Bruce Seaton
Professor P. Flynn
English Romanticism
11.14.05
One Impulse from a Vernal Wood
In his
1798 poem
The Tables Turned,
William Wordsworth makes a bold statement--a statement central to the
philosophical position of much of his early work:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
The Tables Turned is the second of a matched pair of poems; it is a final answer to
Expostulation and Reply, in which Wordsworth’s fictional friend
Matthew asserts that Wordsworth should spend more time
reading and less time sitting outside and
daydreaming. The above statement is the
linchpin to Wordsworth’s response. Wordsworth’s belief, influenced greatly by
sensationalism and the writings of
Hartley, that full, deep feelings and
natural moral wisdom are only attainable by those who have felt strong emotions (both positive and negative) as children, is strongly present in this stanza.
Wordsworth believed that the strong emotions necessary for
moral wisdom could be brought on only by a close relationship with nature. He saw in nature
a balance of powerful forces of inspiration, joy and fear. Wordsworth believed that one impulse, such as the
sunset he describes in
Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty or the looming mountain-monster of lines 357-400 of book I of
The Prelude could have the power to create these kinds of emotions. The powerful beauty of the sunset in
Composed Upon an Evening restores his belief in God and the “
choirs of fervent angels,” while the mountain of
The Prelude that seems to chase the little boat young Wordsworth has stolen instills in the boy a chilling vision of soberingly
eternal moral truth.
Any moment spent outside of society and beyond
the walls and gates of common human life has the potential for this kind of impact on a person. Because these encounters with nature are solitary and direct, they have a far stronger impact than stories told by others or the opinions of “authorities.” Many of Wordsworth’s best-known works, such as
Tintern Abbey and
My Heart Leaps Up reflect the importance of the
catalyst for deep emotion and moral wisdom that nature can be to children.
Wordsworth believed that the strong emotions produced by personal, natural experiences like these that could not be produced by
written words, or through any human
machination. Thus, “the sages” of
The Tables Turned could include all writers who attempt to forward a
philosophy of any kind,
including Wordsworth himself. Thus, his opening line “Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books,” seems to say “
don’t take my word for it”--these natural experiences must be encountered first-hand, and even the most deeply intellectual philosophy or elegant poetry--the “barren leaves” of the final stanza of
The Tables Turned--has no power to shape a person like the power of personal experience within the stimulating leaves, mountains, and streams of a natural setting.
The instinctive moral good described in much of Wordsworth’s poetry seems closer to the
Buddhist concept of Good than to that of
Christianity. For Wordsworth, to be truly good is to be at one with and
balanced within nature. If a person has even one experience as intense and humbling as the ones he describes in his poems, that person will have a fuller understanding of his or her place in the larger scheme of the world, and it will be easier for that person to make decisions that uphold the good of the world. Similarly, to be unbalanced and disconnected from nature is evil in that a person with a
narrow scope of the world sees only his or her own best interests, and will probably make decisions that reflect this
insular and arrogant outlook.
The
hyperbole used in both
Expostulation and Reply and
The Tables Turned seems to be intentionally
melodramatic, suggesting that Wordsworth is not only forwarding an idea, but also making himself the butt of a subtle joke. Matthew claims that men who do not read are “forlorn and blind”--clearly an overstatement in that there were then and are now entire cultures of perfectly happy, well-sighted people who have never even developed a
system of writing, let alone read a book. In
The Tables Turned, Wordsworth claims that books are “
a dull and endless strife.” Anyone who has read a significant amount has felt this way at one time or another, yet ironically, it is Wordsworth’s own occupation to write books of poetry.
Although Wordsworth’s natural philosophy eventually faded into a more classically Christian system of beliefs, the intensity of his
love affair with nature is perhaps never as bluntly stated as it is in
The Tables Turned. The joviality with which he deals with his favorite topic is a rare exception to the serious tone of
The Prelude, the feeling of childhood lost in
Tintern Abbey, and the often sorrowful outlook of later poems like
Surprised by Joy and
Elegiac Stanzas. The poem is a sort of abbreviated
manifesto of natural living, a loose rejection of societal
doctrine, and a
sermon on
moral living.