Introduction: Wordsworth 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 what man” is unstated and that’s probably for the best to explicit about how Wordsworth feels man has failed his fellow men – whether through allowing his fellow humans to starve from poverty and exploitation or through reverting to savage violence. The poem was written against Napoleonic wrars, which followed on the hot heels of the reign of terror.
This poem signals the start of Romantic era and is included in “preface to lyrical ballads”. It also signals the beginning of a platonic relationship between S.T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The poem is in a form of a ballad consisting of six quartains. The rhyming scheme is ab ab.
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In the first quartain, the divinity of nature is revealed in the phrase “a thousand blended notes” implying almost a pervasive presence of nature akin to omnipresence of God.
The second quartain moves briefly away from nature to reminisce on the misery that other humans have caused each other since time immemorial. The poet says man’s state by nature is close to nature “Through primrose tufts, in that green bower. The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And’tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breaths”. The presence of nature as living things strikes. Through out the poem, Wordsworth builds up the idea of a living, breathing world that is only a fraction removed from humanity. “The hopping birds” , “the budding twigs” enjoy their being there. The plants, creepers and birds fulfil nature’s holy plan of living in harmony with one another. But the poet is quick to add “Have I no reason to lament. What man has made of man!”
Through out the poem, there was an attempt made by nature to heal the injured soul of the poet. The world of nature untouched by the miseries of humanity, continues on while human soul, bound in its rigid case of mortality and reason, is left behind to experience the misery of the human world.