Introduction of WilIiam Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770, Cockermouth, United Kingdom. William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads. He died on 23 April 1850, Rydal Mount & Gardens, Rydal, United Kingdom.
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet's mind.”
The Age of Romanticism
Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century, ending around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.
Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1800–1850.
The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.
Features of Wordsworth’s Poetry
Emotions At A Priority
Apart from showing us the role of Nature in the growth of the individual, he related his experiences to bring out the change in perceptions based on emotions.
Nature
Nature was his guide, friend, philosopher, nurse, playmate, mother and what not! She was both beautiful and stern, fearful and sublime, inspirational and also intimidating.
Optimism in Poems
There is also a sense of hope in the form of philosophical optimism that the poems of Wordsworth offer.
Romanticism
Innocence and simplicity are suggested by the Romantic idea of going back to one's childhood and by arriving at an essential attribute viz. The "Vital Soul".
Pantheism
It is the belief that all reality is identical with divinity, or that everything composes god.
Expansion of Tintern Abbey
The poem Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey is generally known as Tintern Abbey written in 1798 by the father of Romanticism William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is one of the triumphs of Wordsworth's genius. It may be called a condensed spiritual autobiography of the poet. It deals with the subjective experiences of the poet, and traces the growth of his mind through different periods of his life. Nature and its influence on the poet in various stages forms the main theme of the poem. The poem deals with the influence of Nature on the boy, the growing youth, and the man. The poet has expressed his tender feeling towards nature.
He has specially recollected his poetic idea of Tintern Abbey where he had gone first time in 1793. This is his second visit to this place. Wordsworth has expressed his intense faith in nature.
There is Wordsworth’s realization of God in nature. He got sensuous delight in it and it is all in all to him. Tintern Abbey impressed him most when he had first visited this place. He has again come to the same place where there are lofty cliffs, the plots of cottage ground, orchards, groves and crops. He is glad to see hedgerows, sportive wood, pastoral farms and green doors. This lonely place, the banks of the river and rolling waters from the mountain springs present a beautiful panoramic light. The solitary place reminds the poet of vagrant dwellers and hermits’ cave.
The poem is in five sections. The first section establishes the setting for the meditation. But it emphasizes the passage of time: five years have passed, five summers, five long winters… But when the poet is back to this place of natural beauty and serenity, it is still essentially the same.
The poem opens with a slow, dragging rhythm and the repetition of the word ‘five’ all designed to emphasize the weight of time which has separated the poet from this scene. The following lines develop a clear, visual picture of the scent. The view presented is a blend of wildness and order. He can see the entirely natural cliffs and waterfalls; he can see the hedges around the fields of the people; and he can see wreaths of smoke probably coming from some hermits making fire in their cave hermitages. These images evoke not only a pure nature as one might expect, they evoke a life of the common people in harmony with nature.
The poet studies nature with open eyes and an imaginative mind. He has been the lover of nature from the core of his heart, and with a purer mind. He feels a sensation of love for nature in his blood. He feels high pleasure and deep power of joy in natural objects. The beatings of his heart are full of the fire of nature’s love. He concentrates attention on Sylvan Wye – a majestic and worth seeing river. He is reminded of the pictures of the past visit and ponders over his future years.
On his first visit to this place he bounded over the mountains by the sides of the deep rivers and the lovely streams. In the past the soundings haunted him like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood were then to him like an appetite. But that time is gone now. In nature he finds the sad music of humanity
The third section contains a kind of doubt; the poet is probably reflecting the reader’s possible doubts so that he can go on to justify how he is right and what he means. He doubts, for just a moment, whether this thought about the influence of nature is in vain, but he can’t go on.
He exclaims: “Yet, oh! How often, amid the joyless daylight, fretful and unprofitable fever of the world have I turned to thee (nature)” for inspiration and peace of mind. He thanks the ‘Sylvan Wye’ for the everlasting influence it has imprinted on his mind; his spirit has very often turned to this river for inspiration when he was losing the peace of mind or the path and meaning of life. The river here becomes the symbol of spirituality.
Though the poet has become serious and perplexed in the fourth section, nature gives him courage and spirit enough to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure. This is so typical of Wordsworth that it seems he can’t write poetry without recounting his personal experiences, especially those of his childhood. Here he also begins from the earliest of his days! It was first the coarse pleasures in his ‘boyish days’, which have all gone by now.
“That time is past and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures”. But the poet does not mourn for them; he doesn’t even grumble about their loss. Clearly, he has gained something in return: “other gifts have followed; for such loss… for I have learnt to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity”.
The fifth and last section continues with the same meditation from where the poet addresses his younger sister Dorothy, whom he blesses and gives advice about what he has learnt. He says that he can hear the voice of his own youth when he hears her speak, the language of his former heart; he can also “read my former pleasure in the soothing lights of thy wild eyes’.
He is excited to look at his own youthful image in her. He says that nature has never betrayed his heart and that is why they have been living from joy to joy. Nature can impress the mind with quietness and beauty, and feed it lofty thoughts, that no evil tongues of the human society can corrupt their hearts with any amount of contact with it.
The poet then begins to address the moon in his reverie, and to ask nature to bestow his sister with their blessings. Let the moon shine on her solitary walk, and let the mountain winds blow their breeze on her. When the present youthful ecstasies are over, as they did with him, let her mind become the palace of the lovely forms and thoughts about nature, so that she can enjoy and understand life and overcome the vexations of living in a harsh human society. The conclusion to the poem takes us almost cyclically, back to a physical view of the ‘steep woods’, ‘lofty cliffs’ and ‘green pastoral landscape’ in which the meditation of the poem is happening.
The poet has expressed his honest and natural feelings to Nature’s Superiority. The language is so simple and lucid that one is not tired of reading it again and again. The sweetness of style touches the heart of a reader. The medium of this poem is neither ballad nor lyric but an elevated blank verse.
The blank verse that is used in it is low-toned, familiar, and moves with sureness, sereneness and inevitable ease. It has the quiet pulse, suggestive of 'central peace', which is felt in all his great poetry. This is the beauty of Wordsworth’s language.
Reference
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/how-was-the-writing-style-of-wordsworth-different-from-coleridge
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth
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