Notes on David Malouf's "Imaginary Life" and Wordsworth's Poems on reading of the theme "In the Wild" with comparison analysis and similarities of the texts by A. Mojako

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Wordsworth's Poems

Modern relevance:

A view of oneness with nature fits in with concepts in Zen Buddhism (fastest growing religion in Australia) and the views of the Green movement.

Similarities:

• Mostly interior monologue (record of narrator's thoughts and feelings), and not to persuade others

• Teaching role of the speakers to children

• Teaching role of nature, there's a better system of values and ideals to be found therein

• Both employ identity-switching technique, whereby nature is personified and humanity is nature-ised (for example, nature is personified in the Child, Ovid becomes the moonlight in his dream of centaurs, in The Prelude the dawn is personified as a mocking teaser when Wordsworth can't decide what to write for his poem). This implies unity.

Differences:

• Wordsworth lived in the countryside during his childhood and has always enjoyed occasional visits to the country in his later years. Ovid begins isolated from nature, but eventually becomes integrated with it: 'I am turning into the landscape… I feel myself expand upwards toward the blue roundness of the sky'.

• Ovid is sent to Tomis against his will (in exile) while Wordsworth escapes to nature intentionally.

• For Wordsworth, nature is his niche in a sense of refuge or escape from the city. For Ovid, the wild nature teaches him to change and leave his old niche or comfort zone.

• Wordsworth's wild is more domestic, small and neat (such as 'pastoral farms', 'plots of cottage-ground' and 'orchard-tufts' in Tintern Abbey). In An Imaginary Life, nature is vast and immense, in the form of cliffs, sea, mountains, sky, river and grasslands, but is inhospitable, 'muddy and stinks' (IL 7), existing in a raw condition long before human activity created 'the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens' (IL 21).

• In the...