Wordsworth's Poetry

Everyone knows that Words-worth was (to use his own phrase), a worshipper of nature.

Born and brought up in Lake District, son of a wealthy lawyer, Wordsworth found in his childhood experiences a source of material very much in keeping with the tendency in the temper of the age.

For every poet his own experience is, of course the raw material of the creative process. There is, moreover, a general understanding that Wordsworth has, in some sense, a moral lesson to teach us; and most of us, like Keats , are uneasy about poetry that has a palpable design upon us. "Every great Poet is a Teacher: ", he wrote to Sir. George Beaumont [Feb 1808], "I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing."

We find not only that a self conscious attitude towards nature is very much one of Words-worth's preoccupations, but that there is a readiness to moralise about - to draw moral conclusion from - this attitude and to press them upon the reader.

Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems published by the fruitful collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of the Landmarks of English poetry. In the later years he succeeded Southey as England's Poet Laureate.

A famous passage from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads :

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: It takes its origin from the emotion. It is a recollected in tranquility. The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Wordsworth - it is plain from the context is describing part of the process of poetic creation as it appears to the poet.

The purpose of his poems, in general terms, is to be "carried along" by description of objects that strongly execute the poet's feelings. Although Wordsworth gives a fair account of his bet practice, it often turns, on an examination of particular poems, to be less than the whole story. SaysR.O.C. Winkler, "The poem Influence of Natural objects  may serve as an illustration. Written in 1799, this was eventually printed as part of The Prelude, but first appeared separately in Coleridge's periodical The Friend.

The full title of the poem in Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strentening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth,  and the initial apostrophe, down to 'A grandeur in the beating of the heart', is a rhetorical elaboration of this title. It is a statement, an assertion, that the spirit of the universe achieves certain things (purification of thought and feeling, etc.) though certain agencies (with enduring things, with life and nature).

In one of his dialogues called The Phaedo Plato says, "know-ledge is simply recollection (and this means that there was) a previous time in which we learn that which we now recollect...

Thus, in Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood, the actual theme of the poem is the failure of his experience of the natural objects of renewing itself on its old terms, his explanation of this and the counting of his compensations of the loss.

"In the first two stanzas he achieves a wistfulness that is poignant. The main force lies in the twelve evenly-stressed monosyllables of the last line of the first stanza. Their knell-like flatness of tone after the two short, feverish lines that precede, achieves a sense of desolation too empty even to imply resignation:

Turn wheresoever I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now 

see no more.

The rest of the poem, in which Wordsworth attempts to discount his loss, never again achieves this kind of force, opines R.O.C. Winkler.

It is impossible to do justice to Wordsworth in brief quotations and to print in full all the passages referred to in his essay would more than double his length. It has therefore been assumed throughout that the reader will find it convenient to refer to a copy of Wordsworth's poems.

Wordsworth's concern has been to recreate experience. In Tintern Abbey,  his central datum is itself subjective, the contents of his own consciousness. His concern is with the recollections of the scene that he has carried with him since a previous visit; and not even with those as such, but rather with sensations they have generated.

We can also see those poems of Wordsworth in which the poets own feelings are not the sole subject-matter, and the experiences of others, particularly their sufferings are explicitly dealt with. It is in this context that Three major poems must be considered:  Resolution and Independence, Margaret and Michael.

In Resolution and Independence, Wordsworth meets on a moor an old leech gatherer who is not only himself natural world and lures Wordsworth in such a way as to bring home to him the qualities of mind and character that are the fruit of the influence of natural objects, and which, in the immediacy of the his personal melancholy, he has temporarily lost sight of.

For several stanzas the poet remains preoccupied with his own thoughts, feeding on his own melancholy and taking the reader further away from the external scene.

      And fears and fancies thick upon me came;

     Dim sadness- and blind thoughts, I know not, nor could name.

Then in the eighth stanza the outside world breaks in again in the shape of the leech - gathered:

     Beside a pool bear to the eye of heaven 

     I saw a Man before me unawares:

     The oldest man be seemed that ever wore grey hairs.

From the first  the conception of the old man as himself a natural objection is insinuated: 'Beside a pool' the pole comes first, and the old man is seen as an adjunct to it, 'unawares'. The three primeval elements - rock, sea and sun - are all associated in the image and at the same time related to the strength of beasts. Even in reality the old man seems half way top being an inanimate object:

     ... Not all alive or dead, Nor all asleep.

Wordsworth himself endorses this sort of account in one of his rare pieces of analysis, in thePreface to the 1815 edition of Lyrical Ballads:

The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the Old Man; who is divested of so much of indication of life and quotation... as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison.

The effect is reinforced - as Wordsworth goes on to imply - by the further image in the next stanza:

Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood,

that heareth not the loud winds when they call,

and moveth all together, if it move at all.

It is a reminder of how remote Wordsworth is from the Victorian vocabulary of romantic images that he can so appropriately find in a cloud a simile for immobility and coherence.

We have seen how successfully he can recreate for the reader his own subjective experiences. He has, in fact, in his poem come some distance from autobiography towards a moral tale, but without making the whole of the technical adjustment that is necessary. In Margaretand Michael  he goes much farther towards making this adjustment.

Margaret, or the Ruined Cottage, is another 'moral tale', but this time it is not, in terms, autobiographical; though, as the story of a woman and her children deserted by their father, it has obvious parallels with what little we know of Wordsworth's relationship with Annette Vallon, whom he had left in France at the end of 1792, less than three years before he began the poem in 1795. Something of the place occupied in Wordsworth's mind by the theme of the wronged, betrayed, or deserted woman is indicated by its recurrence in his output between 1793 and 1799. In addition to  Margaret, Guilt and Sorrow, The Borderers, The Thorn, Her Eyes Are Wild, The Compliant of the Foresaken Indian Woman, and Ruth all deal with it in one form or another. But although all these poems are like Margaret  variations, on the theme of human suffering and sorrow, in none of them does he bring his theme into the relationship of imaginative unity with the world of inanimate nature that he achieves in Margaret. 

The force at which Margaret's sufferings is conveyed makes it plain that his danger is of being overborne by too powerful a sympathy and thrown into the melancholia that was rarely, during the last creative years, altogether out of sight.

Several years passed between the completion of Margaret (in its original form) and the writing of Wordsworth's next great narrative poem Michael. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote the last of his poems about the deserted woman, Ruth and in 1800 Michael followed. In this he leaves the autobiographical framework almost completely behind, and concern himself, as he says at the beginning of the poem, with 'passions that were not my own'. Perhaps the characters in the story, particularly Michael himself, are also completely fused with their natural surroundings, and that Wordsworth's control of the emotional implications of their history never flatters.

The old shepherd is drawn as a man with all the strength and reliability of a tree or a rock.

Amid the heart of many thousands mists,

that came to him, and left him, on the heights.

This line particularly is, in all its simplicity, remarkably suggestive of the drifting to-and-fro of the mist. His natural affinity was with the hills and fields in which he lived and worked.

But the birth of a son late in his life generates a feeling of a different order. He looks after the baby.

... with patient mind enforced to act of tenderness.

In Michael, nature is not something outside the human situation, Michael is part of the natural world himself, and strength of his body and mind, the birth, growth and bereavement of his love for luke are all enforced in terms of his work among the things of nature.

The narration of a simple tale of human suffering, with a sparing use of imagery and an unelaborate vocabulary, is not a common mode of expression for 'English poetry', not at any rate, for successful poetry. To find adequate parallels for Margaret and Michael, we need to turn to Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss rather than to another poet. (When Wordsworth was supposed to be preparing for his Tripos examination, he was reading Clarissa Harlowe instead).

The story of Wordsworth's decline as a poet is well known and sometimes overstated. Though The Prelude underwent over forty years of revision before it was published, comparison of the text published in the 1850 with the original one of the 1805 shows that it, did not by any means always lose by the changes made.

But the extent of the achievement of the fruitful years - far from wholly accounted for in this essay - make out of place in its complaint that it was not more extensive. The faults of Wordsworth's verse were not, in any case, confined to any particular period of his life; and they were the price paid for his achievements, it was not, in the light of those achievements, an excessive one.

William Wordsworth died in 1850, after a long and idyllic life in the Lake District.

Wordsworth was considered to be the first and greatest of the romantic poets. His poems consisted of solitude, passion, unrest, melancholy sensation, extravagance and abundant imagination.

Courtesy:

Works of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth: Biography

The Pelican Guide to English Literature

November, 2000.