The reason Wordsworth thought like this is because for him poetry 'takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity' (preface to Lyrical Ballads). He was brought up in the Lake District, a region renowned for its beauty, and so learned to appreciate nature and think of it in this way. "William spent his free days…"drinking in"…the natural sights and sounds, and getting to know the cottagers, shepherds, and solitary wanderers who moved through his imagination into his later poetry." (Norton 219). This is exactly how his poetry came about, put another way “it is the recollection of the emotions inspired by nature that provided Wordsworth with the subject matter for a lot of his poetry.” (Harvey, 44).
It is obvious "Wordsworth enjoyed the reputation of being best acquainted with 'Lady Nature'" (Modiano, 34), but how did he achieve this reputation? His poem 'Tintern Abbey', included in Lyrical Ballads, is about an area that he is very fond of, and which he often thinks about in time of trouble. Wordsworth has not visited the area for five years, the last time being just after he had returned from France where he felt the revolution was getting too violent for him to stay; despite his support for it. We can see that Wordsworth has a huge amount of respect for nature. He deliberately makes us feel that he is at one with nature by he describing his past self as a "roe" bounding over the mountains. This image immediately gives us the impression that Wordsworth did not simply enjoy experiencing nature but he was actually a part of it. While describing his past self he creates a feeling of remoteness and complete aloneness with nature
Do I behold those steep and lofty cliffs.
Which on a wild and secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion…" 5-7).
Wordsworth wants us to believe that he was alone with nature, but not that he was lonely because he feels completely at home in the seclusion of the wilderness.
We can see, at the beginning of the poem, that Wordsworth represents nature as the environment and landscape; the country rather than the city. His thoughts are moved by these scenes, but at this point in the poem nature is no more than a comforting influence on him. I use the word comforting deliberately because that is the exact impression the poet puts across, when the “the din / Of towns and cities…” (25-26) becomes too much for him he thinks of nature and is rewarded with 'sensations sweet'.
Wordsworth did not particularly enjoy being in the city, and the industrial revolution did not help this. When, in 'Tintern Abbey', he sees the '…wreaths of smoke/ Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!' (17-18) he puts it down to 'vagrant dwellers…/ Or some Hermit's cave…'. This explanation is probably his imagination talking, as the River Wye was alive with signs of the industrial revolution, the smoke undoubtedly came from one of the charcoal manufacturers on the river bank. Wordsworth's denial of the industrial revolution shows his hatred of it, he blocks out the signs of it and tells the reader it is something very different in order to keep the countryside separate and isolated from the city.
This is not the only sense of revolution we get in this poem, after all the last time he was at 'Tintern Abbey' he had just returned from France which was in the midst of revolution. Wordsworth reminisces over his past self and gives the impression of an overly excited man with 'coarser pleasures', he was still full of the energy he experienced in France, yet he says he was 'like a man / Flying from something that he dreads…' (70-71) which gives us an insight into the horrors of France at that time. In actual fact 'flying from something he dreads' was exactly what he was doing when leaving France; he may have supported the cause but he did not like the violence involved and was forced to leave a pregnant lover there during his flight.
Wordsworth believed that nature was a source of knowledge and he reflects that in his poetry and especially in 'Tintern Abbey'. Near the end of the poem Wordsworth talks of nature as if he were an apprentice of hers:
…she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty and so feed
With lofty thoughts,… (125-128)
Line 123 is the first time Wordsworth personifies nature in the poem by using a capital letter for the word. He seems to think of nature as perhaps a teacher, or as he says a few lines on, his goddess. Wordsworth it seems is "A worshiper of Nature", he thinks of Tintern Abbey in times of loneliness and need, and these thoughts see him through these hard times. It seems that instead of praying to God he thinks about past sceneries that he has witnessed, Tintern Abbey is in fact the home of his goddess. Nature has 'a power that is wholly positive, inspiring and anchoring the poet's most pure and elevated thoughts and acting as a moral guide and guardian.' (Harvey, 46).
On the other hand, John Clare did not agree with the way his contemporaries wrote, he did not believe in the sentimental image that they gave to nature. Clare was brought up as a peasant, his father was a farm worker and he had very little education. He became a labourer and hedger and lived a life that was worlds away from the writers and their readers. Clare, unlike Keats, never strived to compete with the aristocracy, he knew what he was and did not try to change. It was this that made his poetry so different, and for a limited time so popular with the audience of his time. His poem 'The Wren' dramatically contrasts Coleridge's poem 'The Nightingale', and this is exactly what Clare stood for. He did not see nature in the same light as Wordsworth; to him nature was the landscape and everything that went with it and nothing more. He lived with nature, had a genuine understanding of the countryside, and knew how to work the land as opposed to Wordsworth's highly sentimental belief in the “spirit of nature”.
His poem 'The Wren' is an attempt to do away with the romantic image of nature, his is making a case for birds other than the nightingale, skylark and cuckoo:
Why is the cuckoos melody preferred
And nightingales sick song so madly praised
He asks why other birds are not represented in poems of the time, he argues that he associates 'happy memories' with the robin and the wren. Clare does not try to make his poems stand for anything that is not written within its words; if he is writing about a wren then that is all that is meant by it!
Another of Clare’s poems 'Insects' again takes all the romantic notions out of the countryside and faces up to what nature really is. Clare does not feel that he has to portray nature as a force or spirit, nor does he feel he has to show nature at its best. In 'Insects' he takes a fairly base, and to a lot of people a repulsive part of nature and personifies it. With phrases like 'sunday dress', 'princes', 'silken beds and roomy painted halls' he in fact portrays the insects as aristocrats so as to try and bring the insects up to the same level as the nightingales and skylarks we are so familiar with due to his contemporaries. Clare is not writing in order to impress the public, he writes because he enjoys it and so there is no feeling that he must satisfy the London literary scene by portraying nature in the way they would like to view it. He knows what nature is and is fully prepared to represent it as he sees it and not how the public wants to believe it is like.
Another example of Clare's unsentimental poetry is 'Emmonsails Heath in winter', in this poem it is obvious how little effort Clare makes to cover up nature's ugliness and he presents the 'black quagmire' just as it is. Clare has an "intense awareness of the fullness and uniqueness of what he is observing so closely" (Storey, 122). With Clare you can imagine the exact scene he is writing of, there is no second meaning, and he portrays what nature has as real and alive, he picks on an intimate detail of nature and tells it as it happens:
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again
This very similar to 'Insects' in the fact that he takes a very small and unusual part of nature to write of yet he does it with such knowledge and understanding that it seems to work.
Clare was never concerned with the French Revolution because it never seemed to affect him, he was very much younger than Wordsworth and his contemporaries and even when he was older it would have never bothered him because he was of such low class. Something that did affect him however was the agricultural, and industrial revolution. In 'The Destroyer' he shows his hatred of what man does to the landscape, it is a fight between man and nature; the shepherd 'With almost every footstep crushed a flower' and the wind cannot resurrect it, yet "ironically, those beaten down by the dogs recover and become as "happy as the wind'" (Storey, 133). In the final four lines Clare expresses his sadness that such nature can be so easily destroyed “Like crouching tigers had howled havoc here?”
To Clare nature is just the countryside, he knows it too well for it to mean anything else, and he has an awareness of nature like no one else. He writes what he sees and that is all. For Wordsworth things are different, he tells us that Nature is 'the nurse' / The guide, the guardian of my heart…'; Wordsworth feels there is much more to nature than just its beauty. Both men have "an intense devotion to watching and describing nature" (Williams, 133), the way in which they do it however is very different. Wordsworth appealed to the Romantic critics of his time, Clare did also but only until the novelty of a peasant being able to write poetry wore off.
Word Count: 2,172.
Bibliography:
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.
Harvey, Geoffrey. The Romantic Tradition in Modern English Poetry: rhetoric and experience. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Modiano, Raimonda. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. London: Macmillan, 1985.
O'Flinn, Paul. How to Study Romantic Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Storey, Mark. The Poetry of John Clare: a critical introduction. London: Macmillan, 1974.
The Norton Anthology, English Literature. Ed. M.H.Abrams. 7th ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Catto and Windus, 1973.
