Wordsworth’s pantheism was the result of his "Religious" walk with nature

Wordsworth believed that it was to Nature that he owed the most in the formation of his mind and character. The Prelude is actually his autobiography in verse by him, and Books I and II deal with Nature as Wordsworth’s nurse, guide and guardian in his early years. Wordsworth points to three stages in their interrelationship.

First: Wordsworth believed that the Spirit or Soul of lonely places had chosen him to be a favored being from his childhood, seeking him out with “gentle visits” or “severer interventions”. Nature’s method, therefore, was twofold: she kindles in him a sense of beauty and also restrains him from doing evil by instilling fear in him.

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew

Fostered by Beauty and Fear alike.

The beauty of nature held the boy fascinated as when at the age of five he saw Skiddaw Mountain “tanned with the deepest radiance” or when the cliffs continued to twist past him during a skating break on Esthwaite Lake. Wordsworth was now unaware of the beauties of nature: they came to him unsought.

But sometimes Nature intervened creating fear and a feeling of guilt. He came up with a severe intervention when he stole a boat and took it to Ullswater. One summer afternoon, the boy found a boat on the lake shore and, with some stealth, rowed it out, when suddenly, from behind a steep slope, a huge black peak reared up. It seemed as if this cliff was chasing him with great strides. The Wordsworth boy’s mind sensitized by conscious guilt, he rowed tremblingly and went home. And in the days after

“Enormous and powerful forms that do not live

Like a living man, he moved slowly through the mind

By day, and they were a problem for my dreams.”

In the second stage, it was not Wordsworth’s merry animal movements, nor the thrill of rowing or bowling that unforgettably moved the boy, but the peace and beauty of Lake Windermere at sunset that sank into his mind. heart.

In the third stage, Wordsworth searched for Nature with constant deliberation.

Nature intervenes up to this moment

And secondary, now finally wanted

For your own good.

The imagination, the “first creative sensibility” that even the Wordsworth boy possessed but lost in his childhood, is now awakened during his adolescence. the imagination is

an auxiliary light

Come from my mind, that in the setting sun

Bestowed new splendor.

Visionary power stirred both his mind and heart. And he too felt that a Being was spread over all things. Acquiring this pantheistic feeling, he walked in “religious love” with Nature, and he could consider God and Nature together.

The Prelude, therefore, ultimately led him to those religious-philosophical conclusions that were to be the animating source of his projected work The Recluse. With him, who had dedicated himself to the art and leadership of man to the highest level he can achieve, (The Prelude) became an epic of which he was the hero. He was aware that for a poet to talk so much about himself could expose him to the charge of selfishness. But he also knew that such an honest and humble self-examination can reveal to mankind the full picture of his own glory and despair.

The Prelude is a unique work, because it combines the epic power and scope of a poem like El paraíso perdido with the introspective voice of the writer himself. The Prelude, written under the pressure of his youthful years, has something of the freshness and vivacity of youth: a loose succession of events which the poet’s mind has lit with the rich glow of memory. What is significant is that the things he sees walking on the lonely road or the moon between the leaves of an ash tree outside his cabin window are of equal importance to the politics and gaudy trappings of human life.

The Prelude has a message that is very modern: the influence of childhood in the afterlife. Childhood offers an explanation of the problems of one’s life. The child is the father of the man. Modern psychology has this same lesson.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth looked at life not just in one aspect, but in its very whole: from the mountain clouds coiling in the slow, glorious convolutions of dawn, to the reality of the depths of life both in the city ​​as in the country. The path is often repeated in his poetry, the path with its strange and tragic simple people that he found in it, and his message of Hope and Love without which we cannot live.

He seems similar to us in our troubles today with his rugged individualism and ultimate stand for beauty and love. No wonder, Wordsworth

I felt the story of a poet’s mind

Is the job not worth considering?