Wandering and Wanderers
The speakers of Wordsworth’s poems are inveterate wanderers:
they roam solitarily, they travel over the moors, they take private
walks through the highlands of Scotland. Active wandering allows
the characters to experience and participate in the vastness and
beauty of the natural world. Moving from place to place also allows
the wanderer to make discoveries about himself. In “I travelled
among unknown men” (1807), the speaker discovers
his patriotism only after he has traveled far from England. While
wandering, speakers uncover the visionary powers of the mind and
understand the influence of nature, as in “I wandered lonely as a
cloud” (1807). The speaker of this poem takes
comfort in a walk he once took after he has returned to the grit
and desolation of city life. Recollecting his wanderings allows
him to transcend his present circumstances. Wordsworth’s poetry
itself often wanders, roaming from one subject or experience
to another, as in The Prelude. In this long poem,
the speaker moves from idea to idea through digressions and distractions
that mimic the natural progression of thought within the
mind.
Memory
Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness
of the contemporary world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults
a chance to reconnect with the visionary power and intense relationship
they had with nature as children. In turn, these memories encourage
adults to re-cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible
as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and despair. The act of remembering
also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the 1802 preface
to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the
calm remembrance of passionate emotional experiences. Poems cannot
be composed at the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead,
the initial emotion must be combined with other thoughts and feelings
from the poet’s past experiences using memory and imagination.
The poem produced by this time-consuming process will allow
the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers
and will permit the readers to remember similar emotional experiences
of their own.
Vision and Sight
Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and
sight as the vehicles through which individuals are transformed.
As speakers move through the world, they see visions of great natural
loveliness, which they capture in their memories. Later, in moments
of darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in “I wandered
lonely as a cloud.” Here, the speaker daydreams of former jaunts
through nature, which “flash upon that inward eye / which is the
bliss of solitude” (21–22).
The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find
comfort even in our darkest, loneliest moments. Elsewhere, Wordsworth
describes the connection between seeing and experiencing emotion,
as in “My heart leaps up” (1807), in which
the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across the
sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s poems, including
descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be
seen, rather than touched, heard, or felt. In Book Fourteenth of The
Prelude, climbing to the top of a mountain in Wales allows
the speaker to have a prophetic vision of the workings of the mind
as it thinks, reasons, and feels.
