The permanence of stars as compared with flowers emphasises the permanence of memory for the poet. But the daffodils were not explicitly related to herself. They had life's weariness, but more, its joyousness, and Dorothy's delight in the spectacle is clear from the energy of her language. They were dancing in wind they are alive. They were not offering a tutelary lesson in morals or inviting their viewers to a perception of transcendence. And, humanised as Dorothy makes them, neither they nor the wind nor the lake had any concern with the observers, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 'Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.' ( Grasmere Journal, 15 April 1802).Īpart from the resting flowers, even those in the dance have different movements. She enjoyed Nature's detail - noticed the very differences evident in the wild daffodils by Ullswater, for example, that 'grew among the mossy stones about & about them'. Not having had Wordsworth's intense early inner life in relation to Nature, she tended to see the natural world as something outside herself, as having its own existence in which, as a separate person, she could delight. But,īut Dorothy was not a reflection of her brother. Wordsworth himself tried in The Prelude to tell the full story of his relationship with Nature, tried to clarify its pattern. In a phase of fancy he could, for example, impose on Nature attitudes learnt from books, could thus provide a Yew tree with a ghost: 'That took its station there for ornament' (The Prelude VIII, 529), or turn a black rock, 'wet with constant springs' and glistening far off into a 'burnished shield over a Knight's tomb suspended' ( ibid., 560-80). So positions in Wordsworth's poetry are not absolute attitudes are not forever discarded or forever taken on. It was the human eye 'that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality' that leant a 'sober colouring' to the 'Clouds that gather round the setting sun'. That 'something far more deeply interfused' of 'Tintern Abbey' whose 'dwelling was the light of setting suns' in 1798, and in whose presence the poet felt a 'sense sublime' and heard oftentimes the music of humanity, is scarcely present in Wordsworth's writing of this time. It was the human heart with its tenderness, joys and fears that gave to the meanest flower, 'Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' (' Ode', 206). ![]() Wordsworth left the 'Ode' unfinished with this question in 1802, answering it two years later in 1804 and almost reversing the earlier balance between Nature and Man.įor Wordsworth, Nature in 1804 was neither so triumphant nor so transcendent a presence as hitherto, and humanity now brought the dominant consolation, and had power even to make Nature meaningful.
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