- 27/02/2013
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
Wordsworth is in England one of the most significant, or may be even the most important poet. He is the singer of the English landscape, quiet and cozy. In 1798, Wordsworth, together with Coleridge’s wrote “Lyrical Ballads”. Collection starts with a poem of Coleridge “Said about the old sailor,” a mysterious tale about the revenge of nature to those who do not respect it.
The most famous works of William Wordsworth are “Excursion Book”, “A Noble Peasant”, “We are Seven”, “The idiot Boy”, “Social order”, “Guilt and Sorrow”, “Alice Fell”, “Descriptive Sketches”, “Christabel”, “Kubla-Khan”, “Prelude”, “The Fall of Robespierre”, “Osorio”, “Remorse” , “The Thorn”, “The Excursion” and others.
William Wordsworth is the poet of Nature and Man. He believed that his poetic purpose was to show the nature of man not as a refuge from suffering and commitment, but as a source of “pure passion and joy, everlasting inspiration and support, the Presentation, unless the person is able to see and hear, the eternal and universal value of the soul and the heart – love, joy, strength and compassion. This belief is rooted in childhood and youth experiences of Wordsworth.
In the best poetic works of Wordsworth clear thinking is combined with expressive accurate description glimpsed the power of feeling, but in the depiction of characters as the appearance, and the human soul is transmitted with perfect certainty.
In the work of William Wordsworth we can see the proportion of mysticism and the deification of nature, there is little moralizing and piety, but it all gets lost in his deeply lyrical and simple poetry. In the works of Wordsworth we can find different characters, like peasant, returned from service, soldiers, the peddler and the peasant’s children.
Really big was the love of William Wordsworth to the people, to children and heirs of nature. In his childhood and his youth he admired rural types, especially the shepherds and “peddlers», which is a peddler. Their images appear in his poetry. Wordsworth never tried dim, and his poetry is warmed with tolerance for human frailties and shortcomings. Wordsworth loved the humble and meek heart. In his poetry we can often see images of children, sometimes to manifest, in contrast to the nearby adults, vision of the heart and imagination, as in the ballad “We are Seven”.
“We are Seven” written by William Wordsworth, was published in 1798 in his collection of Lyrical Ballads. The poem is considered to be one of the best his works; it is really strong and powerful.
Reading the poem, we see a churchyard and a man who meets an innocent, but thought-provoking talk with a little girl of eight years old. The man happily wonders how many sisters and brothers the girl has got, expecting a simple reply, but received much more than he bargains for (Wordsworth. pp. 5-7).
The topic of the poem is not new; it describes something that is shown in many of Wordsworth’s poems: an adult person learning new things from the innocence and wisdom of a child. Everything that Wordsworth deals with is always an interesting subject that is described in non-complex way. It is the nature of the poem that makes it something special, even for the author.
That little girl in the poem seems to know more about pain and grief than the man who is asking questions. At the beginning we see her dancing around the grave of her sister being in a state of denial concerning the death. This episode also shows her pure love for her siblings and unwillingness to let them go away from her. And her dancing around the grave of her sister lets her to feel her sister’s presence for the last time. At the end the girl is asked how there could be still seven of them if her brother and sister died. The reader understands that she says this because she doesn’t want to accept the fact of her brother and sister are not alive any more. Then we again see her being in a state of denial and claiming they are still there with her. The girl could speak with their spirits, imagining they were still alive with her. Probably, she sees death in a different way than the man. Maybe she doesn’t let the grief take control of her life and finds positive things in it pretending, imagining they are still there with her. Anyway, many people could call this being in a state of denial.
The poem shows the innocence of child and she really knows nothing about the death. For that little girl, her dead sister and brother are still with her because she continued playing with them. The author shoed us that sometimes children understand more about life and death than adults because we don’t want to accept the death of our siblings and mourn for them, while innocent children accept the changes after the death of their siblings and continue their lives in best possible way the same as that little girl from the poem (Wordsworth. pp. 15-18).
In “We are Seven” it is difficult not to feel a strong sense of emotion, but this is not the real objective of it. The real point of the poem is that it captures the importance of innocence, of looking at the world with child-like eyes. It is a gentle and beautiful reminder to look at the world afresh each and everyday.
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