Wordsworth; Some Thoughts

     In my previous post, I mentioned that Keats "wrote some of the greatest poetry," but a person interested in reading his poetry might avoid him because his poems seem difficult. If that is the case, then the best place to begin reading English Romantic poetry is with William Wordsworth.  Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote poems that are sensitive, profound, beautiful, and written in he what described as "a selection of language really spoken by men."  A theme that Wordsworth explored often his poems is his view of our relationship with nature.  His poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" illustrates this point:  

                        I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

                        I wandered lonely as a cloud,

                        That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

                        When all at once I saw a crowd,

                        A host, of golden daffodils;

                        Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

                        Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

                        Continuous as the stars that shine

                        And twinkle on the milky way,

                        They stretched in never-ending line

                        Along the margin of a bay:

                        Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

                        Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

                        The wave beside them danced; but they

                        Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;

                        A poet could not be but gay,

                        In such a jocund company;

                        I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

                        What wealth the show to me had brought:

                        For oft, when on my couch I lie

                        In vacant or in pensive mood,

                        They flash upon that inward eye

                        Which is the bliss of solitude;

                        And then my heart with pleasure fills,

                        and dances with the daffodils.

     

     This delightful, simple poem is based on an experience Wordsworth had while he and his sister were out walking one day.  In stanzas 1-3, the speaker "floats" cloud-like above the landscape, isolated and aimlessly drifting, when he is startled by the sight of daffodils, "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."  These are no ordinary flowers, but like the stars of the milky way they "stretch" infinitely "along the margin of a "bay."  As if granted boundless perspective, he absorbs "Ten thousand" flowers within a single "glance."  Seeing the daffodils' transcendent brilliance fills him with an immediate, visceral feeling of joy, but gives "little thought" to the "wealth the show to me had brought."  That wealth only comes to him later "when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude;/And then my heart with pleasure fills."  

     Once having read the poem, it is clear that Wordsworth views our relationship with nature as having something more to it that than just one of enjoying the beauty of natural scenery.  As we follow the poems sequence, we see him notice the flowers, feel inspired by them, then remember the experience days later when his mind is "In vacant or in pensive mood."  It is important to recognize here the necessity of memory, his recollecting the image through his imagination which soothes him in his solitude when "They flash upon his inward eye."   The question is, in what way does the imagination participate in this process?  Is it the force driving the experience toward its fulfillment, or is it subordinate to nature, simple a receptacle, passively receiving nature's spiritual bounty?  To answer that, we must turn to one of Wordsworth's masterpieces, "Tintern Abbey."  

     "Tintern Abbey" (organized into six verse paragraphs) recounts a time when he and his sister visited the river Wye, near Tintern Abbey.  The poem can be described as a meditation on how nature can instill goodness and wisdom in those willing to receive and possess her gifts.  Wordsworth first begins the poem by stating how long it has been since he last visited this place: "five years have passed; five summers, with the length/Of five long winters! and again I hear/These waters."  He then proceeds with this first section of the poem describing the attributes of the scene, which include cliffs, trees, a cottage, growing fruit, farms, and hedgerows.  These images convey a picturesque seclusion of pastoral tranquility.

     If the poem were to end here, the result would be a poem that merely describes, rather beautifully, a specific landscape.  In the second verse paragraph, Wordsworth turns inward and recollects the gifts nature had given him:  

                                         These beauteous forms,  

         Through a long absence, have not been to me

         As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;

         But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

         Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

         In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

         Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

         And passing even into my purer mind,

         With tranquil restoration--feelings too

         Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

         As have no slight or trivial influence

         On that best portion of a good man's life,

         His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

         Of kindness and of love.  Nor less, I trust,

         Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

         In which the heavy and the weary weight

         Of all this unintelligible world,

         Is lightened--that serene and blessed mood,

         In which the affections gently lead us on--

         Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

         And even the motions of our human blood

         Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

         In body, and become a living soul;

         While with an eye made quiet by the power

         Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

         We see into the life of things.

     

     The landscape's gifts become tangible even as Wordsworth remembers memories that comforted him while he lived in "lonely rooms, and 'mid the din/Of towns and cities."  Deprived of the actual sight of the landscape, Wordsworth's memory and imagination recall to him "sensations sweet" at times when he is overwhelmed with "weariness."  These "sensations" are "Felt in [his] blood" and "pass into" his "purer mind," where they restore him to the tranquility, he experienced at Tintern Abbey. But the images of the landscape that memory and imagination transmute into emotions accomplish much more than alleviate the poet's loneliness.  They also inspire him to "acts/Of kindness, and of love" toward his fellow human beings.  Lastly, he proclaims that he "owed another gift" to these "sensations," "Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood," that leads him to a transcendent state in which he becomes a "living soul" and sees "into the life of things."  

     For a brief moment in the next two verse paragraphs, Wordsworth seems to mistrust his memory and the words he just uttered:  "If this/Be but a vain belief," which is followed in the next paragraph by "And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought/With many recognitions dim and faint."  But his doubt is set aside:  "And somewhat of sad perplexity,/The picture of the mind revives again;/While here I stand, not only with the sense/Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts/That in this moment there is life and food/For future years."  In the rest of this verse paragraph, Wordsworth looks back on his youthful days, when he roamed wildly among the "hills," satisfying his "coarser pleasures," and knowing simply the "dizzy raptures" of the "cataract," "the mountain," and the "deep and gloomy wood."  That was a time when he "had no need of a remoter charm,/by thought supplied, nor any interest/Unborrowed from the eye."  His raw response to nature, unmediated by thought, fulfilled his young desire.  

     By the time he visits this landscape at the present moment, he has put away those "dizzy raptures" of his youth without regret, "Not for this/Faint (lose heart) I, nor mourn nor murmur."  Instead, he has an "Abundant recompense," far higher than those ecstatic passions felt along his physical senses.  For the mature Wordsworth, nature's boon enters through the senses, but becomes nourishment for contemplation of our mortality and our indivisible union with nature: 

                                                For I have learned

            To look on nature, not as in the hour

            Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

            The still, sad music of humanity,

            Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

            To chasten and subdue.  And I have felt

            A presence that disturbs me with the joy

            Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

            Of something far more deeply interfused,

            Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

            And the round ocean and living air,

            And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

            A motion and a spirit, that impels

            All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

            All rolls through all things.

     No longer youthful and impulsive, the older and wiser Wordworth hears in nature "The still sad music of humanity," and "A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts."  He has changed since his first visit from a youth who responds solely physically to this scene with aching, dizzying passions, to one who has been chastened through experience to have an empathic understanding of human suffering, which opens him to the immanent "presence" interfusing his mind with all the externalities of the world.  

     The obvious intangible quality of the "presence" in the landscape suggests that Wordsworth receives revelation of divinity strictly through nature.  But that would misrepresent the poem and Wordsworth.  The "motion" and "spirit" Wordsworth "feels" requires those images of nature to be seen, heard and remembered.  He can summon them through the faculty of memory, but the physical scene first must be apprehended by the eyes.  In his "older" and "wiser" contemplation of nature, he is now able to contrast his earlier and later experiences and recognize how he possesses through his creative imagination a sense of transcendence: 

                                                         Therefore am I still

            A lover of the meadows and the woods,

            And mountains; and of all that we behold

            From this green earth; of all the mighty world

            Of eye, and ear--both what they half create,

            And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

            In nature and the language of the sense

            The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

            The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

            Of all my moral being.

     In the poem's final paragraph, Wordsworth turns to his sister Dorothy, hears "The language of my former heart," and sees "My former pleasures in the shooting lights/"Of thy wild eyes."  He prays that in years to come Nature (capitalized in this part) will, 

                                                         inform

         With quietness and beauty, and so feed 

         The mind that is within us, so impress

          With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

          Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

          Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

          The dreary intercourse of daily life,

          Shall ever prevail against us, or disturb

          Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

          Is full of blessings.

     And as the poem ends, Wordsworth avers that Dorothy will always remember the beauty of what this landscape evokes, and how much dearer it was to him because she was with him.  

     Wordsworth's expression of nature, which when recalled through the imagery of the "inward eye" has the power to transform bleakness into blessing of "aspect more sublime...in which the heavy and weary weight/Of all this intelligible world,/is lightened..."  This power is expressed in other words in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads": 

"In spite of differences of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.  The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and the senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.  Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man."

     Wordsworth's vision (and that of all the Romantic poets) provides the ordinary person with the power to overcome the mundane, the tragic, the disastrous, by embracing the beauty that can animate the soul.  

Reading Keats In 2023

     At the beginning of his poetic vocation, John Keats had resolved to follow the examples of two great poets: Edmund Spenser and John Milton.  As they did, he too intended to write pastoral poems, then progress to epic verse.  Keats wanted to imitate the pattern of these earlier poets as a means to achieve the same level of profundity they did.  He laid out this scheme in his early poem, Sleep and Poetry.   In the spring of 1818, he published his pastoral romance, Endymion, inspired by his reading of Spenser, but he included a preface specifying deficiencies he anticipated critics would observe in his work.  His preface to the poem eloquently expresses his concerns: 

     “Knowing within myself  the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.

     What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.”

    In January of that same year, Keats was about to revise the second book of Endymion; he put aside the poem and decided to reread King Lear instead.  His rereading inspired the following sonnet:

  On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!

   Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!

   Leave melodizing on this wintry day,

Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:

Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,

   Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay

   Must I burn through; once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,

   Begetters of our deep eternal theme,

When through the old oak forest I am gone,

   Let me not wander in a barren dream,

But when I am consumed in the fire,

Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

As honestly critical as he is in his preface, his sonnet radiates a critical turn in Keats’s aspiration as a poet.  At this specific stage in his poetic development, he knows he must move beyond writing pastoral poetry and ascend to the realm of genuinely greater human passions.  The first two lines, which refer to Endymion, acknowledge the lure of writing pastoral poetry (“Fair plumed Syren!).  Lines three and four, however, want to silence the pastoral impulse within his imagination.  Once silenced (“mute”), Keats signals his farewell (to composing) to pastoral poetry (“Adieu!”) and directs his imagination to “burn through” the “fierce dispute,/Betwixt damnation and impassion’d  clay” of Shakespeare’s  Lear.  For Keats, Shakespeare has always been a force within his consciousness, but at this point in his life Shakespeare assumes a kind of divinity that he approaches humbly as he invokes his aid to raise him out of a “barren dream” and transmute him like the newly born “Phoenix” into a poet who can “fly” to greater heights of poetic glory.  

     Keats continued to revere Spenser and Milton, and one can continually sense their essential presence in his poetry, but he also understood that for him to become a great poet he needed to “find the agonies, the strife/Of human hearts'' and, distill these passions into sublime poetry.  He found those emotions in Shakespeare, who along with Spenser and Milton, empowered Keats to write his greatest poetry in the few years he lived after finishing Endymion. 

     One of Keats’s greatest poems is Ode to a Nightingale.  In the poem, Keats is listening to an unseen Nightingale, whose song lures him into a trance-like state of mind:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

            My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

                           But being too happy in thine happiness,—

                   That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

                           In some melodious plot

   Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

                               Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

      The effect of the nightingale’s song is astonishing.  It draws Keats into a trance-like state as he becomes intoxicated by the beauty of the song.   He feels as though a “drowsy numbness pains” his consciousness; as though he had swallowed poison (hemlock); or had quaffed an opiate that is pulling him into the Greek river of forgetfulness (“Lethe-wards).  As he experiences the bird’s beautiful song, he tells the unseen nightingale that he is not envious of the bird’s “happy lot” but simply “too happy in thine happiness.”  

      However, this is no simple poem about the ecstatic joy that can be found through nature.  In the next two stanzas, Keats longs for a “beaker full” of wine, to escape this world and to efface his knowledge of the grim suffering that life can inflict.  (His younger brother Tom had recently died of tuberculosis).  In stanza 4, he seems to unite with the nightingale, as he rejects wine as a source of inspiration and turns instead to poetic imagination (poetic fancy), “wings of Poesy.”  As his imagination soars above the terrestrial world, he envisions the “Queen-Moon” (stanza 4) on her throne surrounded by fairies, but he realizes immediately that there is only darkness (“no light”) in the realm of “starry Fays.   “[E]mbalmed” in “darkness” (stanza 5) and unable to see “what flowers are at [his] feet,” he can “guess” each “soft incense” they emit.  Fully absorbed in a trance-like state without the sense of sight (Darkling), he listens to the nightingale, and muses on the peacefulness of oblivion (stanza 6): “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/To cease upon a midnight with no pain.”  (It is in this stanza that one finds allusions to Shakespeare, specifically the play Hamlet).  Longing for “easeful death" has supplanted the feeling of taking an opiate  in stanza 1.  In stanza 7, the bird’s song evokes the healing power of the Nightingale's song through time immemorial.  But suddenly, Keats is abruptly called back to reality by a single word that conveys the despair he wants to  escape, “Forlorn” (stanza 8).  As startling as the opening of the poem is for the reader, the last stanza astounds both the reader and Keats to an even greater degree.  The word “Forlorn” summons Keats back to the world of reality, pulling him from the faeryland trance he entered through the nightingale’s song.  As he awakens from his trance, the nightingale flies away, and he bids it “Adieu” as its “plaintive anthem fades/Past the near meadows”...till “‘tis buried deep/In  the next valley glades.”  Once the bird’s song has “fled,” he is left wondering whether he experienced a “vision, or waking dream?”  

     The poem ends with Keats unable to discern whether or not he has  had a “vision” or has merely been lost in a “dream.”  What is not lost, however, is the significance of his experience.  The nightingale, no less mortal and like Keats and all humanity, will in its own time perish.  What will persist through time is its song as it is heard by successive generations.  Though the bird will die, the time and change-defying persistence of its song make it immortal, and it is in listening and meditating (and composing the poem) on that song that Keats gathers to himself a sense of the immortal.  

     In the ode that follows Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats examines (in the sense of both study and question) a work of art.  Unlike Nightingale, Keats removes himself personally from the poem, creating a speaker who approaches the urn objectively, and philosophically.  The poem begins with the speaker viewing the urn and assigning it a higher artistic value than the very poem he is composing:

  Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

    Of deities or mortals, or of both,

        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

 What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

    What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

                      What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

     In the first four lines of Grecian Ode, the speaker displays a confidence in what he thinks he knows as he describes and defines the urn in its entirety as a physical work of art above his artistic/poetic capability.  In the next four lines he focuses on the painted scenes and figures on the urn, and his matter of fact declarative sentences give way to questions attempting to elicit from the urn a definitive and detailed account of what and whom these images are depicting.  The speaker might seem at a loss once his eyes close in on the urn’s images, but his questions are rhetorical rather than literal. In Nightingale Keats wants to surrender his consciousness to the bird’s song and “leave the world unseen,/And with thee [nightingale] fade away into the forest dim.”  Here, the speaker might seem dependent on the urn for inspiration in some way analogous to the way Keats clearly is in Nightingale, but he maintains an objectivity even as the urn’s aesthetic beauty fires his imagination.  

     That objectivity formulates the speaker’s declaration in the second stanza that unheard melodies “Are sweeter” than those heard.  The silent pipers resonate in the speaker’s imagination and will continue to be “sweet” to those who come long after Keats to see and respond to this work of art.  As in the first stanza, the lines that follow the initial four zoom in on the specific figures on the urn.  Existing in perpetuity (on the urn), the lovers will never fade and even though their passion will never be consummate, the speaker professes that their eternal youth and love negates their unfulfilled passion.  

     In the third stanza, the speaker continues his fervent, joyful observations of the trees and lovers depicted on the urn.  He celebrates the timeless “happy boughs,” the forever “unwearied” “melodist,” and the inextinguishable love and youthfulness of the “Bold Lover” and the female, “For ever panting, and for ever young.”  His feelings of euphoria ebb temporarily when reality edges back into his consciousness and he articulates vicissitudes of human passion and love:

All breathing human passion far above,

    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d

        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

 

      After this brief intrusion of reality, the speaker again concentrates on the urn.  The fourth stanza mirrors the first as the air of distant history and mysterious, mythological ritual returns.  The speaker wonders who the priest and the crowd approaching the “green altar” are.  Then he ponders: “What little town by river or sea shore,/Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel/Is empty of this folk, pious morn?”  The first question examines the urn’s scene and figures, but the second contemplates something beyond this self-contained artifact, a space purely imagined, the forever empty, silent and desolate town.  

     Perhaps it is the drift into that “desolate” space that compels the speaker to refocus on the complete urn and consecrate it as a silent, though eternal form that,

      shalt remain, in the midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

    Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

     These three poems of Keats demonstrate a crucial element of 19th Century English Romantic poetry, (1798-1832).  The poets of the previous period (Neoclassical) stressed the importance of objectivity, restraint and logic in their poems.  The Romantics, beginning with William Wordsworth, rejected this approach in favor of expressing emotions and unleashing the imagination.  The difference can be summed up by comparing two statements regarding poetic intentions from Alexander Pope (18th Century poet) and Wordsworth:

'Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse's steed;

Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;

The winged courser, like a gen'rous horse,

Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Pope, An Essay on Criticism

     

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of Powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads  

The distinction between these two modes of poetic creativity is Pope’s principle that inspiration (“Muse’s steed”) needs to be reigned in, to be harnessed, in order to construct a poem, as opposed to Wordsworth’s belief that poetic creativity arises when the poet feels an initial emotion, recalls that emotion later in a state of “tranquility,” then re-absorbs that emotion completely into his consciousness until it becomes innate and organic within his imagination.  Two other English poets who believed in the organic power of the imagination were Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a close friend of Wordsworth) and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  These three poets, and Keats, wrote some of the greatest poetry one could read. But because Keats's poems can be difficult for someone new to his poetry, readers might avoid his poetry and unfortunately miss out on an experience that is superbly imaginative.  With patience, a little resolve and perhaps some critical aid, anyone can learn to love this poet (and many more) if given the chance.