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.
Theme
This month’s theme is connection. Connecting with people, with your environment, and with the work at hand, is a crucial skill for any leader, and then importance of building a meaningful sense of connection throughout your organization cannot be overstated. Connection is based largely on effective communication, and poetry is good for helping us thing about this: poems speak, but they also listen; always there is a reciprocal exchange between what the poet says and how the reader responds. Within in this exchange is the connection between two people.
Who?
This month’s poem comes to us from one of the best-known poets in the English language: William Wordsworth (1770-1850), our eleventh Poet Laureate. He was also, alongside his friend and fellow-poet Samuel Coleridge, a founding member of the Romantic Movement, a new kind of poetic thinking that (among other things) tried to express a deep and meaningful connection between human beings and their natural environment.
What?
As we can see from the poem above, Wordsworth did not only try to convey the beauty of nature, but also humanity’s difficult relationship with it. His lines talk of ‘waste’, giving ‘our hearts away’, and being ‘out of tune’, as though we are taking too much and giving nothing back. The poem therefore becomes an attempt to rebalance our relationship to landscape: to ‘This Sea’, ‘The winds’, and ‘Nature itself’. One way he does this is to refer to a ‘Pagan’ way of thinking, invoking old emblems of the natural world like ‘Proteus’ and ‘Triton’ to bring things we may have forgotten back to the forefront of our thinking.
He also does this through the poem’s form. If we count the number of lines, we find that there are fourteen. Traditionally, this would classify the poem as a sonnet, which was (and still is) often used to express a feeling of love from one person to another (see here for more on sonnets). Wordsworth adds a twist to the form so that, rather than expressing personal love, it investigates humanity’s love for (and fracture with) the world itself. Indeed, he uses the sonnet’s rhyme-scheme to attempt to retune what has become, in his eyes and ears, dissonant.
The sonnet’s octave – that’s the first eight lines – follows a rhyme-scheme of ABBAABB, meaning the same two sounds are frequently repeated, as though the poem is attempting to capture the natural song of the air around us and put us back in tune. The sestet – the next six lines – then makes an acoustic shift by switching to a scheme of CDCDCD. This change in sound might suggest the poem is also making a change in argument, offering the reader a new means of thinking about our connection to nature: one that forgets ‘getting and spending’, and, instead, values the simplicity of ‘standing on this pleasant lea’ and listening carefully for Triton’s ‘weathèd horn’.
What Else?
Unlike some of the other sonnets we’ve discussed, Wordsworth’s is expressing the difficult – but loving – relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit. Romantic poets thought a lot about this, but they also though about the connections that forged between each other. I mentioned before his friend Coleridge, but Wordsworth was also rarely without his sister Dorothy, who transcribed a lot of his poems, and kept a wonderful journal of their walks together.
So, though we might read a lot about Wordsworth and his genius for poetry, it is important to remember that writing, like many other skills, is always collaborative: it relies on the connections between people, whether friend and friend, brother and sister, or writer and reader. It is within these connections that real work happens.
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