William Wordsworth ideas behind human perception entail the way people perceive things and that it can be different even if they receive the same stimuli. This ideal means that each individual’s mind is unique and complex, placing more worth on the individual mind. The poem, Lines Written in Early Spring, mainly focuses on nature. The connection between Nature and the speaker is obvious. Wordsworth places the speaker all alone except for the animals and plants around him. He puts him right in the middle of Nature thereby strengthening the bond between Nature and the speaker. Wordsworth personifies Nature and gives her the ability to make decisions, as well as to link Nature’s and the speaker’s souls. According to the speaker, while humanity has failed by rejecting Nature, Nature in her own way does everything right. The speaker in the poem thinks deeply about the changes that have occurred around him in the society as he sits in a beautiful grove and yet it brings to his thoughts a great sadness. The narrator becomes lost in thought about Nature, its coherent existence, and its wonderful beauty and to a brief extent, his thoughts turn to man’s misery and the miseries that they had brought to one another. In the poem, Wordsworth describes a moment that is uniquely bittersweet.
Nature has been Wordsworth’s widely recognized poetic reputation. Nature, in Wordsworth’s work of art, assumes a personality that is close to the divine spirit and that which can penetrate any object. In his perspective, being close to Nature is just as being close to God himself. The divinity of the described nature is observed in line one of stanza one. It is coined by the words, ‘a thousand blended notes’ which implies the presence and the ability of nature to manifest thoroughly almost anywhere, something which is similar to God’s ability for omnipotence. In the second stanza, the narrator moves a bit away from nature and thinks about the misery which humanity had brought to itself since the beginning. The narrator states in a moment that the soul is the very idea that has been used to link humanity to Nature just as illustrated in line one and two, stanza two: ‘To her fair works did Nature link/The human soul that through me ran’. The two are interconnected and that humanity’s soul is not that distinct from the soul of Nature, and that, although it has been long forgotten by the rest of the humanity, he reminds people that it is the natural state of man to be close to the very Nature. This idea was one of Wordsworth’s principles: that to be close to nature was one of man’s innate state.
The narrator once more personifies nature and looks at it to a living thing. This can be seen with the use of movement verbs in the stanza. For instance, words like ‘trailed’ in the case of the periwinkle; and for the flowers, ‘breathes’. Wordsworth, throughout the poem, Lines Written in Early Spring does his best to bring into existence the idea a living and breathing world which according to him is only a fraction that has been removed from man. Once again in the fourth stanza, an absolute contrast with the static poet is drawn by the presence of movement in the surrounding environment. In this case, it is nature which draws the attention of the readers as it did the narrator. So much has been spoken about nature which puts the speaker in the poem at nearly a non-entity position. The speaker has no ideas, no personality, and no thoughts and thus he has no presence in the poem. The speaker’s world has no voice but rather is contained by the stronger one, in this case, that of Nature.
Another view of this poem is that the speaker is saddened by Nature’s perfection. Due to the clear contrast between humanity and nature in the speaker’s thoughts, melancholy sets in. As the speaker in the poem wonders whether there is pleasure in Nature in the fifth stanza, in the last stanza, Wordsworth ends the poem with a similar lament which was earlier mentioned: ‘what man has made of man?’ it is especially evident in that question posed by the speaker that he feels that humanity’s mistakes are his responsibility to ponder. Despite the excellent efforts and attempts of Nature to heal the hurting soul of the speaker in the poem, close to the end, the healing effects claimed to be in possession of Nature are negated by the speaker’s low spirits and melancholy. The poem ends on a sad note with a somber mood, in that, while nature goes on as it is untouched by humanity’s miseries, the human soul is left behind bound to experience its own misery.
Conclusion
Wordsworth has created poems and ‘Line Written in Early Spring’ is one of his works that was well received. Man, according to the speaker, can become part of nature. Man can be in control of himself and the surrounding as well as exhibit rationale. The speaker in the poem is a thoughtful person, reasonable and is attributed to philosophy in some way. With all these traits but yet, the speaker is at peace with Nature.
