Since we didn't finish Wordsworth on Monday, and there are quite a few McKibben posts already, I figured I'd talk about a later part of “Tintern Abbey.” Specifically, the latter portion of the stanza beginning with “And now...”
I think Wordsworth, more than any of the poets we've read thus far, has the most compelling discussion concerning the Nature = God ordeal.
After he recalls his experience of the Abbey five years ago, and then discusses a more mature appreciation of nature he has cultivated, he begins to describe something which has properties shared only by divine entities. It seems to be omnipresent, it exists in the physical and mental worlds, it “...impels/ All thinking things...”
Further, Wordsworth's use of the possessive pronoun “whose” is perplexing. Whose can be the possessive form of either who, or which. This does open up a multitude of readings. Regardless of whether or not we read the subject as he, or she, or it, one thing remains clear: this 'thing' lives in nature, amongst other places. But not like a fox in a den, or a fish in a pond. This 'thing' lives in “...the light of setting suns...” etc.
I think Wordsworth is making a strong case for Nature and God being equivalent notions. Or, that Nature is the divine. However, I think it's also important to note there still seems to be some confusion. I think it's possible to read the line about living in “...the mind of man” as a reference to either memory or imagination. Then all of these qualities could be attributed to a divine conception of nature. But, I don't think there's enough evidence to definitively say that. Also, let's not forget how young he was on the date of composition. Wordsworth may have been quite the visionary and talent, but he, along with all of us, had to live within his own mind at one point.
RELATED: I believe it was suggested in class that Wordsworth glorifies a symbiotic relationship with nature in the poem. I kind of fail to see half of this apparent symbiosis. (I think we approached this through Bates' question of Marianne and Edward, but didn't really come out with a satisfying answer) If anything, the relationship seems parasitic.
So, the appropriate answer is that they're both exploitative? Both are certainly engaged in an unequal power relationship with nature. Whether one is more exploitative than the other seems kind of impossible to answer, unless someone here knows how to measure emotion as capital. But, to be clear, neither of these relationships seems symbiotic.
Perhaps I am mistaken, though.
a couple things come to mind. While Wordsworth would embrace more traditional Anglican faith in the Excursion (1814), critics have found a strain of pantheism in earlier work like "Tintern Abbey" that supports your sense that he casts Nature as divine in the poem. How this fits exactly with traditional theology is another question, one that Coleridge more clearly lays out in "Eolian Harp" and the dichotomy between nature's one life and Sara's more traditional outlook that chastises his pantheism.
ReplyDeleteBate's essay actually isolates three positions: Edward the Enlightenment technocrat and scientific improver, Marianne the picturesque environmentalist, and Wordsworth the ecologist. The argument for symbiosis would align with the later (in Bate's argument), while he would certainly agree with Nicholas that the former two positions are exploitive, if unequally so. I might be swayed to qualify this and say that Marianne's picturesque can be as destructive on a conceptual level as Edward's approach is on a physical level, but I'll refer that discussion to the thread Maryclaire started. The important point here is that Bate, like McKusick, would like to see Wordsworth and Coleridge as neither Marianne nor Edward, but something else--as cultivating a more equal and "interfused" relationship to the natural world that they label ecological. Now whether we agree with this reading is quite another story.
As an aside to our class discussion, lines 83-4, which describe Wordsworth's former relationship to nature as not having "any interest / Unborrowed from the eye," would be quite good support for the argument that Wordsworth consciously associates environmental consciousness with his former self to set off his change to something more deeply interfused.