 Hello and welcome back to another GCSE revision lesson. Now, this video, which is going to go over the first poem in AQA's World and Lives anthology, is highly requested, okay? So of course, as you're aware, AQA came out with a new poetry collection that they latched onto their existing poetry anthology, and this collection is called Worlds and Lives. And the first poem that kicks off this collection is Lines Written in Early Spring by William Wordsworth. So what I'm going to be doing in this video and in the series of videos that follow covering all 15 poems in this anthology is I'll begin by giving you some contextual information that you need to be aware of when you're studying Worlds and Lives, especially if this is your chosen anthology in school. So important context that influences the author William Wordsworth. And then afterwards, I will read through the poem with you guys and then show you a line by line analysis of how to analyze this entire poem, okay? So let's begin by firstly talking about context and a bit about William Wordsworth and what influenced him as he was writing Lines Written in Early Spring. Now remember that William Wordsworth is a poet who came from the Lake District in England and he lived between 1770 and 1850, which made him a romantic poet. Remember romantic poetry and romantic poets did not write about love, okay? Contrary to what you maybe think about the name romantic, romantic poets tended to see nature as perfect. They tended to write poems that focused on nature and even celebrated nature and they saw anything to do with the city as corrupt, okay? So William Wordsworth was a romantic poet and he loved walking in nature and lots of his poems were inspired by him observing what's happening in the natural world and then him simply writing about it. The same goes for Lines Written in Early Spring. Now remember that there were two key revolutions that occurred in the time that he was writing this, okay? So you have the first revolution which was really important, the Industrial Revolution in England and also the second crucial revolution, the French Revolution, both of which influenced William Wordsworth as he was writing this poem. Now remember that the Industrial Revolution occurred during this time and this was a time when society changed and people left the countryside searching for jobs in factories that were springing up all over England, okay? So Industrial Revolution was a time when England moved from being predominantly farm based to being industry and factory based. That's the first revolution that happened which really influenced William Wordsworth when writing this poem. However, the second revolution was the French Revolution which of course happened in France. Now this revolution which occurred between 1789 and 1794, this happened whereby France, which at that stage had a lot of very unhappy poor people and a very wealthy monarchy that was very detached from its poor people, a lot of poor French citizens decided to revolt. They rose up against the powerful monarchy and overthrew them and remember that the monarch was King Louis and Marie Antoinette. The heads were chopped off and then France became a republic and actually when the French Revolution initially happened it became obviously very famous but it was also seen as holding a lot of promise in even places like the UK. Even Wordsworth himself and a lot of poets at the time saw it as holding a lot of promise for positive change. However, it unfortunately devolved into violence. This revolution which started with so much promise actually ended up devolving into violence and there are lots of gruesome murders especially in the final two years of the revolution where key members of the aristocracy were basically being killed and there was essentially what was called a reign of terror between 1793 and 1794. Of course William Wordsworth was also hearing about this and hearing lots of news and he became very very disillusioned and really unhappy when he realised this revolution was started with so much promise actually devolved into cruelty and violence because of human nature. Now remember that Wordsworth as I said was affected by this brutality in the French Revolution and he turned to nature for comfort and this is what's encapsulated and contained in lines written in early spring and really lines and written in early spring is basically Wordsworth's own encouragement to his readers to love nature because it could inspire a love for humankind rather than us acting in ways that are very violent and horrible and cruel and brutal to each other i.e. as seen in the French Revolution actually he wanted in this poem to encourage readers to consider and to look to nature and to love nature which would then make them remember how they should love other human beings okay and of course his key message is appreciating this God's creation could also bring us happiness. Now that we've got a general understanding of contextual factors that are really important when understanding this poem let's now actually look into a line-by-line analysis of the poem