A One Sided Relationship: Worsworth and Nature

While reading the prelude for class on Tuesday, I noticed a small detail in book first which greatly change my perspective on the works of Wordsworth as a whole. He writes that "I believe That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame A favored being, from his earliest dawn Of infancy doth open out the clouds...not the less, Though haply aiming at the self-same end, Does it delight her sometimes to employ Severer intentions, ministry More palpable - and so she dealt with me." Wordsworth, despite the love and praise he has heaped upon nature, does not considered himself one of her favored beings. He believes that she has treated him harsher, though perhaps to the same end as she heaps favor upon others. In the light of this line, the idea of Nature as something worshipped in Wordsworths works only grew stronger to me. To me, the idea that he gives Nature his love despite not feeling like one of her most favored children, and puts his faith in her having reasons for her treatment of him, seems a sort of unquestioning, religious devotion. This also caused me to reread some of his poems as less him celebrating his relationship with Nature and more his admiring the idea of Nature, an unattainable beauty serving as the muse to his work. “Three years she grew” in particular changed for me in this new context, as the speaker’s deference to Nature as she takes Lucy makes more thematic sense. Wordsworth does not question Nature for taking Lucy, it fits into the idea of Lucy being one of Nature’s favored beings, and the speaker as one whom Nature treats with severity, in the removal of Lucy.

Do books immortalize us?

While Wordsworth’s Prelude discusses various occurrences of death, he primarily focuses on death’s aftermath: what is left behind. Book 5, appropriately titled “Books,” seems to suggest that books have the power to immortalize humanity.

“Stretched forth the shell towards me, with command/ That I should hold it to my ear. I did so/ And heard…An ode in passion uttered, which foretold/ Destruction to the children of the earth” (92-98).

“It was even so/ As had been spoken, and that he himself/ Was going then to bury those two books—The one that held acquaintance with the stars,/ And wedded man to man by purest bond/ Of nature, undisturbed by space or time” (101-106).

The books mentioned in Book 5 seem to possess a surreal amount of knowledge. In the first quote, the books serve as the source of knowledge of a sort of apocalyptic destruction. The second quote indicates that burying the books will allow them to survive when humanity no longer can; however, it suggests that the survival of books creates a “bond” that allows for men to be immortalized.

Wordsworth continues to explore the after-math of death throughout the Prelude and examines what others leave behind. The next story depicts a boy who died young therefore leaving behind nothing but a memory and a grave. Over time, the world is the same; however, the boy is forgotten. The next story depicts a man who has lived a full life and leaves behind clothes. While he leaves behind something tangible, it will eventually be removed and does not seem to hold the same power that books do. Later on in Book 11, the idea of writing withstanding time is paralleled with the murderer’s engraving.

Despite this surface analysis (and although I cannot fully piece together what Wordsworth is attempting to say) Wordsworth does not appear to agree with this logic. Although the man who drowned does not leave behind any piece of written art, his spirit possessed a “dignity, a smoothness, like the works of Grecian art and purest posey” (480). His life appears to be equivalent to the work left behind by others. Do books immortalize us or does Wordsworth view that as a notion contrived by poets and authors? If they do, can a memory of a life be of equal worth?

The Prelude as a different kind of art (?)

In the second book of Wordsworth's "Prelude," he notes that it is a "hard task to analyze a soul" (232). He writes this in relation to his themes of geometry in line 209, making a connection between the sort of geometrical magic that fascinated him and the organization of thought. This line (and this stanza in general) drew me in because this is one of the times that Wordsworth very self-consciously writes about what he is writing about on the grander scale throughout the poem.

In my view, Wordsworth is trying to make sense of how he sees the world and how he sees himself. Doing this means making rather unnatural delineations between the internal and the external world. As he explains, one cannot simply classify feelings as though they were works of art in glass cabinets (228). He concluded this stanza by writing about the fluid--very much not chronological--nature of thought. These lines speak to the poem on the whole, helping to explain why Wordsworth began his work with linear titles (boyhood, then schooling, etc.) and then went on to basically give up on that whole structure. Instead, he leaps between lyric memories and present-tense musings.

For Wordsworth, however, this poem is linear; for him, each recollection of memory is just as real as his present-tense thoughts. This idea reminds me of one presented in a book that I am reading fro my Spanish class (U.S. Latino Lit), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The author, Gloria Anzaldúa, writes about the difference between Western art and that of tribal cultures. She explains that her "stories are acts encapsulated in time, "enacted" every time they are spoken aloud or read silently" (89). She explains that "[she] likes to think of them as performances and not as inert and "dead" objects (as the aesthetics of Western culture think of art works)" (89). Wordsworth's kind of art seems to almost fall in line with this tribal kind of performance art in some way.

Here is more about the book, Borderlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderlands/La_Frontera:_The_New_Mestiza

Expectations

In "Book Sixth" Wordsworth seems unable to recall his hiking trip in the Alps without returning to the idea that it was a disappointment. He looks at Mont Blanc and "grieves" (453), because what he sees before him is not the vibrant, much talked about mountain that he had imagined. Instead he describes this natural monument as a "soulless image on the eye" (454).
While he describes his disappointment as being the direct fault of the mountain, this idea of disappointment reminded me of a psychology article I read earlier this year about happiness, and the way that happiness has less to do with what is actually occurring in life, and more to do with how those events compare to the expectations of how those events would go. In the article (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/201408/the-secret-happiness-and-compassion-low-expectations) Robb Rutledge, the neuroscientist who conducted the study says, "Happiness depends not on how well things are going but whether things are going better or worse than expected." Could it be then that this poem about Wordsworth's disappointment says more about his expectations about what he would experience that about Mont Blanc itself? Wordsworth writes in the extremes, and I think that this extreme emotional distress he feels about being let down by his hiking in the Alps has far more to do with his preconceived notions about what this experience would mean to him, than the actual aesthetic pleasure of the Alps themselves.
I also believe that Wordsworth places too much of the blame for his feelings of being let down on the places that he went, because that seems to contradict what he says in the second to last stanza of this book. In this passage he says that because nature has failed him, he believes that all along he has been wrong to place so much value in nature, when in fact it was his own mind that was creating the meaning, and therefore, it is his imagination, not nature, that he should be celebrating. However, if he believes that his imagination deserves credit for all of the positive feelings that nature has given him, shouldn't he then blame his imagination, or lack of imagination when viewing Mont Blanc as a let down? It is entirely contradictory to say that he alone has the capacity to create and place positive meaning on his surroundings, but that negativity is the fault of those same surroundings. He must either concede that nature has both positive and negative aspects to it that are able to coexist, or that he creates all of his own meaning, but that sometimes he is unsuccessful at generating the meaning that he sought to create.

Poem as Solitude?

At the end of Book I, the speaker seems to reveal the reason he’s writing his poem—to “fix the wavering balance of my mind” (I, 650) from his recollections—to “be taught/To understand myself” as he is (I, 654-5). He wishes to trace himself back through his childhood so that he can more clearly understand why he is the person that he is now, and then to take that a step further and actually improve himself—for future “honorable toil” (653). Of course, he only introduces this idea while also implying that he recognizes that he may not be doing it at all. Even so, he will be “loth to quit/Those recollected hours” (658-9), and he here reveals what is perhaps a more true reason for his recollections—for nostalgia, recollection for recollection’s sake. The “one end” that has been achieved, he notes, is “My mind hath been revived” (664).

Thus the memories become, essentially, a kind of solitude for the speaker. Wordsworth’s speaker is again infatuated with “the self-sufficing power of solitude” (II, 78). In Book II, solitude becomes oddly “more active than ‘best society’” (314).  And memory itself is a rather solitary pursuit—no one has the exact same memories, after all, even if they were physically together when they were making them. The speaker’s joy at the end of Book I as he defends his recollections revival of his mind is akin to the revival he feels in the solitude of nature, the space within himself becoming a kind of internal nature. The speaker does note another kind of appreciation within himself separate from the “extrinsic passion” (I, 572) of Nature—those “Of subtle origin” (576) that he considers innate.

The poem itself becomes a kind of refuge, a solidified and realized place for the solitude of his memories to coalesce. His worry that he may be putting adult sensibilities onto his childhood memories—tainting them, in essence—demonstrates his desire to almost disappear completely into memory, into the self that was closer to nature. His yearning for this solitude becomes a double solitude, then—in his memory he has been secluded in the natural world, and now, as he is remembering, he is secluded in his memory. No one else can experience his memory, after all.

This is, of course, complicated by the address to the reader/Coleridge, who the speaker notes has also “sought/the truth in solitude” (II, 475-6). As a reference to Coleridge, this perhaps is a more personal address. However, the “you” of the poem also naturally becomes the reader, and thus the speaker could be referring to the solitude the reader is seeking by reading the poem, the speaker’s own solitude. At the same time, can the speaker’s address to “you” be counted as genuine human interaction? There is no response, after all—no way for there to be a response, really. In a sense, his addresses to the reader/Coleridge increases the sense of his solitude. The speaker does create another character in his addressee, but is often obsessed with assuring “you” that you won’t mind listening to his poem, that you will understand. He crafts the “you” character around a possible response to his poem without actually engaging anyone else.  Still, the speaker has said that the point is not only for him to understand himself, but also to give the reader/Coledridge “better knowledge how the heart was framed/Of him thou lovest” (656-7). In this sense, then, his writing of the poem—which fossilizes his solitude—is also a way for him to share his solitude with someone else—for him to break out of solitude.

The Perception of Solitude in 1805 Prelude

            In the second book of The 1805 Prelude, William Wordsworth describes how the union between children and nature can change how one perceives solitude in later life.   Wordsworth first evokes the importance in perception as he describes how adults have a tendency to believe that, “puny boundaries are things / Which we perceive, and not which we have made” (223-224).  Adults live by rules that have been established, living within the borders they are afraid to cross.  Children, meanwhile, have an active part in building the worlds that they perceive.  As Wordsworth states, child’s mind is, “Creates, creator and receiver both, / Working but in alliance with the works / Which it beholds” (273-275).  Children are able to accomplish this because they do not have clearly established “boundaries” yet.  For children, there is no established manner in which to perceive the world.  For example, Wordsworth insists that children are, “eager to combine / In one appearance all the elements / And parts of the same object, else detached / and loth to coalesce” (247-250).  Children take the world as a whole, unaccustomed to the denominations that adults have used to separate objects.

            Because of the inability of children to impose restrictions on their perceptions, Wordsworth considers them to be more connected to nature and therefore less lonely.  He states of a babe in his mother’s arms, “No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; / Along his infant veins are interfused the gravitation and the filial bond / Of Nature that connect him with the world”.  It is clear from Wordsworth’s evocation of his childhood that he never felt truly “alone” in the presence of nature’s objects.  He states, as “a boy I loved the sun” (184), demonstrating how he feels associated with the world around him.  Wordsworth also describes how this specific relationship with nature can fade as one begins to analyze and measure their world.  Moreover, other objects take the place of “natural” ones.  For example, to the adult mind, society can be “made sweet as solitude” (315).

            Interestingly, Wordsworth views a mother’s love as a key element in the formation of a child’s relationship with nature, for a mother is the object that first makes a child feel like it is not “alone.”  For instance, Wordsworth states, that “passion from his mother’s eye” (243) is the catalyst for a babe’s connection to the natural world.  Rather than being brought into consciousness of the natural world by the landscape itself, the child is introduced to nature by a human.  However, the mother is merely one object of a larger system (that of the natural world).  Therefore, the child can survive being alone after his mother because his tether to nature has already been established.  For example, Wordsworth states, “The props of my affections were removed, / And yet the building stood, as if sustained / By its own spirit” (294-296). 

            Overall, Wordsworth emphasizes how a connection with nature as forged by a mother’s love is integral to a healthy life.  He describes (perhaps contradictory to his previous statements about city life) how even in the cacophony of a city, a connection to nature can be forged.  For example, he notes that the city-raised Coleridge has sought “truth in solitude” (476) and is one of “Nature’s worshippers” (477).  It is possible that Wordsworth is suggesting that the strength of Coleridge’s bond to nature as created by Coleridge’s mother was enough to overcome the negative forces of the city.  If so, this stresses the utmost importance with which Wordsworth treats a child’s initial years.

The Hard Task of Analyzing a Soul: Book I and II of Wordworth's 1805 Prelude

Wordsworth, near the end of our excerpts of Book I and II of his 1805 Prelude, deems that one’s days shall be happy if one follows the dictum: “And yet more often living with thyself, / And for thyself” (482-483). These lines come from his address to Coleridge at the end of Book II. Without the poem’s context, this might seem like a statement worthy of an Ayn Rand aphorism. Yet this is not a selfish or solipsistic viewpoint; instead, Wordsworth encourages the sweetness of solitude in the depths of nature as a balm (as it were) for a (particularly urban) society (Book II, 315). What is best is only best when shared; yet what is best may only be first found when alone.

Taken philosophically, this is a fair point. After all, what epiphanies arrive amidst many men, in the hustle and bustle of daily dreary intercourse? Or rather, one can be among many but, in the burst of epiphany, suddenly feel alone and in a state of solitary rapture.

In order to follow Wordsworth on the course of his Prelude, a poem apparently lead by nature’s forces both large and small – “Or shall a twig or any floating thing / Upon the river point me out my course?” (Book I, 31-32) – one must believe that the personal epiphanies of a solitary man are worth reading in depth. Interestingly, Wordsworth is aware that his reader may not share his own selfsame interest in, well, himself. The subject of this poem being his “own passions and habitual thoughts” (Book I, 222), the reader must be convinced that this is a worthwhile affair or journey to embark upon.

Personally, I wasn’t convinced from the start, even after reading Wordsworth’s other (much shorter) lyrics and meditations, these that he names “the holy life of music and of verse” (Book I, 54). What surprised me is that Wordsworth’s speaker (can we just say Wordsworth here?) acknowledges this anxiety, or awareness of the reader who, like me, may feel “as though of hemlock I had drunk.” I found it hard to snap images into attention and distinguish Wordsworth’s descriptions of games of whist from his epiphanies upon rock faces. I had a similar feeling throughout my initial reading of the first section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: many a “who cares?” made up my marginalia.  

Though some of his more self-aware or plain statements struck me: “I yearn towards some philosophic song / Of truth that cherishes our daily life” (Book I, 230-231). The desire (is that enough?) of the poem was there. And the seriousness with which Wordsworth understood his half-failure: “And the whole beauteous fabric seems to lack / Foundation, and withal appears throughout / Shadowy and unsubstantial” (Book I, 226-228). If the “beauteous fabric” merely billows prettily, how can it be of substance? How can it summon truth “that cherishes our daily life”? The poem throughout sounds lovely, but so does a lullaby, drawn through only for putting a child to sleep. When the prettiness is, if not shattered, at least recognized as somewhat insufficient in achieving capital-T Truth, the speaker, and thus his poem/song, gains a strange sort of self-aware power. This is, after all, a poem caught up and continually swept into moments of natural beauty, to the point where the saccharine drip of it nearly drives one to seek irony from the nearest corner of the internet. For example: “The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still / So sweetly ‘mid the gloom the invisible bird / Sang to itself that there I could have made / My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there / To hear such music” (Book II, 132-135). The invisible bird? I could have lived for ever there? Shuddering ivy? ‘mid the gloom? This is almost like a caricature of Romanticism. Or, take this: “and the sky, / Never before so beautiful, sank down / Into my heart and held me like a dream” (178-180). Maybe its my wayward cynicism, but is it possible to read any lines like this now and feel actually moved and not roll your eyes? Never before was the sky so beautiful; it sank into my heart and held me like a dream. Like a dream holds one; like the beauty one can only experience in a dream.

But this critical game is easy to play, and, again, Wordsworth’s awareness of his “beauteous fabric” is interesting and striking. The poem’s awareness speaks not of a naïve young poet but, instead, of one who knows exactly what he’s doing. By the end of Book I, he almost makes the reader (in a nearly passive-aggressive sense) feel badly about passing any judgment on his rural epiphanies: “Nor will it seem to thee, my friend, so prompt / In sympathy, that I have lengthened out / With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale” (Book I, 645). He knows he’s told a tedious tale, telling “like a bee among the flowers” (Book I, 606-608) that “strife too humble to be named in verse” (Book I, 540). I feel like a stereotype of a workshop instructor or fellow poet, urging Wordsworth to “go into” tension instead of reflecting for so long in a meditation about the organic beauty of the natural world and his “intercourse” with it. Yet I do believe that the more interesting aspects of the poem rely on Wordsworth’s admission of failure, or his “tensions.” When he claims, for example, his trial in trying to retrace his childhood that “may I well forget / How other pleasures have been mine” (Book I, 574-575). He worries about imposing an adult imagination on a memory that doesn’t really exist. He is concerned with, too, how “humility and modest awe themselves” and “betray me, serving often for a cloak / To a more subtle selfishness” (Book I, 245-247). His sincerity may yet be thin, serving a subtler master of ill-intent and ego. That, too, if his writing does not form, he will be “unprofitably travelling towards the grave” (Book I, 269). These anxieties were, as one poet reading another, oddly comforting, more so than any description of natural beauty. That a man who believes so firmly in the world, one who is a self-proclaimed “worshipper of nature,” (Book II, 477) could also state self-doubt is, in a way, encouraging.

His anxiety I was most drawn to involves the basic writer’s block problem: where do I start? Wordsworth invokes the muse-wind to solve this riddle in Book I. The blank page rears its head again, though, in Book II, when he realizes that it is a “Hard task to analyse a soul, in which…each most obvious and particular thought…hath no beginning” (Book II, 232, 234, 236). We cannot trace a “real” beginning in the natural world, yet our artificial creation, even one reflecting the natural world, must begin somewhere. To Wordsworth, we begin in the womb, where the mother’s heart and the child converse. So too, naturally, the poem begins with the earliest recollection. How close can we come, the speaker seems to ask, to the very start?