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.
This is a great point - yes, the shine has come off of Wordsworth's relationship with nature. One possible addendum to your claim is the idea that Wordsworth also possessed fear that the Alps wouldn't be all he imagined them to be. The line in which he describes the peasant's words as "Translated by the feelings which we had" (523) suggests to me that Wordsworth was ready to believe that the crossing of the Alps had left him cold. He did not want it to be so, but because he was so anxious about having a remarkable experience he automatically did not have such an experience. I believe the best experience comes from surprises - from a lack of expectation and presumption. The Alps, for instance, have an established history. Spontaneous experience provided by nature, such as a particularly beautiful sunset when one did not expect it, are more likely to leave one satisfied (of course, one could argue that this comes from a lack of expectation rather than an excess)
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