CHAPTER VII WILLIAM WORDSWORTH More than any other eminent English man of letters, Wordsworth is the poet of childhood. His poetry depicts the moods and activities of children more extensively than verse prior to his. His heart was attuned to childhood in all its manifestations. Yet he did not write for children. Wordsworth's classification of his poems, mystifying in other respects, indicates clearly that he did not attempt a body of verse for children. Nevertheless, with affectionate and loving attention to detail he has noticed them from nursery days to school time. His poems contain a gallery of individual portraits, especially of subjects from the humbler walks of life, in London as well as in the Lake District and the southwestern counties of England. Although Wordsworth extended the boundaries of poetry to include all phases of childhood, his treatment is in harmony with that of poets from Prior to Crabbe. His poetry, with that of Blake, represents the fine flowering of the eighteenth-century attitude toward childhood.1 There are, for instance, manifest suggestions of harmony between his lines on native fields and those that have been noted from Akenside to Southey. Sometimes, also, he echoes the very words of eighteenth-century poets, as in the third book of The Prelude, where his lines on the habits of youths at Cambridge University recall Tickell's passage on student life at Oxford, Until a careful study of Wordsworth's sources has been made in the light of eighteenth-century influences, his poetic method can not be fully understood. Where the Black Edward passed his beardless youth. 1 Although Blake and Wordsworth alike felt the strong urge of influences at work in the eighteenth century, there is between them a difference of emphasis in the treatment of childhood. Both poets are fervent and warm in conception and expression. Yet, except possibly for a poem like the Ode, the body of Wordsworth's poetry about childhood reveals a saner treatment. Wordsworth remarked of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience: "There is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." Nevertheless, Wordsworth held closer than Blake to com 1 Thomas Tickell's on Queen Caroline's rebuilding the lodgings of the Black Prince and Henry V. at Queen's College, Oxford: In that coarse age were princes fond to dwell With meagre monks, and haunt the silent cell. Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' court, Their meals were frugal, and their sleeps were short; And froze at matins every winter morn; And their mind opening as their stature grew. In addressing his alma mater, Wordsworth contrasts the luxuryloving youths of his day with the abstemious "nurslings" who submitted to academic discipline "from their first childhood," When, in forlorn and naked chambers cooped And crowded, o'er the ponderous books they hung In silence, or with keen devouring noise Not to be tracked or fathered. Princes then mon experience; the reader feels that he is in the presence of real children. The difference is due, in part at least, to poetic method. Wordsworth preferred to write, not like the earlier master during the spontaneous overflow of emotion, but in his favorite tranquil mood of recollected emotion. Unlike Blake, and much more like Sir Walter Scott, though in a different mood, he loved to localize his affections. His geographical sense, which led to the choice of definite backgrounds in most instances, kept him in the company of children of flesh and blood. His deep sense of moral responsibility served to emphasize this trait of stern fidelity to outward fact. Blake's preternaturally bright and vivid backgrounds can seldom be localized. Blake asked for his visions of delight no merely terrestrial location. In Wordsworth, however, the geography of the background against which he observed children is as a rule clear and definite. Blake's Echoing Green will never be identified, because it incorporates the essential delights of children at play on any English village green. To localize it, as one loves to do with Wordworth's poems, would be out of keeping with Blake's vision of universal delight for children at play out of doors. In The Prelude, Wordsworth individualizes and identifies the Bowling Green on the hillside above Lake Windermere, because his vision of happiness and contentment is affectionately associated with specific localities. His local feeling is strong. His mood demands, like Michael's at the unfinished sheep-fold, an object in nature with which to associate emotional experience. Wordsworth is seldom concerned merely with airy fancies; he usually gives them a local habitation and a name. He gains in realism because he conveys the impression of writing with his eye on the individual child and his experiences. Like Blake, Wordsworth found in the child unspoiled by man the most satisfying illustration of the simple life. He too would rejuvenate society by way of the child. But less radical than Blake, he did not wish to do away with institutions that militate against happiness, but instead to reform them by modifications which he considered practical. His expressed wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing, prompted him to write expository passages on the need of reform. As a result the humanitarian and ethical aspects are more obvious than in Blake. Wordsworth's preoccupation with childhood led him not only to a statement of moods which are the essence of universal childhood, as in the Ode, or We Are Seven, but also to a consideration of the practical problems of education, as in The Prelude, and the reform of industrial abuses, as in The Excursion. I The extent and depth of his interest in the varying manifestations of childhood are reflected in his notice of children under many circumstances and moods from birth to death, in the home or near it, in the fields and beside streams, in school or on the way to and from it. Unlike his predecessors, he observes children with equal variety and interest in the city as well as in the country. It is true that his somewhat rigid nature could not unbend sufficiently to make him the care-free companion of childrenin the Anecdote for Fathers he appears awkward and external-but he nevertheless reveals a consistent deep interest in them, and certainly never fails to notice them. Although he could not sport with them, he evinces an affection that prompted and lay at the heart of his philosophy of life, and conditioned his poetic expression of it. If he was not able to abandon himself to them in their lightsome moods, he yet honored the man who like the Wanderer in The Excursion loved to have children about him: The rough sports And teasing ways of children vexed not him. Michael tells his son that they had been playmates among the hills, so that Luke did not Lack any pleasure which a boy can know. 1 When Wordsworth expressed the anxiety he felt for England, he unaffectedly closed his sonnet by emphasizing affection for his country in an image of the child whose devotion is whole-hearted and unquestioning. In his most inspired lines, as well as in those which show him doggedly but vainly attempting to practice the theory of his Preface, Wordsworth is never far from contemplation of the simple thoughts and emotions of children. As a schoolboy at Hawkeshead he had observed children with a discriminating eye. When he returned during the summer vacation after his first year at Cambridge, he noticed that a change had come over children of those "Whose occupation I really loved." It was a change like that wrought by an eight-days' absence from a garden in spring: pale-faced babes whom I had left To deck some slighted playmate's homely cheek. 2 1 Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, XVII. 2 The Prelude (IV, 203-208).-Grandchildren are not frequently mentioned during the century before Wordsworth. He notices them again in Descriptive Sketches (1. 152), Anticipation, and in The Westmoreland Girl (To My Grandchildren). Burns has suggestive lines in New Year's Day and Second Epistle to Davie. |