THE TABLES TURNED Wordsworth sought to redress the balance between academic study and a first-hand experience of Nature as sources of wisdom in “The Tables Turned”:- Up! up! my friend, and quit your books; Or surely you’ll grow double: Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun […]
Wordsworth
March 5 William Wordsworth
LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING His sister Dorothy, an emotional collaborator in his experience of Nature, as her ‘Journal’ reveals, and Edward, a nephew, as far as I remember, were his companions. Nature, he thought, seemed full of life and joy; why was not mankind similarly happy? I heard a thousand blended notes, While in […]
March 4 William Wordsworth
Pre-eminently the poet of Nature ( with a capital ‘N’ ), Wordsworth particularly delights in Springtime, and besides voicing this joy he expounds his philosophy of natural wisdom in the simplest words he can find – another deliberate aim of this poet: TO MY SISTER It is the first mild day of March: Each minute […]
March 3 William Wordsworth
LINES WRITTEN IN MARCH The joyous scene, recollected in tranquillity, later at a time of leisure, reproduced its poetic feeling, and hence the poem. Another joyous scene is recalled in the lines “Written in March” while resting on the bridge at the foot of Brother’s Water, also in the Lake District: The cock is crowing, […]
March 2 William Wordsworth
DAFFODILS March, in English poetry, also inevitably recalls Wordsworth and daffodils. In our January programme I hazarded a simple definition of poetry as “an expression of feeling in musical language” . Wordsworth, who knew what he was talking about, prefaced his ‘Lyrical Ballads’ of 1798 with the following account of the poetic process, as he […]