Key Quote
“"And much it grieved my heart to think / What man has made of man"”
William Wordsworth · Lines Written in Early Spring
Focus: “grieved”
The verb 'grieved' transforms the speaker's sadness into something closer to mourning — as though humanity's cruelty has caused a kind of death that nature must witness.
Technique 1 — PERSONIFICATION / PATHETIC FALLACY IN REVERSE
Wordsworth uses sustained personification to present nature as joyful and sentient: the birds 'hopped and played', the budding twigs 'spread out their fan / To catch the breezy air'. However, this is pathetic fallacy in reverse — rather than nature reflecting human emotion, nature's happiness contrasts with the speaker's grief. The effect is deeply unsettling: nature thrives while humanity self-destructs.
The anaphora of 'And' at the start of multiple stanzas creates a cumulative, list-like structure, as though the speaker is cataloguing evidence of nature's joy to build a case against human cruelty. Each new natural image becomes another piece of testimony against 'what man has made of man', intensifying the speaker's lamentation (expression of grief).
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
The speaker is caught in a state of stagnation — unable to reconcile nature's evident joy with humanity's capacity for cruelty. The poem ends without resolution; the repeated question 'What man has made of man' is never answered. Wordsworth presents a mind trapped between two truths: that nature is inherently harmonious and that humanity has chosen to destroy that harmony. The speaker can neither return to ignorance nor find a solution, remaining paralysed by grief.
Key Words
Technique 2 — CAESURA & CONTRAST
The caesura in 'And much it grieved my heart to think' creates a deliberate pause that forces the reader to absorb the speaker's emotional weight before the devastating conclusion: 'What man has made of man.' This mid-line break mirrors the rupture between nature's harmony and human destruction. The caesura enacts the poem's central idea — a world broken in two.
Wordsworth structures the entire poem around a binary opposition between nature's pleasure and human cruelty. The ballad form's regular ABAB rhyme scheme and iambic tetrameter create a sense of natural order and rhythm, yet the content reveals disorder within humanity. This dissonance between form and content suggests that nature maintains its pattern while humans have deviated from theirs.
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Context (AO3)
ROMANTICISM & INDUSTRIALISATION
Wordsworth wrote during the Romantic period (late 18th century), a literary movement that reacted against the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason. The Romantics believed nature held a spiritual and moral power that could heal the human soul. 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798), in which this poem appeared, is considered the founding text of English Romanticism.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
By 1798, the optimism of the French Revolution (1789) had collapsed into the Reign of Terror and Napoleonic Wars. Wordsworth, who had initially supported the Revolution, felt a profound sense of disillusionment — the line 'what man has made of man' can be read as a direct response to revolutionary violence and the betrayal of egalitarian (equal rights) ideals.
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WOW — DEEP ECOLOGY & ECOCRITICISM
Wordsworth's poem anticipates the modern field of ecocriticism, which examines the relationship between literature and the natural environment. His suggestion that nature possesses its own joy, independent of human observation, aligns with the principles of deep ecology — the belief that nature has intrinsic value beyond its usefulness to humans. The line 'To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran' implies a spiritual bond between human consciousness and the natural world, a concept the philosopher Arne Næss would later term biocentric equality. Wordsworth does not merely describe nature; he grants it moral authority over humanity, positioning the natural world as a judge before which human civilisation stands condemned.
Key Words