William Wordsworth wrote many poems with various themes depicted. Two of his well-known poems are considered to be Anecdote for Fathers and Three Years She Grew. The first one is considered to be a depiction of a talk between a father and son told from the perspective of the father; actually, it is a criticism of the adult need for reason and a celebration of childhood. This poem attempts to illustrate how adults should learn from children and echoes the poet's concept that 'The child is father to the man'. The second poem - Three Years She Grew - devoted to an English girl Lucy, who has died young. This left the stamp on Wordsworth. The whole series of Lucy poems is devoted to this girl. Each poem should be analyzed more deeply.
Anecdote for Fathers was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads - this is a collection of poems written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This piece of writing is supposed fundamentally to be a talk between a father and his son. In this poem the poet described the innocence, simplicity and purity of children that is familiar with his poem We are Seven. The poem starts with an introduction given by the narrator - the Father of the boy. One morning a father goes for a walk with his son. During his walk he remembers his old home Kilve. He starts comparing his new home Liswyn farm with Kilve. He finally concludes that both places are the same good. He asks his son concenring his preference for both places.
To his wonder, his son would have preferred Kilve over their new home which is Liswyn farm. His answer is being a real surprise for the father. He asks him the purpose for his preference. His little son, whose name is Edward replies that he does not know reason for the preference for Kilve. He asks him why prefers Kilve over the warm and pleasant Liswyn farm which is surrounded by the woods and hills. The little boy answers his father in simple words that he prefers Kilve because there was no weather-cock. He gives this reason to make his father happy with answer. This makes his father realize that what as an adult he could learn from his child that sometimes one need to accept the things without any reasoning.
In the first stanza we learn about the child. We learn straight away that the child is the narrator's son, and that he is 'five years old'. The description of the child in this stanza tells us that his limbs are cast from 'beauty's mould'. Young children are often described as being beautiful; this could be the case here in Anecdote for Fathers. The last line of the first stanza states that the boy loves his father 'dearly'. This is a particularly typical feature of children. Kids often tell their parents that they love them. Love is often depicted in a completely various way, and people say that you can only experience it when you understand what it is. On the other hand, in Anecdote for Fathers, the child is kept in line by the father.
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The father figure keeps him on the path, and could be a metaphor for God, keeping the boy on the correct path. In addition to this supposed metaphor, because it is set in the 'morn' so it would be light. Therefore, the light could represent the light of God.
The third and fourth stanzas are about the father reminiscing about the past when he was in 'Kilve' the 'year before'. The father misses the 'shore' at 'Kilve', but will not let the regrets of leaving there spoil the walk he is having with his son. He lets the memories flood through his head, allowing them to 'entertain' him on his walk. This can be seen from the perspective of a child. Children use their imaginations much more that adults, and will often play games which are mostly based in their heads. The father's use of his imagination here is entertaining him, and could therefore be seen as how a child would entertain itself as it wandered along in the country. This is familiar to us from 'Nutting', in the line, 'Among the flowers, and with the flowers; I played'. Besides, the father narrates that Kilve 'was' a favoured place and that so 'is' Liswyn farm. This shows the father's readiness to forget the past and move onto the new. He does not want to be living in the memories of Kilve. The main theme is that the child actually does not know really why he feels this way, he just does.
The poet proposes the Romantic beliefs on childhood and purity. William Wordsworth is depicting the great things we can learn from children, who perhaps have purer minds than adults. The father in the poem wants a rational and logical answer as to why his child prefers one place to another. The father repeatedly asks why; so in order to please his father and to answer his seemingly 'tedious' questions, the child replies simply that, "there was no weather-cock". The key theme is that the knowledge to sometimes just accept things, without need for rationalisation.
The second poem - Three Years She Grew - belongs to the series of five poems The Lucy poems written between 1798 and 1801. In these poems, the poet wrote concerning unaffected English verse infused with abstract ideals of beauty, nature, love, longing and death. However, all the poems deal with individually a variety of themes, as a series they focus on the poet's longing for the company of his friend Coleridge, who had stayed in England, and on his increasing impatience with his sister Dorothy, who had traveled with him abroad. The poet channeled his frustrations into an examination of unrequited love for the idealized personage of Lucy, an English girl who has died young. The concept of her death weighs heavily on the poet throughout the series, imbuing it with a melancholic, elegiac tone. Whether Lucy was based on a real woman or was a figment of the poet's imagination has long been a matter of debate among scholars. Some researchers suppose that the prototype of Lucy is actually his sister Dorothy, while other scholars consider her as a fictitious or hybrid character.
Most critics agree that she is a literary device upon whom he could project, meditate and reflect. The poem Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower was written between 6 October and 28 December 1798. The poem describes the relationship between Lucy and nature through a complex opposition of images. Antithetical couplings of words -"sun and shower", "law and impulse", "earth and heaven", "kindle and restrain" - are applied to evoke the opposing forces inherent in nature. A conflict between nature and humanity is described, as each one tries to possess Lucy. The poem contains both epithalamic and elegiac features; also, t is evident that the girl is illustrated as wedded to nature, while her human lover is left alone to mourn in the knowledge that death has separated her from humanity.
Both poems are really marvelous and worth reading. However, the themes shown in each are various, but they teach the readers many useful things. The first one - shows the purity of child and provokes to accept and see things through the eyes of kids, while the second one - shows the pure feeling of love towards the opposite sex. The common theme is perhaps may be considered purity.