Mother Nature’s Nurture in Wordsworth’s ...

0:08 Erin: After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he himself had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now mature comportment towards nature, impulse and desire. What can Wordsworth's poem teach us about our own relationships to the natural world? Can Mother Nature truly exert a parental influence? Can nature even make us better people? Today, in part one of a two part episode, we're discussing Wordsworth's 1798 poem Tintern Abbey. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. The. This is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext.

1:00 Wes: So, Erin, have you ever felt betrayed by nature? Or is it true that nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Or maybe you don't love nature that much, I don't know. But I wonder about this thesis. Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

1:15 Erin: Yeah, I was thinking about that quite a bit too. You know, I do love nature and I was thinking actually about a really scary incident that happened to me last summer. I have a. A little state park near my house where I go hiking in the summer sometimes. Every single day, rain or shine. And I go when it's cold too. But anyway, I was kind of cocky about my ability to get up and down the mountain before this big lightning storm that was supposed to happen and ended up being scared out of my mind because there were literal. I literally saw a lightning bolt come down and hit the ground maybe about 20ft in front of me.

1:52 Wes: Wow.

1:53 Erin: Something like that. Yeah. It was really, really scary. It was really wild. The sky turned that kind of weird green color, you know, of like extreme weather, almost like a tornado kind of color. And this was in New England. So this is. I was thinking about this too. The backdrop of a relatively hospitable nature versus a more extreme one. Right. I mean, New England doesn't have terribly. There's like a lot of variation in the weather, which is the big joke. If you don't like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.

2:21 Wes: Yeah. It's not like you went crab fishing in the North Atlantic or something like that.

2:24 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

2:26 Wes: To get in touch with, you know, the primal or.

2:30 Erin: I dried out and became Erin Jerky in the Serengeti or something like that. So there's a certain. Let's say domesticated element of New England and Old England, which I think much written about by Thoreau and Emerson. I was thinking about the Transcendentalist too, and Thoreau's experience of going up Mount Katahdin and his essay up there or his journal entry rather about how it made him see nature in a completely different way because it was so extreme and almost like. I don't know if you've ever been up there. I haven't, but I've seen pictures and it's like the surface of the moon almost. You know, it's all sort of slate looking. Not the happy chipmunks helping me do my laundry kind of. Thoreau,

3:13 Wes: which is really his mother and probably Emerson was doing some of it as well.

3:17 Erin: But it's easy to live in a cabin when you can just go to dinner at Hawthorne's house. But anyway, I love Thoreau and I love Walden Pond, which we should do at some point. I think that there is a more extreme. Wordsworth kind of grew up in more of like a Mount Katahdin kind of landscape to be fair. But yeah, I don't know. I guess so I'm throwing all these things out there just to say it's not as though nature can't be scary and extreme even in these, you know, more mild places, relatively speaking. But that relationship to nature, I think I fear na. I have an appropriate fear of nature, even if I take it for granted sometimes and try to outrun storms and stuff like that.

3:56 Wes: A healthy fear of nature, like being worried about sharks coming up through the shower drains. I'm sorry, that's a reference to a conversation we earlier had about Jaws.

4:10 Erin: And my fear of these things is intense and irrational. But I don't know. What's your read on that? What do you think?

4:17 Wes: I just thought that was a interesting throw off line because it's obviously the case that nature does betray the heart that loves her in some sense. Right. Because it's obviously the case that nature often betrays the hearts that love her and more so the hearts that love her. Not the people who stay on the couch watching tv, but the people who go out for hikes, even if it's not Mount Everest or the people who are outside more often get into more scrapes with nature and it's just a more dangerous place than the living room or the shower. Although maybe not if you look at the falls or the shark attacks statistics in showers, you might, but yeah.

So it's something that we'll talk about as we go through. We're Going to go stanza by stanza. You'll read a stanza and then we'll discuss. So that'll be one of the ideas will be thinking about is just in what sense it might be that nature does not betray the heart that loves her. I will say that this poem was written in the context, should we say the title of the poem, the full title Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1978.

5:41 Erin: 1798.

5:42 Wes: Sorry, did I say. What did I say? 1978.

5:44 Erin: You said 1978.

5:45 Wes: Weird. Six years after my birth. Not six summers with the length of five long winters, but no, July 13, 1798, the year that dyslexia was discovered.

5:59 Erin: I think it is just important to say that Wordsworth would have been better acquainted than most people, maybe even most people living in the world in his day, with the fickle quality, shall we call it, of nature. I mean, he was an early pioneer of mountaineering. He was estimated to have walked something like 200,000 miles almost in his lifetime, maybe. I mean, he pioneered the idea of the walking tour. He was one of the early pioneers of it. He describes in the Prelude in his childhood, climbing out onto the mountainous crags that looked over the school where he was just a boy and taking eagles eggs, climbing up to where the eagle's nests were in the rocks.

He was well acquainted with what we might say is the malicious kind of nature, or how malicious nature can be. And I think that's what makes this line so interesting. Because if anyone would understand nature, well, I think it would be Wordsworth.

6:56 Wes: Right. I was thinking also about the biographical context for the poem. So this is five years after a visit that he took not too long after he got back from France, where he had been for a while and he had a French girlfriend and he had gotten her pregnant. And then he had to come back, I think in part for financial reasons and to figure out how he was going to support a family and wasn't able to go back because France and Britain went to war. And this is in the wake of the French Revolution, which initially Wordsworth was enthusiastic about, but then became disillusioned with.

And by this point he's pretty well disillusioned with it. So as we find out at the end of the poem, he's with his sister, who is very important to him. They were separated for about 10 years as children, and then they basically lived together as adults for the rest of their lives, including after Wordsworth got married. Not to his French girlfriend, but to someone else. Dorothy, his sister, was a big part of his life. And speaking of nature, she. I think she called him a worshiper of nature. And it's pretty clear by the end of this poem, right, that he's singing a prayer to nature.

But he may be a worshiper of nature, but he's well aware of the perils of nature. But the context for this poem is the sort of perils of the human predicament, including war and unrest and injustice, all that stuff. And the ways in which nature can be a refuge from that, but a way of returning to that in a sense, or appreciating the sad plight of humanity. We'll get a little bit of that in this poem. You mentioned the walking tour. And in a way, after coming back from France, he was kind of in exile. So he was traveling around a lot. And, you know, he's not a wanderer in the desert, right?

He's a wanderer within a lush landscape. But he was really quite upset about his predicament, which is that he wasn't able to return to France, where he had a child and baby mama. Where he had a child and the child's mother. So I think of his seeking of solace in nature in that context, you know. So it's significant that he's titling the poem in his way. And it's July 13, which is the eve of Bastille Day. And it's about five years after he came back from France.

9:31 Erin: Should we dive in and I'll read the first stanza or paragraph? Okay, here we go. Five years have passed. Five summers with the length of five long winters. And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day has come when I again repose here under this dark sycamore and view these plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts which at this season with their unripe fruits are clad in one green hue and lose themselves mid groves and copses.

Once again I see these hedgerows, hardly hedgerows. Little lines of sportive wood run wild. These pastoral farms green to the very door and wreaths of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees with some uncertain notice, as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, or of some hermit's cave where by his fire the hermit sits alone.

10:41 Wes: Very nice. This poem has always really grabbed me in the first two lines. This very interesting way of describing the time interval between his present experience of a place and his experience five years in the past. So five summers with a length of five long winters. Why put it exactly that way? I guess winters are emotionally longer than summers. Right.

11:13 Erin: Oh, that's good.

11:14 Wes: If they are technically the same length.

11:17 Erin: Yeah. And there's so much repetition here. But in those first two lines, the repeated five, five, you know, you have that number in your head at the beginning and then it sort of fades away. And I often forget that he's still talking about himself five years earlier. I mean, when he wrote this, he was only 28, is that right?

11:36 Wes: Yeah.

11:37 Erin: So he's talking about his youth, as it were, as a 23 year old, not as a 10 year old.

11:43 Wes: Alan. He's an old 28 year old.

11:46 Erin: Right. And so I think that's a little bit silly for me maybe sometimes. But he is really trying to sell up front just how much growing he's done and just how different things are now with this repetition. But it's also just really. I forget how hypnotic Wordsworth can be. I mean, the language isn't necessarily hugely flashy. I mean, it isn't as a matter of principle for him on most occasions. But the sinking in to the hot tub of his. Of his poem is just really delicious. I think you kind of get on its wavelength because of these repetitions. Again, again, secluded and more deep seclusion. It works really well for me.

12:29 Wes: Yeah, I was going to mention that as well. You know, we get 5, 5, 5 and then again, again, again. So that those repetitions, they syntactically convey the fact that this is a repeat. Right. The fact that this is about the repetition of an experience and the way it's informed by the initial experience. So I wanted to say too, that this idea of talking about five summers and five winters, so you could look at one way of measuring the time as objective magnitude. Right. And the other way as conveying emotional intensity. So I said winters feel longer than summers.

But you could also just say summers feel more emotionally intense or something like that. And in winter we're more damped down. So it creates this contrast between the more, let's say, empirical experience of the world and then the way the world affects us emotionally, which is a very important theme for Wordsworth in general and of course for this poem. So right up front we get that, which I find to be really, really cool.

13:42 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You're making me think too, of the sort of enchanted nature of the landscape in the summer, right? The waters have a murmur because of the fact that it's summer. And maybe they're not murmuring in the winter, they may be frozen over. But I like the fact that this idea that summer is so intense and it is kind of enchanted with this fairy tale quality. We get the murmur at the beginning and then down at the end of the stanza we get the signs of life that are there. It's a little bit fairy tale esque to me. Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's wrong.

14:16 Wes: Well, I think. No, no, I think that's right. So I draw a line right through the middle of this stanza. So I had read something about these being called verse paragraphs, but I guess stanza is. Is correct as well. I'm not sure, but. So we're going to call them stanzas. I draw a line in the middle of the stanza between here under this dark sycamore and view. And then the next line, the plots of cottage ground. Because that's the point where he turns from the landscape itself to the connection between nature and human beings. So and stuff that's man made, like cottages and copses and groves.

And within each of these I see a kind of triad. So just thinking about the first half of the stanza, right, we get the river and the wild secluded scene that he says is surrounding it, which, you know, as the poem progresses, we'll see it as a representative of nature, but also instinct and youthfulness and desire, including possibly sexual desire. And then we get the cliffs, which he says are representative of a more deep seclusion than the seclusion of the scene. So something contemplative and in fact something that connects us to the sky, which we could take to represent gods or ideas, some kind of transcendent realm that's accessible via contemplation.

So I love this kind of stacked. Maybe a totem pole of levels, right? River to cliffs to sky as representative of nature and instinct to mind and to rocks that have probably been there for billions of years. So something more temporally stable to a transcendent realm. That's the triad we're greeted with, I think, in the first half of the stanza.

16:07 Erin: I really like that the seclusion too is kind of. In that first half is sort of undermined and sort of not by the second half because, you know, we get this domesticated nature, as you said. And I kind of wonder. I wonder about this because, you know, we have the murmur, we have this idea of a hospitable nature, like I, you know, like I said before, maybe even a kind of enchanted nature. So we get this feeling of connection. And so I think that word connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky. You know, everything is kind of part of this ecosystem, including him. So there's this idea that he's alone and having all these experiences alone. And yet it's like a homie alone. He's able to have it both ways.

16:49 Wes: Homie alone.

16:50 Erin: A homie alone.

16:50 Wes: That was the original title for the film too.

16:53 Erin: But yeah, you know what I'm trying to say that he's alone and yet he gets to be alone and sort of happy about it. Because this is not some sort of. Maybe I should draw a distinction here between being alone and being secluded. Maybe that's the key. But anyway, do you see what I mean? That he seems to be able to have it both ways. He seems to be able to talk about seclusion and connection in tandem. And it seems to me to be represented by the landscape which he sees in front of him, which is both domesticated and empty somehow. It's devoid of people.

17:24 Wes: Yeah, that's a really interesting turn that he takes in the stanza, right? If you're paying close attention to it, he's talking about seclusion. Then all of a sudden there's cottage grounds and farms and you're like, what? That's weird. Which is a. Great poems that I end up loving have that kind of element where you're kind of jarred by. You're given some sort of surprise or some sort of conflict that the poet just passes over. But yeah, so that's why I draw that line in the stanza. We get all the man made stuff, cottage grounds, orchard tufts, hedgerows.

But then we get this downplaying of those things, right? So the orchards have unripe fruits and are sort of lost in groves and copses. And the hedgerows are hardly hedgerows, right? They're run wild. They're sort of escaping human domestication. And the pastoral farms are green to the very door, right? Human beings haven't been able to put that greenness neatly into a square just for cultivation, right? It overruns itself and comes up right to the edge of the cottage. And then we get the idea that if you see smoke, which we might normally see as a sign of human industriousness, right?

And the conflict between humanity and nature. And here it's just homeless people in the woods at an encampment, or it's a hermit in his cave. So people who are not masters of nature, right, but are sort of Immersed within it. So that's the image of the second stanza, which is that human efforts to tame nature sort of get swep. Swallowed up by nature.

19:00 Erin: Do we ever quite know where the smoke is coming from? Because he says, as might seem.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

19:07 Erin: The more I dig into this, the stranger it gets, you know?

19:10 Wes: Right, right.

19:11 Erin: I really like the self correction. I love any poem that has a little self correction in it. Bishop does this a lot. Once again, I see these hedgerows. Hardly hedgerows, you know, I love that you get the repetition, the, you know, hypnotic repetition, but also that self correction. And then we have this idea that they're overflowing themselves, which is really interesting. It makes me think, of course, of Keats and to Autumn and the mossed cottage trees and the vines around the thatch eaves. So the idea of sort of like nature overrunning itself. I love the way you put that. But we don't even really get a house here, do we? I mean, we get green to the very door. So we get the sort of suggestion of a house, but the door is kind of disembodied from it.

19:53 Wes: Well, he says cottage ground and. But you're right, we don't ever directly get in the house. We get the stuff surrounding it, like cottage ground or orchard or farm or.

20:01 Erin: Yeah, and we don't ever really get a person. The word hermit is in here and the word dwellers is in here. But he is speculating and he does say, you know, as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods. So the implication is that there is a house, that there are houses around. It's as if vagrants were there and as if the woods were houseless. So there are all these really strange tensions.

20:28 Wes: Yeah, it's as if he's fantasizing. This thing that you're pointing out, I think is really important. It's that it's kind of fanciful. Right. The suggestion is that it's just his fantasy that nature overruns what is man made, and that the smoke, right, is coming from a vagrant's encampment or from a hermit's cave, rather than from an actual house or, you know, more remotely from a factory or something like that, from human industry, from human activity. And this is where I think we get a second triad, which is instead of river, cliff, sky, or nature mind, and then the divine or the transcendent, we get nature and then hedgerow and then human being, where the hedgerow is sort of a point of contention between nature and human industry.

Is it wild or is it just man made? Is it autonomous and free or has it been mastered and put to human purposes? So we get a replacement of contemplativeness as the joining feature as suggested by the cliffs to industriousness as the joining feature. And I think the tension between those two things will actually come up again in the poem. A contemplative relation to nature versus a practical or industrious, or even at the very extreme, an exploitative relationship to nature. That I think is what's being hinted

22:03 Erin: at here, even alongside this tension. Yeah, it's just standing out to me now. The redundancies at the end of the stanza alongside those contrasts. I don't know, maybe this is a little too obvious, but vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods. Well, if they're vagrants, then they would be houseless. Right. And the hermit sits alone. I mean, isn't a hermit by definition alone? So there's something. I don't know. This is such a bizarre poem. Maybe this is just too obvious, but I never noticed that before. The redundancy and repetition as opposed to yoking these opposites together. It's just very strange. It almost doesn't make sense.

22:40 Wes: Yeah. Or it suggests we're in the realm of fantasy. He's not just an observer here, but he is co creating the world in a sense, with his own fantasies elsewhere. Wordsworth says something like, the world is half created by eye and ear. So it's this element of subjectivity. And of course, this is historically famous. Right. Wordsworth is going to have a dramatic impact on the history of literature because he's prioritizing the lyrical and prioritizing the subject's description of their inner experiences. Right over the content of a narrative. That and the greater plainness of language. Am I right about that? As you know.

23:28 Erin: Yes.

23:29 Wes: This is the kind of transition we're seeing. Yeah.

23:31 Erin: And I think that in the. At some point. I really would like us to talk about the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which I think we are going to cover at some point on the podcast. Right. I think we both put that down as a favorite. But it's just worth mentioning here that Wordsworth and Coleridge both sort of laid out the principles of their sort of new poetry. And was this poem the last in the Lyrical Ballads, the last poem included?

23:55 Wes: Is it? Yeah. I didn't know that. You know, I don't know a lot about the Lyrical Ballads. I just. I know it's collaboration with Coleridge and that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in there as well. Strangely enough, very different stuff. But yeah. So this is the last one?

24:09 Erin: I think so, yeah. I think this was the last thing written and slotted in. It's just worth a hat tip to that. We won't talk about that now because that's its own thing. But he and Coleridge really laid out the manifesto of their new poetry in this volume of Lyrical Ballads, you know, and it had just an absolutely revolutionary effect on poetry. You know, it's probably the single most important volume of poetry in the English language, easily.

24:32 Wes: That collaboration is really strongly related to one of the themes of this poem and one of the Wordsworth's preoccupations in general. The importance of a combining sense and sensibility. Right. So it's not just, hey, I'm a Romantic, this is a turn towards. We need to return to nature and towards emotion. But Wordsworth is very interested in the. And arguably the Romantics were. But in the ways in which both thinking and feeling are important and in the way in which it's important to combine them. Combine them as a writer. Combine them when it comes to one's emotional comportment to the world.

And I think the idea is that nature is a good way of One's experience of nature can actually combine them. And we're going to see that thesis play out in this poem. But I was thinking of that in relation to the collaboration with Coleridge. Just because Coleridge is so different than Wordsworth. So preoccupied with the supernatural. Right. With that transcendent. The sky, you know, Coleridge is up in the sky. Maybe they're like a peanut butter and chocolate type of thing, you know, it's like, you got your ordinary and my supernatural. You got your supernatural and my ordinary.

I don't know if that's right, but you can tell me. That's my general impression, but yeah, I

25:47 Erin: think probably next in the next episode, we'll get to maybe talking a little bit about the egotistical sublime as Keats character. The sort of Wordsworthian mode, which would be maybe helpful, especially in the long stanza where he talks about flying from something rather than flying to nature. Anyway, yeah, I think all that's really good. Okay, should we go to the next.

26:12 Wes: Let's do it.

26:13 Erin: Okay. These beauteous forms through a long absence have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye, but oft in lonely rooms and mid the din of towns and cities I have owed to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart and passing even into my purer mind with tranquil restoration. Feelings, too, of unremembered pleasure, such perhaps, as have no slight or trivial influence of that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, nor less, I trust, to them I may have owed another gift of aspect more sublime.

That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened, that serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

27:23 Wes: This is another one of these great, arguably immortal lines. His little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

27:31 Erin: So, interesting question there.

27:33 Wes: The subject of the stanza. What is nature good for? Let me tell you, it's a few things. Not just sensations sweet or something felt at the visceral level in the blood along the heart, but also something that happens more at a reflective level, tranquil restoration. And then, apparently, it helps you become a good person. And beyond that, what takes up the bulk of the stanza is talk about something. Again, contemplative, I think, Whatever that means.

28:07 Erin: Yeah. I put in the sort of margin of my copy. I have this memory brings 1, 2, 3 sensations, sweet feelings of unremembered pleasure and a blessed mood because weight of the world is lifted. What is he talking about? Because what is a feeling? For instance, the most bizarre part of this for me, what's a feeling of unremembered pleasure? Is it just a sense of contentment that we can't yoke to any particular memory, but yet it must be triggered by something. It must be. You know, when we're in the city, the evil city to Wordsworth, we must be actively trying to take a mental journey out of that city.

28:52 Wes: So you're really tempting the psychoanalyst in me at this moment. Okay, is there two very tempting words here? One is unremembered and one is pleasure. Both pretty salient to the psychoanalytically minded. But when I look at unremembered pleasure, that's the cause, right? And then I look at the effect, which is this profound influence which I take to be a formative influence on the best portion of a good man's life, on one's life, I think, as an Adult. Right. As someone who is making decisions and has not simply a function anymore of those formative influences.

Or you are and you aren't. Right? Because the formative influences set you up for being free or being good, being ethical. So in this case, which seems to involve these nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. So this is one's ethical comportment. And we get a repetition of unremembered. So I take unremembered here just to be unconscious. Right? Just to be something that happens early on in one's life. Or it's a reference to that. It doesn't have to be that. But there's a connection between our experience of nature and kind of immersion in it in a way where it's not just that we're out on a hike and we're saying, oh, look, isn't that beautiful?

But it's the entire experience, a lot of which can't even be articulated. We don't even know that it is specifically pleasurable. We can't remember it as such. So these sorts of unconscious influences, whether you want to think, be a little forced about it and think of early childhood as the psychoanalysts who think about nature as mother, or you just want to think more generally about the way pleasure isn't always conscious and subject to our attention. What I love about this repetition of unremembered is just the idea that when one is good, one does things kind of unconsciously.

It's just a mode of being. It's like a virtue ethics kind of thing. Right. I'm just disposed to do that. It's part of my character. How is that character built? It's built on pleasures themselves that are unremembered and unconscious and not precisely intentional. These things sort of get woven into my being.

31:14 Erin: Yeah, I think that's crap. But in terms of reality or how these things work, I mean, are you rehearsing that? Or do you really believe that that is the way that character works?

31:29 Wes: The theory that I do subscribe to. Right. Is that early childhood experience does have a. So I'm saying two things at once here. One of them is more of a forced psychoanalytic reading about are formative influences, which obviously included early childhood. But here the formative influence is Mother Nature. Right? There's Mother and then there's Mother Nature. And the thesis that I do accept is that those early childhood experiences do shape our character. Right. So that the whole Freudian idea is that pleasure turns into identification. That's what it means to resolve the oedipus complex, so that we are no longer just pleasure seekers.

Right. And our relationship to nature is no longer just about immediate pleasure. But we develop these identifications. Our character is built of these identifications. So we get conscience and aspiration and lots of other things. And in that sense, our attention is turned inward a little bit. So we're not just looking for external pleasure, but we learn to. It's our own conduct, right, that gives us pleasure, our own moral conduct. So I do subscribe to that. What part of it seems like crap? Am I too idealistic?

32:43 Erin: No, no, no, no, no.

32:44 Wes: Maybe it's not idealistic. Maybe it's too pessimistic.

32:47 Erin: Well, I mean, I'm criticizing Wordsworth here. I guess I have a kind of a two pronged question or Objection. The little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, are those the best portion of a good man's life? And can they be inspired by positive experiences?

33:09 Wes: Yeah, I probably share your skepticism about that part. Right. So once we think about mother Nature, then it becomes a little more tenuous.

33:16 Erin: Yeah, Right.

33:18 Wes: Can nature make you good? On the next Oprah.

33:25 Erin: I mean, it's an interesting question.

33:27 Wes: Sit people up in front of landscapes with toothpicks holding their eyes open, Nature is gonna make you good.

33:37 Erin: My first inclination was to say, of course not. And then even just as I was about to say that, I kind of swung back around. I mean, what about nature would make us good? I implied that at the beginning, or I touched on the fact that Wordsworth had these, you know, trying experiences in nature. Some of them these death defying acts that probably did teach him his limits. But there's also the beauty of nature being around something beautiful as tuning you, maybe like an instrument toward the good. And actually, the more I think of that, the more I think there's something to that. Because, you know, as we know, beauty, truth and goodness are all yoked together. I mean, I think you could still be a terrible, but I don't know.

34:20 Wes: You really are, though. Pointing to a fundamental tension within the poem, which is that there's really two natures here. One is the remembered as remembered. One is as initially experienced. And the one as initially experienced in youth, right. As we're going to find out, is all about impulse and probably sex. Right. Back then it was just an appetite looking forward, you know, a feeling and love. And it didn't have the contemplative element that memory brings to it. So memory brings maturation. So, yeah, nature makes us bad, obviously. Right.

So let's Make a distinction. If we think of nature just as the instinctual. So if we're acting, if it represents acting on impulse, the argument can be made, nature makes us bad. At the next level is the contemplation of natural beauty. But that just might be just a reminder of instinct, including sex. Right. I mean, obviously being. It's birds and bees stuff. Right. I might just be aroused by it, but at a more contemplative level, it's actually mature. And the implication here, I think, especially since he's talking to his not much younger, but younger sister, is that it becomes a vehicle actually of impulse control, of not just being rash like a young person and acting on those impulses, but it can put you into a contemplative spot.

Right. So this is what I was saying before about the Romantics. It's really not just about sensibility and feeling. It's also about sense. It can give us sense if we approach it through the lens of repetition. All these repetitions. We were talking about the lens of memory, the lens of re. Experiencing something.

36:04 Erin: This speaks to your idea too, about Mother Nature. Nature as mother.

36:09 Wes: As teacher, you got at something very important at the beginning because you were saying, memory gives us, or memory of nature gives us. Is that right? Or.

36:20 Erin: Yeah.

36:20 Wes: Did you use that word give? Because that's the one I use in my notes as well. That's interesting, because he doesn't use the word give. I don't think he talks about what he owes to them. Right, right, right. The beginning of the stanza says he's not. He's been absent from the scene, but it's not like he's been blind to it because it's lived on in his memory, it's lived on in his imagination. And I think you listed three things which I initially did as well, because I wanted to line this triad up with my two previous triads, right? It was like, oh, sensation sweet.

You got the river and the wild scene and nature. And then at a more tranquil restoration, at the more reflective level. But then also, like I said, obviously he's talking about character formation and acts of kindness. And then in the final part, this maybe capacity for meditation or for contemplation, which he puts very, very beautifully. But what is it exactly? Is it aesthetic appreciation? Is it poetic insight into the world? He talks about a serene and blessed mood where we basically seems to suspend our bodily existence, which is an odd thing for nature to do or an experience of nature to do and turn us all into soul.

So I associate this with the sky portion of the triad. But the most important part of that, I think, is the way in which he talks about the unintelligibility of the world. The way in which this contemplativeness can lift the weary weight of the world and substitute the world's basic unintelligibility, its inaccessibility, simply to dry analytical thinking with some deeper insight into the life of things. It shows us the harmony of things and gives us joy in that. So I think there's a thesis in here about the poetic and aesthetic experience. And that thesis is that it's not just about feeling, it's also about thought.

But both thought and feeling each have their limitations, right? There's only so far kind of philosophical, analytical approach can go. And there's only so far mere pleasure and the immediate moment in sensation can go. And we get this interesting fusion of them in this contemplative moment. Does that help you with this whole question of whether we should look at nature? Is it corrupting? Does it help make us good? How does it do that?

38:50 Erin: It does. The other tension I see here, or one of many, I should say, or rather another line that stops me is while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, we see into the life of things. So there's this idea, too, that we're looking, but we're not looking. We're almost like, you know, there's something rather of a Eastern religious tradition in these lines, I think, almost like breathing through your eyelids kind of thing. I'm not sure what's happening there. An eye made quiet by the power of harmony. Eyes made quiet. So I think that there's something here to this idea of tempering even the voraciousness of the eye, which is maybe connected to what you're.

39:30 Wes: Yeah, very good.

39:31 Erin: Saying the idea of taming one's. One's desire to consume even the thing that is good, perhaps, or that is. That is teaching. Like, you have to have that balance, as you're saying, between the contemplation and the activity. Am I. Is that.

39:46 Wes: No, I think this is. Yeah, this is really good. It harkens back to the practical and potentially exploitative relationship to nature versus a more passive and contemplative relationship. So it points us to the possibility of two different types of art, right? One type that's merely titillating, that is merely entertaining, that gives us pleasure in the immediate moment that feeds this. You know, I like your phrase voracious eye rather than quiets it. And then something that's more, again, focused on the Contemplative, focused on aesthetic pleasure and beauty per se. As we'll find out, nature can just be a reminder of one's impulsive youth or even spur that on, but it can also be. Put the brakes on that aesthetically.

40:44 Erin: Should we do the next stanza? Yeah. Okay. If this be but a vain belief yet, oh, how oft in darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir, unprofitable, and the fever of the world have hung upon the beatings of my heart, how oft in spirit have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye, thou wanderer through the woods, how often has my spirit turned to thee? Really interesting portrait of city life, of the fretful stirring, unprofitable. You said something about the previous stanza that made me think of this, the unprofitable stirring, and I can't remember now what it was.

41:26 Wes: Maybe it was my talk of industriousness and human activity.

41:29 Erin: Yeah, that's it. Yes.

41:31 Wes: I love this transition from darkness to the many shapes of joyless daylight. What a great image. Right? Because it's not just that nature is good for comforting us in times of loss or if we're scared, we're in the darkness, but it's good for dealing. Or memories of nature specifically. Right. This is about what we keep with us from the scene five years ago, but it's also good for dealing with life's drudgery and distractions, the fever of the world, all that stuff. It's good for getting us off our phones.

42:04 Erin: Well, I also see this portrait of city life as being unintegrated, whereas in nature we might have light and shadow, or darkness and light, or dawn and dusk. Here I see that he's kind of making. And maybe I'm overreading, but I see him making a distinction between darkness and then the many shapes of joyless daylight. I picture a blinding, shadowless, blank kind of daylight, almost like a floodlight from both directions. It isn't necessarily throwing any shadows. It doesn't have any nuance, maybe, is what I was.

42:40 Wes: It's interesting because I realized that I gave no thought to my completely inaccurate image of this line. Which is not to say that it's not also informative, which is that I just imagined shapes as shadows, as human shadows in the workaday world, or they're backlit by the sun in a blinding way, such that you only see the outline or something like that. Which is not what he's saying. It's just because of my own prejudices and the Image that popped into my mind and I never even questioned it. But yeah, he's talking about the configurations of daylight, I guess, which is something more abstract.

Is that what you were getting at? This whole shapes of daylight, not as shapes produced by daylight, but the many ways in which daytime is scarier or worse for us than darkness. Right. Darkness. We're afraid. But what the day does to us in many different ways, it's many different shapes or modes, is to do what? Rob us of spirit. Right.

43:44 Erin: That's good. Yeah.

43:45 Wes: And here now you call it the city existence, which is. I hadn't gotten the word city in my mind, but that's really important too, I think. Cause now we. Here's where the smoke could be coming from. Right. Not from the hermit's cave, but sure.

43:59 Erin: I see this as returning to the lonely rooms mid the din of towns and cities. He's going back there to form a contrast with what he's seeing. But a lot has been made, I think, in critical literature about what Wordsworth ignores here. And of course, it's not just the fact that he's ignoring Tintern Abbey, you know, the structure that's presumably right in front of him, or that he's remembering. Perhaps he's not directly looking at it. There's a lot of ambiguity about where exactly he is in relation to Tintern Abbey, because of course, the title suggests that he's a few miles above it and therefore may not be seeing it. Anyway, there's a reference to it then it doesn't appear. And also, I guess at this time the River Wye was already being pretty heavily polluted by factories. Did you read this too?

44:47 Wes: I didn't. I didn't know that.

44:48 Erin: Okay.

44:49 Wes: Yeah, well, I did see hints of this, actually. I know there's a literature on it. Yeah. On this thing.

44:55 Erin: And maybe I'm misremembering maybe, you know, maybe just the inklings of this were happening at the time. But I do know that at this time some factories were springing up around the why. So there's a lot here, I think, about what he may or may not be ignoring or choosing to sort of like cut out of the frame for the purposes of his particular point that he's making. But I do think that this is city life, what he's talking about.

45:22 Wes: Yeah. Which I think, as we were getting at before, suggests to us that he's ignoring something or overlaying something with fantasy. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that he's intentionally doing that because this poem is, in part, about the two different relations to nature. One of which, again, more practical but conceivably exploitative and associated with the smoke. And it's not that he's not aware of that, because it's right here in the poem. If he's ignoring it. The whole point of this poem is that you ignore it, Right. You use the memory when the scene is gone. When you're back in the city. You use the memory of it to sustain you.

46:06 Erin: Right?

46:06 Wes: Yeah. So don't just pretend the smokestacks aren't actually there. Not exactly that, but you know what I mean.

46:14 Erin: Right. Well, and, you know. And of course, there's also this, like, Russian nesting doll of memory, too. Because now he's actually in the place, remembering an earlier time where he's in the city, remembering where he is now. The fact that part of, you know, folded into this memory is also the unflattering and perhaps oppressive setting of city life. I mean, it is providing the contrast here to give color to the idealized vision that he's currently looking at. On the one hand, it's as if he's sort of submerged in a pool of memory and then sort of surfacing and then submerging again.

Or maybe, rather, I'd like to flip that. Maybe the idea of city life is itself the pool. Because you can't. And it's, you know, you have to hold your breath and wait to emerge into the, you know, the free air of this natural scene. But there is this back and forth between them. This kind of toggling between these two scenes. And yet also there is this Russian nesting doll quality here where he's currently in the scene. Then he's remembering not being in the scene, remembering this scene. It's sort of like a psychic archeological dig almost, right?

So he's in a place, and then he's going down a level to back when he was in city life. And then he's going down another level into remembering this. And then, of course, there's the level of then going back in time to earlier experiences and being in that moment as well. The way that memory is working here is very complex. But I think it's very. If anything, it's true about the way that our memory works. Even if the memory of the place itself is somewhat idealized.

48:03 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think you're pointing to something very important here. Which is he wants to talk about the influence of the memory of an experience of a natural landscape. And we've gone through a lot of different influences. Right. It's the immediate pleasure of it, the influence on character, what it can mean for contemplativeness, and then now the ways in which it can get us through the drudgery of city day life or just everyday mundane life. But when do we get that right? Because later on in the poem he's going to describe how memory used to just be about sensuous desire and youth.

So we might imagine, well, for our relationship to nature to be contemplative, we already have to have made the return that he's making. Now we need two experiences of the landscape, one when we're younger and then one when we're a little bit older and we can compare. But the account here is that maturation has already occurred. So what I'm saying is a little bit jumbled because I'm just trying to make sense of this out loud. But what's confusing to me and which occurred to me when you we're talking about the nesting doll aspect of this is how is it that nature goes from in the immediate moment to being a stimulus for instinct, to becoming something more reflective over time?

I guess we are sort of forced to draw on the memory of nature by its absence. Right. Which you could also give another very psychoanalytic reading to. Right. So I don't know. Did that have anything to do with what you were trying to say?

49:45 Erin: But sure, only better than what I was trying to say.

49:50 Wes: Okay, so we are going to stop there. This is going to be a two part episode. There will be a postscript to each of these parts. I think for our first postscript, what do we want to talk about?

50:02 Erin: Probably just talk about personal stuff in the postscript.

50:04 Wes: Okay, so we could give some personal updates. We might also go into a little more background on Wordsworth and the context, which probably you can, you know, you would have a lot to teach me about that. I don't know. And Erin will talk a bit about her personal relationship to Wordsworth. Maybe we'll talk about the times we've communed with nature. Who knows? But okay, thank you, thank you. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Airwave media.com.