William Wordsworth: a Snapshot of a Mind Out of Time

Born April 7, 1770 in Cooksmouth, Cumberland, William Wordsworth was the second son of attorney John Wordsworth. “Unlike the other major English romantic poets, he enjoyed a happy childhood under the loving care of his mother and in close intimacy with his younger sister Dorothy (1771-1855)” (Encyclopedia of World Biography). Wordsworth and his siblings, after the death of their mother in 1778, were cared for by Christopher Cookson their maternal uncle. Life in the foster home was happy, at least until the death of their father in 1783, at which point the financial situation of the Cookson house became very bleak, because Sir John Lowther, who owed their father more than £4000 in back-pay, refused to settle the debt with their uncle, causing great hardship for the family (Literary Encyclopedia).

In his youth Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where he fell in love with literature especially “the divine John Milton”. In his early adult life he attended university at St. John’s College in Cambridge, returning each summer to Cumberland — to the nature he loved so much. After he graduated from Cambridge he toured France, Switzerland, and Italy. Wordsworth — the “young idealist” was greatly impacted by his trek through France during a period of great “revolutionary fervor” (Enc. of World Biography).

Wordsworth was first published with his poems Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk in 1793. However, these preliminary works are hardly representative of the greatness he would later achieve. In 1798, Wordsworth, along with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of works which was later described as a challenge to “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” (Enc. of World Biography). Most memorable from this collection is “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” better remembered by its shortened title “Tintern Abbey”, which is a medium length poem in blank verse iambic pentameter (Enc. of World Biography and “Tintern Abbey”). Thomas J. Brennan writes in his article “Wordsworth’s TINTERN ABBEY” that Wordsworth, in his poem, takes the ruin of the ancient abbey as a “central metaphor” for how he understood himself (15). In the poem, Wordsworth implies that as he has matured, so to has his experience of remembered things dulled — no longer does he envision his native land with the same passion he did in his youth. Yet he projects the intense emotions of his youth onto Dorothy his younger sister and offers a prayer that she may not dull as he has dulled (“Tintern Abbey”).

Despite what is considered today a breathtaking style, Wordsworth’s simplicity was not well received in his time, and his publications often failed to captivate his contemporary readers as they captivate us today. His works often “were mercilessly lampooned by critics as examples of the poet’s obsession with simplicity”. Wordsworth’s poetry, however, soon took root among readers of the nineteenth century, who struggled with the difficulties of the industrial revolution. It is for this ‘simplification of poetic style’ that Wordsworth is best known and remembered among writers of his period and genre (Literary Encyclopedia).

Though Wordsworth’s poetry is characteristically ‘simple’ it is by no means ‘plain’. True to the Romantic period, Wordsworth often uses emotion in describing his subjects. However, he is stylistically different from other Romantics. This is especially true when he writes about nature. Rarely using “simple descriptions”, “Wordsworth concentrates on the ways in which he responds and relates to the world”, using “his poetry to look at the relationships between nature and human life” and time. He believed that the experience of time in the realm of being is one of the greatest influences on our lives — both emotional and spiritual (“Wordsworth’s Themes”). “For Wordsworth, time is a necessary part of the human experience, and in the progression of time in human existence we find beauty and truth and meaning and ultimately — joy” (Peters 78).

So it is in “Tintern Abbey” that “human time” is portrayed as the principle of growth, whereas nature is relegated more or less to what Regueiro calls the “realm of being”. Regueiro goes on to say that “wholeness of being”, for Wordsworth, is not achieved by transcending time, but by going beyond nature, even if only by reflection and contemplation (Regueiro 59).

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into purer mind,

With tranquil restoration… (“Tintern Abbey” lines: 23-30)

It is in this way that Wordsworth’s metaphor seems to be unique, that it is softened and introduced through the use of structure and that it brings us into Wordsworth’s worldview. A worldview in which the ideas of “animate and inanimate realms” are blurred (Murray 7).

…Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul... [Italics mine] (“Tintern Abbey” lines: 43-46)

Here the juxtaposition of life and death — a life giving death, obscures the distinction between the physical (what Murray considers the animate) and the spiritual (inanimate), the eminent and the transcendent, the terminal and the eternal.

Wordsworth continues, in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, to reflect on the fact that the human senses are totally insufficient for the spiritual needs of life (Groom 94). And, as it were, he extracts himself from time, in the beginning of his reflection, and places himself in a scene, which is not unlike that of many creation myths and which bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Ferguson138-139).

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream…

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare. (“Ode: Intimations on Immortality” lines: 1-5 and 10-13)

In her essay “The ‘Immortality Ode’”, Frances Ferguson suggests that for Wordsworth perfection is found in the “mind standing outside of itself” and that “the project of seeking a reflective vision of thought in its pastness is a self-dooming one” loosing all objectivity (Ferguson 137-141). Yet for Wordsworth, this remained a source of perturbation as he writes in Book XII of The Prelude: “Open; I would approach them, but they close / I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, / May scarcely see at all;…” (XII, 30-32). It was his drive to integrate this philosophy that lead to his highly simplified and structured style.

Works Cited

Brennan, Thomas J. (1). "Wordsworth's TINTERN ABBEY." Explicator 63.1 (2004): 13-15. Literary Reference Center. 26 October 2006. http://search.ebscohost.com.

Ferguson, Frances. “The ‘Immortality Ode’”. William Wordsworth. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. 137-150.

Groom, Bernard. The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966.

Murray, Roger N. Wordsworth’s Style. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

Peters, John G. "Wordsworth's TINTERN ABBEY." Explicator 61.2 (2003): 77. Academic Search Premier. 29 November 2006. http://search.ebscohost.com.

Regueiro, Helen. The Limits of Imagination: Wordsworth, Yeats, and Stevens. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” The Cornell Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800. Ed. James Butler and Karen Greene. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 116-120.

---. The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1805.

---. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”. The Oxford Book of EnglishVerse: 1250-1900. Ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919. 536

"Wordsworth, William." Literary Encyclopedia (2005): 1. Literary Reference Center. 25 October 2006. http://search.ebscohost.com.

“Wordsworth, William.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2^nd Ed. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.