Wordsworths poetry

Session (2):
17/11/12
Introduction:
Blank verse / no stanzas / strophes
We talk about verse paragraphs: Iambic pentameter which is not
riming
A meter is a measure in which poetry/verse is composed
You measure a line of verse by the number of feet in the line
The unit of measurement is the foot
The foot is a combination of stressed / unstressed syllables
When you have 1 unstressed syllable, the sign is U followed by a
stressed syllable \. This foot is called an iamb: this boy
Trochaic: come here \U
Trochee: stop there
When we have 5 feet: iambic pentameter
When we have 5 feet with no rime its blank verse: allows to tell a
story / flowing
The rime will impose restrictions on the narrative/ rime is for a
primitive ear/ genuine poetry should come through musicality
which is softer.
Ill make sense valiantly drawn out Milton
To seal the meaning, poets use a riming couplet.
There should be no confusion between free verse (no rime/ no
meter/ no foot) and blank verse.
Dont expect to find perfect meter through a whole poem/ its not
mechanical.
John Hollander: Verse is what you do to language. Poetry is what
you do with language.
Verse is the schematic patterning of language that will distinguish
it from prose (choose the meter / decide on rime/ cluster the lines
according to a rhyme/ organizing language and giving it musicality
Poetry: images/ feelings/ thoughts suggested by the language. We
can find poetry in prose.

Tintern Abbey (1798)

Background: July 13,1798 (publication of The Lyrical Ballads /
anniversary of the French Revolution.
The French revolution profoundly affected WW (1770/1850)
He witnessed the revolution/ he was almost completing his studies.
The Grand Tour: an academic requirement to travel to the classical
lands (Italy, France, Greece, Switzerland, Germany)
WW has taken his trip throughout France/ anniversary of the
revolution / he saw people celebrating and rejoicing
By 1798, the revolution turned into the terror/ Rhobes Pierre
After the completion of his studies, he got an endowment from his
friend and went back to France. When he was there England
declared war on France and WW was caught there (7/8 months:
September massacres)
He endured a 5-year depression when he came back to Britain
1798: beginning to heal/ long tour of England with Dorothy.
Place: west of England
Form of the poem: A conversation piece: the longest romantic
lyric Abrams
Analysis:
The poet is meditating inwardly and making movements outwards
/ conversing with himself: investigating the life of the mind
Allusion to depression: 5 long winters
Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, /Which on a
wild secluded scene impress/Thoughts of a more deep seclusion;
and connect/The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
Similitude between what hes seen 5 years ago and what he sees
now
Zeugma: a word linking 2 words which arent of the same category
to create the effect of extraordinary connection between earth and
sky.
Il est vtu de lin blanc et dune probit candide.
concrete
abstract

The steep and lofty cliffs impress thoughts of seclusion and

connect the landscape with the sky: the world of the mind and the
real world are connected.
The place of the verb connect: as hes talking about
connectedness he uses enjambment as a figure of connectedness
Description of nature: pastoral scene/ nature in all its serenity /
calm/ splendor then the eye sees smoke coming from an unknown
source / the poets starts surmising on the origin of the smoke
(Playing on grammatical hesitancy/ opening up possibilities/ and
from that the poet starts the journey in his own mind
Wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice as might seem, (oxymoron)
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermits cave, where by his fire (surmise)
The hermit sits alone
The main theme of connectedness between life of the spirit and life
of nature
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty/
I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration
To them I may have owed another gift
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
(Blessed mood in which the burden of mystery of this unintelligible
world is lightened/ we are laid asleep in body and become a living
soul)
Images and sounds from nature echo something within. They
evoke feelings in him/ circulation from the world of nature to the
world of the mind
While with an eye made quiet by the power/ of harmony, and the
deep power of joy/ we see into the life of things
The eye is tyrannical: you cannot select what you see

The ear creates things that are imaginary / ghostly ear

A romantic topos: eye/ ear
The nightingale: a sound that has no source/ divine music/
beautiful natural sound
Main ideas:
Connectedness: nature connecting thoughts / landscapeunknown
sound/ smoke surmiseembarking on a journey into the poets
mind/ the inward eye/ the idea of owing: sensations sweet/ blessed
mood: lucidity by which we gain insight and visionary power/
figures of speech used to convey certain meaning: surmise/
oxymoron/ enjambment/ zeugma
Session (3):
12/01/13
Syntactic ambiguity leads to semantic ambiguity
The mind is not disconnected from the world. They are mutually
kindred (spousal love)
For Coleridge, Dejection ode/ melancholy: the world outside is
dead and whatever we perceive is a projection of the mind (beauty
is self-generated)
Oh lady, we receive but what we give
And in our life alone doth nature live
A tree is beautiful: beauty is in the eye of the beholder
What is nature? The core of western thought
A trove of secrets to be discovered
Nature is endowed with a life of its own and deserving respect
The irony is that in order to see pristine natural beauty modern
societies are creating a museum out of nature / e.g. transgressing
nature by building railroads.
The sanctity and autonomy of nature must be preserved.
In WW theres no explicit social commentary on issues of the age
but emphasis on the dignity of the marginal xers.
Sentimentality: in the works during the age of sensibility poets
It was morally condescending and overemphatic: evoking
sentimental response in the reader

Moral arrogance in this kind of art vs. WW: He gives these

marginal xers a dignity of their own/ doesnt look down on them/
treats them as human beings not in a sentimental way / not minor
characters to make the reader shed a tear.
Tintern Abbey
2nd verse paragraph: (continued to the end)
The beauty of these natural forms was present in his mind
When and how these images are living in his imagination
Careful choice of words/ pudeur (modesty)/ felt along the heart
(not through or in)
Double negative: not unheard: calms down the syntax. WW does
not become shrill/ control of feeling happens through syntax which
is against the shrillness of emotional outbursts of Romantic poetry.
WW talks about the Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
recollected in tranquility: when images go and the emotions stay
How nature affects the mind. WW is far more interested in longterm effects. Hes seduced by the visible image which will be
reprocessed in the bliss of solitude by the inward eye:
The mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half-create
Physical communion with nature is important but anterior
recollection is more important.
Senses are only gateways to the world. Authentic seeing through
nature happens only when the body settles down. Genuine
visionariness comes with the inward eye/ ear.
Mind, spirit, soul and imagination are the same for The Romantics.
Even random acts of kindness in everyday life, we owe to nature
The blessed mood is a gift he owes to nature: moral indebtedness.
Praise is a way of paying back/ a subdued form of recognition.
Theres anxiety that nature may withhold its bounty: forbade not
any severing of our love: death of the poets imagination is his
deepest fear.
WW, I believe, regarded this sense of continuity as a miracle
bestowed by nature and for him perpetually renewed in poetic
discourse; the deep anxiety in the poetry that nature may one day
forsake expresses both his fear of imaginative death, but also his
terror that a breach within self-hood may render him alien to

himself, in other words, a fear of the schizophrenic madness to

which, he tells the reader of the France books of the Prelude, he
drew perilously close in his mid-twenties.
Visionariness: poet sleeps and gets a vision: when the senses are
laid asleep / suppressed only then can we see into the life of things.
Its not an obscure phrase. Its rather profound. It talks about a
difficult things/ describing feelings that are indescribable/ subtle
sensations
Dialectical relation between the mind and nature:
Sleep giving sensations a finer form
past: first visit

moving

present time of beholding

leaps forward

future

WW is playing with the time scheme

During the five years of absence something was lost
You go through life losing things (half-extinguished recollections)
Mind is more important than nature/ nature is sub to mind
Consciousness of nature: how nature goes through different stages
comes from a life-long experience with it.
When like a roe
I bounded oer the mountains () wherever nature led (..)/ for
nature then () to me was all in all. / haunted me like a passion/
coarser pleasure of boyish days/ an appetite: a feeling and love/
that had no need of a remoter charm/ by thought supplied, or any
interest unborrowed from the eye.
Boyish days: purely carnal/ sensuous. He wasnt endowed with
conscious vision/ he simply experienced with nature/ everything
was borrowed from the eye/ now inward eye (dont talk of
childhood as an age of innocence since it implies guilt)
We go through life losing those senses but WW makes something
good come out of it. He has abundant recompense/ nature brought
him closer to mankind/ he can feel sympathy with man/ the love
nature leading to the love of man: finer pleasures of adulthood)
This love is learned not given: pedagogy
A force of connectedness that comes from nature
With many recognitions dim and faint
And somewhat of sad perplexity
The picture of the mind revives again

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years
() that time is past
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abudandant recompense. for I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

WW doesnt neglect the senses. They are the threshold through

which thoughts pass. Perceiving is not blank/ senses are engaged in
fashioning the images
Pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts and the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being
4th verse paragraph:
A prolactic movement (forward): He anticipates his own death, his
sisters feelings
(the ghost/ spirit will keep addressing her after death)
WW materializes phenomena that the mind doesnt understand.
Whenever something is strange, he doesnt give it a supernatural
dimension, he tries to concretize it. He makes his sister go through
the same emotional journey./ when hes dead, hell be substituted
to nature
Play on the words spirit: (mind/ soul/ consciousness/ breath)

Quintessence: a whole cluster of meaning is signified / ambiguity/

polycemy
The poem enshrines all the major themes of WW: its a
quintessential poem.
This prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, ()
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! Then
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
of tender joy wilt thou remember me
WW Speaks of himself as: A worshiper of nature () unwearied
in that service
Evil tongues/ rash judgments/ sneers of selfish men/ greetings
where theres no kindness/ dreary intercourse of daily life: man
betrays whereas nature doesnt.
Main ideas:
Nature survives in the mind even after a long absence
Syntax: double negation/ pudeur vs shrillness
Bliss of solitude: anterior recollection / the inward eyeauthentic
seeing
Gift/ abundant recompense: the serene, blessed mood (moral
indebtedness)
Playing with the time scheme
The idea of loss: we go through life losing things

Youth: Coarser pleasure / no interest in remoter charm

Adulthood: present pleasure/ gleams of half-extinguished thought/
faint recognitions/ sad perplexity / pleasing thoughts /Wild
ecstasies mature into a sober pleasure
Nature: Life and food for future years
Nature: never betrays vs evil tongues/ selfish/ sneers/ unkindness
Nature silence/ quietness/ murmur / recollections provide healing
thought in the din of cities / fretful stir/ fever of the world
The mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half-create
Senses are the threshold through which powerful emotions pass to
the purer mind
Without the auxiliary light supplied by the mind, external
phenomena would remain meaningless: without the poets
comment the human sound would be mere noise or insignificant
chatter; and without its generous gift to the poets early thoughts,
Derwent would be just another stream. The authentic here
describes that which becomes significant by virtue of what mind
adds to an otherwise insensate or mute nature.
We cannot bid the ear be still
The ear must be reined in by thought in order to be enlightened.
Its thought, and not sounds, which composes the still sad music
of humanity.
The sounds, which must take a strict passage through the ear, are
eventually transmuted and sublimated into genuine signs for the
poetic imagination or the interpretative mind.
There could be no joy; that is, no freeing of the spirit, as if hearing,
left to its own device, is likely to generate restless, wayward,
abstruse, and hollow thoughts.
The tension between the ungrounded ear and the mind that seeks
composure is the source of the anxious interrogation that aims at
distinguishing genuine trances of thought and mountings of the
mind form a false or a redundant energy/ vexing its own
creation
The tranquil mood attends composed thought. A mood, that is,
privileged and singled out from the fretful stir of the world. This

mood is fated to be alterable and short-lived because bound up

with temporality theres always the hope of its renewal in time.
Themes in TA:
Remembering/ restoration/ fears/ early childhood/ memory /
childhood/ nature / mind
The pastoral tradition (3B.C)/ Art was commissioned /Sicily
The poet: a shepherd/ midday/ perfect world: a dead metaphor: the
poet sings/ the poet doesnt produce anything. Nature is happy/
idyllic/ summer/ no work.
Romantics: we see with our eyes. We receive the inspiration and
give it back in poetry
WW: real condition/ emphasis on lived, individual experience
Genius/ gifted (creativity/ intellect) / emphasis on imagination and
the role of the mind. The artist is financially autonomous
Ode to a nightingale: pain of consciousness/ deeply unhappy in
being/ human condition.
19/01/13:
The intimations ode ((1798)
Introduction:
There are 3 genres of poetry:
1/ The epic: (He)/ Long narrative poem about a hero (semigod)/ battles/ doesnt happen to ordinary people.
2/ Dramatic: (You) play or drama that is in verse
3/ Lyric: (I) about oneself/ poet speaking about his thoughts/
feelings/ emotions/ not the biographical I (dramatized/
fictional xer in the poem)/ history of thought and ideas
Renaissance Europe:
The very idea that heroism is confined to small elite began to
be subverted thanks to renaissance
What distinguishes man from other creatures is nothingness:
A cat is born a cat a king isnt born a king
We come into the world as nothing, all we become is acquired
Animals come, live and die as that which they are
Human infants come as tabula rasa. What they become is due
to nothingness itself. Equality of humans comes from this

nothingness it enables human freedom. The idea of liberty

emanates from this.
We are free to become what we are/ Pico Della Mirandola
Epic: rigid social classes/ Vs Milton (Paradise Lost)
How things become common/ WW poetry: outward action
(society/ war) has become less interesting than the life of the
mind
The epic has undergone a double movement: from up to down
and from outward to inward
The thematic of the epic appeared in fiction (le roman)
The lyric: short poem in which the poet talks about his own
feelings
The ode: the sublime ode is the highest subgenre of the lyric/
a poem to be sung/ it has to be written in a complicated
fashion/ stanza/ rhyme scheme and has to adopt a lofty theme/
feelings or noble thoughts
Democracy of the art: every child with genius should become
one
Analysis:
There was a time when () /every common sight/ to me did
seem appareled in celestial light/ the glory and the freshness
of the dream. (dream-like vividness and splendor)/ Dreams to
WW suggest images livelier than those of wakefulness.
In early childhood: visible nature appeared clothed with light/
visionariness that disappears afterwards.
It is not now as it hath been of yore/ () the things which I
have seen I now can see no more.
WW accepts loss/ he doesnt yearn for childhood/ fairytale
temporal dimension
I know, whereer I go/ there hath past a glory form the earth
The thorn: in which WW describes a childs grave near a pond
I measured it from side to side, I found it to be 5 meters
wide): concreteness
Platonic: souls predate their embodiment

3rd stanza: typical crisis poem (a narrative in which the

narrator falls into depression and rises stronger/ condemned
crisis narrative
While the birds thus sing a joyous song ()/ to me alone there
came a thought of grief/ a timely utterance gave that thought
relief/ and I again am strong
The poets voice is an echo: the bird sings a joyous song
Poet singled out by feeling of grief/ normally there should be
harmony
Grief: hes no longer responsive to nature/ symbiosis: when
nature is happy the poet is happy/ If the poet is sad vs. nature
is happy: injury to nature: No more shall grief of mine the
seasons wrong
Nature doesnt bring sadness / what brings it is anxiety about
poetry (imagination) or thinking about thinking. He thinks in
grief when hes afraid of not being able to remain a great poet.
Innocence doesnt exist in WW poetry. He takes note. He
doesnt utter his feelings (not the choice of words: A thought
of grief not a feeling)
Innocence can be understood only when its lost. He talks
about light, gleam, visionariness, the purer mind
A timely utterance: a miracle done by speech/ nature. A timely
utterance (speech/ word/ phrase) at the right timecreative word:
A divine gift of salvation/ embedded in the language: a moment
proper enough to save him.
This is similar to Keatss seasonable sweets: elements that
have to come together to create something/ if not it would be
an injury to nature
WW never crosses the line of the supernatural
Wrong (vb): I shall not wrong nature/ a vow made to nature/
transaction / a contract: If you love me, I will love you
Oh evil day! If I were sullen / while earth herself is adorning
What are the lines that sum up WW?
The pansy at my feet/ doth the same tale repeat/ whither is fled
the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Lights faded into common day/ visionary gleam has faded into
the light of common day
Pansy: forget me not
Notes:
26/01/13:
A gleam of visionariness is seen in early childhood and lost
irretrievably as we grow up.
The soul that rises with us, our lifes star/ hath had elsewhere
its setting/ and cometh from afar/ not in entire forgetfulness/
and not in utter nakedness/ but trailing clouds of glory do we
come/ from God who is our home/ heaven lies about us in our
infancy!/ shades of the prison-house begin to close/ upon the
growing boy
In Tintern Abbey, the poet keeps shifting between
remembering and recollection, boyhood and adulthood but in
the intimations ode, theres a linear course.
Stanza 5:
Platonic: soul being immortal / predated its embodiment
WW might simply have meant that the soul is made of a
spiritual nature and therefore cannot die
Intellectual and aesthetic dimension of the entire universe: a
stone is endowed with a life of its own and a moral dignity.
Life forms are not dumb and dead. Nature for WW is living
Line5: progress through life:
We come to the world with glory/ crowned with light (Xian
iconography halos/ enlightened). WW gives thus light to
everyone. We do not come in utter nakedness/ we are clothed
with light, endowed with beauty and soul. We dont come
bewildered and lost. We have beauty, mind and soul. We dont
come as aliens, strangers. We already belong to the universe.
We dont have to adapt to the world.
If a baby is a human being then its worthy of attention and
respect.
-innocence vs. experience: for the person who speaks about
innocence, it implies thats lost. An unconscious state:

children do not know that they are innocent/ knowledge

destroys innocence (self-consciousness) / sexual selfawareness
WW is not concerned with this dimension of human psyche:
hes concerned with something more diffuse. Hes not
infatuated by childhood to think that it should last forever. The
visionary light will take different shapes until it fades away
into the light of common day which is in itself never
pejorative. Its part of growing up.
4 stages of human life: Infancy (glory)Boyhood (already
sees the shades of prison life) Youth further from the East:
sunrise) but still sees it At length in adulthood it fades into
the light of common day ( a honorific adjective).
At length the man perceives it die away/ and fade into the light
of common day.
We dont recall infancy (I cant paint what then I was)
Hes talking about mankind. Its not personal recollection.
Hes outside of it.
Commonness/ commonality:
What is commonly shared is reason; common sense.
For WW what matters is whats common between people not
what disunites them
Whereas in the middle ages what mattered was social rank, in
modern age, what matters is whats common and what
someone has done with his life (accomplishments)
Theres nobility in being common; shared by everyone;
values.
WW takes note/ distant recording. Hes describing ab-extra /
he wants to be objective. He never makes present joy the
matter of his song. He doesnt make poetry in the midst of the
moment. He always lets it sit and simmer.
Stanza 6: a pivotal stanza
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own/ yearnings she
hath in her own natural kind/
Earth likes what is natural to it.

Nurturing/ the allegory of plenty / the horn of plenty / it is

overflowing with bounty.
Nature yearns for its natural kind/ her children. It likes them
and finds pleasure in it. Nature is pleased to do what shes
doing. Shes self- sufficient.
With something of a mothers mind/ and no unworthy aim/ the
homely nurse doth all she can/ to make her foster-child, her
inmate man/ forget the glories he hath known/ and that
imperial palace whence he came.
Man enters the scene. A good mother will push her child
away. Nature does all she can to push man to grow up.
Nurtures then off on your own. Its a natural process. WW
doesnt grieve for it.
WW doesnt idealize the early stage.
Nature gives us awareness. She does all she can by endowing
man with a mind through contact with nature.
WW isnt interested in religion in the ecclesiastic sense.
He has a vague pantheistic religious sense: he sees sacredness
in everything. I feel I endowed the paving stone with a moral
being/ dignity he has religious respect for everything thats
living.
God (not Xian god: a principle of sovereignty over the
universe
God: home/ source of light
All of us have a little spark from gods light.
Thats the only way he can describe where that light comes
from.
Nature: allegorical representation of the created world.
Isis: 3 rows of breasts: generosity/ she can feed everyone/
wearing a veil: mystery and modesty: it gives freely and it
hides its secrets. Nature works in secret ways. How does a
flower grow? Natures work is witnessed but cant be
perceived while in process.
Interest in discovering laws of nature (what goes on)

Artistic way: try to emulate nature in its ways. Youre

interested in the miracle. The artist follows the work of nature:
e.g.: a play mirrors nature
Great art: the art in which you dont see the effort like a poem
coming spontaneously and organically from the poets mind.
The purpose of mankind is autonomy. He should be close to
nature not a natural being.
Lucy poems: she dies young because shes very beautiful.
Nature takes her out of envy / possession.
Nature: god- mother/ angel of death
Stanza7:
A child grows by imitating adults: the light falling on the child
is human light: with light upon him from his fathers eyes. The
unnaturalness of the child: he wants to quicken time to grow
up: theres something injurious about that. Childs play is an
imitation of life. Life is but a stage. The little actor cons
another part/filling form time to time his humorous stage ()
as if his whole vocation/ were endless imitation
Stanza 8: theres something peculiar about this eagerness to
grow up. He addresses him as a prophet Thou, whose exterior
semblance doth belie/ thy souls immensity/ thou best
philosopher/ eye among the blind/ mighty prophet/ seer blest!/
on whom those truths do rest/ which we are toiling all our
lives to find
WW ends up with puzzlement. He finds it unnatural:
everything must come in its time (seasonable sweets).
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke/ the years to
bring the inevitable yoke.
Stanza9: brings some hope. Thoughts keep shifting (like in
hamlet oh! What a rogue and peasant slave I am)
Nature remembers: we sense the light/ ember: (spark) /
shimmering light covered by ashes.
Oh joy! That in our embers/ is something that doth live/that
nature yet remembers/ what was so fugitive
Wordsworthian hope: perpetual benediction. He keeps
blessing nature. He understands that its part of growing up.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed/ perpetual

benediction: not indeed for that which its most worthy to be
blessed/ delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood/
new-fledged hope/ not for these I raise/ the song of thanks
and praise/ but for those obstinate questionings/ of sense and
outward things/ falling from us, vanishings (when external
things began to assert an external existence, previously not
acknowledged)/ blank misgivings of a creature/ moving about
in worlds not realized. (made real or made conscious of/ high
instincts before which our mortal nature/did tremble like a
guilty thing surprised/ but for those first affections/ those
shadowy recollections/ which be they what they made/ are yet
the fountain light of our day/ are yet the master light of all our
seeing/ uphold us/ cherish, and have power to make/ our noisy
years seem moments in the being/ of the eternal silence: truths
that wake/ to perish never/ which neither listlessness, nor mad
endeavor/ nor man nor boy/nor all that is with enmity with
joy/ can utterly abolish or destroy!
Not for that which its most worthy to be blessed (e.g.: being
alive, delight, hope, liberty) but for obstinate questioning of
sense (reason + 5 senses) and outward things falling from us
(when our sense do not make out sthg)the state of confusion
and vacancy all created by nature/ thank for whats obvious
and whats not.
Hence In a season of calm weather/ though inland far we be/
our souls have sight of that immortal sea/ which brought us
hither/ can in a moment travel thither
WW is interested in the life of the mind and in keeping his
imagination alive. As long as the poet can see wonder in
nature, as long as he keeps deciphering its secrets, the spark
might prevail. WW recognizes that the visionary gleam will
fade into the light of common day as part of the process of
growing up. He recognizes that theres no eternal flame yet the
state of confusion and vacancy that he experiences in contact
with nature sustains, invigorates and rejuvenates his mind.
Where senses falter to grasp natures secret ways, the mind

has the possibility to meditate. WW doesnt want to murder

nature in order to dissect it. His poetic imagination is in a
spousal relationship with nature. His poetic voice is the echo
of it. His spirit stays alive as long as his bonds with nature
arent severed.
Dreamlike vividness and splendor / indomitable
30/01/13:
Nature works in hidden, secretive ways. (And also in visible
ways)
Modes of experience with nature are terrifying yet nurturing in
their sublime ways
This idea may be traced back to pre-Socratic period.
Heraclitus: nature likes to hide itself
This generosity of nature comes in a spontaneous way. It
doesnt calculate: shadowy exaltations are secret ways of
instructing the mind (blank misgivings)
If a little boy is scared by thunder at night, that scare is good
to learn the sublime power of nature.
In that pause of silence while he hung listening, all the silent
imagery would enter his mind unawares (worlds not yet
realized): in constant movement or unconscious.
We owe nature not for primal affinities/ primary affections
(pity, fear, love) but for those vague memories which are
instrumental in giving us future joys. These are steadfast
primary values that uphold us in life.
After coming to the conclusion that the gleam disappears;
leaving only intimations, he still affirms that life is bearable.
Then sing, ye birds () a joyous song/ we in thought will join
you throng
Stanza 3/4: grief but here the poet through his thought
decides to join the joy of nature (may: metonymy of spring)
- A little crisis / the journey of the mind goes from crisis to
mounting of the spirit.
What though the radiance which was once so bright/ be now
for ever taken from my sight/ though nothing could bring back

the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower/we will

grieve not, rather find/ strength in what remains behind/ in the
primal sympathy/ which having been must ever be/ in the
soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering/ in the
faith that looks through death/ in the years that bring the
philosophic mind.
Stanza 9: self-reassurance that though the gleam has faded,
theres abundant recompense. What if the radiance is lost?
Something else is gained. Childhood images will never be
recovered but I shall not grieve. Loss is not weakness. Its
strength. Whats gained is the primal sympathy: unshakable
power to feel beauty of nature and mankind.
Which having been/ must ever be: you may go through
hardships, what you gained will always survive but his fear is
that nature may withdraw its blessings.
The philosophic mind: thought
A wish concludes the poem; a mix of anxiety with hope: He
suspects that nature might allow the severing of their love:
forebode not any severing of our love. (Be with me/ do not
forsake me). The loss of feeling for nature will signify the loss
of his poetic imagination. This deep relationship was forged
intensely in childhood but is replaced by a more reflective
intellect.
After having prayed, he says something then changes his
mind: yet in my heart of hearts, I feel your might:
reassurance
WW never engages in outbursts/ gashing out of emotions.
When he speaks of emotions, its covered with gravity and
dignity.
Forebode not any severing of our loves! /Yet in my heart of
heart I feel your might/ I only have relinquished one delight/
to live beneath your more habitual sway.
(habitual sway/ light of common day)
WW is the great poet of loss and gain/ compensation. Things
we experience in early childhood are intense (dizzy raptures/

aching joys). They cant last but are replaced by something

more moderate/ temperate/ common.
Different rewards are given for the contest of maturity as
opposed to childhood and youth
The clouds that gather round the setting sun/ do take a sober
coloring from an eye/ that hath kept watch oer mans
mortality/ ()/ thanks to the human heart by which we live/
thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears/ to me the meanest
flower that blows/ can give/ thoughts that often lie too deep for
tears: something not available to his conscious/ lies in the
unconscious but acts on the conscious. It always contributes
something to the growth of the poetic mind.
From earth to man, from man to earth/ it is the hour of
feeling/ one moment now may give us more/ than years of
toiling reason/ our minds shall drink at every pore/ the spirit
of the season/ some silent laws our hearts will make/ which
they shall obey/ we for the years to come may take/ our temper
from today/ and from the blessed power that rolls/ about,
below, above/ well frame the measure of our souls/ they shall
be turned to love.
WW expects someone to grow. Except, when you grow you
lose things in the process but you also gain things system of
compensation in poetry.
Gains:
Intimations ode Philosophic mind
Tintern Abbey Love of mankind
Elegiac stanzasa painting by association gave him
recollections of grief. Welcome patient cheer/ not without
hope even when we suffer theres hope
Theres a scheme of substitution:
Loss is compensated by gain
Grief by patient cheer
Dizzy raptures by the still sad music of humanity
Intense gleam by the philosophic mind

The Lucy poems (1799-1800)

Introduction:
WW is not into allegorical representations of things. These
poems dramatize something peculiar. Lucy dies in all the
poems. The poet doesnt grieve in the ordinary sense. He just
makes notice of it and passes on.
Strange fits of passion
The speaker: the poet is a lover. Hes going to her cottage. As
he approached, he saw the moon dropping and he feared his
beloved might be dead.
The poet is conscious that whatever he is feeling is strange and
no one but a lover can understandthe strange fit of passion
was played on him by his imagination. (the poet, the lunatic ad
the lover are of imagination all compact)
The moon is getting near the house but by the hypnotic power
of the moon or the horse movement, he somewhat slept/
slumbered.
Self-consciousness: what fond and wayward thoughts will
slide? The death of the beloved/ The drama is in the mind/
his mind plays tricks on him. What has implied the wayward
nature of the thoughts is the fear of losing the beloved. We
grieve to have the things we wish to lose. We want to have
things though we know well lose them: a paradox in the
human mind.
Consciousness/ half-consciousness: the visible experience of
nature/ the moon disappearing has suggested the idea of
Lucys death.
This death is expected to happen. Thinking of their disappearance
will make someone dearer. The idea of losing them goes hand in
hand with loving them. The consciousness of loss will intensify
consciousness of what you own/ the pleasure is troubled: once
youre immersed in pleasure, you dont feel it until you lose it.
This poem is about how our imagination tricks us all the time.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways

WW control of syntax is indicative of his control of emotion. Oh!

The difference to me
A slumber did my spirit seal
A slumber did my spirit seal/ I had no human fears
Death of Lucy
The poem dramatizes some kind of daydreaming. He talks about
grief in a matter of fact seemingly indifferent way.
He had a dream that Lucy was dead/ the 2nd stanza is in the present
tense vs. the 1st one in the past. What happened is that in between,
he woke up and found her dead.
No motion has she now, no force/ () rolled round in earth
diurnal course/ with rocks and stones and trees
The idea/ concept that dream visions are realized is old (Adam in
paradise lost wished for a companion, he slept, and then there was
Eve). Its one of the oldest fantasies of human beings that thoughts
might be concretized. Beware of what you wish for! But with this
recollection of thought, this death doesnt aggrieve him. She had
simply returned to nature (a star that shines on earth).
Thus nature spake- the work was done./ she died and left to me/
this heath, this calm and quiet scene/ the memory of what has
been/ and never more will be
The idea of star: part of the cosmos is old but WW reworks it
because Lucy doesnt become a star. Shes embedded into nature
but shes nonetheless a star. Shell survive eternally in nature.
Ponderous maturity of reflection: even the idea of compensation is
there but is subtly induced.
Lucy gray:
The wretched parents all that night/ went shouting far and wide/
but there was neither sound nor sight/ to serve them for a guide
02/02/13:
The Lucy poems (continued)
Surmise: maybe/ perhaps/ or
Poets use surmise to dally with words (just like Hamlet invents
causes and reasons / thoughts to procrastinate)

Intimations ode: recurrence/ repetition of typical WW themes and

poetic procedures.
A slumber () talks about the enigmatic death of Lucy which is
registered merely as a fact with little emotion of grief. No feelings
seem to be dramatized. However, this seemingly absence isnt
without gravity.
WW times and again reminds his readers that uncontrolled
emotions are not his subject/ a poetic subject for him. His control
is exercised by deep thinking and reworking of what he considers
as hackneyed and dead metaphors. The originality of WW is to
have replaced the clichs associated with the pain of loss with
compensation and subjecting that loss to thinking.
Thought applied to grief doesnt diminish it but puts it in its right
perspective and brings it out to the fore of consciousness, thereby,
humanizing it. For WW only whats accessible to thought is
worthy of being called human. Passions and pains that remain
behind consciousness arent interesting.
Elegiac stanzas/ Peele castle (1806-7)
This poem was composed over a year after his brothers death. It
does not represent a first shocked reaction of grief, but a deeply
considered loss of faith in both nature and the imagination.
Not for a moment could I now behold/ a smiling sea and be what I
have been/ the feeling of my loss will never be old/ this which I
know, I speak with mind serene.
WW doesnt respond immediately to the emotion in his poetry.
A deep distress hath humanized my soul the still sad music of
humanity
This poem is construed as making some kind of watershed in WW
poetic sensitivity. From thence he will pay more attention to
human predicament/ condition and to nature.
Only whats subdued/ quiet is worth considering:
How perfect was the calm! It seemed no sleep/ no mood which
season takes away or brings/ I could have fancied that the might
deep/ was even the gentlest of all gentle things

Ah! Then if mine had been the painters hand/ to express what then
I saw and add the gleam/ the light that never was on sea or land/
the consecration (sanctification/ blessing) and the poets dream/
delusion
The idea of commonality is seminal to modern culture and
sensibility.
These trends affected poetry and literature:
Modernity: from the renaissance on, European thinking has been a
constant promotion of the idea that all men are equal in their
humanity; commonality.
1/ generalization of the democratic spirit
2/ distinction between whats private and whats public
From the end of the medieval ages: movement e.g. communal
room to bedroom/ dining room
Executions: (death just like birth is private)
3/ decrease of outward reality and increase of inward
consciousness:
WW championing of consciousness and control of grief is part of
this process
Greek thought: a wise man should be able to exercise his reason on
his passions and control them/ utter inquilinity / reason: the
paramount power of the mind.
In modern European culture: a good citizen is someone who
doesnt show his passion in public because its not good. Your
passions are yours. (e.: Mozart playing, you cant clap: you cant
show your inward: bad taste/ inability to sense music/ showing
outwardly is a sign of uncultured people/ grief that is controlled is
more powerful it shows heightened sensibility / control it and think
of it/ everyone can cry out.
A contrast is established between the painting and the recollection:
hes not making typical epicphrasis (a poem about a piece of art).
Hes seeing the painting in his mind. The visual picture had
revived the mental image: the painting shows a storm while in his
mind he sees a glossy sea.
The world of recollection is ideal.

A 3rd reflection: castle reflected in the sea. He brings back an

honiric image. His mind has been beguiled by the sea (never in a
storm)/ a trick played on him by his imagination.
When you gaze/ project outward, you are beguiled by your own
senses. Its only when you think that you reach consciousness that
your imagination tricks you.
Delusion/ gleam: painting the sea how he saw it 4 summers ago
(glossy and serene)/ in the fond illusion of my heart. The
betrayal isnt from nature its from his imagination the self-illusion
is thinking that the sea can be this or that not this and that.
Theres loss but submission to a new control. Now he accepts that
nature can represent itself in a stormy, dangerous form.
The soul has become common/ attuned with a common array of
sympathya critique of poets merger with their own imaginative
world. farewell the heart that lives alone/ welcome patient cheer
The sense of loss isnt lived with passion and pain but with depth
of grief/ serene
Power the visionary gleam/ power of imagination
Sentiment of being/ power: a life force that was with him I have
submitted to a new control/ a power is gone, which nothing can
restore/ a deep distress hath humanized my soul
Though power is gone, I dont collapse.
New control: not the reciprocal relation with nature but obedience
to the moral law. We will grieve not rather find/ strength in what
remains behind/ in the primal sympathy/ which having been must
ever be/ in the soothing thoughts that spring/ out of human
suffering (intimations)
The props of my affections were removed, pudic, modest and
grave about death but the building stood because he received
power from naturemultiplicity of meanings
Nature has 3 meanings:
1/ outward nature: given to the senses
2/principle or force that makes a thing what it is/ become what it is
Par nature vs. mechanic (cons nature)/ I was nurtured by nature

As a child he wasnt made to do anything he wasnt supposed to

do. A child should play and learn with and in nature Vs stunting
his imagination / violence / unnatural institutionalized education.
3/the end result of that principle: what makes a thing what it is/ the
process or the product/ what makes a rose grow or what makes the
rose itself./ silent natures breathing life
Farewell, Farewell the heart that lives alone/ housed in a dream,
at distance from the kind (mankind)/ such happiness wherever it be
known/ is to be pitied for tis surely blind.
WW talks about poet being insulated within his own imagination.
When he is blinded by common light and inward illusion
(solipsistic/ infatuated with themselves)
But welcome fortitude and patient cheer/ and frequent sights
of what is to be borne/ such sights or worse are before me
here/ not without hope we suffer and we mourn
Patient cheer: oxymoron/ borne: look at/ confront what well have
to endure
Aphoristic/ gnomic wisdom: not without hope we suffer and we
mourn
14/02/13
Resolution and independence (1802)
This is the archetype that sets the pattern for the modern crisis
lyric. The poem through and in which the poet saves himself for
poetry and by implication for life. In a secularized epiphany or
privileged moment/ spots of time.
The poet receives a peculiar grace, a something given that redeems
the time /that allows renovation to begin.
The poet has first been exalted by the joyousness and beauty of
nature, and then depressed to the lowest dejection and despair.
WW was a young poet overwhelmed by the miserable reverses
which have befallen the happiest of all poets (the boy of Chatterton
who committed suicide). He was so deeply affected by it that he
considers the manner in which he was rescued from his dejection
and despair was almost an interposition of providence in the

character of the leech gatherer: Such a figure, in such a lonely

place; a pond, a pious self-respecting, miserably infirm old man
telling such a tale/ a presence at a time and a place when a spot of
time is badly needed.
An old man was far from house or home. Its not stood nor set
but was. The old man was as a rock is, a part of the landscape on
an ordinary morning. The figure presented in the most naked
simplicity.
R&I is a poem of imagination. (In WW classification)
It relies on the technique of the fade-out: dissolving the
boundaries between objects is presented as natural phenomenon as
part of a given reality (Bloom)
The poem starts with the natural scene visualized under an aspect
of reciprocity where all natural element rejoice, the poet is at first
one with the jocund phenomena around him but the union doesnt
last. The pleasure is troubled by blind thoughts. Fears, thick
fancies, dim sadness, equivocal and unknown came upon him.
From the might of joy in minds that can no further go/As high as
we have mounted in delight/ in our dejection do we sink so low
Strength of joy engenders it contrary. When delight reaches the
limit, it is replaced by dejection.
The mind is at its creative limits and falls over in dejection.
The dimness of sadness starts to dispel as the fears particularize
themselves to the fate of poets who are supposed to be the happiest
of men but are often immolated by their sensibility and art.
The title:
Resolution: an act that resolves a situation/ an act of determination/
the inner conflict that WW has to transcend
By our spirits are we deified/we poets in our youth begin in
gladness/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness
The marvelous boy: WW dreaded leaving his own boyhood behind
him and so abandoning the hiding places of his power.
Chatterton could not achieve resolution and independence and
failed to make the transition from his glad springtime to a summer
of mature poethood.

Glory and joy are 2 great attributes to imagination. The poet is a

god, stimulating new life and representing the perpetual freshness
of the earth but only so long as his spirits remain glorious and
joyful. When they fail, the sense of illusion becomes dominant.
A fatal cycle: we begin with gladness but from it we come to
derangement and melancholia.
WW is at the dead end of imagination which can do nothing with
the hopeless and deceptive natural cycle. He badly needs and
receives a peculiar grace. An emblem of R&I
The old man is very like the scene in which he stands. Hes part of
the solitude around him but WW with his anxieties is a trouble to
the place.
WW associates the sudden onset of imagination with the sound of
rushing waters. (Water follows a course/ river bed/ rough/ calm/
still/ murky/ nature needs to control water/ deluge/ reflection/ wind
source/fountain/ salvation xers appear at ponds) The leech
gatherers body begins to fade into a dream landscape. The
imagination effectuates its salvation in WW by seizing on the
phenomenon of human strength.
WW is verging on the imaginatively fatal sin of willful despair of
being sullen in natures sweet air.
The old mans words suddenly liberate WW into the full freedom
of the imagination. Suddenly all the elements blend together and
the Imagination rises triumphantly from it abyss.
In the poets minds eye he seemed to see the man pacing
continually, wandering alone and silently while he pursued his
thoughts within himself. He scorned himself in comparison to the
old decrepit mans firmness of mind and control while he gave
way to anxious thoughts to trouble his mind.
He received admonishment from the old man.
(To be continued)

Asma Dridi
Analysis of the first stanza of resolution and independence
The first stanza could be seen as a prologue to or a summation of
the poem. The poets mind will follow the same course as the
natural phenomena described in these verses. Thats to say from
crisis to restoration
There was a roaring in the wind all night
The roaring in the wind is analogous to the roaring thought
troubling the poets mind.
The rain came heavily and fell in floods
According to Blooms claim that Wordsworth (in the prelude)
associates the sudden onset of the imagination with the sound of
rushing waters, the rain might represent imagination in this specific
instance.
This apocalyptic imagination / or what the poet later would call
fancies came heavily and flooded the poets mind so much so that
it crippled him.
The third verse starts with the conjunction but and stands in
contrast with the 2 previous verses.
But now the sun is rising calm and bright
The sun as a source of light can be associated to reason (the
gleam). The use of the present progressive tense in is rising
could stand for the progressive healing process that the poet
underwent later on after the crisis at the end of which imagination
triumphed and rose again calm and bright and the mind that has
been previously clouded by dim dejection was enlightened.
The birds are singing in the distant woods
Over his own sweet voice the stock dove brood
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters
The use of birds in the 4th verse might be an appropriation of the
hackneyed topos that both birds and poets sing/ the distant woods
might refer to the au-del (The Garden of Eden). This line possibly
refers to the poets that will be later on mentioned by WW e.g.
Chatterton
Line5: the stock dove brooding over his own sweet voice

The verb brood has a variety of meanings among which are: to

be worried or feel sorry for oneself
Thus it can stand for the poets own worries about his poetic voice
and his fate as a poet.
The next line with the conversation between the Jay and the
magpie might stand for the conversation between the poet and the
leech gatherer in which the jay makes answer/ not answers (as
making involves dedication and resolution) as the magpie or the
poet chatters./ chatters: talks quickly and continuously about things
which are not important (repeating the same question: What is it
you do?)
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters
This last line can stand for the closing stanza of the poem where
the poet is admonished by the leech gatherer and the air which
stands as a metaphor for the spirit is filled again with pleasant
noise of waters (imagination)

What does nature give to men and what do men give to nature?
16/02/13
The ruined cottage (the tale of Margret)
Introduction: simplicity/ abstractness/ habitat
WW values simplicity highly
Idiocy: the religious sense of innocence
Simplicity: being single/ whole
Idiocy: singleness/ wholeness/ ones/ integrity/ consciousness or
intellect that breaks the idea of wholeness and integrity/ not
bothered by thought and self-perception
Someone who is simple is someone who is natural. The extreme
anxiety of hope makes Margret forget simplicity and lose touch
with the simplicity of life. She lives too much in the middle with
excessive hope.
The poet is walking towards something. WW dramatizes this
scene. The poet is walking in nature/ common land to meet
someone

This may hark back to a glamorized era of pastoral community that

pre-existed the industrial era alluding to a time where community
came together
Homing instincts: the poet going somewhere/ home/ the habits of
the mind need a habitus (Bourdieu)/ there no such thing as an
abstract mind that has no home. Thoughts are grounded. They
belong to a natural habitat.
The metaphor of looking for a chosen valley/ a home is a metaphor
for linking or binding/connecting thoughts to a place. Thinking and
emotions must belong.
Theorizing is negative. Its injurious to the mind. Its engaging in
emotions that are not linked to a habitat.
In the prelude:
WW contrasts 2 boyhoods/ types of childrens education:
Rousseaus lmile vs. his own ideal education
The child is removed from his habitat and fed useless information/
one thats likely to pervert his mind. Its teaching the child
thoughts that are abstract/ ape adults
Abstract: divided/ pulling out the essence of something. Thought
thats been pulled out from its natural belonging
Spots of time: conflation/ embedding of space and temporality
which co-mingle to create these moments of simple living.
Analysis:
Bloom: The RC remains a poem of superlative beauty and almost
unbearable poignance.
The old Cumberland beggar, the ruined cottage, Michael
and WWs other poems that depict the sufferings of the English
lower classes are masterpieces of compassion and profound
feeling.
WW had a miraculous genius for teaching one how to feel
sympathy for those in all manner of distress
The ruined cottage is a place of dereliction; a place where thinking
and passion dwell (line68)
The poem begins like a pastoral poem with a perfect pastoral
description.

The way he begins and the main thematic and structural a pastoral
poem is that of ease, happy nature, absence of pain, continuous
joyful physical experience of nature. All that, is utterly belied in
what comes afterthe poem goes on to tell all thats not part of
pastoral poetry: death, dissemination of a family, pain of loss,
poverty, suffering of the dead, the old man shed a tear, the poet felt
melancholy at the thought of that needless fate.
Romantic irony: WW took a poetic tradition and emptied it of its
content; a classical framework with a real story.
He starts dismantling it bit by bit
P1 is a surmiseline1: him is unknown/ anyoneI could have sat
but other lot was mineconstruct then subvert
Anathema: toil (against convention)/ pastoral poets dont toil.
Shepherds lead an ideal life
The poet is homing on / zooming on the old man. Old here doesnt
signify wisdom. Like the leech gatherer hes a peddler, a wanderer.
Who travels far and wide and connects the community/ brings
news/ is always in contact with nature. This doesnt mean that WW
is against thought.
Description of the plot: of land/ the tale
Theme: essay Hanna Arendt: Human condition
The world and the earth: the world is a structured, humanized
version of earth (woods and forests are earth/ a garden is a world.
Only human beings can create a world (the best being the world
within). The world is cultivated earth.
The plot theyre at used to be a world. Now, it has been reclaimed
by earth.
The despondency and sadness of the old man comes from this: the
work of man gone to dereliction. Human life, feelings and
thoughts, if neglected will be taken back by nature.
Human passion of grief calls upon natures sympathy:
Mimetic sympathy the human impulse to make nature respond
to our passions and thoughts
Contrary movement: asking nature to participate and share human
feelings

Crying passion of grief+ tranquil sympathies/ sober coloring/

thoughtnot a shrill poet/ vociferous
He acknowledges strong emotions but also that theres something
which is subdued.
These sympathies come unawares and grow with thought.
The old man makes a movement fluctuating between meditation
and description: reflection
Stopping to drink at what had been Margrets spring, the
wanderer confronts loss directly. Strong yet stoical in its grief
The waters: for them the brotherhood bond is broken. They used to
know Margret. They were pleased to slacken the thirst of the
family.
There are 2 levels you need to investigate.
A/ literal sense: what the poem is telling us
Blake: sick rose/ a worm eating a rose
B/ figurative sense: metaphorical/ allegorical
It must be organically linked to the literal sense. It has to have a
resonance (a worm eating the heart of a rose)
It moved my very heart: the sense of grief is stated with gravity
and solemnity.
Wordsworthian xers work. Michael: he never lifted a single stone
23/02/13
The ruined cottage (continued)
Introduction:
The old man is akin to the leech gatherer/ old beggar
Xers: idiot boys, forsaken women marginal xers. Poetry
contemporary to WW and that before is replete with such
characters but his poetry is different. He never sentimentalizes/
moralizes about these xers. He confers upon them/endows them
with aesthetic and moral dignity.
The old man appears more human by seeming to have fallen out of
humanitymodernity of WW poetry
Modernity: one of the determinations of western thought and the
renaissance is that despite accidental conditions: sickness, social
situation we retain an unchanged core of humanness. Nothing

diminishes ones humanity. In medieval ages, the sick and the poor
were taken care of in the name of Christian piety and not as human
beings. Accidents that occurred to them are things that simply
happened. WW insists on this in a subdued way. His xers retain an
unmovable core of aesthetic and moral dignity. He hardly ever
gives a moral lesson about them. They just are. They have a being,
a presence. They are closer to nature (sparrows eating crumbs with
the beggar). WW describe the scenery in the most natural way.
Part2/ line221: the old man stops his tale then the poet begs him to
resume it. The old man replies: whats this curiosity of yours?
Wantonness: to fill the void, pass time away. He suspects the poet
of wanting to feel pleasure in hearing about other peoples
miseries. If thats so, then telling the story would be vain and such
behaviour would require punishment. Then, he responds to his own
critique by saying that these tales may be good to hear.
Quasi-oxymoron: mournful thoughts (2 terms that cancel each
other out)
Blast of harmony:
Harmony is the opposite of blast. Theres in this sound structure, a
pattern that occurs in a blast (not chaotic). The final image we have
is one of a sound that is both and none of them either.
Syntax contributes to the control of the image.
Anxiety of hope:
The nature of hope and anxiety: when we hope for something we
are anxious and when we are anxious about something we have
hopes that it would or wouldnt happen.
Impotence of grief:
Part of a relentless attempt to control emotions bereft from the
sentimentality around them.
Alien sounds not unheard:
The sounds have no source. They come in an un-deliberate way.
They hit the ear-drum.
To create a subdued image of sound: sound that is controlled by
the ear. Control of the image of sound through the double negation
(vs. shrillness)

WW dislikes the gashing out of emotions (spontaneous overflow

of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity)
Spontaneous: feels intensely but is capable of controlling them
and impose gravity on them.
Mournful thoughts: mourning is checked out by thought
Thanks to the sweet councils between head and heart, he got out of
depression.
Councils: interchange of energy between head (reason) and heart
(emotion).
Vladimir Janklvitch: Que ne peut on tre raisonnable et ardent
la fois
Wish in philosophy: reconciling the faculty of reason; dissecting
and emotion. An ideal to be reached
Art that is mere gashing out of emotion is crying out. Its not
patterned. Art requires a frame which is the analytical synthetic
power of the mind. Both must come together in a natural
persuasive way. Art with no feeling as well as feeling with lacks
pattern will not touch us.
The ideal for an artist is the blending between feelings and
emotions with a heavy and powerful artistic frame. Art without
form is not art.
Its a common tale: moving accident un-charactered/ Othello and
Desdemona: she fell in love with him because of stories she heard.
In the poem: hart leap well. Theres a moving accident that
illustrates the poetry WW aspires to in a clear pragmatic way.
The moving accident is not my trade
To freeze the blood, I have not ready art
Tis my pleasure in summer shade
To pipe a simple song for a thinking heart
The miracle of good art is to express subtle sentiments and endow
them with thought and not just express them.
Common: does not freeze your blood
M.H Abrahams: natural supernaturalism: almost gothic but not
quite.
Natural beings obey some impulse in them that is part of nature.
Its only nature that does its thing.

A tale of silent suffering: Margret is a woman of few words with

deep grief.
Grosser sense: those who are vulgar/ shrill / unrefined emotions/
scarcely palpable for those who dont think.
Calamities happen without Margret expressing herself but her
grasp over her world will loosen in a natural subdued way
L475: slow decay of her world but one thing has remained, the
hope that Robert returns. Xers are destroyed by whats best in them
(Bloom)
Margret dies early of her goodness, of the power of her hope,
which is the best part of her, and which is nurtured by her memory
of goodness, of her life with her husband and children before
disaster came.
WWs understanding that apocalyptic hope, drawing its strength
from benign memory, becomes more dangerous than despair could
be.
WW does not want pity. Its a world beyond simple emotions.
Margret jus seems to be massively human. Its not stoic (meant to
make you think about the purpose of your life)
P140: when a dog passes by she still would quit the shade and look
abroad.
She spent her life waiting and the language is not shrill. The words
are powerfully descriptive and weighty not meant to arouse pity.
Line 500: with a brothers love: impotence of grief. Its heavy,
massive in diction and syntax. Its powerful grief.
In the blessing, theres a recognition of something thats given to
him. He blesses her for the impotence of grief: soothing thoughts
out of human suffering
I blessed her in the impotence of grief
Bloom: secular epiphany not from divine sources but from the
world around us. (e.g.: the leech gatherer)/ The daffodils: hit him
as a vision
The pattern: vision-wisdom-lesson-teaching
Brotherly love: the tale of Margret humanized his soul/ sadness
and grief not pity and charity/ compassion

Grief in WW has the same effect as nature. It draws him closer to

humanity.
Love, griefhuman/ not religiousthe love of nature leads to the
love of man. The cost of grief and loss is recompensed by the love
of mankind
The old man l507: do not read the form of things with an unworthy
eye
Its happiness that has been earned/ tranquillity that comes after
grief maturity of thought/wisdom/ the philosophic mind
Line530: admonishment. Nature comes back. Other melodies at
distance heard.
Admonishment occurs as part of the secular epiphany. It comes
from nature (the birds, the sweet hours coming on).
The poet has received two admonishments:
From the tale of Margret that gave him meditative thoughts
From the sound of nature
Both of which impel him to rise and move on.
Michael
Introduction:
Xers are very similar. Michael is a shepherd; an old patriarchal
figure. The poet is being told a tale he didnt witness about the
sheer weighty power of humanity
Line 19: s story un-enriched with strong events/ domestic, common
tales
WW loves shepherds for they dwell in nature and are part of it.
Love of nature leading to the love of man p17
Rude: unrefined by strange accidents
Michael continues to keep his word. Hes a biblical figure
(Abraham). WW plays on the bond of the covenant and the sheer
abiding power. Everything pointing to dereliction yet hope goes
undiminished till the very end. Yet in Michael (according to
Bloom) the covenant is broken and the old shepherd dies without
the solace of a prodigal return.
He never lifted up a single stone

Death comes as a matter of fact event/ no pathos whatsoever/ no

gashing out of grief; an ending that seems so natural, relentless
memorial.
P26: The poem begins with a memorial a sign that makes you
remember; something that admonishes you.
Michaels world is of utter solitude. He leaves behind him a
pathetic memorial, the sign of the broken covenant, a heap of
unhewn stones.
The man himself is not pathetic
He had been alone/ amid the heart of many thousand mists/ that
came to him, and left him on the heights.
These are the mists of natural imagination. Michael is the solitary
against the sky. An appearance of the sanctity of nature given to
man
The man at the heart of many thousand mists is free; there is a
binding covenant between him and nature, symbolized by the
rainbow of my heart leaps up when I behold and the epigraph to
the intimations ode. But the covenant between him and another
man has little force against the world of experience when his loss
come upon him, Michael is not diminished but we feel the
impotence of grief.
The mechanism of grief, its cause and cure have nothing to do with
the poem. We are left with an image that is permanent, obscure,
and dark, a suffering that shares the nature of infinity.
Memorials in WW are of something gone and turn into a memento
mori: remember death on tomb stones
WW was fascinated by epitaphs. Memorials in WW are linked to
remembering death and his poetry makes a subtle link between
remembering death and the very function of poetry which is the
celebration of human abiding change. Even when nature reclaims
whats hers, the human hand is praised though it is defeated.
Human work stays as a memorial that the human mind will never
be vanquished. (a vision of grief and yet of chiding strength)
Memory: when I was younger, I believed that memory was divided
equally between pleasure and pain, and I thought that I

remembered verbatim the poems that were most inevitable in their

phrasing and most pleasurable in their incantory qualities. In early
old age, I find myself agreeing with Nietzsche, who tended to
equate the memorable with the painful. A more difficult pleasure
can be painful, as I now think Wordsworth explicitly understood.
Here is a way that leads from the protestant will to WW
sympathetic imagination ()
WW did not favour happy endings form in him the metaphor for
marriage has more to do with the rapport between what he calls
nature and his own adverting mind than with the union of man
and woman. Nature in WW is the great persuader, and the
persuasion is on in which experiential loss is bartered for
imaginative gain.
The gain in the old Cumberland beggar is an exultation not easy
to accommodate, but not easy to forget. The ruined cottage
concludes with a blessing that is all loss but fearfully memorable
while Michael also concludes with a vision of utter loss.
All that Www grim but sublime pastorals give us is canonical
memory. Canonical because WW has practiced the selection for
us. He offers himself to us as Hermes who will tell us what and
how to remember, not so that we will be saved or become
prudentially wiser but because only the myth of memory can
redress our experiential losses. His lesson, once learned become
was canonical.
27/02/13
The prelude
Harold Bloo m it is an internalized ro mance with the poet as quester on "a journey seeking
a remembered world." Wordsworth, the poet prophet, as he thinks of himself, continually
speaks in two voices, the 'I' then and the 'I' now, "seeking the elements of continuity
between his two disparate selves, conducts a persistent explorat ion of the nature and
significance of memory, of his power to sustain freshness of sensation and his 'first
creative sensibility', against the deadening effect of habit and analysis, and of
man ifestations of the enduring and the eternal within the realm of change and time"
(Abrams).

The lyrical ballads 1798

1830: most of the Romantic poets died
1st generation: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake
2nd generation: Shelley, Keats, Byron (1815)

The prelude:
Epic: the philosophic poem/ the great poem/ the poem on the
growth of my mind
A poem explaining where the poet narrator of the excursion came
from/ why the poet talks and feels like this
Peculiar: an epic poem is a narrative poem but also a lyric. The
poem talks in his own persona but a lyric is about how to keep
intensity going/ an epic is a narrative and yet he managed to keep a
sublime elevated form of intensity of emotion/ sustain the level of
sublimity of thinking.
Bloom: the poem approximates epic structure, in that its fourteen
books gather to a climax after a historical series of progressively
more vital crises and renovations.
The first eight books form a single movement summed up in the
title: love of nature leading to the love of mankind.
Books 9/10/11 carry this love of mankind into its natural
consequence (WW residence in France and his involvement with
the revolution)
Books 12/13 deal with the subsequent crisis of WW imagination,
how impaired and restored
The conclusion book 14 is the climax of WW imaginative life and
takes the reader back in full cycle to the very opening of the poem.
The conclusion presents WW and Coleridge as prophets of nature,
joint labourers in the work of mans redemption.
What we have loved/ other will love and we will teach them how/
instruct them how the mind of man becomes/ a thousand times
more beautiful than the earth/ on which he dwells
Bloom:
Blake distrust of WW dialectics of nature is confirmed by WW
himself
Blake: natural objects always did and now weaken, deaden and
obliterate imagination in me

WW does fall mute when the external stimulus is too clearly

present
Geoffrey Hartman remarks that even in WW poetry is not an act
of consecration (sanctification/blessing) and nature not an
immediate external object to be consecrated
A natural object liberates Wordsworths imagination only when it
both ceases to be purely external and fades out of its object
status.
Internal/ fuses with the subject? / transcends its objective status?
Becomes a concept/ rainbow: bond?
Line1:
The opening line is a blessing/ distributing praise and benediction/
a gentle breeze is blessing the poet and he fuses with it and it stirs
within him a correspondent breeze.
All epic poems start with an invocation/ invoking spirits/ muses/
gods to come to their aid. Thats the epic opening from time
immemorial.
My voice is too weak and I am going to launch on this long epic
poem. God help me/ Milton Paradise Lost: sing heavenly muse
WW attributes this to nature. How does he invoke nature?
INSPIRATION: wind blowing into you
Traditionally: please muse, give me inspiration
WW: breeze from nature awoke his inspiration. He modernized the
metaphor.
Nature works in a benevolent way.
The poet is the Eolian Harp the music of whom is stirred by the
breeze. Nature likes to make its own music not composed.
Invocation: a fiction that enables the poet to launch
WW begins an epic poem by dramatizing the difficulty of
beginning itself.
The formulation of difficulty is itself the beginning/ rhetorical
question: was it for this that I was born?
The poet has only his voice heard through invocation/ Milton: my
inward vision

The epic is part of a cultural tradition where heroism was possible.

Modernism democratized heroism. WW found his material in the
growth of his poetic imagination and made it into an epic song.
A movement of increasing interiorization of life that Hegel
attempted in the phenomenology of the mind in which he tells
the epic tale of the mind
Fascination with the mind, its history, its shape, its contours the
Romantic generation
Although the breeze made him tell poetry (line50) yet, he tells us
that the inspiration he got that day was bad inspiration. He doesnt
respond poetically to present joy.
Sense of poetic election: WW is singled out but this singling out
does not speak any privilege but rather implies that hes
responding to the call of nature and by nature here is meant that he
has to respond to an injunction (command/ sanction/ embargo) that
he wouldnt resist himself and nature.
Nature is an important and recurrent concept. Its an elusive one in
any language.
1/ Nature can refer to its manifestation as natural objects:
NATURA NATURANS
2/ that which makes things in nature what they are/ applied to
human beings NATURA NATURALITER
Intimation ode: nature wants man to have a mind/ natural to
become autonomous
Its in the nature of man to wrench himself of nature whereas a cat
cant escape his nature.
Natures will endowed man with a mind. Natures first impulse is
to wrench him out thats why man is free.
Mind can mean consciousness, soul, intellect, imagination, spirit.
Imagination: the possibility to create images comes from nature
that wants man to imagine.
Protestant will: nature is god/ Gods will
Renovation/ restoration: a spirit made new/ afresh
Singling out/ election: not aristocratic privilege but hes
responding naturally by being a poet otherwise hed be offending
nature.

02/03/13
Wordsworth begins every poem in an interesting, original way/
procedure/ paradoxical procedure that allows him to launch. A
beginning on the difficulty of beginning
The allegorization of the word inspiration: WW took a poetic
topos (commonplace/ classical convention of epic poetry) and
made it into an allegory
WW takes the word literally. Inspirare: breath insufflated in the
poets mouth/ a demon working inside the poet
The poet is not responsible for what he says. Hes a mouthpiece
WW took this hackneyed topos and allegorized it into a fiction
the breeze touching his cheeks and awakening within him a
corresponding breath. The spiritus (the wind) of nature awoke
inspiration in him
Aspects of the sublime:
Keats: (egotistical sublime)/ the self
1/ beauty has fear/terror in it
2/ nature has taught the young boy through a chastening face and
beautiful manoeuvre
3/ Epic poem is always defined as sublime. A poetic form expected
to be elevated/ talk about lofty feelings using high flowing
language.
a/ aesthetic emotion/ determination of a work of art
b/ poetic form
The ode is expected to be written in a sublime language
Intimations ode: Paulo majora canamus: let us sing of loftier
things/ higher/ more exalted
Egotistical sublime:
Think about oneself/inward thinking about the depths of ones soul
not unmixed with fear
The aesthetic emotion when one explores his own mind/ Keats:
WW talks about himself
Theres a circulation between nature the outward and the ego
inward

The georgic metaphor/ agricultural metaphor: comparing the mind

of children to a fallow field. We must husband the mind of
children like a field (fair-seed time)
WW stole other peoples birds (he had a snare but he stole others
he feels guilty/ low breathing coming after him/ natural
supernaturalism: no ghosts/ spirits of the woods/ everything can be
understood in terms of nature
The prelude is a biographical poem different from the RC. The
theme of the song is the growth of the poetic mind. How is it that I
am what I am? Explaining/ create a narrative series of incidents
that justify the present moment.
Augustine: autobiography/ confession / why am I the Xian that I
am?
WW is hardly ever sarcastic nor given to mirth and joy. But there
is a passage in which he takes pain to mock Rousseaus lmile
(not fostered by nature but by teachers) / unnatural fostering/ a boy
needs to feel nature sending these sounds
The counter-example of lmile is WW himself: a little boy is
expected to be cruel / a love of wisdom to be acquired from daily
conversation with nature
The sublime feeling is experienced by the boy early in life
Fear and anxiety that he felt is not ignoble. These situations have
formed and enlarged his mind. Every experience in the presence of
nature is valuable
The end/ purpose: lesson given by nature/ fearful incidents teach/
reward and chastise/ discipline
Nature disciplines him and participates in the growth of his mind/
formative
Praise to the end, thanks to the means
Nature is personified not in allegorical terms but she chooses her
aim to foster the child
Narrative descriptive passages are followed by meditative passages
in which the poet attempts to make sense of the incidents. The
meditative passages reformulate in intellectual terms what the poet
experienced in material terms.

Nest stealing: nature seems to inflict fear to the truant boy out of
these incidents the adult sees the hand of nature working through
discordant elements/ dark inscrutable workmanship of nature
Human life compared to a piece of music not necessarily
harmonious but in which harmony seems to appear gradually
WW is pursuing a long established line of thinking about nature
Nature likes to hide itself Heraclitus
To get the secret, there are 2 ways:
Follow nature flow to become what we are vs. pervert the natural
impulse
Scientific way: do as nature does to discover the natural law or
impose things on nature that it doesnt like to do (mining: an injury
to nature since it pursues hidden treasures)
Nature is predictable/ functions in terms of rules/ in terms of
religion, god made his creatures with a design and endowed them
with a divine spark of reason to see that design. To pursue
scientific research is participating in what god willed to do
God will not deceive man by creating a chaotic and inscrutable
world otherwise it will be unjust. Theres wisdom and spirit of the
universe
Typical poetic locus of specific moments that the poet calls spots
of time: incident that has extraordinary power on subsequent
recollections.
06/03/13:
Coleridges definition of the imagination
Imagination: that reconciling and mediatory power, which
incorporating the reason in images of the senses, and
organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the
permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives
birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves and
consubstantial with the truths of which they are conductors.
The statesman manual (1816)
Imagination is a power that reconciles and mediates reason
and sensual images. It organizes the flux of senses through the

permanent energy of reason. It creates a system of symbols

analogous to the truth they conduct.
The imagination then, I consider either as primary or
secondary. The imagination I hold to be the living power and
prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
The secondary imagination I consider as an echo, yet still as
identical with the primary in the kind of its agency and
differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation it
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate; or where
this process is rendered impossible yet still at all events it
struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as
all objects as objects are essentially fixed and dead.
Biographia literaria 1813
The beautiful is ... at once distinguished both from the
AGREEABLE which is beneath it and from the GOOD which
is above it. For both these have an interest necessarily attached
to them. Both act on the will and excite a desire for the actual
existence of the image or idea contemplated while the sense of
beauty rests gratified in the mere contemplation or intuition
regardless whether it be a fictitious Apollo or a real Antonius.
On the principles of genial criticism 1814
The spots of time: essential incidents in early childhood/
boyhood which last and are deeply impressed in the
imagination and which the poet refers to in later years/ he
returns to loci of power and poetic / moral strength
WW project has been a continuous revisiting of these sports of
time even the daffodils, an unassuming little lyric later on the
poet recreates in his inward eye.
The incidents in Book 1 are of beauty and fear. Theyre
passages of unsurpassable poetic beauty and ground of WW
poetic strength.
The sublime: when nature reveals its frightening side

Optical phenomenon: the parallax view

I push from the shore/ troubled pleasure (pleasure if not with
trouble is not worth it) a composite feeling animating the boy,
theres always sound echoing/ almost supernatural but not.
He sees the ridge but his angle of viewing expands as hes
rowing further more and more mountains rise
He thought they had power to riseA description of a
phenomenon unknown in a mood of troubled pleasure
He construes this entire incident as the wisdom (nature) and
spirit of the world. Its a tribute to how nature teaches with
sublimity / a principle in living things that shapes the poetic
imagination
WW comes close to the designation of something supernatural
(nature has a life in it) that seems to talk with the imagination
yet never leads it astray to believe in something invisible/
rather the universe shows itself in mysterious ways. The
enigmatic is part of nature not outside of it/ above and beyond
it as though inhabited by ghosts/ ghostly language of the
ancient earth. He always refrains from saying that theres
something invisible. Its just nature hiding itself.
WW plays on the different meaning of spirit/ mind/ breath/
air/ music/ aria/ ghost / essence (distillation/ quintessence) all
these possible etymons are implied/ suggested
WW is the great poet of imagination. Nature presents a
ghostly face but no ghosts. Natural supernaturalism
Nothing is divorced from nature even the mind is part of
nature
F. Schiller: Letters in the aesthetic education of man WW
formulations of the idea of spirit
Nature has endowed men with consciousness mind/ spirit
Nature wants us to have a spirit/ a soul unlike other beasts.
Nature pushed the child away. If someone refuses
consciousness he remains a savage; an individual whos under
the bondage of nature, incapable of the works of the mind.

If someone suppresses nature and celebrates only the mind,

they become barbarian; divorced from nature/ the passions,
feelings of pity and fear
For WW there must be a balance/ interfusion / harmony
between mind and nature
Passions come from feelings/ senses not the mind/ logos: law
comes from reason. WW want a thinking heart/ sweet councils
between head and heart/ romantic idea of mind divorced from
the passions of the heart makes you a barbarian (life of nature
is dead)
Theres no virtue in justice not tempered by love Raymond
Lull 13thC
Love is in nature, justice is in the mind
Goethe a genuine work of art, no less than a work of nature,
will always remain infinite to our reason; it can be
contemplated and felt, it affects us but it cannot be fully
comprehended
Dryden (1979): bombast is commonly the delight of that
audience which loves poetry but understands it not, and as
commonly has been the practice of those writers who not
being able to infuse a natural passion into the mind have made
it their business to ply the ear and to stun their judges by the
noise.
18/03/13
Imagination in Shakespeare and Romanticism:
Romanticism came as a reaction to and against the faculty of
mind/reason dominant in the 18thC.
The entire 18th was called the age of reason
Why? Because of the 100-year war that ravaged Europe
(16th/17thC), thinkers like Voltaire and Locke... began to think
about what was needed to stop the war.
1 main cause was religion that came to sanctify political
decisions.
All of them agreed beyond their backgrounds that religion is
cultural not transcendent. One of the consequences of this is to
respect all beliefs.

Not only is religious cultural but also the color of skin is an

accident of life. All these determinations (faith, social class,
race) are not inbuilt and were given the name of contingencies.
What is it beyond these that all human beings share: the mind
(the faculty of reason is universal)
All 18thC thinkers highlight the idea of reason even in
architecture as they obeyed the rules of geometrical harmony.
Religious faith is a form of liberty (Locke). It is the function
of the state to protect religious freedom but in things that
pertain to the state you cannot claim your faith.
In the French and American revolution, reason itself became
mad. More murders and havoc were committed in the name of
reason. (September massacres)
1790s: in Germany, philosophers started to question the
overall supremacy of reason and hence the promotion of the
no less important faculty of the mind which is creative
imagination which is no less important than reason in the
determination of mankind. A way of picturing that singles
men out.
The age of sensibility: 20 years
Poets and novelists started to talk about things like pity,
beggars, ruined villages and the burden of the work of art was
to create a feeling and not talk to reason.
The poetry that came out was over-sentimental and shallow.
Imagination challenges the excess of reason
The wordsworthian imagination is to link the faculty of mind
to nature. Thats why Imagination is called higher reason or
natural faculty of the mind.
Imagination link to nature: reason that becomes rationalizing/
different operations that reason engages in. If it is related to
and tempered by nature its fine and is humanized. If its left
loose, it becomes mad
Nature: feelings, sentiments/ when reason is checked by
sentiments
Law is reason. Its an objective rational pronouncement.

A thief must go to jail. If we feel pity for the thief, our feelings
check reason
Imagination came to the fore because the 18 thC was dominated
by reason with all its madness and excesses. They wished to
link it with nature. The imagination is a natural faculty, theres
nothing supernatural about it. Its all the work of nature.
Its distinguished from fancy (fantasy). If you are under the
sway of fear youll see a bear in a bush: a trick of the senses
Imagination is a higher faculty of the mind that sees
similarities in dissimilarities. Its a shaping power. From
dissimilarities it creates similar forms
Mind is the largest category. It has different modes of
operating
1/ reason: murders to dissect/ analyses through logic/
syllogistic logical reasoning/ find laws (whats hidden)
2/ Imagination: faculty within the mind. It doesnt dissect. It
makes images/ sees whats common
Romantic imagination: not all poets held the same view
Blake: all imagination no nature. Theres no wedding between
mind and nature
When I behold the sky I see angels through my eyes
WW sees with his eyes not through and always links his
imaginary world to the natural world / the ghostly language of
the ancient earth (not supernatural beings)
Ben Johnson: the child of fancy: Imagination
Blake gives a minor role to senses.
Seeing is no longer related to sense but to the internal works
of imagination (sun: angels singing not big ball of fire)
WW sees with his eyes: the act of perception is linked to the
senses and the natural world. What you see is grounded by the
senses. They create the foundation and give weight to
imagination otherwise it will go loose and see ghosts and
spirits. But senses arent enough. Everyone sees but what it
does to the imagination is more interesting. Imagination has to
go through the senses. Imagination is the power to create
images from nature

WW is always scared that his imagination will carry him away

from the natural world and make him mad.
When it is cut off of its natural ground it will become
meaningless.
The prelude (Book 6):
Grand tour of France
A major event in the Alps (in the growth of his poetic mind)
- A soulless image / a living thought: he had so much
imagined Mont Blanc that he was disappointed. When the
imagination fantasizes and creates images in the mind
and when it is confronted with nature, they dont match.
He wants imagination to come from nature. He wants to
see with and not despite or through his eyes.
The Simplon pass L557:
Yet still in me...
Despite the disappointment that his imagination had
prepared him for; he was still hoping to see something
grandiose in the Alps. A trick was played on him by his
Imagination. He was a victim of his own unbridled
imagination (hopes that pointed to the clouds)
P79: Imagination: that awful, sublime, frightening power/
unfathered vapour: satanic/ apocalyptic imagination that can
create a world of its own. Hes paralysed and made feeble
by his imagination. But now I can say to my conscious self
(not under the sway): I recognize your power/ usurpation /
when the light of senses goes out, the greatness of
imagination grows.
Its something that he recognizes and that he doesnt yield
to.
His imagination is always coupled and grounded by nature
and sensuous experience. When faculties of the mind are
divorced from nature they become dangerous.
Bond / bonding/ connect/ connectedness/ bound each to
each by natural piety: match vs. reason gone wild. He wants
his humanity to be a mixture of feelings and mind

Imagination is linked to the Nile. The Nile coming from the

clouds to fertilize the Egyptian plain
WW doesnt come into frenzy but he almost does it in this
Paragraph. Its due to melancholy. Even in this trance,
everything is connected to nature: the sublimity of nature in
its fearful aspect (whats seen) and all this disparate features
speak of the vastness and infinity of nature that appears to
the poetic mind to have been imported into the imagination.
The book of nature: WW takes a clich/ trope and works it
out.
If nature like to hide itself, it must have secrets that appear to
us in a certain cipher/ code (book/ codex). Nature is like a
book and all we see are xers that we have to decipher (science:
revelation of secrets)
The tree that we see is the code of something else: life?
Rainbow: bond between heaven and earth
WW sees that if we decode nature, we see the symbols of
eternity.
Book7: after completion of Cambridge, he settled in London
(in contrast with the Alps)
London is a catalogue of diverse elements. He finds a secluded
nook/ a sheltered space. He sees in the crowd adversarial
elements.
L640: the book of nature here seems to be mute.
Theres no message except that if we gaze at human condition
we find little but if we resort to imagination then life will be
bearable.
The admonishment that the poet receives from the beggar is
not so much about the paucity of human condition as it is
about human sympathy for that poverty and the fact that he
was able to feel for that beggar.
WW and marginal characters: hes not only interested in
telling us about them but what that did to the poet.
WW went into a kind of dream/ half-consciousness / halfslumbering but he was smitten by the sight of the beggar. Its

not the poverty / its not the what itself but what it did to the
poet: admonishment about his own humanity.
In itself, its dignified (moral and aesthetic)
They taught him that hes human. His love for humanity has
been reinforced.
Sense of loss: death/ loss teachers him. Theres always gain.
He became more human by recognizing loss.
Human feeling: conjunction of head and heart/ increase of
consciousness.
19/03/13:
WW takes biographical elements and fuses them in fiction
French revolution: something in the order of nature / humans
and things follow a course that is meant to be spontaneous and
for the best.
Nature does never do anything wrong/ works spontaneously
for the good
Nature has willed man to leave her/ liberate themselves
because liberation is in the nature of things. Keeping men in
bondage is unnatural.
Edmund Burke: one of the few intellectuals against the French
revolution
Reflections on the French revolution: human progress should
come in stages and through reforms (trial and error)/
institutions kept by society are called customs and values/
values are called prejudiced/ people go through reform
adapting customs and prejudices: belief in common sense
behind.
He saw in the rev something completely novel based on
abstract notions. You cannot find a society born anew: theres
no new dawn (figures of speech) he was for reform rather than
revolution
Momentous: spot of time/ significant
P86: conflict of sensations
Hope: torn between 2 loyalties (Britain and French ideals/
shame and grief
Village steeple: home country

A complex guilt tore him apart: faith in the Rev and needless
massacres
Guilt: having abandoned nature but it was always a pleasant
exercise beyond the current miseries something good might
come out.
Reason: enchantress: oxymoron
Lowest point of crisis: p90 nature has been replaced by
analytical reason
Reason cant justify faith. You lose both of them if you try to
apply one on the other. He was trying to justify through reason
but everything shows that it was going wrong except for
sentimental attachment.
Nature is the fountain head of his imaginative power.
French revolution: he fell in love with reason. He changed the
faculty of the mind from imagination to reason
Reason left to its own device/ internal structure can become
dangerous
Adorno and Hokheimer: the dialectics of enlightenment:
reason leading to misery
The human heart must check reason/ nature humanized by
feelings
A genuine life would be to couple rational nature and human
nature: sweet councils of head and heart.
There mustnt be any faculty left to its own device.
Book 12:
I warred against myself: against his own nature/ new idolatry:
reason
Unsoul: remove the soul
One brotherhood: he removes the soul of human nature.
A mind perverted: unnatural / corrupted by much thinking
Nature is also dissected by reason
Both the physical and moral worlds were subjected to reason.
Hes suspicious of the eye and favours hearing. In order to
balance the tyranny of the eye, he summoned other senses and
sought new pleasures. Seeking reconnection with nature is
purely sensuous at first. WW is not a poet of pure sensuous

experience. He will bring in the thought. He further sought the

reconnection by going back to childhood.
Thanks to the visiting of imaginative power that he
experienced in early childhood, he shook the habit of
analytical reasoning and overcame the depression to re-emerge
as a sensitive being, a creative soul. The importance of spots
of time.
Nature vs. mind:
Mind is willed by nature. Its independent of it yet not
divorced.
Mind: intellect/ consciousness/ spirit/ soul/ imagination
The mind can manifest itself in different forms
2 faculties: reason + imagination ideally for WW they are
bounded/ interdependent
Its the mind that creates thoughts and ideas: a thinking heart
Thoughts alone become monstrous. He desires thought that
belong to human nature/ thoughts are connected to passion and
meet in nature.
The key word is connectedness/ fitting
P92: spots of time
Restoration: renovation virtue brought by spots of time
Sustain: to prop up/ to feed
Renovate: at once renewal/ consolidate/ strengthen
Restoration: bring back to former order/ repair/ nourish
Multiplicity of functions of childhood
Greatness that comes from nature is fortified by the soul.
2nd spot of time:
Early boyhood incidents of a dreary and strange nature/ a
tragic nature
The loss ofhis father: moments of origin / a renovation source
As through the life of the poetic mind began with the spots of
time
Familiar procedure: an incident tragic or trivial flash upon the
heart/ spirit
Remembrance isnt just the flash / whatever the experience
that is stored in the mind, it is returned to as a point of strength

This spot of time is intriguing. Its a major tragic incident. Yet

what the poet remembers is the scene
Loss and grief are under heavy emotional control.
Anxiety of hope is an injury inflicted on time. It hastened the
death of his father.
The prelude: a sequence of spots of time/ points of birth /
growth of his poetic imagination.
If theres one unity that connects the book, its clearing out of
early occurrence that have something in common: nature
presenting itself in a dreary or beautiful way
I am what I am because of these experiences.
Sometimes what survive are the traces, mood and power. It
still lives a life of its own in the mind and they keep restoring
the poetic mind and keep him composing and imagining.
The poets anxiety springs from this fear that visiting of
power/ manifestations of nature will cease. He would no
longer feel them working on his imagination.
Mind is brought about by nature: child /father its issued from
it but struggles for autonomy and yet keeps the bond. Its a
dialectical fruitful relationship.
13/04/13:
WW is the father of English Romanticism/ precursor. He is a
poet who started a literary revolution in form and content
Ill train the literary taste by which my poetry will be
appreciated (the preface). He aimed to be the poet of common
themes (vs. Heroism / ghosts/ fantastic). He focuses on daily
incidents, common objects, experience: the substance of his
poetry
The poet will experience and talk about experience. The poet
needs to experience in order to talk about sympathy. Before,
the poets followed stereotypes.
emphasis on the lived authentic sincerity of the poet with that
commonality/ sincerity of lived experience goes the
commonality of language and diction (the common language

of man): common themes couched / framed within common

language
The poet doesnt have to weave complicated figures. The
readers do not have to be elites.
The poet himself is one of the common people/ no special
status for the poet. The poet is not in a sphere of his own
Whats the rationale behind this?
Its in the name of truth: speaking about a flower that you see
with your eyes is true vs. the stereotype
Before the 18thC there was a relationship to tradition /
convention. With Romanticism came imagination and
originality because of the modern emphasis on individuality.
WW is fascinated by imagination. Before him there was
inspiration. The poet was irresponsible of the process / the
creative power.
Imagination comes from the mind/ It is creative imagination.
Its the offspring of the notion of the individual mind (an epic
scale poem on the growth of the poetic imagination)
Themes:
*Nature: complex, illusive concept
-Signifies the world we behold with our senses
-The life principle that makes things what they are: human
nature
For WW nature is free. The principle of freedom vs. Bondage
for others: No one bids the bird to sing
-The end result of this principle of freedom: the role of man
Child is the inmate of man: nature Vis Vis man, unlike other
creatures behaves in one peculiar way. It pushes man away
from nature to grow: a complex relationship
Although hes part of her, she pushes him away to seek his
own pleasures with the mind/ through consciousness. Nature
created man to wrench away himself
Hes part of nature and not part of it at the same time
The status of nature stems not only from the concept itself but
from the relationship with the man and the poet himself and
nature

WW is the poet of nature: he sings of the human mind

Deep-seated belief that if a child is fostered by nature that will
give him mental, imaginative power that will last all his
lifetime.
Recapturing imagination strength in contact of nature
Anxiety that this link might break/ that imagination will no
longer be responsive or that nature severs their love/ doesnt
speak to him
Nature is not dead. Its not imagination that insufflates life in
it. It is rather a mutually kindred haunting
Nature wants autonomy and freedom of mankind
WW saw the French revolution as part of the process of
nature/ minor problems will follow. He was disillusioned.
Revolution was taking an unnatural course (massacres in the
name of the revolution)
Spots of time and early childhood
Connection/ constant overflow of energy and mutual affection
WW never sees in nature anything unnatural: ghosts
Nature can present a cheerful / sublime face: different faces of
nature
The celestial light/ visionary gleam: metaphors/ a primary
strength in human life that naturally is suppressed in further
life and is replaced by the light of common day. This constant
circulation of power is one of his deepest fears yet for every
loss theres a gain.
Do we go through life losing or gaining things? Thats the
question.
CE QUI NE TUE PAS RENDS PLUS FORT
Moments when hes smitten by something singular that
admonishes him (the daffodils/ the blind beggar...) La nature
linterpelle by secular visions
These visions tell him one thing but we dont know what it
tells him. How consciousness and imagination are taken by
surprise by nature
The poet is enclosed within himself, abstracted in his thoughts
and there suddenly theres this peculiar simple sight that

impels him to wake up and see life outside/ nature outside/

theres something else than yourself/ not to dwell too much on
himself
*Temporality:
Acquires sense when its connected with remembering and
recollection
2 main lines of thought:
I never made present joy the matter of my song: he composes
in hindsight. He never composes on the spur of the moment
WW definition of poetry is the framework
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
recollected in tranquillity. The flow of time is linked to
remembering
Time of composition: now remembering & beholding a scene
he saw 5 years ago in Tintern Abbey
The recollection has already been complexified/ chastised
thanks to mind and memory work
Matching a visible scene with a remembered scene: the scenes
are superimposed
Hes remembering what hes seeing. The remembered scene is
made melancholic not better
Through imagination temporality is fluid. He can project
himself forward and backward in time and with each move
theres something at stake for the mind
With each projection a new train of thought is engaged. WW
is not a poet of description. Hes one of mediation
He made common endowed with peculiar dignity all the
marginal characters. His dramatic personae are rich with
normal and aesthetic qualities.
Vulgar: powerful emotions vs. Controlled diction and
imaginative composure check emotion rather than extempore
effusion. How emotions and affections are deepened by
thought and how the mind beautifies and deepens them.
A deep distress has humanized my soul. Distress is turned into
depth and profundity / slow and ponderous

IMAGINATION:
Imagination- here the power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech
That awful power rose from the minds abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps
At once some lonely traveller I was lost
Halted without an effort to break through
But to my conscious soul I now can say
I recognize thy glory in such strength
Of usurpation when the light of sense
Goes out but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world doth greatness make abode
There harbours whether we be young or old
Our destiny our beings heart and home
Is with infinitude and only there
With hope it is hope that will never die
Effort and expectations and desire
And something evermore about to be
Under such banners militant the soul
Seeks for no trophies struggles for no spoils
That may attest her prowess blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward
Strong in herself and in beatitude
That hides her like the mighty flood of Nile
Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds
To fertilize the Egyptian plain
For WW IMAGINATION WAS/
for the most
subservient strictly to the external things
with which it communed
The Prelude
For Wordsworth there were
...spots of time
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue

The Prelude
D.N.Smith put it, 'may not be the real subjects of his
poems.The titles afford as a rule
little clue to what the poems contain. Wordsworth does not
value anything for itself so
much as for what it can tell us of ourselves.'
Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to
propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty
to things of every day, and
to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening
the mind`s attention from
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and
the wonders of the world
before us: an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in
consequence of the film of
familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not,
ears that hear not, and hearts
that neither feel nor understand.
Nature through its beautiful objects, through its effects on the
perceiver, strengthens
his character, teaches him morals and enables him 'to see into
the life of things.' A
physical sight is thus transformed into a spiritual one,
providing the perceiver with an
insight into ' the spiritual governance of the universe.' The
spirit , by communing with the
forms of nature, humanizes our attitudes toward man. The
effects of the external world
are not the same at various age levels though: childhood is a
time of sensation, youth one
of emotion, and manhood one of thought or reflection.
Although there is description in
the poem, it is not much about landscape as about the effects
on the perceiving mind, so

that the poem is obviously about 'the effects of memory, time

and landscape upon the
human heart.'
Of the Lyrical Ballads Northrop Frye says that "man
first finds his identity in his relation with nature, which is a
better teacher than
booksOne finds one's lost identity with nature in moments
of feeling in which one is
penetrated by the sense of nature`s 'huge and mighty forms'."
NOTES ON THE PREFACE :
how it does it.
In the paragraph that opens with "The principal object"
Wordsworh tells us that for
the Lyrical Ballads he chose "incidents and situations from
common life", intending to
make the interesting "by tracing in themthe primary laws of
our nature." For that
purpose "low and rustic life was generally chosen", implying
that rural life and village
communities show human nature in a pure state. The passage
in which he tries to answer
the question 'what is a poet?' brings a conception of the poet as
a 'man speaking to men'.
The abilities that set him apart are a livelier sensibility and a
greater knowledge of the
world, which enable him to communicate the experiences he
shares with others. A more
intense awareness of the external world is the privilege he
must not keep to himself. That
awareness is here another name for the poetic imagination,
which transforms all
experience into something richer than any real experience.
The statement that 'all good poetry is a spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings'

occurs twice in the Preface and suggests that the poetic

creation is an intense mental and
emotional activity. When he adds that "poetry takes its origin
from emotions recollected
in tranquillity", Wordsworth tells us that the creative process
begins in the calm of his
room when he remembers a past experience.
His definitions of poetry as 'the image of man and nature' , or
that it is 'the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge', or that it is 'the first and last of
all knowledge; it is as
immortal as the heart of man' are both romantic and in the vein
of traditional 'apologies'
of poetry. Wordsworth believed that poetry, like science,
should reveal general truths,
particularly truths about human nature. Since for him there is
no difference between the
'truth' of the man of science and the 'truth' of the poet, it means
that in their common
pursuit they use only different methods. Scientists and poets
are not opposites or enemies,
they are allies whose task is the same but use different means
to achieve it:
The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown
benefactor;
he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a
song in
which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence
of truth
as our visible friend and hourly companion.
The Oxford Anthology says that "the informing idea of
Wordsworth`s theory of
poetry, as of his practice, is that poetry has the power to
prevent and reverse modern
man`s alienation, his estrangement from himself, from his
fellow men, and from the

universe. To the enforcement of this idea and to the

explication of the particular means by
which the poet realizes it, the Preface is devoted."
Conclusion:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier o r more deadly weight,
In triv ial occupations, and the round
Of o rdinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
'Spots of time' are those mo ments of our lives when we experience a sort of revelation
which enables us to grasp the significance of what we have perceived. For Wordsworth
this also means being able to get fro m the experience an extraord inary personal ins ight,
or when we recollect them in times of hopelessness and weariness will relieve us and
sustain.
The Prelude is above all an analysis of the growth of Wordsworth`s own poetic
genius during his childhood and youth, it is about the lessons he owed to Natu re, his first
teacher:
Th is only let me add,
Fro m heart-experience, and in hu mblest sense
Of modesty, that he, who in his youth
A daily wanderer among woods and fields
With liv ing Nature hath been intimate,
Not only in that raw unpractised time
Is stirred to extasy, as others are,
By glittering verse; but further, doth receive,
In measure only dealt to himself,
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy
Fro m the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets.
Wordsworth's belief in the power of nature to 'raise the mind fro m the triv ialities of
life' brought him to the belief that nature can bring man to contact with 'life's essentials'.
His best poems, written during his 'great decade' (1797-1807) are all about "the struggle
of the mind to co me to terms with the situation of man", to regain that 'blessed mood' in
which "the human mind irradiates and transforms the world which it perceives, giving
life and meaning to what be essentially dead." It is the poetic power wh ich stirs the
reader`s imag ination and cleanses his 'doors of perception', rescuing thus both the poet
and the reader fro m 'the visionary dreariness' of a life without joy. Wordsworth`s
powerful imag ination gave shape to his beliefs and turned them into poetic myth. When
the imagination began to fail him, and this process was no longer possible, he settled into
a conventional Anglicanis m.
Here what Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian crit ic, responsible for the phrase 'great
decade' said about Wordsworth`s poetry:
"Wordsworth`s poetry is great because of the extraord inary power with which
Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simp le
primary affect ions and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case
248 R. RIST I

after case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as to make us share it. The source of joy
fro m which he thus draws is the truest and most unfailing source of joy accessible to
man. It is also accessible universally. Wordsworth brings us word, therefore - according
to his own strong characteristic line - he brings us word 'of joy in widesty commonalty
spread'. Here is an immense advantage for a poet. Wordsworth tells us of what all seek,
and tells of it at its truest and best source, and yet a source where all may go and draw
fro m it."
Wordsworth was a conscious artist, well aware of what he was doing as a rebel
against 'contemporary literary fashions'. "As a poet", says Bloo m, "Wordsworth sought to
create the taste by which he could be appreciated, for no central writer - not even Dante was so determined to universalize his own h ighly indiv idual temperament. Wordsworth`s

spirit was so open to both human and natural otherness, as perhaps no other poet`s was,
before or since."

Consciousness
Childhood
Temporality
Nature
Mind
Imagination
Soul
Growth
Prelude
Commonality
Recollection
Connectedness