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On Wordsworth’s Thoughts On Our Ever-Aging Souls

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (“Imitations” 202-3). These poignant words, composed by the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth, conclude his work “Imitations of Immortality,” a poem pondering the human soul’s view of nature throughout life. Mirroring this idea, Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” reflects his own internal struggle to grow up without relinquishing his child-like wonder for life and the natural world. Both published in 1807, the aforementioned works share a common goal of illustrating the role nature plays in life throughout its various stages.

Childhood and adolescence, as described by Wordsworth, are a time of purity in which children enter the world with a blank slate, untroubled by the relentless responsibilities plaguing their parents. Wordsworth describes himself living in his youth “As if life’s business were a summer mood; / As if all needful things would come unsought” (“Resolution” 37-38). According to Wordsworth, children live their lives obliviously. They rush through life as they do when playing in the forest: as unaware of the natural truths they posses, referenced in “Imitations of Immortality” (115), as the waters roaring in the distance (“Resolution” 17). “Trailing clouds of glory when [they] come / From God, who is [their] home” (“Imitations” 64-65), children see the world in a “celestial light” (4) that seems to only dim as they age, causing people to search in vain throughout their later life for the truths and simple perspectives they once possessed so unappreciatively.

This lifelong search, however, is addressed more directly as Wordsworth dissects the adult perspective of nature in both works. In “Resolution and Independence” he describes the all too familiar tendency of the mature to allow their positive mood to become overrun by “dim sadness and blind thoughts” even in the presence of nature’s beauty (28). As life progresses, Wordsworth communicates a pervading feeling “That there hath past away a glory from the earth” (“Imitations” 18). This listless and depressive view of nature and life later prompts the inquiry “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” (“Imitations” 56). This reflective question seems to implore the earth itself to restore the rose-colored glasses everyone posses as a child. The origin of this downward spiral, Wordsworth explains, is simply a part of growing up. As naturally as a child eventually learns to “fit his tongue / To dialogues of business, love, or strife” (“Imitations” 97-98), so does he also learn to live “As if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation” (106-107), merely plodding the bland pathway set before him. Life, for all those who become blind to nature’s vibrance, is naught but a “prison-house” (“Imitations” 67).

Those unable to mount a jailbreak from life’s inevitable “prison-house” undoubtedly find themselves akin to the leech gatherer Wordsworth encounters in “Resolution and Independence,” devoid of all the vigor and spirit they are endowed with at birth. Likening the elderly man to a rock, Wordsworth emphasizes the dullness inherent in a life filled with responsibility and void of nature’s beauty (“Resolution” 57). As described, the leech gatherer stands amid a stagnant pool in a deserted moor; the morning offers none of the same hope and promises of happiness as illustrated before by lively, rushing rivers and darting hares. The man’s figure is said to be “bent double” (66) almost as if life itself weighed down his feeble body, and he moves slowly as a cloud “that heareth not the loud winds when they call” (“Resolution” 76). Compared to the “clouds of glory” described earlier, the leech gatherer’s symbolic cloud is seemingly as lifeless as he (“Imitations” 64). When asked what brings him to such a desolate locale, the man explains his vocation is to travel from moor to moor gathering leeches, alone. Though awed by the leech gatherer’s resoluteness to provide for himself, especially in his “extreme old age” (“Resolution” 65), Wordsworth implores God to support him in exchange for promising to remind himself of the leech gatherer when he forgets to appreciate his own life (139-140). As seen in “Imitations of Immortality” Wordsworth follows through on his promise when the “timely utterance” (23) of words from “Resolution and Independence” gives him the strength to ward off thoughts of grief (Lynch 348n3).

Though Wordsworth’s encounter with the leech gatherer did indeed happen, the poetic retelling included a fable-like moral to the story. In revealing the ups and downs of the human perspective of nature throughout life in both “Resolution and Independence” and “Imitations of Immortality,” Wordsworth hopes to convey the importance of the link between appreciating nature and appreciating life. Though he admits, “nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower” he maintains that “We will grieve not, rather find / strength in what remains behind” (lines 177-180).


Works Cited:

Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early

Childhood.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, edited by Diedre Shauna Lynch, W. W. Norton & Company, 1962, pp. 347-352.


Wordsworth, William. Resolution and Independence.” The Norton Anthology of English

Literature: The Romantic Period, edited by Diedre Shauna Lynch, W. W. Norton & Company, 1962, pp. 341-345.

 
 
 

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