Expostulation and Reply

“Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

“Where are your books?–that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

“You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!”

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

“The eye–it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

“–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.”

Explication

This poem is a great example of what the Romantic poets thought of learning. Unlike the Augustan poets, who thought learning could only be done by looking to the Classics like Aristotle and Virgil, the Romantics believed that a person could learn from observation rather than just reading a book. The Romantics also believed that life experience provides a better base for learning as opposed to the learning from reason. This poem shows the contrasting views of the two writing periods and is a great defense for the Romantics’ idea of learning.

The poem starts out with Matthew questioning the narrator about why he is sitting there daydreaming and why he has no books. Clearly, Matthew believes in the Augustan way of learning and doesn’t think that the narrator is going to learn anything by sitting around and daydreaming. When he says, “Where are your books?–the light bequeathed/ To beings else forlorn and blind!” it seems as if he thinks that the light is the books and without them he will be blind to the learning that he could acquire from them. It is very obvious that Matthew thinks that a person has to learn from books because there is no other good way to learn, just like other Augustan followers.

The second part of the poem is the narrator’s reply to Matthew, which is basically defending the Romantics’ idea of learning. In the fifth stanza, the narrator goes on and on about the senses and how a person can’t help but hear, see, or feel things. He says it is something that is “Against or with our will” and that our senses are going to take things in whether it is actively or passively. That is how he defends that he is not daydreaming but that his mind is still taking in information even though he is not actively learning. This is further proof that the narrator does not believe everything can be learned from a book and that he believes even when it appears a person is daydreaming they are still learning.

Resources
“Esthwaite Water.” The Lakeland Cottage Company. http://www.lakeland-cottage-company.co.uk/lakeland-guide/area-information.php?ID=21