The Recluse Essay -- Literary Analysis

Wordsworth suffers solitude, even as he celebrates it. Alone, the poet can explore his own understanding it exists at both poles of the notion of emotion recollected in tranquillity, and is the dominant developmental mode of Wordsworths childhood as depicted in The feeler (1805). Independence is what is exalted in his introduction to that poem he greets the gentle breeze as a captive set free from the vast city which has been as a prison to his spirit. The oppression of city living is alleviated in this opening reacquisition of isolation the relief is evident I breathe once more, that burthen of my own unnatural self is shaken off, /The heavy weight of many a weary 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 essential quality of his poetic felicity. The egoistical sublime observed by Keats is limpid in this poetry in a separation from other men, rather than in that 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 former heart. She is externalised when poetically useful and it is by this externalisation that Wordsworth is able to avert and diminish his poems undercurrent doubts. This prayer I make/ Knowing that Nature neer 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 total isolation. Wordsworths solitude, as he left childhood, was never again to be absolute for as consciousness developed, so did his readiness to apprehend himself , in language, so even alone he could not be alone without self-intercourse, mediated by language. His solitude was necessary for his employment, 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 kit and boodle CitedGil, Stephen ed. William Wordsworth The Major Works (OUP 1984)Hartman, Geoffrey Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814 (Yale University Press 1971)Morgan, Monique R. Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworths Prelude (Narrative, Volume 16, Number 3, October 2008, pp. 298-330)