“Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” made me think about our discussion of “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”. The latter two are about abandoning academic studies and experiencing nature and allowing Nature to be your teacher. “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree” illustrates that only letting Nature be your only source of knowledge can be dangerous. The man in this poem rejects society and “he many an hour/ a morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here/ an emblem of his own unfruitful life”. The moral of this is that man cannot pride himself on leaving society and all other people. You cannot gain true knowledge without connection and interaction with people and Nature. So the reader of all three of these is beckoned by Wordsworth to go out and learn through Nature, but is warned that you cannot lose all connection to mankind. And who is telling us this moral in “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree”? Is it a person who witnessed the man? Is it Nature? Is it the Tree? I think it is some sort of omniscient God-Mother Nature being. But who knows?
Wow, cool picture--makes you want to stay and rest. This is a totally convincing reading of the poem, but it might have been even stronger with just a tiny bit more quoted evidence from the text. At the end, I think you let your speculation get a bit too speculative, without tying it to anything in the text that night indicate who the speaker is. Is there really any evidence at all that the Traveler is addressed by a nature goddess?
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