The three stages of Wordsworth's love of Nature:
Wordsworth's love of Nature passed through a gradual development. It can be studied in three stages.
First Stage:
In his first stage, his attachment to Nature was that of a boy who took delight in carefree pleasures and open - air joys. At first Nature was but a playground for his “animal movements” and “coarser pleasures”. Wordsworth writes about his boyhood pleasures:
“When like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.”
Second Stage:
The second stage was a stage of mere sensibility, devoid of thought. Nature now appealed chiefly to his senses. He was under the imperious sway of his despotic senses, which held him in thrall and obtained for some time a complete mastery over him, so that the joy of the eye in seeing and of the ear in hearing engrossed him; and faculty of thought that analyses, breaks up the undivided whole into its component parts, and compares one thing with the other, was laid asleep. Wordsworth confesses his inability to point what then he was. He says:
“The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms , were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.”
Gradually the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” disappeared, and the poet experienced yet another development in his love of Nature. He now began to find a spiritual and intellectual meaning in Nature. At this stage, Wordsworth became fully conscious of “the still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, thought of ample power / To chasten and subdue.” Now he found Nature pervaded by a spirit or soul:
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things.”
Final Stage:
In the last stage, Nature became the anchor of Wordsworth's purest “thoughts” and “the nurse”, “the guide” and “the guardian” of his heart. In fact, Nature was now the “soul” of all his “moral being”.
.webp)
