Stylistic Analysis of Wordsworth's Lines Written in Early Spring

Stylistic Analysis of Wordsworth's Lines Written in Early Spring

Abstract: in this paper, stylistic approaches are adopted to analyze Wordsworth's nature poem Lines Written in Early Spring. The poem is analyzed in the aspects of rhythm, stress, syntax and semantics , which combined with the content to make clear how Wordsworth contrasts the harmony of nature with the disharmony of human society.

Key Words: Wordsworth rhythm the stress syntax semantics

Wordsworth is one of the best-known English poets in literature history who spent his life in the Lake District of Northern England. His great contribution to English Romanticism is the Lyrical Ballads published in 1798 and the preface of the second edition of it in 1800, which is regarded as the manifest of English Romanticism. When many poets still wrote about ancient heroes in grandiloquent style, Wordsworth focused on the nature, children, the poor, common people, and used ordinary words to express his personal feelings, which is of revolutionary significance.

Wordsworth is famous for his nature poems. He believes that in nature, man's essential feelings can find better soil and can be better cultivated and strengthened. And he also thinks that man should find beauty, power and knowledge from nature. That is why he chose the beautiful Lake District where to spend almost all his life. Nature is also the inspiration for most of his poems. So in his nature poem, we find vivid descriptions of mountains, rivers, flowers and birds etc. which are full of colors and imaginations. At the same time, his nature poems also reveal his spontaneous joys and thoughts in seeing and hearing the creatures of nature, often with boyish enthusiasm, and contrast his love of nature and his dissatisfaction with human society.

All Wordsworth's concepts of Romanticism and nature are well stated in the poem Lines Written in Early Spring. Here the poet sits passively in a grove, enjoying birds, trees, and flowers. These "fair works" of nature, he feels, are linked to the "human soul," making him lament on the disharmony among human beings, which contrasts with the harmony of nature. In the preface of Lyrical Ballard, Wordsworth defined the poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" arising from "emotions recollected in tranquility"(Norton: 163). The poem is just the result of recollections of the beautiful spring scenery and his emotions and thoughts provoked by the charm and harmony of nature. He offers a vivid and beautiful picture of early spring: flowers, birds, twigs and the breezy air, while observing the pleasure of nature, he laments the misery and disharmony of human society. In the poem, the perceived happiness and pleasure of the natural world and the grim state of mankind form an obvious and strong contrast. In fact both Wordsworth's use of language and rhythm help to build up such contrast, which reveals the poet's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling".

The poem consists of 6 stanzas, each stanza containing 4 lines. The basic rhythm is iambic tetrameter. Each stanza rhymes in couplet abab which is alternatively used. Thus the whole poem basically has strong and lively rhythmictiy indicating the early spring's bright and light foot, as if nature is dancing to a piece of music with quadruple time in the early spring. All the creatures of nature--the primrose, the green bower, the periwinkle, the hopping and playing birds, the twigs swinging in the breezy air are dancing in pleasure. Leech declaims that "rules in poetry are made only to be broken." (Leech: 12) And if the poem rhythm is all the same, the whole poem will be deadly and monotonous. What is more, the poet's gloomy thoughts of mankind's disharmony cannot have been indicated. A sensitive reader can easily find out that the rhythm changes somewhere. Firstly, the rhythm of each stanza's last line changes into iambic trimeter. This means that the rhythm becomes slower and heavier. It cannot deny that the form of language is closely related to the content. So let us take the content of the last line into consideration. Almost each stanza's last line is concerned with the thoughts of the poet. In the first two stanzas, "Bring sad thoughts to the mind" and "what man has made of man", they are obvious belong to the thoughts of the poet provoked by the beautiful nature. The next three stanzas' last line, though they seem to be the pleasure of nature, in fact it's the poet's mind that thinks them happy and at the same time, contrasting with his deeper dissatisfaction with human society. All these show the poet's sorrow deeper-mind provoked by nature. The changed slower and heavier rhythm complies perfectly to the poet's grief. So in the poem, wherever concerning the poet's mind, the rhythm changes to iambic trimeter.

The next, let us pay attention to the stressed word. The stress mostly adheres to the rhythm of iambic × / │× / │× /│× / │ (×stands for unstressed), which is just like the dancing tempo of the early spring. However, the stress also has some variations. In the last line of the first stanza "Bring sad thoughts to the mind", the stress changes into × / │/ ×│× /│. Here both "sad" and "thoughts" are stressed, because at first the poem offers a happy picture