Wordsworth - study questions (adapted from a guide by Al Drake)
Tintern Abbey
The poet discusses the personal importance of memory. Give an example of how a principle learned in the past could be "life and food" for an individual in the future. How is the idea of past connected to present established in the opening lines of the poem?
Quote from the poem to explain the attitude of the speaker toward the physical setting.
In what ways has nature been a source of comfort to the speaker (lines 23-57)? How do these lines reflect Wordsworth's credo (see above)?
Explain what you feel Wordsworth means by "that best portion of a good man's life" (line 33)
How does the speaker respond to smoke which he sees rising from the trees? Why is this response significant? What ideas does the image of the Hermit suggest?
See line 40 - why has the world become "unintelligible" to the speaker? What has happened to him over time?
Briefly, what are the joys of nature that the speaker describes as having experienced in his youth (1ines 65-83)? How do these images reveal his feelings about Nature at this time of his life (age 28) as opposed those of his youth (i.e., at age 23)?
In lines 84-111, the speaker describes two stages in his life, as a youth (line 91) and as mature person (line 95). Why does the speaker think the third stage (lines 93-4) is the best? What is the "presence" which disturbs him (line 94)?
Briefly explain how Wordsworth depicts Nature as a moral teacher in this poem.
In 1ine 116, the speaker addresses his sister. Why is it important that she be there with him? What message does he give her in lines 122- 151?
What is the problem or source of the anxiety felt by the speaker in "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"? How does the landscape described in the opening verse-paragraph seem to contain or reflect this problem?
This poem is one of the great examples of contemplative poetry, both in content and in form. Identify the predominant meter of the poem, scanning several lines. Propose reasons why this verse form is appropriate to this kind of poem.
For general discussion: What evidence does the poem present that William Wordsworth was a "pantheist"?
The actual title of this piece is "Lines", the rest is subtitle. Wordsworth frequently gives us very precise information about the circumstances in which he composed his poems. Why does he locate this poem so precisely in time and space?
Throughout the first half of the poem, we hear about the poet's joy in revisiting this particular site and what his recollection of it has meant to him during the PAST five years. Now he stands there again,
not only with the sense
Of PRESENT pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For FUTURE years.
But this re- visiting turns out not to be a simple recharging of his esthetic batteries. Time has passed, and he has changed. Try to summarize line 66-110: what has he lost, and what is the "abundant recompense" for that loss?
"I have learned/ To look on nature, not as in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity . . . ." He looks on nature and hears the music of humanity? How? What are the intermediate steps in this association? What is that music?
Critics have frequently expressed impatience with Wordsworth's tendency to reduce even other people to objects of the poet's vision, a tendency that Keats famously called "the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime". How does this tendency affect your reading of a poem Tintern Abbey, in which, despite all the apparent solitude of the first half of the poem, like Dorothy turns out to have been present all along?
One of the great mysteries about Wordsworth concerns the abrupt decline of his poetic powers: he wrote almost nothing of any lasting worth after 1805, although he lived for another 45 years. Basil Willey suggests that all along Wordsworth was living on his capital. Can you find anything in this poem which supports that idea?
The three stages of what M.H. Abrams has called "The Greater Romantic Lyric" are a) description of the scene; b) analysis of the scene's significance with regard to the problem that troubles the poet; and c) affective resolution of the problem that has been articulated. How would you apply this three-stage pattern to "Tintern Abbey"?
What is the role of "affective memory" in "Tintern Abbey"? How, in other words, does this kind of memory help Wordsworth's lyric speaker first to recognize his problem and then to resolve it?
Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
[The subject and language of poetry]
1. How does Wordsworth, in delineating the "principal object" of his poems, describe the language he claims to have selected for them? How does he describe the language used by "many modern writers"? (241)
2. What sorts of "incidents and situations" does Wordsworth claim to have chosen for his poems? Why does he choose situations from "low and rustic life," and what is the presumed state of the "essential passions of the heart" for those who live in the countryside? (241)
3. What is the relationship of the "essential passions of the heart" to language and to to the "beautiful and permanent forms of nature"? (241)
4. In explaining the purpose of his poems, Wordsworth declares that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but ... Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man ... who had also thought long and deeply." What effect does the language following "but" have upon the first part of Wordsworth's statement about expression? (242)
5. What meditative process leading to composition does Wordsworth outline immediately following the statement quoted in question 4? (242)
6. What, according to Wordsworth, is the relationship in his poems between feeling and action? (243)
7. According to Wordsworth, "one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses" what capability? (243)
8. What are some of the causes, "unknown to former times," combining to reduce men's minds "to a state of almost savage torpor"? (243)
9. What does Wordsworth think of the distinction between the language of prose and metrical composition? Why? How does he deal with the issue of meter in poetry? (244-6)
[What is a poet?]
10. What are some of the characteristics of the poet? What is his relationship to his "own passions and volitions"? What is the relationship between his feelings and the "goings-on of the Universe"? (246)
11. What sort of truth does poetry give? How is this truth communicated? To what tribunal does it appeal? (247)
12. Of what is poetry the image? Under what one restriction does a poet write? What sort of information may he expect his reader to possess? (247)
13. What sort of "song" does the poet sing, according to Wordsworth, and what effect does it have for "the vast empire of human society"? How does Wordsworth conceive of the relationship between "man and nature," and between "the mind of man" and the "most interesting qualities of nature"? (248)
14. Why, according to Wordsworth, can't "the Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician" accomplish the same thing for human society? What is the difference, that is, between the kind of knowledge science can give us and the kind poetry provides? (247-8)
15. How, in Wordsworth's view, is the poet "chiefly distinguished from other men"? What characterizes his "passions and thoughts and feelings"? With what are they connected? (249)
[Emotion recalled in tranquility]
16. Poetry is defined by Wordsworth as a spontaneous what? From what does poetry take its origin? Then what happens? In what mood is "successful composition" carried on? (250)
17. Wordsworth's "Preface" has been said by some to displace the French Revolution's three main ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) into a theory about the way poetry is composed and the effects it ought to have. What, then, are the "Preface's" theoretical equivalents to liberty, equality, and fraternity? (general question)
Edition: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams, Vol. 2 Eighth Edition.
"Lucy Gray"
1. Why is it important to Wordsworth's speaker that Lucy (along with some characters in his other poems) is solitary? What is the value of solitariness?
2. What is the meter of this poem? What effect does it have upon the subject matter?
3.This poem turns into a "ghost story" of sorts. What point may be drawn from this turn of subject concerning Lucy's value or qualities when she was alive?
"I wandered lonely as a cloud" (a. k. a. “The Daffodils”)
1. How does the sensation of something "natural" lead the speaker to imaginative vision? How does Wordsworth's "poetry of nature" in this poem transform itself into the "poetry of self-consciousness"?
2. In what sense is this poem an epiphany for the speaker? How permanent is the feeling he describes - to what extent can it be sustained or revived? What role does memory play in this poem?
3. Is it unusual to use a word like "host" in connection with daffodils? What is the word's biblical connotation?
4. Why does the speaker connect daffodils with the stars?
“We Are Seven”
1. The poem is a conversation. Who are its participants? What qualities do they represent?
2. Why does the girl insist in including her dead siblings when asked about her family? How does she describe their graves? Where does the boundary lie for her between the two worlds?
3. How do you feel about the adult speaker in the poem and his insistence on setting the girl right? Does anybody win the argument eventually?
4. The poem uses a trope which was very popular in Romantic literature all over Europe. Can you think of any other examples of texts in which the message delivered by the people perceived for various reasons as inferior (uneducated, children, insane etc.) turns out to be as valid as the “official” voice of the educated elites? (The examples do not have to be in English - NB Erasmus students, your input would be here especially appreciated.)