Wordsworth
Returning to Nature
They looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.
-Exodus 16-10
The great Romantic bard William Wordsworth loved nature. To him, nature was a place to return to, not just in a physical sense, as in a sojourn or expedition, but in an emotional and spiritual sense. Returning to nature meant to revitalize an essential part of one's humanity through the cathartic and transformative powers of nature. To help unpack this concept, this essay will analyze two of Wordsworth's poems: "Nutting" and "The World is Too Much With Us."
"Nutting" is a Conversation poem, in the Coleridge tradition, between the Narrator and his Maiden (Rumens). Over the course of the poem, he's tells his Maiden about a day he spent gathering nuts in the forest and how, after gathering the nuts, he felt a sense of guilt for needlessly taking mother nature's bounty. He ends the poem with a warning, telling his Maiden (and by extension the reader) to be careful on how she treats nature because there's a "spirit in the woods," meaning that there's something sacred and special about the woods.
If "Nutting is a warning to readers to treat nature with respect, then Wordsworth's Petrarchan sonnet - "The World is Too Much with Us" - is a complaint about the lack of appreciation for Nature's beauty and vitality. The speaker laments industrial progress and wishes that people would reconnect with nature.
While it's important to understand the plot and action of these stories, where the strong bond created from returning back to nature most clearly manifests is in the language Wordsworth uses in the poems. The speaker in "Nutting" begins the poem by reflecting on his affinity for nature, "It seems a day / (I speak of one from many singled out) / One of those heavenly days which cannot die." The use...
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