Reading William Wordsworth

            A good poem to start with may be “Expostulation and Reply.” While not his finest, it establishes his viewpoint and demonstrates some of his strengths. It originated with his “[good friend Matthew] who was unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy.”

It begins and ends with similar phrases but transforms the feeling towards those phrases by the end (Note: the first is spoken by Matthew, the second by William):

“Why, William, on that old grey stone,

Thus for the length of half a day,

Why, William, sit you thus alone

And dream your time away?”

vs.

“Then ask not wherefore, here alone

Conversing as I may,

I sit upon this old grey stone

And dream my time away.”

This frame is simple yet very satisfying: Why do you do this? That’s why I do that. It works so long as the middle carries through on the promise and it does. Matthew gets brilliant turns of phrases put in his mouth:

“Where are your books?—that light bequeathed

To Beings else forlorn and blind!

Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed

From dead men to their kind.

“You look round on your Mother Earth

As if she for no purpose bore you.”

William is wasting his time and not studying great books. “Spirit” is a wonderful pun or double entendre, meaning the spirit of the dead and the spirit of alcohol. Note, too, the contrast of drinking breath and a supernatural existence.

William’s reply:

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid this mighty sum

Of things for ever speaking,

That nothing of itself will come,

But we must still be seeking?

“Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

Conversing as I may,”

Again, we have contrasts or strange pairings. Passiveness is assumed to have wisdom as an attribute, a phrase which Quakers apparently loved. William is not only listening to nature—“this mighty sum / Of things for ever speaking”—but also talking back in this additional contrast: “alone / Conversing.” Conversing assumes a partner, but he is alone.

A companion poem “The Tables Turned: An Evening on the Same Subject” expands on this. The title and others suggest there is disagreement between the two poems, but to my ear it is simply more deeply exploring the same theme. The turned table may simply be that the philosophically attacked speaker in the first poem becomes the attacker:

hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music...

There’s more of wisdom in it....

the throstle sings....

no mean preacher....

Let Nature be your Teacher....

a vernal wood

May teach you more of man...

Than all the sages can....

Nature is our teacher, not men. Here, we get find out what the “mighty sum / Of things for ever speaking” finally is. “Man” is meant to include women especially since women are also his companions and appear in his poems sympathetically. Also the term “woman” includes “man” –perhaps a man with a womb. But this potentiality has been discarded. Again, “the past is a different country.”

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art.

We screw things up with thought. It sounds like Wordsworth opposes science and art, but obviously he is writing a poem and in “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” he lumps nature with the things of men, perhaps because men are things of nature (more on this poem later).

But he also does so below in this poem:

Close up those barren leaves.

“Leaves” are both a thing of man-made books (which he writes) and things that grow on trees. And obviously to read the poem (at least before computers), one has to read them in a book. But for now, there are times when nature is the teacher, and we must listen.