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| Prof. VSV, enthralling the audience |
Prof. V. S. Venkatramanan, former Professor of English, MCC, delivered the first guest lecture of the new academic year today [Monday, 16 July 2012], with fond reminiscences of his four-decade long association with the College. “My visit here today, brings me pleasant memories of the past” he said.
Excerpts from his Lecture on William Wordsworth:
Wordsworth is hailed as the high priest of Nature. Probably a hundred years ago, if you’d had an aerial picture of this College, in all probability you would have been struck by the barrenness of the landscape. The Scottish missionaries who founded this College gave a lot of importance to the natural surroundings. Thanks to their vision and commitment , today this place is like the Moghul gardens or the Garden of Eden, or a paradise on earth. Wordsworth too had a similar vision about life and Nature. Nature, for him, is a better teacher.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
So, if you want to get real wisdom, you can’t get it through the intellect. You’ve got to transcend the intellect. A Botany class may dissect a picture of a rose and give the intricate structure of a rose. But for a literature student, even a very abstract concept like love, is like a red red rose. Hence, only when the intellect stops functioning, and we start functioning with a power above our intellect, we get real wisdom.
Wordsworth calls Nature “The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul.” There’s a lot of difference between Wordsworth and the other poets. While the other poets of his time, observed society, men and manners and gave memorable expression to their experiences, Wordsworth was not a man of society. He was basically a mystic poet who gave expression to transcendental experiences. Hence he is rightly called the Father of the Romantic Movement in Poetry. His Preface is hence referred to as a Manifesto to the Romantic Movement.
Wordsworth's language is “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”. For Wordsworth, language should be simple. For example, take an auto-rickshaw and go to Chrompet. Give him a 20 Re note, and wait for the response! Will he say, “Dear brother, I would like to point out that you’ve made a slight mistake in your mathematical calculations. It’s like, you’ve got to prefix ‘one’ to the ‘20’?
On the contrary, [being realistic], he won’t say anything. He’ll give a cold stare [to begin with]. This will be followed by the choicest of expletives/swear words. This is exactly what Wordsworth means by language in a state of vivid sensation! When you’re full of feelings, you’ll use only the simplest words. Armstrong, when he landed on the moon, was simply overwhelmed. He did not give a bombastic lecture using high-flown words to describe the momentous occasion. He simply put it as, “One single step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. That explains it all. We have a similar expression in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Eliot. Eliot says, “when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting,” where he is alluding to the mechanical life of the modern man.
Wordsworth had a lot of trust in the common man. He was basically a rustic. He was obsessed with the real language of men. He had full conviction in the life of the common man. Here we have caste based distinctions. Similarly, in England, there were class based distinctions. Hence it was, that he felt like a fish out of water when he came to London.
In Chennai, if you enter a suburban train during peak hours, the human noise and the beehive of activities inside the EMU weigh us down. But in London, you’ll be struck by the cold silence of the people in the metro. You sit by the side of someone, and you see a cold, passive reception accorded to you. Wordsworth hated this type of sophistication.
In “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”, (which is a sort of prelude to The Prelude, he expresses what he owes to Nature. For him, Nature was not inanimate. “it is the ‘soul’ of all his moral being. When he has physical ailments, he goes to Nature for solace and cure. "Tintern Abbey" emphasizes Nature's restorative powers.
Commenting on Wordsworth's poetics, Arnold, in his Preface to The Poems of Wordsworth says that, Wordsworth is a poet who gives us peace and tranquility. Poetry, for Wordsworth, was “the image of man and nature”. Moreover, Arnold reiterates that "Wordsworth's poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote the poem for him".
To be contd…
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