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Wordsworth and Mickiewicz
The Countryside of the mind

This set of activities has been produced by a team including Tatiana Kramer, Hanna Serafinowicz, Joanna Burdzinska and Bozena Koczurek (with the help of Ewa Bandura).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) a major English Romantic poet, the author of Lyrical Ballads (1798) written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often depicted beautiful landscapes. His poem "Daffodils" (1804) is an excellent example.

From Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

(...)

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

  • What feelings does nature evoke? How does it make the poet feel?

  • Does the poem remind you of any Polish Romantic poets or any particular poems?

For the most popular Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1885), who read Shakespeare and Wordsworth with a dictionary in his hand, landscapes are both sources of joy and acute suffering. In his Crimean Sonnets his experience of strange lands and landscapes makes him long for the country and the love he was forced to leave.

Extract from The silence of the sea written on the heights of Tarkankut

O sea! Among the creatures on your floor

A polyp sleeps when clouds blot out the sky,

But in calm weather puts out groping paws.

(...)

O thought! Deep memories like a hydra cower,

That sleeps through storm and harsh calamity,

But when the heart is still digs in its claws.

A fragment from To***

I cannot part from you; it cannot be.

You trace my steps on land, traverse the sea.

In Alpine ice I see your footprints gleam.

Your voice I hear in every rushing stream.

I look around in terror, lest appear

That shape I so desire to see, yet fear.

  • In what ways are the approaches of the two poets to landscape similar or different?

The epitome of his yearning for his homeland is the invocation in Pan Tadeusz (1832-34). It is one of the best known pieces of Polish poetry, made even more popular by the Oscar winning director Andrzej Wajda who made a stunning film adaptation in 2000.

To see those wooded hills, those meadows green,

Far-ranging, where blue Niemen flows between,

The fields bedecked with variegated grain

Wheat-golden or rye-silver, or again,

Where amber mustard, snow-white buckwheat grows

And clover, blushful as a maiden glows:

The whole green-girt, as though by ribbons laced,

With restful pear-trees casually graced.

  • Do you remember the original Polish lines?

  • If you had to leave your country, which elements of the countryside would you miss the most?

There are three sections See also:

1. Forster: Landscape – ‘greeting the foreigner’

3. Heaney, Miłosz and Grass: A Contemporary approach – Three Nobel writers on landscape


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