A Note on Form

In “The 1805 Prelude” Wordsworth sets out a rather typical form in terms of progression where the books move chronologically through his life. This seems all well and good until time within the poem goes all sideways. The poem introduces itself in the introduction as being concerned with “Childhood and School-time,” but he doesn’t mention childhood directly until line 268 where he speaks of how the river would “bend his murmur with my nurse’s song.” And so we receive 250 lines of exposition about what the poem will be about before we get to what the poem is about, a seemingly roundabout way for him to approach the subject.

All of this exposition feels like justification for Wordsworth’s passion for his piece. The lines contain some amount of anxiety that his project will not be received or understood fully and therefore undercut its true genius. This analysis comes from lines such as “It is shaken off,/ As by miraculous gift ‘tis shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self,/ The heavy weight of many a weary day/ Not mine, and such as were not made for me”(21-5) and “I yearn towards some philosophical song”(230), which both suggest an ultimate goal not yet achieved that could be missed. And I think it is here in the Prelude where Wordsworth’s ego meets his reality in which his legacy is both determined by his inner thoughts of prowess and questioned by societal pressure.

Childhood

Within “The 1805 Prelude”, Wordsworth is searching through the details of his childhood to find if there is a greater or lasting truth that remains with him as an adult. He speaks to nature and believes “from the first dawn / Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me / The passions that build up our human soul” (432 – 434). Since childhood, he feels that nature has affected him and explores different ways in which he has drawn from it. This idea reminded me of “Tintern Abbey” because of the way in which Wordsworth also explores the differences in how a nature scene makes him feel as an adult versus how it affected him when he was a child. Wordsworth associates childhood with this innocence and wonderment with nature. He looks back at the scenes in which he was “A naked boy, in one delightful rill” showing the wonder and one-ness with nature that he once felt. What I took away from this similarity is that Wordsworth longs for that childhood wonderment though he still feels close to nature as an adult.

Hear What You Want: Wordsworth Argues Against Resolution?

The poem "Resolution and Independence" ends with its speaker resolving not to allow himself to fall into melancholy while in the mist of nature after meeting the old man, saying "God, be my help and stay secure; I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor." Wordsworth seems to me to argue that the speaker's resolution at the end of the poem is not because of the absolute truth or merit of the old man's words and demeanor, but because the speaker chooses to listen to him, and could just as easily forget this resolution. My evidence for this lies in a connection the speaker makes from the ol man to something he says much earlier in the poem. In stanza three, lines 17-18 the speaker says "I heard the woods and distant waters roar; Or heard them not." He later says in stanza 16 lines 107-108 "His voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard." Though he then asks the old man to repeat himself, and upon hearing the old man's story of trials and perseverance admonishes himself for being sad over so little, the point is made. Just as he chooses when to hear the stream he chooses when to hear the old man, and though he is hearing his words and seeing his struggles fresh in his mind's eye now, the speaker could easily soon forget these things and allow himself to return to his sad spirits if he so chose. This fits with the poem as a whole, which cycles between joyous revelation and sadness, as stated in lines 33-35 "Far from the world I walk, and from all care, But there may come another day to me - Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty." There is not much resolution in "Resolution and Independence," or at least not resolution which lasts.

I'm in that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to mind.

“Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” is really interesting to me because Wordsworth seems to capture a moment that many people don’t really discuss or write about. Wordsworth describes a complex human emotion in seven very short stanzas. The feeling I am referring to is when a person suddenly has an almost unexplainable, bizarre, irrational fear, gut feeling, or thought. I think this emotion most often arises when the person really cares about something or someone and is extremely worried about something happening. The fact that Wordsworth was able to capture this sort of moment in poetry is very fascinating to me.

In “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” the speaker tells a story of going to see his love, Lucy, and upon arriving having this sudden feeling that she had died. I think the feeling comes out so powerfully because the speaker uses a very dramatic, story-telling tone until the last stanza. This keeps the reader interested and at the edge of his/her seat. Many parts of the poem drag along, keeping tension in each line. For example, “The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot/ Came nearer, and nearer still” (15-16) or“My horse moved on; hoof after hoof.”(21).

On a completely different note, I find myself sometimes irritated with Wordsworth’s rhyme schemes. They often sound childish and Dr. Suess-ish to me which makes taking the poetry seriously very hard for me. There was even a time in class when Onno read some of Wordsworth’s poetry aloud and he (or someone else) said “It sounds Dr.Suess-ish.”I am currently in a Poetry workshop so I know how hard it is to do what Wordsworth does and I appreciate and respect that. After reading some of Wordsworth poetry I wondered why the rhyming bothered me at all. I came to the conclusion that in today’s literary society, poetry is…much different. Many forms have been abandoned or completely modified, including rhyme schemes. The only place we often see rhyme schemes like this is in a children’s book or an old Disney movie. So Wordsworth didn’t do anything wrong, we kind of just met at the wrong time.

The Leeches in "Resolution and Independence"

On the whole, I gleaned that Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" puts forth the idea that we must sometimes gain strength from others' suffering because simple beauty does not always suffice. That's not to say that the speaker in the poem wishes suffering upon the old man (nor does he relish in the suffering itself), but rather, he uses it as inspiration because his life, in comparison, is not so bad. In the poem, the speaker falls into a state of "despondency and madness" despite the natural, blissful beauty in stanza 5 (49).

The speaker then comes to the realization that he can comfort himself by will of mind in the final stanza of the poem. However, the realization strikes only after the old man explains that he gathers leeches to sell to doctors for a living (100). The speaker sees this as such a dismal existence that he is able to be thankful for his own existence and overcome his misery. I find it interesting that the old man is a leech gatherer for two reasons: firstly, the image's symbolic significance, and secondly, the image's historical magnitude.

In this time, leeches were used to suck out poison of the blood, ailments, etc. as a healing device. Meanwhile, the little leeches could be fat and happy, gorging themselves on the blood they craved. The method was supposed to be a symbiotic relationship for both parties. In this sense, the old man could be likened to a leech, sucking the mental ailments right out of the speaker. The old man might even gain from the exchange: he smiles as he repeats his means of subsistence for the speaker (although this may be a stretch) (120).

Historically speaking, though, this leech arrangement was far from symbiotic. It in fact drained both good and bad blood (and too much of it) from the human bodies. So, when I read this poem over again, I could not help but instead liken the narrator to a leech, sucking the life right out of the old man to quench his own selfish needs while the man wastes away before him.

The Lucy Poems: Three years she grew

I found the discussion on "Three years she grew" to be really interesting, but one question that continued to nag at me was "why three years?" We circled around the idea to a certain extent, thinking about whether or not it was a parent/child relationship versus two lovers, and we discussed Wordsworth's title choices, and how he transitions from referring to her as "This Child" (4) to "The Girl" (9), to "the Maiden" (23), and finally to "Lucy" (34). This demonstrates her growth over the years, so clearly she was not simply three years old when she died. The more thought I put into it, the more my other thoughts on her age became confused.
Initally, I considered the idea that the speaker of the poem was imagining Nature's ideal future for Lucy. It seemed that Lucy had quite possibly died at the age of three, and the audience was potentially seeing a father figure mourning the death of his daughter. The speaker imagining Nature's thought process in giving Lucy life, and then taking it away after realizing that it had given her too much of the natural world. Wordsworth writes, "This Child I to myself will take" (4), and I took this to mean that Nature saw, after three years on the earth, that Lucy was too beautiful to allow her to keep living in the human world. Instead, Nature saw so much of the natural world in Lucy, that Nature wanted Lucy to be completely one with Nature.
The more I considered this to be a possibility, the more reasonable it seemed. There is no other specific evidence that Lucy grew to be an adult, only what Nature predicts about her future. All of these predictions bring Lucy more into the natural world, and they have no mention of what she will look like or any more human traits and qualities. Ultimately, I think that Wordsworth wrote about a grieving father, trying to reason with himself over the loss of his small child. The father figure imagines why the natural world would take his daughter away so quickly, and his only explanation is that the natural world saw something so beautiful in the child, that it knew the child was meant to have "an overseeing power" (11); the child belonged in nature, sharing her beauty with the natural world.

Elegiac Stanzas

Sea – Ship – drowned – Shipwreck – so it came,
The meek, the brave, the good, was gone:
He who had been our living John
Was nothing but a name. – William Wordsworth

In this quote from Wordsworth the reader is once again reminded of the message in the Lucy poems that nature is capable of taking life much like a god. However the tone of Elegiac Stanzas differs from that in the Lucy poems, and I would venture to guess it is because this poem actually expresses the genuine despair Wordsworth feels over having lost his brother. The poem begins with a appreciative praise of a castle by the sea, which he is observing in a painting is being hit by a storm. He initially points out that this castle is on a "glassy sea" (4). Though it is a storm, Wordsworth's initial reaction to the sea has far more to do with its general appearance than its appearance in the observed storm. However, as his description of the sea escalates, the reader senses a connection between the way that Wordsworth feels about the sea and the way Wordsworth is feeling about his brother. As he talks about wishing he had "the Painter's hand" (13), so that he could create a painting in which the sea "could not cease to smile" (19), the reader begins to sense a shift in Wordsworth's tone from being from the perspective of a simple art viewer, to someone who is more invested in this picture. It is also important to note that the description begins to shift away from the castle to almost an obsessive discussion about the sea. It then becomes clear the Wordsworth has a deeper emotional attachment to this topic when he wishes for "Nature's breathing life" (28), and then instantly begins the next stanza referring to how these desires for a friendly sea are not real, but that they are merely a "fond illusion" of his "heart" (29). It is then that the footnote introduces the reader to Captain John Wordsworth, William's brother who was lost at sea in a shipwreck.

The poem's description of the sea begins to shift at a far more rapid pace from Wordsworth's idealized sea, a calm and inviting body of water into a "sea in anger" (44). The reader can feel Wordsworth's emotion coming out of this poem, and he trusts the reader enough to make himself very vulnerable, admitting that he is experiencing a "deep distress" that has "humanised" his "soul" (36). This line references his quote that I began my post with where he refers to his brother John as now being "nothing but a name." I read the "power" that Wordsworth believes to be gone is the power that comes from the special bond between brothers. Now that his brother is gone "nothing can restore" (35) this feeling of companionship that two brothers have, and therefore, the power that he feels dies along with his brother. His feeling of being humanized directly relates to this loss of power, because he not only has encountered the fleeting nature in life, personally experiencing someone close to him dying, but he also feels the way that his brother's death is in a sense the death of a piece of himself. There is a certain immortality that all people feel, and those who make us feel loved and appreciate us strengthen this feeling because they help to build us up as not just human beings but as ideals. Having lost his brother, Wordsworth no longer has that person to speak to the ideal that is William Wordsworth, and what is left behind is the flawed and very real person that Wordsworth truly is. However, though the tone of this poem is incredibly sad and heavy, it ends on what I read to be a very positive note. As he concludes the poem with the thought that "not without hope we suffer and mourn" (60), I read this to mean not that we suffer and mourn which crushes our hope. Instead I think Wordsworth is saying that despite his suffering and despite the assumed suffering that all of his readers either have or inevitable will face, life is still filled with hope. I think this poem ultimately suggests, though this is making somewhat of a leap, that it is better to feel the agony of losing a loved one, but know what it is to love someone enough to mourn them, because such a strong connection to someone else gives you a power that you simply cannot achieve on your own.



The site below is where I found Wordsworth's quotation, and it also provides further reading about the shipwreck that took Captain John Wordsworth's life.

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/tag/john-wordsworth/