The Romantic Child

the music you are those of you here in the hall heard as we were just about to start it was one of Robert Schumann's kinder Thane and scenes from childhood composed in 1838 and it was the seventh variation dreaming and what I want to propose in the lecture today is that in essence the romantics invented our modern idea of childhood I would suggest that although before the time of the romantics of whom Schumann is one of the great examples music was of course written for children's simple songs music of a cover of a kind of childlike quality the notion of a piece of serious art music about childhood suggesting various aspects of childhood for example the idea that children spend a lot of time daydreaming that is something that simply would not have happened before romanticism because it was the romantics who invented our idea of childhood William Wordsworth in lyrical ballads which those of you who were here last month my previous lecture that revolutionary poetic collection of 1798 co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge included a poem in which he imagined encountering a child in a churchyard the poems called we are seven a simple child dear brother Jim that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb what should it know of death I met a little cottage girl she was eight years old she said her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered around her head she had a rustic woodland air and she was wildly clad her eyes were fair and very fair her beauty made me glad sisters and brothers little mate how many may you be how many seven in all she said and wandering looked at me and where are they I pray you tell she answered seven are we and two of us at Conway dwell and two are gone to see gone to see presumably because this is a time of war so if we've gone off as Midshipmen and entered into the Navy two of us in the churchyard lie my sister and my brother and in the church shut cottage I dwell near them with my mother notice that she's a single mother again perhaps the father has had to go off to the war or maybe they're never the father was never present we don't know you say that - at comrade - island - are going to see yet you're seven I pray you tell sweet med how may this be then did the little maid reply seven boys and girls are we two of us in the churchyard lie beneath the churchyard tree you run about my little maid your limbs they are alive if two are in the churchyard laid five their graves are green they may be seen little favors made replied twelve steps or more from my mother's door and they are side by side my stockings there I often nipped my clutch chief there I ham and there upon the ground I sit I sit and sing to them and often after sunset sir when it is light and fair I take my little porringer and eat my supper there the first was that died with little Jane in bed she moaning late Oh God released her of the pain and then she went away so in the church church she was laid and all the summer dry together around her grave we played my brother John and I and when the ground was white with snow and I could run and slide my brother John was forced to go and he lies by her side ironically a few years after this poem Wordsworth's own dear brother John died at sea in the wreck of the ship Abergavenny how many are you then said I if 32 are in heaven the little maiden did reply Oh master we are seven but they are dead these two are dead their spirits are in heaven twas throwing words away for still the little maid would have her will and said nay we are seven the child does not know death for the child there is no difference between the five who are alive but two who are dead she sits and sings to them the spirit of the dead brother and sister are with she is in the churchyard they are below the ground but as in Wordsworth great poem about another dead girl Lucy there is a sense that the body that is in the earth is as alive as a living body and this little maid has a certain willfulness the maid would have her will she's determined to say that we are 7 Wordsworth has been mocked for this poem as a famous caricature by max Beerbohm called William Wordsworth at cross-purposes in the Lake District it's pouring with rain as it tends to in the Lake District and there is Wordsworth I'm the little girl and he's kind of missing the point but I think he doesn't miss the point he precisely gets the point and in the very simplicity of the poem there is a reaching out a sympathy with the viewpoint the consciousness of the child a similar kind of debate occurs in a pair of poems also included in lyrical ballads they're called expostulation and reply and the table's turned and they take the form again of a dialogue in this case a dialogue between Wordsworth and a figure who's partly based on his own school teacher a man called William Taylor but also based on Wordsworth said someone else that he met who was a little bit too obsessed with philosophy and intellectualizing and reading books and they have a debate about the relative merits of book learning and simply learning from nature learning from look from looking around you says from towards the end of the first of the poems where Wordsworth replies to his friend whom he calls Matthew the I it cannot choose but see we cannot bid the ear be still our bodies feel where they be against or with our will nor less they deem that there are powers which of themselves our minds impress that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness think you made all this mighty some of things for ever speaking that nothing of its self will come but we must still be seeking then ask not where for here alone conversing as I may I sit upon this old gray stone and dream my time away again like Schumann in his childhood creaming piano piece like the little girl in the church and Wordsworth is just sitting in an old stone dreaming in a kind of wise passiveness his senses are receiving the beauties of the world around him and for him that is as important an educational process as the act of book learning he comes upon Matthew his friend again and actually finds Matthew also just out in the outdoors but with his head deep in a book and misses the table's turned they're kind of sequel poem in which he says there's books there's a dull and endless strife come hear the woodland Linnet how sweet his music on my life there's more of wisdom in it and hark how belies the throstle that's that the song thrush the throstle sings and he is no mean preacher come forth into the light of things let nature be your teacher she has a world of ready wealth our minds and hearts to bless spontaneous wisdom breathed by health truth breathed by cheerfulness one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man of moral evil and of good than all the sages can sweet is the law which nature brings our meddling intellect miss shapes the beauteous forms of things we murder to dissect enough of science and of art close up those barren leaves come forth and bring with you a heart that watches and receives so again this idea of listening listening to nature the consciousness receiving the sweet impulses of nature putting the intellect to bed spontaneous wisdom achieved through the breeze coming from the wood respecting and listening to what Wordsworth rather beautifully calls the light of things let nature be your teacher could perhaps be the watchword for the romantic idea of childhood education Wordsworth was not alone in thinking about the importance of spontaneity to the child a few years before he published lyrical ballads with Coleridge the eccentric brilliant marginalized London figure of William Blake published his Songs of Innocence and songs of experience and again and again what Blake does is look at two different aspects of childhood a childhood of innocence a childhood that falls into experience here's a pair of poems one from innocence one from experience infant joy I have no name I am but two days old what shall I call thee I happy an joy is my name sweet joy before the pretty joy sweet joy but two days old sweet joy I call thee thou dust smile a sing the while sweet joy befall thee and of course Blake engraved all his own poems Illustrated them himself and there in the image we see a naked child than the idea of a figure of the naked child was so important to William Blake jean-jacques rousseau who I'll be talking about in a moment said that an infant er a young child a baby knows only two emotions joy and pain for Blake joy should be the emotion of childhood but he's acutely conscious that once the child enters the world and is forced to submit to the conventions of the world then we get the opposite of joy infant sorrow my mother groaned my father wept into the dangerous world I left helpless naked piping loud like a fee hidden a cloud struggling in my father's hands striving against my swaddling bands bound and weary I thought best to sulk upon my mother's breast keyline in that poem is striving against my swaddling bands in 1762 in France Geneva and Amsterdam that was published a book by jean-jacques Rousseau called a meal or on education it was really the first treatise on the first treatise to suggest a kind of child centered education the first treatise of what we might call romantic childhood and right at the beginning of that Blake that's like Rousseau says um there's two things wrong with the way we rear our children number one women don't breastfeed typically well-to-do women would not breastfeed that their babies themselves they would send them out to a wet nurse and number two the moment a child was born it was swaddled wrapped in swaddling bands wrapped round restricted and Rousseau said what we need is breastfeeding and no swaddling and I think once you see that idea you immediately get an idea of a desire for a freedom for a kind of Liberty for the child and also a great importance placed upon the bond between mother and child Rousseau says that if a mother doesn't breastfeed her child then that bond which comes from the physical contact with the breast and the eye contact between the child and the mother without that then the sentimental education will always be deprived and so it is infant in infants solo it's for swaddling bands that are restricting the child causing the sorrow and so it is that the sorrowful child instead of feeding delightedly on the mother's breast is sulking on the mother's breast and then of course as children grow older they are regimented into the ways Society in Songs of Innocence and experience Blake wrote two poems called Holy Thursday an innocent one and an experienced one but here even in the innocence mode the children are beginning to be regimented you see in the engraving they are being taken into church was on a holy Thursday that innocent face is clean four children walking to and two in red and blue and green gray headed beadles walked before with ones as white as snow to lint of a high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow so they're being led on Maundy Thursday Holy Thursday led to church but there's that regimented quality the Beadle is there beforehand keeping them in line they seem or what a multitude they seemed these flowers of London town suited in companies they sit with radiance all their own there is a kind of innocence of radiance there but the hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands multitudes of lambs you immediately think of lamb who's going to the slaughter now like a mighty wind they raised to heaven the voice of song were like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among beneath them sipped the aged men wise guardians of the poor then cherish pity lest you drive an angel from your door if you feel the emotion of pity or compassion then perhaps the child will grow up in a good society but that doesn't always happen it especially doesn't happen in the world of London in the 1780s and the 1790s a world of poverty of oppression of strict social hierarchies thus in songs of experience hurry Thursday again is this a holy thing to see in a rich and fruitful land babes reduced to misery fed with cold and use yours hand is that trembling cry a song can it be a song of joy and so many children poor it is a land of poverty and their son does never shine and that feels oblique and and their ways are filled with thorns' it is eternal winter there for wherever the Sun does shine where the rain does fall babe can never hunger there nor poverty the mind appalled Blake appalled by poverty Blake Songs of Experience are extraordinarily radical poems in that they are advocating an idea of childhood and education and growth that was diametrically opposed to the manner in which poems were traditionally used to bring up children throughout the 18th century one of the most popular books was Isaac Watts the Reverend Isaac Watts is cheap repository tract divine songs attempted an easy language for the use of children sometimes known as divine and moral songs a collection of moralistic poems printed again and again through throughout the 18th century and among the most famous of those are the poems against idleness and mischief and the sluggard how doth the little busy be a didactic teaching poem telling you not to be lazy telling you you have to be good this is what children's poetry songs for children were for through the 18th century what Blake is doing is taking the form of what's his didactic poems and turning them against what against indeed their precepts the restrictive precepts of the church similarly one of the most influential books for children in the 18th century was called the history of Sandford and Merton a work intended for the use of children which tells the story of how a spoilt little boy called Tommy Merton is transformed into a proper gentleman through the example of a human farmer's son called Harry Sandford the yeoman farmer son is a good sturdy Englishman who gets down and works and his never idle and he teaches the spoiled upper-class boys the value of hard work good behavior conformity to the social order so the key attacks behind all this as I've said is rusev we've met them so in previous lectures we we saw him on the origins of inequality in our first lecture we saw him writing the social contract and helping to shape the French Revolution in the second we saw of a new Vella a louise is his great novel of sentiment and and passion but Emil or on education was probably his most influential work it was a work that was banned in Europe mainly because of one particular section in it where Emil the child who is being educated is given a religiously lesson by a vicar a vicar from the savoir for the alpine district who gives him his profession of faith and this vicar actually says the only real evidence for God is the beauties of nature the there is no evidence for a transcendent God natural religion as it was called is really the only kind of possible religion and for that reason maurices work was banned but it was an enormous ly influential work it was translated into English during the French Revolutionary period by Helen Mariah Williams those of you who were at my lecture on the the French Revolutionary period will remember she was the woman the English poet in Paris whom Wordsworth sought to meet and while she was in Paris she started so I do I do pick you up and saying it's a different book she she translated I'm coming to that one in a moment come rushing ahead of myself but Emil was translated into English and it exercised an enormous influence across across Europe it begins with Rousseau saying everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things everything degenerates the hands of man Sam Russo's idea is that when we're born we are what would he calls a natural man we have a kind of freedom we look after ourselves this is a similar idea to his notion of the noble savage that we also talked about in an earlier earlier lecture but then as a child is educated and brought into society that natural man falls away so how do you avoid this process we were so asked in a meal and he suggests essentially he invents the idea of what we would now call child centered learning he says we should just let the child be spontaneous let the child learn from nature so typically he says it's best for a child to be educated in the countryside and we shouldn't be thrusting books and doctoring and learning down the throat of the child we should allow the child to have exactly what Wordsworth calls that kind of wise passiveness just receiving the influences of nature if you think of the kind of what we sometimes think of as the kind of 1960s revolution in education the move towards child centered learning in a way that was a revival of Rousseau istic ideas um now the danger of that this Rousseau says is that it could lead to a kind of selfishness and so he says how do we make children into good citizens without restricting them are oppressing them through didactic learning of the sort that we saw in Isaac Watts his poems and the answer he says is that we teach them to have sympathy for the poor that we should show children particularly as they grow towards their teenage years they should be exposed to those who are less fortunate from themselves less fortunate than themselves and that would then cause them to develop feelings of sympathy or what we would now call all empathy and reserve very interestingly says it's particularly important that this should happen around the time of puberty because around the time of puberty is when sexual desires begin to be awakened and the danger of sexual desires is if they are not mingled with love with altruism with a desire for friendship then they can become highly destructive they can lead to sex with indulgence to prostitution and so on and so forth so the poor the suffering become of immense importance to the educational process through so and I think this is one of the lessons that Wordsworth learns from Rousseau interestingly Wordsworth is very reticent about his own reading of Rousseau and that's partly because Rousseau was regarded as such a controversial figure was closely associated with atheism of the French Revolution and as Wordsworth began to back away from the revolution he didn't really want to be tarnished with the Rousseau brush but there is no doubt that the sense we get and again we talked about this in last month's lecture about the lyrical ballads where so many of Wordsworth poems are about encounters with the poor the sense that you would meet a deserted mother a discharged soldier a beggar on the road a shepherd with the last of his sheep from these impoverished people you learn you learn the art of sympathy the art of empathy another aspect of the idealization of the child goes back to this idea of what Rousseau calls the natural man the child close to nature now this is the book that Helen Mirai Williams translated into English it was called Paul aviación II and she translated it as Paul in Virginia written in the 1780s just before the French Revolution hugely influential book by a writer called Bevin addenda sent Pierre and it tells the story of a boy and a girl who have been friends since birth and they fall in love and the story is set on the island of Mauritius which is a kind of paradise a paradise in the Indian Ocean it wasn't malicious was of course under French rule at the time and then it has to simply actually worked there for a time he was an advocate for the abolition of slavery but he in describing life on Mauritius he makes it into a kind of utopian society the inhabitants share their possessions they have equal amounts of land they live in harmony there is no violence the story becomes a tragic one Paul is on Mauritius the genie comes to it and there's a shipwreck and he tries to save her and fail so and so it is it is a tragedy but the influence of the novel was in simultaneously idealizing the childhood intimacy of Paul envisioning their innocence and their intimacy and linking that to the idea of a kind of paradise or state of nature on this island of Mauritius again that link between the Rousseau idea of the noble savage and the idea of childhood was further established with a story that swept across Europe around about 1800 was when which was when a feral child was discovered in the woods in the avowal region of France they called him Victor he he appeared to have spent his whole life in the woods he couldn't he didn't he didn't have any language and he was sort of adopted by a man called Jean Marc Gaspard Itard who duly wrote a book about it and historical account of the discovery and education of a savage man it's very mysterious as to exactly where Victor came from how long he'd been in the woods and so on but for the thinkers of the time here was a true story of childhood and the noble savage taken together and it was an opportunity to educate him and to to discover what man a child would be like in the state of nature many many journalistic accounts were written of him and he duly became a figure celebrated in poetry mary robinson known as Perdita robinson one of the underrated but very important poets of the period wrote a poem about him calling it the savage of Averell it was in the mazes of a woods that lonely would it have our own I heard a melancholy tone it seemed to freeze my blood a torrent near was flowing fast and hollow was the midnight blast as are the leafless woods it passed while terror fraught I stood amazing woods of ever on a wilds of dreary solitude amid thy thorny alleys rude I thought myself alone I thought no living thing could be so weary of the world as me while on my winding path the pale moon shone it's very like one of Courage's ballets Mary Robinson was actually the poetry editor of the Morning Post and she really in some ways discovered courage as a poet and so she hears this voice and obviously it's going to be Victor the child sometimes the tone was Salas it was loud and sad and sometimes dulcet faint and slow and then attained a frantic were it almost made me mad the burden was alone alone and then the heart did feebly groaned and suddenly a cheerful tone proclaimed a spirit glad Oh Maisie woods of have I run a wilds of dreary solitude and amid your thorny alleys rude I wished myself a traveller alone remember Rousseau saying the child in the state of nature has only two emotions joy and sorrow she hears the tone not not speech but just inarticulate sounds of the child first it seems to be sad and woeful but there suddenly it's jet cheerful tone and at that point she can flips the poem and says it's actually quite nice being in the state of nature I would like to be the one who is alone alone I heard the wild boy say and swiftly climbed a blasted oak and there while morning's herald woke he watched the opening day yet dark and sunken was his eye like a lawn maniacs wild and shy and scowling like a winter sky without one beaming ray then Maisie woods have I rond and wilds of dreary solitude amid thy thorny alleys rude I sighed to be a traveller alone alone alone I heard him shriek her version of the child can actually speak English which of course he couldn't heretic licensed there it was like the shriek of a dying man and then to mutter he began but oh he could not speak ah she's projecting the idea of alone into a child I saw him point to heaven and sigh the big drop trembled in his eye and slowly from a yellow sky I saw the pale morn break I saw the words that have I run their wilds of dreary solitude I marked the thorny alleys rude and wished to be a traveller alone so often the romantic wishes to be alone at the same time of course the late 18th early 19th century was a period of huge population increase and of urbanization people not being alone people coming together in the city and one of the places that they like to come together and to to be exposed to kind of new ideas and ideals at the time was the theatre and so it was that in 1803 a twelve-year-old actor took to the London stage he was known as master Betty he was regarded as a child genius he took on the role of a character called young Norville in a kind of historical tragedy by a Scotsman called John home the tragedy was called Douglass sir but nobody's heard of it now but he was hugely hugely popular in the late 18th early 19th century and then he went on at the age of 12 to play the part of Hamlet the performance sold-out cues all around the block riots people trying to get in the child genius it's two portraits of him burr by by James Opie of him as the young Norville and and by James North god of his Hamlet sadly mark the fashion for master Betty didn't last he rather quickly declined when he tried coming back to the stage at the age of twenty-one and it was a complete a complete disaster you know often the fate of the child actor and rather sight he lived for a long time and actually devoted his life to theatrical charities which is rather kind of him but the sort of the idea of the child the child genius enormous Lee popular at the time well I've given you a kind of very brisk taller of a range of influences on and examples of the romantic child but it seems to me that it is in the poetry of William Wordsworth that we get the greatest most thoughtful they sustained examples - perhaps contrasting examples the first from another of a lyrical balance the poem called the idiot boy this is a poem about a Down's syndrome boy of Down syndrome shall I think the first time anybody in history had written a poem about a child with Down syndrome and he rides out at night and his family was terribly worried that he's lost and when ventually they find him and he comes back and this is his encounter with his mother for while they all were travelling home cried Betty that's his mother Betty for a she's called tell us Johnny do where all the long night you have been what you have heard what you have seen and Johnny mind you tell us true now Johnny all night long had heard the owls in tune for concerts drive no doubt to he the moon had seen four in the moonlight he had been from eight o'clock till five and that's to Betty's questions he made answer like a traveler bald his very words I give to you the Cox did crow - whoo - whoo and the Sun did shine so cold thus answer'd Johnny in all his glory and that was all his travel story so it's in the nature of his condition that he doesn't distinguish between the crow by day the owl by night the Sun by day the moon by night and I think what was with the saying here is that this this child in his naivety because of his medical condition because he is the quote marks idiot boy he's a kind of wise servant that he's an v he doesn't see division it's like the little girl at home I began which she doesn't see the division between the five children above the ground for two below between the living and the dead he has a unified idea in which the sound of the owl and the sound of the crow are somehow the same the day and the night somehow the same a unified consciousness and a unified relationship with nature in contrast of a divided consciousness and the alienation from nature that characterizes education adulthood and perhaps urbanization similarly this child at one with nature there was a boy he knew him worldly cliffs and islands of Wynn and Irwin ander is the old name for Windermere many a time of evening when the stars had just begun to move along the edges of the hills rising or setting would he stand alone beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake and there with fingers into woven both hands pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth uplifted he as through an instrument blue mimicked hootings to the silent owls that they might answer him and they would shout across the water avail and shout again responsive to his call with quivering peels and long hollows and screams at echoes loud redoubled and redoubled a wild scene of mirth and jocund in and when it chanced that pauses of deep silence his skill then sometimes in that silence while he hung listening a gentle shock of mouth surprise has carried far into his heart the voice of Mountain torrents or the visible scene would enter unawares into his mind with all its solemn imagery its rocks its woods and that uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady Lake Fair other woods and beauteous is the spot the veil where he was born the churchyard hangs upon a slope above the village school and there along that bank when I have passed at evening I believe that near his grave a full half are together I have stood mute for he died when he was ten years old wonderful sense in that moment when the owls don't respond the whole of the scene responds it enters him unawares again that idea wise passiveness of receptiveness to the forces of nature all the scene all the valley of win and Emir enters the child for consciousness of the self and of nature is unified when Wordsworth first drafted this poem he wrote it in the first person I he then changed it put him to the third person and imagined the child dying at the age of ten in a sense what he's doing there is symbolically saying that unified consciousness of nature die is when childhood ends when puberty begins the style of that poem a moment of boyhood in the Lake District remembered became the style the hallmark of Wordsworth greatest poem his long autobiographical poem which he never gave a title to but which was published after his death with the title the prelude or growth of a poet's mind an autobiographical poem Hanna wrote epic stories about Troy Virgil wrote the national poem about the foundation of Rome Milton wrote the great epic poem Paradise Lost about the war in heaven in the salvation of man Wordsworth became the first writer in history to write an epic autobiographical poem an epic poem not about his society not about God's not about heroes about himself he invented the idea of poetic autobiography Rousseau's confessions had in some senses invented modern autobiography in prose Wordsworth invents it in verse a vision of himself and he begins it the first two books with his childhood a vision that begins with the River Derwent flowing beside the garden wall of the house in Cockermouth where he was born the river speaks and it asks the native parent the poet of the place to respond in flowing lives that are themselves somehow like the river his childhood home his birthplace in Cockermouth that's owned by the National Trust now it was an elegant imposing house but for Wordsworth the key memory of it was the memory of that river that he heard as he grew up indeed he says his own earliest memory was of total immersion in the crystal waters of that River the River Derwent and the first self image in the first draft of his autobiographical poem is of a naked four-year-old boy making one long bathing of a summers day basking in the Sun plunging into the stream and then when the rain comes pouring down sooner or later usually sooner it always does in the Lake District he remembers himself standing alone as he puts it like a naked savage framed against crag Hill wood and distant sky doors lofty height skid or the pyramid like mountain which he could see on his home naked savage child you became to see a theme of this lecture coming together each of these words and words with his writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution carries heavy political baggage Wordsworth was born into a Britain in which bodies were always covered in public frock coats stiff collars breeches and boots people did not wear shorts to hike the hills let alone strip off to sunbathe in the early 1780s when Wordsworth was entering puberty the actress fashion icon and former royal mistress Perdita Robinson he would go on to become a parrot and write that poem about the boy of averin she imported a new style of garment from France the figure-hugging chemise flowing with the contours of the female body in a world of hoops and strays that was stays that was perceived to be revolutionary and dangerous as was the celebration of naked youthful bodies in the art of William Blake for Wordsworth as for Blake the naked child denoted a state of innocence free from the oppression and control that came with swaddling clothes dogmatic lessons and the disciplines of the whip three years before Wordsworth was born Johann fusilli an artist like Blake who rebelled against the conventions of the age and relished four naked human body published with the aid of the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson a brief treatise called remarks on the writings and conduct of JJ Rousseau and is probably the first work to offer a defense in English of Rousseau's writing in Russo's thought experiments of imagining a society without inequality the ideals as we've seen are two figures who do not have any notion of property Rousseau believes that the origin of inequality is property those two figures are the savage or natural man what has become known as the noble savage and the young child so when Wordsworth begins his poetic autobiography by representing himself as a naked boy and then a naked savage in the thundershower living in the moment at one with nature he is identifying himself as a natural man of the kind of oked infusing his account of how Rousseau don't equate fusili here traced man to the nipple of nature brilliant use of the metaphor nipple there because of the importance for research idea of breastfeeding traced map miso traced man fuse Lee says to the nipple of nature found him wrapped up in instinct taught his law by appetite and fear harmless because content contempt because void of comparative ideas solitary because without once snatching the moment on the wing from the past and future ones in this wilderness of nature behold him free improvable compassionate and almost every term where that flew easily applies to Rousseau could be applied to Wordsworth the nipple of nature instinct fear so many of the great moments of Wordsworth childhood in the prelude are those where there is a moment of fear or he's climbing to steal eggs from a bird's nest or famous account when he steals a boat rose out onto the lake and suddenly sees a cliff rearing up in front of him that idea of the sublime is associated with or with fear and then the idea of solitariness and being in the moment lovely phrase snatching the moment on the wind and the wilderness of nature free improvable compassionate that idea of sympathy again early in the prelude Wordsworth offers another early childhood memory of how his eye would be drawn to a road that led over the hill above the town in which he was born and on into an unknown distance few sights he claimed pleased him more than a public road and but a public road the road you know others like that I put a public bridge with an impoverished figure on it and behind it a waterfall another form of what a motion that Wordsworth adore and then Wordsworth writes this about the site's he sees on a public road a site that had wrought on my imagination since the morn of childhood when a disappearing line one daily present to my eyes that crossed the naked summit of a far-off hill beyond the limits that my feet have trod was like an invitation into space boundless one of Wordsworth miss fantastic poetic techniques is running his sentences across four line endings we saw that with the the the pause in the what there was a boy but what he hung listening you hang as you read it from him dat the line ending and he does it there this idea looking up to this road leading to the distance like an invitation into space boundless we are actually invited into the space the white space at the end of the line of verse before it runs on boundless boundless without bound associated with freedom he's imagining himself being called from his home to a wandering life and the on the road conversation with a vagrant a discharged soldier a dispossessed woman and impoverished leach gatherer a shepherd this would become the hallmark of his poetry a childhood was not all ideal Wordsworth was educated by hard experience into strong feeling nearly all his greatest poetry is pervaded by a feeling of loss the loss of childhood of freedom the loss of that unmediated relationship with nature that began when the four-year-old child plunged naked into the River Derwent for a psychological explanation of this we need look no further than a day one month before his eighth birthday his mother returned from a visit to friends in London she had been accommodated in the so-called best bedroom and that's to say a guest room reserved for special occasions and therefore not regularly aired the bed was damp she caught a cold which turned to a decline probably pneumonia soon after her return she died seven-year-old Williams last impression of his mother was a glimpse of her on passing the door of her bedroom during her last illness while she was reclining in her easy chair years old he readily admitted that he remembered very little of his mother yet he firmly believed that it was from her that he learned his love of nature blessed the infant baby road as he embarked on his project to use his best conjectures to trace the progress of our be this great autobiographical poem of the prelude the baby nursed in its mother's arms or sleeping on its mother's breast presumably having fed up that breast is blessed because it is learning the experience of sympathy the force of love it is Wordsworth says through the bond with our mothers in our infancy that we first claim manifest kindred with a soul other than our own as the baby at his breath at the breast gazes into the mother's eyes it has its first experience of strong feeling or what we might call love the reciprocal exchange of passion Wordsworth says is like an awakening breeze but in time will expend its force and bind us to our natural surroundings in radiating and exalting all objects through all intercourse of sense along his infant veins he writes in the prelude our interfused the gravitation and the filial bond of nature that connect him with the world the baby feels safe when by intercourse of touch it holds mute dialogues with the mother's heart and there's an analogy there with that mute dialogue with nature in the owl passage that is the sensation needed to make the self secure in the world and one's worth says this infant sensibility is the great birthright of our being but what happens if the mother is lost the young self left alone seeking this visible world not knowing why the props of the affections removed words with rights of the baby in his mother's arms no outcast he bewildered and depressed he's reaching back there in the prelude to that unconscious early memory or perhaps he's clutching at the beautiful belief of belonging because his mother's death occurred when he was at such a sensitive age it made him an outcast bewildered and depressed how would he eventually recover his sense of self his faith in the world first as we saw last time through the hope brought by the revolution that he witnessed in France but then when the revolution turned to violence and political disillusionment followed through a return to the place of his birth and his childhood to mother nature to the lake district which he did more than anyone else to immortalize and so to preserve and it is that story of the Lake District from Wordsworth to can enroll me to Beatrix Potter that will be my theme next month thank you [Laughter] you

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, Jonathan Bate, rhetoric, poetry, William Wordsworth, the romantics, Childhood, William Blake, songs of innocence, songs of experience, poetic autobiography, Robert Schumann, Kinderszenen, We Are Seven, Paul and Virginia

Id: InpMnEPiQZA

Length: 49min 19sec (2959 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018