Wordsworth and the natural world
In 1921, David Nichol Smith described Wordsworth as ‘our greatest nature poet’ and it is a judgement many would still accept. The poem generally called ‘Daffodils’ (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’), like Kipling’s ‘If’, is one of the last remaining genuinely popular poems. From it, one gains an image of Wordsworth as someone sustained and cheered by the flowers he finds when walking among the dales and hills. In other words, Wordsworth’s natural world seems to be restricted to the country – implicitly denying that urban life is ‘natural’ – and, secondly, Wordsworth is seen as emotionally nourished by attractive, rural objects. This example of his nature poetry is easily aligned with pastoral and, at the same time, it seems to support a tourist’s or holidaymaker’s experience of the countryside.
‘Nature’ in this context means, roughly speaking, the non-urban or rural and this meaning of the word now predominates (partly because of the way in which Wordsworth was understood by his Victorian readers). When celebrating Wordsworth as a nature poet, it is easy to assume he is no more than a spokesperson for rural values or for the National Trust, the society established in the late nineteenth century for the preservation of the finest of the English landscape, amongst the founders of which were many admirers of his poetry. It is easy, in other words, to forget that in Wordsworth’s day ‘Nature’ was a term continuously employed in profound theological, philosophical, and political debates. Nature could be seen as brutal or as a harmonious system reflecting the perfect order of its creator or as the world of the heart not the head – as a realm of intuitions and affections which counterbalanced the overly strict dictates of reason. Each of these readings could be employed in support of different political positions: natural brutality justifies an oppressive tyranny, natural harmony reflects not only God’s order but the settled order of the established state, and natural feeling encourages the rebel to believe that his or her impulse of defiance is right. If Wordsworth is ‘our greatest nature poet’ we need to decide to what extent his writing contributes to these larger questions, inevitably raised by the word.
Our modern assumptions, then, about what nature means may distort our understanding of Wordsworth, turning him into a great pastoral poet whose work defends rural life against the invading corruptions of the city. If the natural is considered to be the same as the rural, then nature will, like pastoral, provide a refuge from the afflictions of everyday life and the opportunity to leave behind philosophical uncertainties and political difficulties. The following essay argues that Wordsworth’s position is more complex because, for him, nature involves community. In Wordsworth’s work ‘the natural world’ is always social, both in itself and in its relation to man. Consequently, nature does not offer an escape from other people so much as express an alternative mode of relating to them. As he says in The Excursion, it is not ‘a refuge from distress or pain, / A breathing-time, vacation, or a truce’ but, potentially at least, nature will provide ‘a life of peace, / Stability without regret or fear’. Moreover, Wordsworth’s writings about nature are often strangely jarring. It can be difficult to read them with any confidence that you are reading them correctly. In my view, they employ their oddity to provoke in their readers what Wordsworth sees as nature’s social relations. His writings aim to awaken in us what he called, in Home at Grasmere, the ‘kindred independence’ shown and shared by natural things.1
The 1798 Lyrical Ballads begins with two poems by Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, followed by ‘The Foster Mother’s Tale’. The first poem by Wordsworth in the collection, and hence the first poem he had published for five years or more, is the clumsily entitled, ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree Which Stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, On a Desolate Part of the Shore, Yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’. Several such titles interrupt the collection at regular intervals: ‘Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed’, ‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’. These titles stand in contrast to the abrupt terseness of ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Last of the Flock’. They run like a thread through the book, from Wordsworth’s first contribution to his last (which ends the volume): ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’. Notably, the longer titles Wordsworth gives all refer, with extreme specificity, to time and place, especially place. By emphasizing the circumstances of these poems, Wordsworth makes them appear occasional – prompted by a moment in time and place, and to be understood by keeping that situation in mind. Conversely, his shorter titles lend ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Mad Mother’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ a representative and universal quality. These poems are displaced from the circumstances which, in the case of Wordsworth’s poems called ‘Lines’, both engender his writing and threaten to limit its applicability.
Wordsworth uses these extremely long and very short titles to draw attention to personhood (the person writing or reading at one, particular moment) and, on the other hand, to its opposite – a world quite different from, indifferent to and unconfined by the character of the poet or speaker. In the various titles, as in the title of the collection, ‘lyrical’ is paired with and opposed to ‘ballad’ – the lyrical repose of his ‘Lines’ with their expansive titles contrasts with the brisk, ballad-like crispness of his other titles. Both in the book and in its separate poems, then, Wordsworth is probing the relation between ‘lyrical’ and ‘ballad’, between personal feeling and given world, between, in philosophical terms, subjective and objective.
This is confirmed by the fact that the poems called ‘Lines’, which seem more subjective, are also those situated most exactly within nature. At the opening of ‘Tintern Abbey’, for example, Wordsworth attends to the natural world in a verse-paragraph which catalogues ‘steep and lofty cliffs’, ‘plots of cottage-ground’, ‘woods and copses’. Similarly, in ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, the reader is urged first of all to stop and take in ‘the barren boughs’ and ‘the curling waves, / That break against the shore’. Personal history and its configuration through poetry seem to arise out of and be dependent upon precise self-location. Yet, at the same time, the natural world apparently declines at moments into mere context. All the objects mentioned at the beginning of ‘Tintern Abbey’ are being seen ‘Once again’. ‘Again’ is used four times in the first fifteen lines, on each occasion linked to Wordsworth’s actions: ‘again I hear’, ‘again / Do I behold’, ‘I again repose’, ‘again I see’. Objects do not provoke particular recollections, in a Proustian way; rather, and more introvertedly, Wordsworth’s seeing and hearing is suffused with his personal feelings. More important than what he sees is the fact that he is seeing these things again, with an overwhelming sense of relief and release.
Some of Wordsworth’s earliest readers objected to this intrusion of private feelings into his landscapes. Francis Jeffrey, who was in his contributions to the Edinburgh Review Wordsworth’s most influential assailant, contrasts him unfavourably with the poet Crabbe, who ‘delights us by the truth, and vivid and picturesque beauty of his representations’ while ‘Mr Wordsworth and his associates’:
introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature: and excite an interest for them – where they do excite any interest – more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation.2
For Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s 1807 poems are unlikely and boring – they excite little interest and their subject-matter is so out-of-the-way as to stretch credibility. Furthermore, he says, Wordsworth tries to make the subjects of his poems interesting by an analysis of his own ‘capricious feelings’ about them, instead of by providing reasons for his (and his readers’) ‘sympathy in their situation’. The two projects – of observation and self-analysis – are in clear and unavoidable conflict, as far as Jeffrey is concerned, and this has moral consequences. Better, more acute observation would produce greater sympathy, while Wordsworth’s self-concern produces instead ‘an eloquent and refined analysis’. All the terms Jeffrey employs here are loaded: Wordsworth appears scientifically heartless (‘analysis’ instead of ‘sympathy’), snobbishly condescending (‘refined’ instead of ‘obvious’) and impressive but deceitful (‘eloquent’, by contrast with ‘intelligible’). His self-involvement hampers his perception of the world around and, for Jeffrey, it makes him cruel.
By abandoning Crabbe’s ‘vivid [. . .] representations’, Wordsworth has replaced truth with the analysis of capricious feelings, an exercise which is pointless because it attempts to find a pattern in the merely transitory moods of a single mind. Wordsworth’s cruelty and his self-deception, however, are less important for Jeffrey than his interference with ‘picturesque representations’ – that is, with a consensual mode of perception and depiction in which, theoretically, the nature of things is made available to all, without fear or favour. By imbuing his landscapes with personal feeling, Wordsworth puts himself first and this suggests (among other things) that it may be difficult to find an ‘intelligible ground of sympathy’ between his readers and the landscape or between his readers and the ‘beings’ whose situation he presents. Epistemological confidence and the access which it gives to social sympathies are both overturned by Wordsworth’s writing. It is in response to this extremely disturbing challenge that Jeffrey deploys his highly charged vocabulary and accusations of egoism.3
‘We are Seven’ supports the idea that what Jeffrey noticed in Wordsworth’s poetry and condemned as vulgar egotism may have been a purposeful disruption of ‘picturesque’ certainties. The poem stages a confrontation between its presumptuous speaker and the resisting distinctiveness of a little girl’s perceptions. Despite the adult’s arguments to the contrary, she will not concede that her two dead siblings are no longer part of her family, insisting repeatedly that, nevertheless, ‘We are seven’. One can see in this disagreement an educative disruption of the speaker’s belief that the world conforms to his idea of it and, equally, that there is one idea of the world which everyone shares. Instead, the little girl’s world seems utterly separate from his own and from what he assumes to be everyone else’s. The speaker is brought abruptly into contact with something external to himself and his response is obstinately to regard it as nonsensical. There is a comic self-importance to his manner throughout this undignified squabble. There is also an ungenerous disregard for what one might read as the child’s griefwork. Wordsworth presents the poem without comment or explication so that his readers cannot help but see the clash between two stoutly defended and incompatible points of view. It is not really a question of who one sides with in this poem. Rather, ‘We are Seven’ suggests that sympathy for others needs to countenance (more than Jeffrey is willing to do and more than picturesque assumptions allow) the radical differences between people’s points of view. To Wordsworth’s mind, there is no one landscape which poets observe and represent; there are as many as there are people whose lives are structured and made meaningful through their love for that landscape. Likewise, for Wordsworth, society is ‘seven’ – seventy times seven, even – and not one. Yet, at the same time, he regards it as meaningful and as vitally important to think in terms of ‘We’, to remember ‘That we have all of us one human heart’ (‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, line 146).4
It has been usual to think of Wordsworth’s relation to the natural world either as separate from politics or as a ‘displacement’ of politics. Both accounts have tended to underestimate the sociality of Wordsworth’s natural world. For M. H. Abrams, and Geoffrey Hartman as well, Wordsworth’s writing is understood by reference to the starkly dichotomous epistemologies of the Enlightenment. His project is seen as, fundamentally, a reunification of subjective and objective. Wordsworth’s fusion of personal feelings and external objects is treated as predominantly perceptual – as the resolution of dilemmas produced by the eighteenth-century scientific world-view (the idea that objects are seen truthfully when seen in terms of their constituent elements and under the light of universal laws.)5 Subsequently, New Historicist accounts of Romanticism have followed this reading and found its seeds in Wordsworth himself. His works – ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, in particular – are regarded as disguising political quietism and defeated radicalism by elevating the speaker above the worldly and political. Wordsworth’s spiritualizing of the material world, which Abrams celebrates, is re-read as his pretending to escape the immediate concerns of his historical moment. Wordsworth’s set of fraudulent moves in this area conform to and help produce ‘The Romantic Ideology’ which is perpetuated by the ‘romantic’ critical readings of his work, such as those by Abrams and Hartman. New Historicism criticizes Wordsworth’s treatment of the natural world in terms reminiscent of Jeffrey: in the famous poems, Jerome McGann believes, the ‘light and appearances of sense fade into [. . .] the landscape of Wordsworth’s emotional needs’.6 Jeffrey opposed ‘Acutest observers’ to ‘capricious feelings’; this is repeated in McGann’s opposition between ‘sense’ and ‘emotional needs’; in both, it is assumed that the truth lies in externals and that perception is, at best, impersonal; sensation can and should occur without the distorting influence of personal feeling.
Influential readings of Wordsworth, then, either make his treatment of nature central to his achievement of ‘the philosophic mind’ or they condemn it as a pre-eminent area of deceit. Either way, however, emphasis is laid on Wordsworth’s concept of ‘Nature’ and little attention is paid to the interaction in his work between ‘Nature’ and ‘natural objects’. Secondly, ‘Nature’ is allegorized: in Abrams, it is synonymous with ‘the Other’ to the Self; in McGann, ‘Nature’ means ‘the immaterial plane of reality’ where particulars are replaced with ‘a record of pure consciousness’ (McGann, Romantic Ideology, p. 90); in other words, it is the falsified version of Wordsworth’s experience. There are other consequences too: firstly, Wordsworth is made into a sublime egoist, in the tradition of romantic idealist philosophy; his selfhood is either glorious or reprehensible; it’s rarely doubted. The Prelude is read as a story of self-realization and his withdrawals from the proclamation of his own centrality are seen as self-protective strategies (by Hartman) or a drift towards sympathy instead of political agitation (by McGann).
Secondly, Wordsworth’s relation to particular places is not discussed very much and when discussed, it is treated as merely intriguing. Recently, Jonathan Bate’s reading of Wordsworth as an early environmentalist has brought with it a renewed attention to the poetry’s embeddedness in identifiable, specific locations. Similarly, Stephen Gill has shown Wordsworth’s considerable influence over late nineteenth-century conservationism and the beginnings of the National Trust.7
These related emphases are both valuable, not least for suggesting that Wordsworth’s sense of nature arises out of and depicts a particular group of places with which he feels himself irremovably bound up. The fact and form of his involvement is as important as the particularity. Wordsworth’s explorations of nature are constantly inquiries into social relations. Neither apolitical nor anti-radical, they continue to seek a form of social life which allows personhood and community to coexist.
This, lastly, implies that Wordsworth is more than just an early conservationist. Modern ecology is divided between ‘deep’ greens and environmentalists; these groups differ radically on the question of humanity’s status within the natural world and, therefore, on the proper relations which should exist between the two. ‘Deep’ ecologists maintain, broadly speaking, that human beings can re-enter a state of union with nature, through what Arne Naess has called ‘identification’ – ‘One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life’.8 Mainstream conservationists, on the other hand, propose only to change man’s treatment of nature and not his fundamental relation to it. They argue for better management – for the more enlightened stewardship of an environment in which man is the possessor and from which he remains separate. These disagreements imply that human personhood is either lost in nature (through ‘identification’) or exists strictly independent of it. Ecological arguments are repeating, in other words, Wordsworth’s preoccupation with how people emerge from and are tied into the natural world. Moreover, some of the most insightful ecological writing (such as that by the major American conservationist Aldo Leopold, 1887–1948) reaches towards a more social understanding of humanity’s relations with nature – an understanding similar to Wordsworth’s.9
‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ is very helpful in considering how Wordsworth thinks about the natural world and people’s relations to it. The piece describes a ‘youth, by genius nurs’d’ who ‘to the world / Went forth, pure in his heart’ and returned, disappointed by the world’s neglect of his ‘lofty views’, by its indifference to his war against ‘dissolute tongues [. . .] jealousy, and hate’. The yew-tree seat is his refuge, where ‘he loved to sit’, ‘And with the food of pride sustained his soul / In solitude’. This life-history presents in miniature that of ‘the Solitary’ in The Excursion; indeed, the poem puts in a nutshell the central issue of books three and four of the longer work: how can one move beyond ‘Despondency’ to the state where ‘Despondency [is] Corrected’? ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ shows two relations to natural objects which offer comfort to dejection – the first is a glance downwards:
on these barren rocks, with juniper,
And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o’er,
Fixing his downward eye, he many an hour
A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here
An emblem of his own unfruitful life
Wordsworth changed ‘downward’ to ‘downcast’ in 1800 as if to stress the connection, which he also makes in several other places, between gazing fixedly on the ground and unhealthy depression. Interestingly, too, Wordsworth seems to be agreeing with the likes of Francis Jeffrey when he says that it is a ‘morbid pleasure’ which looks for and discovers traces and emblems of oneself in the world around.
The alternative is more elevated, both literally and metaphorically. ‘[L]ifting up his head,’ Wordsworth says, ‘he then would gaze / On the more distant scene; how lovely ’tis / Thou seest, and he would gaze till it became / Far lovelier’. Wordsworth is apparently following a fairly conventional pattern here, which contrasts melancholy self-involvement with ‘the labours of benevolence’ – the first is confined to narrow views while the second is evoked by a view of distant, beautiful prospects. To Wordsworth’s youthful recluse this traditional narrative is ineffective, however; although he accepts that the world seems a kindly place to kindly people he cannot share their experience.
Nor, that time,
Would he forget those beings, to whose minds,
Warm from the labours of benevolence,
The world, and man himself, appeared a scene
Of kindred loveliness: then he would sigh
With mournful joy, to think that others felt
What he must never feel: and so, lost man!
On visionary views would fancy feed,
Till his eye streamed with tears.
(34–42)
Rejection by the world gives rise to a despondent isolation, in which selfcertainty comes at the price of losing kinship with others. What Francis Jeffrey condemned as an indulgence is here regarded as a plight: once one begins to trace emblems of oneself in the surrounding world, it becomes almost impossible to recover benevolent feelings of social sympathy. Wordsworth’s account of the better state, which his protagonist has lost, is, however, already different from Jeffrey’s: the minds of the benevolent perceive a ‘scene / Of kindred loveliness’ and ‘kindred’ applies to the relation between mind and world and similarly to that between world and man. Benevolence seems not so much to reveal grounds of sympathy between viewer and object as, instead, to produce the perception that mind and world replicate each other because they are kin to one another. The ‘individual Mind [. . .] to the external World / Is Fitted’ and ‘The external World is fitted to the Mind’, Wordsworth wrote around the same time in a section of Home at Grasmere which he presented as a Prospectus to The Recluse in the preface to The Excursion sixteen years later. ‘Lines left upon a Seat’ shares this conviction and represents it poetically – the lines contrast the stable variety of the section describing benevolence and the tightened alliterativeness, a minute later, of ‘visionary views’ and ‘fancy feed’. The feeling of over-rigid concentration is continued by the assonance of ‘feed’ and ‘streamed’ (the second word made more prominent by the rhythm of this line) and when ‘feed’ nearly repeats ‘feel’. The obsessiveness of the hermit-figure’s self-involvement is reproduced by the sounds of Wordsworth’s language. Furthermore, his final position seems an echo and a worsening of his situation earlier when looking fixedly down. Then the near-rhymes and half-rhymes of ‘sand-piper’, ‘juniper’, ‘o’er’ and ‘hour’ culminate in the word ‘here’, as if to raise the suspicion that his gaze downward is becoming a fixation. Both extremes of attention – which are customarily seen sequentially as disease and cure – are shown to lead to the same condition of morbid self-attention, the last more extreme and desolate than the first.10
The resolution offered by ‘Lines left upon a Seat’ is humility, the ‘lowliness of heart’ which engenders a temperate sense of one’s own relative insignificance. Editors have suggested the closing verse-paragraph (lines 44–60) may be influenced by Coleridge and manuscript evidence suggests that the lines were certainly an afterthought.11 Whatever their origin, they downplay ‘kindred loveliness’ in favour of submission – a more orthodox Christian view in which the individual is placed within a natural order, which is greater and more valuable than he or she can ever be. However moving and impressive (which I think they are), the lines seem less to resolve the poem than to redirect it.
In The Excursion, Wordsworth treats the whole issue once again. In book 4, the Solitary’s despondency is ‘corrected’ by the long speeches of the Wanderer, who argues that ‘living things, and things inanimate, / Do speak, at Heaven’s command, to eye and ear, / And speak to social reason’s inner sense, / With inarticulate language’. The man, he goes on, who communes with nature, who knows and loves its forms and objects:
needs must feel
The joy of that pure principle of love
So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught
Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose
But seek for objects of a kindred love
In fellow-natures and a kindred joy.
His discontent and self-involvement no longer need to be condemned or warned against because they disappear: ‘he looks round / And seeks for good; and finds the good he seeks: / Until abhorrence and contempt are things / He only knows by name’ (The Excursion, book 4, lines 1204–7, 1212–17, 1223–6).12
The living and the inanimate things of nature all ‘speak to social reason’s inner sense’ because they exhibit sociality themselves, at all levels from the smallest to the largest, from the ‘craggy regions’ to ‘The tiny creatures strong by social league’, to ‘the mute company of changeful clouds’ and as high as ‘The mild assemblage of the starry heavens’. Furthermore, these ‘Creatures that in communities exist’ do so less ‘through dependence upon mutual aid / Than by participation in delight’.13 Avoiding ‘dependence’ is, curiously, essential to Wordsworth’s idea of ‘kindred’ and hence to his concept of our proper relationship to the natural world. Resisting ‘dependence’ is motivated in part by his aim of ensuring that nature’s laws are authoritative without becoming absolute: the right-thinking and right-feeling person, Wordsworth says, ‘needs must feel’ and ‘cannot choose / But seek’. This sounds dangerously like a determinist point of view in which nature is thought to condition people, programming them with reflex preferences. Wordsworth, however much he wishes to credit nature with an influence over our hearts and minds, dislikes the idea that our responses are automatic. He would not deny that nature has formed him but wants to preserve a full sense of what it is that nature has formed: an independent being who repeats, freely and with delight, the loving behaviour which fashioned his independence originally. Equally, that independent self naturally seeks ‘objects of a kindred love / In fellow-natures’; it seeks a community of fellows comparable to the one it finds. Consequently, instead of the ardent, overwrought vision of nature, in ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, which moves from ‘lovely’ to ‘lovelier’, from ‘beauty’ to something ‘still more beauteous’ beyond it, Wordsworth now recommends a more prosaic reciprocity: the man properly attuned, the Wanderer says, ‘seeks for good; and finds the good he seeks’. This phrasing verges on suggesting the delusional or solipsistic; Wordsworth accepts that danger because anything less risky would diminish a person’s equality with what he or she sees and hears.
The account of ‘independence’ is so precise because it takes part in an effort to redefine the word. In The Borderers, his play composed 1796–7, Wordsworth considers intellectual independence as a terrifying and self-destructive claim to pure rationality. His target is the thought of William Godwin (whose influence he had recently thrown off) and more generally the ideas of those who advocated the French Revolution as the triumph of reason. His villain in the play urges obedience to ‘the only law that wisdom / Can ever recognize: the immediate law / Flashed from the light of circumstances / Upon an independent intellect.’ This law offers freedom from ‘the tyranny / Of moralists and saints and lawgivers’. When, in The Prelude, Wordsworth returns to the same concerns and quotes these lines from The Borderers, he sees the ‘independent intellect’ as dismissing not only received morality but, in addition, ‘with a resolute mastery shaking off / The accidents of nature, time, and place’. So the independence he wants to defend must be prevented from turning back into this Godwinian disregard for precedent and the consequent deracination of self from context – this treatment of circumstances as mere ‘accidents’ or as only a mirror of the ‘immediate law’.14
At the same time, Wordsworth is writing in the knowledge that, for some opponents of the revolution, its disastrous consequences proved the absolute and necessary authority of precedent, confirming that the self must acknowledge its dependence on ‘nature, time and place’. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France recommends following ‘our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges’. The application of speculative, philosophical ideas to the practical matter of political life has led, Burke believes, to insurrection and carnage. Hence, nature ‘rather than’ reflection must be our guide – nature which is, Burke says, ‘wisdom without reflection’ and obliges us to observe ‘the great primaeval contract of eternal society [. . .] which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place’.15 Notoriously, Wordsworth showed increasing admiration for Burke as he grew older. The Prelude, however, wrestles with a paradox that Burke would not have recognized: that the reliance on nature which defends us against the inhumanity of untrammelled reason, produces in turn an inhumanity of its own. Subjects who act ‘without reflection’ may be content and it may even be that nature is guiding them aright, yet they are not practising full humanity. The danger of Godwinian ‘independence’ provokes an opposite reaction – Burke’s advocacy of willing, submissive dependency, with the paternalistic politics that it entails.
If nature can neither be passively relied upon nor safely ignored, its position in relation to us becomes difficult to grasp, particularly when one moves from speaking dogmatically, as in The Excursion, towards personal testimony, as in The Prelude. Early on in his autobiography, Wordsworth is keen to establish that his response to nature was initially untaught and spontaneous, unprompted by others, by books or by convention. This experience confirms the existence of and helped create the ‘independent musings [which] pleased me so / That spells seemed on me when I was alone’ (Prel.1805 iii 231–2). Even London, in some respects threatening to this sense of himself, reveals itself to be ‘thronged with impregnations, like those wilds / In which my early feelings had been nursed’. Wordsworth is able to perceive around him in the city things that are ‘like the enduring majesty and power / Of independent nature’. Human-kind, the ‘individual sights / Of courage, and integrity, and truth’ which he comes across, nurse him rather as nature had done before, sustaining his confidence in himself, in his own convictions and in ‘the unity of man’ (Prel.1805 viii 791–2, 785–6, 839–40, 827). He finds in the city – at least at times – an equivalent to the balance between kinship and independence which characterizes the natural world and man’s relationship to it. For Wordsworth, the brotherhood of man is born out of this perception that others are autonomous and, at the same time, united to oneself.
An autobiographical poem such as The Prelude is based, however, on giving oneself disproportionate centrality. Arguably, it is an exercise in vanity. Wordsworth pursues the project not only to vindicate himself as a poetic authority (his publicly avowed reason for composing the poem). He writes The Prelude also to defend egoism, seeing it as a true component of the independence in which full humanity consists. Brotherhood – revolutionary fraternité – will decay without our insistence that each person is, from one perspective, a world unto themselves. Without this counterweight, ideas of ‘the unity of man’ will produce either the Terror’s totalitarian devotion to the state or Godwin’s unacknowledged will to power over one’s fellows or Burke’s insistence on natural hierarchy. Consequently, the poem has two apparently conflicting purposes: the first, to elevate Wordsworth into authority over the world of his experience and, the second, to place him amidst it. In Book Eight, for example, he writes that at ‘a time of greater dignity’ when:
the pulse of being everywhere was felt,
When all the several frames of things, like stars
Through every magnitude distinguishable,
Were half confounded in each other’s blaze,
One galaxy of life and joy. Then rose
Man, inwardly contemplated, and present
In my own being, to a loftier height [. . .]
Acknowledging dependency sublime.
In this argument – more like Coleridge’s ideas of ‘One Life’ than the community everywhere present in The Excursion – ‘Man’ becomes pre-eminent, ‘first / In capability of feeling what / Was to be felt’. The 1850 version of the poem tones down this portrait: ‘In the midst stood Man’, still first but nonetheless ‘kindred to the worm’. As has been noted, Wordsworth displays here his anxiety about keeping himself within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. His use of ‘kindred’, however, also marries with his rewriting of the lines about the stars; instead of being ‘half confounded’, it is now stated that they ‘Shone mutually indebted, or half lost / Each in the other’s blaze, a galaxy / Of life and glory’ (Prel.1850 viii 483–5). This revision is clearer than before, less rapturous and more considered in its portrayal of a society based upon reciprocity. Man’s being ‘kindred’ to the worm consequently appears another instance of being ‘mutually indebted’ so that our ‘dependency sublime’ upon God stands alongside a humbler involvement with ‘the several frames of things’. The 1850 version is more consistent with The Excursion but as a result it deflects The Prelude from its real aim, not only removing the poem’s possible heresy but obscuring its energizing paradox as well. How individuality, seen from the inside, is both all-embracing and confronted by the indisputably separate to which it is also joined – this is, perhaps, the central issue of the poem and the concept of ‘mutual indebtedness’ cannot do justice to it.
Later poems by Wordsworth continue to engage with the paradoxical relations between consciousness and object, man and nature and do so in ways that still register the paradox. Less abrupt than the clashes between lyric and ballad forms in Lyrical Ballads and less grandiloquent than The Prelude in addressing the perplexity, his later work (at its best) hints at the irresolvable curiosity of the mind’s place in the world.
The tenth sonnet in Part 2 of the Miscellaneous Sonnets, for example, first published in 1815, begins, ‘Mark the concentred hazels that enclose / Yon old grey Stone, protected from the ray / Of noontide suns’. It ends, ‘Solitary nature condescends / To mimic Time’s forlorn humanities.’16 The hazels gather round and enclose the spot, making the stone into ‘the pensive likeness’ of a grave and themselves into natural mourners. They mimic human sympathy and Wordsworth feels this imitation not as a parody or cruel irony but as a sign of nature’s condescension to man. Solitary nature does not suffer itself. It is, however, generous enough to recognize how mankind suffers and to respond with kindness. This is a curious idea and one that Wordsworth slips into the sonnet almost unnoticed. The complication of the relation between nature, time, and humanity (meaning here ‘humane behaviour’) is presented so rapidly that it sounds like an enigma and, not quite understanding him perhaps, we may pass on to the next poem in the series. Wordsworth’s thinking is so strange because it reverses usual expectations. We would not be surprised to be told that churchyards were laid out like a natural feature, in this case like a grove of hazels, but Wordsworth says it is the other way round; that the hazels have grown in imitation of churchyards. They reveal the willingness of nature to go along with his impulses of sympathy.
Wordsworth personifies nature here as a regal figure, unmoved yet sympathetic, who is literally benevolent – nature desires our welfare even though our harm would do it no harm. Such regality ‘condescends’ to our weaknesses, yet also mimics our acts of sympathy. Nature’s imitation of the graveyard looks, on the one hand, like a disinterested, supportive gesture and, on the other, like a spontaneous repetition. The sonnet, then, first reverses our expected understanding of the relation between man and nature. It then unbalances the new relation which has been set up. Nature is first our imitator (where usually we are its imitator), then our kindly ruler, and finally our mimic.
Two points arise from the sonnet, I think: firstly, Wordsworth presents human behaviour as appropriate when nature imitates it. Taken literally, this sounds untenable. It is difficult to imagine hazel trees checking out the latest in churchyard design before deciding where to grow. Wordsworth wants, however, to say something of this kind in order to preserve the separateness and the co-existence of ‘humanities’ and natural things. Human behaviour should not be judged appropriate when it is found in nature, nor should we think that the two spheres are convergent. Rather, the enterprise of ‘humanity’ continues as best it can, independently, and suddenly finds itself reflected in nature in unexpected ways. These reflections back are not replications of human sympathy but likenesses to it. (One is reminded of the emphasis he lays on ‘like’ in The Prelude book xviii: the city is ‘like those wilds’ and ‘like the enduring majesty and power / Of independent nature’ [my emphasis].) Similarly, the hazels resemble the owls who hoot when Wordsworth’s boy impersonates them.17
Secondly, the sonnet is dependent on something counter-intuitive, which if expressed directly would have to sound fanciful to be heard at all. The density and sudden complication of the sonnet’s last lines enclose the kernel of the poem as if it needed protection. They preserve an imaginative perception from being exposed as a mere fancy while, at the same time, they leave the attentive reader the chance to understand properly. And, for Wordsworth, this proper understanding is not confined by the normal categories of reason nor is it entirely mystical. The imaginative perception is continuous with the exercise of mind that reading the poem demands. Yet, on the other hand, the sonnet is decorous and standard so that its deep insight may be passed over by those who do not (or would not) understand it.
In Wordsworth’s The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets (1820), the speaker is again drawn to the thought that nature actively protects – as the stream descends from bare upland, ‘to form a shade / For Thee, green alders have together wound / Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around; / And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade’. In the sequence, individual sonnets present different parts of the landscape, often raising the possibility of an allegorical meaning for them, sometimes making it unmistakable. In this case, the trees are like parents watching over and nurturing the young stream; the course of a life, charted by the stream, has reached childhood and nature’s nursing of the human soul is visible in the trees’ protective efforts and again, a moment later, in the cottage nearby where a ‘mother’s eyes / Carelessly watched’ her children at play (Sonnet 5). This movement of thought is typical of the sonnets and, as here, the fancifulness of Wordsworth’s language draws attention to the mind creating the allegorical sense at the same time as it claims that that sense is genuinely present.
These delicate, modest allegorical suggestions are a mode of kinship and independence between man and nature. Wordsworth’s speaker at times yearns after a more intimate communion, asking in ‘The Faery Chasm’, ‘where / Is traceable a vestige of the notes’ that were once immediately audible – where, in other words, can one recapture an immediate experience of natural things? ‘On, loitering Muse – the swift Stream chides us – on!’ the next in the sequence promptly begins (Sonnet 12, ‘Hints for the Fancy’). The old relationship cannot be re-entered (except, perhaps, by going on); nature, in the stream’s onward flow, proves it is natural to leave childhood behind and enter adulthood, to leave union with nature and enter allegory’s kindred independence. The ‘River Duddon’ sequence, then, follows in thought and idea the pattern of ‘Tintern Abbey’ or The Prelude. In the jolting shifts from one sonnet to the next, however, Wordsworth keeps us alert to the complications of his position: as each sonnet’s achieved stability vanishes, sometimes abruptly, Wordsworth creates the sense of kinship being thrown back into independence, so that in the next sonnet it has to be rediscovered again. Likewise, in tracking the course of the river, Wordsworth repeatedly finds calm stretches between a rapid descent earlier and turbulence to come. The sonnets are equivalents to these calms and the transitions of mind are pictured in the structure of the landscape. Moreover, the sonnets were first published in one volume with A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England, a version of what later became Wordsworth’s Guide Through the District of the Lakes. They suggest a mode of visiting landscapes which the Guide recommends as well: one in which the visitor adopts neither a serenely picturesque attitude towards the objects around nor a position of sublime command over them. Instead, the Lake District offers to engender ‘pleased attention’. This formulation parallels ‘kindred independence’. Such attention, Wordsworth says in the introductory poem to the River Duddon sequence, promises to ‘fill the hollow vale with joy’ (‘To the Revd Dr Wordsworth’). The ‘hollow vale’ refers to the Lake District, whose dells and recesses are described in the Guide and the sonnets. It refers, at the same time, to human life, the ‘vale of tears’. As always in his poetry, the natural world and the person experiencing it are understood as quite separate and as inseparable.
NOTES
1 Wordsworth, Poetry and Prose, with an introduction by David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, repr. 1969); The Excursion, book 3, lines 383–6; Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, MS b, line 461, Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First of ‘The Recluse’, ed. Beth Darlington, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 68.
2 Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh Review, April 1808; quoted in Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 5.
3 Wordsworth’s relation to picturesque representations has been discussed frequently, most recently in Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4 Wordsworth remarked in a letter (c. 27 April 1835) that he regarded this as one of the key lines of his whole life-work. See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 121.
5 See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–11.
6 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 87; see also pp. 90–1.
7 Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, pp. 235–60.
8 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated and revised by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 174.
9 I discuss Wordsworth’s relation to ecology more fully in ‘How Green Were the Romantics?’, Studies in Romanticism, 35: 3 (Fall 1996), 357–73.
10 Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ is similar: ‘her eyes were downward cast; / And when she at her table gave me food / She did not look at me’, MS b, lines 416–18, RC, p. 66.
11 LB, pp. 341–3, and Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969), pp. 206–7.
12 The Excursion, book 4, lines 1207–98 were originally drafted in 1798–9 as part of ‘The Ruined Cottage’. See RC, pp. 121, 261–71, 372–5.
13 From one verse-paragraph (The Excursion, book 4, lines 427–65) which is worth consulting as a whole.
14 Wordsworth, Borderers, pp. 210–11; 1805 Prelude, x, 821–2, 828–9.
15 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, vol. viii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 85, 83, 147.
16 PW iii 24–5.
17 ‘There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs / And Islands of Winander! . . . ’. LB 139. The Winander boy passage was incorporated in The Prelude, 1805, v, 389–422.