论文部分内容阅读
Abstract:Childhood is one of the most important subjects in Wordsworth’s poems. In many poems there is often a sharp contrast between children and adults. Children are always simple-minded and innocent, while adult’s world is filled with lies, sadness and complexities. Wordsworth believed that growing is a process of forgetting, and “the Child is father of the Man”. Wordsworth missed and cherished the childhood which he had lost for ever, and he thought that nature could recall our memories of childhood.
Key words: Wordsworth; childhood; nature
Childhood is one of the most important subjects in Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth is known as a“worshipper of nature”. And his speciality was writing on nature, not the supernatural. But the children, in many of Wordsworth’s poems, have the supernatural power, or more exactly, have the instinct of immortality, although they are not aware of it. In many of this kind of poems written by Wordsworth there is often a sharp contrast between children and adults. Children are always simple-minded and innocent, while adult’s world is filled with lies, sadness and complexities. Wordsworth believed that growing is a process of forgetting, and “the Child is father of the Man”. Wordsworth missed and cherished the childhood which he had lost for ever, and just like I have mentioned, as a“worshipper of nature’, he thought that nature could recall our memories of childhood.
The innocence and spontaneity of childhood, as portrayed in two of William Wordsworth's poems, are often a source of frustration and confusion to adults. "Anecdote for Fathers" and "We Are Seven" relate two conversations between grownups and youngsters which demonstrate the range of emotions adults may experience when faced with the thought process of a young child. The adults depicted in Wordsworth's poems become irrational and exasperated--almost childlike--in the way they respond to their situations. Their inability to attempt an understanding of the children's mindset has reduced their own capabilities for logical reasoning and rational thinking. These two poems, some readers think, are more like short stories than poems while another poem by Wordsworth “Ode: Intimation of Immortality” is really a mature masterpiece about the childhood memories and the adult mind. In this essay, I will try to discuss the poet’s treatment of childhood by analyzing these three poems. “Anecdote for Father”, “We Are Seven” and “Lines Written in Early Spring” appeared together in Lyrical Ballads when it was published in 1798. In "Anecdote for Fathers" the reader sees how the relationship between adult and child should be. A father asks his boy, of two particular places which is his favorite? The boy gives a simple answer to his father, who asks for an explanation. An innocent child is content with a simple fact, while someone else needs an explanation. The father asks numerous times throughout three stanzas for an explanation. So finally the little boy gives his father what he wants, a simple explanation, he doesn't like the weathercock at one place so he chose the other. The father is touched by the simplicity of the child's answer. The child's simplicity represents his innocence. Oh dearest, dearest boy!my heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn. (57-60)
The father desires to be simple-minded, like his son. However, as we see in line 59, the father knows that he cannot fully understand his son. The father cannot fully understand the innocence of his son which he cannot explain. We find that Wordsworth likes to use the technique which according to Prickett ,“depends upon the contrast between the naivety of the narration and the unspoken complexity it implies.” (Prickett, 32) This poem is more like a short story, and the poet is just like a narrator, but every adult reader may get more meaningful lessons from this poem.
While in another poem "We Are Seven", Prickett observes that:
Though‘We Are Seven’ again depends on the contrast and even tension between the ‘na ve’ vision of the child and the unspoken sophistication of the adult reader, whereas in an ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ the understanding of the adult is necessary in the poem to interpret the ‘lies’ of the child and so lead to a moment of sudden revelation, here the irony is directed against the adult—who remains unenlightened. (Prickett, 32)
"We Are Seven" was written by Wordsworth, along with "The Idiot Boy" and "The Thorn" to supplement Coleridge's supernatural poem the "Ancient Mariner". It was inspired by a girl the poet had met six years before composing the poem. In this poem we see the narrator asking a girl about her siblings. The girl says that there are seven of them, including two that are dead. The narrator of the poem tries in vain to tell the little girl that her two deceased siblings cannot be counted among them because they are no longer alive. However, this little girl insists that these two be included.
“But they are dead- those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
'Twas throwing words away, for still
The little maid would have her will
And said, “Nay, we are seven!” (65-69)
Nobody can know for sure what happens to us when we die. The narrator has very natural beliefs that the two deceased children are gone. However, the little girl believes that they still exist around her, maybe not in a physical presence, but she still feels that she can sense them. "'Their graves are green, they may be seen',"(37). The living plants sprouting from her siblings graves offer proof to the little girl that they still exist. The girl is innocent and simple-minded. She will not let go of her beliefs. Whether the narrator is aware of it or not he is trying to change this little girl's perceptions. He feels that it is a waste that she won't listen to him, "'Twas throwing words away". Unlike in "Anecdote for Fathers", the narrator of this poem doesn't try to learn from the young one, instead he tries to force his conceptions on her. Actually there is no clear distinction between life and death in children’s mind. Wordsworth always believes that if there is no belief in immortality, “a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of love.” (in Owen, 123) Since this poem touches lightly upon a supernatural theme, we may think that the girl in this poem has the instinct of immortality which can not be understood by many adults. But the problem is why can't the man let the girl have her beliefs and not try to force her out of them? Once one loses an understanding of innocence that person can't help but corrupt innocent people. The poem following "We Are Seven" is "Lines Written in Early Spring". The poem has a sad tone. Wordsworth is in a beautiful setting and writing a poem of lamentation. What does he have to lament? “And much it grieved my heart to think/ What man has made of man.” (7 and 8) Wordsworth is grieved by "what man has made of man." What does Wordsworth mean by this? From these poems, we see that man takes innocence away from man. The child loses its innocence by allowing itself to be molded by others. Pirie tells us that “children gradually burden themselves with what Tintern Abbey calls ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’ (39-40)” (Pirie, 156). In Prickett’s analysis, Wordsworth “believed in the fundamental innocence of childhood, and argued from this that lying is not natural to children but is the product of an evil social system”. (Prickett, 31) Someone is constantly trying to force conceptions on the child. It is an endless cycle. Wordsworth wishes to go back to the innocent days of his youth, but he cannot achieve that dream. Once innocence is lost it is lost for good. This is what Wordsworth is grieved of. Childhood represents the innocence that Wordsworth misses. The heroine of "We Are Seven" embodies the innocence that Wordsworth misses. In 1841 he returned to Goodrich Castle with vain hopes of find this embodiment of innocence, but she was gone without a trace.
When comparing "We Are Seven" with "Anecdote for Fathers" and "Lines Written in Early Spring" the reader notices a slow regression from the innocence of childhood from poem to poem. The poems point to the cause of this regression as coming from the ignorant person who no longer understands innocence. Wordsworth sees that innocence cannot survive in this world because mankind ruins it. And this problem is discussed again in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”. The poet seems to have got the way to come back to the innocent age again and that is to love nature and love all the nature objects. To him “the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”. In this poem, Wordsworth combines the two most important subjects of his writing together: childhood and nature.
The main idea of “Ode: Intimation of Immortality” is this: as a vision for nature's, "celestial light" gradually fades from our childhood to adulthood. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth toils with the conditions of mortal life - he realizes that as he grows older, he inversely loses the ability to see the fresh, "celestial" gleam of nature. Through his struggle to rejoice in behalf of nature's divinity, he is left oblivious to humanity's link to the divine—the immortality of the soul. The poem begins by painting a scene of nature's sublimity, but in past tense descriptions: though nature was once appealing to his sight, he could no longer see its "celestial" gleam. Wordsworth describes a condition in which the absorption in nature can lead to an eventual loss of divine identity. In the first line of the first stanza, Wordsworth states that earth's "meadow, grove and stream…to me did seem Appareled in celestial light". His descriptions of nature seem to be derived from past memories and experiences; and he can no longer envision their vividness. The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go
That there hath past away a glory from the earth. (16-18)
Childhood is described as humanity's closest connection to God. Actually, according to Pirie, “initially normal children do seem able to enjoy a world which they cannot describe…so the Ode addresses itself to the phenomenon of a child’s mind in a tone mixing envy with admiration (Pirie, 148):
Thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,-
Mighty Prophet, Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave,
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day,(112-20)
But as the child grows up, he becomes the “little Actor”:
He will learn ‘dialogue of business, love, or strife’. He will discover the social world of ‘A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral’, and recognize it as the proper theatre for much that his ‘human heart’ is compelled to enact (94-9). Nature will not give him ‘some special privilege’ to remain in the joy she grants to ‘the meanest flower that blows’. He cannot escape his destiny as our partner. (Pirie, 158)
As children, we still retain some memory of the Heaven, which “lies about us in our infancy”, which causes our experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic—but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. We are common people, and we live in the secular world, so we cannot avoid to be influenced by the people around us and to lose our innocence of our childhood. It’s a tragedy of all human beings.
The life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. If in “Anecdote for Father” and “We are Seven” the poet is like a narrator, then in “Ode”, we find a thinker who thinks seriously the difference between children and adults. Of course we can not come back to our childhood and regain the instinct of immortality belonging to children, but because of the belief in immortality, the poet describes the Romantic appreciation of nature and is deeply moved by “the meanest flower”. Maybe at this time, just like Pirie comments that “a grown man may feel again as securely rooted to the earth as he did in childhood”. (Pirie, 157) Here, in this way, Wordsworth combines childhood and nature together, both of which he loves most. As the works of one of the greatest Romantic poets, Wordsworth’s poems are still quite meaningful to the people of modern time. Busy modern people hardly have time to look back upon our childhood, but I believe most of us quite miss the lost innocence just like the Romantic poet who lived nearly 200 hundred years ago. Many things have changed as time goes by. If we have the chance to communicate with the children, I don’t know whether or not we will be surprised that we had been like that. When we get something, we must have lost something. We think we have learned a lot during the process of growing-up, but actually, we have lost the simplest joy of our childhood. If we could choose to stay in the innocent childhood forever, maybe some of us will refuse to grow up. But we have no choice. So the poet advises us to love nature. Maybe only nature can give us the power to recall the memories of our childhood.
References:
Pirie, David B. William Wordsworth—The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982.
Prickett, Stephen. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1975.
Wordsworth, William. Essays upon Epitaphs. In: Owen, W. J. B. ed. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegen Paul Ltd, 1974.
Key words: Wordsworth; childhood; nature
Childhood is one of the most important subjects in Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth is known as a“worshipper of nature”. And his speciality was writing on nature, not the supernatural. But the children, in many of Wordsworth’s poems, have the supernatural power, or more exactly, have the instinct of immortality, although they are not aware of it. In many of this kind of poems written by Wordsworth there is often a sharp contrast between children and adults. Children are always simple-minded and innocent, while adult’s world is filled with lies, sadness and complexities. Wordsworth believed that growing is a process of forgetting, and “the Child is father of the Man”. Wordsworth missed and cherished the childhood which he had lost for ever, and just like I have mentioned, as a“worshipper of nature’, he thought that nature could recall our memories of childhood.
The innocence and spontaneity of childhood, as portrayed in two of William Wordsworth's poems, are often a source of frustration and confusion to adults. "Anecdote for Fathers" and "We Are Seven" relate two conversations between grownups and youngsters which demonstrate the range of emotions adults may experience when faced with the thought process of a young child. The adults depicted in Wordsworth's poems become irrational and exasperated--almost childlike--in the way they respond to their situations. Their inability to attempt an understanding of the children's mindset has reduced their own capabilities for logical reasoning and rational thinking. These two poems, some readers think, are more like short stories than poems while another poem by Wordsworth “Ode: Intimation of Immortality” is really a mature masterpiece about the childhood memories and the adult mind. In this essay, I will try to discuss the poet’s treatment of childhood by analyzing these three poems. “Anecdote for Father”, “We Are Seven” and “Lines Written in Early Spring” appeared together in Lyrical Ballads when it was published in 1798. In "Anecdote for Fathers" the reader sees how the relationship between adult and child should be. A father asks his boy, of two particular places which is his favorite? The boy gives a simple answer to his father, who asks for an explanation. An innocent child is content with a simple fact, while someone else needs an explanation. The father asks numerous times throughout three stanzas for an explanation. So finally the little boy gives his father what he wants, a simple explanation, he doesn't like the weathercock at one place so he chose the other. The father is touched by the simplicity of the child's answer. The child's simplicity represents his innocence. Oh dearest, dearest boy!my heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn. (57-60)
The father desires to be simple-minded, like his son. However, as we see in line 59, the father knows that he cannot fully understand his son. The father cannot fully understand the innocence of his son which he cannot explain. We find that Wordsworth likes to use the technique which according to Prickett ,“depends upon the contrast between the naivety of the narration and the unspoken complexity it implies.” (Prickett, 32) This poem is more like a short story, and the poet is just like a narrator, but every adult reader may get more meaningful lessons from this poem.
While in another poem "We Are Seven", Prickett observes that:
Though‘We Are Seven’ again depends on the contrast and even tension between the ‘na ve’ vision of the child and the unspoken sophistication of the adult reader, whereas in an ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ the understanding of the adult is necessary in the poem to interpret the ‘lies’ of the child and so lead to a moment of sudden revelation, here the irony is directed against the adult—who remains unenlightened. (Prickett, 32)
"We Are Seven" was written by Wordsworth, along with "The Idiot Boy" and "The Thorn" to supplement Coleridge's supernatural poem the "Ancient Mariner". It was inspired by a girl the poet had met six years before composing the poem. In this poem we see the narrator asking a girl about her siblings. The girl says that there are seven of them, including two that are dead. The narrator of the poem tries in vain to tell the little girl that her two deceased siblings cannot be counted among them because they are no longer alive. However, this little girl insists that these two be included.
“But they are dead- those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
'Twas throwing words away, for still
The little maid would have her will
And said, “Nay, we are seven!” (65-69)
Nobody can know for sure what happens to us when we die. The narrator has very natural beliefs that the two deceased children are gone. However, the little girl believes that they still exist around her, maybe not in a physical presence, but she still feels that she can sense them. "'Their graves are green, they may be seen',"(37). The living plants sprouting from her siblings graves offer proof to the little girl that they still exist. The girl is innocent and simple-minded. She will not let go of her beliefs. Whether the narrator is aware of it or not he is trying to change this little girl's perceptions. He feels that it is a waste that she won't listen to him, "'Twas throwing words away". Unlike in "Anecdote for Fathers", the narrator of this poem doesn't try to learn from the young one, instead he tries to force his conceptions on her. Actually there is no clear distinction between life and death in children’s mind. Wordsworth always believes that if there is no belief in immortality, “a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of love.” (in Owen, 123) Since this poem touches lightly upon a supernatural theme, we may think that the girl in this poem has the instinct of immortality which can not be understood by many adults. But the problem is why can't the man let the girl have her beliefs and not try to force her out of them? Once one loses an understanding of innocence that person can't help but corrupt innocent people. The poem following "We Are Seven" is "Lines Written in Early Spring". The poem has a sad tone. Wordsworth is in a beautiful setting and writing a poem of lamentation. What does he have to lament? “And much it grieved my heart to think/ What man has made of man.” (7 and 8) Wordsworth is grieved by "what man has made of man." What does Wordsworth mean by this? From these poems, we see that man takes innocence away from man. The child loses its innocence by allowing itself to be molded by others. Pirie tells us that “children gradually burden themselves with what Tintern Abbey calls ‘the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’ (39-40)” (Pirie, 156). In Prickett’s analysis, Wordsworth “believed in the fundamental innocence of childhood, and argued from this that lying is not natural to children but is the product of an evil social system”. (Prickett, 31) Someone is constantly trying to force conceptions on the child. It is an endless cycle. Wordsworth wishes to go back to the innocent days of his youth, but he cannot achieve that dream. Once innocence is lost it is lost for good. This is what Wordsworth is grieved of. Childhood represents the innocence that Wordsworth misses. The heroine of "We Are Seven" embodies the innocence that Wordsworth misses. In 1841 he returned to Goodrich Castle with vain hopes of find this embodiment of innocence, but she was gone without a trace.
When comparing "We Are Seven" with "Anecdote for Fathers" and "Lines Written in Early Spring" the reader notices a slow regression from the innocence of childhood from poem to poem. The poems point to the cause of this regression as coming from the ignorant person who no longer understands innocence. Wordsworth sees that innocence cannot survive in this world because mankind ruins it. And this problem is discussed again in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”. The poet seems to have got the way to come back to the innocent age again and that is to love nature and love all the nature objects. To him “the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”. In this poem, Wordsworth combines the two most important subjects of his writing together: childhood and nature.
The main idea of “Ode: Intimation of Immortality” is this: as a vision for nature's, "celestial light" gradually fades from our childhood to adulthood. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth toils with the conditions of mortal life - he realizes that as he grows older, he inversely loses the ability to see the fresh, "celestial" gleam of nature. Through his struggle to rejoice in behalf of nature's divinity, he is left oblivious to humanity's link to the divine—the immortality of the soul. The poem begins by painting a scene of nature's sublimity, but in past tense descriptions: though nature was once appealing to his sight, he could no longer see its "celestial" gleam. Wordsworth describes a condition in which the absorption in nature can lead to an eventual loss of divine identity. In the first line of the first stanza, Wordsworth states that earth's "meadow, grove and stream…to me did seem Appareled in celestial light". His descriptions of nature seem to be derived from past memories and experiences; and he can no longer envision their vividness. The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go
That there hath past away a glory from the earth. (16-18)
Childhood is described as humanity's closest connection to God. Actually, according to Pirie, “initially normal children do seem able to enjoy a world which they cannot describe…so the Ode addresses itself to the phenomenon of a child’s mind in a tone mixing envy with admiration (Pirie, 148):
Thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,-
Mighty Prophet, Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave,
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day,(112-20)
But as the child grows up, he becomes the “little Actor”:
He will learn ‘dialogue of business, love, or strife’. He will discover the social world of ‘A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral’, and recognize it as the proper theatre for much that his ‘human heart’ is compelled to enact (94-9). Nature will not give him ‘some special privilege’ to remain in the joy she grants to ‘the meanest flower that blows’. He cannot escape his destiny as our partner. (Pirie, 158)
As children, we still retain some memory of the Heaven, which “lies about us in our infancy”, which causes our experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic—but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. We are common people, and we live in the secular world, so we cannot avoid to be influenced by the people around us and to lose our innocence of our childhood. It’s a tragedy of all human beings.
The life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. If in “Anecdote for Father” and “We are Seven” the poet is like a narrator, then in “Ode”, we find a thinker who thinks seriously the difference between children and adults. Of course we can not come back to our childhood and regain the instinct of immortality belonging to children, but because of the belief in immortality, the poet describes the Romantic appreciation of nature and is deeply moved by “the meanest flower”. Maybe at this time, just like Pirie comments that “a grown man may feel again as securely rooted to the earth as he did in childhood”. (Pirie, 157) Here, in this way, Wordsworth combines childhood and nature together, both of which he loves most. As the works of one of the greatest Romantic poets, Wordsworth’s poems are still quite meaningful to the people of modern time. Busy modern people hardly have time to look back upon our childhood, but I believe most of us quite miss the lost innocence just like the Romantic poet who lived nearly 200 hundred years ago. Many things have changed as time goes by. If we have the chance to communicate with the children, I don’t know whether or not we will be surprised that we had been like that. When we get something, we must have lost something. We think we have learned a lot during the process of growing-up, but actually, we have lost the simplest joy of our childhood. If we could choose to stay in the innocent childhood forever, maybe some of us will refuse to grow up. But we have no choice. So the poet advises us to love nature. Maybe only nature can give us the power to recall the memories of our childhood.
References:
Pirie, David B. William Wordsworth—The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982.
Prickett, Stephen. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1975.
Wordsworth, William. Essays upon Epitaphs. In: Owen, W. J. B. ed. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegen Paul Ltd, 1974.