Words Worth Sharing

Any claim about the autobiographical significance of an author’s writing requires a thorough understanding of a predominate proportion of that author’s life work. Thankfully, William Wordsworth left us a very long and detailed record of the philosophical cha

nges the poet underwent during his career, especially with regards to the twin Blakean states of Innocence and Experience. For Wordsworth that two part concept underpins his view of the evolution of the poet’s (and the individual’s) world view. By examining three successive poems by Wordsworth a pattern develops which suggests that he grew increasingly doubtful as to the absolute value of naturalism. The earlier Lines Written in Early Spring attempts, perhaps unsuccessfully, to unify oppositions with youthful optimism–or naiveté, if you will–and a pantheistic naturalism, an unstated belief that nature is everything, even God. A later poem, Tintern Abbey, grapples with the mature realization that what we see, think or feel about nature is distorted by our own projections, associations and recollections, by the very operation of the mind itself. In what was nearly his last, and certainly his longest, work, The Prelude, Wordsworth shares an intimate, poignant picture of the final dissolution and disintegration of what once was once a heartfelt communion with nature.

Early Spring follows a pattern typical of the young Wordsworth:  it begins descriptively by rendering nature in minute detail, and then, as if in immediate response to a particular landscape, the poem suddenly becomes meditative, jumping from the physical to the metaphysical without any logical explanation. Nature as a spiritual guide is an emotional and enigmatic source of inspiration, and forms the basis for the poem’s moral questioning of `what man has made of man.’  In the climax the speaker appears to fuse with nature in a process of sympathetic identification as capital-N Nature becomes personalized, internalized, even humanized by the poet:  `To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran’(l.5-6).   Nature’s `links’ provide the imagination with the light of inspiration, the brilliant beacon of Romanticism.

The poetic process of gaining insight through the identification with nature is affirmed by Wordsworth to be the root of his faith in naturalism, the belief that the outward forms of the natural world, such as groves, birds, clouds, and flowers, are vitally interconnected with ideas like Truth, Beauty and Goodness (inner reality). The more mature Wordsworth, however, in Tintern Abbey, cannot reaffirm the Innocent enthusiasm of Early Spring. Experience has led to the poet extemporizing on how the `weary weight Of all this unintelligible world’(l.43-4) drags the `corporeal frame’(l.43) down unto death. Gone are the youthful `forms of beauty’(l.24) that had once been a source of `tranquil restoration’(l.31) and `abundant recompence’(l.89). Now `The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements [are] all gone by’(l.74-5).  The poet has learned to `look on nature, not as in the hour of my thoughtless youth’(l.90-1), but with `a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused’(l.96-7). At this point the emotionally simple and naturalistic connection with the landscape in Early Spring seems juvenile; the speaker here is talking about the imagination as having a more sophisticated correspondence with nature and involving mystical or quasi-religious epiphanies. Sober rationalization leads to argument in entelechy: there is `A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of thought And rolls through all things’(101-3).

Tintern Abbey at first appears to be a situational poem similar in structure and method to Early Spring.  But it soon becomes apparent that the poem does not follow the typical pattern of inspiration via nature, but rather seeks to explore the connection between outer and inner reality, the processes of thought, feeling and memory. Past, present and future, the physical and the metaphysical, the poet’s mind becomes a nexus for all these concepts and is itself the center of the poem. Introspection and powerful intellectualizing have displaced mere intuition and feelings. Experience has brought the realization that the mind not only passively perceives external influences but can also actively `half-creates’(l.107) them—as if thought were like the notes of sound produced by the plucking of Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp.

In his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth writes that nature and `all that we behold’(l.105) is ultimately unknowable in any truly objective sense, but instead, like a poem, it is a constant source of a subjective, psychological truth. Projections, associations and recollections paint the `picture of the mind’(l.662) with the `colouring of imagination’(l.597). Nature is not simply a one-way lamp of inspiration; it is a two-way mirror of self-realization: what we see is largely a reflection of ourselves. To use yet another Romantic image, nature is like a sea shell which seems to echo the voice of the eternal sea, but in reality echoes the heart and pulse of life within the listener. This is indeed a touching sentiment, until undercut by the realization of our supreme isolation caused by the infinite chasm between our inner and outer worlds. Perhaps in the mode of damage control more than inspiration, our poet adopts what is essentially a dualistic philosophy of pessimism to replace his earlier monolithic enthusiasm. Unlike the primal state of Innocence, where the unfettered mind is free to explore the great world outside, the state of Experience is like being bound by the metaphorical chains in Plato’s great epistemological analogy of the Cave:  the conditions of human knowledge are such that all that we can normally apprehend is but a shadow of reality, reflections on the cave wall.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth’s coda, instead of a cave there is a boat on the water from which the observer looks down and perceives a reflected and refracted view of things. We are all `As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving boat’(IV:l.247). The view of Wordsworth’s lake bottom is distorted by conditions of perception, the reflections of sunlight and of the observer’s own image, and the refractory flux of water as a medium for sight.  The passive, `spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ which characterizes the young Wordsworth is a poetic process which no longer appeals to the poet for whom `the mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight’(I:l.237-8). At this point the difference between Innocence and Experience is comparable to the difference between the poet of Early Spring and that of The Prelude.

All quotations from: William Wordsworth. Ed. by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1984.