Wordsworths attitude to Nature and Man as revealed in Tintern Abbey

Wordsworths attitude to Nature and Man as revealed in Tintern Abbey, the cult and
creed of Wordsworths poetry, was the outcome of his direct communion with nature. This
education of Wordsworths feelings, passions, receptive powers were derived namely from
natural phenomena. Nature was a necessity of his being and through it he lives and
breathes.
In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth has carefully analyzed the stages of his spiritual
development with nature. During the first of these stages he had no conscious
acquaintance to Nature. It was to him a mere playground giving him all these feeling of
physical sensation. Stop ford Brooke has rightly observed that in the first stage of his
acquaintance with Nature it was not he that was in search of Nature but it was Nature who
allured the boy but eluded him with its beautiful and myriad manifestation. The
mountains and the hills, the deep rivers and the lonely stream charmed his eyes and he
wondered about whenever Nature led. At this stage Nature was but,
Secondary to my own pursuits
And animal activities and all
Their trivial pleasure (The prelude)
In the second stage , his own love for nature baffled his own power of description.
He says, I cant paint what then I was. The coarser pleasure of his boyhood days
and his glad animal movements were all gone by. Nature was to him all in all. It was the
stage when all that he behaves was dear and hence to finer influences his mind lay open
for a more exact and close communion. The world of eye and ear came near to him and
the sensuous beauty of nature was loved with an unreflecting passion altogether
untouched by intellectual interest. The sounding cataract, the toll rocks, the dense forest
with their beautiful colours and forms were to him like a passion of an appetite. This
ardent and fierce influence that nature made on him was purely sensuous. Wordsworth at
this stage was a veritable realist and the idealistic view of life held no charm for him.
But the mental repose of this stage was terribly shattered by the heat and furvour
of the French Revolution. He, for a moment, lost faith in nature as a beneficial to him. All
the aching joys and dizzy raptures of youth were gone and his mind was diverted to the
tragedy of humanity. He gained faith in the dictum which Keats was to declare after lapse
of many years Nature may be fine but human nature in finer still. For in the
interim he had heard the still sad music of humanity. Nature now opens to him the gate
of spiritual meditation and suggested to him the deeper truth of human life. This mystic
insight into the mystery of life has already been limited in his other poem Tables Turned:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Then all the sage can.
The final stage was thus a complete departure from the super sensuous world
suggested by nature. The outer world was cast into oblivion on. He felt in his heart an
echo of great soul, the presence of devine motion and spirits which pervades through the
infinite variety of beautiful objects. The recognition of one in the many laid him to the
glorious part of pantheistic philosophy. He felt the vibration of the same mighty soul every
where, in the light of the setting sun, in the waves of the sea, in the living air, in the blue
sky and in the mind of man. If God is never absent from the earth, it every natural beauty
is a living image of a simple divine presence then we can glory everywhere. Pantheism,
Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra

thus poetically realized can create a new heaven and a new earth out of the common stuf
of daily experience.
Tintern Abbey, thus record the acute spiritual crisis sufered by Wordsworth as well
as his ultimate success in rediscovering his lost faith.

Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra