The Recluse Essay -- Literary Analysis

Wordsworth suffers solitude, even as he celebrates it. Alone, the poet can explore his avow consciousness it follows at both poles of the notion of emotion recollected in placidity, and is the dominant developmental mode of Wordsworths childhood as pictured in The Prelude (1805). Independence is what is exalted in his introduction to that poem he greets the gentle breeze as a captive bunch free from the vast city which has been as a prison to his spirit. The onerousness of city living is alleviated in this opening reacquisition of isolation the backup is evident I breathe again, that burthen of my own stirred egotism is shaken off, /The heavy weight of many a cloy day/ Not mine, and such as were not made for me. In this, the commencing statement of his autobiography, the independence of solitude is represented as the natural timbre of his poetic felicity. The egoistical sublime observed by Keats is manifest in this poetry in a separation from other men, rather than in th at of a Byron, whose narrators egotisms are evinced by their social interactions. Wordsworths company is disposition his sister, his wife, his children exist as assimilations rather than relationships. The sister of Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, is conjured into independence in the final paragraph, so as to exist as a previous self For thou are with me, he suddenly reveals, and in thy voice I catch/ The language of my causation heart. She is externalised when poetically useful and it is by this externalisation that Wordsworth is able to ward off and diminish his poems undercurrent doubts. This prayer I shake/ Knowing that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her, has a contrary traction as a plea intimating des... ...this as his essential condition, but it is worth observing that recluse does not imply native isolation. Wordsworths solitude, as he left childhood, was never again to be absolute for as consciousness developed, so did his capacity to app rehend himself, in language, so even exclusively he could not be alone without self-intercourse, mediated by language. His solitude was necessary for his vocation, but his vocation trespassed on that solitude for to be a poet is to cast experience away from the self even in egotism, isolation is disrupted by the projection of an audience. whole shebang CitedGil, Stephen ed. William Wordsworth The Major Works (OUP 1984)Hartman, Geoffrey Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814 (Yale University Press 1971)Morgan, Monique R. Narrative heart and soul to Lyric Ends in Wordsworths Prelude (Narrative, Volume 16, Number 3, October 2008, pp. 298-330)