WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND NATURE

 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND NATURE

English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850] is recognized hed as the greatest Nature poet of England. His close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also a lover of not only nature but also supernaturalism. They together wrote Lyrical Ballads, which was first published in 1798 and marked the beginning of romantic movement in literature. Their predecessors William Cowper, Robert Burns and William Blake had also been inspired by Nature, but more  than they their close contemporaries Lord Byron, John Keats and P.B. Shelley turned out to be  great lovers of Nature.  

            The principal object of Lyrical Ballads, said Wordsworth  was to write poems with incidents and situations from common life described in a language actually used by men. Both he and Coleridge chose humble and rustic life because in that condition the essential nature of humanity found a more congenial soil.

            Wordsworth worshipped Nature not for its physical beauty but because he saw in it the innate spirit of  the Supreme Being. Nature in his view was a perfect all-round teacher.  As a character says in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It”, Wordsworth also found: tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.    

                    Nature, as a teacher,  finds mention in many places in Wordsworth’s poetry including Lucy poems. At one place, he says a linnet, the small song bird, imparts more wisdom to a listener than a whole book on the subject does to a scholar.

                 Finally, the following words of Wordsworth in support of his thesis that Nature is a unique moral and spiritual teacher:

                 One impulse from a vernal wood

                 May teach you more of man;

                Of moral evil and of good,

                Than all the sages can.

                                                ******

G. R. Kanwal

20^th August 2023