![]() ![]() But 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” (109). Then, in an important transitional sentence, Dorothy reveals her “fancy” going to work on these objects of nature: “We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side” (109). a few primroses by the roadside, wood-sorrel flower, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry yellow flower which Mrs. Dorothy’s recollection sounds initially like that of a natural historian: “The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the twigs. We should recall that Wordsworth’s image derives not only from his own observation, but also from Dorothy Wordsworth‘s journal text. 9-10) leading to, “And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the Daffodils” (ll. ![]() His daffodils are only the most famous example of this recurrent tendency: “A Poet could not but be gay / In such a laughing company” (ll. I saw one life, and felt that it was joy. (II, 420-21, 425-27, 429-30)Ī passage like this reflects the natural history of Wordsworth’s time while also connecting his emotional (and poetic) power to similar powers that he attributes to the plants and animals around him. Or beats the gladsome air, o’er all that glidesīeneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself O’er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings, This is not, however, just watered down, Wordsworthian pantheism: his 1805 description of the unity of natural process owe as much to the natural science of the era as it does to his own emerging “theology”: Rather, he links feelings of pleasure in himself directly to emotions that he ascribes to the rest of the world: “From Nature and her overflowing soul / I had received so much that all my thoughts / Were steeped in feeling” (II, 416-18). ![]() Wordsworth, however, sees this link in much more psychological terms than a poet like Shelley: “To unorganic natures I transferred / My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth / Coming in revelation, I conversed / With things that really are” (1805, II, 410-13).Wordsworth sees this interaction as more than merely a symbolic representation of his inner states in the outer world. Wordsworth, in a famous passage from The Prelude, links a similarly “scientific” form of observation to a pleasure that is essential to the very definition of the poetic. Wordsworthian “nature” emerges as much a product of his widespread reading as of his wanderings amid the affecting landscapes of the Lake District. We should also recall, however, that he made widespread use of other texts in the production of his Wordsworthian (Keats said “egotistical”) sublime: drafts of poems by Coleridge, his sister Dorothy’s Journals, the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and countless others. Wordsworth’s ideas about memory, the importance of childhood experiences, and the power of the mind to bestow an “auxiliar” light on the objects it beholds all depend on this ability to record experiences carefully at the moment of observation but then to shape those same experiences in the mind over time. ( Shelley made a related claim in “ Mont Blanc” when he said that his mind “passively / Now renders and receives, fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around”.) Such an alliance of the inner life with the outer world is at the heart of Wordsworth’s descriptions of nature. At the same time, Wordsworth was a self-consciously literary artist who described “the mind of man” as the “main haunt and region of song.” This tension between objective describer of the natural scene and subjective shaper of sensory experience is partly the result of Wordsworth’s view of the mind as “creator and receiver both.” Wordsworth consistently describes his own mind as the recipient of external sensations which are then rendered into its own mental creations. On the one hand, Wordsworth was the quintessential poet as naturalist, always paying close attention to details of the physical environment around him (plants, animals, geography, weather). William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the Romantic poet most often described as a “nature” writer what the word “nature” meant to Wordsworth is, however, a complex issue. ![]()
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