Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth
1770—1850
Lens 1: Surface
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran.
- The poet speaker claims to be the voice of the human soul. He is reflecting inwardly, speaking as if the human soul is passing through him.
- The speaker suggests that Nature has joined the human soul to the natural world. He experiences this connection personally while sitting quietly in a grove, listening to birds.
- In this moment, what he hears brings both pleasant and sad thoughts to mind. He watches and listens to nature breathing, playing, and growing. This is pleasure. But then he laments “what man has made of man.” The poet does not elaborate, but by contrast one might imagine words like choke, burden, or stunt.
Lens 2: Sound
- Words Repeated: Opposites — pleasure / grief, Nature / man
- The poem fills us with pleasure, then blunts it with grief. As poems often do what they say, we see a man — the poet speaker — showing us the pleasure of nature, then taking it from us in sorrow. Nature gives pleasure, but man blunts it in how we treat each other.
Lens 3: Structure
- The structure of the poem reinforces this message: the poem builds through several images of natural pleasure before turning suddenly to grief in the final stanza.
Lens 4: Suggestion
- Nature: a grove, primrose, periwinkle trails, birds.
- Nature as spirit: capitalized like a title or name; linked with words such as soul, faith, and “from heaven.”
- Pleasure: growing, hopping, playing, singing, spreading, breathing.
- Man: blunted in the poem. No description. Only grief.
Lens 5: Significance
- Grief as pleasure denied. The poem does what it says: it gives us pleasure, then blunts it.
- How man treats his fellow blunts the pleasure nature would give any of us.
The speaker presents nature as joyful and harmonious. Because he believes the human soul is linked to Nature, the harm humans do to each other feels like a violation of something sacred — which robs us all of nature's pleasure.