[Dominic Carlone has kindly shared Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom, his elegantly designed Hallam site at the University of Windsor (from which this document comes), with readers of the the Victorian Web.]
From Wordsworth, Hallam learned how to expertly recreate nature in all its majesty. Hallam embodies the pleasures of nature in a number of gorgeous lyrics, always with a calm reflection of tone befitting the tranquil meditations of his great predecessor. Wordsworth's influence is strongly felt in lines such as these:
The garden trees are busy with the shower
That fell ere sunset; now methinks they talk,
Lowly and sweetly as befits the hour,
One to another down the grassy walk. [Complete text]
I lay within a little bowered nook,
With all green leaves, nothing but green around me,
And through their delicate comminglings flashed
The broken light of a sunned waterfall
Ah, water of such freshness, that it was
A marvel and an envy! [Complete text]
Although his poems are not fully developed, passages such as this, from "Meditative Fragments, IV"demonstrate a keen ability to give nature "a certain colouring of the imagination"whereby ordinary things are presented to the mind in an unusual way (Wordsworth, 143).
Hallam's nature poetry owes much to Wordsworth. However, as the sonnet quoted above demonstrates, Hallam could use the Wordsworthian idiom to create fresh and unique conceits of his own. Furthermore, the extreme sensuality of the second quotation foretells the extravagant natural landscapes of Tennyson. Hallam was still under the spell of Wordsworth and the Romantics when he died, but he was well on the way to mastering the Romantic idiom and forging a style of his own.
Last modified 7 April 2000.