Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, he remains a poet of blessed consolations in distress
IN THIS SEASON of cancelled parties, the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworths birth will also go unmarked in public. Celebrations of the English poet, born on April 7th 1770, should have bloomed like his beloved daffodils all over the Lakeland region (pictured), and beyond. He taught not only his compatriots but devotees around the world to be, like him, a lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth. Now the British landscapes he trudged through are empty of the visitors that his verse attracted from overcrowded Victorian cities. (Indeed, in his later years Wordsworth fretted about the mass tourism that his Romantic worship of unspoilt nature had fostered. Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault? he thundered when the Kendal and Windermere railway, designed to carry Wordsworthian excursionists, was proposed in 1844.)
Wordsworth has lately stridden back into fashion as a pioneer ecologist, a green visionary. For him, nature is a single, interconnected system. Every child joins it not as an alien manipulator but, as his autobiographical epic, The Prelude, puts it, an inmate of this active universe; even as an agent of the one great mind. The fledgling poet, his mature self recalled, grasped and gloried in the interdependence of nature, for in all things / I saw one life, and felt that it was joy. The so-called Gaia hypothesis of modern environmentalism starts here.
First-hand encounters with the healing benefits of fell and vale have now been put on hold. Still, the bard of the great outdoors has lessons for people trapped inside by natural forces greater than human will. In a period of enforced apartness, Wordsworths lifelong pursuit of joyous solitude seems timelier than ever. He contrasted calm, reflective isolation with the loneliness of compulsory sociability. As his poem Home at Grasmere warns, he truly is alone, / He of the multitude whose eyes are doomed / To hold vacant commerce day by day / With that which he can neither know nor love.
For Wordsworth, solitude brings joy above all because it carves out space for memory. Even his over-familiar daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) matter most not at first sight but when, recollected, they flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude. More than the treks, tours and climbs around picturesque locations that filled his years and drew generations of disciples to ramble after him, what Wordsworth cherished was memory as solace and strength. The Prelude finds meaning not so much in the rapture of observation as the balm of reminiscence, since The earth / And common face of Nature spake to me / Rememberable things. Uncannily, his great poem of 1798, Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, talks of finding relief through memory from the fever of the world. That relief comes in fond thoughts of the winding river Wye, Thou wanderer through the woods, / How often has my spirit turned to thee.
Generations of readers have noted that Wordsworths own memory-enriched solitude was companionably shared: his poetic jaunts around the Lakes depended on the decades-long support provided by his sister Dorothy, wife Mary, and sister-in-law Sara. This champion of rugged hermits, outcasts and nomads could always walk home to warm fires and friendly faces. He did, however, live with grief and lossof his parents, his brother, of two young children, and of the political hopes prompted by the French Revolution that later shattered into what he calls these times of fear / This melancholy waste of hopes oerthrown.
As a poet of comfort via simple, everyday experience, of blessed consolations in distress, he remains without equal. The philosopher John Stuart Mill paid the finest tribute to this gift. Stricken by a depressive breakdown after his hyper-intellectual youth, Millas his Autobiography of 1873 explainsfound in Wordsworth a supremely effective medicine for my mind. His poems fed Mill with a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings. As Mill put it: I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.
During this spell of collective standstill, that power need not dimand you do not need to contemplate some awesome summit, torrent or ravine to feel it. As the Ode: Intimations of Immortality confesses, To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Look closely when out on your next state-approved stroll.
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William Wordsworth was the supreme bard of nature and solitude - The Economist