To Look on Nature

In Celebration of Tintern Abbey Day

For the 225th anniversary of Wordsworth penning the lines of “Tintern Abbey” I’ve pulled a section of my thesis discussing his depiction of the natural world alongside the work of Thomas Hardy.

Nature Yet Remembers:  “Tintern Abbey,” Lyrical Ballads, and “Nature’s Questioning” 

In situating Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and sections of Lyrical Ballads in conversation with Hardy’s “Nature’s Questioning,” the sense of nature’s collective existence appears, an existence that grows and spreads in Wordsworth and spreads and suffers in Hardy.  Stephen Muecke writes in “Mixed Up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming” that “While each animal, tree and water source strives to persist in its own way, engendering its filiations, it is also a necessary mutually sustaining part of the heterogeneous network” (37).  This necessity of the presence of the natural world contributes to its sense of agency. Wordsworth and Hardy witness this agency of the plant, particularly in its ability to adapt to its surroundings in their poems “Tintern Abbey” and “Nature's Questioning.” 

In his poem completed in April of 1798, “Lines Written in Early Spring” Wordsworth explores the philosophical idea that human nature is linked to physical nature.  He writes: “To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran; / And much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man” (5–8).  The evocation here is that Wordsworth’s speaker is crestfallen at the condition of mankind, and that it is mankind itself that has somehow disrupted the naturally occurring link between itself and the natural world—leading to an irreversible internal corruption.  Much in response to the impacts on society of the changing political climate, Wordsworth’s lamentation on the dangers humans pose to each other when they depart from the organic link between the natural world directly reflects an inherent fear of man-made destruction.

In addition to the consideration of how humans’ behavior towards one another reflects a disruption in the natural state of the universe, Wordsworth uses Romantic sentimentality in his lush descriptions of the scene in which his speaker is reclining.  His poetic speaker illustrates the plant life he is witnessing  

The budding twigs spread out their fan, 

To catch the breezy air; 

And I must think, do all I can, 

That there was pleasure there” (17–21).  

The imagery of the canopy of leaves and branches above the speaker evokes a sense of a naturalistic empire. Wordsworth’s use of the adjective “spread” to describe the leaves growing from the branches presents an image of one small being evolving to cover more space in the world. The budding twigs spreading out their fan-like leaves evokes the sense of sails, of the power of the plant life displayed through the allusion to a naval power, hinting towards the Royal Navy of the British Empire. This movement and growth highlights how alive the natural world is, and how easily it spreads out with the potential for domination.

 In parallel with the growth and spread of the British empire, Wordsworth illustrates that nature itself is an empire, an empire in which all creatures exist, and one that is the ultimate power to which all creatures must submit. He also speaks to the feelings of the plant, of the budding leaves experiencing “pleasure.” As Emanuele Coccia so aptly writes on the life of plant leaves in his 2018 book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture “The leaf is a paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being transverse by the world without being destroyed by it” (27-28). 

Nature also depicts a sense of power in Wordsworth. Returning to Klein’s "The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought” for a moment, the presence and agency of plant life in Wordsworth is examined as a source of power. She approaches the work of Bate in Romantic Ecology with a differing opinion on what the “natural world” and what the desire of plants may truly be. She writes “Wordsworth’s poems do not limn a vision of untroubled ecological ‘harmony.’ Rather, they  help us to abide with the terrible uncertainty of being, and to countenance the unknowability and otherness of the nonhuman with something approximating grace” (108-109). The desire of the natural world in Wordsworth’s landscapes of plants is to assist the human through tragedy, to provide direction to the uncertainty of human existence that is oftentimes the source of tragedy. Klein focuses on the “budding twigs” as an illustration by Wordsworth of the “inner life” (110) of the plant. She writes on the decision to depict a leaf in the shape of a fan and the lamentation by the speaker that he must “do all I can” (19) in light of witnessing this movement and life within a plant. “It is as if certain aspects can only be grasped through the indiscretion, or transgression, of the figure; or as if we cannot see nature at all without linking its life to ours” (110) writes Klein on the aforementioned question of anthropocentrism in regards to the previous excerpt from “Lines Written in Early Spring.” 

This linking of the human life with the life of nature mirrors the idea mentioned in the introduction as found in Marder: that the moments in which plant agency are be visible to the human eye appear when  “a certain pace and rhythm of movement” customarily disregarded by the human eye and mind “since it is too subtle for our cognitive and perceptual apparatuses to register in an everyday setting” and “with which the tempo of our own lives is usually out of sync” (21) can be seen and recognized. This is the indiscretion of the figure that Klein argues is necessary for the aspect of plant agency to be understood. On a particular level, whether conscious or not, the speaker of Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” sees this and recognizes that he must think and “do all I can” (19) to witness not only the “pleasure” of the plant, but the choice of the plant to experience that pleasure—the agency of the plant itself. 

Wordsworth again uses the word fear to describe the environment in “Tintern Abbey,” a poem that represents the nature-philosophy found  throughout his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads: 

                                 …For I have learned 

To look on nature, not as in the hour 

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, thought of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt  

A presence that disturbs me with the joy 

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused (90-98). 

The reason why Wordsworth’s speaker is drawn to the natural world is to witness its sublimity, its ability to inspire awe. Nature is a presence that disturbs him with joy, a seemingly contradictory description. It is the marriage of beauty and fear that invokes the sublime, and the meaning of plant life is just this: the moment of sublime coinciding with human perception and rhythm of the plant. The element of the rock cliff, a cavernous precipice of the unknown, is most commonly linked to the sublime as it evokes such a physiological response to its material presence. In these lines from Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth’s speaker looks “on nature” allowing the broader choice of word to include the plant life alongside the “ample power” of the stony interfaces which he so commonly links to the evocation of the sublime. 

Wordsworth’s speakers feel this connection with plants, and it produces terror which evokes the sublime. In a note he wrote in regard to his 1802 poem “Resolution and Independence”—a poem commonly read as one of Wordsworth’s “stone” or “rock” poems—in an attempt to fully capture the intricacies of the imagination, Wordsworth describes how the sublime functions as an unstable space of being, yet a synthesis that brings together two things: “the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison” (126). This is the rhythm of movement that Marder attributes to the meaning of plant life, two separate things: the meaning of plants and the existence of humans, that occasionally meet to create a connection that produces the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. It is something that goes consciously unnoticed as it is too undefinable, yet unites and coalesces with human existence whether we notice it or not. Marder further writes, “the act of thinking embodies the living legacy of the vegetal soul’s signature capacity. Even in our highest endeavors, we remain sublimated plants” (40). Wordsworth evidently did realize this—he witnessed it himself—the human soul being intrinsically linked in all plants, in all landscapes. It is only the moments in which the lives and emotions of Wordsworth’s speakers align with the tempo of the plants that the speaker finds solace in their soul and recognize their shared kinship of existence. In the sequence of lyrics known as the Lucy Poems—written for Dorothy—Wordsworth is aware of this tempo, particularly in the poem “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal,” which reads: “She neither hears nor sees; / Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees” (6-8). This kinship is expressed in various fashions by Wordsworth, but perhaps the most noticeably in his quest to grapple with mortality and to place meaning upon the unknowable. 

Wordsworth’s speaker in “Tintern Abbey” is reflecting upon the changes humans go through as they age, as they grow apart from the wonders of the natural world. Nature leads the human in “Tintern Abbey”, through the various elements of rock, water, soil, and plant, “Whenever nature led” (72) the speaker sought to follow. Wordsworth proposes the everlasting life of the plant compared to the mortality of the human, the tragedy of the human lifespan in the following lines: “Until, the breath of this corporeal frame / And even the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul” (44-47). This sense of human living in “Tintern Abbey” is mirrored in Coccia’s Life of Plants study on plant breathing, what he considers to be the language of the environment: “The world is the matter, the form, the space, and the reality of breath” (53) Coccia writes. “Plants are the breath of all living beings, the world as breath. In turn, any breath is evidence of the fact that being in the world is, fundamentally, an experience of immersion” (53) as Wordsworth speaks to the breath of the human in his corporeal frame, the division of “human” blood from the non-human. 

Coccia argues that this breath that Wordsworth mentions is the universal language of all beings, both human and non-human, “Any being is a being of the world if it is immersed in what immerses itself in it” (53). On the plant, he argues “The plant, then, is the paradigm of immersion” (53). The immersion of the human within plant agency is paramount to the Romantic poetics of nature, as seen in Wordsworth’s plants. In his 1815 poem “To the Daisy” Wordsworth depicts this complete immersion at the hand of a plant: the daisy, a flower of the Asteraceae family. “We meet thee, like a pleasant thought” (29) the speaker announces, later claiming that upon meeting the plant, the speaker owes his happiness to the encounter with the flower, “When thou art up, alert, and gay, / Then, cheerful Flower! my spirits play” (64-65). In a flower as small and seemingly unimportant as the daisy, Wordsworth manages to depict the immersive pull of the plant, illustrating the daisy as not just a flower but as a being. A being with the agency to attract the human, to provide its observers with the feeling of happiness. 

This happiness in Wordsworth’s nature is not mirrored in the collective experience of Hardy’s nature. In his 1898 Wessex poem “Nature’s Questioning” Hardy expresses the opposite of this cheerful tone in the tragic emotion and existence of nature, including plant life: 

When I look forth at dawning, pool, 

Field, flock, and lonely tree,

All seem to look at me 

Like chastened children sitting silent in a school; 

Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn, 

As though the master’s ways 

Through the long teaching days 

Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne. (1-8)

Through Ruskin’s idea of the pathetic fallacy the plant life here in Hardy is transformed into the faces of schoolchildren worn down by their own existence. The trees look at the speaker with dull faces conveying their loss of “first terrestrial zest” at the hand of their master. As Nishimura proposed Hardy departs from the Wordsworthian nature to the Darwinian in his essay “Thomas Hardy and the Language of the Inanimate,”the master of nature suggests the role of the human and the tragedy inflicted upon the natural world by those very hands. 

The dull faces of the tragic plants in Hardy contrast with the carefree plant life found in Wordsworth’s poem “Ode.” Whereas Hardy’s Victorian nature poetry suggests that the plant life itself is tragic due to the treatment by its master and its detachment from the experience of “first terrestrial zest”, indicative of childhood, Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry illustrates the opposite: that the master, the human, is the one who can freely detach and reattach to the plant life, that the loss of childhood is an experience entirely unique to human life, and that the wonder and beauty of the anti-tragic world is saved for nature, for plant life. 

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In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth illustrates this “plantedness” of plant life in the hedgerows and orchard-tufts, yet he chooses to depict the flux of the collective plant life. “These orchard-tufts, / Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, / Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves / ‘Mid groves and copses.” (11-14)—the individual plants are rooted, but the collective plant life loses itself among the whole. The leaves are “one green hue” instead of individually depicted, the groves and copses of the plant life become a larger entity composed of the individual life. This plantedness is mirrored in Hardy’s “Nature’s Questioning” but is instead presented as a tragic and melancholic dilemma that plants face, not as an example of nature’s interconnectedness. Hardy describes their faces as  “constrained” as a result of, as the plants themselves express the constraints of nature as it: “framed us in jest, and left us now to hazard” (15). 

The faces of nature’s tragedy in “Nature’s Questioning” and the unity of greenery in Wordsworth are examples of the consistency of nature. Coccia writes “What radiates unity also radiates form, visibility, consistency” that “this same family resemblance is what allows us to recognize the real identity of a collection, and the atmosphere is what makes a place visible to us in its totality, beyond the objects that occupy it” (52). This is how Wordsworth’s speaker is seeing the plant life in “Tintern Abbey”, as a united presence. The plants converge to create a united green, “Green to the very door” (17) as Wordsworth’s speaker announces. The liveliness and vitality in this image is contrasted with the nature in Hardy’s “Nature’s Questioning”: “the winds, and rains, / And Earth’s old glooms and pains / Are still the same, and gladdest Life Death neighbors nigh” (26-28). Through this collective the space that Coccia suggests is limited to the ground in which the plant occupies is expanded to be depicted as a larger and more expansive area. The collective plant sees more, taking on more of the human-like presence in both Wordsworth and Hardy. In Wordsworth, the greenery is a sign of life, and in Hardy, the collective plant is a sign of gloom and melancholy.

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