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The childlike factor in poetry:
‘The Child is father of the Man’
Wordsworth’s famously paradoxical line above is popularly regarded as
a proverb expressing the truism that childhod experience determines
adult behaviour. In its proper context, however, it has a more
far-reaching significance: “The Child is Father of the Man; And I could
wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.”
These are the last three lines of the nine-line poem, ‘The Rainbow’ .
They convey the thought that the preservation of the ‘natural piety’ of
the child is beneficial to the grown man or woman.Our concern here, as
it must have been for Wordsworth, is how the continuation of certain
childlike attributes into adulthood benefits the poetic imagination. For
this we need to consider the previous six lines of this poem: “My heart
leaps up when I behold A Rainbow in the sky: So it was when my life
began; So it is now I am a Man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let
me die!.”
These lines capture the child’s sense of wonder, delight and awe
before the splendour of the natural world. That Wordsworth retained this
is evident in his work, particularly ‘Tintern Abbey’ where he traces its
development into “a sense sublime” and speaks of nature as the “anchor
of his purest thoughts...and soul of all my moral being.” Other poets
have maintained this sense in their different ways, as when Keats says
in ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill’, “For what has made the sage or
poet write But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?” Or Lawrence saying
of his ‘Snake’: “For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in
exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.”
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William
Wordsworth |
Wordsworth’s childlike rapture with nature also gives him an insight
“into the life of things” and the sense of “a motion and a spirit that
impels all thinking things...and rolls through all things.” He cannot
define this further although his artistic expression of it is most
convincing. So is Blake’s when he proclaims his ability, in the
appropriately entitled ‘Auguries of Innocence’, “To see a world in a
grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower etc.” For Hopkins’, however,
the wonder of the natural world unquestionably reflects the glory of its
Creator. Thus in ‘God’s Grandeur’ he exclaims, “The world is charged
with the grandeur of God”, and in ‘Pied Beauty’, “Glory be to God for
dappled things.....All things counter, original, spare, strange....He
fathers-forth, whose beauty is past change: Praise him.” His childlike
perception of the divinity behind nature is entirely convincing.
The child’s unsullied and unconditioned perception of things also
enables a poet, in Blake’s words, to “cleanse the doors of perception”
and see and describe the natural world in all its freshness and
immediacy. The Hopkins of the poems mentioned above immediately comes to
mind. And Keats in ‘Autumn’ describes, in virtually tactile terms, how
this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” conspires with the sun to
“load and bless with fruit the vines....bends with apples the moss’d
cottage trees, and fills all fruit with ripeness to the core.” Even such
a sophisticated poet as Marvell displays this ability when, in ‘The
Garden’, he relates how “The Luscious Clusters of the Vine Upon my Mouth
do crush their Wine; The Nectaren, and curious Peach, Into my hands
themselves do reach.” And the usually intense Eliot can slip into a
childlike mode when, in ‘Prufrock’, he personifies the London fog as a
large, languid cat: “that rubs its back....and rubs its muzzle on the
window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.... .
Curled once about the house and fell asleep.” While in his ‘Bogland’
Heaney can tell us, as a child might, that “The ground itself is kind,
black butter, Melting and opening underfoot.”
Furthermore, the childlike sense of oneness with nature can give a
poet the ability to employ natural imagery in a strikingly effective
manner. The supreme example, of course, is Shakespeare whose sonnets,
(not to consider here the far greater evidence of the plays), abound in
vivid illustrations from the natural world. These range from the joyous,
as in “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and
more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And
summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” to the more sombre, as in
“For sweet things turn sourest by their deeds Lillies that fester, smell
far worse than weeds.” Across the Atlantic and nearly three centuries
later Dickinson, even though she does not subscribe to the Romantic
search for meaning in nature, readily resorts to it as a source of
illustration.Consider the beautiful metaphor of the bird to describe
hope: “Hope is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul-And
sings the tune without the words—And never stops—at all—” How different
from Pope’s essentially adult utterance of the same thought, “Hope
springs eternal in the human breast” a century and a half earlier!
Another facility of natural piety is that of recreating convincingly
the experiences of childhood for poetic purposes. Wordsworth himself
excels in this, a famous example being the episode of the stolen boat
from the autobiographical ‘Prelude’. As a schoolboy he had borrowed a
boat without permission for a clandestine row across a lake surrounded
by mountains. All went well, the boat “heaving through the water, like a
swan”, until the boy caught sight of a mountain peak that towered over
the rest. Here is how he describes it: “A huge peak, black and huge, As
if with voluntary power instinct Uprear’d its head. I struck and struck
again, And, growing still in stature, the grim shape Towered up between
me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.” The
terrified child stole back to the shore and his home. Note how the poet
is able to reproduce the experience just as it was impressed upon his
childish mind: the desperate rowing to get away from the gigantic peak
that seemed to be pursuing him with punitive purpose. Apart from the
instinctive personification of the peak, this is achieved by the
childlike repetitiveness of “I struck and struck again” and “a huge
peak, black and huge.”
This brings us to the evocation of a childlike dread of the
unknowable and even hostile side of nature. Blake has it in his “Tyger,
tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or
eye Could frame thy feaful symmetry” In ‘The Picture of Little TC in a
Prospect of Flowers’, Marvell warns the little girl who is enjoying
herself plucking and playing with flowers in the grass, “But O young
beauty of the Woods, Whom Nature courts with fruits and flow’r’s, Gather
the Flowr’s, but spare the Buds; Lest Flora angry at thy crime, To kill
her Infants in their prime, Do quickly make th’ Example Yours; And, ere
we see, Nip in the blossome all our hopes and Thee.” And in ‘The Four
Quartets’ Eliot can write that “the river Is a strong brown god –
sullen, untamed and intractable....ever, however, implacable, Keeping
his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to
forget.” The child instinctively has that respect for the implacable
element in nature which the adult tends to lose to his cost.
There are more aspects of the beneficial effects of natural piety on
the poetic imagination. We hope to consider them next time along,
perhaps, with a Sri Lankan example of this quality at work.
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