By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ was written in April 1798, the year that William Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge signalled their arrival on the literary scene with their ground-breaking collection of Romantic poems, Lyrical Ballads.

In some ways ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ can be seen as the precursor to Wordsworth’s more famous ‘Lines’ poem, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’.

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ is written in quatrains rhyming abab; the metre is iambic tetrameter. And the poem should be read in the context of Wordsworth’s other poems from this time.

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’: summary

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

In summary, Wordsworth sits in a small woodland grove and listens to the birdsong around him.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

But although happy thoughts are prompted by the birdsong, so are more sombre ones: nature has forged a strong connection between itself and the soul of mankind, but man has repaid the favour by making a mess of his relations with his fellow man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

Wordsworth admires the flowers – the primrose, the blue of the periwinkle, the greenness of the woodland area in which he sits – and the birds which ‘hopped and played’ around him.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

The birds, and the twigs on the trees, seem to exist in a world of pleasure – at least, Wordsworth decides he must tell himself that this is so. This is the way nature is, and nature, in being the work of God, is like this for a reason.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

Wordsworth ends by reasserting his lament about ‘what man has made of man’.

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’: analysis

The world of nature, in Wordsworth’s poem, is depicted as cooperative and pleasurable – there is none of the ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ that we get from Tennyson just over half a century later, in the wake of geological discoveries that cast doubt over the heaven-sent view of nature Wordsworth espouses.

This is a pre-Darwinian world – although, interestingly, Wordsworth’s friend Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, would publish a book called The Temple of Nature in 1803, just five years after ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, which proposed a remarkably proto-Darwinian (the other one, that is) view of nature, and contained the couplet:

From Hunger’s arms the shafts of Death are hurl’d,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!

But that’s all by the by: the point is that Wordsworth, in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, presents the natural world of birds and flowers as one of calm agreement and pleasure, contrasted with the implied failure of mankind to live up to such a model.

What precisely ‘man has made of man’ is unstated, and that’s probably for the best: to be explicit about how Wordsworth feels man has failed his fellow man – whether through allowing his fellow humans to starve from poverty and exploitation, or through reverting to savage violence (the poem was written against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, which followed hot on the heels of the Reign of Terror) – would be to limit the poem and to make it too time-specific. As it stands, the poem becomes timeless through its vagueness.

Forty years on, Wordsworth was to recall of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’:

Actually composed while I was sitting by the side of the brook that runs down from the Comb, in which stands the village of Alford, through the grounds of Alfoxden. It was a chosen resort of mine. The brook fell down a sloping rock so as to make a waterfall considerable for that country, and, across the pool below, had fallen a tree, an ash if I rightly remember, from which rose perpendicularly boughs in search of light intercepted by the deep shade above.

This note is included in the excellent edition of Wordsworth’s poems, The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics).

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’: metre and stanza form

A note on the metre and rhyme scheme of the poem. ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ is written in iambic tetrameter, meaning there are four iambs (ti-TUM) per line – but the last line of each stanza is shorter, and has just three iambs (iambic trimeter). We can see this from the first stanza (where the stressed syllables are highlighted in capitals):

I HEARD / a THOU / -sand BLEND / -ed NOTES,
While IN / a GROVE / I SATE / reCLINED,
In THAT / sweet MOOD / when PLEA / -sant THOUGHTS
Bring SAD / thoughts TO / the MIND.

Wordsworth was fond of the iambic metre, since it allowed him to write in something that roughly approximated natural human speech (a key part of his mission as a writer for ‘ordinary men’), but that shorter final line brings us up short.

Why should Wordsworth wish to do this? The answer may lie in the recurring refrain ‘What man has made of man’, which concludes the second and final stanzas (it has shifted to a question by the final stanza, of course) of the poem. He is happy among nature, but the behaviour of humankind troubles him. The rhyme scheme is abab throughout, with these alternating rhymes operating like the to-and-fro of the poet’s thoughts as he ponders nature and man.

About William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the leading poets of English Romanticism, and, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, is regarded as one of the ‘Lake Poets’: poets so named because of their associations with the Lake District in Cumbria in northern England.

Wordsworth’s themes are nature and the English countryside, the place of the individual within the world, and memory: especially childhood memory. One of his most famous statements is ‘the child is father of the man’, which asserts that our childhood years are so formative that they determine the adult we become. Wordsworth is often looking back to his childhood, and nowhere more so than in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805; revised 1850).

Lyrical Ballads heralded the arrival of English Romanticism in poetry, and Wordsworth added a famous preface to the collection when it was reprinted in 1800. However, he later fell out with Coleridge, and his poetic creativity dried up in his thirties; much of his best work was written before 1807. He accepted the role of Poet Laureate in 1843 when his fellow Lake Poet, Robert Southey, died, but he never composed a single line of official verse during his seven years in the post. He died in 1850.

If you’ve found this analysis of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ useful, you can discover more about some of Wordsworth’s best poems here.

For more discussion of his poetry, see our analysis of his poem about Milton, Wordsworth’s classic rainbow poem, and ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways‘.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.