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.'

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.