Saturday, November 5, 2022

Paper : 3 Assignment : Wordsworth's life and Nature in his poems

 Paper : 103 Assignment :

Worsworth's life and Nature in his poems



Name - Hina Parmar

Batch - M.A. Sem 1 (2022-2024)

Enrollment no - 40692064202221

Roll no - 11

Subject code - 22394

Paper no - 103

Paper - Literature of the Romantics

Email address - hinaparmar612@gmail.com

Submitted to - Smt.S.B. Gardi Department of English M.K.B.U.

Date of submission - 7 th November, 2022



This blog is Assignment given by Dr.Dilip Barad sir H.O.D of English Department M.K.B.U. In this blog I write about Wordsworth's life and "Nature" in his poems. 



Worsworth's life



Wordsworth was the most important figure in English History.  He was regarded as the most celebrated and influential Romantic English poet of his time. He was the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton. He was born in 1770 at Cockmouth in the country of Cumberland. Wordworth was the second eldest of five children. His father was a lawyer and also land agent for Sir James Lowthen. William  had a special connection with his sister Dorothy. They are special friends and they roamed the woods and valleys of the local Derwent river. 



When William was eight years old his mother died because of pneumonia. The following year William was sent to  Hawkshead Grammar School,  which is near Lake Windermere. William received great freedom at this school. He roamed the countryside and he boated, fished and many times he spent the night  alone in the forest.  The great biographical poem of his life is "The prelude", he wrote this poem to recall  the winter when the lakes were frozen over he went skating on them. 


All  with steel, 

We biss'd along the polish'd ice, in games

Confederate,imitative of the 

And woodland pleasures, the resounding born, 

The pack loud bellowing, and the bunted bare.


" Lakeland poets " was a group that is widely credited in the English Romantic Movement, in this group there were William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Coleridge. Romantic movement was characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment, it was focused on reason, logic, and structure. On the other hand, Romanticism focuses on emotion and imagination. The poets who emphasize man's connection with nature are called "nature poets". Wordsworth was considered a nature poet; he addressed this connection in his three poems, "Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey", "Ode intimations of immortality" and "I wandered lonely as a cloud". William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats.


 Higher education and Works



In 1791 he pursued a  BA degree at Cambridge, then he returned to France to spend a year there. This was the period when most revolutionary events happened in France, and this was an important period of his life. Wordsworth was fired by a deep and passionate faith in the Revolution, he fell in love with Annette Vallon. In 1792 he had a daughter Caroline by her.  He wanted to marry her but he ran out of money , his uncle refused to provide him money for his residence abroad. At the age of 23, in January 1793 he published two poems; these poems established him as a poet. This poems were written in heroic couplets, in the eighteenth century tradition, 


"An Evening Walk"

"Descriptive sketches"


The period 1793-95 was one of depression for Wordsworth, this was his great unhappiness and uncertainty about his professional future. When the French Revolution passed into terror he lost his trust in immediate social reform, and turned to abstract meditation on man and society.


In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, with few poems anonymously. After Wordsworth's death, his wife published a preface, which is known as "poems for Coleridge ''. 


wordsworth as conservative person


The great production of his early and middle years was now over, and Wordsworth turned into a patriotic, conservative public man. He was honored by the universities of Durham in 1838  and Oxford in 1839, and in 1842 he received a Civil list pension of 300 a year, and in 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey as poet Laureate (1843-1850). He died at Rydal mount in April 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard.


Worsworth's Marriage life-


Wordsworth lost his brother John at sea in 1805, which came as cruel below, and he also lost his two children in 1812. He also faced physical deterioration of Coleridge.

Wordsworth's married and domestic life is considered a happy life. His another disappointment for some time came from Coleridge in 1810. 


Poetic works


His major early single works are 



Poem

Year

Description

An Evening Walk

1793

A poem in heroic couplets and a conventional attempt in the picturesque and sublime.

Descriptive Sketches

1793

A poem in heroic couplets and an attempt at and sublime

Guilt and sorrow

1793-4

Lyrical Ballads

The waggoner

1805-1819

Completed in 1805 and published in 1819

Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse

1798-1819

Composed in 1798 and published in 1819

The Ruined Cottage

1797-98, 1814

Included in "The Excursion" in 1814


Wordsworth's longer poems and Dramatic works



Longer poems

Dramatic works

The White Doe (1815)

The Borderers, composed in 1796-7 published in 1842)

The River Duddon (1820)


Ecclesiastical Sketches(1822)


Memorials of a Tour in the Continent (1822)


Yellow Revisited (1835)


Poems (collected editions of 1827, 1832, 1836-37, 1849)




His prose works and Travel Book


"Lyrical Ballads' ' (1800) is his Essay.

"A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England '' written in 1810 is his Travel book.


His style


Wordsworth's writing style is simple but wonderfully  directed. He uses a language that is "Really spoken by men ''. He was "regarded as a common inheritance of poets' ', he largely used language that was not to decorate his experience but to record it. Wordsworth most of ideas were simple; he waved his ideas through his poetic work, in his poems he included the natural world, religion, morality, mortality, memory, and also served the power of the human mind. In his work there is the lack of obvious literary artifice. His method of writing poetry shows simplicity and clarity. 


Nature in Wordsworth's poems-


William Wordsworth was  one of the prominent poets of romantic poetry. He always tries to build a better future for the world. That's why he expressed his feelings in the natural world rather than in reason. The French revolution made him use writing as self defense of war and returning to nature.in his writing he used simple language to describe geographical places or special places. William Wordsworth's description of nature was not the nature of Darwin, Isaac Newton, or neither the nature of Stephen Hawking. His nature created in his mind, his desire for writing, upbringing in the middle class, and his education at Cambridge. Wordsworth strongly believed that  there is a relationship between human and nature. In the nineteenth century he created a new version of nature "It was mostly male, white, upper middle class, very literary, and romantic". Wordsworth has a personal experience about nature everywhere, he said behind each his poem has a valuable purpose. He was regarded as a great poet of nature because most of his poems represent human beings' dependence on nature. 




One of his poems "The world is too much with us" which was written in 1802 and it was published in 1807. In this poem he denies the elements of nature because he was frustrated with humans ' treatment of nature. These three poems express his feelings of nature in different ways.


The world is too much with us; late and soon 

 Getting and spending, we lay waste our power: 

Little we see in nature that is our;

 We have given our hearts a way, 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,


In another poem which was "The prelude", "Lines written in Early spring" Wordworth described nature as being loyal to man.


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. 

To her fair works did nature link  

The human soul that through me ran; 

And much it grieved my heart to think  What man has made of man?


Another one of the shortest poems "The Tables Turned ". Wordsworth strongly believes in the power of nature and this poem is a good example of that thing.


Up! Up! My friend, and quit your books; 

Or surely you‘ll grow double: 

Up! Up! My friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?



Here is a table of William Wordsworth selected poems entitled in london, 1802. This table includes the element of nature and its meaning .



Elements of Nature

Literal meaning

Figurative meaning

Fen / of stagnant waters

A type of wetland in a ground water

Thing that rotten in the state of England

Star

Stars are planet, like Venus, Mars

Stars are far from earth, Consist of hard material and shining in the sky

For intelligence people starrs are famous people.

Sea

Sea is large place of the world

Sea consist of water containing salt

Sea as something unpredictable

Sea as mysterious of thing

Heaven

Distant sky in which the sun, moon, star

The afterlife

The religion

And the purity of something



The word star symbolizes awesomeness, it shows that Milton's "soul was like a star" and was separate from all the rest of the people in the world. The other symbol sea describes the artistic voice of milton. Wordsworth expresses the power of Milton's "voice" in his simile, in which he compares it to sea. The last symbol of heaven represented the purity  of his ability in his poems. 


The feeling of William Wordsworth of nature in his poem "My Heart Leap Up"


My heart leaps up when I behold  

A rainbow in the sky: 

 So was it when my life began; 

 So is it now I am a man;

 So be it now I shall grow old,  

Or let me die! 

 The child is father of the man; 

 And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety



William Wordsworth wrote this poem in 1802 in a very simple language and he wrote this poem when he saw a rainbow. This poem is considered as one of his best poems in English literature. In this poem he used his beautiful emotion to express his feelings towards nature. He was the poet who taught us that simple language can connect human beings and other living things with nature, because he believed that -


" the language enables us to converse with nature"


In this poem, William Wordsworth used imagery and figure of speech which is called metaphor. Metaphor is common in Wordsworth's poems. He also gives human characteristics to a non human entity which is called personification and aso used paradox, paradox are types of figurative language. In this poem he described the rainbow as a symbol of nature and he expressed his feeling when he saw a rainbow in the sky. To see this rainbow he  collected his childhood experience.


 In this poem he tries to say that he felt the same feeling whenever he saw a rainbow. William Wordsworthes view on nature that nature is one of the things which protect human beings because human survival is dependent on nature and used literature especially poetry to spread his message. This poem is the best example of the thought that human beings are close to nature. Wordsworth emphasizes that humans can't live without nature because it can be dangerous for both. Whenever humans see the beauty of nature they enjoy themselves and we know that rainbows are a phenomenon that happens rarely but at the same time it gives human beings a nice feeling. William Wordsworth loved to describe the appearance of nature. 


Conclusion


In the end we can say that William Wordsworth is described as a great ecological poet by several critics. He admired nature in the nineteenth century. He was one of the pioneers who wrote about nature in particular in a simple language to convey his message to all people that nature has power  that can serve human beings psychologically and physically.





Citation



Benin, Nikola. “(PDF) William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) - Researchgate.” William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) December - 2019, Dec. 2019, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338033117_WILLIAM_WORDSWORTH_1770_-_1850.


Cantor, Rebecca. Berkow, Jordan ed. "Wordsworth’s Poetical Works Study Guide". GradeSaver, 17 November 2007 Web. 6 November, 2022.https://www.gradesaver.com/wordsworths-poetical-works


Cooke, Jim. “William Wordsworth, His Life and Poetry and His Visit to Ireland in 1829.” Dublin Historical Record, vol. 55, no. 1, 2002, pp. 4–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30101314. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.


Hasan, Mariwan. “Nature and Environment in William Wordsworth's Selected Poems: An Eco ...” Nature and Environment in William Wordsworth's Selected Poems: An Eco - Critical  Approach, Sept. 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344072124_Nature_and_Environment_in_William_Wordsworth%27s_Selected_Poems_An_Eco-critical_Approach.


Rohayu, Atika  Rose. The Element of Nature in William Wordsworth's Selected Poems : A Sematic Study, Sept. 2018.




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Pictures - 4
Video - 1
Tables - 3 













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