William Wordsworth’s poetry, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, are full of wonder at nature – from ‘the meanest flower that blows’ to the streams and lakes, crags and farms, and the people that work them. Can they help us to make the imaginative leap that we need today, placing conservation not only in daily life, but deep in our bones, in our being?
To create an environmental policy, we asked ourselves, ‘what do we understand by Wordsworth’s thoughts on the environment?’. Key themes emerged, particularly the interdependence of the natural world and human life. These are a few of many lines of thought and we hope that they will prompt more.
1. Wordsworth’s admiration, love and sometimes fear of nature reminds us that it is something to be respected, noticed and nurtured, not taken for granted or abused.
2. Though the early poem ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house’ doesn’t say anything specific about caring for the land or fighting the destruction of the landscape, the whole poem is a love letter to the Earth, celebrating the joy that it gives us and demonstrating how we are tied to it by love. The lines are so simple and hopeful – he feels the life emanating from the environment.
There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field …
… Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth,
—It is the hour of feeling.
3. ‘Feeling’ is the key. This is not sentimental. Wordsworth often felt almost mystically part of the world around him, not separate from it. His poetry advocates a ‘Nature-led’ response to landscape and the environment, in which we should take our cues for engagement from the natural world itself.
4. Looking back across two centuries of environmental damage, we can see the deep significance in Wordsworth’s words. If that link with nature is broken – if we deny that we are a part of the natural world and see ourselves as its lord and master – our lives are indeed worthless: we cannot survive.
5. ‘We live by admiration and by love’, Wordsworth writes in The Excursion, 1814. The love of nature leads to love of mankind, providing an underpinning argument in favour of love and kindness.
6. Wordsworth values nature’s sanctity and power in contrast to the ‘the mean and vulgar works of Man’. Nature is transcendental; it elevates us, gives us the power to ‘see into the life of things’. It also restores us when ‘The world is too much with us’, giving us the calm and perspective to judge the rush of the commercial world, and find ‘true value’.
7. Wordsworth’s poetry is a source of wisdom on the relationship between the local and the global. How does love for a particular place like Grasmere –’made for itself… unity entire’ – mobilize concern for the broader ecosystem, indeed for the biosphere? How might the Lake District’s designation as a National Park and World Heritage Site help us access different ways to think about preservation and sustainability?
8. Wordsworth couldn’t have known that his writing was at the start of the Anthropocene – he can’t have imagined a world where we could kill species of insects or plants on a huge scale to suit ourselves. We often quote his poem ‘The Tables Turned’, but the sense that we have meddled to our cost rings true:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
We have meddled – the economy of nature that has served us well is being murdered. We need admiration and love to restore our values and to place us within the world and not superior to it.
