Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson Part 11

McClurg & Co.

NOTES

MICHAEL

The poem was composed in 1800, and published in the second volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the same year. "Written at the Town-end, Grasmere, about the same time as _The Brothers_. The Sheep-fold, on which so much of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and circ.u.mstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields and woodlands on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Grasmere. The name of the Evening Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side of the valley, more to the north."

In a letter to Charles James Fox the poet says: "In the two poems, _The Brothers_ and _Michael_, I have attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections, as I know they exist among a cla.s.s of men who are now almost confined to the north of England. They are small independent _proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . .

Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

Edward Fulton in a _A Selection of the Shorter Poems of Wordsworth_ (Macmillan) says: "The reason Wordsworth succeeds best in describing the type of character portrayed in _Michael_ and _The Brothers_ is, of course, chiefly because he knew that type best; but the fact that it was the type for which he himself might have stood as the representative was not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home; and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith and his never-failing spring of enjoyment, is himself.' Types of character wholly alien to his own have little attraction for him. He is content to look into the depths of his own heart and to represent what he sees there. His field of vision, therefore, is a very limited one: it takes in only a few types. It is _man_, in fact, rather than men, that interests him."

The poem _Michael_ is well adapted to show Wordsworth's powers of realism. He describes the poem as "a pastoral," which at once induces a comparison, greatly to Wordsworth's advantage, with the pseudo-pastorals of the age of Pope. There the shepherds and shepherdesses were scarcely the pale shadows of reality, while Wordsworth's poem never swerves from the line of truth. "The poet," as Sir Henry Taylor says with reference to _Michael_, "writes in his confidence to impart interest to the realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and when this is combined with intensity of observation and peculiarity of language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to rest upon the common realities of life and to dispense with its anomalies." The student should therefore be careful to observe (1) the truth of description, and the appropriateness of the description to the characters; (2) the strong and accurate delineation of the characters themselves. Not only is this to be noted in the pa.s.sages where the poet has taken pains openly to portray their various characteristics, but there are many pa.s.sages, or single lines perhaps, which serve more subtly to delineate them. What proud reserve, what sorrow painfully restrained, the following line, for example, contains: "Two evenings after he had heard the news."

TO THE DAISY

COMPOSED 1802: PUBLISHED 1807

"This and the other poems addressed to the same flower were composed at Town-end, Grasmere, during the earlier part of my residence there." The three poems on the Daisy were the outpourings of one mood, and were prompted by the same spirit which moved him to write his poems of humble life. The sheltered garden flowers have less attraction for him than the common blossoms by the wayside. In their un.o.btrusive humility these "una.s.suming Common-places of Nature" might be regarded, as the poet says, "as administering both to moral and spiritual purposes." The "Lesser Celandine," buffeted by the storm, affords him, on another occasion, a symbol of meek endurance.

Sh.e.l.ley and Keats have many beautiful references to flowers in their poetry. Keats has merely a sensuous delight in their beauty, while Sh.e.l.ley both revels in their hues and fragrance, and sees in them a symbol of transitory loveliness. His _Sensitive Plant_ shows his exquisite sympathy for flower life.

TO THE CUCKOO

COMPOSED IN THE ORCHARD AT TOWN-END 1802: PUBLISHED 1807

Wordsworth, in his Preface to the 1815 edition, has the following note on ll. 3, 4 of the poem:--"This concise interrogation characterises the seeming ubiquity of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of her power, by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight." The cuckoo is the bird we a.s.sociate with the name of the vale of sunshine and of flowers, and yet its wandering voice brings back to him the thought of his vanished childhood. We have already noticed the almost sacred value which Wordsworth attaches to the impressions of his youth, and even to the memory of these impressions which remains with him to console his maturer life. The bird is a link which binds him to his childhood:

"And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again."

In other poems, especially in the _Intimaticns of Immortality_, he speaks of "the glory and the freshness of a dream," which hallowed nature for him as a child, and which grew fainter as the "shades of the prison-house began to close upon the growing Boy".

NUTTING

COMPOSED 1799; PUBLISHED 1800.

"Written in Germany; intended as a part of a poem on my own life, but struck out as not being wanted there. Like most of my schoolfellows, I was an impa.s.sioned Nutter. For this pleasure, the Vale of Esthwaite, abounding in coppice wood, furnished a very wide range. These verses arose out of the remembrance of feelings I had often had when a boy, and particularly in the extensive woods that still stretch from the side of Esthwaite Lake towards Graythwaite."

Wordsworth possessed in an unusual degree the power of reviving the impressions of his youth. Few autobiographical records are so vivid in this respect as his _Prelude_. In his famous ode on the _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, he dwells upon the unreflective exultation which in the child responds to the joyousness of nature, and with a profound intuition that may not be justified in the facts, he sees in this heedless delight a mystical intimation of immortality.

In the poem _Nutting_ the animal exhilaration of boyhood is finely blended with this deeper feeling of mystery. The boy exultingly penetrates into one of those woodland retreats where nature seems to be holding communion with herself. For some moments he is subdued by the beauty of the place, and lying among the flowers he hears with ecstasy the murmur of the stream. Then the spirit of ravage peculiar to boyhood comes over him, and he rudely mars the beauty of the spot:

"And the shady nook Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being:"

Such wantonness seems to his maturer reflection a sacrilege, and even the boy was not insensible to the silent reproach of the "intruding sky."

TOUCH,--FOR THERE IS A SPIRIT IN THE WOODS. Many lines might be quoted from Wordsworth to ill.u.s.trate his theory of the personal attributes of nature. In some of his more elevated pa.s.sages nature in all her processes is regarded as the intimate revelation of the G.o.dhead, the radiant garment in which the Deity clothes Himself that our senses may apprehend Him. Thus, when we touch a tree or a flower we may be said to touch G.o.d himself. In this way the beauty and power of nature become sacred for Wordsworth, and inspired his verse at times with a solemn dignity to which other poets have rarely attained.

The immanence of G.o.d in nature, and yet His superiority to His own revelation of Himself is beautifully expressed in some of the later verses of _Hart Leap Well_:

"The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creatures whom he loves."

Yet the life in nature is capable of multiplying itself infinitely, and each of her manifold divisions possesses a distinctive mood; one might almost say a separate life of its own. It is, in his ability to capture the true emotional mood which clings to some beautiful object or scene in nature, and which that object or scene may truly be said to inspire, that Wordsworth's power lies.

Wordsworth possessed every attribute necessary to the descriptive poet,--subtle powers of observation, ears delicately tuned to seize the very shadow of sound, and a diction of copious strength suggestive beyond the limits of ordinary expression. Yet purely descriptive poetry he scorned. "He expatiated much to me one day," writes Mr. Aubrey de Vere, "as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern poets--one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect [evidently Sir Walter Scott]. 'He took pains,' Wordsworth said; 'he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever struck him most--a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home and wove the whole together into a poetical description.' After a pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a flashing eye and impa.s.sioned voice; 'But Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had pa.s.sed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated; that which remained--the picture surviving in his mind--would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic.

In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.'"

The student should learn to compare the descriptive methods of Coleridge and Wordsworth. See especially Lowell's note quoted on pp. 197-198; also see pp. 47 f.

INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS

This poem was composed at Goslar in 1799 as part of the first book of _The Prelude_ (published in 1850). It was first printed in Coleridge's periodical _The Friend_, in December, 1809, with the instructive though pedantic t.i.tle, "Growth of Genius from the Influences of Natural Objects on the Imagination, in Boyhood and Early Youth." It appeared in Wordsworth's poems of 1815 with the following t.i.tle:--"Influence of Natural Objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth."

The opening verses of this poem are still another instance of the identification of G.o.d with nature. As Mr. Stopford Brooke writes, "we are here in contact with a Person, not with a thought. But who is this person? Is she only the creation of imagination, having no substantive reality beyond the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the living Spirit of G.o.d in the outward world, in order that he may possess a metaphysical thought as a subject for his work as an artist."

_The Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey_ contain the highest expression which Wordsworth has given to this thought, To the heedless animal delight in nature had succeeded a season in his youth when the beauty and power of nature "haunted him like a pa.s.sion," though he knew not why.

The "dizzy rapture" of those moods he can no longer feel. Yet,

"Not for this Faint I nor murmur; other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. _And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things_."

In ll. 42-46, of _The Influence of Natural Objects_, we have an inimitable Wordsworthian effect. Into the midst of his wild sport the voice of Nature steals, and subdues his mind to receive the impulses of peace and beauty from without. We involuntarily think of the boy he has celebrated, his playmate upon Windermere, who loved to rouse the owls with mimic hootings, but

"When a lengthened pause Of silence came and baffled his best skill, Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake."

_The Prelude_, v. 379 f.

ELEGIAC STANZAS

COMPOSED 1805: PUBLISHED 1807.

Further references to John Wordsworth will be found in the following poems:--_To the Daisy_ ("Sweet Flower"), _Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother_, _When to the Attractions of the Busy World_, _The Brothers_, and _The Happy Warrior_.

With lines 33-40, and 57-60, compare the _Intimations of Immortality_, ll. 176-187:--

"What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the gra.s.s, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind."

A BRIEF HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE SONNET