Lines written in early spring

Wordsworth

As its title implies, ‘Lines written in early spring’ was one of the products of Wordsworth’s great creative
blossoming in the spring of 1798, during which he experimented in a variety of poetic forms and subjects.
About this time, too, there develops more clearly in his mind the idea of the ‘universal heart’ (The
Prelude; XII.219); this, in simple terms, is his view of nature as the active will, deeply interfused within
the phenomena of the natural world, animate and inanimate. It is this idea which inspired ‘Lines written in
early spring’.

The poem begins in physical though not spiritual repose. The ‘grove’ (2) or ‘bower’ (9) is the familiar
Romantics’ code for tranquil disengagement from the world’s tensions and pains (cf. ‘Tintern Abbey’,
line 6). Here, in the opening stanza, Wordsworth composes himself as a preparation to propounding his
‘creed’ (22). Yet no sooner has he settled himself physically beyond the cares of the world, than he
returns to them in contemplation.

The ‘blended notes’ of harmonizing nature act powerfully on the ear to subdue him; lotus-like into that
sweet mood which presages sadder (but also creative) thoughts on the world of man (3–4). As a means of
entering Wordsworth’s ‘creed’, the opening stanza of the poem attempts to subdue and prepare the
reader’s mind too, a literary parallel to nature’s effects on the poet.

The second stanza takes up the opening idea of ‘blended’ in the word ‘link’ in line 5, thus literally linking
the two stanzas. Setting up harmony as the keynote, Wordsworth personifies nature (‘her fair works’) as
an active and deliberative agency, while the opening lines of this stanza reiterate one of the major ideas of
the nature poems: the unity of man and nature: To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that
through me ran (5–6)

This revisits, of course, the ‘power / of harmony’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’, as well as the motion and spirit that
‘impels / All thinking things’.

‘Lines written in early spring’ is equally preoccupied with thinking and thoughts (meditation is referred
to in one form or another in every stanza), yet where ‘Tintern Abbey’ stresses the restorative power of
nature, this poem posits a slightly different angle on the theme; namely the potential of nature to grasp the
human soul and elevate it to unwonted levels of reflection and insight, to the height of Romantic
‘sublime’.

We can trace echoes of these ideas in ‘Nutting’ and ‘There was a Boy’, where the youthful poet is
harrowed by nature’s capacity to

enter unawares into his mind

With all its solemn imagery (‘There was a Boy’, 22–3)

Although the details are absent here, the references to ‘heart’ and ‘think’ in line 7 are likely to bring to
mind another of Wordsworth’s dualities, of ‘think and know’. This line reveals how the poet engages on a
deeply sensitive level with the pain of what man has made of man. The full weight and intrigue of the line
are left trembling in the silence between stanzas 2 and 3.

The final line of the second stanza, ‘What man has made of man’ with its engaging poise, draws the first
part of the poem to a pause with a complex metaphysic. Nature’s occult but penetrating action on his soul
reminds Wordsworth first that he is a thing of nature himself, blended to nature’s ‘fair works’ and then,
extending this thought, that, as a human, he is also linked to other men and women. However, and
ironically, this double alliance reveals to him less the possibility of their concord than their antagonism,
threatening the ideal of the ‘universal heart’

Stanza 3 expels his melancholy and recovers something of his former mirth via the nature present before
him. Nature has once more set somewhat to delight and distract. The primrose and the periwinkle
fascinate his mind by their intertwining patterns, while the word ‘bower’ reinforces the atmosphere of
intimate seclusion. Nevertheless, just as the poet discovers consolation in nature, the word ‘wreathes’ in
line 10 unsettles with a solemn reminder of mortality (our ‘heavy laws’ again). Despite this, he evades
this avenue through a new and significant direction,

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

‘Enjoys’ here is perhaps discordant on the modern ear, as is the anthropomorphism implicit in it
(offending Coleridge’s satire on the poet who ‘filled all things with himself’). At the same time, we may
resolve this by thinking of ‘Enjoys’ as meaning ‘deriving benefit from’ or fitting its environment. In any
case, while the word annoys, it does express well Wordsworth’s deep delight in this setting, implying the
spontaneity of the thought.

By using a term normally attached to animate nature, Wordsworth implies another facet of his mystical
‘faith’: once the individual is prepared to be at one with the spirit in nature, nature will reciprocate with
the joy of that moment. Taking a broader perspective, he seems to say that if people would only adjust
their deeply-held precepts, they stand to prolong such delightful moments into a reconstructed and
happier life.

This combination of epiphany and rapture, akin to Gnostic ecstasy, is extended into the fourth stanza with
its ‘thrill’ projected onto the birds. In another instance of ‘feel and know’, Wordsworth’s recognition that
animals also think establishes a primitive kinship with them, but at the same time their inscrutability
(‘cannot measure’) divides them from him. After the thought comes the emotion, the ‘thrill of pleasure’, a
celebration of the minutiae of nature calling out to him, revealing and reflecting his own happiness in its
energy.

Throughout the poem, Wordsworth ascribes not only a causative agency to nature but also intentionality.
This purposive agency is personified in line 5 with ‘her fair works’, the goddess nature, recalling the
classical Gaia-Tell us. Hence, not only does nature happen to link his soul to the ‘fair works’ but,
referring to lines 17–18, there is a purpose or a volition in nature

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air (17–18; emphasis added)

‘Spread’ is one of Wordsworth’s favorite words in Lyrical Ballads for denoting nature’s impulse to
disseminate influence as well referring to biological growth. Further, given that this is a spring day with
the sap beginning to rise, it is plausible to translate the budding, trailing, wreathing, spreading of tuft,
flower and twig, as a willed purposive struggle for survival and attention.

In ‘Three years she grew’ Wordsworth again talks of the impact of nature as a generator and a moulder.
But sure enough he tries to take us beyond a view of nature that understands only a blind deterministic
force. Nature’s formative influences are catalogued, while nature herself is visualized as:

an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain. (11–12)

In ‘Lines written near Richmond’ the stream cunningly beguiles its unsuspecting spectators, whereas in
‘The Fountain’ the small birds do not merely respond naturalistically to their context but:

Let loose their carols when they please,

Are quiet when they will. (39–40; emphasis added)

More than anything, the expression of emotions (joyous, smiling, brooding and so on) in nature’s
inanimate objects (leaves, streams, mountains and clouds) reinforces an impression of nature as in
adjectival possession of soul, mind and sensibility.

Thus, in line 16, the hopping and playing birds seem to Wordsworth to perform these actions out of the
‘thrill of pleasure’. His conviction of this is re-stated in the following stanza where, in spite of doing ‘all I
can’, he becomes united with nature, so much so that he becomes convinced that the whole scene,
including the trees and even the ‘breezy air’, shared in the pleasure of that elevated moment as the
‘universal heart’.
The use of the past tense ‘was’ in line 20 points to the possibility of at least two moments here: one is the
occasion of the original experience of ‘pleasure’ in the grove, and the other, the later recollection of this
in tranquility (although, about 45 years after writing the poem, Wordsworth claimed that he composed it
more or less simultaneously with the moment of hearing the birds). In the former he is fully absorbed in
nature’s vitality and in the other meditating and making meaning of it.

The latter point is confirmed in line 19 with his imprecation, ‘I must think, do all I can’. The ambiguity
in the second half of this line evidences a more general ambivalence or uncertainty at work in the poem.
This ambivalence continues into the final stanza that opens with two hesitant conditional clauses.
Withdrawn from society, he becomes profoundly introspective, uncertain, and confused.

In fact, line 21 (‘If these thoughts may not prevent’) is so loose as to be practically meaningless. The
following line only gropes towards the hope that his ‘creed’ accords with Nature’s plan, that is, that the
whole of Nature’s ‘fair works’ are in fact blended with the ‘human soul’ in the ‘universal heart’ – as
stanza 2 proposes. If this is so then mankind, by holding itself aloof, discrete from the rest of nature, is a
force for division and destruction, a ‘reason to lament’. However, the poem ends inconclusively on a
question mark, part inquisitive, part accusative, and a confrontation with the reader

Wordsworth later revised the final stanza (in a moment of even greater tranquility), thus imposing on the
end of the lyric a narrower range of interpretative possibilities, though also invoking a stronger sense of
closure,

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man!

The gains in closure and clarity need to be set against connotation and latency of meaning. Replacing the
final question mark with an exclamation mark also reinforces the new finality, though it dissipates the
poem’s vital anxiousness and it loosens the reader’s engagement at the very point where it had been most
intense.

The poem’s complexity of metaphysics and mood is engagingly induced in its simple diction. A
reverential paean to nature and an elegy on mankind’s strife and frailty, each is deepened by its difference
to the other. Consistent with its balladic tone, its perspective is both subjective and tentative, framed in a
near balladic meter and quatrain (the second line of each stanza usually replaces trimeter with tetrameter).

Nature, though, is also human nature and in addition to primroses and periwinkle Wordsworth presents
the human response to nature, as well as the reflective and contingent in humanity. These qualifications
help to restrain any tendencies to didacticism in the poem’s voice. The discovery of happiness in nature’s
‘fair works’ encounters the somber recognition that man himself undermines the happiness in himself.
Ironically, it is his capacity for reflection that both links and sunders man from nature, while recognition
of this operates as a form of supernatural creed.