The powerful and evocative poems on nature by William Wordsworth, the well-known and much loved poet of the Romantic age have inspired in my friends and me a deep affinity for all aspects of nature and an undying love for nature poems. This is the power of poems.

Our obsession with electronic gadgets lead to monotony, our precocious strive to grow up only results in increasing frustration but when we find refuge in the heart of poems on nature, it makes us glad and keeps us in the ambit of our childhood.

William Wordsworth is a poet to whom “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”. In The Daffodils he writes:

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

Oh! What a way to delineate such a beautiful thought in such a simple way. Even today the
enjoyable sight of ‘Palash’(a flower with vibrant orange-red hue) during the season of Basanta (January-February), ‘Kaash’ (another type of flower) at the advent of Autumn and the vibrant yellow mustard fields, resonate with the same feeling.

Again in The Solitary Reaper when the poet gets enchanted with a rustic melody although unable to decipher the lyrics, he says:

“Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.”

Wordsworth found abundance of beauty in this mundane world and to him nothing was ugly. Our exasperation with city life and monotonous drudge is explicitly brought forth in Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’. He could feel the omnipresence and omnipotence of nature and so paid the highest encomium to Nature through his poems. He was rightly termed by Mathew Arnold as the ‘Highest priest of nature’.  

The greatest poet of the Romantic age, William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland in England on 7 April 1770. His father, John Wordsworth was a lawyer and his mother Ann Cookson exerted an everlasting influence on his life.

Wordsworth, the second of five children in the  family, lost his mother at an early age of eight and later his father when he was only 13. He started his schooling at Hawkshead Grammar School near Lake Windermere.

His repository of knowledge was  invigorated from hills, flowers and stars than from books or the imposed discipline from school.

We find this reflection in his poem Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower where Mother Nature, the best teacher in the universe teaches Lucy the qualities of a human being.

How the mellow rays of the rising sun, the floating clouds amidst the midnight stars or the gurgling rivers imbue her with calmness, gracefulness, freshness, tenderness, sublimity and dignity. In the year 1787, he began his university education at Cambridge.

He was an ordinary scholar who was intrigued with the mystery of nature more than the lessons taught.

Wordsworth travelled widely during his student life particularly to places like Cumberland, France, Yorkshire and Switzerland.  He graduated in 1791. His revolutionary zeal attracted him towards The French Revolution, the motto of which was ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.’

However an excessive indulgence in this movement disillusioned him and he returned to England. A few years later in 1802 he married Hutchinson and settled in Grasmere and later at Rydal mount with his wife and sister Dorothy.

Some of his famous poems include Lyrical Ballads, Lucy Poems, The Green Linnet, Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Ode on Duty and The Prelude. On 23 April 1850, the greatest precursor of Romanticism breathed his last and was buried in the church yard at Grasmere.

Coordinator, Class IX, St Vincent’s High & Technical School, Asansol