Hold on, dear brother. I think your head is getting a little too big now. I’m not going to disagree with your skills as a poet, but I think I had more of an influence on the environmental movement than you. I didn’t write that much poetry, but my journals specifically describe the nature of the day. Why don’t you read part of my journal entry from Saturday, Oct. 11th, 1800?
“The oaks dark green with yellow leaves – The birches generally still green, some near the water yellowish. The Sycamore crimson & crimson-tufted – the mountain ash a deep orange – the common ash Lemon colour” (D. Wordsworth 394).
Now I may not have used poetic devices like personification, but wouldn’t you agree, brother, that I have an uncanny ability of illustrating the everyday beauty of nature. My descriptions of the trees are sparse and assume that my readers are educated enough about tree to do a lot of the tree identification themselves. See, I don’t talk down to my readers – I know that they are smart enough to do some of the work themselves. Sure, maybe some of my journals may seem unnecessary and pretentious (possibly to the working-class) but I also bet there’s working class people who value and identify with the land. And they don’t need poetic devices to appreciate it.
There is a student in the ENGL 2252 class who agree with me, William. Renee Albeln states,
“One feels (Dorothy’s) words were chosen carefully, not only for their precise meaning, but for their sounds. It is peppered with alliteration, such as ‘coast,’ ‘cliffs,’ and ‘clear’ and ‘walked,’ ‘woodlands,’ and ‘waterfall'" (Albeln).
So I guess I used poetic devices like alliteration after all. Would the rest of you readers agree, that I am the greenest of all writers of this time?
2 comments:
William replies:
Dear sister,
I think you forgot that I wrote "Guide to the Lakes". After being inspired by Thomas Gray’s "Journal in the Lakes", I thought that I could write a travelogue about England’s lakes.
Sister Dorothy, maybe you should read my passage about Lake Windermere’s mountains. I’ve included a section of it for you below:
“The general surface of the mountains is turf, rendered rich and green by the moisture of the climate. Sometimes the turf, as in the neighbourhood of Newlands, is little broken, the whole covering being soft and downy pasturage. In other places rocks predominate; the soil is laid bare by torrents and burstings of water from the sides of the mountains in heavy rains” (Wordsworth from Norton Online).
You are not the only one who has the gift of natural description. It must run in the family, eh? And someone from the ENGL 2252 class you speak of also agrees with my natural interpretations. In her Second Open Letter on Feb. 2, Jessica Williams writes about me to her classmate Devin. She states,
“If you are able to travel the Alps I hope you feel what Wordsworth writes, ‘But Nature then was Sovereign in my mind, / And mighty Forms, seizing a youthful fancy, / Had given a charter (Privileged freedom) to irregular hopes.’ (ll. 334-336) I hope you feel nature all around you and I hope the freedom gives you hopes you could never imagine.”
See Dorothy, two can play at this game.
I think it might come down to arm-wrestling or something between these two, Matt. ;D
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