The Power of Calm: Two Wordsworth Sonnets

William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. (By comparison, the second most prolific Romantic sonneteer was Keats with a paltry 67.) Two of Wordsworth’s best-loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets with the same rhyme scheme, written in the same year, published in the same volume. Yet their messages, at least at first blush, are fundamentally opposed; one admires London’s cityscape and establishes a truce between the trappings of human innovation and the untouched features of the natural world, while the other laments a developed, industrialized, disenchanted England. How might we reconcile Wordsworth’s two minds on city life? What characterizes his so-called pagan creed? And must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune—however discordant—of our own age? Wes & Erin discuss Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” and “The World is Too Much With Us.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. By comparison, the second most prolific romantic sonneteer was Keats, with a paltry 67. Two of Wordsworth's best loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets with the same rhyme scheme, written in the same year, published in the same volume. Yet their messages, at least at first blush, are fundamentally opposed. One admires London's cityscape and establishes a truce between the trappings of human innovation and the untouched features of the natural world, while the other laments a developed, industrialized, disenchanted England. How might we reconcile Wordsworth's two minds on city life? What characterizes his so called pagan creed? And must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune, however discordant, of our own age? Today we're discussing Wordsworth. Wordsworth's composed upon Westminster Bridge and the world is Too much with us. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and this is Wes Alwan and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, Wordsworth's first published poem, it turns out, is a sonnet that he published in 1787. And then for about 14 years, I think, he didn't write any sonnets. So the 523 came. Well, I guess 522 of them or 21 of them, because I think there might have been one other early sort of juvenilia sonnet effort. So 520 plus came after 1801. And I guess the sudden resurgence of interest in the sonnet happened when he and his sister Dorothy were sitting around, I think, at Grasmere and happened to open up a volume of John Milton's sonnets. And Wordsworth was rapt and suddenly decided to write almost, you know, a whole volume's worth of his two volume poetry collection from 1807 in the Sonnet form, which I think is so odd, it's so interesting that he then just went straight into it and then wrote over 500 of them. 2:20 Wes: Wow, that's amazing. Sonnet fever. 2:24 Erin: That's right. 2:26 Wes: Have you experienced that? Have you gone through a sonnet phase? 2:30 Erin: I did. I'm thinking about sonnets a lot right now because I actually am in a workshop where we were assigned a sonnet this week and apparently I've discovered it's one of those things I can do when it's not assigned to me. I write a lot of sonnets, or I have in the past and I've had people Also sort of prescribe sonnets to me. I remember when I was first getting into writing poetry, I had a semi mentor figure, this older woman I knew who was very accomplished poet, who said, if you want to be a poet, you should write a sonnet a day. And that's how you learn to write poems. And I did not do that, but I thought it was pretty good advice. And there's something about the sonnet form, I think, that is adaptable to any situation. It's extremely flexible and it has the capacity to kind of hold whatever you put in it. It's like a Mary Poppins bag or something. Take that with a grain of salt. Obviously, many poems are not sonnets for a reason, but I do think that there's something magical about the form, especially in English. 3:37 Wes: Why did you pick these two? So we just got done with Tintern Abbey, which we did as a two parter. And then you suggested that we do these two sonnets as a third Wordsworth episode. Why these two in particular? 3:51 Erin: Well, they're a really odd pair. They sit just a few sonnets apart in that poems of 1807, that Wordsworth book that he released obviously that year. And yet they're such an odd pair. I mean, they're so opposite each other in certain ways. It's rare to see a poem in which Wordsworth is praising a cityscape in which he's looking at something man made and admiring it. Though granted he admires it as if it's a landscape and it has some pretty odd features. And then the second one is sort of atypical for him too, I think, in that I find it odd that he seems so angry. I don't know if his anger registered for you, but he seems rather angry and it seems very strident in a way. And where he goes at the end of the sonnet is really surprising. So there are two really surprising sonnets that I think make an even O. And we could have done any number of his sonnets from that volume. Like there's London, 1802, in which he directly addresses Milton's legacy in England. And you sort of see this burgeoning conservatism really at that point in which he longs for an older and quote unquote, more authentic England, which would have been really interesting. But I just think these two together are such an interesting dichotomy and yet they kind of wrap around into each other as well, I think. 5:15 Wes: Yeah, I think they go very well together. And Composed Upon Westminster Bridge is a surprising poem for me because he's praising the city, Right. And he's doing it as if the city were a natural wonder. So we get something interesting and counterintuitive there, and that will extend through the poem. There are a lot of interesting, paradoxical seeming images and thoughts in the poem. And so, you know, it's a really good extension of our discussion of Tintern Abbey as well. And this sort of relationship between nature and the human and human artifacts and buildings in the city and the way they. The way those things interact. Do you want to. Do you want to go ahead and read it and then we'll go line by line? 6:07 Erin: Sure. Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802. Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty. This city now doth like a garment wear the beauty of the morning Silent bare ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples Lie open unto the fields and to the sky all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendour, valley, rock or hill Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep. The river glideth at his own sweet will. Dear God. The very houses seem asleep and all that mighty heart is lying still. 6:58 Wes: Very nice. So Earth is not anything to show more fair. Wow. That's a pretty extreme statement. Very clickbaity. Wordsworth. 7:12 Erin: Yeah. 7:14 Wes: Interestingly, it's not anything. It's not any and thing or not together there, but anything. We are going to be given an ode to the city in a way. And the way it starts, it seems as if the city is something like a natural wonder. Right. It's just another of the things of the sublime things that one might appreciate in nature, which is obviously counterintuitive because the city is something that's made by human beings. It's human unnaturalness and artifact making at a very large scale. And then the other thing is, it's industrialized and cramped and filled with work and drudgery. Dirty, maybe crime ridden. All the ills that city suffers from. So we have to figure out how it is that as it'll become clear in this poem how it is, one might try to treat the city as if it were somehow another one of the things of nature. I was reminded of green to the very door in Tintern Abbey, the way he can treat human products and dwellings and so on as integrated into the natural landscape or overrun by the natural landscape. Something like that, sure. 8:33 Erin: Yeah. Well, you know, even before we have to figure out how he's going to Treat the city. He really buries the lead. I mean, we don't understand that this is a city even until line four. Right. I mean, I suppose the title is a clue, but Wordsworth is famous for being places and thinking of other places, so he could just happen to be on the bridge and thinking of something else. And so we really don't get what it is that he's looking at. He really could be describing anything. What is this sight? What's this thing that's so, so fair that you'd have to be an idiot not to see its beauty? I think Earth there, as you suggest, is a strange word because he is emphasizing a kind of scale which seems extreme. And fair is also an odd word, as if he's saying, let's be fair, you know, let's give this sight its due. There's, I think, the suggestion of fairness within that word in its other sense. 9:29 Wes: And also notably, it's not beauty. 9:32 Erin: Yeah. So there's something about. I mean, fairness is. Maybe Wordsworth would argue against this, and maybe he did argue against this in Tintern Abbey, but fairness is not something that we associate with nature in its second sense that I'm kind of suggesting. Right. And so there's the trappings of civilization that he's admiring and the things like justice and fairness that we get when we live in a city with other people and have to contend with others. So. 9:56 Wes: Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. Double meaning. Yeah. 10:00 Erin: Yeah. And then in the second line, dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty? So he's. Again, he's suggesting, I think, that he really should admire this. You know, he's by himself and is sort of talking to himself here. And the dullness, I think, in the second line is really contrasted with, like, the images of brilliance and the glittering quality of the city in the later part of the poem. 10:30 Wes: Yeah. 10:31 Erin: This is interesting, too. You know, it's as if he's sort of chastising himself, maybe. At least I read into it that way, because anytime that Wordsworth is admiring something man made, I think that he must be kind of forcing himself to. 10:48 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. It's a lover of nature who is perhaps, you know, surprised to be so affected by human industry. You know, this urban scene on a large scale. So, you know, the suggestion might be that romanticism itself contains the peril of dullness by ignoring the majesty of artifice on a grand scale. And here. Majesty. Right. Seems to be. Again, we're not getting beauty per se. And this sounds a lot more like sublimity, which I think the rest of the poem supports. Although the word beauty is going to be used as well or beautifully, you know, and that's. The sublime is something usually reserved for nature. Right. It's grand in scale and beautiful, but dangerous. And it reveals one smallness. It's dangerous in a way, but it's. But it's also, as Kant thought, we can appreciate it because we're not really in danger, but it's still evocative of something terrifying and dangerous. And so, you know, the typical examples of that are cliffs and the ocean and lightning and just these large, scary natural things. So to treat the city as an instance of sublimity, if I'm right in reading Majesty that way, is a really interesting way to look at this. 12:13 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right. And that makes touching even odder to me, because it strikes me as odd. I mean, are things that are majestic and sublime, do we say that they're touching? It seems an oddly domestic. You know, a word at a domestic scale. I mean, literally taken the whole idea of majesty and the sublime is something that seems out of our reach. Right. 12:40 Wes: Yeah. I think this is one of the many paradoxes of the poem, which is that by the very end of it, it's almost like when he talks about the houses seeming asleep and the river of its own sweet will gliding. It's almost like he's looking at a sleeping child or something. You know, that's almost like it's. Oh, this is very quaint. And so you get this mix, I think, of its grandness and its scale with these words like touching. It also argues. It could argue against my reading, obviously, but it could also just be an interesting tension. 13:17 Erin: No, I think you're right. I mean, there are so many paradoxes. Like the idea of. I remember trying to explain this to my students. The idea that the city is. Is like a person wearing clothing and yet it's bare at the same time. 13:31 Wes: Apparently Wordsworth thought of revising that later on because some lady in London complained about. Complained about that contradiction. But it's a really great contradiction because the idea that the city wears the beauty of the morning like a garment. So we get two ways in which the city is sort of integrated into the natural environment. The first part of it is more temporal. It's like the city is integrated into the diurnal rhythm of the day. And we're going to get some explanation of the majesty of the city in terms of Its silence, the fact that it hasn't really woken up yet, which is really important because we can imagine that the city, while awake, would not have the same majesty. Right. And once it starts producing smoke, which we find out it's not producing right now, which would be the garment of the active city. So here it's clothed in nakedness, paradoxically. Right. So the beauty of the morning and the sky, it's wearing the natural like a garment. But to wear the natural like a garment just is to be naked. And there's even more to that because. Right. The garments are a form of artifice, and they are, in a way, the original form of artifice. Right. With Adam and Eve. 14:51 Erin: Right. 14:51 Wes: The first. The first technology is the technology that covers up one's naked body once one becomes aware of that, even if it's just a leaf. Right. And the only artifice involved is taking it from the tree. So you get a recovering. Right. So the city is covered in the sense that it's already artificial, already a product of artifice. And then the recovering is the covering by nature. Right. The whole green to the very door thing, again, where to cover is to uncover. To cover will turn out to be open to the sky, open to the fields. That'll be the bareness. And it's a bareness associated with silence. 15:31 Erin: I like that. I don't know if you're giving Wordsworth too much credit, because if he wanted to edit it, he must not have been thinking about it. 15:38 Wes: No, no. Yeah, but. 15:40 Erin: But it's a subliminal genius that he has. 15:44 Wes: Yeah, well, my authorial intent is. It's not irrelevant, but it's not everything, of course, so. 15:52 Erin: But, yeah, no, that's great. 15:54 Wes: Yeah. One more thing about this idea of sublimity at work here, the sublime, one of its effects, right, is to make us feel our smallness as human beings in relation to the natural. And here one can feel that in relation to the city, if I'm right, that there's something sublime about the city and therefore to the collective. To collective effort, to the grandness inherent in human cooperation. So I just wanted to highlight this whole interesting paradox with regard to the sublime. 16:35 Erin: Yeah. So then in line six, we get this list of buildings or structures. Were you able to make something out of the combination of structures that he lists? I suppose we have. You know, we have ships, so we have this idea of the merchant life of the city or communication with the outside world. And sort of the same thing for towers, which could be, you know, towers related to churches or related to Having a vantage point to military. 17:06 Wes: Military stuff. 17:07 Erin: Right. Military. And domes. Domes are pretty. They're pretty multivalent, too, in what they might suggest. I mean, they could belong to the theaters or the temples. Or a sort of administrative building or some kind of court building or some other municipal building. And then theaters and temples, I suppose, are more straightforward. So he's sort of like, you know, with towers and domes. Seems to be sort of like picking out elements that could belong to theaters or temples, but they also are suggestive of other types of buildings, too. And so maybe he's picking at the. Or rather maybe he's taking apart those elements of towers and domes, which, if he named the. You know, the buildings to which they belonged, it would kind of undermine the peaceful. You know, the peaceful moment that he's in. I don't know. 18:06 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. You know, I'd be inclined to read this as, you know, ships, commerce, towers, military domes, Administrative, you know, city legal stuff. Theaters, entertainment, temples, religion. So you get all these different functions associated with human cooperation. That have physical embodiments in the city that are observable, right. And concrete. And also. Not just concrete, but stand in a physical relationship to the natural. They are open to the fields and to the sky. And that relationship, again, is that. That openness, right, goes along with bareness and nakedness. And then also with. With silence. I think it might be the case that we're being asked to think here that the bareness is not the way it always is. It's not the only mode for the city. And it's associated with this particular time, this transitional point in the morning. From sleeping to waking up and in the darkness. The city and human beings kind of. They share a lot more with the natural world in the sense of being asleep and like any other animal and not engaged in an activity. And that will change, though the distinction between nature and the human will become much sharper when things are active. Right. And when there's smoke in the air. And when there's no longer silence. Which I think, again, is the thing that the silence and the inactivity are the things that are so impressive here. And open up the city as something naked and a thing with these physical, concrete manifestations of what otherwise is more like a process, human activity, more like something abstract and invisible. But again, as we leave the morning, the implication is that that's going to. To actually fade away. 20:24 Erin: Yeah, I guess. London in 1802 is not the city that never sleeps. The idea of not being awake, the city not being awake. I think of a parlance that they probably didn't use in Shakespeare's day, but, oh, the city's dead right now. And I was thinking about that relationship between sleep and death and also the structures open to the natural elements, of course, makes me think of Tintern Abbey and, you know, Tintern Abbey itself as being like a dead structure. A structure taken over by nature and no longer used for what it was intended. And so there's something creepy about this to me. I mean, it's like, you know, he's taking enjoyment out of it because it's kind of a ghost town. I mean, I suppose it's less creepy than a ghost town because he knows that eventually it is going to be filled up with people and it's going to be used for the purposes it's intended to be used for. And if it was just abandoned or something, it would have a different. There would be a different gloss on it. But that, it occurs to me, is interesting, too, because it means that the sort of like, you know, the quiet that he's enjoying is necessitated by, or rather is allowed for, by the contrast to the alive, awake city that he doesn't seem to like very much. And yet without that alive, awake city, this would have a very different kind of tone. It would be creepy, and it would be. In other words, the stuff that he doesn't like necessitates the appreciation and enjoyment in the moment, but also the stuff that he doesn't like. The awake city allows for this peaceful moment and also for this serene reflection which doesn't seem to be tinged by. I'm losing it. 22:15 Wes: Yeah, No, I just have to get 22:17 Erin: to the end of that stupid sentence. 22:19 Wes: I know. 22:19 Erin: Sorry. 22:20 Wes: This is good. I'm ready to. 22:22 Erin: Okay, just cut me off. Tinged by what? I just need one more word and I can't think of it. 22:29 Wes: I think what you're getting at, there's a kind of a dark side to the poem. It's what lies on the other side in the morning. He hints at it very ingeniously in the whole idea. Right. The domes, et cetera, are all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. So that's like the. Cue the Jaws music right there. He's smokeless. Well, the smoke is coming. 22:55 Erin: Yep. 22:56 Wes: There's a sense of foreboding there. So. And then you can start to see that the poem, in a way, is an inversion of the daytime reality. So what is the garment of the city? The smoke is the proper. Metaphorically is the garment for the city. That is the right way to think about this instead of Wordsworth's very imaginative, wishful way of thinking about it. So what is the garment of the city? It's the waste product of human industry and it's something that will pollute the natural world around it and itself covers the natural world. So the idea that the city can kind of wear the purity and clarity and beauty of nature like a garment, which is to say it becomes naked in the wearing of nature, inverts this idea. It inverts the reality that the city in many ways is not naked. It's not just not naked because of the smoke. It's not naked because it is full of self conscious human beings and the products of self consciousness. It is full of artifice. And garments are artifacts, but also all artifacts in a way are garments. They cover up nature and they take natural resources. Right. The buildings are built of rock and wood and other stuff that we get from nature. So they take natural resources and they process them and they make use of them. So again, another way in which nature is actually covered up, but it's at this moment of this morning moment where you can imagine that again this very covered in the sense of artificial thing can be so integrated into the natural environment that the natural environment becomes the nudity producing garment, the denaturing, I mean, sort of the garment that takes away the artifice. 25:07 Erin: Yeah, that's I think too smokeless. Besides the suggestion of the sort of ceasefire of industrial life, it's also suggestive to me of the fact that Wordsworth wrote this, I believe, very shortly after the peace of Amiens and he was able to go back to France and see his one time mistress there and his child because of the fact that there was a brief period of peace between France and the uk. So there is like a sense of, I think deeper foreboding too, as you're suggesting, of what would end up being, I think a relatively long period of peace, but short in terms of the whole sweep of history. Because wasn't it succeeded then by the Napoleonic wars later? So yeah, so it's smokeless for now and aren't we relieved? But yeah, I think there's something military too. So, you know, the structure of this poem really interests me because one of the things that, you know, that characterizes a sonnet is of course a turn and this is a Petrarchan sonnet. And so we've just made our way through the octet and he does end the sentence at the end of the octet. He sort of unnaturally prolonged it with A lot of colons until now and some semicolons. And so then we get to smokeless air, period. And then we have the sestet. Never did sun more beautifully steep. I wonder what the turn is here. Or if it's just. If there is one. He seems to just sort of be continuing his thought or taking a different gloss on the thought, but it's not quite so different. I don't know. Does something. 26:46 Wes: Well, is the turn is smokeless? Not the turn. Just that sense of foreboding that it produces or. 26:52 Erin: Oh, that's good. Sure, sure. Then we immediately come out of that, right? With the. With the sun. 26:59 Wes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. We get a little hint of that. And then we go back to early morning fantasy land. 27:07 Erin: That's nice. 27:07 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 27:09 Erin: That always bothered me, but there it is. You fixed it 27:15 Wes: again. You know, he's returning to the earth. Has not anything to show more fair. It's a little bit like someone's protesting a little too much. And it's the same thing here. Never did sun more beautifully steep. In his first splendor, Valley rock or hill. We get an evocation, I think, of primeval times, pre human times. Right. This idea of first splendor, I think. Right. Maybe not, but that's the image I got. And now the idea is that this idea of the sun steeping something, I think is another image of natural integration of something. These things of the natural world are in a way integrated with each other, not just by physical contiguity, but by the presence of light. Interestingly enough, you need light to see things as integrated with each other and as beautiful and as all the rest. So we might read into it the role of God in creation. Right. And let there be light. Let things come into being through their disclosure in that light. And the steeping accentuates that. Right. So it's not just that the light falls on things, but things get soaked in the light. The light suffuses them, and they are all suffused with the same thing, as if it's a sort of fluid substance in which everything is like an ether, a natural world ether, that everything. You might even treat everything as sort of a vibratory product of that ether, not to get too abstract, but as a wave function of the ether in which everything is. Is steeped. So that light is not just revealing, but light is actually creative. But the startling idea here is that. Wait a minute, really, the city turns out to be a kind of completion of the natural, not a departure from the natural. Right. If it's better at the natural integration than all these much more obviously natural things like valleys and rocks. Then we're asked to see human industry as a. As a kind of completion of a natural process rather than a mere exception from it. And that I think is. There's a truth to it. Obviously human beings are products of nature. But it's also hard to accept. It's easier to accept. Right, Again in the early morning. But what happens when the air is no longer smokeless? 29:58 Erin: Right. Well, this is the tension too, that again, that I see in Tintern Abbey and that selection of that landscape, which is not, um. We talked a little bit about the fact that he might have been ignoring the pretty heavy industrial activity that was going on in that area of the river. Why? Nevermind the fact that he was choosing as the site of his meditation not a completely untouched landscape, but a landscape that bore the obvious evidence of human intervention. With the cathedral. Sorry, with the abbey, granted, one that had been overtaken by nature. But why not just choose a completely untouched landscape? Yeah, it seems to me to suggest a preoccupation with a sort of man made victory and then a corresponding defeat. Like he seems to want to see that rather than just nature, period. With no evidence of intervention, which I think is an odd impulse. 30:55 Wes: We'll say more about that. 30:57 Erin: Well, the idea that man comes in and changes the natural scene with buildings and, you know, flattening things in order to build them. In order to build structures. Right. Probably interfering a lot with the natural state of things. And then man is sort of defeated by that nature or undermined by that nature. It crawls back, as in the case of Tintern Abbey. Or there are sort of breaks in the clouds where you could see the sun like in the morning in London before the city is up. And yes, man has interfered with this nature, but there's an opportunity for nature and these structures to interact and coalesce with each other for a few glorious moments before it's ruined again. And so there's a sort of like ebb and flow or. Yeah, like advancement and retreat going on. It's strange to me. Why don't. Partially it's because of the age in which he's writing, which is this industrialized age, which is really, I think, ambivalent about human progress. Or at least the Romantics were right and concerned because of the rapid change in ways of life and quality of life as a result of that. But I do think that what is he trying to do? Is he trying to redeem human intervention in this way or what? Because I think it's an odd choice. 32:22 Wes: Yeah, I think that's very good. And I think part perhaps of the solution to that is the idea that intervention is bivalent. And we saw that in Tintern Abbey as well, right? So there's the. The intervention of creating structures and the arts and artifice and technology. And then there's the more contemplative intervention. And we'll see this in the next poem as well. I think, you know, there's the more passive intervention of just being self conscious and conscious of one's environment. And this whole idea in Tintern Abbey, right, the world is half created by us. These ideas that are evocative of German idealism and the notion that being, you know, there's being as it is in itself, which we can associate with the natural right. The rock not conscious at all for billions of years, just sitting there by itself, not comprehended by anyone. And then there's the kind of being that comes about through the consciousness of human beings, which is to say it is being. And perhaps nature from the Hegelian point of view, fulfills itself in self consciousness. So it's not just human beings coming to know nature, the natural landscape and the rock, but it is nature coming to know itself through human beings. So nature comes to be not just in itself, but in and for itself. And so being as we comprehend it is also partly a product of our cognitive faculties of the way something in itself interacts with our eyes and our ears and our brains. And so that the product, the result is co produced and so naturally artificial in some sense. So there's the intervention that maybe pollutes nature, that covers it in smoke. And then there's the intervention that plays a role in creating nature as we know it. And if you zoom out on the Hegelian point of view, then it's God, you know, it's spirit or gods or some super subject's self consciousness that is implicated in this creation. And human beings, you know, particularly human beings just sort of partake of it. So I think your idea of the ambivalence is spot on because it's. It's not just factories that are the product of human self consciousness, but it's the arts, right? It's culture. It's things that we might see as the fulfillment of the natural right. A landscape painting, is that. Is it merely a deviation from the natural or is it the fact that there can be beings that actually appreciate nature? Can that be its kind of culmination or its. So one might treat the city in the Same way as something that can be more beautifully steeped than the mere rock before the advent of the human. 35:25 Erin: And in that same vein, I think it allows for never feeling a calm so deep as the contrast of the bustling city. Right. Like the loud noises of human activity, I think allow for that contrast to be more extreme, which is why he's feeling this incredibly deep calm. Because you don't get that kind of calm exactly when you're already in a calm place. Right. So it is. 35:53 Wes: Yeah. Or when you're just a rock. 35:55 Erin: Right, right. 35:57 Wes: Rocks are very, very calm, but they can't be as deeply calm as a human being. 36:02 Erin: That's right. 36:03 Wes: Returning from their workday to sit on the rock and contemplate the valley or whatever. 36:08 Erin: Something about the way you said that reminded me of Charlie Brown Halloween, I got a rock. And then we get the river gliding at its own will, presumably because it hasn't been impeded by a. Well, I guess dams don't sleep, but traffic. 36:26 Wes: Yeah, that's exactly what I thought as well, but it took me a minute to figure that out. That's a really interesting idea. Yeah. And it's not just of its own will, Its own sweet will. So what I find interesting here is that the overall meaning of the line is that its will is free in a sense. Right. Because it's not impeded just by human traffic. But he doesn't say own free will. Own sweet will. Which to me is evocative of something innocent and childlike. 36:58 Erin: Yeah. And yet I like that too, because free and sweet, they have that suggestion of the other, the assonance. I think you can hear the echo of free in sweet. 37:09 Wes: Yeah. It's worth noting that he's anthropomorphizing here, the natural world. And I think that's the first time that happens. Right. And then in the next lines, we're going to jump from the anthropomorphizing nature to anthropomorphizing houses and human artifice in order to get us a little hint of actual human beings here. Which we haven't gotten yet. Well, we gotten hints before, but in the final lines of the poem we get a much more. It's still indirect, but a more direct evocation of the fact that there are human beings here in the city about to wake up. 37:52 Erin: Right. And I think there's something paradoxical in this houses being asleep line, too. Well, first of all, I think it's interesting that it does have that chime with sweet and sweet will. I mean, it's Not a direct. It's not rhyming with that line, but he has, you know, steep, deep, and then sweet will asleep. As if to suggest that the houses want to be asleep. Right. That that is their will because of that little chime. But the paradox that I see is the fact that, okay, the very houses seem asleep. Well, what would make a house asleep, I assume would be to be empty, and yet people are sleeping in those houses. 38:31 Wes: I was just thinking of the. Just the fact that. Yeah, that the people are asleep and that there's no activity in them. So if the house were active, if there were bustling, if there were people going in and out and making dinner and working, that would be what it means for the house to be awake. 38:48 Erin: Sure, yeah. Maybe I'm overreading, but it seems to me that the idea of the houses being asleep also suggests a kind of emptiness. But I suppose it could be asleep in a. In a cozy co. Mingling with the people asleep in that house as well. 39:06 Wes: Yeah. 39:07 Erin: With the last line we get. And all that mighty heart is lying still. All that mighty heart is interesting. 39:18 Wes: It's a line that takes a second to figure out, right. So we get this quick move from anthropomorphizing the river to anthropomorphizing the houses. And now it sounds like he's doing it to the city as a whole. So we go from the river being left alone by human beings to these households, which are so the houses. And that's the one thing he doesn't mention. Up with the ships, towers, domes, and all the rest of it. And these are the things that are evocative of families, which is to say proto Ur communities are proto cities. Right. The very core components or units of the city. And then we suddenly zoom out again and we get the idea that there's a kind of collective heart. I think I'm. You know, tell me if you disagree with that, that the heart of the city is that there's one heart for the city, and in that it's lying still, which kind of straddles the line. And maybe this goes towards your reading, your initial reading of houses, but it straddles a line between merely being asleep and then being dead. Right. Because hearts don't normally stop while you're. While you're asleep. But what I thought was interesting here is just the movement from anthropomorphizing the natural to doing it to the collective. Right. Because it may seem odd to say that we can anthropomorphize the human collective and we start doing that by doing it to its visible signs, the houses. But it's true because the collective is not itself a subject, it's not itself an individual. The. The city as a whole only metaphorically could have thoughts and feelings and a heart. And yet somehow human subjectivity is a inter subjective thing. It is written into the collective in some way as a kind of information. So that's what I took away from that last line. 41:16 Erin: I really like this idea that you brought up that in line eight there is the turn before we get to line nine. And then, and then we sort of have like a second verse, same as the first kind of moment where we return to the beginning and then we have, you know, at the end, I think, the smokeless air. We also end with death again. So I see that as a kind of reprise as well of the idea of smokelessness or this sort of seemingly benign but potentially creepy implications. Which is interesting too, because you're cycling through two. It's like the poem has two life cycles or goes through the course of two days or two lifetimes or two working days. 41:55 Wes: Right. 41:56 Erin: Where the poem gets up and goes through something and then ends in a death and then gets up and cycles through it again. 42:03 Wes: Yeah, well, again, you know, there's that. The ambivalence that you noted. Do we want that heart to lie still forever so that natural beauty can be natural beauty and the river have its own sweet will and the smoke not rise above the city? In other words, do we need to get rid of human beings? Some people, their worship of the environment and the natural world. It goes so far as to either implicitly or even explicitly sometimes suggest that, well, the earth would just be better off without human beings who are ultimately just going to destroy it, going to use up all its resources. But on the other hand, if human beings weren't around, there'd be no one to enjoy it in the way that only human beings can enjoy it. 42:49 Erin: So we'd all be rocks. 42:51 Wes: Yep. I mean, to be animals. But you know, they can't, can they really appreciate nature? You know, no animal is ever going to go to a museum and look at a landscape. 43:06 Erin: I can't even get my cats. 43:09 Wes: No animal is going to stand on the edge of a cliff staring out into the majestic valley with a feeling of. With aesthetic feelings. Whether they are the beauty of the valley or the sublimity of the valley, it's unavailable to non humans. 43:25 Erin: I think that my cat takes some enjoyment of nature when she's torturing a vole. But then I can't get her to see her own reflection in the mirror. That's one of my big problems that I have. I think she's a really intelligent cat. Then I put her in front of a mirror and she couldn't care less. So anyway, it's hilarious. 43:47 Wes: Yeah. Animals are so dumb. 43:52 Erin: No self consciousness there. Maybe she's just saying, I know I look good. You don't have to try and force me to acknowledge it. 43:58 Wes: Yeah, you gotta make a choice. You can be natural or you can enjoy the natural. It's hard to be both. All right, so shall we move on to our next selection, Too Much With Us? 44:15 Erin: Okay, I hesitate to read this because it seems like an advertisement for turning off this podcast. Okay, here we go. The world is too much with us. The world is too much with us. Late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers Little we see in nature that is ours we have given our hearts away a sordid boon. The sea that bears her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours and are upgathered now like sleeping flowers. For this, for everything we are out of tune. It moves us not. Great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn so might I, standing on this pleasant lea have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 45:08 Wes: All right. The world is too much with us Late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers so late and soon. That's a very interesting. 45:19 Erin: It is. I don't. And then our talk of Earth from the very first line of Westminster Bridge also has me thinking about world. The world is too much with us. Like worldly things, I guess. But there is a kind of. Again, a kind of a strange meaning in that the world could also contain the natural world, which he's arguing is not with us enough. Right. 45:42 Wes: Yeah. 45:43 Erin: But this late and soon is maybe the most difficult part of the poem for me. What do you make of it? 45:50 Wes: Well, it took me a while to come up with a theory, but I suppose in the end I associate late with getting and soon with spending. So the idea is that in our acquisitiveness we feel like we are late in a way. There's a sense of urgency, there's a sense of. And even in our day to day busyness, we don't have enough time. So there's a sense that we lack and that we very urgently need to get something but then the soonness goes with the spending, which is to say that. Well, I think there's two ways of looking at that, which is that the things that we acquire, we squander in some way. But the suggestion at the end of the line is that our getting is a squandering. It is a spending in the sense we lay waste to our powers, which will turn out to be powers of contemplation, powers to be put into a passive, appreciative. Maybe passive isn't the right word, but an appreciative relationship to nature. So that world. I think you're right in a way. It has two meanings. Right. The world is too much with us in the sense of worldly things. But he wants us to be with the world in the sense of. In the way of appreciating it. But the other way is a more exploitative way in which we overpower natural resources. We take them for ourselves, we use them. 47:24 Erin: Yeah, I like that. You know, because lay waste our powers. I mean, you know, power and industrialization seem to go hand in hand. So you might say Wordsworth. What are you talking about? We're more powerful than ever before. We're more efficient than ever before. Right, yeah. So I like that kind of double meaning too that you're suggesting. 47:44 Wes: Yeah, the idea that it's too much with us. It's a very nice irony given the trajectory of the poem, which is to say that his claim is that it's not enough with us. It's not enough with us by being too much with us. So if we are too much with nature in the sense of merely making use of it and turning it into artifacts and being involved in the exchange and trade of those artifacts, you know, all the day to day, busy world stuff that submerges the natural. There's a way of being with the natural in which it's submerged in our economic activity, let's put it that way, or even our cultural activity. And then there's a way of being with nature in a way in which we are submerged in it. We are in it. And his suggestion is that it may seem that our mastery of nature makes us more powerful, but it's actually our powers lie in being in nature, integrated into it, appreciating it. And so you can see, Right, the crossover with the previous one. 48:45 Erin: Right, yeah. And then in line three seems like a continuation of that thought. Presumably we put our grubby little hands all over nature. It's fully ours. We've written ourselves into it and all over it. And Used it to our own ends, and yet at the same time, it's. Now we don't recognize it. 49:00 Wes: Yeah. So we see little in nature that is ours, as I think you've pointed out. You know, the paradox here is that we treat nature as if it were ours and that the boon comes from making it ours, mastering it. When in fact, what we squander here, what we lose, is the idea that nature is ours. And the. Again, the more contemplative sense. So we lose the riches of nature in the sense that we cannot be. We lose our ability to be focused on it, to enjoy the natural world in the same way. 49:39 Erin: Yeah. And I think there's something maybe of my cat not recognizing herself in the mirror. Right. Like, we are nature too. So I think, like, ownership and this idea of looking into nature and we're supposed to see something that in the Wordsworthian ideal, resembles us somehow. Maybe that's the Rousseau in Wordsworth coming out. 49:59 Wes: Right. 50:00 Erin: But there's supposed to be something natural in us that we're seeing and recognizing as being a part of us. I guess that's just another way of saying what you've already said. But the line four, we've given our hearts away. A sordid boon. Well, I thought our heart is there and it's just dead. But anyway, a sordid boon is really silly sounding. I hate that line. 50:25 Wes: Oh, yeah. 50:26 Erin: I think it sounds awful. But sordid boon is so interesting. I don't have anything to say about it. I just think it's dumb. 50:36 Wes: I might have something to say about that, but only after we read the next few lines. 50:40 Erin: Okay, so the sea that bears her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours. There's an interesting. At least in line five. I think there's a really interesting idea of exploitation going on there. Perhaps the sea is. It's innocent on the one hand, then at the same time, the moon is sort of using the sea. There's a relationship between the moon and the sea. It's symbiotic. It may even be a kind of a marriage. And yet at the same time, we know that this is also being exploited by people who are, like, not letting the river glide at its own sweet will or are harnessing that power and using it for ill. So am I wrong to read something sort of sexually exploitative that he's trying to get at here, or am I just a sicko? 51:33 Wes: You're definitely a sicko. 51:34 Erin: But okay, I guess both could be true. 51:37 Wes: I hadn't Thought of that, I guess the way I was reading this, I thought, wow, it's really interesting that, you know, I was taking the sea bearing her bosom as like the sea confiding in the moon. Which is a really interesting idea because it suggests that the sea could be confessing something and that it's something that we might overhear, that we might listen to, or that nature might in a way confide in us. So that when we. Our loss of powers with respect to nature includes the inability to hear what nature is saying. So that when we ignore nature, it's not just ignoring something inanimate, but it's like ignoring the subjectivity of another person. And the same thing with the winds, right? So the howling of the winds, you could put in parallel, if I'm right, that bearing the bosom is kind of a confiding, then the howling is a complaining. So instead of a confiding, we get this kind of rough complaint from the winds, except that they were howling at night and now they're up, gathered, I take it, during the daytime, which this is a beautiful image, but the idea that they were, you know, they were howling at all hours, but now they are upgathered like sleeping flowers. And it's a little unclear to me exactly what that means. Maybe, you know, maybe the. The idea is that the air is calm now and that the roughness and dangerousness, you know, again, maybe even the sublimity of the howling winds grounds. What happens, the peacefulness of the day. And what we do is we take that peacefulness and we reproduce a pseudo sublimity within it in the form of busyness. That's the sordid boon. So we make what otherwise might be sweet and peaceful into something rough again. And we do that because we're ignoring nature, including its dangerous aspects. And so we reproduce a kind of different, sordid form of dangerousness within our civilized environment. Or maybe we try to capture it and control it so that the whole acquisitive urge, which seems like it's. That we master nature, right, in order to get rid of danger. In fact, we undo our own peace, a peace that we might have from nature. Because it's a kind of. There's two moments to it. There's the dangerous part and then there's the appreciative part. And so we lose the capacity to appreciate, which is its own form of. Own form of danger. And the danger there, right, is a. It's a spiritual danger. So we get rid of some material dangers, but we put ourselves in spiritual danger. But that's maybe a bit of a reach, you know, just going back to the sexual part of that. I'd have to think about it. Right. I produce such a strong reading now, it's hard for me to. I have to revise it in order to think about the sexual implications of that. And maybe I willfully ignore them. Too dangerous. 54:52 Erin: Right, Right. Well, I don't know. I mean, you know, bosom isn't necessarily a sexy word, but I was just thinking about that. The implied relationship and then the broken relationship that human intervention implies. But I agree with you. I love the sleeping flowers. It's so great. 55:12 Wes: Was that your reading of it as well? Because it's another confusing one. The idea of peaceful, non. Windy time that follows the windy time. 55:20 Erin: Right. I didn't have nearly so developed a reading as you. I just think of windmills and then Dorothy falling asleep in the poppies, but obviously that's not in there. Windmills are, but not poppies. And, you know, the Wicked Witch of the West. But anyway, my favorite line maybe is for this, for everything, we are out of tune. And I was thinking about that first of all about what for this refers back to. And then he qualifies it with for everything. So there's this idea, I think, of that brokenness, like between the sea and the moon, or as you're saying, between the howling winds and the lack of wind, there's an out of stepness or there's a. One is not logically leading to the other, perhaps like a kind of a broken. I don't know, a metaphor, a broken natural process that's happening here, rather, that's not happening here. 56:17 Wes: It's interesting because I was thinking of this in terms of the powers that we've laid waste to, our capacity to appreciate these things and to see them for what they are, maybe. And that includes the sea bearing our bosom and the howling winds and then the up gathering that follows. But here, the way he's putting it, and I hadn't thought about this, is in terms of tuning so that we are not vibrating sympathetically with it, which is an interesting way of understanding the capacity to contemplate and appreciate nature. 56:55 Erin: And there's also the. Not just the vibrating, but the idea that it's playing some kind of music that we're no longer playing. But then there's the complication of the. You know, how do we know it's out of tune? Because of our own perception, which is related to this idea of music and of things that only humans can perceive. As you Were suggesting with this idea that we're the only ones who have the capacity to appreciate nature. We're also the ones who've invented this idea of music. And the whole, like the poem itself is an argument against itself. That's what I see here. The music of the sonnet, the music that the sonnet creates is very much a studied one. The result of human intervention on language, which is itself a human intervention in the world. And so the idea of tuning and music and all of these things I see as being. You know, he's suggesting that there's a natural music, but you can't kind of suggest that there's a natural music to the world that we shouldn't interfere with and put that in a sonnet, which is, you know, up gathering the sleeping flowers in a way. Right. 58:01 Wes: Yeah. Again, yeah. It's that paradox of the artificial quality of. We want to talk about returning to nature, appreciating nature. But that in itself is a highly artificial thing in some sense. But I was thinking of my sympathetic vibration reading of out of tune. The idea is that. So nature doesn't move us. It moves us not because we don't vibrate sympathetically. So it's producing its music, but we can't be moved by it because we are not tuned into the right frequency. In a sense, the idea here seems to be that our power is not in the possession of nature, but it's in being part of nature. Or in being in a more passive, seemingly passive relationship to nature, being moved by it. Right. So our power is not in being movers, movers and shakers, but in being in our capacity to be moved. And that means being in tune in some way. So we can't be in nature and part of it. And obviously, in a. I think this is what you're pointing out in some sort of sense of returning to being mere animals. Right. Without language, without self consciousness, if we want to be in nature, we have to, in a way, do it obliquely. We have to vibrate sympathetically. We can't just be in there. 59:30 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking about the fact that in my intro, I kind of prefigured this conversation. I said, must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune, however discordant, of our own age? And so I kind of wanted. I just wanted to touch on the discordancy of the current tune. I like what you're talking about with this vibrating frequency. And I hate to keep returning to a more musical reading of that line because I think I agree with you, but I Was also thinking of this idea that, you know, the modern age is playing one kind of music, the modern age meaning Wordsworths, and the natural world is playing another kind of music. And so there's a discordancy, there's a lack of integration. It's not the polyphony maybe, which is like creating the proper chords of highly ordered music, like a medieval chant or something like that. Again, I think of Tintern Abbey, but it's almost like some sort of industrialized John Cage kind of music that he wouldn't recognize as being tuneful, but I guess that few do recognize as being tuneful. And so that contrast between like the two songs that are singing, I mean, I can hear truly that industrialized music that makes use of those types of mechanistic, non expressly musical sounds in a song. I can hear that going on in the background, that clink, clink, clink, or you know, some monstrous factory making its sounds and turning over and growling or, you know, something like that. And so the idea that we're out of tune with that, we're now playing a different song. We can't hear that song that's happening in the natural world. We can't hear those winds howling. 1:01:18 Wes: Yeah. We're not moved to play along with that. We play to our own tune. 1:01:26 Erin: Yeah, Right. 1:01:28 Wes: So there's the music. Yeah. That comes from us, that we. And then there's the music that we might participate in that comes from nature. 1:01:38 Erin: Well, and I think that musical metaphor prefigures the turn and the, you know, the sestet of the poem in which he would rather be playing a tune which is maybe out of date, which he knows is not the right tune per se. Right. In quotes, but which is actually harmonizing with nature. And I mean, you can argue that lots of different religions harmonize with nature, but he goes to the pagan creed. And I wonder. 1:02:12 Wes: So I was gonna ask, why does he have to become a pagan? 1:02:16 Erin: Right. You know, that too seems out of tune in its way, I guess, when you think about it. Right. The idea that it's not nature, but in fact it's also magical and enchanted. That also seems to be not looking at the thing square in the face. 1:02:30 Wes: I don't know, I think I get the basic association, which is that in pagan religions you have multiple gods who in a way are representatives of the forces of nature. So Zeus. Right. Not just creator, but the lightning bolts come from Zeus. And what's his face? Triton, son of Poseidon, representative of the sea. Right. So you get these divine figures that are very closely associated with the natural. And the critique of this, and someone like Nietzsche, right, was famous for this type of critique, is that as philosophy and ultimately religion develop, we are taken out of this more natural relationship because we are taken out of the instinctual. So this is also Rousseauian kind of idea. But civilization ends up corrupting us. And correlation to that is Christianity, which is very strongly associated with the second moment in civilization. So we get the ancient Greeks and then we get the Judeo Christian. And the Judeo Christian is somehow supposed to be corrupting in the sense that it is anti instinctual. So the wish here is to go back to this more. You still get a relation to the divine, but it seems to be more in line with the natural. I don't know. So that's the basic. To me, the basic association. But I still thought it was kind of funny, you know, do we really have to do that to get back 1:04:07 Erin: in tune or part of this, I think, is performative, of course. I mean, first of all, these are just incredible images. It goes to such a high pitch of rhetoric at the end. I really find it actually incredibly powerful and quite different from his normal happy, you know, relatively sedate kind of tone. So I find it thrilling. And I think that that acceleration and the rhetoric is mirrored by the extreme suggestion, which, again, I take as being performative. Not that we shouldn't take him at his word, but I think there's something going on with there. 1:04:46 Wes: You're making me think I've kind of given a little bit of a misreading. Because what he's saying is, I'd rather be. So he's not saying I need to be in order to get back in tune. But if it were the case that getting back in tune required me going to this extreme, becoming a pagan, then that's what I would do. But that doesn't imply that there aren't more modest measures for getting back in tune. So what it's there to do is to convey, you know, I think you. You were right to talk about the anger, but he wants us to understand how outrageous it is or how regretful it is, the depth of that loss, that being out of tune, that being not moved. 1:05:25 Erin: All right, well, I think we'll leave it off there. We'll continue our conversation in the postscript. 1:05:31 Wes: Okay, great. 1:05:33 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 1:05:43 Wes: [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.