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Indeed, Geoffrey Hartman, in relation to Descriptive Sketches, mentions Wordsworth’s failure to wrest control of the
visual sense from its subservience to nature:
The eye, the most despotic of the bodily senses in Wordsworth, is thwarted in a peculiar manner. It
seeks to localise in nature the mind’s intuition of ‘powers and presences’, yet nature itself seems
opposed to this process, and leads the eye restlessly from scene to scene. 6
In this view of Wordsworth, it is nature, or sense data, which is the controlling factor in vision. Similarly, in Book II of
The Prelude, Wordsworth recognises nature’s unremitting controlling influence over his senses:
My soul was unsubdued. A plastic power
Abode with me; a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood;
A local spirit of his own, at war
With general tendency, but, for the most,
Subservient strictly to external things
With which it communed. 7
However, Wordsworth’s recognition of the despotic nature of vision should not lead us to the conclusion that his
passivity in the presence of nature was undesirable to him. Wordsworth’s writings and correspondence are replete
with his advocacy of what has been called the ‘static nominals of reason’: his use of language in a nominal way. 8
David Pirie, in William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness, comments that, ‘instead of concocting
imaginary worlds for our diversion’, Wordsworth, ‘directs us back to the one world which is real’. 9 In ‘Techniques of
Truth in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound’, Geoffrey Clifford Jaggs notes:
His interest is not in language for itself, but as a means to an end. That end is an irreducibly empiricist
one: we are of the earth, our nature bound up in the larger nature that sustains us. Our engagement
with the universe is prior to language, but language-or poetic language, at least-is in a constant state
of reaching out to the universe. 10
Elements of this can be seen in his poem ‘The Influence of Natural Objects’:
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
And giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man;
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature; 11
With regard to Wordsworth’s subtitle for Book VIII of The Prelude (‘Love of Nature leading to Love of Man’) Pirie
writes:
This subtitle still misdirects many readers in their approach to The Prelude as a whole and to much of
Wordsworth’s other poetry as well. […] ‘Love of Nature’ sounds soothingly abstract whereas the
poetry itself is often defiantly concrete and insists upon the unqualified actuality of ‘rocks, and stones
and trees’. 12
Of the poems in Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth writes, ‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject,
consequently, I hope that there is in these poems little falsehood of description’. 13 In a letter to his sister concerning
Dryden he writes:
That his [Dryden’s] cannot be the language of imagination must have necessarily followed from this.
That there is not a single image from Nature in the whole body of his works; and in his translation from
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