Wordsworth and Vedic Tradition

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K.N.D. Sanjeeva Rao

Wordsworth resembles the Vedic Aryans in many respects. He was a child of Nature like them and represented in his poetry, a pastoral and rural life like theirs.  He worshipped a Spiritual Presence in Nature as the Rigvedic Aryans worshipped its powers.  Then, he indulged in philosophical speculations about man and God as the sages of the later Vedic period and had his mystic visions of the Invisible World like them.

The Vedic literature is divided into four sections, the SAMHITA or the hymns, which are songs of praise, the BRAHMANAS which are works connected with ritual, the ARANYAKAS relating to the philosophical contemplation and meditation about the nature of Truth and the UPANISHADS dealing with the knowledge of the Ultimate Reality.  The purpose of this article has been to relate some sections of Wordsworth’s poems to these four divisions and see how closely they compare with the Vedic tradition.

Wordsworth’s approach to Nature is very much similar to that of a Vedic disciple to his Teacher, full of reverence and love and with a desire to serve and worship.  The poet tells us in his ‘Tintern Abbey’ that he went there as “A worshipper of Nature…/ Unwearied in that service…” with a deep zeal and holy love. This association with Nature, Wordsworth tells us in ‘The Prelude’, purifies and sanctifies our thoughts and feelings until we recognise a spiritual grandeur in them.  The ‘Susrusha’ and ‘Guru Bhakti’ in the Vedic tradition are also stated to purify the disciple’s mind and qualify him to receive the spiritual knowledge from his Teacher.

The Vedic poets were astonished at the manifestations of Nature and venerated them in their hymns.  We have such hymns addressed to AGNI, the Fire or VAYU, the Wind etc. The gods were impersonal and exhibited the same characteristics of the powers of Nature they represented.  Thus AGNI has a ‘searching beam’ and VAYU has a ‘rushing sound’ as he moves about.  Now, many of Wordsworth’s poems describing the forms of Nature resemble the SAMHITA category.  In ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’ we have the “…sea that bears her bosom to the moon”, and “The winds…howling at all hours”.  The daffodils are “Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance”.  In the poem “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’ “…the Mighty Being is awake / And doth with his eternal motion make / A sound like thunder – everlastingly”.  In “The Lines Composed Upon Westminister Bridge’ “This city now doth, like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning”.  In all these examples, there is an adoration of a Spiritual Presence in the forms of Nature represented as exhibiting the same characteristics of the form it represents, as in the Vedic hymns.

The Brahmanas are theological treatises concerned with the practical application of the hymns in worship and ritual, and the significance of such rituals.  We have these ritualistic sections in Wordsworth’s poetry when he puts his Nature – philosophy into practice.  In ‘The Daffodils’he “…gazed and gazed” at the competitive performance of the dance by the waves and the flowers.  The ritual or ‘Upasana’ brought him the ‘wealth’ of spiritual bliss at the end of the poem.  We have another ritual in the Cuckoo poem when the poet is ‘…lying on the grass” and hearing the ‘two-fold shout’ of the bird.  This ritual brought him “That golden time again,” his ‘visionary hours’ of creative activity revived by the bird’s song.  We have yet another ritual in ‘Tintern Abbey’ when the poet “…bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides…/ Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams / Wherever Nature led.”  This external contact with Nature helped him discover the Inner Reality in later life.  Wordsworth also recommends a similar ritual to his sister Dorothy in the poem when he tells her to ‘let the moon shine’ and ‘the misty mountain winds blow’ on him freely.  We have another kind of ritual in ‘Tintern Abbey’, which is psychic.  “When the fretful stir…and the fever of the world” weigh him down, he longs for the beautiful Wye for consolation and relief. He says “O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, / How often has my spirit turned to thee!”  This agonised longing for the forms of Nature is itself a ritual performed at the spiritual level.  And Wordsworth lists the gifts conferred upon him for the ritual in the same poem. Ritual or ‘Upasana’ conferring favours on ‘Upasaka’ or worshipper is a well known thing in the Vedic tradition.

The Aranyaka refers to the life of solitude and retirement in a forest spent in contemplation and meditation about the nature of Truth.  ‘The Tintern Abbey’ which resembles a ‘Rishyasrama’ with its ‘steep woods’ and the ‘hermit’s cave’ provides the suitable atmosphere for the Aranyaka in Wordsworth’s poetry.  His disillusionment with the French Revolution not only sent him to the English country-side for comfort and solace but taught him

“To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.”

His mind was filled with sympathy for the human suffering and concern for the human welfare.  He indulged in philosophical contemplations about man and Nature. Communion with Nature appeared to him as the only remedy.  In ‘The Tables Turned’ Wordsworth says that Nature has a ‘ready wealth’ to bless us and observes that

‘One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.”

Again in ‘The Prelude’ we have another observation that

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.”

This is how the human being is sustained by the Spiritual Presence before he is sanctified and raised by an association of his passions with the ‘high’ and ‘enduring things’ in Nature.  The Immortality Ode is full of Wordsworth’s contemplations about man, Nature and God.  In the fifth stanza beginning with

“The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:”

Wordsworth touches upon the doctrine of pre-existence, transmigration of the soul and the doctrine of reminiscence which are very close to the theory of Rebirth and Karma in the Vedic tradition.  In the sixth stanza we are told how Nature like a mother makes man forget his ‘imperial palace’ and makes him ‘her Inmate’ by providing him ‘with pleasures of her own’.  This account has a close resemblance to the concept of Prakriti and Purusha in the Sankhya philosophy.

Such thoughts as these led Wordsworth into habits of deep meditation.  In ‘Tintern Abbey’ he speaks of that ‘blessed mood’ in which we ‘become a living soul’ and ‘see into the life of things’.  This is the state of Samadhi or Trance in which “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world / Is lightened” as the Truth behind the world of sense is revealed to the poet.  The Chandogya Upanishad has the utterance: ‘Tarati Sokam Atmavit’, meaning that the knower of the Self crosses all sorrow.  These are the sort of thoughts and comtemplations in Wordsworth that can be related to the Aranyaka part of the Veda.

Last come the Upanishads which are concerned with a quest for Truth and knowledge of the Self leading to the final emancipation or ‘Moksha’ from the bondage of life on the earth.  The opening line of ‘The Daffodils’, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” represents the search for Truth in Wordsworth.  The ritual of worshipping the Joy in Nature blessed him with the perception of the Reality about the Oneness of Life in man and Nature, in a ‘flash’ at the end of the poem.  The lines

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

record an experience which is akin to the spiritual bliss of the Upanishadic sages.  Again we have the famous lines in ‘Tintern Abbey’ where Wordsworth felt a ‘presence’ in Nature
“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

The Ultimate Reality behind the visible world is described as pervading and animating every thing in the universe including ‘the mind of man’.  There are many passages in the Upanishads which contribute to the poet’s experience in these lines. Wordsworth speaks of the Oneness of Being at several places in his poetry.  In the “Simplon Pass” he says that all the manifestations of Nature like the winds, torrents, rocks etc.

“Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst and without end”

That the visible world is a manifestation of the Invisible Spirit is as much a Vedantic thought as Wordsworth’s.  These lines relate to the concept of Viswarupa in the Gita depicted as ‘Naantham, Namadhyam, Napunasthavadim’ etc.

Wordsworth represents the Vedic tradition in many respects.  In his devotion to and faith in Nature, he is like a follower of the Bhakti Yoga.  In his observations like ‘unknown modes of being’ exist ‘bound / Together by a link, and with a soul / Which makes all one’, he appears like a ‘Jnani’. In saying that the world is too much with us and our worldliness threatens us with a spiritual disaster, he sounds like a Jagadguru.  In such lines as “When the light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shown to us / The invisible world” in ‘The Prelude’, he appears like a Yogi.  In his reference to the earth as an ‘unsubstantial place’ in the Cuckoo poem he reminds us of the ‘Jaganmithya’ concept of the Advaita philosophy.  His praise and philosophy of duty in the first stanza of his ‘Ode to Duty’ is just the experience of Arjuna on hearing the voice of God in the Gita.  Again his surrender to Duty as expressed in the last lines of the poem is not different from Arjuna’s surrender to Lord Krishna at the end.  That mere study of books and scholarship, not ed by practical experience, leads one nowhere, is as much Wordsworth’s argument in ‘The Tables Turned’ as Sankara’s in the ‘Vivekachudamani’. Wordsworth’s preference to be taught by the birds in the same poem is also the practice followed by Satyakama Jabala in the Chandogya Upanishad.  His disregard for Reason as a ‘false secondary power’ that does not help one find the Reality, is the substance of Yagnavalkya’s argument in the Brihadaranyaka.  His reference to the earth as Mother and his statement that life has a purpose in ‘Expostulation and Reply’ are distinctively Vedic concepts.  These and such other Vedantic echoes in Wordworth’s poetry make him appear like an ancient Indian Rishi living in the English country-side, doing his ‘Sandhana’ for self-realisation under the benevolent guidance of Nature which is his favourite Teacher or Gurudev.