If you know any part of one poem in English, it’s quite likely that you know, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’ which is the beginning of William Wordsworth‘s famous ‘daffodils‘ poem. Wordsworth (1770-1850), was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one of a group, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, known as the Lakes Poets, as he lived in and wrote about the Lake District. Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement that originated in Europe at about the time of Wordsworth’s birth, and has heavily influenced art, literature, music and thought ever since. It is a way of seeing the world that emphasises emotion and individualism, respecting the past and nature, suspicious of science and industrialisation. If you’d like to know more, this video is really helpful.
I read a great deal of Wordsworth at university, and, although I respected his place in literature and his elevated position of one of our greatest writers, I never really enjoyed his poetry. As an undergraduate, I was less taken with nature and beauty, and more interested in tough, gritty subjects, existential struggles and, quite frankly, misery.
I feel as if I have come full circle with Wordsworth because now I read him every week, mainly because he is one of the GCSE set poets. This passage from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, tells how the poet, as a young boy, stole a boat moored at the edge of a lake and rowed into the lake. Unfortunately, he didn’t understand that our perspective can change as we move, and when, suddenly, a large rocky ‘steep’ came into view, he thought he was being stalked by what we might now refer to as a monster. He rowed back and ran home, but for many days afterwards his thoughts were plagued by monsters and he suffered from nightmares. It’s a funny story, quite self-deprecating, but it also shows how, even as a boy, Wordsworth was aware of the connection between himself and nature, loved to fill his mind with beautiful landscapes and suffered when he felt overwhelmed by the power of the environment.
Speaking of the environment, Wordsworth was quite the campaigner and might not be out of place in our current concerns for the natural world and the planet. When the Kendal and Windermere Railway was first proposed in 1844, and then opened in 1847, he opposed the plans, worried the railway would destroy the natural beauty of the area. He wrote this sonnet to voice his concerns.
Reading these poems as an older adult, perhaps more weary of youthful angst and more appreciative of the power of nature (and certainly more educated about the environment), I find I have more time for Wordsworth. I have begun to re-read The Prelude and I now understand much better, from my own experience, why a poet might want to explore so carefully the relationship between the human mind and emotions and the natural world around us. Whereas I used to dismiss ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ as a poem mainly about flowers and beauty, I now see it much more as an exploration of memory, the power of the imagination and the almost indescribable feelings we can all experience when coming across some natural phenomenon. In fact, we know from the writing of Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, that the daffodils episode really happened, so we can infer that Wordsworth really did keep that memory alive to cheer him up for many years to come.
Finally, I want mention the sonnet, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, which describes London, seen from Westminster Bridge, in the early morning. The city is wearing the beauty of the morning like a garment, everything is calm and the city’s ‘mighty heart’ is still. I am sure that if one were to stand on Westminster Bridge in the early morning in 2023, such stillness and calm would be harder to find, as we have more of a 24 hour culture. We can still all visit Westminster Bridge if we wish, however, just as we can visit the Lake District and experience the majestic splendour which Wordsworth spent his career celebrating.
