William Wordsworth The Environmentalist

S. K. Mangammal Chari

“Raman Magsaysay award given to Mr. M.C. Mehta, the Indian Environmentalist, is of course a shot in the arm.  This is the first time that an Indian has been honoured with the Asian award equivalent of the Nobel Prize for his first case of a threat to the Taj Mahal from industrial pollutants including emissions from a nearby refinery.  A number of other cases affecting environment have been taken up by him and it is through his single-minded work that public awareness about the importance of environment has been raised as never before.”

The above news made me remember the Poet of nature William Wordsworth, the greatest of the romantic poets, an out and out environmentalist, who had learnt from plants, flowers, lakes and mountains. 

Environment constitutes flora, fauna, atmosphere, living creatures and human beings, which maintain eco balance for existence and life on earth.  The relationship between man and environment is mutual, complex and subtle, each shaped by the other.  The eco balance is gradually being disturbed in alarming proportions with growing urbanisation and industrial pollution.

In this context, environmental education assumes great importance.  A child loves natural surroundings.  It likes to play in open air.  Children love flowers, plants, pet dogs, pussy cats and stars. They learn by playing with the objects of nature.  The familiar rhymes ‘Mary had a little lamb…’ ‘Pussy cat, where had you been, “refer to their taste.  Taking this aspect in view, education to children at all levels should be imparted as far as possible outside the class-room, under trees, meadows, near lakes etc.

William Wordsworth was a worshipper of nature.  He did not like a flower to be plucked nor a plant to be hurt.  He detested violent and noisy revolutions like the French Revolution.  He could not face the killings, destruction and the ruin of humanity.  He was even ready to abandon his French wife Annette Vallon who was to be the mother of his daughter only to run away from the French Revolution.  Even after his return to England, the noise, pollution, the deforestation, the Industrial infrastructure, the loss of greenery and the artificial way of breeding birds and animals troubled him.  He preferred music to noise, greenery to parks and gentleness to violence.

William Wordsworth had stored his mind with the experience in nature, which later he was to recall in his verses.  He distrusted reform, in the fear that the rural England which he loved would be destroyed at the hands of the rising industrialists.

For him every object of nature was a manifestation of God.  He actually worshipped nature.  In the Immortality Ode, he describes a mystical intuition, a life before birth, which dies in the material world but which can be recovered in a few fortunate moments in the presence of nature.  His childhood was spent in the pursuance of many experiences in the secret corners of man’s nature; though others felt that his vision of nature was an illusion.

Here is the greatest interpreter of the message of nature.  He wrote first-rate poetry when inspiration was upon him. In ‘Tintern Abbey’ he returned to his own experience of environment and showed how a unique experience could be brought within the reader’s understanding by bold and imaginative language’ - “the mighty world of eye and ear”.

His grave and noble sonnets often have a majesty which places him among the greatest environmentalists with a poetic vision. His famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality is one of the most magnificent of poetic utterances.  In one of his inspired stanzas ….

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar ….
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home,
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”

In the poem ‘Solitary Reaper’, he goes into raptures when he comes across a solitary reaper….

“Behold her single in the field,
Yon solitary high land lass,
Singing and reaping; old unhappy far off things
And of battles long ago,
…..The music in my heart I bore,
long after it was heard no more”.

Here, Wordsworth describes the valley, the surrounding hills, which echo the song of the high land lass; He does not want to disturb her and he carries the song in his heart long after he leaves Scotland. 

In this poetic piece - ‘Michael’ we find how tragic dignity could be given to the story of a shepherd and his son.  Wordsworth breathes new life into ‘Lucy’ - the innocent child of nature”

“---Three years she grew, she dwelt,
among the untrodden ways, ——”

Another poem - “ I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a poem to be always remembered.

In ‘The Prelude’ he compares himself to an Aeolian Harp which answers with harmony to every touch of the wind and the figure is strikingly accurate as well as interesting.  There is hardly a sight or a sound from a violet to a mountain and from a bird-note to the thunder of the cataract that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth’s poetry.

To him nothing in God’s creation is ugly or common place. There is hardly an object or natural phenomenon which he has not touched to beauty or glory, which does not possess some charm unnoticed by the naked eye.

For example, he made a remarkable poem of the ‘Thorn’.

-“There is a thorn; it looks so old.
    In truth you’d find it hard to stay,
          How it could ever have been young,
          It looks so old and grey ——
No higher than a two year’s child,
          It stands erect, this aged thorn.

In another poem, a stone is rendered life. He also knew the behaviour of owls.

In the words of Shellely - “With
Wordsworth the senses think”.

He used to dance with the Daffodils —

“For oft, when on my couch I lie;
In vacant or in pensive mood;
They flash upon that inward eye;
which is the bliss of solitude, and there
my heart with pleasure fills;
and then dances with the daffodils.”