Poem of the week: Lines Written in Early Spring by William Wordsworth

This week's poem, "Lines Written in Early Spring", has all the simplicity of diction advocated by the two radical young poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, when they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's poem is a pastoral, with some distinctly rustic qualities. But the meditative tone we associate with his later or larger-scale works is present too.

It was composed in the year the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published, 1798, and its sombreness reflects the personal and political disappointments pressing on Wordsworth in his early maturity. In the more substantial and densely argued "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey", which appears in the same collection and was completed a few months after "Lines Written in Early Spring", there's a famous passage that seems to refine the argument of the earlier poem: "For I have learnt / To look on nature not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity".

In "Lines Written in Early Spring", nature and mankind are linked but stand for contrasting modes of being. "Tintern Abbey" works its way through self-doubt to a triumphant resolution. "Lines Written in Early Spring" leaves the situation unresolved. If it's a sketch for "Tintern Abbey", it's one of those sketches made by a great master, minor in scale, less profound than the finished painting but with an allure of its own, part of which is a space left open for interpretation.

The onomatopoeia of the first line is subtle. There's a diversity of vowel sounds and a choice cluster of consonants in the lovely phrase "a thousand blended notes". We're not brought into the midst of "all the birds/ Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire", true, but we hear the birdsong faintly all the same, like the memory of a memory. Otherwise, Wordsworth's scene-setting is spare. It's the mental state provoked by his thoughts that interests him. The reader enters two parallel imaginative worlds, one mimetic and clear, the other indistinct. The poet generalises fearlessly: "pleasant thoughts" invite "sad thoughts", and the whole constitutes a "sweet mood". Perhaps the enjoyed sadness has an erotic quality (is there an echo of "parting is such sweet sorrow"?). The reader, at any rate, is expected to know the kind of mood the poet means.

The sadness will take a more serious turn in line eight. Meanwhile, the originality in the next stanza first appears in the idea of the soul as an active force, implied by the stroke of metaphorical genius in the final verb: "To her fair works did nature link / The human soul that through me ran". The soul is not some static entity: it runs, like blood, rivers, an electrical current. This leads us swiftly to the crux of "what man has made of man". As an aphorism, the phrase has authority. It may not be specific, but it feels undeniable. The raison d'être of Lyrical Ballads was a poetry that used the language of "a man speaking to men". This is a chilly echo of those words. All the negative connotations of "man-made" cling to it, and the reflexive grammar forms an inescapable knot. We have gone wrong; worse, we have wronged ourselves.

The next three stanzas picture nature's various "fair works". The growing insistence of the poem on pleasure is remarkable. In stanza one we had the speaker's "pleasant thoughts", and now the pleasure is nature's – or so the poet believes. "And 'tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes", he says, and later he seems to emerge from a still more conscious battle between reason and instinct: "And I must think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there". In acknowledging the subjectivity of his interpretation when he senses the pleasure a leaf takes in opening and feeling the spring breeze, he seems to leave a space for doubt, even while asserting his faith.

As Pamela Woof points out, Wordsworth's mind is flexible: like Keats, he possesses "negative capability" and can live with uncertainties and ambiguities. However, for the moral purpose of this poem, it's necessary to set up positive against negative. The poem's core is solid and bright, with the simple flora and fauna whose regeneration brings us (and it?) such pleasure. Their opposite, the destructive human forces, are compacted into that bare, three-beat refrain line, which first appears at the end of stanza two and reappears to end the poem. Almost any of the humble characters featured in the narratives of Lyrical Ballads could have expressed, if less gracefully, a similar thought. It seems to contain the small hoard of wisdom that belongs to people, whether poets or peasants, who have been uprooted from the natural world. Perhaps the key word in the phrase "what man has made of man" is "made". Factories, mines and mills are spreading the sooty sores of manufacture over English fields and groves. But the Romantic movement would not have been born without them.

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:-
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

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