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Besides praises
nature, he also attempts to discuss his relationship with nature. That is
his growth with nature. Both his Tintern Abbey and The Prelude
show his growth with nature, his relationship with nature. In the Tintern
Abbey which is the last poem in Lyrical Ballads and the best of
his lyrics, he shows his reaction towards nature in the process of growth:
the childhood is “The coarser pleasure of my boyish days, and their glad
animal movements”; while the youth is:
“a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm;
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.”
Compared to the first two periods, his third period is
“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,
…………
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
…………
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, --both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
The Prelude
The Prelude
which opens a new form of autobiography in English, that is poem, carefully
records poet’s spiritual journey from childhood to his maturity; covers his
boyhood, school days, years at Cambridge, his first visit to France and the
experience of his living in France during the Revolution, and his sentiment
towards these various experiences. The poem illustrates Wordsworth’s
transition from an enthusiastic Revolutionary figure to a conservative: the
reasons that made him become a Republican in Paris and then made him
disillusioned.
However, the Revolutionary theme is only a part, the growth of mind is more
important: how his crisis in mind lessened, how nature cured his trauma and
recovered his poetic ability, what pushed his entering into the highest mind
state: tenderness. In addition, the success of The Prelude was also
because it successfully combined autobiography and philosophy together, the
co-existence, through the changing or combining of various episodes, melting
into a sound symphony.
Nearly all Wordsworth’s good poetry was composed between 1798 and 1807.
Although it is only 10 years, because of his great harvest in these
years—his fresh poems that break the ice of neo-Classicism, and his literary
principles, which played as the milestone in English literary history, he
had become the pride of English Romanticism and one of the best poets in
English literature.
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