Lines Written in Early Spring--Jessica

In Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring,” the speaker is both part of nature and also its observer: “I heard a thousand blended notes, / While in a grove I sate reclined.” This leads to an exploration of the “sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” Perhaps the speaker’s divided (melancholic?) state can be read as a reason why happy thoughts engender sad ones. (Also, I couldn’t help but think of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal in the context of the LBs: there are a striking number of references to headaches and illnesses. I wonder to what extent illness and recovery might account for Wordsworth’s interest in the common man, illness being a kind of equalizer.)

In the second stanza, nature’s “fair works” have been linked to the eternal human soul—but to what end? Wordsworth’s construction of feminized nature feels largely solipsistic, allowing the speaker access to grief for “what man had made of man.” Man’s agency has superseded nature’s, and nature becomes the backdrop for men’s affairs. Although I’m not advocating for an increase in patriarchy, what would have been the result of a long-ago emergent “father nature,” or better, “the great big hermaphrodite,” etc.? How would this work against expectations regarding how “mother nature” is expected to both behave and react?

There is an emphasis on pleasure in the poem, undercut (?) as it is by grief and lamentation. The speaker gives us the hopeful thought that “every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes,” and observes playful birds and budding trees. Does the presence of grief and lamentation enhance our pleasure, causing our feelings to mirror those of the speaker? Is this poem Wordsworth’s effort to make visible a universal human soul and to remind readers of their ecologic connections with both other readers and nature, or does it remain in the realm of “environmental writing,” where nature has relational, but not actual value? The repetition of “What man has made of man” encourages me to support the more generous reading.