Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring" is uniquely powerful and characteristically Romantic poem. As Professor Schwartz pointed out, it is incorrect to say the romantics simply wrote about nature. Rather, they wrote about nature as experienced by man and about man's relationship to it. Romantic literature addresses the questions of where man fits into nature, of whether or not a harmony between nature and man is possible, of whether nature is sympathetic or indifferent to human concerns, and if man is the summit of creation or a perversion of it. In this poem, Wordsworth takes a stab at answering those questions, but in the end is more sadly confused than he began.
The twice repeated line "What man has made of man" (8, 24) is first a declared statement and later asked as a question. In between, the poet reflects on the beauty and happiness in nature and how alienated man is from that happiness. The poem begins with the narrator (presumably Wordsworth) reclining in a grove, engaged in a reflection moving from sweet to bitter thoughts. The beauty of nature he metaphorically hears as "a thousand blended notes" (1) of sweet music. I don't think I'm off base when I claim that Wordsworth sees an original unity between man and nature. As he says "To her fair works did Nature link / The human soul that through me ran" (5-6). Man is of nature and ought to play his part. But something has gone wrong. Man has made something of himself (or tried to) which nature never intended for him to be. Wordsworth never specifies what it is, but the reader's imagination immediately conjures up images of war and poverty, hatred and oppression, environmental degradation and urban jungles that humans were never meant to live in. Stanzas 3-5 artfully describe the beauty of flowers, birds and baby trees as they grow and thrive. The narrator believes there to be a "pleasure" in every moment of the lives of these creatures, as short as their existence might be. He admits that he "cannot measure" (14) the thoughts of these creatures and this can be taken as evidence that there is a fundamental separation between man and other parts of nature. The poet cannot empathize with what it means to live every day for the beauty of it, accepting all parts of existence, even death. Humans don't do this. Rather, they plan and plot for the future and seeks immortality through religion, through potions and through glory.
Reading this poem left me agreeing with Wordsworth in part, but mostly with questions for him. Does he think there is a solution, a way for man to unmake himself and become natural again. If so, what is it? The poem has a feel to it which echoes the creation story of Genesis and the fall of man. Is Wordsworth saying that the fatal flaw in man is really his inability to accept himself as a part of nature and be content with it? If so, is there a way back to the garden? Additionally, Wordsworth seems to regard the ideas this poem expresses as revelations from a higher power. What is that power and what relevance does it have for both man and nature? It's a good poem, but reading it left me wondering.
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and what of the question, "what man has made of nature?" I think that in this poem it is an interesting perspective to think of what man has made of nature. Not just allowing nature to feel pleasure and elicit pleasure in the poet, but in a contemporary view, what perception of nature do we hold? So, what has man made of nature? For the romantics, what immense power and pleasure man has attributed to nature. For us today, what ill treatment. I wonder what Wordsworth's lament would look like if it were written today amidst a receding natural wilderness and growing exploitation at the hands of progressive capitalism.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very astute observation. But how do you suppose the Romantics would react to modern biological science? I think the notion of Man being detached from nature is too simplistic. Man is embedded in nature whether he likes it or not—biological science of recent years has been making this a more urgent fact of life. Lewis Thomas— physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, policy advisor, researcher, and educator—wrote a poignant essay entitled “The Lives of a Cell,” making this point. Below, I provide excerpts from his essay.
ReplyDelete“We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.”
“But what of the other little animals, similarly established in my cells, sorting and balancing me, clustering me together? My centrioles, basal bodies, and probably a good many other obscure tiny beings at work inside my cells, each with its own special genome, are as foreign, and as essential, as aphids in anthills. My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with; they are ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay.”
“I like to think that they work in my interest, that each breath they draw for me, but perhaps it is they who walk through the local park in the early morning, sensing my senses, listening to my music, thinking my thoughts.”
“We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.”
“The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.”
I love and hate conversations like this! The one thing that grasped my attention in Calvin's post, was when he said "the reader's imagination immediately conjures up images of war and poverty, hatred and oppression, environmental degradation and urban jungles that humans were never meant to live in." Who knows where man is "meant" to live, if some higher power knows, then are we supposed to live our lives feeling that we ourselves will never know? Are not all these conditions created by man? If he is not "meant" to live with them, then who is? This also can attest to Danny's scientific justification of man and nature as one in the same. Science is telling us all these things, yet we cannot deny our desire to continue creating technology which assures us that we are progressing higher away from our origins. We can look back upon everything we have done with regret, but we cannot stop the progress in human society which seems to remove man further and further from this world. I had a good conversation with a friend about this "progress" and he simply said, "We cannot not progress. Cultures who stop progressing die off quickly." "What man has made of man," is what man does best.
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