What is the meaning of Wordsworth's claim that he grew up 'foster'd alike by beauty and by fear' (I:306)?

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What is the meaning of Wordsworth’s claim that he grew up ‘foster’d alike by beauty and by fear’ (I:306)?

In the opening book of The Prelude, Wordsworth illustrates his claim that he was ‘foster’d alike by beauty and fear’ by relating several memories of the type he describes as ‘spots of time’. We get the sense that these encounters with the natural world are powerfully constitutional of his character. In what is essentially an account of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’, Wordsworth is laying creative hold on his past and tracing the origins of his power and genius. But these passages have a quality that teaches us something of a more universal nature. They remind us of our own similar experiences of shaping influence, to which our indebtedness is often left unarticulated. We are reminded that we all hold a kind of intercourse with nature, particularly intense in childhood, which shapes the mind’s perception of the world as we are introduced to it. Wordsworth demonstrates a typically Romantic sensibility to the sublime aspect of this intercourse, exploring the emotion of fear as one of the ‘passions that build up our human soul’ (I:434). He also clearly recognizes the importance of the beautiful in his sense impressions of the landscape in which the two aesthetic modes are intricately bound. To understand exactly what is meant by the sublime and the beautiful, and more importantly how they were conceived in the early 19th century, it is useful to consider book I in the light of Edmund Burke’s influential text A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which established many aspects of aesthetic thinking for the Romantics. Wordsworth is concerned with the workings of the mind in relation to nature and sees the sublime and the beautiful as two critical areas of human life.

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear;

Much favour’d in my birthplace, and no less

In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,

I was transplanted. (I:305-309)

The image of Wordsworth as a plant presents him as a child of nature. A plant is ‘fostered’ by the elements and has its roots firmly set in the ground. The natural landscape Wordsworth describes is where he believes his roots are; he sees its features as his foster-parents. A clearer sense of what he means by this emerges from the incidents that follow. As he begins his account, Wordsworth firmly establishes an atmosphere of wildness in which every last crocus is ‘snapp’d’ by the frosty wind, conveying a violent hostility to fragile things. The young Wordsworth takes pleasure in asserting himself in this kind of environment, especially as a kind of scourge - he traps woodcocks as a ‘fell destroyer’. ‘Twas my joy’, he says, emphasizing the excitement to be found in such an atmosphere and perhaps pointing out to us as readers out that the sublime, as an aesthetic mode, is meant to be enjoyed. It fills us with wonder, admiration and awe; Burke, capturing the paradoxical nature of the category, called it ‘delightful horror’ (Boulton, p.73). But Burke also holds that the sublime must be kept at a distance, and that if we get too close, our enjoyment turns to terror. It seems that the figure of the young Wordsworth steps over this kind of boundary. At first, he senses his mere presence to be a ‘trouble to the peace’ among the moon and the stars but his transgression - the theft of another’s catch - precipitates a sense of invisible foreboding:

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I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of indistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (I:329-332)

And, as Wordsworth is poised over a nest to plunder the eggs of a mother bird he has a sense of becoming defamiliarized with the landscape:

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ears! The sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds! (I:348-350)

The imagery of fast-moving clouds and of an alien sky suggests a kind of turbulence, ...

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