Natural Environment In William Wordsworth's Poetry

The Purpose the Natural Environment Serves in William Wordsworth’s Poetry Among those debatable issues recently, whether natural landscape should be preserved or to be developed for residential purposes has not yet reached a consensus. Since this has aroused more public awareness on the destruction of the natural environment, people start to care for the nature by actions, such as reducing pollution and wastes. Comparing the relationship between nature and human with around 100 years ago, is there any difference between two centuries? William Wordsworth is a well-known poet who lived from late 18th century to 19th century. He composed numbers of poems in the Romantic period of the early 19th century. One of the major subjects for his poetry

In the same poem “Tintern Abbey”, once again the speaker can see the “hedge-rows” around the “pastoral farms” of people, and “wreaths of smoke” seemingly coming from vagrants or hermits lighting a fire (15-17, 20-21). Unexpectedly, the speaker is not describing the natural environment alone but connecting the images of nature and life of people together. Pastoral farms belong to nature and people herd domestic animals there; vagrants or hermits produce smoke that travels through trees in order to keep them warm or cook. Their reliance on nature to lead a life builds up a harmonious relationship between nature and humans. Coming back to the banks of the Wye after five years, the speaker says that he feels a “presence” of something that readers do not know (94). The presence leads the speaker to think deeply and in a higher level (95). Apart from being passionate for nature, he generates more profound thoughts when feeling the presence. The presence exists in the “light of setting sun”, the “round ocean and the living air”, the “blue sky”, and lastly the “mind of man” (97-99). It should be something mystic as it is present in everything in nature from the top to the bottom and even in human minds. Furthermore, the speaker defines it as “a motion and a spirit” that drives all the actions of thinking and pervades the whole universe (100-102). A spirit is usually linked to gods, implying that God is the presence and he is binding everything in the universe, nature and humans included. As a result, the God in the nature, or the nature in the God keeps the speaker’s thoughts true, cure and guard his heart, and is the “soul” of his “moral being” (109-111). The power of nature exerts on his thinking, his spiritual mind, his moral values, and finally his