CHANAKYA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY, PATNA

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AS A POET OF NATURE

SUBMITTED TO: MR. PRATYUSH KAUSHIK

(FACULTY OF ENGLISH)

S UBMITTED BY: BHAVYA

(1209)

[1 STYEAR, 2NDSEMESTER]

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I take this opportunity to express my humble gratitude and
p e r s o n a l reg a rds t o M r. P r a t y u s h K a u s h i k f o r i n s p i r i n g m e a n d
guiding me during the course of this project work and also for
his cooperation and guidance from time to time during the
c o u r s e o f t h i s p roj e c t w o r k o n t h e t o p i c Wil l i a m Words w o r t h a s
a poet of nature

I express my gratitude to the faculty of , English for the

concepts given by him in the subject which has been the base
f o r t h i s sm a l l p i e c e o f w or k o n t h e t o p i c Wil l i a m Words w o r t h
as a poet of nature

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction--------------------------------------------------------------03
2. Wordsworth and his early life-----------------------------------------04
3. Pantheistic elements in poetry of wordsworth----------------------14
4. Role of nature in making wordsworth as a poet-------------------17
5. Conclusion---------------------------------------------------------------21
6. Bibliography-------------------------------------------------------------22
7.

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 INTRODUCTION

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES:

THE AIM OF THE PROJECT IS TO PRESENT A DETAILED STUDY OF W i l l i a m
W o r d s w o r t h a s a p o e t o f n a t u r e THROUGH BOOKS, SUGGESTIONS AND

DIFFERENT WRITINGS AND ARTICLES.

SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS:

THOUGH THIS IS AN IMMENSE PROJECT AND PAGES CAN BE WRITTEN OVER THE

TOPIC BUT BECAUSE OF CERTAIN RESTRICTIONS AND LIMITATIONS I WAS NOT

ABLE TO DEAL WITH THE TOPIC IN GREAT DETAIL.

SOURCES OF DATA:
THE FOLLOWING SECONDARY SOURCES OF DATA HAVE BEEN USED IN THE

PROJECT -

1 ARTICLES

2 BOOKS

3 WEBSITES

METHOD OF WRITING:
THE METHOD OF WRITING FOLLOWED IN THE COURSE OF THIS RESEARCH PAPER

IS PRIMARILY ANALYTICAL .

MODE OF CITATION:
THE RESEARCHER HAS FOLLOWED A UNIFORM MODE OF CITATION THROUGHOUT

THE COURSE OF THIS RESEARCH PAPER .

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 WORDSWORTH AND HIS EARLY LIFE

CHILDHOOD

William Wordsworth was born 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, England, a village in the northwest
county of Cumberland. He was the second of five children born to John and Ann Cookson
Wordsworth. His sister Dorothy was born in 1771. The two siblings were baptized together,
which marked the beginning of a lifelong closeness. From childhood, William Wordsworth was
unusually intense. When he was seven years old, his mother told a friend that the only one of her
children "about whose future life she was anxious, was William; and he, she said, would be
remarkable for either good or evil." Yikes.

For someone who grew up to romanticize childhood, Wordsworth did not have a particularly
happy one. His mother died when he was eight. His father worked as a lawyer to the Earl of
Lowther, a notoriously corrupt man who had earned the local nickname "Wicked Jimmy." When
John Wordsworth died in 1783, leaving thirteen-year old William and his four siblings orphans,
the family discovered that the Earl owed their father a large sum of money, and as a result they
were left deeply in debt. They sued but were unable to claim any money until the Earl died
twenty years later. The siblings were forced to scatter among relatives. Dorothy was sent off to
relatives in Yorkshire while William stayed with his mother's clan in Penrith, Cumberland. The
siblings did not see each other again for nine years.

William Wordsworth did not get along with his mother's family and was very unhappy in Penrith.
Rather than stay at home with them, he occupied himself on long walks through the beautiful
rugged hills of northwest England. For the rest of his life, nature would be a source of inspiration
and comfort. It was also a crucial part of his work. "Poetry is the image of man and nature," he
wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. A poet "considers man and nature as essentially adapted
to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting
properties of nature." His family eventually sent him to school in the Lake District, a gorgeous
corner in northwest England known for its picturesque landscapes. Wordsworth would make his
home there for most of his life.

In 1787, he entered St. John's College at Cambridge University. He also made his publishing
debut as a published writer that year, with a sonnet in The European Magazine. On school
holidays, Wordsworth set out on foot for long walking tours of Europe.

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 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM

In 1791, William Wordsworth graduated from Cambridge and traveled to France, which was then
in the throes of the French Revolution. When we think of the French Revolution today, we
picture guillotine blades, beheadings, and the Reign of Terror. All those things were years away
when William Wordsworth arrived in Paris. At the time, the revolution was a
truly Romantic political act. No one anticipated how it would later go awry.

Until the Revolution, France had been ruled by a monarchy with absolute power, whose policies
wrecked the economy. A frustrated population guided by the values of the Enlightenment sought
change. Wordsworth was fascinated by the Republicans, the faction that sought to establish a
government headed by a leader of the people's choosing. For an idealistic young European,
France was THE place to be. In his long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Wordsworth wrote
about that time:

"For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!"

Wordsworth fell in love with a Frenchwoman named Annette Vallon. The two were serious about
each other, but by 1792 Wordsworth ran out of money and returned to England, leaving behind a
pregnant Vallon and their unborn baby. When war broke out in France, he was unable to go back
to his family. It would be a decade before Wordsworth met his daughter Caroline, though he
eventually arranged for her financial support. Inspired by his experience in France, Wordsworth
began to work on a series of poems. The results, two collections of poetry entitled Descriptive
Sketchesand An Evening Walk, were published in 1793.

Back in Cambridge, England, a senior named Samuel Taylor Coleridge finished

reading Descriptive Sketches and decreed that "seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original
poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." Coleridge, a vicar's son
from Devon, was a brilliant student and poet whose academic career was marred only by his
difficulties in making deadlines and waking up on time. In Wordsworth, he recognized the
beginnings of a new type of poetry, one that struck him as genius. "It was the union of deep
feeling with profound thought," Coleridge wrote, "the fine balance of truth in observing, with the
imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed."8 He finally met Wordsworth in 1795,

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when the poet and his sister Dorothy were living in a house together in Dorset, England. He
walked an incredible 50 miles to get there, and as he approached Wordsworth noticed that their
visitor "did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field
by which he cut off an angle." Such was Coleridge's enthusiasm to reach his new friend. The two
poets took to one another instantly, and in 1797 Dorothy and William moved to a house in Nether
Stowey in order to be closer to Coleridge. Thus began one of the most productive, intense, and
unusual three-way friendships in literary history.

DOROTHY AND COLERIDGE

From 1797 to 1798, the Wordsworth siblings and Coleridge spent nearly every day together.
They took walks that lasted hours through the hills and thickets of the Lake District, sometimes
talking, sometimes composing poetry. They embraced the Romantic notion that nature was the
only place where one could truly experience the deep, powerful emotions from which true poetry
emerged. Wordsworth believed that cities and the seemingly boring jobs men held there made
people more stupid. "A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a
combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind to reduce it to a state of almost
savage torpor," Wordsworth wrote. Urban life made men crave stimulation, "which the rapid
communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." In light of this national dumbing-down,
Wordsworth felt it was a poet's duty to develop the reader's ability to feel things without resorting
to the lurid provocations of romance novels and crappy melodramas. In the Lake District, he
intended to carry out this poetic duty.

The three friends operated under the unspoken agreement that the brightest star in their
constellation was William. Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth, both brilliant writers in their
own right, seemed to take for granted that their greatest achievement would be advancing
William Wordsworth's career. "Tho' we were three persons it was but one God," Coleridge wrote
of their year in the Lake District.

Dorothy Wordsworth never married and lived with her brother (and later his wife) for all of her
adult life. Her attachment to her elder brother was so intense that some have speculated that she
was in love with him. Dorothy kept detailed journals of the household's activities. She kept better
track of William's moods, headaches, and feelings than her own. The diaries were kept not for
her own memory but for William's, so that he would have material to draw on for his poetry later.
He borrowed her reminiscences shamelessly in his work. In his 1804 poem "The
Daffodils," William Wordsworth makes it sound as though he discovered the flowers as a solitary
traveler:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

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That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

In fact, Dorothy had been on the same walk and was the first to record their reactions to the
lovely sight two years earlier.

"When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water
side. as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees,
we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country
turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and
about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest
tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon
them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing."

As for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his genius may have actually surpassed
Wordsworth's. Coleridge was a brilliant poet and literary critic. He was a factory of ideas, but
serious personal problems, including depression and opium addiction, often left him unable to
execute his ideas. Many literary historians have described Coleridge as the "brains" behind the
two men's collaboration; Wordsworth, with his superior discipline, was the "brawn" who actually
put their ideas on paper.

The two men set to work on a new type of poetry, one that relied on the language of regular
people instead of the stuffy "poet-speak" of classical writers. The result was Lyrical Ballads,
published in 1798. (In a typical move, Wordsworth insisted on having sole authorship credit,
even though five of the poems in the collection were Coleridge's.) Wordsworth added a preface
to the second edition that essentially became the manifesto of English Romantic poetry. The
language of peasants, Wordsworth argued, was more real and more suitable for expressing ideas
than the stuff poets typically used. "Such men hourly communicate with the best objects from
which the best part of language is originally derived," he wrote. "I have wished to keep the
Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by doing so I shall interest him."

The real world and the ideal world depicted in Wordsworth's poetry were separated only by a
common language. Wordsworth wrote that good poetry should be made of speech, passion, and
meter, a combination that lifted the lines above the "vulgarity and meanness of ordinary
life." None too modestly, Wordsworth suggested that if readers got on board with his ideas, they
would judge the work of modern and ancient poets differently. His goal was no less than to
change the course of poetic history.

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 MARRIAGE

In 1799 William and Dorothy moved to the village of Grasmere, and Wordsworth began work on
a long piece he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge." In 1802, he and Dorothy traveled to
France so that he could meet his daughter Caroline and make arrangements for her support.
When he returned to England, he married Mary Hutchinson, a former schoolmate and longtime
friend. The couple had five children over the next eight years, including daughter Dora, a
frequent inspiration for Wordsworth's poetry.

Wordsworth finished the "poem to Coleridge" by 1805 but refused to publish it, saying that it
would be the prologue to a longer piece entitled The Recluse. He instead published in
1807 Poems in Two Volumes, a new book of verse. The year after the book's
publication, Coleridge moved in with the Wordsworths. Two years later he moved out, his mind
and body wracked by addiction to laudanum, an opium-based painkiller frequently prescribed at
the time. When he learned that Wordsworth had warned a mutual friend against taking the high-
maintenance Coleridge in as a houseguest, Coleridge sank into a deep depression. The two men
split and eventually reconciled some years later. In 1812, Wordsworth experienced acute tragedy
of his own when two of his children, six-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Catherine, died in
the same year.

DEATH

In 1813, the Wordsworths moved to a home in Grasmere called Rydal Mount, where William and
Mary lived out their lives. William had obtained an official position as the Distributor of Stamps
for Westmorland, exactly the kind of cushy, bourgeois job that his younger self would have railed
against. By this time people were catching on to Wordsworth's new school of poetry, and he had
serious fans. "Year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were
found chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their
admiration was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by
its religious fervor,"Coleridge wrote. Wordworth's civil salary, combined with the income from
his poetry, meant that he had a secure income for the first time in his life.

In 1814, he published The Excursion, a long, moralistic poem intended as the second of the
three-part Recluse, of which the "poem to Coleridge" would be the prologue. Wordsworth never
finished the other two parts. He continued to write poetry and was lavished with honors
including an honorary degree from Oxford and an appointment as England's Poet Laureate.
However, he had achieved his most important poetic triumphs between the years of 1798 and
1807.

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In 1829, Dorothy Wordsworth came down with a serious illness that left her an increasingly
senile invalid. Coleridge died in 1834. In 1847, Wordsworth's beloved daughter Dora died of
tuberculosis at her parents' home. Wordsworth was devastated and seemed to lose his will to
write after her death. On 23 April 1850, William Wordsworth died at the age of 80 of pleurisy, an
inflammation of the lining around the lungs. A few months after his death, his widow Mary
published the "poem to Coleridge," a work now known as The Prelude. This long,
autobiographical poem about Wordsworth's spiritual transformation is now considered his
masterpiece. It is proof that he knew himself well.

"I had known

Too forcibly, too early in my life,
Visitings of imaginative power
For this to last: I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In Nature's presence stood, as now I stand,
A sensitive being, a creative soul."1

1 http://www.shmoop.com/wordsworth/

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 NATURE AND ROMANTICISM

In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed,
the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the
Poets thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true,
his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of
sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge
it is as immortal as the heart of man.
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
Romanticism was arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s. Its influence was felt
across continents and through every artistic discipline into the mid-nineteenth century, and many
of its values and beliefs can still be seen in contemporary poetry.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the romantic movement, as its beginnings can be traced
to many events of the time: a surge of interest in folklore in the early to mid-nineteenth century
with the work of the brothers Grimm, reactions against neoclassicism and the Augustan poets in
England, and political events and uprisings that fostered nationalistic pride.

Romantic poets cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world, idealism, physical and
emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural. Romantics set themselves in
opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace
freedom and revolution in their art and politics. German romantic poets included Fredrich
Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and British poets such as Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, and John Keats propelled the
English romantic movement. Victor Hugo was a noted French romantic poet as well, and
romanticism crossed the Atlantic through the work of American poets like Walt Whitman and
Edgar Allan Poe. The romantic era produced many of the stereotypes of poets and poetry that
exist to this day (i.e., the poet as a tortured and melancholy visionary).2

Romantic ideals never died out in poetry, but were largely absorbed into the precepts of many
other movements. Traces of romanticism lived on in French symbolism andsurrealism and in the
work of prominent poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke.

2 http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-romanticism

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In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared in The Social Contract: Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains. During the Romantic period major transitions took place in society,
as dissatisfied intellectuals and artists challenged the Establishment. In England, the Romantic
poets were at the very heart of this movement. They were inspired by a desire for liberty, and
they denounced the exploitation of the poor. There was an emphasis on the importance of the
individual; a conviction that people should follow ideals rather than imposed conventions and
rules. The Romantics renounced the rationalism and order associated with the preceding
Enlightenment era, stressing the importance of expressing authentic personal feelings. They had
a real sense of responsibility to their fellow men: they felt it was their duty to use their poetry to
inform and inspire others, and to change society.

Revolution
When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind are William
Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-
1834), George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an intuitive feeling that they were chosen to
guide others through the tempestuous period of change.

This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New
World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared similar
outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping
that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them
profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the
Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.

The imagination
The Romantics were not in agreement about everything they said and did: far from it!
Nevertheless, certain key ideas dominated their writings. They genuinely thought that they were
prophetic figures who could interpret reality. The Romantics highlighted the healing power of the
imagination, because they truly believed that it could enable people to transcend their troubles
and their circumstances. Their creative talents could illuminate and transform the world into a
coherent vision, to regenerate mankind spiritually. In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley
elevated the status of poets: They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human
nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit He declared that Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world. This might sound somewhat pretentious, but it serves
to convey the faith the Romantics had in their poetry.

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The marginalized and oppressed

Wordsworth was concerned about the elitism of earlier poets, whose highbrow language and
subject matter were neither readily accessible nor particularly relevant to ordinary people. He
maintained that poetry should be democratic; that it should be composed in the language really
spoken by men (Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]). For this reason, he tried to give a voice to
those who tended to be marginalized and oppressed by society: the rural poor; discharged
soldiers; fallen women; the insane; and children.

Blake was radical in his political views, frequently addressing social issues in his poems and
expressing his concerns about the monarchy and the church. His poem London draws attention
to the suffering of chimney-sweeps, soldiers and prostitutes.

Children, nature and the sublime

For the world to be regenerated, the Romantics said that it was necessary to start all over again
with a childlike perspective. They believed that children were special because they were innocent
and uncorrupted, enjoying a precious affinity with nature. Romantic verse was suffused with
reverence for the natural world. In Coleridges Frost at Midnight (1798) the poet hailed nature
as the Great universal Teacher! Recalling his unhappy times at Christs Hospital School in
London, he explained his aspirations for his son, Hartley, who would have the freedom to enjoy
his childhood and appreciate his surroundings. The Romantics were inspired by the environment,
and encouraged people to venture into new territories both literally and metaphorically. In their
writings they made the world seem a place with infinite, unlimited potential.

A key idea in Romantic poetry is the concept of the sublime. This term conveys the feelings
people experience when they see awesome landscapes, or find themselves in extreme situations
which elicit both fear and admiration. For example, Shelley described his reaction to stunning,
overwhelming scenery in the poem Mont Blanc (1816).

The second-generation Romantics

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a backdrop of
war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his outlook: indeed, second-
generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt that he had sold out to the
Establishment. In the suppressed Dedication to Don Juan (1819-1824) Byron criticised the Poet
Laureate, Robert Southey, and the other Lakers, Wordsworth and Coleridge (all three lived in
the Lake District). Byron also vented his spleen on the English Foreign Secretary, Viscount
Castlereagh, denouncing him as an intellectual eunuch, a bungler and a tinkering
slavemaker (stanzas 11 and 14). Although the Romantics stressed the importance of the
individual, they also advocated a commitment to mankind. Byron became actively involved in
the struggles for Italian nationalism and the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule.

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Notorious for his sexual exploits, and dogged by debt and scandal, Byron quitted Britain in 1816.
Lady Caroline Lamb famously declared that he was Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Similar
accusations were pointed at Shelley. Nicknamed Mad Shelley at Eton, he was sent down from
Oxford for advocating atheism. He antagonised the Establishment further by his criticism of the
monarchy, and by his immoral lifestyle.

Contraries
Romanticism offered a new way of looking at the world, prioritising imagination above reason.
There was, however, a tension at times in the writings, as the poets tried to face up to lifes
seeming contradictions. Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the
Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Here we find two different perspectives on
religion in The Lamb and The Tyger. The simple vocabulary and form of The Lamb suggest
that God is the beneficent, loving Good Shepherd. In stark contrast, the creator depicted in The
Tyger is a powerful blacksmith figure. The speaker is stunned by the exotic, frightening animal,
posing the rhetorical question: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? In The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790-1793) Blake asserted: Without contraries is no progression (stanza 8).

Wordsworths Tintern Abbey (1798) juxtaposed moments of celebration and optimism with
lamentation and regret. Keats thought in terms of an opposition between the imagination and the
intellect. In a letter to his brothers, in December 1817, he explained what he meant by the term
Negative Capability: that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (22 December). Keats suggested that
it is impossible for us to find answers to the eternal questions we all have about human existence.
Instead, our feelings and imaginations enable us to recognise Beauty, and it is Beauty that helps
us through lifes bleak moments. Life involves a delicate balance between times of pleasure and
pain. The individual has to learn to accept both aspects: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is
all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (Ode on a Grecian Urn [1819]).

The premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats contributed to their mystique. As time passed
they attained iconic status, inspiring others to make their voices heard. The Romantic poets
continue to exert a powerful influence on popular culture. Generations have been inspired by
their promotion of self-expression, emotional intensity, personal freedom and social concern.3

3 http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-romantics#sthash.HH5BG1Ho.dpuf

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 PANTHEISTIC ELEMENTS IN POETRY OF
WORDSWORTH

The greatest contribution of Wordsworth to the poetry on nature is his use of unqualified
Pantheismmaking nature itself divine. If to follow the traditional poetic habit of
imaginatively giving life to all experience, and of imaginatively unifying all experience, is to be
a pantheist, then Wordsworth was a pantheist. He believes God shines through all the objects of
nature, investing them with a celestial light. He finds Him in the shining of the stars; he marks
Him in the flowering of the fields. This immanence of God in nature gives him mystic visions.
Nature is no longer a mere vegetation; subject to the law of growth and decay; not a collection of
objects to be described but a manifestation of God. Wordsworth came to believe that beneath the
matter of universe there was a soul, a living principle, acting, even thinking. It may be living, at
least, speaking to him, communicating itself to him: And have felt a presence that disturbs with
the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose
dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and
in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all
thought, And rolls through all things [Tintern Abbey (1798)]. The chief faith of Wordsworth,
namely, his pantheism, is lyrically expressed in this poem. Here the poet most directly expresses
the sense of a unifying spirit within all things. Thus Wordsworth identified God and Nature as
one. In lines 6-8 of It is a beauteous evening, the speaker begins to address someone who
turns out to be a young girl. He tells her to listen that the mighty Being is awake and making a
sound like thunder that lasts forever. The speaker then tells the child (actually his daughter,
Caroline) who is walking beside him that even though she isn't affected by the solemn ideas he
has when he comes face to face with nature, she is not any less divine. In fact, she liest in
Abraham's bosom all year, because God is with her even when she is not aware of Him: Thou
liest in Abrahams bosom all the year;/ And worshipst at the Temples inner shrine/ God being
with thee when we know it not (Lines 9-14). In the woodcock episode of Book I, for example,
the boy has stolen someone else's bird. In the context of solitude, darkness, and guilt, the effect is
chastening, for the boy senses that, in breaching his own ethics, he has also offended that life
beyond himself: "and when the deed was done/I heard among the solitary hills/Low breathings
coming after me, and sounds/ Of undistinguishable motion" (Prelude). So, from the above
discussion we find that Wordsworth thinks of the unifying force of Nature as God and God in
nature appears in different names like spirit, life beyond physical world, a mighty/powerful
Being, a living principle, an undistinguishable motion, and natural lord, etc. Pantheism in
Christianity Naturally many may believe that the very idea of Wordsworths Pantheism is the
idea of Christianity. But Christian idea of Pantheism that Wordsworth holds derives from two
gospel roots. The first one is St Paul, as he states: For in him we live, and move, and have our
being. Though it is believed to be his statement, it is rather a quotation from a Greek poet,

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Aratus, probably influenced by the Stoic Cleanthes, who was a pantheist. In his own words Paul
implies something similar when he says of Christ-God: "For by him all things were created. . .
He is before all things and in him all things hold together

"Tintern Abbey" typifies William Wordsworth's desire to demonstrate what he sees as the
oneness of the human psyche with that of the universal mind of the cosmos. It is his pantheistic
attempt to unfurl the essence of nature's sublime mystery that often evades understanding,
marking his progression as a young writer firmly rooted within the revolutionary tradition to one
caught in perplexity about which way to proceed socially and morally, and further, to define for
himself a new personal socio-political vision. Moreover, "Tintern Abbey" exhibits Wordsworth's
eclipsing of the Cartesian belief in a supernatural creator who stands beyond the universe,
echoing the ideas of Burach Spinoza, and redefining late eighteenth century deism into a more
personal, pantheist revision of nature. The poem's portrayal of the intimate connection with
nature implicitly underscores Wordsworth's view on conventional religious belief as one
surpassing commonly held interpretations of the supernatural. It conveys Wordsworth's ideal of
the universe as bound inextricably within the essence of all that is harmonious and natural -- a
"Oneness." It sympathetically depicts the inseparability of "God" from nature, the "material-
spirit" of energy that, as Wordsworth portrays it, imbues the life force with
. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (96-103)

In terms of "Tintern Abbey"'s naturalistic depiction of nature's interconnection with the universe
and humanity, the poem reveals Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Thelwall's implicit influence
upon Wordsworth's development as both a writer and naturalist poet. Similar to Wordsworth, for
instance, John Thelwall illuminates the organic spur of the human frame and other life forms in
his scientific prose, such as found in his celebrated medical essay, Towards A Definition of
Animal Vitality (1793). Thelwall's "cosmic-monism" fuses the workings of the human body to
the movements of heaven and earth -- a holistic interconnection of the organic to the inorganic.
His connection to Wordsworth through Coleridge serves to partially explain the inherent
pantheistic vision in "Tintern Abbey"'s 1798 composition. In a letter written in October of 1797,
Coleridge expresses this way of seeing nature to Thelwall, stating that,

One can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe -- in themselves and for themselves. But
more frequently all things appear little -- all the knowledge that can be acquired, child's play; the
universe itself, what but an immense heap of things? One can contemplate nothing but the parts,

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and parts are all little! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great,
something one and indivisible -- and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls,
mountains or even caverns, give me a sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things
counterfeit infinity! 4

Like Wordsworth, Thelwall's materialism similarly echoes that of Baruch Spinoza's earlier
philosophical view on nature and its connection with the cosmos. In this sense, he conflates
Spinoza's "pancomism" that informs "Tintern Abbey"'s general method of looking at the universe
through the lens of pantheistic understanding. Although not as explicit as later nineteenth century
materialist thinkers who moved beyond many of the theistic philosophies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Spinoza's rejection of the "Cartesian dualism of mind and matter in favour
of a God who is identified with the ultimate substance of the world 5foreshadows the grafting of
Renaissance logic to late eighteenth century materialist ideas about the universe. In Spinoza's
schema "God" no longer stands beyond the universe. His holistic conception of the universe --
different to Coleridge and Thelwall's only in degree of materialist science -- implicitly reveals
itself in "Tintern Abbey", illustrating Wordsworth's universalizing deist-pantheism that reminds
us, as in his "Ode. Intimations of Immortality" (1802-1804), that 6

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
-- "Ode. Intimations of Immortality"

4 S. T. Coleridge. "Letter from S.T. Coleridge to John Thelwall, 14 October 1797

(extract)," in Wu, Romanticism, 2000: 460

5 Magnus Magnusson. "Baruch Spinoza" (1632-1677), in Chambers Biographical

Dictionary (1993): 1380

6 http://www.123helpme.com/deist-pantheism-in-tintern-abbey-view.asp?id=153642

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 ROLE OF NATURE IN MAKING WORDSWORTH AS A
POET

Throughout Wordsworths work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on the human
mind. All manifestations of the natural worldfrom the highest mountain to the simplest flower
elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the people who observe these
manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature to an individuals
intellectual and spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect
to both the spiritual and the social worlds. As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of
nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as The World Is Too Much with Us
(1807) and London, 1802 (1807) people become selfish and immoral when they distance
themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanitys innate empathy and nobility of spirit
becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the squalor of city life. In
contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity
and nobility of their souls.7

As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is a worshipper of Nature, Natures devotee

or high-priest. His love of Nature was probably truer, and more tender, than that of any other
English poet, before or since. Nature comes to occupy in his poem a separate or independent
status and is not treated in a casual or passing manner as by poets before him. Wordsworth had a
full-fledged philosophy, a new and original view of Nature. Three points in his creed of Nature
may be noted:

(a) He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a divine spirit
pervading all the objects of Nature. This belief in a divine spirit pervading all the objects of
Nature may be termed as mystical Pantheism and is fully expressed in Tintern Abbey and in
several passages in Book II of The Prelude.

(b) Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human heart and he
looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-stricken hearts.

(c) Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He spiritualised Nature
and regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best mother, guardian and nurse of man, and as
an elevating influence. He believed that between man and Nature there is mutual consciousness,
spiritual communion or mystic intercourse. He initiates his readers into the secret of the souls
communion with Nature. According to him, human beings who grow up in the lap of Nature are
perfect in every respect.

7 http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/themes.html

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Wordsworth believed that we can learn more of man and of moral evil and good from Nature
than from all the philosophies. In his eyes, Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and
without which any human life is vain and incomplete. He believed in the education of man by
Nature. In this he was somewhat influenced by Rousseau. This inter-relation of Nature and man
is very important in considering Wordsworths view of both.

Cazamian says that To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative influence superior to any
other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our hearts of the deep-laden seeds of
our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child in the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the
young poet to an ecstasy, the glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life..

In The Prelude, he records dozens of these natural scenes, not for themselves but for what his
mind could learn through.

Nature was both law and impulse; and in earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Wordsworth
was conscious of a spirit which kindled and restrained. In a variety of exciting ways, which he
did not understand, Nature intruded upon his escapades and pastimes, even when he was indoors,
speaking memorable things. He had not sought her; neither was he intellectually aware of her
presence. She riveted his attention by stirring up sensations of fear or joy which were organic,
affecting him bodily as well as emotionally. With time the sensations were fixed indelibly in his
memory. All the instances in Book I ofThe Prelude show a kind of primitive animism at work;
the emotions and psychological disturbances affect external scenes in such a way that Nature
seems to nurture by beauty and by fear.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth traces the development of his love for Nature. In his boyhood
Nature was simply a playground for him. At the second stage he began to love and seek Nature
but he was attracted purely by its sensuous or aesthetic appeal. Finally his love for Nature
acquired a spiritual and intellectual character, and he realized Natures role as a teacher and
educator.

In the Immortality Ode he tells us that as a boy his love for Nature was a thoughtless passion but
that when he grew up, the objects of Nature took a sober colouring from his eyes and gave rise to
profound thoughts in his mind because he had witnessed the sufferings of humanity:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Spiritual Meaning in Natural Objects

Compton Rickett rightly observes that Wordsworth is far less concerned with the sensuous
manifestations than with the spiritual significance that he finds underlying these manifestations.
To him the primrose and the daffodil are symbols to him of Natures message to man. A sunrise
for him is not a pageant of colour; it is a moment of spiritual consecration:

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My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bound unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit.

To combine his spiritual ecstasy with a poetic presentment of Nature is the constant aim of
Wordsworth. It is the source of some of his greatest pieces, grand rhapsodies such as Tintern
Abbey.

Nature Descriptions
Wordsworth is sensitive to every subtle change in the world about him. He can give delicate and
subtle expression to the sheer sensuous delight of the world of Nature. He can feel the elemental
joy of Spring:

It was an April morning, fresh and clear

The rivulet, delighting in its strength,
Ran with a young mans speed, and yet the voice
Of waters which the river had supplied
Was softened down into a vernal tone.

He can take an equally keen pleasure in the tranquil lake:

The calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure

A brief study of his pictures of Nature reveals his peculiar power in actualising sound and its
converse, silence.

Being the poet of the ear and of the eye, he is exquisitely felicitious. No other poet could have
written:

A voice so thrilling neer was heard

In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Unlike most descriptive poets who are satisfied if they achieve a static pictorial effect,
Wordsworth can direct his eye and ear and touch to conveying a sense of the energy and move-
ment behind the workings of the natural world. Goings on was a favourite word he applied to
Nature. But he is not interested in mere Nature description.

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Wordsworth records his own feelings with reference to the objects which stimulate him and call
forth the description. His unique apprehension of Nature was determined by his peculiar sense-
endowment. His eye was at once far-reaching and penetrating. He looked through the visible
scene to what he calls its ideal truth. He pored over objects till he fastened their images on his
brain and brooded on these in memory till they acquired the liveliness of dreams. He had a keen
ear too for all natural sounds, the calls of beasts and birds, and the sounds of winds and waters;
and he composed thousands of lines wandering by the side of a stream. But he was not richly
endowed in the less intellectual senses of touch, taste and temperature.

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 CONCLUSION

Wordsworths attitude to Nature can be clearly differentiated from that of the other great poets of
Nature. He did not prefer the wild and stormy aspects of Nature like Byron, or the shifting and
changeful aspects of Nature and the scenery of the sea and sky like Shelley, or the purely
sensuous in Nature like Keats. It was his special characteristic to concern himself, not with the
strange and remote aspects of the earth, and sky, but Nature in her ordinary, familiar, everyday
moods. He did not recognize the ugly side of Nature red in tooth and claw as Tennyson did.
Wordsworth stressed upon the moral influence of Nature and the need of mans spiritual
discourse with her.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

The major English romantic poets- Edited and with introduction by William H. Marshall,
Washington Square Print
The prelude- 1

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