FruitFly

Pome of the day. The poem below is by William Wordsworth. I’m not a big fan. He is often categorised as a Nature Poet and Romantic. However, compared to Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence, for example, he tends to describe nature in the abstract, and under philosophical headings. This poem is one of his smaller pieces, and though we do not know who She was, the poem is insistant on emphasising the fact that she has ceased to be. What is significant is the vocabulary he uses: Motion, Force. These are terms taken from Physics. The Romantic movement was in some respects a reaction to the rise of science and it’s triumphant consolidation into a theory unifying the mundane and the celestial, the Newtonian synthesis. No matter how much he may laud his own sensibilities and muse on the mystical face of Nature, somewhere in the recesses of his mind must have lurked a fear, born of the implications of the success of science: it’s obliterating impersonality that cared not a fig for his delicate imaginings. In this little poem he tests himself, his nerve: for eight lines he peeks at the machine as it processes a figure of romantic longing into an object with the same status as ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’. The implication by the end is that the machine just keeps going….

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stone, and trees.