A poem foreshadowing the Anthropocene – Paradise Lost – And Found?
Chapter 10
Close Reading of a poem
"The World Is Too Much With Us" (1807) by William Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In an almost wailing gesture, and a resigning tone in iambic pentameter, Wordsworth laments about the loss of Nature, one that he so dearly loves and loath to let it go. the human race has now succumbed to modernity, to consumerism that has corrupted modern man. Where is the wild inhibited sea that bares her bosom to the moon? And the fickle winds that howl and gnaw at all hours? Oh wilderness! Where is the Sky-lark, where is the Butterfly? Where is the Yew-tree, and the Daffodils? Where is the lonely Cloud or the impatient Wind? The animal world; plant world; inorganic world – are about to vanish. Or, just to remain dormant, fold up for a while and sleep like night flowers? Next morning it will wake.
D. H. Lawrence praises the Tuscan flowers. At the onset of rain in spring, narcissus would appear on the grassy banks of babbling brooks, jostling for a place at the water's edge to get a glimpse of their own reflections. Lawrence loves narcissus most, mentioning it more than other flowers in "Flowery Tuscany." O mio caro narcisso! Mi stai guardando?
But Wordswoths is not so vain. He is happy with the humbler varieties that fill his heart with pleasure, his feet busy, danceing to rhythm of the wind. Further, the daffodils that Wordsworth adores are the more intra-active types, homogenous in colour, even in temper and tonal quality. It corona and petal are united firmly in one piece, like a graduation cap, unlike the Tuscan variety, the orange cup and the white saucer that interacts rather than intra-acts, detachable, reminding us of humanistic unitary self, and the dualistic separations.
But Lawrence does not praise only the Tuscan flowers; he also admires their methods of cultivation. After thousands of years of intense culture of vine and olives and wheat, worked by the ceaseless industry of naked human hands, the Tuscans has not denuded the ground and laid it bare. In England it is a different story.
In Wordsworth's Italian sonnet, written barely half a century after the First Industrial Revolution, the British have given their heart away to the sordid boon in industries, capitalism, commercialism, consumerism. For now and well into the future – late and soon – the rape of nature. Hereby, Wordsworth envisions the Anthropocene.
Anthropocene is the product of anthropocentric humanistic thoughts, stemmed from Aristotle, gather impetus in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, regards materials in the environment are theirs to objectify. When Wordsworth says, "Little we see in Nature is ours," (man has lost touch with nature because they are too busy making and spending money), he should also means, if he is post-humanistic, "Little we see in Nature is ours to take." Nevertheless, Wordswoths presents himself as posthumanesque animist, anthropomorphising the inorganic sea and the wind, baring its bosom and howling until it falls asleep.
Unfortunately, humans must be asleep too, totally "out of tune," too slumbered to hear nature's callings. Nature "move [them] not." Should nature has a voice, called "ecodiegesis" after Boes and Marshall, then humans would hear. And should humans have a means to reply, in action, before the damage is done unto nature, then there may be no Anthropocene. In order to establish this dialogue, a lingua franca is called for – lingua ecohomodfranca; lingua echofranca for short – to bridge the gap between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, subject and object; the essence of Cartesian dualism.
If Wordswoths is not an atheist, he does act like one now. In the poem, he renounces his Christian faith, prostests to the Great God, and would rather be a pagan, to follow the faith of yesterday, longing for Proteus to rise form the sea – the sea world – and to hear Triton blow his conch. He refuses to follow Genesis (1:26-28) to "be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth and subdue it ... have dominion ... over everything that moves." He would rather be an animist than humanist.
Hence, Wordsworth's poem encompasses issues that are (un)natural, (a)spiritual, (im)moral, economic and socio-political. After all he has done to denounce his fellow humanist countrymen, a Spaniard would accuse him of being one of those "false poets." For Pessoa, Nature is not real like the way Wordsworth treats it; Nature is only a humanist construct.
“The Keeper of Sheep XLVII” (1914) by Alberto Pessoa (under the heteronym of Alberto Caeiro.)
On an incredibly clear day,
The kind when you wish you'd done lots of work
So that you wouldn't have to work that day,
I saw – as if spotting a road through the trees –
What may well be the Great Secret,
That Great Mystery the false poets speak of.
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real ensemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.
This is what, without thinking or pausing,
I realized must be the truth
That everyone tries to find but doesn't find
And that I alone found, because I didn't try to find it.
Therefore, unlike Wordsworth, Pessoa does not see nature as a whole; he sees only the parts – hills, trees, rivers, not even "the plant world" or "the water world." He sees an ensemble. an assemblage. But the Englishmen keep on seeing Nature as a commodity, industries and population continue to bloom. So by the time Alice Oswald (2002) writes about the English countryside, there is no much nature to write about; she writes about pollution on the Dart in Devon. She writes about the sewage worker's job description in a prose poem: "It's a rush, a splash of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled out and waste off, looped back, macerated digested clarified and returned to the river, I'm used to the idea. I fork the screenings out – a stink-mass of loopaper and whathaveyou, rags cottonbuds, you name it. I measure the intake through a flume and if there's too much, I waste it off down the stormflow, it's not my problem" (30). One's adoration of the Dart may suddenly loss. But such loss does not confine to England. In the past two decades, the plunder of nature starts to take shape also in the Antipodes: particularly in the supposedly pristine New Zealand. For the sake of producing more milk, New Zealand farmers fertilise their lands increasingly with chemicals, leading to algae blooms downstream. River water are not pure as before. All rivers should be conferred "human rights."
Wordsworth is right, his prometheus insight enable him to look into the future, to foresee the coming of the Anthropocene. Patiently he stands on the bow of his boat, waiting for Proteus. He has not arrived yet, 'cause if he does, the water world should be in a better state.