![]() If you have been watching His Dark Materials think of Will, learning to use the subtle knife, to instinctively feel the strands of shining matter, of dust. To see what is around us, but see it clearer, deeper, on a more intimate level. Poets are poets because they have an unusual ability to see into the stuff of things. Have each for his peculiar dower, a sense … Poets, even as Prophets, each with each ![]() This is so tied into his idea of poetry and what makes a poet that it’s impossible to unravel them. In ‘The Prelude’ he writes of how as a boy: ‘I would stand/Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are/The ghostly language of the ancient earth.’ ‘Thence’, he says, ‘did I drink the visionary power.’ (1805 Prelude, II, 326-330) But in Wordsworth’s world rock doesn’t just live: it can speak to the receptive listener. ![]() In ‘To Joanna’ he calls the rock exactly this, ‘living stone’. He does not differentiate in his active universe between the parts of it conventionally thought of as living – trees – and those thought of as inert, non-sentient, like stone. In ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, he places rocks and trees and stones on an equal plane. He believed in an ‘active universe’, buzzing with information, if we are only open to receive it. For Wordsworth, poetry came from our interface with the world around us. I’m going to explore in this piece what Nature meant to William Wordsworth and what we can gain from that now, here, in this strange parallel earth of 2020. Polly Atkin joined our digital event on William Wordsworth, live from Grasmere, to discuss what learnings we could take from Wordsworth's poetry today.
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