Thursday
As tomorrow is the official first day of spring, here’s a blog post by my son on William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Tobias Wilson-Bates is an English professor at George Gwinnett College who recently started the practice of “reading poetry each day and finding a few lines to chew on.” (I’ve reported on his blog here.) Toby is an extraordinarily sensitive reader, and I always learn something from these literary excursions. To date he’s written short posts on John Keats, Oscar Wilde, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Lucille Clifton, Percy Shelley, and this one on Wordsworth. You can find his posts here. I’ve included the entire poem at the end of the post.
Toby has fallen off in the last couple of weeks because he’s frantically trying to complete his book on Victorian time machines before his semester-long sabbatical runs out. Here’s what he has to say about Wordsworth’s spring poem.
By Tobias Wilson-Bates at PhD Hurt Brain
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.
One of the poems and lines that I return to most frequently is Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” (1798). Especially these days as the news and social media is inundated with nearly unthinkable acts of cruelty at seemingly every scale internationally and domestically. I won’t enumerate them here although they quickly multiply in my head because I assume that the feeling is all too familiar to anyone reading this.
Do we not have reason to lament “what man has made of man”?
However, I think the poem is saying something more and different from simply “what the fuck??” because Wordworth builds to this last statement each time he makes it.
First, a personified female Nature links the poet’s soul to his body, and, presumably, gives that body the capacity to feel and grieve atrocity/cruelty. Then it sets such acts in motion for the poet to experience them. It is not merely that man has done terrible things to man, but that to be man seems to be made for such cruelty.
The opening stanza really platforms the odd left turn of the poem’s direction:
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.
The poetic narrator seems to be in a pretty sweet situation! Listening to a thousand blended notes while reclined in a grove?! (yes, please!), but nonetheless follows a natural progression from “sweet mood” and “pleasant thoughts” to “sad thoughts.”
At that point we are off to the races at considering how shit everything has turned out. I say this in part because I feel this pattern mirrors in some ways the experience of modern social media. Connected to people in a sometimes awe-inspiring international community of thinkers (a thousand blended ones perhaps), we nonetheless often default to communal grief and anger.
I have no particular judgment on the matter as good or bad. I think it’s important to recognize the suffering of vulnerable people and the cruelty of the powerful, but I also find participating in it at times unbearable because it’s just too hard to live for long in that torrent of sadness. As with so much of Wordsworth, I am left with a kind of ambivalence at the Wordsworthian narrator, who often appears to offer a coherent criticism, only to retreat from view when the poem’s themes become too tangled to offer a full politics (which is, I think, what ultimately soured Percy Shelley on Wordsworth’s Romanticism).
I will continue chewing on this poem for the rest of my life. Perhaps I will come to some more coherent conclusions.
Lines Written in Early Spring
By William WordsworthI 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?
