Wordsworth: Nature Poetry And The Nature Of Poetry.

`Wordsworth is often miscast as a nature poet. He is only interested in the natural insofar as it pertains to the human`. Discuss.

One of the most persistent popular and critical truisms regarding Wordsworth is that he is a 'nature poet'. However, while images of the natural are everywhere abundant in Wordsworth's writing, it would be disingenuous and reductive to take this to mean that Wordsworth holds a consistent opinion of nature, or that his work presents nature as existing in a vacuum. Throughout his writing Wordsworth continually interrogates what it is to represent nature in verse, and explores the ways in which the human and the natural overlap and interact. In this sense, to reduce Wordsworth to a highly successful pastoral poet is to ignore the scope of his writing, and a great deal of its nuance. However, to contend that Wordsworth's interest in the natural exists 'only insofar as it pertains to the human' is an equally perilous act of exclusion. Central to any discussion of Wordsworth as a 'nature poet' must be the question of how Wordsworth and his contemporaries actually understood the term 'nature' and the manner in which they employed it. As Ralph Pite notes, the modern view of nature as 'the non-urban or rural' does little justice to the theological, philosophical, political, and psychological values that were attached to the word in contemporary debates. Of these it is perhaps the psychologically expressive capacity of nature which is most frequently played in Wordsworth's work. The psychological focus of Wordsworth's depiction of nature is perhaps best demonstrated by examining the various iterations of The Ruined Cottage, a poem whose revisions likewise serve to reflect Wordsworth's constantly shifting perspective on the natural world. The version of 1797, recorded in a letter by Coleridge strips nature of any sense of plenitude, presenting it as the tangible emblem of the malign forces responsible for Margaret's physical and mental decline. '. for he was gone, whose hand, At the first nipping of October frost, Closed up each chink.' (10th June 1797, ll. 477 - 479)

'. and so she sat Through the long winter, reckless and alone, Till this reft house by frost, and thaw, and rain Was sapped.' (10th June 1797, ll. 480 - 483)

Nature in this context exists in opposition to the human, serving as an equal and opposing force to both Margaret's husband and her belief in his return, aligning the persistent growth of this hope with the encroachment of destructive nature upon her home. However, the addition of a forty line coda in the revised text of what comes to be titled The Ruined Cottage, and the introduction of the figure of the Peddler, a typical Wordsworthian rambler who provides an apparently idealized model of perception and interpretation, displaces the poem's original narrator and prompts the poet figure to reevaluate the role of nature in Margaret's suffering.

The Peddler asserts that the scene is now one of serenity, 'She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.' (The Ruined Cottage, ll. 512), and reformulates the hitherto malicious activities of nature as simply the innocent emanations of an unconscious power, '. the calm oblivious tendencies / Of Nature' (The Ruined Cottage, ll. 504 -505). The activity which prompts this reassessment is one of revisitation, just as it is in Tintern Abbey. The Peddler returns to the site of Margaret's distress and finds himself able to reappraise it, just as he reformulates the language in which her distress was registered;

'Those weeds, and the high speargrass on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er, As once I passed did to my mind convey So still an image of tranquility, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The passing shews of being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream that could not live Where meditation was.' (The Ruined Cottage, ll. 514 - 524)

In this reading of the scene, Margaret's human suffering, indeed the integrity of her very identity, are dismissed as 'all the grief / The passing shews of being leave behind'. The human is displaced in favour of an appreciation of the natural scene's tranquility and stability as expressed in the word 'still'. The multiple senses in which 'still' is employed, capable of suggesting inertia or persistence while at the same time containing the ring of a concession, reformulate lines 486 - 489 of the version from Coleridge's correspondence. '. Yet still She loved this wretched spot, nor would for worlds Have parted hence; and still, that length of road, And this rude beach one torturing hope endeared.' (10th June 1797, ll. 486-489)

Margaret and her surroundings are 'still'; immobile, and fixated to the point of catatonia, yet they also remain, they are 'still' there, just as is Margaret's 'one torturing hope'. Yet, the scene the Peddler constructs is pointedly placid - the tension between the two definitions of 'still' as applied to Margaret's turmoil has been deliberately suppressed.

In this sense, the Peddler is not interested in the natural 'insofar as it pertains to the human', but is interested in the human only insofar as it pertains to nature. However, the distinctly affective and psychologically nuanced impression the reader has received of Margaret is not completely quelled by this refocalisation, and the reader is left to negotiate between which view of nature they wish to endorse, and perhaps to apply the Peddler's comments regarding the 'unworthy eye' to his own perceptive faculties. Wordsworth draws upon the capacity of natural imagery to express both the interior and exterior without privileging one over the other.

Through the person of its narrator, The Thorn likewise enacts a struggle between the natural and the psychological. Though the 'superstitious' narrator apparently seeks to describe the eponymous 'Thorn' and its picturesque surroundings, their attention is continually drawn away from the natural to 'adhere' disquietingly to Martha Ray and her infant. This bifurcation of focus is demonstrated even in the opening six lines of the poem, which employ the incongruous and paradoxical imagistic approach that characterizes many of the poem's most psychologically telling moments: 'There is a Thorn - it looks so old, In truth, you'd find it hard to say How it could ever have been young - It looks so old and grey. Not higher than a two years' child It sands erect, this aged Thorn;' (The Thorn, ll. 1-6)

The tautologous emphasis laid on the Thorn's aged appearance in lines 1-4 and the tendency towards the repetitious these lines display ('. it looks so old . It looks so old and grey...') have the appearance of jarring poetic missteps until they are understood in terms of the paradoxical contrast established in line 5 ('Not higher than a two years' child'). The use of an image of a 'two years' child' to describe an object 'so old and grey' that the narrator finds impossible to imagine its every having been young is deliberately and productively incongruous.

It is a metaphor which seems to flow in reverse, enacting an inversion of perception by focalizing the reader's attention on its vehicle rather than its tenor. Far from providing a clearer sense of the Thorn's appearance, it instead establishes the image of the two years' child in the mind of the reader, just as throughout the poem images of natural objects (the 'erect. stone' of line 10, the 'Pond' of lines 30 -33, or the 'heap' of line 36) are used to concentrate attention on Martha Ray's infant. The 'malfunction' of the metaphor then serves at once as a structural rendering of the narrator's thought-process, foregrounding the tendency towards monomania that will serve as the poem's unspoken focus, while likewise serving as an indication that the focus of the poem is as much the nature of perceptive activity as the natural objects on which such activity centers. In this sense The Thorn recalls the Pedlar's warning to the poet in The Ruined Cottage against reading 'the form of things with an unworthy eye' (ll. 509 - 510), by demonstrating the effect of such an eye on apparently benign images of nature.

In contrast to The Thorn, the narrator of Lines Written in Early Spring is at once ecstatically and painfully aware of their inability to render the natural in language.

'The birds around me hopped and played: Their thoughts I cannot measure - But the least motion which they made, It seemed a thrill of pleasure.' (Lines Written in Early Spring 13 - 16)

The narrator is held at one remove from the inner life of the scene they observe, striking a perceptive barrier just as the reader's eye must contend not only with the line-ending, but the dash ('-') following 'measure'. Yet, though they are frustrated by their inability to probe and quantify the natural phenomena that surround them, the narrator is equally aware that this inscrutability is exactly what gives nature its validity. Experience of nature is here presented as a contention rather than a fact, the 'thrill of pleasure' is felt as semblance rather than certainty, and the ascri ption of meaning to the scene is given a decidedly tentative quality.

What the narrator of the Lines seeks then is not simply to express the extent to which nature 'pertains to the human' but to explore the ways in which humanity strives to make nature pertinent to itself. Thus, the existence of the 'pleasure' the narrator detects in the bower is a matter of 'faith' and the product of concerted effort:

'And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.' (Lines Written in Early Spring 11 - 12)

'And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.' (Lines Written in Early Spring 19 - 20)

The ambiguity of 'do all I can' in line 19 is a telling reflection of the uncertain agency at work in the narrator's perception of the scene. Syntactically, 'do all I can' may act as an extension of 'I must', and thus as an emphatic statement of intent or a revision of 'think', or it may serve to oppose it, implying that despite their best efforts the narrator must concede that 'there was pleasure there'. In the first formulation it is the narrator who has willed the pleasure into being, in the second it is nature that has forced the perception onto the narrator. Rather than excluding either reading, Wordsworth allows both to productively coexist just as the narrator's construction of the scene sits in tension with the reality of the scene itself.

The quality of relationship that the narrator imagines to exist within the poem between its various subjects chimes more broadly with the way in which Wordsworth conceptualizes an expresses interrelation throughout his work. The poem opens in a 'blended' harmony;

'I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.' (Lines Written in Early Spring 1 - 4)

The blending of the notes seems to be mirrored in the mingling of the emotions the narrator experiences. However, this 'blending' is more marked than it at first appears, operating across the unstopped line ending in a manner which is surprising without being jarring or incongruous. Reading 'In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts' prompts the assumption that a phrase such as 'Impress themselves upon the mind' will complete the image of the narrator's harmonious contemplation in the following line.

However, Wordsworth wrong-foots expectation with the evocation of 'sad thoughts', establishing the interplay of pleasure and melancholy that will recur throughout the poem. Nature here suggests a mode of interrelationship that respects both particularity and unity, allowing the constituent elements of a scene or experience to be highlighted without being hermeticised. It is this 'blending' of various 'distinct' yet connected elements which Wordsworth chastises Macpherson for effacing in 1815:

'In nature every thing is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work, it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, - yet nothing distinct.' (Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, 1815)

It is worth noting the appropriateness of the contemporary spelling of 'every thing' - the division maintained between 'every' and 'thing' at once emphasizing the distinctness of all things, whilst still maintaining their interconnectedness.

A similar process of harmonious 'blending' manifests itself in Home at Grasmere. Like so much of the natural world Wordsworth encounters in The Prelude, the landscape of Grasmere is figured in poetically charged terms:

'Dreamlike the blending also of the whole Harmonious Landscape, all along the shore The boundary lost - the line invisible That parts the image from reality;' (Home at Grasmere 574 - 577)

The quantification and division of natural space which constitute such frequent concerns for Wordsworth are here figured in terms of literary division. The unstopped lines blend together with the same 'dreamlike' unity that Wordsworth perceives in the 'Harmonious Landscape'. Yet, as Christopher Ricks points out in his survey of the Wordsworthian line ending A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines, this is a passage which is concerned with the 'lost' boundaries which constitute such unity. The distinction Ricks highlights between the 'line invisible' (the almost metaphysical 'white space' between lines) and the visible dash is expressed without interrupting the flow of thought between lines 576 and 577. Tellingly, the dash itself here serves to evoke the 'boundary lost' even while at the same time connecting it with 'the line invisible'; it represents not only a boundary, but a point of intersection. As Ricks notes,

'Such a gentle transfer of energies must be both effected and symbolized in the transfer of energies from one line to another in such a passage.'

For Wordsworth then, nature is not simply a force acting upon humanity, interesting only insofar as it does so, but instead represents an aesthetic principle in itself. Its transitions come with 'the gentle shock of mild surprise' (The Prelude, v ll. 407), neither annihilating what is particular nor wrenching apart what has been blended.

Though Wordsworth's depictions of nature undeniably turn back to reflect upon the human, they rarely limit themselves to simple acts of pathetic fallacy or emotional analogy. The poet's engagement with nature is frequently presented as an exploration of the perceptive process, its psychological ramifications, and its aesthetic implications, and Wordsworth continually seeks to foreground what is at stake in positioning oneself in relation to nature. In this sense, Wordsworth is invested in exploring the ways in which the human and the natural pertain to one another, and the role of the poet in enabling, and explicating that pertinence.