Wordsworth was one of the ‘big six’ Romantic Poets (Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Byron. A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to Wordsworth.

It should be noted that life in the late 18th and early 19th Century life during the time of King George III, known — ironically given the terrible social conditions of the time — as the Romantic Era. The Romantics were also Pantheists, that is they believed that God was manifested in nature.

This poem appears in a collection published in 1802 entltled Lyrical Ballads. The principal object of the collection was to portray situations from common life, and to relate them in easily-understood language. At the same time the language should be compelling and ordinary things presented as extraordinary.

In this poem the unnamed narrator relaxes beneath a tree in the wilderness, and thinks about recent societal changes. The beauty around him is in contrast to the miseries humans suffer. At the time the French Revolution was raging and, in Britain, observers were stunned by the cruelty of French society. Wordsworth and other Romantics wrote primarily to try and take back the world from the brink.

Structure
The poem comprises six quatrains, that is stanzas of four lines each. There is a regular ABAB rhyme scheme. The metrical rhythm is the same in each stanza. The first three lines are iambic tetrameters, that is four metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. The fourth line in each stanza is iambic trimeter, that is three metrical feet per line. The effect is easy to listen to, accessible and rhythmic.

Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a first person narrator who addresses the reader. The tone is sad and thoughtful, the language straightforward and accessible and the thoughts expressed intelligent and sensible.

The beauty of nature is contrasted with the sad state of humankind. In the third stanza, for example, the descriptive language is vivid and almost tactile. But the sadness of reality is never far away, exemplified in stanzas two and six. The detailed annotations provide deeper analysis.