NATURE AS A TEACHER.
Both Keats’s and Wordsworth regarded nature to be the best teacher in their poems. In The Tables turned Wordsworth writes.
“let nature be your teacher, she has a world of ready wealth, our minds and heart to bless”.
He said that mortality and wisdom are best sought in nature. Wordsworth portrayed nature to be mankind’s best moral teacher and ultimate guide. In Tintern abbey he writes“
“And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels”
He believed that there is a pre-arranged harmony between the mind of man and the spirit of nature which enables man to communicate with nature. This intellectual junction between nature and man helps man to accomplish perfection and practical knowledge.
Keats saw the secret of a creative genius as an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature. In The Poet, Keats writes
“To the core and every secret essence there
Reveals the element of good and fair
Making him see, where learning hath no light”.
He says that the maturing creativity and philosophical mind benefits immensely from natural landscape more than institutionalized learning. The psychological relationship[ between the poet and the nature provides creative material .
NATURE AS A HEALER AND NURSE
“The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse,
The guide. The guardian of my heart and soul.
Of all my moral beings”
“healing thoughts of tender joy”.
Wordsworth believed that nature is capable of alleviating the tormented mind of man. The believes that the beautiful and frolicsome aspects of nature are an infinite source for healing. The material life becomes so stark and painful that human beings loose the aspiration for living. At such times the sweet and affectionate contact with nature can drive away the cynicism from the mind of the humans.
Keats portrayed contemplation of beauty as ways delaying the inevitability of death. He thought although we all die eventually, we can choose to spend out time looking at beautiful objects and landscapes which will he relates to as healing powers of nature and which makes people forget about their pain and sorrow. In Ode to a nightingale he writes
“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret”
The song of the nightingales takes him far away the dullness of life. He leaves the real world and travels into the world of fantasy where he
“where are the songs of the spring? Ay where are they.
Think not of the them, thou hast thy music too”
In ode to autumn keats loses himself in the nature and its beauty. He only lives in the present forgetting about the past and the future.
THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY OF NATURE (WORDSWORTH)
Wordsworth’s mysticism is remarkable for its meditative mood and pantheistic conception of nature. It is moulded by the belief that nature is a living being and the dwelling place of god. Nature is the means through which a man can come into contact with god. Wordsworth maintains that a divine spirit pervades through all the objects of nature. As a true pantheist he also says that all is God and God is all. ”thou liest in the temple’s inner shrine, god being with thee when we know it not”
Poems of Wordsworth contained a lot of spiritual refence. mentions “the holy time” and “quite as the nun” he converys the monochromatic link between nature and god.
BIRDS IN NATURE
Wordsworth and Keats both wrote poems about birds, and both imbue their birds with a mystical nature, but where Keats sees the bird as a representation of a better life, Wordsworth sees it as a mysterious presence that represents the disembodied spirit of nature.
In Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo” he never sees his cuckoo and had long since stopped looking for it, so the bird had become a spirit that represents the rest of nature, and like the daffodils it transcends itself. In an “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats speaks to the nightingale as the representation of his desire for happiness — Keats feels a “numbing pain” because he is so happy that the bird is happy that it begins to work on him like a drug. He sees the nightengale, at first, as the essence of summer and the chance of a new life. However, the bird eventually loses its magic beginning first as a “light winged Dryad of the trees” and slowly transforming tin a “plaintive anthem” that fades away only leaving a dejected Keats unable to see reality.
Wordsworth never loses the mysticism of the cuckoo because he doesn’t tie temporary or seasonal ideas to it, so its magic is permanent and doesn’t end. Wordsworth ties his cuckoo to nature and the “grandeurs that are found in the beating of the heart,” so a temporary loss of the bird’s song or beauty is not a reason for dejection because beauty is temporary for Wordsworth and the beauty is in the magic not the thing itself.
Keats focuses solely on the beauty of the song, so when the song is gone, he loses his beauty and is left with his own deflated self. However, his deflate is temporary because he knows the bird and beauty will return eventually. Should the cuckoo ever lose its mystery for Wordsworth, (through him finally seeing it) he would permanently be deflated.
PERSONIFICATION OF NATURE
Keats and wordsworth both believed to present the objects of nature as a living being with life of their own.
In a manner breaking from the form he claims in the preface, he creates a lrical poem personifying nature who, given the ability to speak claims “a lovelier flowe/on earth was never sown” and the daffodils are personified to be flutter and dancing. “fluttering and dancing in the breeze”
BEAUTY
Beauty for keats was a moving principle of life. He loved the beauty of nature that appealed to his senses. “with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every consideration”. Keats loved the nature for the beautiful sights and senses of nature. keats used the beauty of nature as a device to express his emotions like in the “bright star”.
Wordsworth believed that beauty of nature lies in the subjective impact it has on the human mind. He thought of natural beauty to be more than just what was seen. It had a deeper meaning ot it.
