Sonnet V by Wordsworth

River Sonnet V
William Wordsworth represents the interconnected qualities of Nature in Sonnet V of his River Duddon Series. This Italian style sonnet, with an ABBA-ABBA-CDCDDC rhyme scheme, celebrates England’s River Duddon. The breeze, the water, the trees, the plants, and finally, the humans who coexist along Duddon are the subjects of Wordsworth’s ode to this favorite river of his childhood. This sonnet shows how they are all connected and reliant upon one another to create the beautiful scene that Wordsworth describes.
Wordsworth makes extensive use of personification in this sonnet. All of the natural forces have human associations. The breeze blowing across the river “play[s] with thy clear voice”, suggesting that the breeze is like a child, and the noise of the river is like a voice. The moss on the banks of the river is not described with an adjective normally used for a plant; instead, the moss is “sullen.” Duddon has also “tempted here to rise” a cottage, implying that the river itself built the cottage, not humans. The trees on the banks of the river “flung their arms around” the river, giving it shade, as if the trees were a mother protecting a child from the beating of the sun. Even nature itself is personified. Wordsworth portrays Nature as a lonely being, lying on “infant bosoms.”
In addition to this personification, Wordsworth also portrays takes these natural phenomena and shows how they are interconnected. The trees put their arms over the river, shading it from the sun, establishing a clear mother and child relationship between the trees and the river. The inverse situation is also true, though, because the trees can also be seen as the children of the river because they drink from the rivers water to grow tall. The humans living in the cottage are children of the river, because Wordsworth says the river has “tempted to rise” the gray cottage they live in. The trees, in turn, are also the parents and protectors of the humans because the cottage sits “’Mid sheltering pines.” The underlying idea behind all of this is that nature is an infinitely connected web, where all life depends on all other life. Wordsworth best encapsulates this idea in the last line of the poem, saying that “On infant bosoms lonely Nature lies.” Nature can be as great and grand as a river or the trees, but it is also part of and reliant on the smallest parts of life, like babies.
Wordsworth’s Sonnet V from his River Duddon Series celebrates life and nature in Italian sonnet form. It bears little if any resemblance to the Petrarchan sonnet, which often deals with heartbreak and unrequited love. There is a volta in the poem, after line 8, where Wordsworth switches from describing the strictly natural world to the human world, but the change is not very significant, considering the content and message of the poem. This transition to talking about humans is barely noticeable for a reason. Wordsworth’s point in this poem is to show how the natural world and the human world are truly not separate, which he gets across by showing the beauty of interconnectivity of the players in this river scene. All forms of life are unified under Mother Nature. Humans, like Wordsworth himself, are merely the “ruddy children”, “sport[ing] through the summer day”, being “carelessly watched” by their Mother.