The World Is Too Much With Us

The Rooster wanted to come out for the weekend.  I’m a self-confessed pain in the environmental arse when it comes to fuel.  I can’t take a drive unless I consider my carbon tyre-track.  Am I able to do other errands on this trip?  Could it wait?  Could I walk?  The Rooster coming out for the weekend involved a bus trip from Cairns.  Surely a bus is a more energy efficient way to travel. 

     After I made peace with nature for my vicarious recreational abuse of fossil fuels, the Rooster arrived on the bus on our tenth day of rain.  What better place to spend a wet weekend than the farm.

     The Rooster is a giant, silent presence that moves slowly, mostly towards the sofa where he sprawls or to the kitchen to refuel his ever-growing body.  The Rooster never wastes words.  When he finally talks, it’s for good reason.

     “Mum,” he said on Saturday morning.  “Can you help me with my English?”

     I’ve always found it difficult to help the boys with their work at boarding school.  Email and the phone is no substitute for presence. Worse, the Rooster tends to ask for help the night before his assessment is due.  I can’t do anything, but a quick edit for spelling and grammar.  I am still working with him on his time management, but time has little relevance for him apart from Time to eat, Time to sleep, Time to go hunting, Time to play footy and so on.

     So I was surprised to learn his English draft was due on Tuesday.  The Rooster has never been an early bird and I was excited to actually have a chance to help him, in time and place.

     His task was to analyse a poem from history and relate it to a contemporary issue with reference to the historical context and author’s circumstances.

     He had chosen the following poem and I read only a few lines before I felt I was on a dinghy in the Torres Strait in heavy seas and boxing tide with a bad case of motion sickness.  I’ve never been keen on poetry which stems from pure ignorance and a little fear of words that aren’t garden-variety Standard Australian English. I seriously regretted not paying attention when poetry was on the class menu thirty years ago.

The World Is Too Much With Us

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

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!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered 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 wreathèd horn.

     The Rooster saw my distress, but he had it all worked out and gave me a run down.  He had annotated the poem, defined the whacky words like “sordid boon,” “lay waste our powers” and “bares her bosom” and checked out the identities of Proteus and Triton (I was thinking a South African flower and a Mitsubishi ute).  We Googled a bit of history and I could see why the teacher set the task.  That’s when I started to get very depressed about the state of our world.

     Wordsworth wrote the poem in the early 19^th century.  He is lamenting the First Industrial Revolution which led humanity away from the glory of Nature towards machines, chemicals, mining of coal and iron ore, gas lighting, manufactured products and the construction of roads, rail and waterways.  People flocked from the countryside to the cities to get work in the factories and enjoy a better standard of living for the first time in English history. 

     Wordsworth was a Romantic poet who wrote, not mushy declarations of love, but about the beauty of Nature, favouring emotion and intuition as opposed to the current trend of the time (the Age of Enlightenment) which praised reasoning and analytical thinking.  That he capitalised Nature suggests to me he’s keen on it having proper noun status rather being an ordinary abstract noun. 

     “We have given our hearts away” is a reference to turning our backs on nature.

     The “sordid boon” is the sick materialism people have embraced following the increase in the standard of living brought about by the First Industrial Revolution.  I thought that was a bit hypocritical considering Wordsworth was socially privileged and with ‘help’ he would have had the time to enjoy nature.  On the other hand, if you are illiterate and spend sixteen hours a day in a factory weaving fabric, I understand a ‘get and spend’ approach to life. 

     “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”  Humans are on a path of devastation.

     Wordsworth wishes he was a pagan so he wasn’t so disturbed by the way humanity has embraced consumerism.  

     Hang on!  Isn’t he talking about the digital revolution of the 21^st century and the materialism that sustains people using money they don't have (credit) to live unsustainable lifestyles?

     If Wordsworth thought things were bad 200 years ago, he’d be writing in his grave today.  Humanity has declined to new depths and we are headed for unprecedented disaster; an increasingly warmer world, the loss of natural habitat through urbanisation and rising temperatures, uncertain food security, political instability, an overwhelmingly indolent first world population that has caused the problem and then, ultimate anarchy, war and death.  Of course, there will be whimpering.

     I’d had enough of poetry. It was depressing.  I felt like a drink, but I did some yoga to calm my nerves while the Rooster worked on his assignment.

The Glade.  Before the rain.

     Then the two of us went for a long walk, he slashing weeds with his bush knife, me revelling in this little pocket of nature largely untouched by industry (except that it is tertiary growth rainforest and there are more weeds than native grasses!).

     There had been torrential rain during the week.  I’d never seen the Dirran Creek in flood.  Where there had been a crystal-clear stream meandering around sentinel-like boulders, there was a single milky river, swollen with rage.  What I saw wasn’t the peak of floodwater.  Metres higher, trees, logs and debris had been discarded on the path we walked.

     A tree, thirty metres tall, flicked asunder.

The Glade, after flood waters have receded.

     It occurred to me Wordsworth might not be so disturbed if he knew nature could deposit a tree, weighing a tonne, two metres up a hill.  Perhaps he didn’t credit nature with enough resilience.  For a few moments, till I returned to the house and listened to the road trains rumbling on the highway transporting imported electronics, clothes manufactured in Asian sweatshops and mixed berries shipped from China (more on this one), I thought Nature might come through the 21^st century with nothing more than bruises, cuts and abrasions.