Nature in Wordsworth: A List

In discussing the many different "natures" found in Wordsworth's poetry and prose, we were moving pretty fast (or rather maybe it was I who was moving pretty fast) through the corpus of early Wordsworth. Below is an extempore walk-through the selections in the Longman Anthology with some brief notes about the nature (or natures) found in Wordsworth.

Simon Lee: simple nature of common people (Simon Lee); what man has made of man (last two lines)

We are seven: simple nature of common people (little girl); "She was wildly clad"; "For this, for everything, we are out of tune" (a line from the Wordsworth sonnet "The world is too much with us late and soon" that sums up the mood of the poem)

Lines written in early spring: active nature; sentient nature; link, wreathes, blended; "cannot measure"; "every flower enjoys the air it breathes"; "The budding twigs spread out their fan, / To catch the breezy air"; "what man has made of man

The Thorn: Nature as opposition ("the mosses creep, / And this poor thorn they clasp it round / So close, you'd say that they were bent / With plain and manifest intent, / To drag it to the ground"; Nature as strong and indifferent ("oft the stormy gale / Cuts like a scythe"); natural beauty or human depravity (flowers cover "infant's grave"?); Nature not indifferent? ("And she is known to every star, / And every wind that blows"); blank and unreadable ("I cannot tell, I wish I could", "No more I know, I wish I did", "I cannot tell how this may be"); Nature/human (he mistakes Martha Ray for a stone); blankness and ineffability, silence in the face of suffering and the unknowable ("I did not speak--I saw her face, / Her face it was enough for me")

Expostulation and Reply: wise passiveness; we think "nothing will come" unless we seek it (the inquiry and mastery of science?); instead passivity ("The eye it cannot chuse but see"); how do we "know" Nature? through probing its mysteries with filthy hands (to paraphrase Victor Frankenstein)?

The Tables Turned: nature as source of wisdom; let Nature be your teacher; "Spontaneous wisdom" (what is that?); "One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good /Than all the sages can"; our "meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things" (recall Tintern Abbey); we murder to dissect; watch and receive (more passivity)

Old Man Travelling: old man like nature itself; passivity; "insensibly subdued"; the birds "regard him not"

Tintern Abbey:
verse paragraph 1--the visible scene, once again, presence, impress, connect, lose themselves; sensory description of the scene as "landscape"; emphasis on deictics (this, these, words that anchor us in the present moment and scene, that are almost like pointing words)
verse paragraph 2--forms lead to memory lead to sensations leads to restoration leads to influence of best portion of life leads to maybe something more, the sublime, the burden of the mystery, the serene and blessed mood where we see into the life of things
verse paragraph 3--the contrasting world outside (fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world) but the power of memory to restore us
verse paragraph 4--not just traveling in space (from this scene back to the city and then back to this scene) but also in time from this moment back to prior moments and prior visits; memory and identity, the self as not just this-me but these-me's all taken together; the prior self as unworthy; love of nature as appetite and passion (consuming?); love of nature purely sensual ("that had no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrowed from the eye"); other gifts have followed, a presence that disturbs, something far more deeply interfused that is in the world and in the human mind; therefore, (i.e. my argument is concluded) am I still a lover of nature, where nature is both what we half create (the mind and imagination making sense and meaning out of sensory data) and half perceive (the sensory data); in Nature and the language of the sense is the anchor of our moral being;
verse paragraph 5--turn to Dorothy (what some critics call the colonizing of her mind, but you don't have to see it that way); she an earlier version of himself--glad animal passions? the poet's second self? transmission and inheritance; Nature never did betray the heart that loved her; protects us; this moment/memory/place and its tranquil restoration set in opposition to the world to which we must return ("evil tongues, / Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, / Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all / The dreary intercourse of daily life"); language of devotion (worshipper, service, zeal, holier); final return to the landscape ("this pastoral landscape")

There was a boy: we talked about this one; we left off with de Man but we probably should have returned to Fry. De Man leaves us contemplating the silence and the void, the existential abyss of the homeless human in a godless universe. Other critics would have us focus less on silence as deprivation and absence and more on silence as necessary precondition to enlightenment (with an eye made quiet we see into the life of things). When all is silent, then and only then does the visible scene enter into his mind, another kind of reciprocity that goes beyond interchange and becomes something like the loss of boundaries, not the human and nature as separate--in other words an encounter with the sublime.

Strange fits of passion have I known: natural world as symbol system; he sees the moon set and imagines the death of the girl

She dwelt among th' untrodden ways: rustic wildness here figured not as source of wisdom, but lonely and blank

A slumber did my spirit seal: elemental blank; what exactly are "human fears"? full of hesitation and hedging "She seem'd a thing that could not feel"; the girl's death unstated (occurs in the blank space between the two stanzas); she is part of nature where nature is reduced to its most elemental--no motion and no force (almost Newtonian); like us all, rolled around in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees (note the absence of humans and animals)

Lucy Gray: a folk ballad about the death of a little girl; she (like Luke) is a child called too early to duty; instead of death as absence, abyss, annihilation, the folk tale transforms her into an active presence in nature; she returns to the "wild"; she is Nature or part of Nature; her song is the whistling wind

Poor Susan: the country and the city; the girl in the city has a momentary vision of the country; but unlike Tintern Abbey and others her memories of Nature do not provide tranquil restoration nor do they protect her from the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world

Nutting: we discussed this in class

Three years she grew in sun and shower: a tale of 'fancy'; Nature as goddess mother who will 'adopt' the little girl and raise her; the girl will come to feel nature's power and know nature's calm; blendings and interchanges in lines such as "And beauty born of murmuring sound / Shall pass into her face" (water => sound => Nature => face => beauty); but the last stanza shows this all to be a fantasy, like the folk story told of Lucy Gray, the little girl lost in the snow who didn't die but still wanders the moors; here the little girl is dead ("She died") quite matter-of-factly and the poem has been a seduction, a teasing away of death. Actual death leaves heath, clam, quiet, memory, and absence.

The Old Cumberland Beggar: the 'ecology' of the beggar, part of the environment (he is fed by the villagers and he in turn (unintentionally) feeds the birds) and part of the economy (he reminds people of charity and allows even the poorest to feel their boons); Nature's law, that no creature is divorced from good; interconnections ("we have all of us one human heart")

Michael: partially discussed in class; it would take me an hour to type up even general notes and this 'brief' post has already gotten out of hand.