English

Wordsworth’s poetry

This unit of work was prepared by Anne Collins, Learning Materials Production Centre -OTEN

Elective requirements
Life of Wordsworth
Quiz
Context and values for the writer
Context and values for the reader
Language, purpose and audience

Poems set for study:	‘Strange fits of passion have I known’
	‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798’
	‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’
	‘The Solitary Reaper’
	‘The Prelude: Book First. Introduction – Childhood and School-time’

Links with An Imaginary Life
References

Elective requirements

In Module A: Comparative study of texts and context; Elective 2: In the wild; Prose Fiction and Poetry section, you will study both An Imaginary Life and the set poems by Wordsworth, exploring and comparing these texts.

• In relation to their contexts: the English Stage 6 Syllabus (p140) defines context as:

“The range of personal, social, historical, cultural and workplace conditions in which a text is responded to and composed.”

You will have to consider these influences both on the writer and the reader.

• In terms of the values they reflect: the English Stage 6 Prescriptions (p.18) gives further information about what these values might be:

“A significant concern for humanity is its relationship with the natural world and its rhythms. The quality and importance of this relationship can vary across different times and cultures.”

In this elective students select a pair of texts and consider the ways in which human understanding of and relationship with the natural world is shaped and reflected.

The content of this elective could thus be summarised as follows:

	An Imaginary Life	Wordsworth poems	For both
Context	Social, cultural and historical factors (for writers and readers) influencing human understanding of and relationship with the natural world   Changes in these influences according to different times and cultures		Ways in which these are similar and different in the two texts.   Language, purpose and audience of texts.
Questions of Value	1. Content, values and attitudes of texts, concerning humanity’s relationship with the natural world and its rhythms.

You are to study this content developing “a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions” which “may be realised in a variety of forms and media”. You are therefore to develop your own responses to the content in a number of ways. Some possibilities might be, for example, you might respond by imagining you were representing views in a web page on Wordsworth.

	Forms	Media
Imaginative	Writing	a newspaper/magazine article a talk to your class
Interpretive	Speaking	an essay a television or radio interview
Analytical	Representing	a web page a letter

Syllabus outcomes in these web pages being specifically addressed are 1, 2, 2A, 3, 4, 8.

Life of Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, in the Lakes District in England. His father was an agent to a rich man who provided the house where Wordsworth was born. One brother was older, and there was a younger sister and two younger brothers. When Wordsworth was eight, his mother died, and the children went to live with their grandfather. However Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, soon went to live with cousins.

The next year Wordsworth began school with his older brother Richard, and they spent much of their time in lodgings while attending school. From school he went to Cambridge University in 1887.

Late in 1791 Wordsworth was travelling in France and met Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter in 1792. After her birth, with troubles in France during the Revolution, Wordsworth returned to England. It was not generally known until this century that Wordsworth had had an affair when he was twenty one. The revival of Wordsworth’s popularity during the First World War was followed by some careful research by Professors Legouis and Harper, which turned up a fairly complete history of the affair. All the facts of the affair were well known to those who were close to Wordsworth, but were deliberately covered up out of respect for Wordsworth’s dignity and in respect for Victorian morality. In his later years especially, Wordsworth was regarded as the image of the Victorian family man, and the facts of the affair would have severely tarnished his reputation.

By 1793 Wordsworth was beginning to make his mark as a poet, but he suffered under financial difficulties until 1795, when an old friend died and left him some money. In the same year he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another very famous English poet, who became a close friend.

Using the money left to him, Wordsworth set up house at Racedown, in Dorset with his sister Dorothy, who was to be a very important influence on his life and work. There, in 1797, they were visited by Coleridge, and he and the Wordsworths became so close that the Wordsworths decided to move to Alfoxden House to be near him. In these years, the Lyrical Ballads, a joint publication between Wordsworth and Coleridge, was planned.

In 1799 Wordsworth and Dorothy spent the winter in Germany together. They had gone abroad with Coleridge, but during the winter they resided in Goslar, Coleridge in a different town. Coleridge was constantly asked out and kept a lot of company, but Wordsworth and Dorothy were not invited out, probably, Coleridge suggested, because it was assumed that Dorothy was Wordsworth’s mistress and not really his sister. Coleridge wrote to a friend that it was common for gentlemen travelling with their mistresses to pretend that they were their sisters. Wordsworth and Dorothy therefore spent a very isolated winter, and Wordsworth said of it later that, having no books to read, he was forced to write. Most of the famous Lucy poems were written at this time, including the first of the set poems, “Strange fits of passion have I known”.

A great deal of research has gone into finding out who Lucy was, but no entirely satisfactory answer has ever been found. In the poems Lucy appears to be a young girl Wordsworth was in love with, who lived in an isolated part of the country, and who died young. But no such person is known to have been in Wordsworth’s life.

It is clear that even those closest to Wordsworth did not know of any such person. Wordsworth’s friend, Coleridge, in fact, commented about one of the Lucy poems, a short one beginning, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ that he thought Wordsworth had written it imagining what his emotions would be if his sister Dorothy were to die. He wrote:

Many critics believe that the poems express his feelings about Dorothy.

At this time too, Wordsworth’s relationship with Dorothy was at its most intense. They had grown up apart from each other after the death of their mother in 1778, when Wordsworth was eight and Dorothy seven. Their father died a few years later, and Wordsworth and Dorothy saw very little of each other until the legacy from a friend enabled Wordsworth to set up a house of his own and Dorothy came to live with him. They continued to live together, even after Wordsworth married their childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson.

It is certainly true that about the time the poems were written, Wordsworth and Dorothy’s relationship was very intense, and some of the feelings expressed in the poems certainly are explained by their residence abroad together. For example, the appreciation of England expressed in another Lucy poem I travelled among unknown men’ reflects the feelings they both talked about on returning to England.

Some other suggestions that have been made about the origin of the poems are firstly, that the figure of Lucy was imaginary, a composite made up of a number of people, Dorothy among them, and also including a sister of Mary Hutchinson who died young; secondly it has been suggested that Lucy really represents nature to Wordsworth, and particularly the land that he loved and grew up in; and lastly some still believe in or hope for a real Lucy.There has been a suggestion of Wordsworth having fallen in love at 17, and another suggestion that the one period of his adult life which is not well documented, when we really don’t know where Wordsworth was, that is, from about March to September of 1795, was the time when he knew Lucy.

After returning to England, Wordsworth and Dorothy stayed with Mary Hutchinson and her parents before settling near Grasmere, in the Lakes District. They lived there at Dove Cottage for eight years, among the happiest years of Wordsworth’s life. ‘The Prelude’ (You are studying part of the first book.) was written at this time, as were some others of his most famous poems. Also while living there, he married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, and three children were born.

Before the marriage, in July 1802, Wordsworth and Dorothy travelled to Calais, as Wordsworth wanted to talk to Annette Vallon about his prospective marriage. There he saw his daughter Caroline, now nine, for the first time since her birth, and one of the set poems, ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’, was written to her.

Although the Wordsworths moved into other houses as their family grew, they never lived anywhere other than their beloved Lakes District again. It provided much of the inspiration for his poetry, and it is worth looking through some photographs of the area, if possible, on the Internet. You can find these at Literary Locales . Further scenes from the area can be seen there are another 220 pictures .

Wordsworth lived to be 80, but his most famous poetry was written in these early years. It can hardly be denied that he wrote, especially in his later years, a lot of very pedestrian stuff. Perhaps, however, if Keats had lived longer, he would also have done so. Wordsworth’s reputation as a poet was by this time fully established, however, and made his living and supported his family through his writing, no small achievement for any poet! In 1843 he was made Poet Laureate, and continued to write until his death in 1850. Nothing can take away the achievements of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, and some of those are set for study.

Quiz

1. Wordsworth’s affair with Annette Vallon in 1991 was not generally known until this century because:
   1. the Wordsworths deliberately kept it quiet because Annette was French, and the English were prejudiced against the French
   2. the Wordsworths deliberately kept it quiet to protect Wordsworth’s reputation, because Victorian morality was strict
   3. Wordsworth didn’t want his wife to know about Annette
   4. Wordsworth was afraid Lucy would be jealous.
2. ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ was written:
   1. to Dorothy, Wordsworth’s sister, in Germany
   2. to Annette, when Wordsworth visited Calais
   3. to Caroline, Wordsworth’s daughter, when Wordsworth visited Calais
   4. to Mary, Wordsworth’s wife, on their marriage.
3. Wordsworth’s first household, in Racedown, Dorset, was shared with:
   1. Coleridge
   2. Mary Hutchinson
   3. Annette.
4. In the winter of 1799, Wordsworth wrote a great deal of poetry because:
   1. he had nothing to read
   2. he and Dorothy were not asked out much
   3. their friend Coleridge was in another town
   4. all of the above.
5. Critics have suggested that the Lucy of the Lucy poems:
   1. represents nature
   2. represents his feelings to his sister Dorothy
   3. is a composite of a number of different people
   4. all of the above.
6. At Dove Cottage, in the Lakes District:
   1. Wordsworth lived for eight years
   2. Wordsworth lived with Dorothy
   3. Wordsworth lived with Mary and their three children
   4. all of the above.
7. Wordsworth visited Calais in 1802:
   1. to marry Annette Vallon
   2. to see his daughter
   3. to discuss his marriage to Mary with Annette
   4. all of the above.
8. The Lakes District is important in understanding Wordsworth’s poetry because:
   1. it is where he was born
   2. it provided the inspiration for much of his poetry
   3. it is where he lived with Annette
   4. None of the above.
9. Wordsworth died in:
   1. 1795
   2. 1802
   3. 1843
   4. 1850.
10. In Wordsworth’s later years he:
    1. was made Poet Laureate
    2. wrote his best poetry
    3. sank into poverty
    4. All of the above.

Answers

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
b	c	c	d	d	d	c	b	d	a

Context and values for the writer

In Elective requirements we saw that, for this elective, you need to understand the context of the set poems, that is, the social, cultural and historical factors influencing the writer. You need to see how these factors influence the views shown in the poems of human understanding of and relationship with the natural world; you need understand how these influences might change the views of the readers in different times and places.

Finally, you need to consider the values and attitudes expressed in the text, concerning humanity’s relationship with the natural world and its rhythms.

As well as understanding the context of Wordsworth’s own life, you need to understand the context of his background in literary terms.

Wordsworth is part of the Romantic period in English poetry. He, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley (and, some would add, Byron) were the great English Romantic poets. “Romantic” used in this sense is not merely concerned with the love between a man and a woman, though there is a connection between the uses of the word, because both involve passion. The Romantic movement in the arts and literature, however, was a wide-reaching movement in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which rejected conventional techniques and subjects and which insisted on the artist’s freedom to express passionate feelings, whatever they were.

The Romantic poets believed that poetry was the best medium for expressing this passion. They felt that people should rely more on their powers of feeling in responding to the world, and that earlier poets had lost this power. In Wordsworth’s own words, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads).

For Wordsworth, the powerful feelings usually came from his responses to nature. It was characteristic of the Romantic artists and writers that they admired wild and rugged natural settings, and for Wordsworth, who grew up in the Lakes District, this admiration was fervent. It is hardly surprising that he became known as a nature poet.

This idea that Wordsworth is a nature poet is very firmly entrenched, but he is not first and foremost a nature poet. First and foremost his poetry, like all great poetry, is about those moments of insight into people, into ourselves, which we all have sometimes and which great poets are able to capture, so that we recognise them, or which great poets can even provide us with. Different poets use different paths to arrive at those moments: some use relationships, some use religion, and some use nature.

When we study Wordsworth it becomes clear that very few of his poems are strictly descriptive poems about nature: certainly the great ones are not. Rather, he uses nature and the emotions it evokes in him to see past the curtain of reality, of normality, that limits our vision in every day life. In every day life, we often fail to see fully what is around us. We see a tree, but somehow we fail to see the “treeness” of it, perhaps partly because the label “tree” stands between ourselves and the experience. Sometimes, however, just for a moment, we see past that label. We have a moment of insight, of transcendency, when we fully experience the tree. Perhaps you have had such a feeling yourself? In ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Tintern Abbey’) he describes this moment as the moment when “We see into the life of things”.

Wordsworth’s understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world, then, is based on this idea that through nature we can transcend the every day experience of life and relate to the universe on a different plane.

He believed that children were able to do this more easily (as we see in ‘The Prelude’) because they were closer to our beginnings in the natural world. For children, nature could be, as it had been for him as a child, a parent and a teacher.

Activity

In the following exercise you are going to articulate and represent your own ideas in imaginative text from two different perspectives. (Syllabus outcome 8)

Write the transcript for an interview that might have taken place between a journalist in Wordsworth’s time and Wordsworth. You should have the journalist ask questions which you have thought about, while reading about Wordsworth’s life and times. Wordsworth’s answers will be based on your understanding of his views.

Context and values for the reader

It used to be assumed that when we study literature, we study only the text, and perhaps, to some extent, the life of the writer. These, it was assumed, were what created for us the meaning of the text. In the last half century, however, critics have shown that the meaning of the text, for any individual reader, is created not only by the text and the writer’s context. The reader also brings a context to the experience of reading the text, and the meaning which the reader receives from the text will be changed by that reader’s context.

Thus, in different times, and different places, when the overall context of that time differs markedly from the original context of the writer, we might expect that a text will be received differently.

Wordsworth’s popularity as a poet has undergone several fluctuations. During his own lifetime he first became popular as the Romantic movement grew and strengthened. His reputation grew into a literary legend later in his life during the early Victorian era. This was possibly because the Victorian age was a time that emphasised strong family values and a wholesome, non-sexual attitude to life. Wordsworth was seen as a family man and a lover of nature, and what could be more wholesome than nature?

By the time of his death, however, his popularity was already starting to decline, and his popularity was not great during the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the late Victorian age, when strong feelings of any kind were seen as dangerous.

During the First World War, however, there was a revival of interest, which lasted through the first half of this century. Perhaps a period or turmoil, which exists during times of war leads to questioning, when people are reassessing their values.

There is no doubt that in Australia, at least, during most of the second half of the twentieth century, his work was once again in one of the low periods of popularity, although still often represented in poetry anthologies by poems like ‘The Daffodils’. Wordsworth came to represent to many people the old, traditional view of poetry that poetry has to be nice, that it has to be about nice feelings, and what could be nicer or more wholesome than nature? His poetry was taught to little children because it expressed that niceness.

The recent revival in the popularity might be seen as consistent with the rising interest in alternative views of the world. In many ways, Wordsworth’s views on oneness with nature fit in with concepts taught in Zen Buddhism, and with the views of the Green movement.

Activity

In the following exercise you are explaining and evaluating the effect of context of the responder (You!) on text. (Syllabus outcome 1)

1. Explain your own relationship with nature. Think back as far as you can in your life and consider all the factors which have influenced your feelings about the natural world. These might include the influences of:
   • parents’ attitudes
   • early experiences in nature
   • where you lived (country or city)
   • peer groups (e.g. scouts or guides)
   media (childhood story books, films like Babe, nursery rhymes, poetry, news reporting on, for example, the green movement)
2. What context do you bring to Wordsworth’s poetry? Do your previous attitudes dispose you to accept his attitudes to nature? Do they influence you to see his attitudes as hippy-weirdo-freaky?

Language, purpose and audience

In Elective requirements we also saw that, for this elective, you need to understand the language, purpose and audience of the text.

For the most part, language will become clearer as you study individual poems. In the set poems there are a variety of structures, from the simple, Alcaic stanzas of the first poem, to the sonnet, ‘It is a beauteous evening...’, to the blank verse of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Prelude’. Wordsworth uses poetic techniques such as figures of speech, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and allusion to shape meaning, as you will see in the following studies of the individual poems.

Purpose and audience are closely related to context. Remember that Wordsworth was at the forefront of the Romantic movement in poetry, and so purpose is closely connected with the need to rebel against earlier trends in poetry and to introduce something fresh, new and passionate into poetry. However, like many poets, Wordsworth probably wrote more out of a need to express his feelings than out of a need to persuade others. Remember his famous words, quoted earlier, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Those powerful feelings, his feelings about the natural world, demanded to be expressed and communicated. But his best poetry, written in his youth, and including the set poems, was probably written without a particular audience in mind, other than his immediate acquaintance. He was writing then for educated, like-minded people, and consequently there is little of the conscious striking of a pose which mars some of his later poetry, written for his public.

You will consider more about language, purpose and audience when making links between Wordsworth’s poetry and An Imaginary Life. First, however, you need to study the individual poems.

‘Strange fits of passion have I known’

‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ is the first of the so-called “Lucy poems”. It shows a technique Wordsworth would often use, that of projecting human feelings into nature. As the poet rides towards Lucy’s cottage we are told “The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot/Came near, and nearer still”. There is the suggestion of something foreboding it the word “sinking”, which is confirmed when the moon drops behind the cottage and the poet fears that Lucy is dead. In a first version of the poem, sent to Coleridge in a letter from Goslar, a further stanza was added:

By not including this stanza in the published version, Wordsworth leaves the ending of the poem on a note of mystery which intrigues the reader, and leaves the emphasis of the poem on the experience itself, one of those moments which Wordsworth captures in which we are in such harmony with nature that we see into the reality of things.

The critic John Beer suggests that the force of this poem comes from the contrast between the “entranced” state of the first half of the poem and the “unentranced” state after the moon drops. He says:

In terms of style, as in most of the Lucy poems we have a simple lyrical style in regular Alcaic stanzas. The simplicity of the four-line stanzas with their abab rhyming pattern suit the simplicity of the tale being told. The rhyming pattern and regular rhythm are almost nursery-rhyme-like, suiting the mood of the rider and the regular beat of the horse’s feet. So also does the literal language used: apart from the personification of nature as “Kind Nature” in the fifth verse, there are not even figures of speech to adorn the tale.

You can read the other so-called ‘ Lucy poems ’ (and, in fact, the complete works of Wordsworth). The other Lucy poems are:

• ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’
   
• ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’
   
• ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’
   
• ‘I travelled among unknown men’

The five Lucy poems might not rank with his greatest work (although, as you see in the quote below, not all critics would agree), but they are certainly very interesting and are the earliest of Wordsworth’s poems to show those qualities which later became so distinctly associated with his work, such as what Margaret Drabble calls “the tone of tender personal emotion, at its best pure and strong, and at its worst dangerously near sentimentality.”

Whatever their origin, the poems stand on their own. As Alan Gardiner says,

“Their power derives not from their possible association with actual persons but from their vivid representation of a particular kind of life, and their moving evocation of the poet’s response to the ending of that life. The girl (or girls) portrayed in the poems seems isolated from the rest of humanity and has an unusually intimate relationship with nature. Death is seen as the inevitable conclusion of that relationship; the girl is finally absorbed by nature and becomes part of its eternal life. But there is a tension in the poems between acceptance of the girl’s death and an unconcealed, poignantly evoked sense of loss. The poems are justly regarded as among Wordsworth’s greatest achievements. Despite – it might be more accurate to say because of – their simplicity of language the poems are richly suggestive and have remarkable emotional depth and complexity.”

Activity

In this exercise, you will revise some important poetic terms. (Syllabus outcome 3)

1. Use a dictionary or dictionary of literary terms, or search the Internet to find the meanings of the words you are unsure about.
    
2. Re-write the following paragraph, expanding and explaining it through your understanding of the terms.

“In terms of style, as in most of the Lucy poems we have a simple lyrical style in regular Alcaic stanzas. The simplicity of the four-line stanzas with their abab rhyming pattern suit the simplicity of the tale being told. The rhyming pattern and regular rhythm are almost nursery-rhyme-like, suiting the mood of the rider and the regular beat of the horse’s feet. So also does the literal language used: apart from the personification of nature as ‘Kind Nature’ in the fifth verse, there are not even figures of speech to adorn the tale.”

HINT: On the Internet you will find many interesting sites which will provide help with language relevant to the study of English. You can use a search engine such as Google to find glossaries of poetic terms.

‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798’ (“Tintern Abbey”)

This poem begins with the sort of description of natural scenery for which Wordsworth is commonly known, but, as with so many of his other poems, it is not nature in itself which absorbs Wordsworth, but the idea of the harmony between humanity and nature.

Wordsworth’s description of nature is not an end in itself, however good it may be, but it is a means by which the poet enters a state of heightened consciousness, in which he is able, through nature, to see past nature to the universe. It is supposedly in this poem that we see Wordsworth as a nature poet most clearly for the first time, and certainly the poem talks a lot about nature and its effects on the poet. But it is the effects that are important. It is not nature but the “I” of the poem which is constantly the focus of attention. Look at how often the word “I” is repeated.

In 1815, Wordsworth complained of a woman admirer who had misunderstood the poem in just this way. He said, “She talks of my being a worshipper of Nature – a passionate expression uttered incautiously in the poem on the Wye has lead her into this mistake, she reading in cold-heartedness and substituting the letter for the spirit.”

Clearly Wordsworth did not see himself as a worshipper of Nature in any literal sense. Rather, he sees nature, as Margaret Drabble says, “as a doorway into a state of visionary, trance-like insight.”

The poem begins with a description of the scene and circumstances: Wordsworth is returning to the banks of the Wye after a five year absence. He writes of the pleasure the memories of it have given him when in towns and cities, and goes on to ascribe to the influence of such scenes, our own better selves. But then, listen to the language in which he describes a further experience: it might almost, in fact, be a description of the state of consciousness achieved through meditation in Zen Buddhism or Yoga.

This state of disembodiment, of oneness with the universe, the moment when the curtain of reality and normality is seen through, is at the essence of all Wordsworth’s best poetry. It is hinted at in the Lucy poems, as the state Lucy arrives at after death, and it is the moment of contact with the infinite, in which time is suspended in ‘The Solitary Reaper’. It is the state Wordsworth imagines we were all in before our human birth, in another famous poem ‘Ode: intimations of immortality’.

The poet goes on to picture his animal state of oneness with nature when he was a child. This idea too, is apparent in the descriptions of Lucy’s closeness to nature, and is also described in ‘Ode: intimations of immortality’ and ultimately in ‘The Prelude’. “I cannot paint/ What then I was”, says Wordsworth in this poem, but of course he does paint it very clearly, here, and in ‘The prelude’. His sense of the spirit of the universe is called up again in the lines:

It is because of this sense of the meaning of life that he calls nature “the nurse/the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul/Of all my moral being.”

Finally, in this remarkable poem, Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy with a personal tenderness of tone. He sees in her the spontaneous response to nature which he used to have in his younger days, and he wishes that for her in the future, nature will be the comforter that he has known it to be.

This poem is obviously very different in content and style to the Lucy poems. A most important difference is in content: it is the first clearly autobiographical poem: a form that so many of Wordsworth’s poems were to take from now on. Wordsworth himself said that it was “a thing unprecedented for a poet to talk so much about himself”. In most of the remaining set poems, the autobiographical element is strong.

In terms of language and style, in the Lucy poems we have, for the most part, a simple lyrical style in regular Alcaic stanzas, with fairly simple sentences and traditional rhyming patterns. They are all very different to the long sentences, elevated language and blank verse of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Swinburne considered the blank verse of this poem as unequalled except by Milton.

Activity:

In this exercise, you will revise some important poetic terms and use them to explain the way they shape meaning in ‘Tintern Abbey’. (Syllabus outcomes 3, 4)

What is blank verse? It is verse which has a regular rhythmic pattern, but no regular rhyming pattern. Much of Shakespeare’s drama is written in blank verse. Blank verse sounds like poetry because of the rhythm, but is less obvious in sounding like poetry because of the lack of rhyme. Generally, blank verse in English is written in iambic pentameters:

• an iamb is a “foot” (like a bar in music) of one unstressed (?)and one stressed (´) syllable (?´)
   
• “pentameter” means five of these feet to a line.
   

1. Choose a passage from ‘Tintern Abbey’ and mark out the feet, with their stressed and unstressed syllables, in each line. Read the passage aloud, trying to see the effect of the rhythm on the poem. Notice the sentence structure and use of elevated-sounding language.
   
   Are there any other features of language in the passage you have chosen, such as figures of speech (metaphors, similes, personification)?
    
2. Write a few paragraphs about the effect of these language features on the meaning of the passage.

‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’

This beautiful sonnet was written to Wordsworth’s daughter, Caroline Vallon, who was nine years old when he visited her in 1802. It is one of ten sonnets written during his visit to Calais.

The sonnet is a highly structured form of poetry, imposing a discipline on the poet to regulate the outpouring of emotion into its mould. The sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines. In its traditional form, these are divided into eight lines (the octave) and six lines (the sestet), with a pause between which is called the volta. The division between the octave and the sestet might not appear in a space between the two sections (there is no space between them in this poem) but the two are distinguished by a different rhyming pattern. There is also, traditionally, a change in the direction of thought after the volta. Often the octave will be a description while the sestet will be a reflection on that description.

The octave usually consists of two quatrains (a quatrain is four lines) which are linked together by their rhyming pattern. This is usually abba abba in the Italian form of the sonnet, used also by many English poets. However, an alternative English form is abba cddc

The sestet, in the Italian form, usually took a rhyming pattern such as cdecde, or cdedce, or rhyming couplets. In the English form, it often took the form of a third quatrain and a rhyming couplet.

The sonnet form was used by Milton, Shakespeare and Donne but after their time had been less popular with English poets until the Romantic period, when it was revived by Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets. Wordsworth himself is often considered the best sonnet writer amongst the Romantics. The Romantic poets, though they often rejected the immediate past, tended to look back farther into the past for inspiration, both in terms of content and form. However, consistent with their love of freedom and rejection of the strictures of the past, they often took liberties with the form, as we can see in this sonnet.

The first two quatrains are linked in their rhyming patterns: abba acca. They describe the beauty of the evening as the sun sinks into the sea. In the first quatrain this beauty is described as spiritual: the silence of the moment captured in the simile comparing it to “a Nun/Breathless with adoration”. The feeling of calmness and silence is conveyed through the sound of the quatrain: long vowel sounds, assonance, variation in the metre, enjambment of the second and third lines and the caesura in the third line force the reader to read it slowly.

In the second quatrain, the sound of the sea is juxtaposed to the silence spoken of in the first quatrain. Once again a spiritual element is introduced as the “eternal motion” of the sea, with its everlasting “sound like thunder” is said to be the “mighty Being”.

The sestet is written as an apostrophe to his daughter, who appears “untouched by solemn thought” at the sight of so much beauty. He assures her that her nature is “not therefore less divine”. Children, in Wordsworth’s view are always in touch with nature, where adults have only occasional exquisite moments of understanding it. “Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year”, he tells her.

Note: This is a biblical allusion: Abraham’s bosom is a term used in the Bible as a metaphor for closeness to God, for instance in the story of Lazarus, Luke 16: 19-31.

She, as a child, can worship “at the Temple’s inner shrine”, the inner shrine of a temple being where only the most holy or initiated may go, and the temple here being a metaphor for nature which Wordsworth identifies with God.

Activity:

In this exercise, you will revise some important poetic terms and use them to explain the way they shape meaning in this poem. (Syllabus outcomes 3, 4)

If you do not know the meanings of “assonance”, “enjambment”, “caesura” and “Biblical allusion”, look them up in a dictionary, or on the Internet.

Explain the ways in which these, and the structure of the sonnet shape meaning in the poem.

‘The Solitary Reaper’

In simple people, and people living close to nature, like Lucy, and particularly in the basic feeling and passions of humble people, Wordsworth found a beauty, power and mystery that were like the forces he already knew in nature.

The oneness with nature which forms so important a theme of the Lucy poems is to be found again in ‘The Solitary Reaper’. In the first stanza, emphasis is placed on the isolation of the individual, through the words “single”, “solitary”, “by herself” and “alone”, but unity with nature is suggested in the idea of the vale “overflowing with the sound”.

The harmony between humanity and nature is symbolised by the song of the reaper. It transcends space and time: in the second stanza, Wordsworth calls upon what, to the nineteenth century were mysterious and magical settings; Arabia and the New Hebrides, to emphasise the universality of the reaper’s song; in the third stanza the timelessness of the song is established by the reference to “old, unhappy, far-off things,/And battles long ago,” and in the fourth, her song is to “have no ending”. It is timeless, too, in continuing to be heard in the poet’s heart “long after it was heard no more”. The literal meaning of the song then, is unimportant because it represents much more than any literal meaning, encompassing all that is human and melancholy: “sorrow, loss or pain”.

Wordsworth freely admitted that the idea for the poem came not from a first hand experience, but from an account sent to him in a letter by a friend, and that the last two lines of the poem were taken almost directly from the letter. The friend, Thomas Wilkinson, wrote in his letter: “Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.” It is clear from this that what intrigued Wordsworth was not so much an experience of nature, his own or another’s, but the idea of the inter-connectedness of humanity and nature, and this idea recurs through his poetry. We see it most clearly in the next set poem.

Activity

In this exercise, you will compare and contrast two poems and explain the way language shapes meaning in them. (Syllabus outcomes 2, 4)

Compare ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ in terms of both content and style. Consider:

• the inspiration for each
   
• themes
   
• language and structure.

‘The Prelude: Book First. Introduction – Childhood and School–time’

The final set piece, the “Childhood” passage from ‘The Prelude’, contains what is generally considered some of Wordsworth’s best poetry. Its genius lies in his ability to describe with startling accuracy and beauty his childhood experiences, but to describe them at the same time from his adult perspective, so that we are able to see not only what the child experienced, but what the man sees that the child gained or learned from the experience.

‘The Prelude’ is subtitled ‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, which describes what it was that Wordsworth was trying to do in this long poem; to trace his own development as a poet. We have already seen what importance Wordsworth attached to childhood experiences in ‘Tintern Abbey’, and the first two books of ‘The Prelude’ and passages from the other books, make similar claims for the formative influence of nature on the development of a child’s mind. Yet, as the set passage makes clear, it is not simply the passive influence of nature which is important for this development, but the receptiveness of the child’s mind. It is as always the interplay of humanity and nature which interests Wordsworth.

The much quoted lines from the set passage, “Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up/Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” form a fitting introduction. The poet’s “seed-time”, when he was, unconsciously, being formed by the experiences he describes, is to influence all of his later life. The word “fostered” also has great significance. Remember that in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth calls Nature “the nurse,/The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul/Of all my moral being.” Nature was a foster parent in an almost literal sense to the child whose own parents died so early. And it was a parent not only in awakening him to the beauty of nature, but in the fear of it as well, which influenced the moral development of the young Wordsworth.

In the incidents which are described in the passage following, that fear also has a formative influence because these incidents belong to the period when the child has become active; in real life, after Wordsworth and his brother had moved, when Wordsworth was eight, to Hawkeshead, in the Valley of Esthwaite, “that beloved Vale to which erelong/We were transplanted”. This period contrasts with the period described in the thirty preceding lines (lines 270-300), which deal with his early childhood in his birthplace, Cockermouth. Then nature wore a purely benign face because for the child it is the time of innocence. But now, as he enters the age when right and wrong begin to have meaning, nature, his foster parent, takes on another aspect when his actions are wrong; the disapproving face which induces the fear which also fosters him, which he refers to in lines 355-6 as “severer interventions, ministry/more palpable”.

In the set passage, five scenes from the poet’s childhood are described, and in the first three, this fostering fear plays an important part. The five scenes are interspersed with three sections of direct authorial comment, and the passage ends with further comment from the author.

The first scene, described in lines 306-325, is of the child Wordsworth going out trapping at night at age nine. There is a hint that nature does not accept even the trapping itself as acceptable in the lines, “I was alone,/And seemed to be a trouble to the peace that dwelt among them.” But nature’s disapproval is more strongly expressed when the child steals from traps belonging to others. Then,

“I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.”

It is easy to explain the child’s fear in modern psychological terms as his projection of his guilt into the setting around him, to interpret the breathings and the steps as his guilty projection of the sounds in fact made by himself, but the achievement of the poem is to make us accept the child’s view that nature frowns upon him.

The second scene, described in lines 326-339, is of the child bird-nesting, a common occupation for young boys to steal and collect the eggs from birds’ nests. Again disapproval is implied in the word “plunderers” and the poet’s recognition that the object was “mean”, but the description of the boy’s exaltation as he hangs, almost suspended in mid air after a climb to a raven’s nest is no longer disapproving. It is one of those moments of heightened awareness, when nature transforms our vision, and “we see into the life of things”, as Wordsworth says in ‘Tintern Abbey’.

Lines 340-356 are the first of the passages of authorial comment. Here Wordsworth expresses his thankfulness for that fostering fear, which helped to make him into a better person.

This draws him on to the third scene, in which the fear is at its most palpable, the scene where the child stole a boat. Led by nature on a summer evening he finds a boat tied up to a tree and takes it out for a row. Although feeling guilty (it was a “troubled pleasure”) the child’s enjoyment of the moment is clear, and the scene is described in some of Wordsworth’s best verse: his accurate observation of detail, such as the traces left on the surface of the water by the oars, and his imagery as with the picture of the boat “heaving through the water like a swan” give us a clear picture. We are also able through this descriptive verse to feel with the child the fear of the “huge peak, black and huge” which “upreared its head”, “Towered up between me and the stars”, and finally “Strode after me”. We sense his panic in “I struck and struck again”, and “trembling oars”, even though we again, intellectually, might interpret the pursuing mountain as a projection of the child’s guilt. The lines which follow, explaining the after-effects on the child of this terror, although unspecific, show that the fear too had the result of giving the child further insight.

This section is followed by more authorial comment in which Wordsworth apostrophises the spirit of the universe which through such education refined his perceptions and granted him a further and special communing with nature.

The fourth scene described in lines 425-463, is the famous description of the child skating, where again the perfection of the verse has been often and justly praised.

Another section of authorial comment follows from lines 464-507, in which the adult poet is again able to feel close to the emotions nature aroused in him as a child. This leads into a final scene pictured this time indoors in lines 508-543 showing the occupations of the children on winters’ days and evenings, as they drew or played cards or other games beside a peat fire.

In the concluding lines of Book I, Wordsworth affirms the value of his childhood close to nature, and justifies speaking of it in such detail in a direct address to Coleridge, to whom much of the original poem was written.

Activity

In this exercise, you will consider language use in one passage of the poem and explain the way meaning is shaped by it. You will explain your views in interpretive text. (Syllabus outcomes 4, 8)

1. Choose one passage of description from ‘The Prelude’. Write a short essay explaining how language is used to influence your response to the passage.

Links with An Imaginary Life

In this elective, remember you are to consider the two texts in relationship to each other. Refer back to the section, Elective Requirements and to the diagram: Content of this elective.

Activity

In this section, you will compare the two texts, both in terms of context and value, and in terms of language, purpose and audience. (Syllabus outcomes 2, 2A)

Consider the following points of comparison, and expand, in your own notes, with your own ideas and examples.

Context

Wordsworth was writing about the landscape of the Lakes District from the perspective of a native. He grew up in these surroundings, had the deep attachments of childhood to the wildness. Malouf was writing about an alien landscape, from the point of view of a foreigner. Ovid’s early feelings about the desolate landscape around Tomis, as compared to the cultivated landscape of Rome might compare to Malouf’s own feelings about Australia, from one who comes from the cultivated beauty of the Mediterranean.

The foreign landscape of Tomis is described in language reminiscent of the Australian landscape:

Values and attitudes

Wordsworth’s concept of Nature as a teacher, of learning about the self through nature, is mirrored in An Imaginary Life. Ovid is changed, transformed by the landscape. Part 1 ends with his recognition that, “Now, I too must be transformed” (p.33). Part 2 is about that transformation

Language is an important aspect of relationship with nature for both texts. With Wordsworth, paradoxically, although he uses language to evoke his feelings, the feelings he describes occur when he progresses beyond language to the cosmos. Ovid finds that he first begins to relate to the landscape when he learns to describe it in the language of the Getae : “Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world.” (p.65) Consider how language affects our perception of the natural world. The Eskimos, it is said, have over thirty words to describe different forms of precipitation, where English has only four or five: rain, snow, sleet, hail. Why do they have so many? What does it say about their relationship with the natural world? How does this compare with Wordsworth?

Remember the suggestion, under Context and Values for the Writer that the word “tree” provides a label which prevents our experiencing the treeness of the tree? Compare that concept to the following quotation from An Imaginary Life:

The closeness of childhood to nature is important in both texts. Wordsworth sees himself, as a child, and all children, as having a closer connection with nature. In An Imaginary Life, Ovid sees the child as having that closeness, as seen in the passage quoted above from p.96. The child is nature. In that passage, Ovid is unable to feel this connection to the universe, but by the end of the novel he has learned it. (See p.147). He has learned this from the child. Ovid almost believes he is the same child he glimpsed in his own childhood. The child is a symbol of childhood, “always the same age” (p.9), which suggests a closeness to Wordsworth’s idea of childhood.

Ovid himself must learn to be like a child again, must learn from the child, in order to relate to nature. He senses this early in the novel:

The closeness of simple people to nature is also reflected in both texts. Refer back to the notes on The Solitary Reaper. In An Imaginary Life, though Ovid at first finds the sounds of the Getae’s speech “barbarous”, his attitude changes. “I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken” (p.21). Gradually, his recognition of the dignity of the old man, his involvement in the life of the community (defending the settlement, joining in the ceremony honouring the dead) change his view of the Getae.

Like Wordsworth, once Ovid experiences oneness with nature, he has an experience of disembodiment:

Language, purpose and audience

Of course, the greatest difference between the texts in terms of language is that Wordsworth is writing poetry while Malouf is writing prose fiction. What are the implications of these forms? What are your own reactions to each?

Consider, however, that although Malouf is writing prose fiction, it is of an unusual kind. It is written almost as an interior monologue, in Ovid’s mind. There is no dialogue. The language is dense, and in places, almost poetic, particularly towards the end, where the tone becomes visionary, and the word choice (“spirit”, “soul”, “glorying”) might well be compared to Wordsworth’s language.

In terms of purpose and audience, Malouf, obviously, is writing for a modern Australian audience, though he chooses a character and time frame remote from modern Australia. Why does he do this? Does this make it more, or less accessible to a modern Australian audience than Wordsworth’s poetry? How do his purposes compare to Wordsworth’s?

References

Beer, John (1979):Wordsworth in Time, London, p.83.
Drabble, Margaret (1966):Wordsworth, London, p.64, p.74.
Gardiner, Alan (1987): The Poetry of William Wordsworth, London, pp.41-2.

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