Terror in \"The Tell-Tale Heart\"

Terror in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

In "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," William Wordsworth focuses on truth exposed through poetry. He alleges "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth Preface 19). From this, he illustrates an association between experience and manifestation of that experience. In this case, poetry is the manifestation of the experience and Wordsworth believes the overlfow of powerful emotions is evident through encounters with nature. A wonderful example of this is Wordsworth's poem, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." This poem reveals the scope of how emotions can overwhelm. The relationship between man, nature, and poetry becomes significant seen through a very different set of eyes belonging to the same man.

In "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth draws upon a similar form of acknowledgment. In this poem, the poet contemplates the past and compares it to the present. The waters "rolling from their mountain-springs/With a soft inland murmur" (3-4) elicit his memories. The poem comes about not simply by his present experience but an emotional response to the evidence of change. He sees the hills as an escape "from something that he dreads, than one / who sought the thing he loved" Lines (67-8). As a young boy, he fled to the mountains and experienced their fullness; as an older man, he sees the same mountains and their "deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms, were then to me/an appetite; a feeling and a love" (78-80). Here, the poet realizes that he is a different person. While the change is not negative, it brings him a touch of sorrow.

The passing of time cannot be slowed or stopped. The poet acknowledges "time has past, / and all its aching joys are now no more" (83-4). Here the poet realizes he is not the same person and the things that once made him happy do not seem to do so now. He realizes the loss of innocence and this change occurs about nature and about him at the same time. He states he has "learned / to look on nature, not as in the hour / of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / the still, sad music of humanity" (89-91). A disturbing presence fills him with the "joy of elated thoughts; a sense sublime / of something far more deeply interfused" (94-6). In this scene, we see how he associates thoughts to his senses; he is also experiencing nature past and present. He remembers his joy but he is not like the joyful young boy he was before. This place in nature comes to mean more to him as an adult because heunderstands the folly of youth. What brought him joy now eminds him of the sadness that exists in the world. It is still the same beautiful place but it gives him a "presence that disturbs me with the joy of elated thoughts; a sense sublime/of something far more deeply interfused" (94-6). There are two distinct experiences happening here and through poetry, Wordsworth can appreciate both of them without preference.

Both experiences have their benefits. The poet's adult experience allows him to contmplate everything he has known before where as a young boy, his imagination was limited by experience. Now, experience reveals to him to beauty and impossibility of youth. What he knows know is a presence existing in the "light of the setting suns, / and the round ocean and the living air, / and the blue sky, and in the mind of man" (96-8). As a grown man, the poet can connect the consciouness of man to nature all in all. He also identifies a spirit that "implies / All thinking things, all objects of thought, / and rolls through all things" (100-2). In addition, he writes, "all that we behold of this green earth; of all the mighty world / Od eye, ad ear -- both what they half create, / and perceive" (103-6). Here he admits his senses are responsible for only part of the nature he is experiencing and his mind is reponsible for the emotions attached to it. When writes, "the language of the sense" is the "anchor of my purest thoughts" (108, 109). Nature becomes the channel by which the poet realizes self and maturity is how the poet reaches his destination. One could not work without the other.