Marked by the worshop of nature and by the sympathy with the lives of simple,rural folk central to the work of the English romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Wordsworth's feelings and thoughts about nature find their fullest expression perhaps in "Tintern Abbey", a poem in his first book, "Lyrical Ballads", published in 1798. In that poem he traces his developing response to nature. When he was a boy, he reacted with sheer animal spirits.
I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
In Wordsworth's poems, nature exerts a beneficient influence, whether in remembered images that "flash upon the inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude" (from The Daffodils), or in the formation of character of those who live in rural places and follow simple rural pursuits (The Lucy Poems, "Michael", "The Leech Gatherer", "The Solitary Reaper".) It follows that Wordsworth cried out against the baleful influence of industrialization, as in the sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
~Facts on File
