Nature Tripping Episode 18 - Poetry and Birds in the Industrial Revolution

“Come, summer visitant, attach to my reed roof your nest of clay”.  In this episode Jo and Cathy look back to the Victorian era with poetry scholar Clara Dawson.  Clara introduces us to poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Christina Rosetti, Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, and the interweaving of human and bird worlds. What is revealed about the poets’ relationships with nature as industrialisation took grip across the country?  And how might these poems spark our own imaginations, both in terms of experiencing nature’s previous plenitude, and in forging new relationships with the living world to carry us into an uncertain future?  The poems are read by Clara and set to field recordings.  This episode was supported by the University of Manchester.