The I is a privileged site, symbol, or avatar of unity, and it is around such a unity that the surrounding elements are placed in a hierarchy of events, movement, idea, impression etc. When Nature is called upon, it is to corroborate such a unity that the I either already possesses or it attains by a renewed encounter with Nature. The artistic form that arises carries that same innate scaffolding, a miniature replica of higher principles, the way infinity is reflected by a grain of sand (in William Blake and other Nineteenth century Romantic poets). As nature is, so should the poem and the I be. This resolves the mystery of the origin of order surrounding poetic language or discourse. This is the organicist Rhythm that flexes itself within and without; as sound echoes the sense, so shall the form also mimic or extend a fundamental order from which both the I and Nature, as subject and object, find their true purpose and meaning. This is why they need to be thrown into the rhetorical and textual mix, as the center around which the whole revolves.
That is, more often than not, they must be made obvious, stated, mentioned, directly or indirectly, as either presence or loss presence, or as a hidden dimension recovered partially or incompletely through some special process that still requires closer analytical inspection. A key ingredient deployed is displacement: a journey is then made and told, often to the countryside, in a moment of solitude and contemplation, where the noise of the world no longer imposed itself, from a vantage point where the I could survey a measure of the whole (as sea or sky, for instance), and then return with an intimation of the invisible order that confers unity to the I’s vision and understanding of itself and its world.
The Romantic lyrical poem, thus, arises from a dislocation or separation that triggers the contemplation and imagination of otherness. It is akin to what Philip Dickinson (2018) called "the protocol of the ‘negative way’ that defines Wordsworthian Bildung." He writes:
"In slightly different terms, the creative nature of perception relies upon the negation of ‘customary sense’, of pre-existing conventions of mediation. In his later study Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman suggests that this negative, extinguishing power is named by Wordsworth in Book VI of The Prelude as Imagination, whose effects are always the same: ‘a moment of arrest, the ordinary vital continuum being interrupted; a separation of the traveler-poet from familiar nature; a thought of death or judgment or the reversal of what is taken to be the order of nature; a feeling of solitude or loss or separation’. This is not imagination as some- thing straightforwardly vitalizing: it is instead ‘apocalyptic’—destructive and revelatory—the most important consequence of which is ‘the poem itself, whose developing structure is an expressive reaction to this consciousness.’"
