Nicholas Higgins 06/05/2020

 On Nature and Poetry

‘Come forth into the little things, let nature be your teacher’, William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned (1798)

For the ‘Romantic’ poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, nature was the means to express authentic personal feeling, stimulate creativity and trigger the imagination. Living amidst the Industrial Revolution, it revitalised the Romantic poet in a way that crowded, polluted urban life could not. So inspired by the sight of daffodils after a walk with his sister, William Wordsworth went on to pen these famous lines:

“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

— William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1802)

Trapped indoors today, many of us are all too familiar with Wordsworth’s ‘vacant’ and ‘pensive’ moods on his couch. Yet to the cynic, poetry that talks of nature in such an inflated way just sounds corny. The idealist in me, rather, thinks that Wordsworth knew nature better. He understood that being in it, breathing, hearing and smelling it, is an elemental part of existence, and what it means to be human. 

Ever greater urbanisation, along with the burgeoning of indoor and virtual recreation options, have disconnected us from the outdoors many times more than Wordsworth’s Britain. TV in the 50s, video games in the 70’s, the desktop computer in the 90s, and now the ubiquitous smartphone. When information and entertainment is instant, in your pocket and in your face, why bother going outside?

Severed from the land, we are imprisoned with clocks and enclosure and routine. Chained like a horse to an iron pin in the ground, we flock to masses of grey and steel, throw ourselves into property and scramble up career ladders. It doesn’t take a genius to witness this amongst the joyless, instagram scrolling mob on the 8:30 to Canon Street. To be in nature, by contrast, is to strip away the manufactured lens of modernity, with its screens, engines, switches, 0s and 1s. Modern industrial society has divorced modern man from the primal landscape of blood, wood, muck and fire. We developed in the wild, the free roaming human mind needs it still.

As scientists have long pointed out, people are healthier, physically fitter and better adjusted, and children’s schoolwork improve, if they have access to countryside, parks or gardens. When their hospital room had flowers and foliage, post-surgery patients needed less painkillers and reported less fatigue. Amongst recent campaigns for greater awareness of mental health, might we direct ourselves outdoors, and not to Freud or Prozac?

Putting my money wear may mouth is, I wrote this article beneath a Japanese Cherry Blossom tree in our garden. Gazing at its flowers sailing down to the earth, forced unto me some pretty lofty thoughts. I reflected how that tree so curiously captured nature’s union of permanence and temporality. Enjoy those white blossom, for as quickly as they have shined, they will fall and fade away. Truly, ‘the flower that smiles today tomorrow dies’. Yet that same blossom would return with a regularity and a greater permanence than any man could covet.

Seasons change but will consistently return. We change, but we always know that there is an unordained time when we will cease to be. As the Persian poet Hafaz noted, our lives should be like the blossom. Bloom magnificently, ‘with bright laughing lips, a friendly faced look’, then return to the earth from which we are formed. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. But be bright, even if brief.

A friend suffering from depression remarked to me similar feelings. When he swims in the ocean he feels its power and its size. Both healthy reminders of his fragility. Nor does the ocean care for the petty trivialities of his daily life. It is wonderfully oblivious to the size of his bank account, or whether he’s a doctor, lawyer or dentist. Though its water is perpetually in motion, the ocean has existed since time immemorial, and it will outlast him. Nature, in short, puts anxious lives in perspective.

In an Ode to a Nightingale John Keats also sought escape from the ‘drowsy numbness’ of his heartache. From his mortal body, ‘where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs/ Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin and dies’. Respite he found only through union with the humble Nightingale, ‘Away! Away! For I will fly to thee!’

In an Ode to a West Wind, Percy Shelley is ‘chained and bowed (by a) heavy weight of hours’. He too sought union with nature, not in a bird, but in a gusty west wind: ‘Be thou Spirit fierce / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ For the Romantic poets of old, nature not only sustained their mind and body, it was the balm to their soul. So to all those feeling cut adrift during quarantine, I say be like Keats and Shelly, step outside!

Even for those that don’t suffer from the Romantics tortured thoughts, greenery brings a coolness of mind. Having a classic car that breaks down every couple months, I’ve been left stranded more than once on a motorway hard shoulder. There you are left, contemplating not a Cherry Blossom, but the lorries whistling past you. M25 construction managers however had the mercy of building their hard shoulders near woods, grassy knolls and open fields. While I wait for the AA now, instead of cursing myself for owning a classic car, I’ve taken to rambling around these small tracts of nature. Even amongst roaring traffic, and though it’s probably illegal, how it lifts my mood indeed.

I try emulate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Young Werther…when he ‘lies in the tall grass beside a rushing brook, and becomes aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground’. Even Werther knew that nature’s gift is free and simple. We don’t have to pay for it or work for it, we simply have to lay down in the grass, open up our senses and enjoy it.

Daniel Defoe once said that ‘all of our discontents for what we want spring from want of thankfulness of what we have’. In an ever so muddled world, perhaps we ought to start appreciating nature the way poets always have. Be thankful that when the world goes crazy around you, you can still get lost in a rose, listen to a chirruping nightingale, or wonder at the grandeur of mountains and oceans.  Nature furnishes these small, vitalising moments that make life worth living. No malignant virus can take this away from you. In my mind, the dearth of this Romantic mindset toward nature, and the resulting disregard for it, has played no small part in the worlds current climate change crisis.

So to anyone that says poetry is for the pretentious dilettante, think again and read between the lines. In Romantic poetry we enter into a mind acutely aware of the power and purpose of the natural world. Whilst we might not share their same fervour, their attitude to nature is as relevant today than ever before.