Marie-Rose Zeenny

1. Account for Wordsworth’s Attitude towards Nature. Support your answer.

Wordsworth is the poet of nature. He lived in the Lake District which is one of the
most spectacular regions. It is a mountainous place full of many lakes, waterfalls, green
meadows and wild life. Moreover he spent his free days and part of his nights roaming in
the woods “drinking the delight of nature”. He was also in contact with nature in all his
travels and journeys to France, to Germany, to Wales and to the Alps. Thus,
Wordsworth’s attitude towards nature developed with years. Nature for him is a source of
over joy, comfort, happiness, beauty, wisdom and knowledge.

In “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, the speaker says that when he lies on his
couch feeling depressed and melancholic these daffodils would flash on his imagination
and this is the joy of being alone. The emotion created when he saw the daffodils
recreated in him when he recalls them and this fills his heart with pleasure. “And then my
heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils”. Thus, in this poem nature is a
source of comfort and a source of pleasure and joy.

In “My Heart Leaps up”, the speaker says that he feels overjoyed when he sees a
rainbow. To him being in close physical contact with nature fills his life with over joy.
“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky …” He says that this has been a
continuous relationship when he was born, now and will always be, and if he loses this
bound with nature he prefers to die. He is in perfect harmony with nature. In this poem
nature is a source of over joy, pleasure and delight.

In “the tables turned”, the speaker says to his friend not to confine himself to
books and let nature be his teacher. He says that nature teaches the mind and the head and
it is a source of spontaneous wisdom; that is, one doesn’t need a lot of effort to
understand it. He also says that Nature is a moral teacher. Nature teaches good and evil
more than a wise man can teach. Moreover, Nature gives sweet knowledge; the mind
being the only interpreter misshapes the beauty of things. In other words, if one
approaches the human experience only through the intellect then (s) he will kill the
beautiful forms of things. Thus for Wordsworth, Nature is a source of wisdom, of
knowledge, of beauty and a moral teacher.
 In “The World Is too Much with Us” the speaker says that nature is very generous
with man, but man concerns himself with materialistic concerns; man wastes the power
of interacting with nature and the power of evaluating what nature offers. The speaker
says that since we have given our hearts away, then we are not in harmony with nature.
Moreover, the speaker praises Greek mythology because it appeals to the sacredness of
nature. He wishes he could have been as a pagan standing on the seaside. He is
melancholic but if he sees glimpses of these gods in nature, this will make him less
melancholic.

Thus Wordsworth’s attitude towards nature is a Romantic attitude. Wordsworth

expresses his love of nature for it is the source of beauty and happiness. He expresses his
anger that man doesn’t value the gifts of nature, being only concerned with materialistic
affairs. He is also a worshiper of nature. In “Tintern Abbey” the speaker says that the
beauteous forms haven’t been anything to him: when he was lonely, weary and amidst
confusion, he thought of this beautiful place and had sweet sensations felt in his blood,
heart and mind. He could restore these beauteous forms in tranquility and than his heart is
filled with pleasure and excitement. Thus to Wordsworth nature is a comforter.
Moreover, the speaker says that the heavy burden laid on us by the world which we don’t
understand is lightened by that mood which nature creates in us. The emotions created in
us by Nature gently carry us forward until we become overwhelmed and no more aware
of the existence of our physical body. We become so much dissolved with joy and
harmony that quietens our eye and “we see into the life of things”. Thus nature is a
visionary insight which is trance-like in nature.

Furthermore, the speaker experiences nature in two different ways: when a child,
he experienced nature physically. For instance he says that he used to jump over the
mountains, to run along side of the streams … However, as a mature person, the way he
experienced nature changed from one form to another. He says that nature taught him to
understand human misery. Thus nature to Wordsworth is a comforter, a door to visionary
insight and to knowledge.

In conclusion, Nature to Wordsworth is a source of comfort, over joy, pleasure,

wisdom, knowledge, beauty, and religion.
 2. Discuss the Concept of the Poet and Poetry in the Romantic Period.

The Romantic Period comes as a reaction against the 18th century period, and
against the neo-classical restrictions on poet’s emotions. The 18th century was based on
imitation, forcing strict rules on writings. It aimed at teaching a moral lesson while
delighting the audience. According to Wordsworth, the writers of the 18th century had
imposed on poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural expression.

While 18th century poetry was regarded as an imitation of human life – “a mirror
held up to nature”, and as putting things in order to instruct and give artistic pleasure,
romantic poets dealt with it as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. To them,
the source of a poem is no more the outer world, but the individual poet, and the essential
materials of a poem are no more the external people and events, but the inner feelings of
the author or external objects only after these have been transformed by the author’s
feelings. Lyrical Ballads, co-authored by Coleridge and Wordsworth, are a reflection of
the familiar in common life becoming strange after throwing a color of imagination on it.
In these poems, we feel the younger personal emotion of the poet. As a result to the
poet’s own feelings and temperament, the lyric poem written in the first person became a
major romantic form.
Romantic poets endowed nature with life. They used the description, but not for
the mere sake of description, but the description that leads to feelings and deep thinking.
Although they used simple language and daily ordinary topics, but they colored them by
imagination. They added strangeness to beauty as a glorification of the ordinary. By this,
familiarity becomes fresh.
For them, the imagination is dependent on the impressions of the sense, and they
protested against the exclusive reign of mere logical reason. They rebelled against the
rules of judgment and the behavior imposed by the society in the interest of the order and
stability.
Blake was a visionary poet, and he absorbed the symbolism of the Bible, and
proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism. For him innocence is
the unawareness that evil exists. He wrote in the language of a child, outside the
conventions of the 18th century poets. In “The Chimney Sweeper”, he criticizes the
parents, the church and the masters of the chimney sweeping business. Here, Blake is the
voice that rebels against the exploitation of the parents towards children. “My pretty rose
tree” is a great symbolical poem about passing from a state of innocence to that of
experience.

The Romantic Period led the poets to express their rebellious thoughts in their
writings, trying to seek idealism; though later they become disappointed and frustrated
about this idealism that is far and difficult to reach.