| William Wordsworth is the Romantic poet most often described
as a "nature" writer; what the word "nature" meant to Wordsworth is, however,
a complex issue. On the one hand, Wordsworth was the quintessential poet
as naturalist, always paying close attention to details of the physical
environment around him (plants, animals, geography, weather). At the same
time, Wordsworth was a self-consciously literary artist who described "the
mind of man" as the "main haunt and region of [his] song." This tension
between objective describer of the natural scene and subjective shaper
of sensory experience is partly the result of Wordsworth's view of the
mind as "creator and receiver both." Wordsworth consistently describes
his own mind as the recipient of external sensations which are then rendered
into its own mental creations. (Shelley
made a related claim in "Mont
Blanc" when he said that his mind "passively / Now renders and receives,
fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear
universe of things around".) Such an alliance of the inner life with the
outer world is at the heart of Wordsworth's descriptions of nature. Wordsworth's
ideas about memory, the importance of childhood experiences, and the power
of the mind to bestow an "auxiliar" light on the objects it beholds all
depend on this ability to record experiences carefully at the moment of
observation but then to shape those same experiences in the mind over time.
We should also recall, however, that he made widespread use of other texts
in the production of his Wordsworthian (Keats said "egotistical") sublime:
drafts of poems by Coleridge,
his sister Dorothy's
Journals, the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson,
and countless others. Wordsworthian "nature" emerges as much a product
of his widespead reading as of his wanderings amid the affecting landscapes
of the Lake District.
His poems often present an instant when nature speaks to him
and he responds by speaking for nature. The language of nature in
such instances is, like the language Wordsworth uses to record such events,
often cryptic and enigmatic. The owls in the often-quoted "Boy
of Winander" |
| Wordsworth on the natural world (poetry and prose)
Erasmus Darwin in "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" Wordsworth's Complete Poems (Columbia)
|
passage
of The Prelude hoot to a Wordsworthian child who answers first in
their owl-language and then with a poem that records only the mirroring
image of an "uncertain heaven," the dark sky reflected in a still silent
lake. Wordsworth longs for a version of nature that will redeem him from
the vagaries of passing moments, but he usually records those natural phenomena
that promise only the passing of time and the cyclical transience of natural
process. "