"Tintern Abbey" and Time

I find it interesting that “Lyrical Ballads” beings with "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and ends with "Lines written a few miles about Tintern Abbey". Both are incredibly long poems. "Rime" is fantastical and supernatural, while "Tintern Abbey" seems to be based on an experience of Wordsworth. They are distinctly works of their respective writers. Despite the collaborative bond, and the fact that Wordsworth contributed to the premise, I don’t think Wordsworth could have written “Rime”. His mind seemed too rooted in the natural world to delve that far into the supernatural. These poems are the opposite poles of Romantic poetry; but, I get the same feeling from both poems. I don't think Wordsworth necessarily intended this, yet at the end of the poem I am struck by melancholy. The speaker has accepted the changes in his life and the landscape over the years, and is even glad for some of them. However, even embracing change does not lighten the realization that youth has gone and only death and separation lie ahead. Long after the speaker is gone and eventually forgotten, change will still come to his landscape. His memories have been left hanging in the air, but below them the river will turn and the green recede. Sometimes I find myself wanting my memories to hang in the space where I created them, so I can return to the place/person/time unchanged and unaffected by the future events that have transpired between then and now and then. I think this is related to a universal rumination of choices made and the never-ending desire to be able to undo mistakes. Perhaps with the Singularity and other technological progress (like that time machine someone must be building) this will be realized. If we did have the ability to leave everything as we remembered, waiting for our return, would it be worth it? Is stagnation really more comforting than change?

Perception

My English professor for Brit Lit II gave us a list of Romantic Elements. As I was reading the Wordsworth assignments for this week, I ran across the line “In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind”. It reminded me a lot of a line from one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows: “The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings” from “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”. After pondering it for awhile, it seems to me that the Counting Crows body of work fits Dr. Akers 7 elements of Romanticism. I will have to dig her list out and fully compare.
The other thing that struck me while reading Wordsworth was an area where he and Blake seemed to diverge. I have serious issues with Blake’s “where man is not, nature is barren” as I don’t believe that nature is devoid of inherent value removed from humanity. Wordsworth doesn’t seem to believe that, either, as in lines like “their thoughts I cannot measure” concerning birds. The line points to the birds having some experience outside of humanity. This contradicts Blake’s notion of man essentially creating nature through his imagining of it. If nature is man’s imagination, it cannot exist outside of humanity. Wordsworth, however, puts nature in the position of having something to teach man, a wisdom beyond man’s knowledge aquired through books and manmade things. Despite this difference, Blake and Wordsworth seem to agree on the way the human mind can warp man’s perception of nature. The speaker in “The Tables Turned” expresses that thoughts turn the beauty of nature to hideousness and one’s heart must be open in order to learn from nature. This line of thinking is similar to Blake’s idea that most people’s perception of nature is corrupted and dark, which taints nature, and if their imagination was purged of this corruption, their entire relation to nature and life around them would change for the better. It is interesting that they can share this point, but differ on their fundamental ideas of the purpose of nature.

Wordsworth's view of life

I really enjoy the writings of Wordsworth because of his perception of life and society. "Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-tree" demonstrates the folly of pride and the importance of humility, while Harry Gill gets exactly what he deserves. "Simon Lee" illustrates the importance of good deeds and their effect on others, and "We are Seven" demonstrates perfectly the innocent understanding of a child compared to the jaded ideas of an adult. "Seven" and "Yew-tree" both seem to share Blake's idea that the perception of the young is the most pure. "Seven" shows a young girl's keen insistence that her two dead siblings still count as part of her family, while an adult tries to tell her otherwise. She refuses to acquiesce, because she still plays on their graves and interacts with them. The man in "Yew-tree" begins his journey innocent and idealistic, but as he becomes experienced his idealism turns to the cement of pride and contempt for his fellow man. He is so convinced that his notions are better that he becomes isolated. In his isolation, he cannot carry out his ideas at all, and sits idly by as his life slips into oblivion.
This man reminds me of an ongoing discussion with my father about the splintering of the Left. I am a die-hard lefty, especially concerning the environment. However, I was recently struck by what I feel is the proliferation of elitist, bourgeois terms in the movement. A simple word no longer will suffice to describe an action; a five-word phrase with 3 syllable words, ending in "Justice" is absolutely necessary. I'm not talking about the eloquence of our newly elected president, I'm talking about the mission statements of the myriad of lefty groups. I feel this is alienating people and also making an anti-elitist movement elitist. The other problem is the sheer number of Leftist groups. Like the man who isolates himself and therefore can't accomplish anything, the Left becomes so splintered that it starts to lose the ability to do anything. Eco-feminism is an example of both of these problems. I'm an environmentalist; I'm a feminist. I don't feel like I need a whole new label to identify myself and to splinter off from both of these movements; although, what an awesome, insider, elite label it is! It may seem like a combination of ideas, but combinations have to be made from beginning wholes, which end up fractured in the process. Something about eggs and omelets, I think....

Exploitation

The two "Chimney Sweeper" poems by Blake are both powerful. The first one, told by a child young enough to still have a lisp, equates the innocent children with the innocence of the lambs previously found in Blake's poems. It also ends with the societal lie that injustice, hardship, and exploitation should merely be endured, because rewards lie in the eternal life beyond all misery. The second one, which emphasizes the "THE" at the beginning, as if to imply this the true, real chimney sweeper, exposes the deplorable conditions of the young chimney sweepers. In the child's mind, because he was happy and full of life, society had to break him and fill him with sorrow and death. The illustration does not even look like a child, but a beast. There is also the juxtaposition between white and black occurring in both poems. In the first, the soot turns the child's white hair black, and in the second, the blackened child is surrounded by the white snow. The soot blackening the child's hair is symbolic of outside society stealing the child's innocence, while the soot-covered child illustrates that the purity is no longer within the child, but only existing outside of it in nature. The snow is untouched by the societal demands and perceptions that have chained the child, and which could be symbolically washed away by the snow, as water washes away soot.
I like these poems because aside from Blake's perceptions of reality and society and the chains humans intertwine around these things, I always saw these two specifically as speaking against the horrors of industrial society. The exploitation of the innocent is one of the worst aspects of an industrial, capitalistic society. Even though we have mainly have stamped out child labor in the United States, it still persists in other countries. We also still have to deal with labor issues and class exploitation of adults in this country. However, I am hopeful that our new President will continue to "bolster labor" and examine the evils of capitalism and unnecessary consumption that have led us down this dark rabbit hole of recession and depression.