What does the line "The echoes of your rocks my carols wild" mean?

Question

From the poem "An Evening Walk" by William Wordsworth (emphasis added): > FAR from my dearest Friend, 'tis mine to rove Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove; Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore; Where peace to Grasmere's lonely island leads, To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads; Leads to her bridge, rude church, and cottaged grounds, Her rocky sheepwalks, and her woodland bounds; Where, undisturbed by winds, Winander sleeps 'Mid clustering isles, and holly-sprinkled steeps; Where twilight glens endear my Esthwaite's shore, And memory of departed pleasures, more. > Fair scenes, erewhile, I taught, a happy child, **The echoes of your rocks my carols wild:** The spirit sought not then, in cherished sadness, A cloudy substitute for failing gladness, In youth's keen eye the livelong day was bright, The sun at morning, and the stars at night, Alike, when first the bittern's hollow bill Was heard, or woodcocks roamed the moonlight hill. What does the line "The echoes of your rocks my carols wild" mean?

Answer 1

I suppose you have already been reading a great deal of Wordsworth, so it goes without saying that his celebration of nature and pastoral imagery was a reaction to the intellectualism and religious fussiness of 18th-century English literature.

This entire passage is about a walk the grown, reflective Wordsworth is taking along a similar route he enjoyed tramping along as a child. An old-fashioned meaning for "carols" is just plain-old "songs," such as "Christmas Carols," which are songs sung at Christmas.

The carols in question here are the sounds he heard as a child of water lapping on the shore of (I believe) Lake Esthwaite. I'll grant you that it's hard to tell exactly which body of water. Wordsworth is nothing but, well, wordy, and he forces this poem into iambic pentameter, so he's kinda stuck with it. Great art has its price, ya know? :p

But let's get a little deeper here.

In the next lines, we read how he starts thinking about how happy he was as a child, how innocence unblended with knowledge of the Real World was a blessed condition, how simple things were, etc., etc., almost as if he had been living in an emotional Garden of Eden. In a situation like that, these "carols" might have been something along the lines of angels' hymns, and everything he saw back then was something holy and eternal.

Now that he's grown up, though, he can see that it never was. It's beautiful, sure, and he loves it all the same, but it's part of the world, just like him, mortal. This turns him, metaphorically, into a Christ-like figure, except Wordsworth is trying to spiritually redeem the world through poetry instead of ministry.

How's that grab you?

I'll leave you to think on that one. Maybe you like it, maybe not, but I promise it'll make for a great in-class discussion topic.

If you haven't read the rest of the poem, go for it. It does go on, and on, and on, and on. Wordsworth takes work.

But he's also deep and rich for the digging.