinated by nature and have wrote poems about it — Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and T.S. Eliot, to name a few. Nowadays some people have rebelled against materialism and preach the ancient Pagan religions of which Wordsworth spoke about in "The World is too Much with Us".