Influence Of Natural Objects

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Title:     Influence Of Natural Objects
Author: William Wordsworth [More Titles by Wordsworth]

  Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
  Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
  And giv'st to forms and images a breath
  And everlasting motion! not in vain,
  By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn               5
  Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
  The passions that build up our human soul;
  Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man:
  But with high objects, with enduring things,
  With life and nature: purifying thus                      10
  The elements of feeling and of thought,
  And sanctifying by such discipline
  Both pain and fear,--until we recognize
  A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
  Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me                  15
  With stinted kindness.  In November days,
  When vapors rolling down the valleys made
  A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
  At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
  When, by the margin of the trembling lake,                20
  Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went
  In solitude, such intercourse was mine:
  Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
  And by the waters, all the summer long.
  And in the frosty season, when the sun                    25
  Was set, and, visible for many a mile,
  The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
  I heeded not the summons: happy time
  It was indeed for all of us; for me
  It was a time of rapture!  Clear and loud                 30
  The village clock tolled six--I wheeled about,
  Proud and exulting like an untired horse,
  That cares not for his home,--All shod with steel
  We hissed along the polished ice, in games
  Confederate, imitative of the chase                       35
  And woodland pleasures,--the resounding horn,
  The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.
  So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
  And not a voice was idle; with the din
  Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;                       40
  The leafless trees and every icy crag
  Tinkled like iron; while far-distant hills
  Into the tumult sent an alien sound
  Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
  Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west           45
  The orange sky of evening died away.
  Not seldom from the uproar I retired
  Into a silent bay, or sportively
  Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
  To cut across the reflex of a star;                       50
  Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed
  Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
  When we had given our bodies to the wind,
  And all the shadowy banks on either side
  Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still        55
  The rapid line of motion, then at once
  Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
  Stopped short, yet still the solitary cliffs
  Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled
  With visible motion her diurnal round!                    60
  Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
  Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
  Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.

 

NOTES:

8. Nature's teaching is never sordid nor mercenary, but always purifying and ennobling.

10. PURIFYING, also SANCTIFYING (l. 12), refer to "Soul" (l. 2).

12-14. Human cares are lightened in proportion to our power of sympathising with nature. The very beatings of our heart acquire a certain grandeur from the fact that they are a process of nature and linked thus to the general life of things. It is possible that "beatings of the heart" may figuratively represent the mere play of the emotions, and thus have a bearing upon the words "pain and fear" in line 13.

15. FELLOWSHIP. Communion with nature in her varying aspects as described in the following lines.

31. VILLAGE CLOCK. The village was Hawkshead.

35. CONFEDERATE. Qualifies "we," or "games." Point out the different shades of meaning for each agreement.

42. TINKLED LIKE IRON. "When very many are skating together, the sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy trees, and the woods all round the lake _tinkle_." S. T. Coleridge in _The Friend_, ii, 325 (1818).

42-44. The keenness of Wordsworth's sense perceptions was very remarkable. His susceptibility to impressions of sound is well illustrated in this passage, which closes (l. 43-46) with a color picture of striking beauty and appropriateness.

50. REFLEX=_reflection_. _Cf_.:

Like the _reflex_ of the moon
Seen in a wave under green leaves.
Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_, iii, 4.

In later editions Wordsworth altered these lines as follows:

To cut across the image. 1809. To cross the bright reflection. 1820.

54-60. The effect of rapid motion is admirably described. The spinning effect which Wordsworth evidently has in mind we have all noticed in the fields which seem to revolve when viewed from a swiftly moving: train. However, a skater from the low level of a stream would see only the fringe of trees sweep past him. The darkness and the height of the banks would not permit him to see the relatively motionless objects in the distance in either hand.

57-58. This method of stopping short upon one's heels might prove disastrous.

58-60. The effect of motion persists after the motion has ceased.

62 63. The apparent motion of the cliffs grows feebler by degrees until "all was tranquil as a summer sea." In _The_ [Transcriber's note: the rest of this footnote is missing from the original book because of a printing error.]

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NOTES:

This poem was composed at Goslar in 1799 as part of the first book of _The Prelude_ (published in 1850). It was first printed in Coleridge's periodical _The Friend_, in December, 1809, with the instructive though pedantic title, "Growth of Genius from the Influences of Natural Objects on the Imagination, in Boyhood and Early Youth." It appeared in Wordsworth's poems of 1815 with the following title:--"Influence of Natural Objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth."

The opening verses of this poem are still another instance of the identification of God with nature. As Mr. Stopford Brooke writes, "we are here in contact with a Person, not with a thought. But who is this person? Is she only the creation of imagination, having no substantive reality beyond the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the living Spirit of God in the outward world, in order that he may possess a metaphysical thought as a subject for his work as an artist."

_The Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey_ contain the highest expression which Wordsworth has given to this thought, To the heedless animal delight in nature had succeeded a season in his youth when the beauty and power of nature "haunted him like a passion," though he knew not why. The "dizzy rapture" of those moods he can no longer feel. Yet,

"Not for this
Faint I nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe
Abundant 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,
Nor 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
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things_."

In ll. 42-46, of _The Influence of Natural Objects_, we have an inimitable Wordsworthian effect. Into the midst of his wild sport the voice of Nature steals, and subdues his mind to receive the impulses of peace and beauty from without. We involuntarily think of the boy he has celebrated, his playmate upon Windermere, who loved to rouse the owls with mimic hootings, but

"When a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."
_The Prelude_, v. 379 f.

[The end]
William Wordsworth's poem: Influence Of Natural Objects

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