WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
S. K. Mangammal
Chari
“Raman
Magsaysay award given to Mr. M.C. Mehta, the Indian Environmentalist, is of
course a shot in the arm. This is the
first time that an Indian has been honoured with the Asian award equivalent of
the Nobel Prize for his first case of a threat to the Taj Mahal from industrial
pollutants including emissions from a nearby refinery. A number of other cases affecting
environment have been taken up by him and it is through his single-minded work
that public awareness about the importance of environment has been raised as
never before.”
The above news made me remember the Poet of
nature William Wordsworth, the greatest of the romantic poets, an out and out
environmentalist, who had learnt from plants, flowers, lakes and
mountains.
Environment constitutes flora, fauna,
atmosphere, living creatures and human beings, which maintain eco balance for
existence and life on earth. The
relationship between man and environment is mutual, complex and subtle, each
shaped by the other. The eco balance is
gradually being disturbed in alarming proportions with growing urbanisation and
industrial pollution.
In this context, environmental education
assumes great importance. A child loves
natural surroundings. It likes to play
in open air. Children love flowers,
plants, pet dogs, pussy cats and stars.
They learn by playing with the objects of nature. The familiar rhymes ‘Mary had a little
lamb…’ ‘Pussy cat, where had you been, “refer to their taste. Taking this aspect in view, education to
children at all levels should be imparted as far as possible outside the
class-room, under trees, meadows, near lakes etc.
William Wordsworth was a worshipper of
nature. He did not like a flower to be
plucked nor a plant to be hurt. He
detested violent and noisy revolutions like the French Revolution. He could not face the killings, destruction
and the ruin of humanity. He was even
ready to abandon his French wife Annette Vallon who was to be the mother of his
daughter only to run away from the French Revolution. Even after his return to England, the noise, pollution, the
deforestation, the Industrial infrastructure, the loss of greenery and the
artificial way of breeding birds and animals troubled him. He preferred music to noise, greenery to
parks and gentleness to violence.
William Wordsworth had stored his mind with
the experience in nature, which later he was to recall in his verses. He distrusted reform, in the fear that the
rural England which he loved would be destroyed at the hands of the rising
industrialists.
For him every object of nature was a
manifestation of God. He actually
worshipped nature. In the Immortality
Ode, he describes a mystical intuition, a life before birth, which dies in the material
world but which can be recovered in a few fortunate moments in the presence of
nature. His childhood was spent in the
pursuance of many experiences in the secret corners of man’s nature; though
others felt that his vision of nature was an illusion.
Here is the greatest interpreter of the
message of nature. He wrote first-rate
poetry when inspiration was upon him.
In ‘Tintern Abbey’ he returned to his own experience of environment and
showed how a unique experience could be brought within the reader’s
understanding by bold and imaginative language’ - “the mighty world of eye and
ear”.
His grave and noble sonnets often have a
majesty which places him among the greatest environmentalists with a poetic
vision. His famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality is one of the most
magnificent of poetic utterances. In
one of his inspired stanzas ….
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar ….
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home,
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”
In the poem
‘Solitary Reaper’, he goes into raptures when he comes across a solitary
reaper….
“Behold her single in the field,
Yon solitary high land lass,
Singing and reaping; old unhappy far off things
And of battles long ago,
…..The music in my heart I bore,
long after it was heard no more”.
Here, Wordsworth describes the valley, the
surrounding hills, which echo the song of the high land lass; He does not want
to disturb her and he carries the song in his heart long after he leaves
Scotland.
In this
poetic piece - ‘Michael’ we find how tragic dignity could be given to the story
of a shepherd and his son. Wordsworth
breathes new life into ‘Lucy’ - the innocent child of nature”
“---Three years she grew, she dwelt,
among the
untrodden ways, ——”
Another poem - “ I wandered Lonely as a
Cloud” is a poem to be always remembered.
In ‘The
Prelude’ he compares himself to an Aeolian Harp which answers with harmony to
every touch of the wind and the figure is strikingly accurate as well as
interesting. There is hardly a sight or
a sound from a violet to a mountain and from a bird-note to the thunder of the
cataract that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth’s poetry.
To him nothing in God’s creation is ugly or
common place. There is hardly an object or natural phenomenon which he has not
touched to beauty or glory, which does not possess some charm unnoticed by the
naked eye.
For example, he made a remarkable poem of
the ‘Thorn’.
-“There is
a thorn; it looks so old.
In truth you’d find it hard to stay,
How it could
ever have been young,
It looks so
old and grey ——
No higher
than a two year’s child,
It stands erect, this aged thorn.
In another
poem, a stone is rendered life.
He also knew the behaviour of owls.
In the words
of Shellely - “With
Wordsworth the senses think”.
He used to dance with the Daffodils —
“For oft, when on my couch I lie;
In vacant or in pensive mood;
They flash upon that inward eye;
which is the bliss of solitude, and there
my heart with pleasure fills;
and then dances with the daffodils.”