Wordsworth and the Industrial Revolution

Wordsworth and the Industrial Revolution:

Wordsworth was a romantic poet born in 1770 in Cockermouth, England. As a poet he  on every aspect of nature and beautified it. Most of Wordworth’s poetry highlights the topic of the sublime in nature and how beautiful our surroundings are. He brought out the hidden, true beauty of life and showed it to all those who read his work. Romantic artists' work was based on creating images that portrayed everything as being beautiful and expressed the simple life. The centre of all their work was nature. Wordsworth and other romantics in the period believed that nature was the window to life and life’s meaning. Wordsworth believed that nature and plant life held the answer to a happy and healthy life for everyone. He tried to express to his readers through his poetry that the factories and mines brought by the industrial revolution were the cause of the social and economic problems of the period. Wordsworth wrote the poem “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” expressing these feelings saying “This City now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!". These lines show us how beautiful Wordsworth thought nature was and how important it is for people’s mental health as nature keeps people calm and at peace with the world. Wordsworth wrote about how beautiful nature is and how much of a positive impact it has on day to day life. These positive poems on the sublime made readers aware of how much damage the industrial revolution was doing to nature and plant life at the time. Forests and green areas were being torn down and converted into space for machinery and factories. The impact of the pollution caused by said factories was also an issue as it was slowly destroying the plant life that still remained. Many poems written in this time period also mention how destructive the industrial revolution was. For example, William Blake’s poem, The Tyger personifies the industrial revolution and the destruction it has caused throughout the period. As botany and nature were both very important themes during the 19^thcentury it was absolutely devastating when the muse of the Romantics was beginning to be taken away with them.

Wordsworth wrote many poems about the impact that nature has on children, specifically himself when he was a child. Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude” was one of his great pieces of work which is him narrating his own childhood and upbringing until he leaves for university. Wordsworth talks about the wonder of nature and how much of a connection he felt to it as a child. One instance is when Wordsworth is ice skating with friends and is distracted by a beautiful star in the sky, so he leaves his friends and skates away to admire the nights sky. This shows us how Wordsworth felt a strong connection to nature as a child, thus him expressing that nature is an important factor in the upbringing of a child. A similar theme is featured in Wordsworth’s poem “Lines Written in Early Spring” in which he says “tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathed”. This personification of the flowers within the poem links to the attitudes of botany in the period. In general botany plants were seen to be personified and respire just like humans do. This is an example of Wordsworth romanticising this theory and making it seem beautiful and sublime. As this was the aim of the Romantics, Wordsworth made a huge point in expressing that Botany and plant life is a huge part of living a happy and healthy life. Depicting flowers as ethereal creatures helps to promote the positivity of botany and how important it is to the upbringing of children in order to make them grounded individuals. People who have a closer relationship to nature, like Wordsworth, seem to live happier lives than those solely focused on money and materialistic items.

Emily Dimond