| Extract |
| I - Perspective, continued |
| Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
(1798), from the Lyrical Ballads collection, is written in the
same style of blank verse as The Prelude. Wordsworth has only
a pen, yet cannot rest until he has wrung from it a brush's
work: |
 |
.. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite. |
| This poem records his return to a spot on the
Wye river, five years after his having first visited it: |
|
Five years have past: five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. |
| Although in the same place, the poet's feelings
are different from those of five years ago. His sister, Dorothy
Wordsworth, is a barometer of his own psychological change during
his absence: |
|
.and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! |
| Wordsworth also wrote wonderful ballads. These
contained very serious - yet pithily rhyming - exhortations
- half-hidden by the apparently not so serious bounding metre
- to immerse oneself in the natural world, not the world of
books: |
|
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! On my life,
There's more of wisdom in it. |
| This was not the arcane work of a William Blake,
whose personal, religious vision - especially in a post-Enlightenment
Europe - of a New Jerusalem, was easily classifiable, and therefore
perhaps dismissible, as the ravings of a madman. (Blake claimed
that he conversed regularly with angels and it was not uncommon
for him and his wife to sit, naked, in their garden reading
Milton's Paradise Lost aloud to each other. So, Blake's contemporary
readers, or critics, possessing the fashionable amount of worldly
cynicism, would, of course, usually have been predisposed to
reject the utterances of such a man.) No, this was the condensed
wisdom of a perfectly sane Dalesman who hardheadedly rejected
what was not natural - and whether this was the uselessness
of scholarly erudition or the insidiousness that he believed
too often attended scientistic reasoning, Wordsworth was against
all things in whose names men impose restrictions on the happiness
of their fellow beings: |
|
No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from today, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year. |
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