Summary
In Book Eighth, Wordsworth does not describe any new events or phases in his life. Instead, he embarks on a retrospective, reviewing the events he has already covered and explaining how his early love of nature taught him to love other humans. The section begins near Helvellyn, a mountain in the Lake District. Wordsworth describes a pastoral country festival, in which animals roam, a maiden sells fruit, and people of all ages enjoy themselves. Nature itself seems to be working in their service. The speaker then backtracks to his time in London. He remembers how, in the city, he felt a fresh appreciation for nature: a childhood in pastoral beauty taught him to love the world and mankind even when surrounded by degradation. He recalls one early memory, of watching a shepherd and his dog in the mountains. The shepherd was able to signal to his dog, who in turn herded a flock with nimbleness. Even famous places of beauty in faraway places like China aren't as lovely, to the speaker, as the mountains where he was raised. His home region was imperfect and unluxurious, sometimes challenging, but full of an authentic humanity. His first love, he recalls, was nature. Thus the humans he loved first were those with ties to nature, especially shepherds. The shepherds he grew up with weren't as lovely as the ones described in pastoral idylls. These modern shepherds lived sparse, tough lives and met frequent danger. The woman who raised the speaker told him a harrowing story about a shepherd and his son, who went out to seek a lost sheep. The son, who recalled learning that lost animals will always return to the grazing pastures of their infancy, sought out the place where the lamb had been born. He found the lamb, but ended up stranded on an island within a rushing stream. His father managed to find and rescue him.
In the olden days, in warm places like Greece and Italy, shepherds lived lives of leisure and ease, overseen by their gods. But the unpredictability and harshness of the British landscape is special, creating an array of seasonal tasks and challenges for shepherds. The speaker, as a child, loved gazing up at the figure of the shepherd and his animals in the distance. He is grateful that he was presented with people so pure, rustic, and tied to nature. After all, a young person exposed to evil early on might lose all sensitivity. Early exposure to nature and to people entwined with it gave him a kind of defense against vulgarity and harm. Until he was twenty-two, however, he loved nature much more than mankind. Only when he was older did he understand the beauty and importance of the rural people he knew. His imagination was ignited by stories lying at the intersection of the human and the natural. For instance, a glistening patch of woods near his home sparked his imagination, making him think of knights and fairies. Later, at Cambridge and in London, the steady influence of nature remained with him and kept him from getting swept away by superficialities. He notes that Coleridge, his addressee, was miserable without memories of natural beauty. For the speaker, who had lived periods of real dignity in which all of nature seemed unified and whole, even the vulgar appeared lovelier or less threatening. Confronted with ways of life he found distressing, the speaker appointed himself a kind of moral arbiter, hoping to both help others and learn more about the world. He then recalls entering the city of London and experiencing a dawning realization of his own power—perhaps as a moral arbiter, as a poet, or both.
The speaker then describes a traveler entering a cave and shining a dim light, so that the shapes around him seem to shift and move bewilderingly. He cannot separate shadows from reality, but eventually, as he imagines the forms around him assuming fantastical shapes, they begin to make more sense. Similarly, once he became used to London's nonsensical-seeming array of people and places, he found it moving and empowering. He was able to discern the history and the narratives that it held. Admittedly, England is not as illustrious or obviously lovely as Greece or Rome. But in London he felt the weight of ages bear down on him, and despite the ways in which he disliked the city, it did not destroy his soul or values. Instead, it served to sharpen his attachment to nature and to mankind. Even in London, he sometimes saw examples of humanity's true goodness, and those moments inspired his continued love of humans and nature alike.
Analysis
This section serves a somewhat unusual purpose within the book as a whole. It doesn't tell a new story. Rather, it works like punctuation, telling us to pause in the midst of the linear narrative. Here, Wordsworth tells us to consider everything we've learned so far through a single, unifying lens. Up until now, he's spoken about his affection for certain human individuals and communities, about his love of nature, and about the importance of artistic and poetic imagination. It's here that these values are brought together explicitly for the first time. Nature, the speaker's first teacher, has given him a certain internal strength and integrity, as well as a constant desire to find beauty anywhere. This expresses itself in a powerful imagination. With that imagination, the speaker is able to find beauty and gravity in even the most trivial or gross aspects of life. His imagination and subjectivity function as tools for sorting what he sees around him, so that, for instance, even in the mayhem of London, he is able to seek out or dwell on that which he finds lovely and authentic. This means that, even when he meets people who seem truly unpleasant (unlike the admirable shepherds of his childhood), he views them with curiosity and is able to extend a certain love to them. Nature, in short, gives him the power to imagine, to retain his values, and to care about humanity even when he is confronted with scenes and cultures he dislikes.
The allegorical description of a traveler in a cave is an interesting illustration of this process (and, perhaps, an allusion to Plato's allegory of the cave). Wordsworth describes a situation in which shadow, light, and objects play off of one another and become baffling. This isn't the first time he's used such a metaphor. In Book Fourth, he describes a boater unable to parse "shadow from substance" in the water, in that case using that visual confusion as a metaphor for time and memory. Imagistically and thematically, Wordsworth is interested in such moments of fluidity and murkiness. Here, though, the allegorical cave-explorer uses imagined scenes of ships, warriors, kings, and forests to make sense of his landscape. Imagination and storytelling are tools for understanding and for shaping nonsense into sense.
On a separate note, this book is interesting for the way in which it articulates a specifically British national character and relationship to nature. Wordsworth positions Britain and, even more specifically, the Lake District as the opposite of at once the classical world, Asia, and a lost pastoral world from the past. He does so somewhat defensively, as if feeling that readers are unlikely to think much of his home. China, he posits, is a place of grandeur and loveliness so striking that a child might be unable to mentally cope with it. Meanwhile, Greece and Italy are the opposite—balmy, effortless, and easy. He also introduces a nostalgic past era, full of festivals and maypoles. On the surface, he suggests, these are all preferable to chilly, spartan England. However, he suggests, England has a certain authenticity and truthfulness. The difficulty of living there builds up moral and imaginative strength. Wordsworth associates Britishness with rusticity, honesty, and industriousness. In doing so, he relegates things like comfort and luxury to the realm of the superficial, claiming that poeticism belongs to England rather than to storied landscapes like Italy. Furthermore, by linking struggling and suffering to poeticism and profundity, he articulates a highly Romantic worldview, in which emotional extremes are viewed as routes to truth and beauty.
