Lines Written in Early Spring Flashcards
1
Q
‘I heard a thousand blended notes, while in a grove I sate reclined’
A
- Right from the start, there’s a sense of collective harmony here. Those “thousand notes” feel like a luxurious rush of sound. The musicians making those notes, whatever or whoever they might be, are working together to “blend” their music, creating one song out of many notes. This feeling of delightful unity is going to be at the heart of the poem’s philosophy.
- That sense of mysterious unity gets clarified in the second line. Now the reader knows where this speaker is: in a “grove,” under the trees. Perhaps, then, the music the speaker is hearing is birdsong.
- The speaker’s not even sitting up, but “reclined,” lying back to better enjoy the chorus. This is an idyllic picture of spring bliss. Notice, too, how the long /oh/ assonance of “notes” and “grove” connects the song to the place it comes from. Everything is working beautifully together here.
2
Q
Context
A
“Lines Written in Early Spring” is English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s meditation on the harmony of nature—and on humanity’s failure to follow nature’s peaceful example. In the poem, written in 1798 and published in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, a speaker reclines in a lovely grove on a spring morning. The joy he perceives in the natural world, and his belief that his own soul is somehow intimately connected to that joy, leads him to mourn “what man has made of man”—in other words, the cruelty, selfishness, and fighting that characterize humanity. The poem argues that while humans are part of nature, they sure don’t act like it.
3
Q
Humanity vs Nature
A
- “Lines Written in Early Spring” presents nature as the spirit that moves every living thing. Nature unites all the creatures of the landscape in a shared sense of joy, making them part of one big, delighted entity. But as the speaker soaks up the lovely grove around him, he finds cause not just for celebration, but for grief; humanity, in his view, is indeed part of this natural splendor, but it sure hasn’t been acting that way!
- The speaker personifies both the creatures he sees around him and nature itself, suggesting that they’re all united in a single, joyful consciousness. In the grove where the speaker sits, twigs “spread out their fan,” flowers “enjoy the air,” and nature is a conscious force with a “holy plan.” All of these entities seem to be feeling the same delight.
- The speaker also uses images of interweaving and intertwining to suggest that everything in nature is connected. He hears “a thousand blended notes” of birdsong, sees the periwinkle growing “through primrose tufts,” and speaks of the “link” with which nature connects his own soul to the natural beauties all around him. Not only is everything in nature inherently joyful, then, but everything also shares that joy—and that sharing is all part of the pleasure!
- Humanity, meanwhile, fails to emulate nature’s model of interconnectivity and joy. Though the speaker feels that nature has made a “link” between the human soul and the natural world, he feels that humanity has betrayed that link.
4
Q
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
A
- Having evoked the interconnected beauty of nature in his first stanza, the speaker now talks about his own experience while sitting in the grove. Nature—here personified as a kind of goddess—has made a “link” between the speaker’s soul and “her fair works,” (that is, the things of nature, like the birdsong, the birds, and the grove itself). This goddess seems like a deeply benevolent one; her works are “fair,” or beautiful, and she wants humans to share in them. That personification also means that Nature herself has human-like qualities, strengthening the human-nature connection even more. Like the “blended notes” of the birdsong, humanity and nature seem to be like interweaving, interrelated parts of the same big thing.
- Notice, too, the way the speaker describes his “human soul.” His soul’s not a static object like a lump of gold that he carries around inside him. Rather, it runs, like a stream of clear water—or like the song of the birds. If his soul is connected to nature, that means he shares in a continual, joyful motion. The enjambment here reflects his thought: his sentence runs on seamlessly over the line break.
5
Q
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
A
- The second half of the second stanza makes an abrupt turn to darkness. Having lifted off into a transcendent sense of union with nature in lines 5 and 6, the speaker is suddenly “grieved”; here are those “sad thoughts” he promised in the first stanza! And what grieves him? “What man has made of man.”
- This feels like an awfully big thing to grieve. What has man “made of man”? The speaker doesn’t say. But then again, he doesn’t need to. Any human can think for two seconds about grief-worthy things that “man has made of man” and come up with endless answers: war, poverty, cruelty of all stripes. Merely being human means that one has plenty of insight into humanity’s failings.
- The sound of that final line emphasizes its grimness. Every word in this line is a single syllable, like a drumbeat—an impression emphasized by the thumping alliterative /m/ of “What man has made of man.” There’s also a metrical change here: the first three lines of the stanza use iambic tetrameter (four da-DUM beats in a row), but this one uses trimeter, cutting off abruptly after only three da-DUMs:
- Notice, too, that this thought doesn’t arrive all on its own. As the speaker moves from the first half of the stanza, with its beautiful thoughts of the human soul’s connection to nature, he uses an unexpected conjunction to start his darker reflections: “And.” It’s not in spite of his connection with the natural world that he mourns, but because of it. If humanity is intimately linked with the harmonious joy he’s spent the first lines of the poem evoking, then the mess that “man has made of man” is all the more tragic. It just doesn’t have to be this way, the speaker seems to think.
6
Q
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
A
- From his “sad thoughts” regarding the mess that “man has made of man,” the speaker turns back to the vivid, immediate, physical world of nature around him in the grove. He’s immersed once more in its beauty as he looks at the fresh new “primrose tufts” and “periwinkle”—both distinctly springy flowers.
- These flowers, like the notes of birdsong and the speaker’s soul, seem to be interwoven. The periwinkle grows “through” the primrose—and, like the goddess Nature in the second stanza, it’s personified, “trail[ing] its wreaths” like a nymph. The alliterative sounds here reflect the interweaving, matching the /p/ and /t/ sounds of “primrose tufts” and “periwinkle trailed.”
- Note how the speaker constructs this stanza so that it runs parallel to the one before it. The first two lines once again come to a gentle pause with an end-stopped semicolon, while the next lines begins with an “And.” This suggests a link between what the speaker perceives (all those flowers) and the philosophy he draws from it.
- Here, that philosophy is an impassioned statement of belief: “‘tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes.” Watching the intertwining flowers, he can only feel that they’re not just alive, but loving life. And the soft alliterative /f/ sounds of “faith” and “flower,” which themselves sound like puffs of breath, suggest that the speaker, too, breathes that same pleasurable air.
7
Q
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
A
- From the flowers, the speaker turns to the birds, and reads a similar “thrill of pleasure” in every one of their little hops and scurries.
- While the speaker deeply believes in the birds’ “pleasure” in life, he admits that “Their thoughts I cannot measure.” In other words, he can’t actually know what the birds are thinking. Similarly, he has to have “faith” in the flowers’ enjoyment of the air in the previous stanza.
- This sheds some light on the way he’s been using personification in the poem more broadly. The speaker is certainly experiencing the pleasure of being alive himself—and part of that pleasure is reading pleasure in the living world around him. This seems to be a relationship of give and take. If “Nature” has made a “link” between the speaker’s “human soul” and the world around him, feeling travels along that link in both directions: the speaker’s human pleasure in observing nature seems to inhabit the birds and flowers, as much as it’s taken from the birds and flowers.
- But it’s also important to recognize that the speaker stays a little separate from these creatures, and hence can only assume what the birds and flowers are feeling. Difference, the poem implies, is as much a part of the harmony of nature as connection; if the “blended notes” of birdsong in the first stanza were all the same, there wouldn’t be any music!
8
Q
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
A
- That feeling that the speaker is inhabiting nature as much as he’s inhabited by nature continues in this next stanza, where he seems almost to feel the personified “budding twigs” stretching as they “spread out their fan, / To catch the breezy air.” And those alliterative /b/ sounds of “budding” and “breezy” hit like the playful buffets of a fresh spring breeze.
- Once again, there’s structural parallelism in this stanza—specifically, in the movement from the speaker’s impression in the first two lines into a philosophy or belief in the last (the speaker sees the twigs, which leads the speaker to think “there was pleasure there”). And again, a form of the word “pleasure” shows up. There’s a feeling here of both immersion and insistence. The speaker just keeps getting hit with waves of pleasure—so much so that he “must” think it’s there, he has no choice. This experience of pleasure is so overwhelming that it maybe even overcomes a little doubt in him: that he “must think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there,” suggests that he’s putting his faith in this pleasure in spite of himself. For, remember, these “pleasant thoughts” are always closely followed by “sad thoughts.”
9
Q
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
A
- Having felt the same overwhelming sense of pleasure in the birds, the flowers, and the trees, the speaker comes back at last to those “sad thoughts” of the first stanza. In this last stanza, he speaks rather like a philosopher, working out a reasonable argument. If all that I’ve experienced is true and holy, he asks, then isn’t it reasonable that I should mourn “What man has made of man?”
- Here, his experience seems to have become a religion to him. His “faith that every flower / enjoys the air it breathes” now registers as a message from “heaven” itself, and the goddess Nature’s delight-driven plan isn’t just hedonistic, but “holy.” The pleasure he’s shared with the whole natural world seems to him an intrinsic part of life. And if the human soul shares a “link” to all of this glory, then humans should be able to live in the same constant joy as the flowers and the birds.
- But humans don’t. With his final rhetorical question—”Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of man?”—the speaker reaches out to include the reader in his experience. He leaves the reader in a bittersweet state rather like the one he describes: the sweetness of the natural joy humans could live in, the bitterness of the sad separation from nature and each other that humans do live in.
10
Q
Spring
A
- Spring is named only in the poem’s title, but it plays a major symbolic role here. Spring generally represents rebirth, and the fact that the speaker’s thoughts of joyful natural unity take place in the spring suggests that these thoughts are connected to the speaker’s hopes for some kind of renewal.
- The poem is filled with signs of spring even if it doesn’t mention it directly. Notice how the birds and flowers of this poem are all emphatically “springy” creatures: new buds, fresh tufts of primroses, and hopping songbirds all call to mind the changing season. They also all share a deep pleasure in merely being alive. But in spite of the fact that humans are also connected to this pleasure, the speaker argues that they’ve pretty severely betrayed that connection.
- While the speaker has cause to lament over this betrayal, he offers some hope by setting the poem in the season when what seemed to be dead in the winter comes back to life. In other words, while humans have forgotten their connection to nature, setting the poem during a season of rebirth suggests that they might just be able to regain it someday.
11
Q
Form
A
- The 24 lines of “Lines Written in Early Spring” are broken up into six stanzas, each containing four lines (making them quatrains). These are also ballad stanzas—meaning they follow a simple ABAB rhyme scheme and have a specific meter (more on that in a moment).
- This poem actually comes from an important collection called Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth and his fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge resurrected old poetic traditions like the folk ballad. (See the Context section for more on this.) “Lines Written in Early Spring” is actually not just a ballad, but a lyrical ballad—meaning its pleasing form is meant to beautifully reflect the speaker’s emotion
12
Q
Meter
A
As the speaker reflects on the harmony of nature (and the disharmony of humanity), his rhythms match the movements of his mind. The more evenly-balanced ballad stanzas describe only the joys of nature. The stanzas that build up from tetrameter to a final line of trimeter, on the other hand, often have stings in their tails. The speaker’s “sad thoughts” about “what man has made of man” feel particularly punchy because their lines, only three beats long, come to a surprise halt.
13
Q
Rhyme Scheme
A
- This poem, like many that Wordsworth wrote, uses a simple rhyme scheme that hearkens back to traditional songs and ballads:
ABAB
- Wordsworth valued plainness in language, and his easy pattern here suits his poem’s philosophy of simple natural harmony. But as the reader has perhaps already noted, this rhyme scheme isn’t totally uniform. In fact, the poem breaks from its own scheme in the very first stanza. Here, “notes” and “thoughts” almost rhyme, but not exactly—a type of matching known as slant rhyme.
- This choice to kick the poem off with a rhyme that’s just slightly off-kilter makes a lot of thematic sense. “Lines Written in Early Spring” is a poem about how humanity has fallen out of the natural rhythm of nature, and this first mismatched sound echoes that idea.
14
Q
Speaker
A
- This poem’s speaker is a sensitive, thoughtful soul. He feels himself to be deeply connected to the world around him—so much so that his sense of natural joy becomes his “faith,” his religion.
- Perhaps because of his sensitivity, he also deeply feels the pains of the world. The beauty and pleasure he experiences on this spring morning reminds him that human life could be like this always, but isn’t, because of human folly.
- The reader may note that we’re calling the speaker “he” here, though this person isn’t gendered in the poem. We made this decision by drawing on some literary context. Wordsworth often wrote poetry in the first person, from a perspective that seems very much his own. One of his most famous works, the Prelude, is explicitly autobiographical, and shares many themes and ideas with this poem. We’ve thus decided to treat this speaker as an avatar for Wordsworth himself. But that’s certainly not the only way to read this poem, and it’s up to the reader to decide how to interpret the speaker here!
15
Q
Setting
A
- As the title says, it’s early spring in this poem’s world—a time of birdsong and lush new growth. Looking around him as he lies at his ease in a beautiful grove, the speaker sees wildflowers, budding trees, and hopping birds. This is a landscape of freshness, joy, and renewal. Perhaps the setting’s springiness reflects a quiet hope: spring, after all, follows winter, and even if humanity is living through some self-imposed darkness, there’s still the chance that it will one day find new life through its connection to nature.
- This setting also works on a very human scale. The speaker doesn’t have to go and stand on a cliff and look out over a whole vista to feel his deep connection with nature. All he needs is a little grove with room to lie down in.
16
Q
Literary context
A
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the greatest thinkers and poets of the Romantic era. His sense of the holiness of nature, the spiritual depth of childhood, and the value of every human soul would forever change the literary landscape.
- This single, paradigm-changing volume is often credited as the official start of English Romanticism. This was an artistic movement during the first half of the 19th century that glorified emotion over reason and expressed deep awe for the natural world, a realm that the Romantics took as overwhelming in its magnificence. Romanticism was, at least in part, a response to the Industrial Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, which saw the increasing urbanization of society and reliance on scientific inquiry. “Lines Written in Early Spring” reflects these Romantic ideas—championing the joyful harmony of nature and lamenting the mess that human beings have apparently made of things.
- Wordsworth had a tremendous influence on generations of poets who followed him—though the younger Romantic poets, like Keats and Byron, became disenchanted with him as he lost the fervor of his youth and settled into a comfortably conservative old age. By the time Queen Victoria made him Poet Laureate in 1843, his best and most important work was behind him. That work nonetheless lives on; poems like “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” remain some of the most famous and influential in the world to this day.
17
Q
Historical context
A
- Wordsworth lived through a chaotic time in European history. During his youth, he traveled to France in the midst of the Revolution, when citizens rose up and toppled their despotic monarchy. Like many of his Romantic contemporaries, Wordsworth was at first inspired by this rebellion, seeing it as the beginning of a new age of liberty. But he was soon disillusioned and horrified by the bloody excesses of the Terror, when the newly-installed French Republic mercilessly beheaded countless political prisoners.
- England, too, went through a crisis of leadership during Wordsworth’s lifetime, when King George III’s health deteriorated and his shiftless son George IV was installed as Prince Regent. The young Regent’s slothful, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving ways were seen as an insult to his struggling people—especially rural people, who endured years of famine in the early 19th century.
- Wordsworth’s first-hand experience of the dangers of revolution made him uneasy with the anti-monarchical political rumbles around him in England—and relieved, toward the end of his life, by the stability and power of the English monarchy under Queen Victoria.
