When I was younger – more than quarter of a century younger – I did something that I now think was wrong, though I didn’t at the time. I was asked to cover someone’s Higher English evening class and found that they were studying Wordsworth’s poem that begins

‘Up! up! my friend, and quit your books’

(which I find is called ‘The Tables Turned’ and is actually part of a sequence – see here: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww134.html) The poem contains one of his most famous lines, the last in this verse:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–

We murder to dissect.

As one who had spent his university education largely in philosophy, I found this equation of intellectual analysis with meddling and murder difficult to stomach and I’m sure it contributed to a general antipathy I felt (and still feel) towards Wordsworth, whom I also studied at university. It is a purely personal prejudice: I allow that he wrote some beautiful poetry, but I cannot like the man. This poem in particular I find repellent, I think because it has a strain of jolly heartiness throughout: one can picture those opening lines accompanied by some hearty backslapping that sends the poor weedy scholar sprawling, with each exhortation to be ‘Up!’:

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you’ll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

There is also a glib certainty about many of the sentiments expressed that strikes me still as oversimplification, the same sort of wholesome hokey that sets my teeth on edge when people post it on Google Plus as ‘inspirational quotes’ (often misattributed):

Let nature be your teacher!

and

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

And I have always found a smack of ‘Strength through joy!’ in the lines that follow the exhortation ‘Let nature be your teacher’ (though that is hardly Wordsworth’s fault):

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless–

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

So, finding myself confronted with this, I chose instead to offer the class an alternative view, in the form of this poem by RS Thomas, which seemed to me the perfect rejoinder to Wordsworth’s ‘bland philosophy of nature’:

AUTUMN ON THE LAND

A man, a field, silence — what is there to say?

He lives, he moves, and the October day

Burns slowly down.

                                     History is made

Elsewhere; the hours forfeit to time’s blade

Don’t matter here. The leaves large and small,


Shed by the branches, unlamented fall

About his shoulders. You may look in vain


Through the eyes’ window; on his meagre hearth

The thin, shy soul has not begun its reign

Over the darkness. Beauty, love and mirth


And joy are strangers there.

                                                    You must revise

Your bland philosophy of nature, earth

Has of itself no power to make men wise.

I am quite sure now that what I did was wrong, on the simple ground that I would not have liked someone to come in and subvert what I had chosen to teach my class; besides, doing Higher English in a year can be hard enough without having extra texts sprung on you at a moment’s notice. So for that, I apologise (as I recollect, I was never actually paid for the class in any case, so that is amends of a sort, I suppose).

However, I still think Thomas’s the better poem. It exposes a shallowness in Wordsworth’s thought: he overlooks the preconditions for learning from nature, which surely include some measure of material prosperity, a degree of leisure and perhaps also a certain level of education; if your relationship with the land is simply one of back-breaking toil for little reward, then I do not think you will reap many of the benefits that Wordsworth promises.

But that aside, I find myself now in a curious pass, because I have changed sides in the debate – not between Wordsworth and Thomas, but between Wordsworth and philosophy. Though by training and education I am a meddlesome intellect and a murderous dissecter, of recent years I have come to think that Wordsworth was right: I now believe that (in Western culture at least) we hugely overvalue the rational, the intellectual, the literary and the academic in relation to the instinctive and intuitive, and that we are the poorer for it – in simple terms, we have given the Head dominion over the Heart, when they should at least be equal partners.

In another post, I would like to consider this in particular relation to stories and storytelling; but for now, enough.