The Tables Turned

"The Tables Turned"

The speaker begins by telling his friend to stop reading books; he'll become fat from being sedentary. The speaker then asks why he chooses to be so serious while outside there is a beautiful evening scene:

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks,

Why all this toil and trouble?



The sun above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.


The speaker continues, telling his friend that books are dull and tedious. Rather than reading, he should venture outside to where the linnet (a small finch) and the throstle (a song bird) are singing beautiful music containing more wisdom than any book. The two lines that follow (15 and 16) are probably the most important in the poem: "Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher." The speaker is telling his friend that Nature has more to teach than books, and that he should go outside rather than seek refuge in dry pages:

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it.



And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

In the next two stanzas the speaker tells his friend that Mother Nature is full of wealth, and that she is ready to bestow her fruits on our minds and hearts. He also says that in nature wisdom comes from being happy and healthy, and that a person can learn more about humanity and about good and evil from a tree than from a sage:

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless--

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.



One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.


The speaker suggests that even though nature brings humanity sweet traditions of intelligence, we tend to ruin that knowledge by dissecting it. Instead, we should reject traditional science and art and simply come into nature ready to learn with "a heart / That watches and receives":

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--

We murder to dissect.



Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Analysis:

"The Tables Turned" consists of eight four-line stanzas in interlocking rhymes (abab). It is in ballad form, written in iambs with four beats in the first and third lines of each stanza, and three beats in the second and fourth lines.

It certainly seems strange to find a poet telling his friend (and through his friend his readers) to stop reading, and yet much of what Wordsworth is saying in "The Tables Turned" fits perfectly with the Romantic Movement, which emphasizes the importance of being a part of nature. For Wordsworth there is much more to be learned by watching, listening to, and simply taking in one's surroundings than by studying books. At the same time, there is a strong element of irony at play here. First of all, Wordsworth is making these statements in a poem, which will become (as he knew it would) a part of a book meant to be read. Even though he believes that nature is a great teacher, he is not ready to throw away books altogether.

It is important to note the poem's title: "The Tables Turned." The title leads us to believe that Wordsworth is reacting to the status quo, or to the way that people usually think, which in this case is that books are the best way to learn. In order to make the strongest statement possible, Wordsworth goes to the opposite extreme, even though his true feelings probably lie somewhere in the middle.

The Solitary Reaper

"The Solitary Reaper"

1- In the first stanza the speaker comes across a beautiful girl working alone in the fields of Scotland (the Highland). She is "Reaping and singing by herself." He tells the reader not to interrupt her, and then mentions that the valley is full of song.

Behold her, single in the field,


Yon solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.


2- The second stanza is a list of things that cannot equal the beauty of the girl's singing:

No Nightingale did ever chaunt


More welcome notes to weary bands

Of travellers in some shady haunt,

Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.

3- In the third stanza the reader learns that the speaker cannot understand the words being sung. He can only guess at what she might be singing about:

Will no one tell me what she sings?--


Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again?


4- In the fourth and final stanza the speaker tells the reader that even though he did not know what she was singing about, the music stayed in his heart as he continued up the hill:

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang


As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending;--

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill

The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

Analysis:

"The Solitary Reaper" was written on November 5, 1805 and published in 1807. The poem is broken into four eight-line stanzas (32 lines total). Most of the poem is in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme for the stanzas is either abcbddee or ababccdd. (In the first and last stanzas the first and third lines don't rhyme, while in the other two stanzas they do.)

This poem is unique in Wordsworth's oeuvre because while most of his work is based closely on his own experiences, "The Solitary Reaper" is based on the experience of someone else: Thomas Wilkinson, as described in his Tours to the British Mountains. The passage that inspired Wordsworth is the following: "Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse [the Gaelic language of Scotland] as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more" (as qtd. in The Norton Anthology English Literature).

Part of what makes this poem so intriguing is the fact that the speaker does not understand the words being sung by the beautiful young lady. In the third stanza, he is forced to imagine what she might be singing about. He supposes that she may be singing about history and things that happened long ago, or some sadness that has happened in her own time and will happen again.

As the speaker moves on, he carries the music of the young lady with him in his heart. This is a prevalent theme in much of Wordsworth's poetry. For instance, the same idea is used in "I wandered lonely as a cloud" when the speaker takes the memory of the field of daffodils with him to cheer him up on bad days.

William Wordsworth

"William Wordsworth Biography"

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life.

With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. In that same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791.

During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland. On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had an illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem "Vaudracour and Julia", but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity.

In 1795 he met Coleridge. Wordsworth's financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy.
Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude.

Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic 'Lucy' poems. After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth's sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of her life.

Wordsworth's second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807. Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. His poems written during middle and late years have not gained similar critical approval. Wordsworth's Grasmere period ended in 1813. He was appointed official distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. He moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public man.

In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843) as England's poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850.

Romanticism

"The Romantic Movement" 

The Romantic movement in literature began around the end of the 18th century in Western Europe and flourished in the first half of the 19th century. It was in part a rebellion against the Enlightenment of the previous century and its focus on scientific and rational thought. Romantic literature is characterized by an emphasis on emotion, passion, and the natural world. Nationalism was an important factor in the Romantic movement, and many authors turned to folk tales and native mythologies as source material. A return to the aesthetics and ethos of the medieval period also featured strongly in the Romantic sensibility. 

Some of the earliest examples of Romantic literature emerged in Germany, where the most important literary figure of the period was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), about a young, sensitive artist, was popular throughout Europe. Goethe also used myth and local folklore as subjects for his poetry and helped inspire a sense of German nationalism in the decades before a unified Germany. The American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century added to the popularity of such romantic ideals as freedom, liberty, and national pride.

 

Romanticism dominated English literature throughout the 19th century. Romantic poetry, in particular, is among the most important work of the period. Notable Romantic poets from Britain include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Common themes in their work include religious fervor, nature, Ancient Greek aesthetics, and emotional response to beauty. Romantic novels were also popular in 19th century Britain, often in the form of the Gothic novel, which exploited such emotions as fear and romantic love. Some well-known examples are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847).

 

Romantic literature also flourished in the young United States. Much of it was also in the Gothic vein, such as the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson stressed the beauty of nature and man's identity as a natural being, themes echoed in the later work of poet Walt Whitman. James Fennimore Cooper focused on the nationalist aspect of Romanticism with his tales of the American frontier and Native Americans.

Romanticism also influenced the literature of other countries, although not as extensively as those discussed above. In France, the novels of Victor Hugo and Stendhal showed some Romantic influence, but they are more often characterized as part of the Realist movement. In Eastern Europe, Russian writers Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, as well as Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, were among the practitioners of the Romantic movement.

 

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