Wordsworth’s tapestry of poems
Faith is a passionate intuition - William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland (England) in 1770. His
compositions reflect emotions such as love, sorrow, happiness and
sympathy. Ecstasy and rapture of nature also inspired his poetry. He was
conferred the honour of poet laureate.
 Being an orphan, he had pangs of loneliness but found consolation in
his books. When he was twenty years, he visited France. he was so
enraptured by the grandeur of the Alps that he composed descriptive
sketches of this majestic terrain in all its silent escarpments.
In the poem ‘Calais Beach’, he captures the aspect of serenity with
waters washing it in the quietness and gentleness of rhythmic ebb and
flow. Meanwhile the Romantic Poets were impressed with politics and
Wordsworth took a fancy to the French revolutionaries. He was
enthusiastic about the “Girondist Movement” but as he witnessed violence
and brutality evolving he returned to England. He found a tranquil abode
in Dorsetshire and lived with his sister.
Dorothy whose mutual love for nature kept them united. On the death
of his brother a state of depression caused him to compose ‘The Ruined
Cottage’, ‘The Recluse’, The Waggoner and ‘River Duddon’ conveying his
emotional disorder. When his dark moods were subdued he began writing
pleasant, flowery poetry and was accepted as a Victorian Pastoralist.
‘Evening Walk’ and ‘The Loir’ revealed his healthy mind once again.
“I wondered lonely as a cloud” is a delightful composition in which
he indicated how enthralled he was with a field of golden daffodils
fluttering and dancing in the breeze”. He visualised them romantically
as stars that shine and twinkle on the ‘Milky Way’
The ‘Solitary Reaper’ is a rhapsody in pathos and reverence to a
lonely country woman cutting and binding sheaves of grain in a field.
The poet alluded to the solitude of the worker singing to herself “a
melancholy tune”, when he embellished the poem with these lines -
O listen, for the vole profound
Is overflowing with the sound
Wordsworth’s rendezvous with natures’s poignant beauty, its
allurement and his own sinister moments which enveloped his life are all
poetically portrayed.
- Caryl Nugara
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