English Romanticism and Chinese Nature Poetry

Abstract

This poem creates a scene and a mood not entirely unlike that in the first eight lines of Tintern Abbey. The opening of Wordsworth's poem contains elements common to much of Chinese poetry: the imagery of a closely observed natural scene, the figure of a poet alone and at home in nature, a mood of rapport between natural scene and man, and a hint of some deeper meaning residing in this rapport. All these are easily observed superficialities which create the suspicion that there is a sameness bridging the great gaps of culture and time, style and language, which yawn between the poetry of ancient China and that of nineteenth-century England. Is William, as he sits upon his old