A short introduction to Wordsworth’s poetry

Wordsworth’s poetry is about the ‘sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply
interfused’, but much of it is immediately and overtly about mountains and lakes, about
clouds and weather and growing things. This immediately attractive aspect of the poetry
eventually became the primary identifier of ‘Wordsworth’- the Nature Poet. His spirit
brooded over the foundation in Great Britain of the National Trust, charged with the
preservation of landscape of exceptional beauty, and to persuade his contemporaries that
the survival of wilderness was vital for the national soul.

Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime’ was increasingly alien, or simply unintelligible, to a

post-Christian, urbanized readership. Victorians found reassurance in their ‘Prophet of
Nature’; a few fanatical Wordsworthians testified that they carried a Poetical Works
along with their Bible. But it is with a sense of urgency that much criticism is
reconsidering Wordsworth’s writings about the natural world and the place of human
beings in it.

Wordsworth and Romanticism

William Wordsworth’s centrality to any review of English Romantic period writing

continues fundamentally undisturbed. Critical fashions and methodologies change, but
as regards English Romanticism they are tested against a canonical core of writers. Of
those, Wordsworth almost always takes centre stage either as the best support of new
theories, or as the writer whose authority they must displace in order to show their
innovative power and originality. It is Wordsworth and Byron, and not Coleridge and
Shelley, who have remained the touchstones of canonical English poetry of the romantic
age. These two authors capture the definitive contrasts of the period’s sensibility and
style.

But many major works used in his critical evaluations now- the ‘Salisbury Plain’
poems, The Borderers, The Prelude- remained unpublished while Wordsworth was
alive and largely unknown to his contemporaries. The depth of his immersion in
republican thinking and radicalism generally during the Revolutionary period, the
formative stress which must have been occasioned by his enforced abandonment of
Annette Vallon and their daughter, Caroline (a connection itself politically fraught
because of the mother’s strong Royalist persuasion) now seemed crucial to the
interpretation of his work. His writings successfully displace both these historical and
personal commitments.
Yet it is because he is so implicated intellectually and humanly in his age that
Wordsworth can articulate that passage through revolution to restoration which is
commonly taken to identify the Romantic dilemma.

M. H. Abrams celebrates Wordsworth as ‘the central figure of English Romanticism

who has exerted a revolutionary influence on all our lives.’

Critical understanding now of the Romanticism to which Wordsworth was central is

beset by historical diffidence. It is generally assumed that we can detect the Victorian
view of Wordsworth and differentiate our own critical readings from it. However it is
arguable that the complex Victorian view has persisted in obscuring Wordsworth’s
pivotal role in expressing a Romantic difference from and development of what went
before. ‘Lines written a few miles above ‘Tintern Abbey’ condenses the conflict of
Enlightenment and Romantic ways of understanding within the calculatedly fictitious
excerpt from an imaginary autobiography.

Poetry like Wordsworth’s becomes the necessary conduit of philosophical ideas which
would otherwise remain obscure or would entirely lack credibility. A core notion of
Romantic, post-Kantian philosophy is that in art we grasp the inexpressible end-point of
a philosophy ambitious to demonstrate our relation to a world that always exceeds our
scientific differentiation of it; we belong to that world in still more fundamental ways:

‘An auxiliar light

Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow’d new spendor; the melodious birds,
The gentle breezes, fountains that ran on,
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obey’d
A like dominion; and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye.
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
And hence my transport.’

(The Prelude, 1805 II 387-95)

Clearly there is a doctrinal core to this passage, but its purpose seems rather to stress the
importance of conveying some background theory by other means. ‘Obeisance’,
‘devotion’, ‘transport’ suggest commitments to felt experiences which amply substitutes
for its theorization, but commitments whose full import is not understood unless the
reader acknowledges their power of philosophical attorney. We cannot extract the
lyricism from the philosophical rhetoric without diminishing the poetry.

Comments on ‘Tintern Abbey’:

Wordsworth did notice that poetry might be able to show what philosophy could only
postulate, and that the philosophical poem’s supreme importance lay in fulfilling that
office. ‘Tintern Abbey’ poses interpretative problems; the poem’s subtle balance in
which Hartleian elements, that look to the British empirical line of thought, is poised
against a rhetoric of the sublime.

Read in this following passage that the collectivism of ‘Tintern Abbey’ becomes more
comprehensible, its ‘still, sad music of humanity’ a source of happiness not misery for
the narrator because its image of the convergence of individuals, the motor-force of the
entire poem, predominates over its melancholy. The self’s preparation for this insight
has been a progress across time through increasingly refined sensations incorporating
rather than eschewing youthful, unrepresentable, animal affinities with nature, a
progress itself moving towards a comparable extinction of consciousness signalling
unconscious rapport:

‘that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on, –
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.’ (lines 42-50)

The fact that Wordsworth then redescribes this insight as ‘a sense of sublime/ Of
something far more deeply interfused’ indicates once more his Romantic view of how
we retain a philosophical interest in areas philosophy points to but cannot itself
articulate. The poem is an elegy for an absent cause. Just as his other poem, The Ruined
Cottage, it celebrates a humanity characterized by its inability to leave lasting
memorials of its intensest feelings. The author discovers authenticity in a loss of
individual consciousness, and his poetry expresses his difficult sense that he still
remains a match for this new, even fatal expansion.

Tintern Abbey in 1798 was swarming with beggars and the Wye Valley echoed day and
night to the sound of ironworks. A poetic vantage-point high enough to continue deaf
and blind to this defining uproar is actually the view from nowhere. The poem’s plot,
too, is allegedly evasive. Five years back should recall a time when the author was
exiled from his new family and wrote a republican pamphlet too treasonable to publish;
he suffered a sense of alienation better summed up by the poem he wrote at the time,
Salisbury Plain, than by any lines from Tintern Abbey:

‘Oh! dreadful price of being to resign

All that is dear /in/ being! better far
In Want's most lonely cave till death to pine,
Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star;’ (lines 306-10)
The poem that replaces this with ‘the hour/ Of thoughtless youth’ and says it ‘cannot
paint/ What then I was’ is sublimating history for its own purposes, and discrediting
these purposes as a result.

Wordsworth’s Romanticism can figure in those allegedly slighter moments for which he
was often taken to task. The lyrics begun in 1802 look modest by comparison with the
sonnets of the same year. Poems to daisies, celandines, butterflies, and green linnets, not
to mention daffodils, seemed provocative in 1807 when they were included in Poems,
in Two Volumes, as ‘Moods of My Own Mind’. Some said that Wordsworth had
imposed a metaphysical importance on trivial things. But when in the second poem, ‘To
a Butterfly’, Wordsworth compares the alighted creature with ‘not frozen seas/ More
motionless’, the complexity of the conceit draws attention to the author’s study at that
time of Elizabethan and metaphysical poetry. The imposition of meaning on the insect
asks for the conceit to be read through those conventions. The immobility of the
butterfly reminds one of so opposite a defining or elemental capacity for flight that it is
appropriately described as a fluidity temporarily suspended. But the poem perhaps also
anticipates a Tennysonian attention to detail, something characteristic of the Victorian
Era. A metaphysical resonance is surely coupled with an observational nicety which,
like the later 19th century movement in painting, pre-Raphaelitism, artfully updates a
once naive simplicity. Writers of the period such as Schlegel and Stendhal proclaimed
all poetry and literature to be romantic. And Wordsworth assimilation here of a
scientific niceness to fit a poetic address is as distinctive as his bigger Romantic
sketches of natural process, memory and nationhood.

Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes

Lyrical Ballads:

1798

The 73 year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are
Seven’, agreed that his task was to write about subjects from common life but to treat
them imaginatively. However, Wordsworth’s brief critical statement included in Lyrical
Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were
‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle
and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’.

As with most plans, what seemed so obvious to Wordsworth and Coleridge after Lyrical
Ballads was published looks rather messy and haphazard at the start of their work on the
book. In order to pay the expenses of a walking tour, the two poems began the Rime of
the Ancient Mariner collaboratively in November 1797, but the poem soon became
Coleridge’s alone. As for Wordsworth’s activity late in 1797 and early in 1798, he
completed his play The Borderers, revised his tale of The Ruined Cottage by adding an
account of the philosophic pedlar-narrator, and began an industrious programme of
reading in preparation for his work on the vast philosophical poem The Recluse. Spring
1798 saw an extraordinary period of Wordsworth creative activity on lyrics and ballads.

Many of these lyrics record the growth of the speaker’s perceptions as he creates and
meditates upon his view of the world. Stanzas from the first of these poems are typical:

It is the first mild day of March:

Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

One moment now may give us more

Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

And from the blessed power that rolls

About, below, above;
We'll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.

(I-4, 25-8, 33-6)

In the best of these poems, Wordsworth merges his humanitarian concerns with an
interest –fostered by his recent work on The Borderers and on The Ruined Cottage- in
the psychology not only of the victim but also of the poet-narrator who, interacting with
the sufferer, tells the tale. In ‘Simon Lee’, for example, we hear the old huntsman in a
bouncing rhythm that fights with the more serious subject matter:

Full five and twenty years he lived

A running huntsman merry;
And, though he has but one eye left,
His cheek is like a cherry. (13-16)

Both the suffering and the joy detailed in Lyrical Ballads are acknowledged and fused
by Wordsworth as he hears ‘still, sad music of humanity’ and is ‘A lover of the
meadows and the woods/ And mountains’, both suffering humanity and beautiful nature
parts of that ‘mighty world’ which we half-create and perceive.

In 1800, two new poems appear in the second added volume of that year’s addition of
Lyrical Ballads: ‘Nutting’ and ‘There was a boy’.

Nearly all his rhymed poems written in the frigid winter of 1798-99 deal with death,
particularly the ‘Mathew’ and the ‘Lucy’ poems.

In ‘Strange fits of Passion I have known’, for example, the narrator recounts his
seemingly ordinary horseback journey to Lucy’s cottage. But that journey becomes
increasingly mysterious and foreboding. As the moon descends towards the cottage, the
speaker’s consciousness gradually merges the moon with Lucy in the trance-like reverie
in part produced by the rhythmic galloping of the horse. At the end of the poem, the
speaker experiences a moment of pure terror:

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,

Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopp’d:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropp’d.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a lover’s head!
‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,
‘If Lucy should be dead!’ (17-28).

When the two volume edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared, Wordsworth wrote in
his famous ‘Preface’ that the principal intent of such seemingly uneventful poems was
to trace in them ‘the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in
which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’ (p. 743).

Poems, in Two Volumes

In 1802, Wordsworth left behind both ballads and pastoral, and created new styles and
subject matters in the works that dominate Poems, in Two Volumes.

There is some carry-over from his earlier work, but now many of Wordsworth’s poems
became more joyful, more personal, more playful, more rooted in his own memories,
and more varied in their lyric forms:

‘Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,

The time, when, in our childish plays,
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the butterfly!’

(‘To a Butterfly’, 10-13)

One influence on Wordsworth’s new style in poetry was his reading of older English
writers, particularly Chaucer. What the author drew from these writers was not specific
subjects and images but rather a more light-hearted, polished, metrically proficient,
graceful style.
An ubiquitous springtime flower forms the subject of what is probably Wordsworth’s
most well-known work, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, sometimes referred to as ‘The
Daffodils’, even by the poet himself. This poem opens with the speaker remote from the
natural world, as is a cloud that soars distantly above the world. Abruptly, a ‘laughing
company’ of daffodils surrounds him. The sparkling waves of Ullswater, the daffodils
‘dancing in the breeze’, the surrounding trees, and even the floating cloud all fuse in a
vision of unity that encompasses the poet himself. But the ultimate import of that
visionary moment becomes apparent to him only years later:

‘For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.’ (13-18)

The poem is thus a miniature Prelude, showing the congruence between Wordsworth’s
short lyrics and the mammoth blank verse poem that he was simultaneously composing.
Like The Prelude, the lyrics of 1802 and a few years afterwards chronicle renovating
‘spots of time’, but in these shorter poems frequently drawing less from childhood
memories than from the poet’s mature experiences.

Even though Wordsworth continued to write short poems after 1807, Lyrical Ballads
and Poems, in Two Volumes thus stake his claim to be a major lyric poet.

Conclusion:

Wordsworth’s Romanticism states the following: that what is philosophical in his poetry
contributes nothing to its success. To contest this assumption one should return to the
Enlightenment traditions in which Wordsworth’s intellect was formed and see the
sublime structure of his poetry.

The young Schelling wrote of the human spirit carrying ‘within itself not only the
ground but also the border of its being and its reality’. The limitations we suffer are
necessary if we are to have a self to be conscious of, an identity; but to know these
necessary restrictions for the limitations they are transforms them into borders. This
difficult, uncanny thought permeates European romanticism. And in English, it is
Wordsworth who gives it its most memorable expression.