Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and
precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the
object and his imagination beyond it.
Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s
observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness,
a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his
character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility,
to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long.
When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.
Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to
have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance
of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are
vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about
“The smell of violets hidden in the green.”
Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in
this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant.
Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was
his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most
frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency,
the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset
“that imbues
Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.”
But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we
may almost say, unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For these he had
what he describes in his sailor-brother,
“a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch.”
In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the
world at twilight, he says:
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel;
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass,
The horse alone seen dimly as I pass,
_Is cropping audibly his evening meal_.”
At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and
mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then
“a gentle shock of mild surprise
_Has carried far into his heart the voice_
_Of mountain torrents_.”
At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from a rift in the cloud-ocean at
his feet, he hears
“the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.”