Compare and contrast William Wordsworth and John Keats' attitude towards nature in the poems "Ode To Automn" , "Ode To A Nightingale", "The Solitary Reaper", "Daffodils" and "To A Sky-Lark".

Fled is that music: -- Do I wake or sleep? “.

Today scholars interpret this poem in terms of what parapsychologists call an Out-Of-Body experience, an OBE or what  is commonly called as near death experience. This happens as Keats describes when the senses are disrupted sometimes by drugs and the mind then floats upwards out of the body, afterwards when the mind returns to the body, the person recalls the

experience not as a dream but as a vivid and wide awake experience. I really find this interpretation quite fascinating and I am amazed at how Keats would describe so accurately something  which modern science acknowledged two centuries later. This perhaps shows how classical poetry deals with eternal truths.  

In a similar way Wordsworth in the two poems “The Solitary Reaper” and “Daffodils” expresses the impact  of the experience which stayed with him for a long time and affected him deeply. The song of “The Solitary Reaper” was so exquisite that he “Listened motionless and still” and forever afterwards, he could recall the impact of that song “The music in my heart I bore/ Long after it was heard no more”. Even with regard to “Daffodils”  Wordsworth in the last stanza of the poem emphasizes how a beautiful experience can have a permanent  impact on anyone, Wordsworth had asserted in “The Lyrical Ballads” that poetry is an spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which has its origin in emotions recollected in tranquility. It is the same idea that he is expressing in the “Daffodils” in the last six lines “For oft, when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude;/ And then my heart with pleasure fills,/ And dances with the daffodils.” Thus it is very clear that nature and objects in nature have a very deep effect on these two people and triggered some of the most beautiful expressions of poetic outpouring known in English literature.

All the poems that I am dealing with spring from the poets’ personal experiences. They all have people or objects from nature as a central character and it is the poets’ experiences at particular situations and the impact of these experiences that is recounted in different ways by Wordsworth and Keats.

Keats himself had said about how a nightingale in his friend’s garden gave him several hours of ecstatic music which was a source of “Tranquil and continual joy”. Keats has always been considered as a highly sensual poet. He uses vivid and concrete imagery, he portrays the physical and the passionate and he gave importance to the here and now. In his ode “Ode To A Nightingale” Keats on hearing the Nightingale longs for a respite from the continuous pain that he was suffering  from. He imagines that the nightingale is engaged in “Some melodious plot” and it “Singest of summer in full-throated ease”. He is “Too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from “Beechen green/ And shadows numberless”

Similarly it was during a Sunday walk that Keats come across the stubble fields which looked so warm and attracted him so much that he wrote “Ode To Autumn” with its images of freshly ploughed furrows. In “Ode To autumn” Keats gives a vividly attractive picture of Autumn. She is like a young girl “Sitting careless on a granary floor/ Thy  hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind”.

In “To A Sky-Lark” Wordsworth makes it clear that the poem is inspired by the Sky-Lark  and longs to be with the lark “Into the clouds” . He imagines that “There is madness about thee and joy divine/ In that song of thine”. In “The Solitary Reaper”  Wordsworth conveys directly through the poem how while taking a walk in the Scottish Highlands he came across a “solitary Highland lass/ Reaping and singing by herself;”. He wonders whether he should “Stop here or gently pass”. In the same way the wonderful experience of the sight of the daffodils was like an unexpected gift when he was wandering “Lonely as a cloud…Beside the lake”. He had not expected to see anything unusual and it came as a pleasant surprise “When all at once I saw a crowd/ A host of golden daffodils…fluttering and dancing in the breeze”

It is clear that the Romantic poets were greatly influenced by nature and nature is “the hero” in most of their poems. Therefore it is only appropriate that their poems should be full of natural imagery. I feel that Keats’s use of imagery is more vivid and elaborate while Wordsworth uses more simple language in his portrayal of images and the simplicity of the images is sometimes very effective. In “Ode To A nightingale”  Keats qualifies the nightingale as a  “light-winged Dryad of the trees”. He describes the spring  season in vivid, almost sensual language where “The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;/ White hawthorne, and the pastoral eglantine; “. Even the musk-arose is “ full of dewy wine./The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”

In “Ode To Autumn” Keats vividly pictures autumn as a season when everything in nature is filled with a “mellow fruitfulness”. Autumn is differentiated by the “swell (of) the gourd”. The “plump…hazel shells” and “the mossed cottage-trees” are “bend with apples”. His poem is “o’er-brimmed” with images. While we can visualize the images of ripeness and fruitfulness in the first stanza, the sound images in the last stanza have a pleasant impact on our auditory senses. He writes of the “wailful choir” of “the small gnats” . The “loud bleat” of the “full-grown lambs”, the singing of the “Hedge-crickets” and how “with treble soft/ The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft” while the “gathering swallows twitter in the skies”. It is simply amazing the way that Keats with a minimum of words is able to recount so effectively the sights and sounds of autumn. The use of onamotopoeic words like “wailful”, “mourn”, “bleat”, “whistle”, “twitter” etc. brings alive autumn to our senses. Keats’s interweaving of visual and auditory images is like a feast for our senses. Along with the sounds of autumn he describes how the “barred clouds bloom” on “the soft dying day” and how the “stubble plains” and touched with a “rosy hue”.

Wordsworth’s images does not over brim our senses like Keats’s does but they are nevertheless effective in helping us to conjure a vivid picture in our minds. The image of the daffodils in “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” and “tossing their heads in sprightly dance” is unforgettable. The thousands of them were as “continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way” and “they stretched in a never ending line”. The personification of the “fluttering and dancing” “tossing their heads” and out-doing “the sparkling waves in glee” conjures up an image of sprightly young girls dancing with great joy. But I feel the poem’s main brilliance in the first line lies in the reverse personification. The poet is metaphorically compared to a natural object – a cloud- “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud/ That floats on high over vales and hills” , and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, “dancing” and “tossing their heads” in “a crowd, a host”. This technique shows a sort of fundamental union between man and nature.

In “The Solitary Reaper” also Wordsworth uses vivid images to describe the quality of the music of the reaper, he feels that “the vale profound/ Is over flowing with the sound” “the plaintive numbers flow” and “the Maiden sang/ As if  her song could have no ending”. Thus in the poem, Wordsworth is really praising the beauty of music and its fluid expressive quality, which he called the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, that is the heart of poetry itself. To vividly convey the exquisite rhythmic quality of the reaper’s song. Wordsworth compares her music to two of nature’s greatest singers, the nightingale and the cuckoo. He is able to bring up an effective visual picture of how the songs of these birds are a source of intense relief to weary exhausted humanity at times. “To weary bands/ Of travellers  in some shady haunt/ Among Arabian sands” the song of the nightingale is some of the most “welcome notes” . Similarly in “the farthest  Hebrides” after the long and bone-chilling winter, there is nothing more “thrilling” than the voice “In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird/ Breaking the silence of the seas”. While these two poems of Wordsworth show how images of nature filled him with a greater joy, some of his other poems show how certain objects in nature come with a message for him and help him to be more contented with his fate. In “To A Sky-Lark” he longs to go with the lark “to thy banqueting-place in the sky” but he is reminded of the prosaic reality where his life “rugged and uneven/ Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind”, but hearing the voice of the skylark, he recognises that he must “with my fate contented, will plod on”. 

In the same way in “Resolution And Independence” Wordsworth accidentally comes upon the leech-gatherer  and is struck by the perseverance and the independence shown by the very old man. He leads a “hazardous and wearisome” life, gathering leeches and “From pond to pond, he roamed, from moor to moor” leading a precarious life. Yet the old man seemed so confident, so peaceful, so dignified and so stately that Wordsworth felt so ashamed of himself. He felt that nature had sent him this man “To give me human strength, by apt admonishment” and he resolved that in future he will never allow himself to complain or to be depressed but decides “ ‘God’ said I, ‘be my help and stay secure/ I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’ “.

In “Tintern Abbey” also Wordsworth shows how nature had a profound impact on him. “The sounding cataract/ Haunted me like a passion”. “The tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy woods” with their colors and their forms “were them to me/ An appetite, a feeling and a love”. He had learned to look on nature and hear “The still, sad music of humanity”. Thus both Wordsworth and Keats show how nature had an impact upon them.  

Keats’s odes are fairly regular in structure written mainly in ten-line stanzas, his “Ode To A Nightingale” is one of his longer odes because through the poem he is not merely exploring the world of the nightingale but shows how the poet because he is unhappy with the real world attempts to escape into the ideal and disappointed with his mental flight, he returned to the real world. “Ode To A  Nightingale”  differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza , ababcdecde,,

   “Ode To Autumn” has only three stanzas but with three distinct pictures of autumn. The first stanza provides a picture of the richness, the ripeness and fruitfulness of the season while the second stanza has four distinct images which personify autumn as a young girl sitting carelessly “on a granary floor” while her hair blows softly in the “winnowing wind” another image is the reaper on “a half reap’d furrow sound asleep”. The next one is about a gleaner steadying his “laden head across a brook” and the last image is that of a person sitting patiently  by the cider press watching “the last oozings hours by hours”. The third stanza of the poem is about the sounds of autumn and the large number of sound words end the poem recalling to our mind vividly the full picture of autumn.

 Wordsworth’s “To A Sky-Lark” is much shorter than Keats’s odes, the stanzas are irregular and after expressing a desire to be with the skylark up in the sky he comes back in the last short stanza with the realization that he has to be contented with his life on Earth, however,  “rugged and uneven” it might be. He concludes the poem by expressing the hope that he would experience “higher raptures , when life’s day is done”.

In Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” the structure is simple. The first stanzas sets the scene, the second offers the bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of the songs and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker. The language is natural and unforced. In fact, the final two lines of the poem “music in my heart I bore/ Long after it was heard no more” return its focus to the familiar theme of memory, and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings. The regular four, eight-line stanzas of the poem also follows a rhyme scheme of ,ababccdd, though in the first and last stanzas the “A” rhyme is off.

The poem “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” has a regular four six-line stanzas with a regular rhyme scheme ,ababcc,. This simple poem is one of the loveliest and most famous of Wordsworth’s poems. Here also he revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory. The plot is extremely simple, portraying the poet’s wandering and he discovers a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of this pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored or restless.       The sudden occurrence of the memory of the daffodils which “flash upon the inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude” shows how Wordsworth once again reaffirms his belief that nature has a sustained effect on us if we are sensitive to her. With the “inward eye” and the mind’s ear we can listen and record the “still sad”  or joyous music of nature and replay it when we are in need of relief or consolation.

Throughout the poems I have analysed, I have learnt the profound impact that nature had on these poets. Somehow while analyzing these poems I feel a sense of loss because in all my life, living in a big city, I have never even once thought of nature as a concrete or a physical reality around me. Of course I have seen flowers, birds and lakes but mostly these have been in city parks where these objects  of nature have been carefully guided and moulded or controlled by the hand of man. I am resolved from now on to be more aware of the presence of nature around me. After all it does not take much effort. All what I have to do is lift my head up to see the brilliant sky with its changing colours and moving clouds and there! I have nature right above me and around me.