Wordsworth: The Reconstruction of Loss

Abigale Upham
ENGL 179
Professor J. Carlson
27 November 2012
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Wordsworth uses poetry to analyze what constitutes loss and death by challenging the
cultural idea that loss and death are synonymous and by developing mental health schemas for
humans to avoid complete incapacitation by loss. Wordsworths poem We Are Seven depicts
death from the understanding of a child as compared to that of an adult in an attempt to broaden
and extend our perspectives on mourning past the traditional beliefs that stifle our ability to find
peace. In Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey he furthers his exploration of grief
and loss by intertwining experiences with nature and memories from childhood to foster his
ability to cope with and see through miseries.
Wordsworth approaches the question of, What is loss? from two unique directions in
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey and We Are Seven. In Tintern Abbey loss is
growing into adult hood and simultaneously formulating a conscious mind that fills our lives
with constant analysis, evaluation, questioning, and fear all of which foster griefs and mournings.
Further, loss is becoming embedded in cultural civilization that is laden with thought consuming
stressful issues and an anxiety to constantly shelter ourselves. Tintern Abbey enhances loss by
warning that losing touch with childhood nature induced memories significantly weakens our
ability to deal with our adult worlds, loss itself and the grief and mournings that accompany it.
He attempts to alleviate the impact of this culturally constructed definition of loss by suggesting
that our past childhood subconscious houses memories through which we can access more
tranquil blissful moments, even when in the face of disturbances. Such memories can transport
us to happier removed freedoms of the mind allowing ourselves to be less haunted by and hidden
from traumas like death or our ailing physical bodies.
Wordsworth acknowledges that we grow and inevitably become more conscious causing
a loss of our ability to feel totally immersed and wholly pleased. However, he circumvents
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devastation over lifes unavoidable phases by focusing on the positivity in what he has gained:
reliable memories. Simply accessing memories of nature while situated in prison like urban
environments can actually break down the dreary bars of reality and allow for some mental
relief. Even in the poems present moment the memory of his past experiences at Tintern Abbey
floats over his present view of it. He thinks happily, too, that his present experience there will
provide many happy memories for future years.
We not only see this idea supported by his own experiences throughout the poem, but
also in the advice given to his sister towards the end. He assures that unconscious, unconstrained,
unconfined, and animalistic childlike emersion in nature can resurface in the form of memories
to restore ones mind as he or she grows older and faces despairs. Nor all / The dreary
intercourse of daily life, / Shall eer prevail against us, or disturb / our cheerful faith (432:
130-133). She later validates his theory by writing her own poem, Thoughts on My Sick Bed, that
speaks of a similar process where bits of nature brought to her bedside by friends conjure images
of romping through nature as a child. She continues to validate Wordsworths theory by stating
her extreme happiness and satisfaction discovered through memory and its unsurmountable
effect on her previously mournful state of mind. As long as we posses this ability we can engage
in a process of reflection to renew our current strengths and vitality.
We see Wordsworth take a traditionally miserable subject of suffering and create a poem
of optimism by punctuating the poem from scenes across different chronologies of life and
acknowledging that each stage has its beneficial components. Almost as an alternative to anti
depressants Wordsworth accesses the healing powers of beauty and nature to restore and
reinvigorate the self. If we can at least maintain the ability to reflect on those memories than all
is not lost. He truly believes that the key to bypassing incapacitation of loss and grief is found in
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our ability to alter our realities with memories of nature and of our unrestrained childhood. To
them I may have owed another gift... / In which the heavy and weary weight / Of all this
unintelligible world, / Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood (430: 36-41). The poem
accesses natural scenes of an unconscious youthful past as a solution to evading incapacitation
from loss, fear, grief, and mourning. Such memories lighten the idea of loss by rejuvenating a
more carefree consciousness for a more adaptable and understanding peace with our present.
To better illustrate his explanations Wordsworth deliberately associates grief to urban city
and adult life. Urban atmosphere represents the notion that as we get older we become more
prone and vulnerable to becoming confined by grief. Much like he does in We Are Seven,
Wordsworth sets beauteous forms of nature and childhood in direct opposition to adulthood
and constantly revisits how his past memories have worked upon him in his absence from them
(430: 23). In hours of weariness they have been able to provide him with Sensations sweet, /
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart / ...Tranquil restoration and have even affected him
when he was not aware of the memory, going as far as to influence his deeds of kindness and
love. In nature... / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my
heart, and soul / Of all my moral being (430: 27-30, 432: 108-111). Reality is defined negatively
by the contrast that is produced when he looks into nature, but that natural scene is at the same
time the key to coping with those oppositions.
Wordsworth also harmonizes nature and children. He emphasizes youthful relation to
nature as having a strong sense of present wonder rather than a focus on worry of consequences.
He describes the actions and thought processes of children as simply living in the moment,
unattached and free from a need to derive deeper meanings and answers from every scenario.
The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, / And their glad animal movements all gone by / ...all
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its dizzy raptures... (431: 73-74, 85). Children do not indulge and waste the mind on worrisome
evaluative matters. Like a man flying from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the
thing he loved (431: 69-72). Much like in his piece The Boy From Winander, Tintern Abbey
heightens the importance of desirous child play and exploration in nature with ones ability to
later connect past to present and develop an overall sturdy healthy mind.
Conceptualizing the most carefree moments of our lives through past natural and youthful
explorations sustains mental relief. Tintern Abbey is able to intertwine and align Wordsworths
past and present worlds to set a cyclical process of recognizing grief and alleviating grief. For I
have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing
oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity... (431: 88-91). The poem leads the reader through
Wordsworths overall theory that our past memories can aid our present oppressions from loss
and mourning. It is this sturdy healthy mind that will be able to reject the urge to shelter oneself
from fear and hurt and instead approach inevitable situations of pain and loss with a sense of
mystery, acceptance and eventual peace. Such natural exploration and experiences rely partially
on childhood ignorances toward fear, death, and the weight of dangers. Adults are plagued with
bothersome compulsive and excessive needs to indulge in meta-analysis and evaluation. Children
are able to more fully engage themselves in nature and in a moment because they do not
conceptualize fear, stress and death like the adult mind allowing them to develop not only a
variety of healthy memories, but also a spectrum of perspectives which Wordsworth further
focuses on in We Are Seven.
We Are Seven shows child perspectives as more adaptive, less rigid and defined, less
definitive and finite, and less influenced by fear and a need to shelter oneself. Overall the childs
thought process is more open to the idea of making space for the in-betweens, the unknown, the
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mysterious, and for varieties of approaches to a single situation providing for a more therapeutic
at peace understanding of life and death.
The child understands death as a process instead of simply black or white. Much like the
child in The Boy From Winnander and Wordsworths younger self in Tintern Abbey, the child in
We Are Seven lives in the moment full of imagination and nature that allow her to approach dire
scenarios with more wonder, adaptability, and ironically an understanding that aides her sadness
while the older man is left surrendering to suffering great grief. For the young girl grief and
mourning have to do with the ability to interact everyday. This is further defined when she makes
the comparison of her dead siblings with her siblings who have left home in travel. She almost
appears more likely to grieve over her living siblings rather than her deceased because she cant
be in their presence everyday. She speaks often of eating dinner, singing and playing around her
siblings graves giving birth to the idea that proximity allows her to abstain from grief and
mourning and denounces the theory that death is empty and finite. She sees death as a
continuation as opposed to strictly a matter of being present or absent. She represents a more
open minded perception of death that is not in opposition to life nor an absolute, but a
phenomenon that is liminal and process oriented. Their graves are green, they may be
seen (417: 37). In her imagination they are still alive and as long as her siblings are a part of her
daily life then she will consider them seven and not five.
Wordsworth furthers Tintern Abbeys reconstruction of loss in We Are Seven by depicting
loss to be defined simply as what cannot be seen instead of what has been labeled as dead. This
perspective challenges the reality of death and societies construction of the phenomenon of death
by demanding that loss and death are not correlational. For the adult, death constitutes loss and
leaves little room for alternate explanations or soothing. For the child, loss is associated more
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with personal senses than with cultural definitions. Loss comes from being out of reasonable
proximity. Only when someone is completely removed from your sense perception and ability to
interact can they be fully grieved for and mourned over. The childs constitution of loss has space
for death, which in turn shapes death to be less traumatizing and alarming. To evade
incapacitation by loss humans must then not harden their definitions of death into standardized
traditional notions of being either alive or completely erased from life. We must be able to access
the flexible mind of a child to find peace, acceptance and broader views of death in order to
lessen jolts of grief and mourning.
While Tintern Abbey looks at the process of grief and mourning from the perspective of a
child who grows into an older man and how his childhood continues to serve as an important
positive role in his perception of grieving, We Are Seven directly corresponds a childs view on
the process of loss with that of an adults and their typical inability to come to terms with or face
terrifying dark subjects. We see a tension throughout the poem arising as both characters
approach the concept of death from completely different directions and their inability to come to
terms with the others standpoint. Twas throwing words away; for still / The little Maid would
have her will (417: 67-68). This is especially true with the old man who repeatedly fails to wrap
his understanding around the young girls position. But they are dead; those two are
dead! (6417: 6).
The adult sees death as society and culture has come to define it: a forever absence that we
should be completely and heavily saddened about. No shades or variety in perspective exists for
the adult, only drills, rigidity and reasoning. Because of this, he can only see the child as naive,
ignorant, sheltered, fundamentally mistaken in her copings with death.
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Wordsworth t delves into the puzzle behind adults inclination to shut down when faced
with loss. He interrogates the basis that drives the speaker and the little maidens theories in such
utterly opposite directions. This analysis is most clearly presented in stanza one where
Wordsworth assembles the argument that adults assume children know nothing of death and
should know nothing of death because they themselves can not bare to comprehend the
phenomenon. A simple child...What should it know of death? (416: 1-4). Adults feed off of
their own fears and sheltered platforms to create cultural assumptions of what knowledge
should and should not be passed down to children. Because of this embedded perspective, adults
find it difficult to accept the notions children do create to deal with and maneuver about grieving
and loss. Instead of regarding them as innovative and thought provoking, they pass off such
approaches as naive and uneducated when in reality the child is providing a perspective that
could soothe grievances adults are feeling and put at ease their mournings and stresses derived
from experiences or fears of death.
An optimistic view is eventually taken in each poem claiming that if you can follow or
access a natural and childlike perspective or memory you can find yourself more at peace with a
spectrum of experiences and phases we encounter and have to deal with in life. Wordsworths
analyses outline a healthy mental position. With aging comes awareness, especially of mortality.
Therefore we need to run through the forest and be imaginative and grow multiple accepting
perspectives as children to cushion the inevitable blows of reality we will encounter later in life.
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References
Damrosch, D. D. & Dettmar, K. J. H. (2012). The Longman Anthology of British Literature.
Fifth Addition, 2A, 416-432.
J. Carlson, English 179, University of California Santa Barbara, Fall 2012.
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