The Nature Of Wordsworth’s Childhood Essay, Research Paper

The Nature of Wordsworth s Childhood

An Explication of To a Butterfly

To A Butterfly

Stay near me do not take thy flight!

A little longer stay in sight!

Much converse do I find in thee,

Historian of my infancy!

Float near me; do not yet depart!

Dead times revive in thee:

Thou bring st, gay creature as thou art!

A solemn image to my heart,

My father s family!

Oh! Pleasant, pleasant were the days,

The time, when in our childish plays,

My sister Emmeline and I

Together chased the butterfly!

A very hunter did I rush

Upon the prey; – with leaps and springs

I followed on from brake to bush;

But she, God love her! feared to brush

The dust form off its wings.

In Wordsworth s poetry, two themes emerge as predominate. The first is that of nature. The second is his idea that The Child is father of the Man. In To A Butterfly, these themes meet. The result is a poem showing how, for the poet, the experience of nature is intimately associated with the experience of childhood.

The dramatic progression of the poem is simple. The speaker, observing a butterfly, is drawn back to the joys of his childhood and a memory of playing outside with his sister, chasing after butterflies. This type of association is common for Wordsworth throughout his poetry. The beauties of the natural world as experienced by his highly attuned poetic senses seem to cast a kind of spell on him, transporting him back to the innocent and blissful moments of his childhood. There is a kind of longing, frantic and desperate and ecstatic, that compels Wordsworth. In the first line it is as if he is pleading, almost begging on his knees, hands clasped, for the butterfly to stay, to remain so that he might revel in the memories just a moment longer. It is just the kind of frantic excitement you might find in a child observing the same scene. Witness the six exclamation points in the first paragraph alone; it s just another signal of the ecstasy of the moment.

In the third line the word converse has a number of relevant meanings. The first is conversation or exchange. The speaker literally feels there some form of conversation, some kind of a dialogue occurring between himself and the butterfly. It is as if the butterfly had said, Look at me. Remember back to the days when you and your sister would chase after me? , in effect starting a conversation. Another meaning of converse is to have acquaintance or familiarity. This is not the first time Wordsworth has had the experience of a butterfly floating around him. He is intimately familiar with these kinds of interactions with nature. A third meaning of converse is something reversed in order, relation, or action. Indeed, in being whisked back to memories of his childhood there is a kind of reversal taking place. This butterfly has the uncanny power to turn back time, at least in the eye of Wordsworth s mind.

In line four the butterfly becomes a Historian of my infancy! The butterfly not only has revived certain lasting memories, but is able to somehow synthesize these memories, bringing back what was most poignant or most important. In line five, again we hear a kind of begging and desperate tone the poet is taking, like as if he couldn t bear loose the intensity of the moment. There is a sort of magic in the experience the poet is having, the times of his infancy, long since past, are said to have been brought back to life, not literally of course, but revive(d) metaphorically in the body of the butterfly.

In line eight Wordsworth uses the word solemn to describe the image that is brought to his heart. I was a little confused by the use of this word, as it immediately brought to mind somber and gloomy images, images converse to the feelings he previously described. However, taken in the context of the poem, I believe there is room for all of the word s meanings. The primary meaning of somber I think would be awe-inspiring or sublime. This reading of the word is backed by the previous line where he refers to the butterfly as a gay creature. The sense of the word meaning somber and gloomy, can be attributed as its secondary meaning once we look back to the first stanza in a different light than we have just done. If we think of the butterfly as representative of Wordsworth s lost youth, a new meaning of the poem emerges. It can now be read as a sort of lamentation of his lost infancy. The butterfly becomes a kind of vision, a re-experiencing of his youth fluttering before his eyes, in any moment threatening to float away. Stay near me he begs, do not yet depart. For he knows that once the image has left, he will again be the aging man of his present day reality.

The second stanza of the poem is devoted to describing the solemn image the butterfly has evoked. We see a juxtaposition between how Wordsworth and his sister Emmeline used to interact with butterflies. Wordsworth acts as the hunter, while his sister acts as the preserver, fearing to brush the dust from off its wings. It is hard to say too much about the relationship between Wordsworth and his sister and the meaning of the seemingly fundamental differences in their nature. Essentially, this poem is not about this sibling relationship. Rather, I think Wordsworth chooses to include this contrast as a kind of indulgence, a kind of shrine to joys of his childhood as it was shared with Emmeline. Also in the final stanza there is another juxtaposition, one between the Wordsworth of his youth and the Wordsworth of now. We see how in the passing of time much has changed in how the poet expresses his feelings towards nature. As a boy, the poet s expressions were wild and unadulterated, rushing with leaps and springs after the prey that was the butterfly. As an adult however, these expressions, which I feel stem from the same inner emotions Wordsworth felt as a child, are manifested in other ways, namely in his poetry.

So at the end of the poem we have come full circle. We begin with Wordsworth the man observing a butterfly and being taken back to the memories of his childhood. We drift through these memories, glimpsing the Wordsworth of his youth, and by the end of the poem are made to realize how in many ways the child in Wordsworth is still alive. Yet as a man, the means of expression for the joys he feels in experiencing nature have changed. We come to the end of the poem, and in doing so have experienced ourselves the product of this change: the poem itself.