Chapter 8 Wordsworth Foreshadowing the Anthropocene
Chapter 8
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, with a resigning tone in iambic pentameter, Wordsworth laments the loss of Nature, one that he so dearly loves and loathes to let go. Diatribes against the modern man permeates the poem's metaphors and phrases – "Getting and spending," "lay waste," "sordid boon!" "out of tune." The human race has now succumbed to modernity, to capitalism and consumerism. In an act of anthropomorphism, and turning the inorganic to organic, he harks back the "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;". Intertextually, reader could also reminisce on Wordsworth's other laments: 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 – contents of the natural world that he cares about.
To juxtapose Wordsworth with D. H. Lawrence, the latter is not so anxious, warming himself to the array of flowers under the inviting Tuscan sun. At the onset of rain in spring, narcissi will bloom on the grassy banks of babbling brooks, jostling for a place at the water's edge to get a glimpse of their own reflections. Perhaps because of this myth, Lawrence loves narcissi most, mentioning them more than other flowers in "Flowery Tuscany."
In contrast, Wordsworth is not so vain, happy with the humbler varieties that fill his heart with pleasure. Further, the daffodils that Wordsworth adores are the more intra-active types, homogenous in colour, even in temperament and tonal quality. Its corona and petal are united as one, unlike the Tuscan variety, where the orange cup and the white saucer interact rather detachably, reminding readers of Cartesian dualistic separations.
However, Lawrence does not praise only the Tuscan flowers; he also admires the Tuscans' methods of cultivation. After thousands of years of intense culture of vine, olives and wheat, worked by the ceaseless industry of naked human hands, the Tuscans has not denuded the land and laid it bare. But England has 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, from the recent past to the future – "late and soon." Hereby, Wordsworth envisions that humans are obsessed with making and spending money, and have lost their connection with nature – "Little we see in Nature is ours;" instead, they objectify nature. In some way Wordsworth is foreshadowing the Anthropocene.
While Wordsworth's anthropomorphic wind stops howling and falls asleep, folding up like flowers, humans is also asleep, totally "out of tune," too slumbered to hear nature's calls – Nature "moves [them] not." Had there been an effective lingua franca between man and the natural world, the Anthropocene could have been avoided. Lingua franca will be discussed in chapter 10.
Wordsworth's blasphemous language is provocative. In the poem, he renounces his Christian faith, protests to the "Great God," wishing to be a pagan to follow the faith of yesterday, longing for Proteus to rise form the sea, and to hear Triton blow his conch. It seems, therefore, Wordsworth chooses not to follow God's anti-ecological capitalist instruction in Genesis (1:26-28): "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it ... have dominion ... over everything that moves." He would abandon humanism to become an animist and posthumanist. But is Wordsworth really a pagan now? Certainly not. Proteus and Triton are merely metaphors to reflect his nihilistic resentments.
Hence, Wordsworth's poem encompasses (un)natural, (a)spiritual, (im)moral, economic and socio-political and theological themes. But unfortunately, after declaring himself so passionately as a faithful defender of nature, a Spaniard would accuse him a "false poet." For Pessoa, Nature is not a reality the way Wordsworth treats it; Nature is only a humanist construct; it exists in parts, not in whole:
“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 individual parts of an assemblage. But Englishmen keep seeing Nature as a wholesale commodity. Industries and population continue to bloom. So by the time Alice Oswald (2002) writes about the English countryside, there is not much pristine nature left to write about, instead, she writes about pollution on the Dart in Devon. She relays a sewage worker's experience 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 suddenly evaporates. Worse, such loss does not only confine to England. In the past two decades, the plundering of nature starts to take shape also in the Antipodes, even 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. River water are not pure like before, prompting environmentalists pressing for rivers' "human rights."
Wordsworth is right, his prometheus post-humanistesque insight enables him to look far into the future, to foresee the coming of the Anthropocene. Patiently he stands at the bow of his boat, waiting in vain for Proteus.
Work Cited
Oswald, Alice. Dart. Faber and Faber, 2002.