NATURE IN WORDSWORTH’S POEM A NIGHT-PIECE
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NATURE IN WORDSWORTH’S POEM A NIGHT-PIECE
I A Diah Laksmi
Jurusan Sastra Inggris
Fakultas Sastra Universitas Udayana
ABSTRAK
Dalam studi ini, puisi karya penyair terkenal Inggris William Wortdsworth yang berjudul A Night-Piece dipilih untuk dianalisis dengan menggunakan teori sastra yang ditulis oleh Knickerbocker,, K.L. 1963. Interpreting Literature, dan didukung buku Theory of Literature yang ditulis oleh Rene Welek and Austin Waren (1962).
Dalam puisinya, Wordsworth menggambarkan orang-orang di bumi yang begitu mudah mengabaikan alam, menghilangnya bagian-bagian hidup yang baik. Malam yang megah serta bulan, yang diam-diam menghadap ke bumi yang berada di bawahnya. Ini sebenarnya mengejutkan orang yang merenung ketika melihat-lihat dan menikmati alam sekelinglingnya. Penyair melanjutkan dengan menggambarkan langit malam: itu begitu besar dan tak terkira jauhnya. Semua ini memungkinkan membuka pikiran untuk memikirkan apa yang sekarang menjadi jelas. Langit, yang terbatas secara mendalam, telah membuat kemampuan berpikir yang terbatas.
Dalam studi ini ditemukan bahwa A Night-Piece memiliki elemen-elemen yang dipengaruhi oleh pengalaman hidup penyairnya. Penggunaan bahasa kiasan, pilihan kata dan pemilihan dalam penyajiannya, penyair memiliki efek pada 'alam' atau ' 'suasana hati' dalam puisinya itu. William Wordsworth adalah perencana yang memanipulasi kata-kata dan pemandangan dari kejadian alam dalam kehidupan nyata. Dia telah menciptakan ilusi bahwa dunia ini aman dan indah, dan ada kebenaran di dalamnya. Seseorang hanya perlu tahu di mana harus mencarinya
Kata kunci: langit, bulan, bintang
Knickerboker & Renninger, (1963; 307) says that “poetry is the hymn of praise. Good talk about poetry is nevertheless rare and even the best of it will rest on fallow ground until we ourselves have learned how to penetrate the inner life of a few poem”. Poem is a medium not only to express the feeling of the poets but also to make us enter into these feelings about the things, persons, situations or ideas in the poem. Poetry can give entertainment, satisfaction, pleasure and enjoyment to the reader. This is because there is great a difference between language in a poem and our daily language, in that poetic language is stylized with aesthetic or artistic effect.
Poets work with words, while artists work with a variety of media including paint, ink, paper, canvas, clay, and metal. But both poets and artists offer pictures that reflect their responses to images, experiences, people, places, emotions that are observed, remembered, or imagined (Stamford, 2006 : 1235)
According to Wellek and Warren in their book, Theory of Literature (1955: 309), the meaning of poem is seldom stated directly, but is carried or revealed by the element and structure of the work that is usually in the form of figurative.
In this study, the poem entitled A Night-Piece by a well-known English poet William Wordsworth was analysed. The poem excels in beautiful description of nature. Wordsworth describes the dullness and gloom caused by heavy and wan cloud as well as the bright moon and the small and sharp stars shining in the deep vault of heaven with equal felicity.
Based on the background above there are two questions to be discussed as follows,
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1. How does the poet describe nature in A Night-Piece?
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2. How does Wordsworth’s life experience help to understand the poem?
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3. Aims of the Study
This study has three aims; they are the general, specific, and academic aims.
The general aim of this writing is to apply the theories related to Wordsworth’s poem A Night-Piece and the specific aim is to find out what message the poet wants to deliver to the readers.
The last is an academic aim that is to apply the theory of literature learned in the English Department and write a scientific article to contribute to this department. Besides, this writing can be used as a reference for the student who likes to write about literature.
There are three points in this section: data source, method and technique of collecting data, and method and technique of analysing data.
The data of this study were taken from William Wordsworth’s poem entitled A Night-Piece cited in http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-night-piece/ and Wordsworth’s biography which was taken from Wikipedia, the free Encyclopaedia, a website addressed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth
The data is the object of the study. The method applied in this study is library research because this method is reliable and relevant to the process of collecting the data. The important one is to get some books in the library and some articles on internet as data sources and references in order to find out more data related to the topic of study.
The data is analysed in accordance with Theory of Literature by Warren and Wellek. 1962 and Interpreting Literature by Knickerbocker, K.L. 1963. And one more theory to support this study is Smith’s theory in his book of theory Inside Poetry. 1985.
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5. Analysis
A Night-Piece
------The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close, Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon, Which through that veil is indistinctly seen, A dull, contracted circle, yielding light So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls, Chequering the ground--from rock, plant, tree, or tower. At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam Startles the pensive traveller while he treads His lonesome path, with unobserving eye Bent earthwards; he looks up--the clouds are split Asunder,--and above his head he sees The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away, Yet vanish not!--the wind is in the tree, But they are silent;--still they roll along Immeasurably distant; and the vault, Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
At length the Vision closes; and the mind, Not undisturbed by the delight it feels, Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.
William Wordsworth uses personification, imagery, and diction to portray the beauty and wonder of the moon as it shines on the darkest nights for any creature that cares to look up into the sky.
The poem A Night-Piece firstly, refers to the dim, cloudy sky. It describes the heavily overcast sky, the cloud is continuous and is of close texture and looks
5 heavy and wan. It is whitened by the moon. The moon itself is seen as a dull, contracted circle behind the veil of cloud. The moonlight is there but it is too feeble to cause shadow. The whole scene appears to be heavy and gloomy. The poet treads along his lonely path. It seems that there is not anything in nature that can attract him, so he looks earthwards and moves on.
Secondly, the poem also refers to the bright moon in the glory of sky. Suddenly the change of the sky startles the poet and he looks up. The cloud splits into two and the bright and clear moon sails along in a black-blue vault, followed by multitudes of stars. The moon and the stars appear to be sailing. The stars are small, but they are sharp and bright. They wheel away very fast but do not quite vanish from the sight. The vault built by the white enormous clouds gets deeper. The stars seem to be far away in the vault, but they roll along.
At length, the vision is over, it is a delightful experience and the poet cannot be disturbed by the joy offered by it. Gradually this joy settles into peaceful calm and he is left to muse upon the solemn scene he has just watched.
A Night-Piece excels in beautiful of nature. Wordsworth is describing the dullness and gloom caused by the heavy and wan cloud as well as the bright moon and the small and sharp stars shining in the deep vault of heaven with equal felicity. In the first part, the un-observing eye of Wordsworth bent earthwards emphasises the gloominess of the atmosphere. In the second part, he talks of being disturbed by the joyful scene. It suggests the intensity of happiness the scene offered him. The descriptions are so graphic that no details, but minute, seem to have escaped the poet. The moonlight in the first part is so feeble that no shadows fall on the ground to chequer it. In the second part, he presents two contrasting sights, the rustling leaves and the quiet stars.
A Night-Piece is a poem in which "a close veil" or "texture close" of cloud makes a signal appearance, though Wordsworth's clouds may strike us as problematically physical, however connatural a part of the landscape. The "close veil of one continuous cloud" is all whitened by the moon, but the veil's blank
6 reserve casts no shadow to the ground. Wordsworth also describes in this poem that the people on earth are simply ignoring the nature, missing the good parts of life. The night is majestic as well as the moon, which silently overlooks the earth below. It in fact startles the musing man to look around and enjoy the surrounding nature.
He goes on to describe the night sky: it is so vast and "immeasurably distant”. All of this opens up the mind, allows it to dwell on what is now perceptible to. The sky, unlimited in depth, has made the mind unlimited in capability.
Finally, in A Night-Piece by William Wordsworth, his choice of figurative language, choice of words, and his selection and presentation of images did not seem ‘firm’
As well, the use of figurative language, choice of words and the selection and presentation of the poet has an effect on the ‘nature’ or ‘rather’ the ‘mood’ of the poem. In Wordsworth’s poem A Night-Piece, the way in which his much more modern language sounded did not have a dark or seriousness nature to it. Rather, his poem-the nature of it seemed more fantasy-like. A Night-Piece, just seemed rather calming like a dream not so surprisingly and sombre.
William Wordsworth is a mastermind of manipulating the words and scenery of a real life natural occurrence. He has created the illusion that the world is safe and beautiful, and in truth it is. A person just needs to know where to look.
Knickerbocker, K.L. 1963. Interpreting Literature. USA: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.
Morner, Kathleen. 1998. NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group
Smith, Sybille. 1985. Inside Poetry. Pitman Publishing Ltd: London.
Stanford, Judith. A. 2003. Responding to Literature; Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. Fourth Edition. New York: The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc.
Waluyo, Herman J. 2003. Presiasi Puisi. Jakarta : PT. Gramedia Pustaka
Wellek, Rene and Austin Warren. 1963. Theory of Literature. London: Cox and Wyman Ltd.
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