Wordsworth and Audubon Park

During my field study of Audubon Park (which mainly included observing different tree species e.g., Weeping Willows and Cypresses and noting their crown uniformity and foliage), William Wordsworth's poem "Lines Written in Early Spring" quickly came to mind despite the winter season. Published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), this poem offers a penetrating study on humanity and our environment. For my post, I'll give a rather lengthy explication of the poem.

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

I generally tend to scoff at the standard interpretation of “Lines Written in Early Spring”—that is, another poor anti-industrial, Romantic laments on humanity’s detachment from nature. When the line “what man has made of man” is uttered, the mind, in Pavlovian fashion, automatically thinks pollution, deforestation, chemical spills, and ceaseless technological change. This interpretation is suffocatingly simplistic. First and foremost, humanity is intricately a part of nature, whether we like it or not, and any petty attempt at escapism is woefully ignorant. Recent biology strengthens my point. At the microcosmic level, we are composed of mitochondria, which have their own DNA and RNA quite different from our own. Without them, we would not move a muscle or think a thought. Rarely mentioned, our centrioles and basal bodies, along with other similar tiny creatures work in our cells each equipped with their own genomes. Even further, our cells are ecosystems more complex than the Greater Antilles. As moderns, we must acknowledge that we can never detach ourselves from nature materially, no matter the polymer, glass, and steel we enclose ourselves in; however, spiritual detachment is possible.

Nature's and humanity’s existence vastly differ in “Lines Written in Early.” To begin with, nature merely exists. It’s unemotional, non-judgmental, and unthinking. It just is. To the human eye, nature is organically beautiful and content in this ontological state. In typical Thel fashion, nature is content because it has a purpose. In the poem, inside a grove, the speaker observes what nature has to offer from “primrose tufts” and “periwinkles” to “budding twigs.” Imposing an aesthetic, he finds these natural elements beautiful and pleasant. However, a crucial turn surfaces when “in that sweet mood” “pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind.” In other words, the act of thinking elicits depression and psychological discomfort within the speaker, for human thought is corrupt, which is a point William Blake would emphatically make. Throughout the poem, the speaker arduously anthropomorphizes nature as blissful and highly pleasured. This isn’t surprising since humans have an unwavering talent for anthropomorphizing and an insatiable appetite for pathetic fallacy. Arguably, I don’t think Wordsworth advocates this talent: in his view, humans shouldn’t anthropomorphize nature; nature should anthropomorphize us. Pathetic fallacy is malicious ivy. It permeates our ontological philosophy. Throughout the centuries, humanity has asked their ontological environment about the nature of existence, being, and reality, always beginning with that petulant, relentless interrogative word “why.” We attempt to give our environment the human characteristic of thinking and speaking, so it can answer us. Wordsworth wants us to discover a way other than cognition to link to nature.

In this poem, pathetic fallacy is the poetic fulcrum. In lines 19-20, the speaker is doing all he can to convince himself that nature is sanguine in its state—it’s a yearning so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted. As a Romantic, he envies this ontological state, for nature doesn’t delve into horrid grief when someone dies, and nature doesn’t suffer from existential anxiety when it contemplates the strangeness and irrationally of reality. Assuming this is so, we shouldn’t be a part of nature—we should be nature. With human hearts beating to this idealistic idea, we must escape our imperfect, besmirched, seedy, and spurious mammalian nature. It’s important to note that nature isn’t this cold, robotic entity. The Swiss Alps, the ornate lion fish, or very tightly furled buds beginning to burgeon and unfold do not convey this image. More to the point, it seems as though the natural world does not react to destruction with human hysteria. Rather, it embraces destruction and flawlessly realizes that destruction is a part of creation without even thinking, similar to life and death. Since we are at the mercy of our limited senses, humans have trouble viewing life and death as existence itself. Ultimately, “Lines Written in Early Spring” is a grab at transcendence, transcending this feeble state of mind--so we can just be.