CC - IX: Tintern Abbey: As a philosophical poem about nature and man/ different stages in wordsworth's attitude to nature

 

-Whereas "Shelley intellectualizes Nature, keats is context to express her through the senses, " Wordsworth spiritualizes" it-observes Compton-Rickette. We find nothing unnatural in wordsworth's treatment of nature when he is a priest-poet. But the question arises whether such kind of attitude is abrupt or sudden or it is the culmination of some successive steps. The answer is "Tintern Abbey" as well as "The Prelude". Both the poems are a sort of spiritual autobiography of the poet in close communion with Nature. The former in particular is said to be "the consecrated formulary of the wordsworthian creed", as "they (the lines etc.) say in brief what it is the work of poet's biographer to say in details".

            Even a cursory reading of the poem would suggest that wordsworth's Nature-philosophy proceeds through four successive stages- Those of "blood, senses, heart or imagination and spirit" (Dowden) respectively.

        The first is the stage "when like a roe/ I bonded o'er the mountains, by the sides/ of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams/ wherever nature led". This was the phase of "Coarser pleasures" of his boyish days" and "their glad animal movements". Understandably, then the boy-wordsworth derived simple pleasures peculiar to that age like boating, skating, nutting, fishing, robbing of birds' nest etc. It had nothing to do with sensation or thought. It was "simply a healthy boy's delight in freedom and open air". It is akin to "animal activities," and all/ their trivial pleasures" in "The Prelude"

            In the second stage, the poet was enthralled by Nature's enchanting physical loveliness-the varied tints and shades of the green-wood tress, the majesty of hills, the rush and roar of cataracts sweeping down the sights and sounds of nature were then to him "an appetite; a feeling and a love./ That had no need of a remote charm,/ By thought supplied. it was all a matter of eyesinght but not insight ("not any interest/ unborrowed from the eye"), and yielded "aching joys" and "dizzy raptures" in him. Obviously, Nature then appealed to him in sense, and senses only reminding one of keatsian sensuousness ("O for a life of sensation rather than thought"). One is reminded of the love of nature from amidst the chaos of childish excitements as indicated in  " The Prelude".

            Then came a turning point with the disillusionment with French Revolution which has become a bloody business, the death of a brother, poverty, hardship when he learned "to look on nature/ not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing of ten times / the still, sad music of humanity/ .../ To chasten and subdue" it was a phase in which his vision of nature was mellowed or sobered through human suffering. Nature appeared to him with a soothing moral effect. Nature appeared to him "both law and impulse" (three years she Grew in Sun and shower) It was a phase of thought in the throes of life in which "The clouds that gather round the setting sun/ Do take a sober colouring from on eye/ That kept watch o'er man's mortality" (Immortality ode). 

                Thought, deep thought or contemplation once led to the final stage of his realization of nature, and that is the philosophical observation of the heart of things. he could then penetrate the veil of illusions of the phenomenal world and the really real, the ideal(Plato's Idos), the Absolute, the "radiance", the supreme beauty in all things-"And I have felt a presence.... Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/ And the round ocean and of the living air/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man". This sums up the poet's religious pantheism or natural mysticism according to which God is immanent. He is everything is God. We find wordsworth spiritualizes Nature Vis-à-vis Nature  spiritualizes wordsworth.

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