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Works of william wordsworth
Works of william wordsworth
Study of william wordsworth
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Fear in Wordsworth's My heart leaps up when I behold, We Are Seven, Tintern Abbey, and Resolution and Independence
Fear in Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold", "We Are Seven", "Tintern Abbey", and "Resolution and Independence"
Romantic poetry conjures in the mind of many people images of sweet, pastoral landscapes populated by picturesque citizens who live in quaint houses in rustic villages, with sheep grazing on green-swathed hills, while a young swain plights his troth to his fair young maiden, who reclines demurely amidst the clover and smiles sunnily. William Wordsworth is perhaps the archetypal Romantic poet; his most famous poem, "I wandered lonely as a cloud", would seem on first reading to support the traditional, one could say stereotypical, image of a Romantic poet. Even his name, Words-worth, reinforces that image. And yet, upon looking more closely and carefully at his works, it becomes clear that the emotions which motivate his creativity are not solely a love of nature and pastorality.
Let us consider Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold". The poem can be interpreted on a very simple level as a typical Romantic poem: there is the glorying in and of nature that most people immediately think of when Romantic poetry is mentioned. The speaker is thrilled when he sees a rainbow, he was thrilled in his youth when he saw a rainbow, and when he is old he will continue to be thrilled by seeing a rainbow; if he cannot be thrilled, he would rather be dead. The speaker's life has a kind of continuity, of stability, through the process of memory. The reader can wipe away a tear and mumble "Isn't that nice?", and switch on Three's Company; this interpretation affirms our sense of what poets should fee...
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...rom finding "In that decrepit Man so firm a mind" (line 145), finding, however temporarily, a source of courage against his fears (lines 146-147):
'God,' said I, 'be my help and stay secure;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor.'
Works Cited
All quotations are taken from the following book, references given parenthetically within the text:
Stephen Gill, editor. The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
o "The Idiot Boy", pp. 67-80
o "Michael", pp. 224-236
o "My heart leaps up when I behold", pp. 246-247
o "Resolution and Independence", pp. 260-264
o "Tintern Abbey", pp. 131-135
o "We Are Seven", p. 84
except, where indicated by "Coleridge", from:
Donald A. Stauffer, editor. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Random House: New York, 1951.
o "Dejection: An Ode", pp. 78-82
The idea of fear is a fairly simple concept, yet it carries the power to consume and control lives. Fears have stemmed from an inadvertent psychological response to situations deemed threating to one’s personal safety, but have evolved into a complex web of often illogical misconceptions which are able to cloud a person’s judgment and result in situations often worse than originally intended. Fears can be hard to quell, but it has been shown the best way to overcome fears is often to face them, as author James Baldwin asserted when he wrote, “To defend oneself against fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.” Baldwin makes strongly qualified statement, and his idea fears must be faced to ensure one is not conquered by them is evident frequently, and is especially visible in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. In The Scarlet Letter, two characters are placed in situations in which they are directly confronted with their fears, but react much differently, resulting in contrastingly different consequences. Baldwin’s assertion is qualified by the journeys of Hester Prynne and the Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, who show how facing one’s fears can have a positive outcome while defending oneself from their fears can have detrimental consequences.
G. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: Norton, 2000. Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
In “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” we find the purest expression of Wordsworth’s fascination with friendship.
When she feels sad or lonely, he wants her to remember what he told her about nature because he believes that if his sister where to recall him, he will gain eternal life. The idea of “Lines composed of a few miles above Tintern Abbey” expresses Wordsworth sensational admiration for nature and feels a deep power of delight in natural things. He exclaims how at a moment of sadness, he turns to the nature for peace of mind and inspiration. As he becomes serious about the nature, it gives him courage and spirit enough to stand there with a sense of delight and pleasure. He lets the reader know that even though his boyish days are gone, he doesn’t ponder on it or mourn for its loss.
Victor as he takes his walk, these emotions are also prevalent in “Tintern Abbey” as Wordsworth
Wordsworth begins the journey into "Tintern Abbey" by taking the reader from the height of a mountain stream down into the valley where the poet sits under a sycamore... ... middle of paper ... ... together even after his death. Over two hundred years after it was written, "Tintern Abbey" continues to uphold the essence of William Wordsworth's beliefs and continues to touch the emotions of its readers. Even though, here in the twenty-first century, the term real-world has a connotation of life in the fast-lane, the real world - the natural world - of Wordsworth's time still holds a place of eminence both in literature and in the hearts of its readers.
There was no apparent tragedy in "Ode to Duty," but perhaps Wordsworth felt mankind was on the verge of one. His feelings toward the French Revolution had soured, and he may have found the new liberation and fraternity being portioned out in unequal measures in poetry. Change is a good thing, both "Ode to Duty" and "Elegiac Stanzas" suggest, but only when adopted "in the quietness of thought"; otherwise, rash decisions only mirror the frenzied environments out of which they grew. Whether or not "Ode to Duty" or "Elegiac Stanzas" have veiled political agendas is unclear; what is ingenious is Wordsworth's ability to deliver so many comparable messages in such contrary envelopes.
Magnuson, Paul. "The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & The Wordsworths in 1802." Criticism 4(2001):451. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
...h happiness, wherever it be known, / Is to be pitied; for ‘tis surely blind” (lines 53-56). In these lines, Wordsworth finally counsels that the human world is actually not so near-sighted. Rather, when a man assumes himself separate from mankind—when he reinforces that separation—he actually blinds himself. So finally, the comparison between Vaughan and Wordsworth is not absolute. However, sorting through the words of men who’ve been dead for centuries for evidence of a literary association beyond mere coincidence is never and easy undertaking. But let us assume that, if Wordsworth was right, both he and Vaughan shared universal human experiences. Perhaps, upon reaching a certain middle age, they also shared fear and awe of the conditions of their mortality—and if one may have looked to the other’s words for poetic guidance, the poetic genre is better for it.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.
The ear is looked upon as a miniature receiver, amplifier and signal-processing system. The structure of the outer ear catching sound waves as they move into the external auditory canal. The sound waves then hit the eardrum and the pressure of the air causes the drum to vibrate back and forth. When the eardrum vibrates its neighbour the malleus then vibrates too. The vibrations are then transmitted from the malleus to the incus and then to the stapes. Together the three bones increase the pressure which in turn pushes the membrane of the oval window in and out. This movement sets up fluid pressure waves in the perilymph of the cochlea. The bulging of the oval window then pushes on the perilymph of the scala vestibuli. From here the pressure waves are transmitted from the scala vestibuli to the scala tympani and then eventually finds its way to the round window. This causes the round window to bulge outward into the middle ear. The scala vestibuli and scala tympani walls are now deformed with the pressure waves and the vestibular membrane is also pushed back and forth creating pressure waves in the endolymph inside the cochlear duct. These waves then causes the membrane to vibrate, which in turn cause the hairs cells of the spiral organ to move against the tectorial membrane. The bending of the stereo cilia produces receptor potentials that in the end lead to the generation of nerve impulses.
In "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth explains the impact of Nature from Tintern Abbey in his every day life. "Tintern Abbey" shows the great importance of nature to Wordsworth in his writings, love for life, and religion. The memories he has of Tintern Abbey make even the darkest days full of light.
Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System, A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe. Cambridge: University Printing House, 1970.
His poem recognizes the ordinary and turns it into a spectacular recollection, whose ordinary characteristics are his principal models for Nature. As Geoffrey H. Hartman notes in his “Wordsworth’s poetry 1787-1814”, “Anything in nature stirs [Wordsworth] and renews in turn his sense of nature” (Hartman 29). “The Poetry of William Wordsworth” recalls a quote from the Prelude to Wordsworth’s 1802 edition of Lyrical ballads where they said “[he] believed his fellow poets should "choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them.in a selection of language really used by men” (Poetry). In the shallowest sense, Wordsworth is using his view of the Tintern Abbey as a platform or recollection, however, this ordinary act of recollection stirs within him a deeper understanding.
Within a few years, there will be well over a billion mobile phone users worldwide and the majority of mobile phones will be connected to the Internet.