Sense of Innocence and Fascination with Death in Some Selected Poems of Wordsworth

Asish Kr Charan

Guest Lecturer, Bhatter College, Dantan. E-mail: akcharan24@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020

Abstract

Death is the great reality that is eternally united with Nature. In the Romantic era death is romanticised; it considered a dream through which one could escape the sufferings and hardships of human life. By knowing what the essence of life and death is, can people change their attitude towards death? Of course, the realisation of death is different from child to adult. The romantic poet Wordsworth in his poetry sought to express how children perceived death as a continuation of the relationship with Nature, where adults perceived it as an ending of life. It seems that children are nurtured with love, confidence, and self-confidence and a continuation with nature which over-rides death. The purpose of this paper is to study how Wordsworth tried to keep continuity with the insights of childhood innocence within life that would minimize the stern reality of death.

Keywords: Death, Childhood, Nature, Innocence

Introduction:

Wordsworth considered himself as a child in the cradle of  Nature, but truly conscious of  ‘’the very heart of man’’. In some of his poems, Wordsworth sought to express philosophically the place of death in human life. Despite describing a vivid sense of the harsh and sad reality of death; he was fascinated with death with the children’s view of fearless joy. Wordsworth nullifies the terrors of death and enjoys the joyful relation of childhood to Nature. Geoffrey Hartman, in his book ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry’(1787-1814) asserts that Wordsworth’s poetic impulse ruminates on the thought of ‘’an absolute death…, final separation from the sources of renewal’’, that is from Nature(Lenon: 1). Some of Wordsworth’s poems such as “We are Seven”, “Lucy poems” (‘Lucy Gray’, ‘Three Years she Grew in Sun’, ‘She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’) “Ode on the Intimation of Immortality” and “Prelude”( book 1,5) present an intimate relationship between nature and childhood innocence which is stronger than death and death is seen to be less frightening.

In the poem “We Are Seven” Wordsworth signifies different perspectives on the death of children and adults. Here the little girl is ‘simple . . . and feels its life in every limb’ without threatening and overbearing frighten of the adults. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet asks ‘what should it know of death’? The poet enquires about her family members and learns that they are seven but two of them are dead, so the two children can’t be counted as family members. But the child very confidently denies the death of her two siblings as she enjoys a close intimacy of siblings with nature—“Their graves are green; they may be seen”. Here the serious fact ‘graves’ i.e. death deals with innocence and the power of nature softened grim realities of death. Her activities show her continuation of the relationship with siblings.

 

                         My stockings there I often knit,

                         My kerchief there I hem ;

                        And thereupon the ground I sit,

                        And sing a song to them.

                        And often after sun-set, sir,

                       When it is light and fair,

                       I take my little porringer,

                                                                                And eat my supper there. (“We are Seven”, 41-48)

The poet seems that the girl does not know about death but she is not ignorant of the reality of death because she told ‘The first that died was sister Jane; / In bed she moaning lay, /… And then she went away (49-50-52). The little girl also told a plain account of the tragic death of her brother in a euphemistic way that John was ‘ forced to go’. And the phrase, ‘white with snow’ symbolically signifies death with innocence. To Wordsworth, with the communion of nature children are ignorant of pain and sufferings which make them ‘best philosopher’. It seems death has no power over the cheerful girl to break the relationship who proclaims ‘Nay! We are seven’.

Wordsworth was concerned with the reality of death as he grew up as an adult but he grieved over the loss of childhood vision. He tried to keep the continuity of childhood that would minimize the harshness of death. He expresses his love for nature and feels an eternal relationship with Nature. He still gets pleasure when he beholds a rainbow.

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

                                             (“The Rainbow”, 1-6)

 Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” represents his philosophy of Nature, Man, and Death. In the poem “Lucy Gray”, Lucy herself represents Nature, who ‘was the sweetest thing that ever grew/ Beside a human door’(7-8). Her relationship with nature is more profound than a human being. William Hartman identifies Lucy with Nature and moon:

Lucy, by the very fact of being loved, is something more than herself; becomes a landscape even… and may not appear as only a person. The unconscious yet natural transfer from Lucy to moon… I suggest that the moon represents the power of Nature over man…I emphasize the speaker’s perception of the external world, which is coloured by his responsive to the death of Lucy”. (Gowland5)

 ‘At break of day’ when Wordsworth enters into the realm of childhood innocence, he ‘chanced to see’ Lucy, the solitary girl of Nature. She is far away from the complexities mind of adults; ‘she dwelt on a wild moor’. She is more playful with innocent animals like the fawn, the hare, and the mountain roe. But her a sudden death occurred upon the instruction of her father on a stormy night is pathetic. It seems the death of simplicity and innocence in the hand of wretched adults(her parents). Lucy died amid of Nature which suggests the continuity of her relationship with Nature. Wordsworth grieved here not for physical death but the death of innocence.

Again, the poem “Three Years She Grew In Sun” focuses on the strong relationship between Lucy and nature. Nature unifies with her as she is ‘a lovelier flower on earth’. But why Lucy died? Was it for her to keep the relationship with nature? However, death does not affect its continuity. The speaker feels comfort imagining the affinities between Lucy and Nature:

                           She shall be sportive as the fawn

                           That wild with glee across the lawn

                           Or up the mountain springs;

                           And hers shall be the breathing balm.

                                                                                                (“Three Years She Grew in Sun” 13-16)

The speaker wishes to connect the world of nature, ‘happy dell’ where Lucy exists. This world of nature is filled with delight, spirit, and innocent pleasure. The speaker would find solace when ‘the stars of midnight shall be dear to her’. The death of Lucy is bereavement to the speaker but he silently accepts this. According to Herbert Hartman, this poem elaborates ‘’the influence of natural objects and piety upon the child—a philosophy, with which the others are far less deeply interfused’’ (Hall 166).

      In the poem “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”, Lucy is dead, the poet tries to praise her beauty by using metaphors:

“A violet by a mossy stone

. . .

Fair as star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.” (5-8)

Her beauty is unpraised ‘and very few to love’ because very few people follow the ‘untrodden ways’. It may be very few people are close to nature. She is a girl of nature and her loss is the loss of nature. This is the death of love, beauty, and nature in the mind of a human being. The poet recollected Lucy’s story which is inflicted by her death but enchanted with the images of beauty and tranquillity. Curl Woodring recognised the Lucy series as elegiac “in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death”. David Ferry Writes about Lucy Poems that ‘’we are made to feel two exactly contradictory feelings: first, it is a pity so beautiful a girl should have been taken away so young, just when she had been perfected for her life on earth; and second, her death is justified and right, the only adequate culmination of the work Nature was doing. Even in her life on earth, she was in a special culmination with natural things, and before our eyes, she becomes not so much a human being as a sort of compendium of nature’’ (Hall 167).

“The Ode on the Intimation of Immortality” presents a philosophical aspect of death and childhood. To Wordsworth, a child has visions of innocence and simplicity that gradually ‘fade into the light of common day’ as the child turns into an adult. It is true that ‘life is growth’ as he followed Virgil’s idea of ‘lachrimae rerum’. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet saddens over the loss of ‘celestial light’ (innocence) and said “the things which I have seen I now can see no more’’. He asks in the fourth stanza “whither is fled the visionary gleam/ where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (56-57) But when thought of loss prevails in the mind, the poet feels unhappy and weakened, then nature lessened the grief:

To me alone there came a thought of

Grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought

Relief;

And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from

The steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season

Wrong; (27-35)

He finds this pleasure in the children for their communion with nature. Mortal nature is not predominated over children. Wordsworth describes the child—‘whom thy immortality/Broods like a Day, a Master o’er a slave. (119-120) An adult knows the impermanence of life in this earth and becomes weakened by the thought of mortality while a child willingly embraces it.

Since child age Wordsworth is blessed with ‘gentle breeze’ as described in “Prelude”, Book 1, he proclaims freely that ‘the heavy weight of many a weary’ were not made for him as he finds pleasure ‘from the green fields, and from the yon azure sky’. Thus, innocent childhood achieved ‘a redundant energy’ through the unconditional union of nature and he benefited ‘long months of ease and undisturbed delight’. No human being is free from pain and sufferings but how the poet’s thought deals with it:

I was looking on, a babe in arms,

Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts

To more than infant softness, giving me

Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind

A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

                                                                                                                        (“Prelude” Book 1,77-82)

In Book V, the poet describes a boy of Winander who moves along the edges of the hill and stand-alone beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake and feels Nature as an inseparable part of his life. He also tries to communicate with the silent owl by mimic hooting and he might get a response with the quivering peals. But the boy died in childhood. Frances Ferguson explains that nature and boy as, both absolute and definitive. The interpenetration between the boy and nature becomes so complete that the boy becomes one with nature. (Barth, J. Robert 3) But this death is not a sad one as nature has a great role to forget. Even the Throned lady of the same village with whom the boy had a connection, Wordsworth describes –

I see her sit

. . .

On her green hill, fretful of this Boy

Who slumbers at her feet,–forgetful, too.

Of all her silent neighbourhood of graves,

And listening only to the gladsome sounds

That, from the rural school ascending, play

Beneath her and about her.’’

                                                                                                            (“Prelude” Book 5, 401-408)

To Wordsworth, the lady might have seen a long race of young to die. Children are ‘not too wise’ and ‘not too learned’ and ‘’though doing wrong and suffering, and full oft/ Bending beneath our life’s mysterious weight/of pain, and doubt and fear, yet yielding not/In happiness to the happiest upon the earth’’(18-21). Another incident, when Wordsworth saw a dead body on Esthwaite lake, he is not seized with ‘soul-debasing fear’. His inner eye transformed the terror scene and ‘’hallowed the sad spectacle/with decoration of ideal grace’’.

Conclusion: Death is the greatest threat to our life; accept it or not, it is inevitable. Common people fear death and this irrational fear affects their mental health. The perception of death whether it will be frightening or a natural phenomenon depends on the workings of the mind. If the mind is sublimed with an imagination that is aligned with nature and innocence then we can triumph over the fearful appearance of death. Wordsworth’s concept of death has a relation to the poetic imagination. His poetic imagination is heightened by the childhood innocence and nature. In these poems, he emphasises the greatness of childhood for their deeper connection to nature and allows one to perceive death as a natural phenomenon.‘’Death is wholly natural, and if death is dead, then nature must be dead also’’ (Bloom, 2005, p.141). However, the death of relatives and other persons left a shadow of sadness on our minds. But nature playfully mingles pleasure with pathetic thoughts, and though children are not rational, they distill our mind through their vision of innocence and lead to harmony with nature. Thus, Wordsworth’s vision of continuity on the relationship to nature and younger hearts subsume death, fear, and grief.

 

References

Ansari, Shaukat, Mohammad. “William Wordsworth as a Philosophical Escapist: A Critical Evaluation’’. Language In India. vol.18:2 February 2018. www.languageindia.com.

Barth, J. Robert. “The Poet, Death, and Immortality: The Unity of The Prelude, Book V’’. The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 10:1, 1979, pp. 69  -75. JSTOR.

Blades, John. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, New York, N. Y., Palgrave Macmillan,(2004).Print

Gowland, Elizabeth. William and Dorothy: The Poet and Lucy a Reading of William Wordsworth’s “Lucy’’ Poems, Simon Fraser University, (1980, 24, April).

Johnston, Richard Rutherford. Romanticism and Mortal Consciousness. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.2013.

Lenon, Joan. Wordsworth and Death, Ph.D. Thesis, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6459. 1984, May 5

Hall, S.Wordsworth’s” Lucy” poems: Context and meaning.Studies in Romanticism, 10(3), 159-175. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/25599802,(1971).  May 7

Milnes, Tim, and Nicolas Tredell. William Wordsworth: The  Prelude. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Wordsworth, William, and Helen Darbishire. Poems In Two Volumes, 1807. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Print.

Asish Kr Charan teaches in the department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan as a guest lecturer.