Wordsworth is one blooming genius in English Poetry whose poems are very close to the philosophy of the Vedas. But, before coming to Wordsworth, I would like to point out the relation between poetry and philosophy, which will enable us to have a comprehensive idea about our Vedantic interpretation of Wordsworth's poetry.
To begin with, Aristotle says that poetry is the most philosophical of all writings where Truth is carried alive into the heart of passion. Wordsworth not only comprehends it but goes one step further to declare that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” He does not stop here. Like Vedic rishis, his poems are not the composition of mental faculty. (The Vedic poets are called 'Drashta' and 'Shrota' because they have heard the songs and seen the truth in deep meditation -- whatever they have composed was 'heard' and seen by them.) Wordsworth, falling in the line of Vedic seers, declares that his poems are "meditations passionate from deep recesses of man's heart."
All these things point out that a creation of a piece of art or a poem is not by the so-called mental faculty only. It does not mean that it is below the mind but it is beyond the mind. Plato could not understand the truth, calling poetry imitation's imitation, and thus twice removed from the truth. Ironically, he explains the traditional view in his book 'Ion':
"The muse first of all inspires men himself… For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed; so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him."
It is an ironical statement of Plato, but if we can replace the phrase 'the mind is no longer in him' by 'going beyond' and the tranquility of mind and not absence of mind, we can understand the truth of the creation of poetry. At this stage, I am reminded of the famous lines of `Tintern Abbey':
“If I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind, with tranquil restoration ...
I may have owed another gift
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the myster, in which the heavy and the weary weight
Is lightened ...............
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
We see into the life of things.”
So like the Vedic seers. The composition of sublime poetry is only possible when the poets go beyond the ordinary mind or enter into meditation and can 'see' the 'beauty' and 'truth'. How aptly Coleridge described the being of Wordsworth: "The rapt one, of the godlike forehead. The heaven-eyed creature."
In the 'Prelude', we have a statement -- "The light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world.” Commenting on the above lines, Ernest de Selincourt remarks: “But the highest vision is superinduced upon this in a state of ecstasy in which the light of sense goes out and the soul feels its kinship with that which is beyond sense."
The Upanishad declares that the highest Truth is beyond even mind there is an existence of a being beyond senses and mind. The body, vital and mind receive capacity 'from the source' unknown to them. That state of being 'sees' the mystery of the world or "we see into the life of things."
Keno Upanishad 1-3: 'There sight travels not, nor speech, nor the mind. We know it not nor can distinguish how one should teach it." It is that state of being, which not only “sees into the life of things,” but the unknown and unknowable source is felt, too.
The line quoted earlier, "that blessed mood...We see into the life of things," also gives expression to a state of trance, which in Indian tradition and Yoga is called 'Samadhi'. It is a condition of 'body-sleep' and 'mind sleep' but activeness in the higher region of our being, which enables us to see things beyond. "That serene and blessed mood" in which the lightning takes place. It is to be marked that the serenity is of the mood and not merely of the physical being -- "The motion of human blood almost suspended." The spirit experiences the profound peace, the soothing calm that enables the poet to cross the human limitation and transcend to a higher plane where he is able to have an experience. We see not into the form of things. This capacity opens the mystic capacity of knowledge through identity.
There are other expressions too that call for notice. One occurs in 'The Prelude', Book VI. Wordsworth, looking back at an experience, tries to know in depth its implications and realizes how “that awful power,” imagination, rose from the mind of abyss: "But to my conscious soul I now can say I recognize the glory, in such strength of usurpation, when the light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed –
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbors, whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home
Is with infinitude, and only there."
Shri Aurobindo, the great seer philosopher said – “The wonderful fact that not only is death seeming, but life itself is seeming." The Indian seers always believed in the continuity of life. This fact is so deep rooted in the consciousness of the Indian people that even the rustic believes it without a single ray of doubt. The doctrine of 'Karma' lingers with the seemingly passing away of life into another life. The oft-quoted lines of Geeta have very beautifully compared it with the changing of clothes: “When the garments are worn out man changes them, similarly the man changes the body when it is old or becomes useless for the soul.”(Bhagvad Gita, Chapter 2 - verse 22)
Time cannot touch; it is present -- in life, after life. How beautifully Wordsworth sung the song of soul's immortality in his world famous poem, “Ode to Intimation of Immortality”:
"Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting,
The soul that rises with as, our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from a far
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."
Isha Upanishad I-I says that there is a divine spark in every atom and the same spirit dwells in everybody and every molecule. God dwells in the whole of universe.
Now we come to Wordsworth. Nature is not matter, a non-living mass. It has its own being. Every object of nature not only exists but also has knowledge that it exists:
"Every flower enjoys the air it breathes" (lines written in Early Spring). And not only flowers, but also all things:
“Every form, rock, fruit and flower
Even the lose stones that cover the highway."
The poet says: "I saw them feel." (Prelude)
Shewtashwatara Upanishad 1-4 says that, “Thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed, Thou art the womb of lightning and the seasons and the oceans, spirit without beginning, because thou last poured thyself Man-foldly into all forms, therefore the words have being.”
And to quote the pragmatic yet beautiful lines from Tintern Abbey:
"………And I have felt A presence
...
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the Round Ocean and living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
Again, there are almost parallel lines in Taittiriya Upanishad for the last two lines quoted above.Taittiriya Upanishad (4-1) says that the spirit who is here in man and the spirit who is there in the sun, it is the spirit and there is no other.
To sum up I think it will more than suffice to quote Shri Aurobindo's comment on Wordsworth:
“It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can do more than conceive intellectually of the self or God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realization of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realization is. For, first, we see that he has the vision of something in the world which is the very self of all things that it contains, a conscious force and presence other than its forms and manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only the vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which its presence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital, physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being but in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile rock; and finally, that he even occasionally tainted to that unity, that becoming the object of his dedication, one phase of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal', where he describes himself as become one in his being with earth, “rolled round in its diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.” Exalt this realization to a profounder self than physical Nature and we have the elements of the Yogic knowledge.”
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