![]() ![]() However, he later fell out with Coleridge, and his poetic creativity dried up in his thirties much of his best work was written before 1807. Lyrical Ballads heralded the arrival of English Romanticism in poetry, and Wordsworth added a famous preface to the collection when it was reprinted in 1800. Wordsworth is often looking back to his childhood, and nowhere more so than in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805 revised 1850). One of his most famous statements is ‘ the child is father of the man’, which asserts that our childhood years are so formative that they determine the adult we become. Wordsworth’s themes are nature and the English countryside, the place of the individual within the world, and memory: especially childhood memory. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the leading poets of English Romanticism, and, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, is regarded as one of the ‘Lake Poets’: poets so named because of their associations with the Lake District in Cumbria in northern England. The rhyme scheme is abab throughout, with these alternating rhymes operating like the to-and-fro of the poet’s thoughts as he ponders nature and man. He is happy among nature, but the behaviour of humankind troubles him. ![]() Why should Wordsworth wish to do this? The answer may lie in the recurring refrain ‘What man has made of man’, which concludes the second and final stanzas (it has shifted to a question by the final stanza, of course) of the poem. Wordsworth was fond of the iambic metre, since it allowed him to write in something that roughly approximated natural human speech (a key part of his mission as a writer for ‘ordinary men’), but that shorter final line brings us up short. In THAT / sweet MOOD / when PLEA / -sant THOUGHTS I HEARD / a THOU / -sand BLEND / -ed NOTES, We can see this from the first stanza (where the stressed syllables are highlighted in capitals): ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ is written in iambic tetrameter, meaning there are four iambs (ti-TUM) per line – but the last line of each stanza is shorter, and has just three iambs (iambic trimeter). ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’: metre and stanza formĪ note on the metre and rhyme scheme of the poem. This note is included in the excellent edition of Wordsworth’s poems, The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics). ![]() The brook fell down a sloping rock so as to make a waterfall considerable for that country, and, across the pool below, had fallen a tree, an ash if I rightly remember, from which rose perpendicularly boughs in search of light intercepted by the deep shade above. ![]() As it stands, the poem becomes timeless through its vagueness.įorty years on, Wordsworth was to recall of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’:Īctually composed while I was sitting by the side of the brook that runs down from the Comb, in which stands the village of Alford, through the grounds of Alfoxden. What precisely ‘man has made of man’ is unstated, and that’s probably for the best: to be explicit about how Wordsworth feels man has failed his fellow man – whether through allowing his fellow humans to starve from poverty and exploitation, or through reverting to savage violence (the poem was written against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, which followed hot on the heels of the Reign of Terror) – would be to limit the poem and to make it too time-specific. This is a pre-Darwinian world – although, interestingly, Wordsworth’s friend Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, would publish a book called The Temple of Nature in 1803, just five years after ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, which proposed a remarkably proto-Darwinian (the other one, that is) view of nature, and contained the couplet:įrom Hunger’s arms the shafts of Death are hurl’d,Īnd one great Slaughter-house the warring world!īut that’s all by the by: the point is that Wordsworth, in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, presents the natural world of birds and flowers as one of calm agreement and pleasure, contrasted with the implied failure of mankind to live up to such a model. The world of nature, in Wordsworth’s poem, is depicted as cooperative and pleasurable – there is none of the ‘ Nature red in tooth and claw’ that we get from Tennyson just over half a century later, in the wake of geological discoveries that cast doubt over the heaven-sent view of nature Wordsworth espouses. ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’: analysis Wordsworth ends by reasserting his lament about ‘what man has made of man’. This is the way nature is, and nature, in being the work of God, is like this for a reason. The birds, and the twigs on the trees, seem to exist in a world of pleasure – at least, Wordsworth decides he must tell himself that this is so. ![]()
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