The Wordsworths and the Cult of Nature

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• 1. A sensibility moulded by childhood
• 2. The Prelude
• 3. Revolution
• 4. The poet's doubt
• 5. Dorothy's story
• 6. The daffodils
• 7. Find out more
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A sensibility moulded by childhood

William Wordsworth was born in April 1770 - one year before before his sister Dorothy - in Cockermouth, Cumbria. From his earliest infancy he heard the murmuring of the River Derwent as it flowed past the garden of his childhood home. Later, he recorded his gratitude for this, and described how, as a child, its 'steady cadence' had given him.

A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm / Which Nature breathes among the hills and groves. (The Prelude 1805, I, 284-5)

'Stillness and an openness to receive were the basic slate of Wordsworth's being.'

Somewhere within him Wordsworth kept that child, knew that possibility of stillness, and he strove to express it in his poetry. As in his description of the great city of London ('Sonnet: Composed upon Westminster Bridge') which, astonishingly, could in the early morning 'lie open unto the fields and to the sky', achieving thus its own deep calm.

Stillness and an openness to receive were the basic slate of Wordsworth's being. Dorothy records a day spent on the fells above Rydal, in the Lake District, with her brother and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and tells of how she and Coleridge 'left William sitting on the stones feasting with silence' (Grasmere Journal, 23 April 1802).

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Published: 2002-05-01