Man and Nature in 'The Prelude' /William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

'The Prelude' is important in giving one of the most succinct of Wordsworth's accounts of the development of his attitude to Nature - moving from the animal pleasure of childhood through adolescent passion for the wild and gloomy to adult awareness of the relation of our perception of the natural world; but its poetic interest lies in its brilliant combination of the lyric and the meditative, the exaltation of reminiscence into poetry through the proper handling of 'Relationship and Love'.

Nature in Wordsworth's poetry is not regarded as a background for his pictures of men, nor as a mere mirror refecting the feelings of man, but rather as a wonderful power around us calming and influencing our souls. An essentially Wordsworthian feature of his treatment of Nature is his intense spirituality revealed in these lines of 'Tintern Abbey'-

'She can so inform the mind that is within us, so impress, with quietness and beauty, and so feed with lofty thoughts...'

Similar idea is beautifully and effectively expressed in these lines of Book I of 'The Prelude'-

'The immortal spirit grows
like harmony in music.
There is a dark invisible workmanship
that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
in one society.'

According to Wordsworth, the best in man comes out during his companionship with Nature. Infact, Nature has the power to draw out from within us those hidden powers that go to build what we essentially are! Wordsworth's strong conviction that 'the child is the father of man' is an extension of his feelings for Nature. He felt that he owed what he was in maturity to his childhood, spent in the free natural surroundings of hills, groves and streams. Thus, Wordsworth had developed from passive admiration of Nature to the possession of an active creative power induced by Nature.


Wordsworth insists that through contact with Nature, the heart is exalted and made happy. Such happiness and exaltation is moral and in such a moral condition the heart can do no wrong. 'Wordsworthian Nature and Worsworthian Man appear akin.'

Ode to a Nightingale/ John Keats

W. J. Neatby's illustration for Ode to a Nightingale

Joseph Severn's depiction of Keats listening to the nightingale

 

 

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

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.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
    Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
    Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
    Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
        With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
                And purple-stained mouth;
    That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
        And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
    What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
    Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
    Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
        Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
                And leaden-eyed despairs,
    Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
        Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
    Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
    Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
    And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
        Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
                But here there is no light,
    Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
        Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
    Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
    White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
        Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
                And mid-May's eldest child,
    The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
        The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
    I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
    To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
                In such an ecstasy!
    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
        To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
    No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
    In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
                The same that oft-times hath
    Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
    To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
    As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
    Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
        Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
                In the next valley-glades:
    Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
        Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?
 

 

 

Written in the spring of 1819, this ode was inspired by the song of a nightingale that had built its nest close to the house of a friend in Hampstead. The proper subject of the poem is not so much the bird itself as the poet's aspiration towards a life of beauty away from the oppressing world - a beauty revealed to him for a moment by listening to the bird's song.

The effect of listening to the song of a nightingale is that the poet's heart is full of aching pain and his senses are dulled, owing to the very happy participation in the happiness of the bird. The pain is the outcome of the excessive joy of the poet to think that the nightingale should thus sing in full throated ease in the carefree manner.
"My heart aches and a dowsy numbness pains,
My sense, as though of Hemlock I had drunk."

The 'Ode to a Nightingale' is one of the greatest lyrics in the English language. As Bridges writes- "I could not name an English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this Ode." According to Middleton Murray the poem is unsurpassed in the English language for "sheer loveliness"! The poem represents the fleeting experience of the poet - an intense imaginative experience in which sorrow is fused into joy, and the world of time merges with the world of eternity. It is a romantic poem, but it denies nothing of human experience; it tells the sorrows of life and it reveals lso the bitter human experiences that can be transmuted into beauty, which is truth.

The poem is above all, the high watermark in sensuousness. The poet is keenly susceptible to beauty. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow!

Ode to Autumn/ John Keats

ODE TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

This, the last of Keats' odes was published in 1820. The poem shows Keats in a rich mood of serenity. Autumn is not regarded here as the prelude to winter, but it is a season of mellow fruitfulness - a season of ripeness and fulfilment. The Ode gives a graphic description of the season of autumn with all its richness. The first stanza describes its gifts of ripe fruits and new crops of flowers. The second stanza gives an authentic image of autumn through living personifications like those of a reaper, a gleaner and a wine-grower. The third stanza describes the music of autumn, the plaintive singing of the gnats, the bleating of lambs, the chirp of the crickets and the soft tremble of the red breast.

In the 'Ode to Autumn', Keats wrote a poem which shows Greek spirit and Greek way of writing more than any other poem in the English language. It is classical in the true sense of the word. There is to be found here, no romantic strangeness or mystery, no emotional agitation. Everything is simple, direct and clear, and the poem is pervaded throughout by a mood of serene tranquility. Moreover, the living  personifications of autumn are exactly in the myth-making mode of the ancient Greeks.

The 'Ode to Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' may have a greater appeal by reason of their pathos and glow of emotion, but the 'Ode to Autumn' is unique in its rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness. The exqusite sense of unity and proportion leaving a single art impression, the rich but the subdued melody of the long lines, perfectly adapted tot he mood of brooding and mellow contentment, the wonderful description of Nature for the sake of Nature, tinged with that sweet sensuousness which is a trait in the poet's nature, the charming and vivid personifications of Autumn in the Greek manner, the absence of subjectivity and melancholy- all these fully deserve the eulogy of the subtlest critic. Swinburne speaks of this ode as 'perhaps the nearest to absolute perfection.'!

Relationship and love/ William Wordsworth

 William Wordsworth considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and the most interesting properties of nature. 'The fairest and most interesting properties of nature' are not the most beautiful and most picturesque aspects of natural scenery, but those aspects of the physical world which when they react on the sensitive mind of the poet, produces an awareness of some of the basic laws of the human mind. Wordsworth writes-

"The poet is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love."

As for the poet being 'rock of defence for human nature', this world seems to mean that the poet in virtue of his achievement of this kind of awareness, redeems man from triviality and from selfishness by demonstrating the importance of sympathy and the relation of the individual experiences to the sum of life. Wordsworth further expands-

"The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society."

He does this by revealing hte common psychological laws which underlie all sensation and all sensitivity and revealing it not by abstract discussion but by showing through the persuasive concrete illustration. The poet thus reveals the relationship of men both to each other and to the external world.

For Wordsworth, it is neither the edifying nature of the poet's world, nor the accuracy of his psychological observations, nor the smoothness and agreeableness of his versification which gives him pleasure; it is his ability to body forth in concrete and sensuous terms those basic principles illustrated alike in the mind of man and the workings of nature.

Wordsworth removes the instruction from the 'instruction and delight' formula of many 17th and 18th century critics, but saves himself from falling into a simple hedonistic theory by insisting on the moral dignity of pleasure and its universal significance in man in nature. He resolves the Platonic dilemma in a quiet new way. Poetry is not an imitation of an imitation, but a concrete and sensuous illustration of both a fact and a relationship which provides pleasure and at the same time shows the universal importance of pleasure. It does not debase men by nourishing their passions, for passions are but a means of knowledge. Passion, sensation and pleasure are, under the proper conditions, good and helpful things. conductive to knowledge and to love. It is an answer curiously Platonic in tone, though so un-Platonic in its assumptions.

Study of Social Rituals in Novels of Jane Austen

"A study of Social Rituals, by which I mean events like balls, dinners, evening parties and visits, will help us understand how Jane Austen viewed her society."

Indeed, David Monaghan is correct in his assessment of the imprint of social life in Jane Austen's novels. The social thrust of her novels is made clear by the type of communities in which she chooses to locate them and by the extremely selective way in which these communities are populated. With the exception of 'Emma' in which the action only once strays beyond the confines of Highbury, she does not in fact, stick rigidly to this one type of setting. Nevertheless, Jane Austen is faithful to the spirit of the dictum. Her major characters may move away from the village, but it is within these settings that their values are shaped and their future lies. Thus, the centre of her novels' world are its Bartons, Longbourns, Pemberleys and Mansfield Parks, Not its Londons and Baths.

As Jane Austen herself says about the characters in a novel- "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." In selecting the 'three or four families' around which her representations of village life were to be constructed, Jane Austen did not attempt to present a demographically accurate cross-section but rather to give emphasis to these groups which her contemporaries regarded as most important.

Consequently, her heroines and heroes almost all came from the ranks of the landowners, particularly the gentry-the class to which Jane Austen herself belonged, because these provided society with its moral leadership. The middle classes were not granted any independent moral role, but were expected simply to follow the example set by the landowners. For this reason Austen gives them rather less attention. However, they were important to her because she realised that they had developed an alternative bourgeois ethic that posed a serious threat to the moral authority of the landed classes. Among the most important areJohn Isabella, Lucy and Ann Steele, Mrs Bennet, Mr. Gardiner and Mrs Elton. The lower orders in the 18th century were considered too ignorant to have any conception of the general welfare. Thus, servants, shopkeepers and gypsies appear only on the fringes of Austen's novels and play a little part in the main action.

Jane Austen is obviously not a rebel in the depiction of her characters, but as an intrinsic realist, she depicts her chosen world as it is. It is to this merit in her writings that Compton Rickett praises-"Her compass is not great, but within it she never fails." In a positve way, Austen's characters are distinguished in accordance with the rightness and fineness of their feelings and taste, and taste is a moral quality. The novels have very few characters who enjoy the author's or the reader's entire approvals and her comedies of manners have far more edged satire than unalloyed humor.

It is a prime necessity for readers of Jane Austen to learn her language and not be misled by its smooth surface. She has relatively little interest in her characters' physical appearance, but the language they use is a continual revelation of their cultural and moral standing. Characters who unthinkingly reflect the common values of their world use words with looseness or wrongness that indicate their more or less serious deficiencies. But the author, and the  characters she presents as thoughtful and right-minded, use such terms- simple or complex- with conscious, intelligent correctness and they carry the weight of moral, cultural and social tradition and taste.

 

Revival of Shakespeare in Romantic Era.

It was Madame de Stael who first coined the word "romanticism" in her book on Germany (1813). Her definition occurred in the section on poetry in which she contrasted classical and romantic poetry. She found the basic difference in the artificiality of the classical and naturalness of the romantic poetry. The greatness of the Romantics came from elevating character over action. Placing character in the foreground, they centered their attention upon honour, love and bravery- inshort, upon the internal condition of individuals rather than upon those external forces the ancients thought guided human destiny. This meant the primacy of 'emotion' and 'sentiment', since the human character must be detached from the environment and analyzed in terms of the individual's own emotions.




Madame de Stael's praise for the moderns and hostility toward the ancients epitomized a feeling quite prevalent at the beginning of the century. This was explicit in the plays of the time which tended to become mere vehicles for violent emotions displayed on stage. Oratory and emotion were prized far above well-cnstructed action.. Not the construction of Shakespeare's plays but the ideal of character portrayal which contemporaries saw in him, led to a renewed international popularity of his works. When Shakespeare was first revealed to France in 1827 by kemble and his troupe of actors, the audience was struck by the 'sentiment' and 'emotion' which they contrasted favorably with the great French classical writers like Racine and Corneille. Similarly, the romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare was so great in Germany that by the end of the century one writer wrote a whole book entitled 'Shakesperomania' (1873) in order to save German literature from such contaminating English influence.


Romantics saw in Shakespeare an anticipation of the modern in the arts. He seemed to have put into practice the conceetnration upon the internal condition of man which Madame de Stael had praised. This 'inner man' seemed to be sumsumed under a series of words which the Romantics used constantly: character,emotion, sentiment and soul. Romantics used them to oppose rational systematizing: "He who believes in systems expells love from his heart." Yet, when the consequences which flowed from its view of life are analyzed, it is apparent that romanticism tended to become a system itself.


Excerpts taken from 'The Culture of Western Europe' by George Lachmann Mosse

The Poetry of Life

The Romanticism which became all pervasive in modern European culture was a "mood" that escaped any rigid scheme of classification. That was part of the strength of the movement, for it could change from person to person and combine with various political and social ideals. Romanticism did have one explicit base however-it accorded the greatest importance to the emotions and to the imagination. The feelings of the heart, however irrational, were considered more valid than the thoughts of the head. The enemy was that cold reason which Charles Dickens had symbolized in Scrooge and which had provided the essence of the Enlightenment's hope for a better world. For Romantics, human nature was best descibed through the 'soul' which contained emotions and which furthered imagination. All else was abstract "intellectualizing", typical of people who lacked true emotion and therefore a true soul.




The Romantics themselves summarized their attitude in the phrase "the poetry of life". Not only did this term imply the primacy of poetry as an expression of the human soul, but it also contained a view of an individual's feelings which was central to romanticism. These feelings were thought "private" and "secret", something which only that person who was swayed by them could understand. However, on the surface, the secrecy of the soul was not well maintained by the Romantics. Undoubtedly, Rousseau's 'Confessions' (1783), stimulated the outpouring of their feelings to one another. Rousseau had set out in the very beginning of his book maxims which the Romantics were to imitate: "I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that of man myself."




It is important to note here that the origin of Romanticism lie within the age of reason itself and it was none other than Rousseau who foreshadowed many aspects of this mood. The ideal of the "natural man" which he popularized but which also existed in many other thinkers of the period emphasized that the individual was good and virtuous when removed from the fetters of civilization. In such an ideal state heart and head were unspoilt. For Rousseau and other eighteenth century thinkers this meant that humans were bothe reasonable and virtuous. However, the element of human reason in the state of nature played, for Rousseau, a lesser part than the goodness of the heart. This foreshadowed the romantic belief in the essential rightness and virtue of mankind's proper emotions when they are left to develop freely.




The concept of natural man became a widespread fad in the 18th century. This image was associated with rural life, the kind of Arcadia which writers ahd idealized for centuries. The ideal of natural man associated with rural life was not only a background for the Romantic Movement, but also went into the making of one of the most important preoccupations of the 19th century, indeed of modern times: namely, that the peasant represents the greatest virtues in a society which is growing ever more industrial and urban.