Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. William Wordsworth
I thought I was a city gal. I’m rethinking. Born and bred and in South Africa, the ‘bright lights and big city’ draw of London was so overwhelming that now I call North London, N7, my home. Two and a half years – a baby, spans of concerts, an influx of history and art, magnificent travel and fab friends – down the line I find myself experiencing a Wordsworthian yearning for nature, for ‘the simple life’. The reason: I have no idea because I have too many ideas. Has motherhood changed me? I know that part of the yearning is a desire to provide an innocent and free life (as far as possible) for my daughter – I am certain that the city will taint this possibility. Perhaps age, experience and I say ‘wisdom’ tentatively, now allows me to appreciate that which I have previously taken for granted. Travel must play a part: it has certainly opened my eyes to the natural beauty that pervades the world, and nature’s grandeur is compelling. Perhaps the yearning is a combination of all of the above. But I think it’s more.
Wordsworth said “The world is too much with us”. Perhaps I am now ready to acknowledge the truth of this statement, and relinquish ‘the world’. My hunger for nature can’t merely be an appreciation, a desire for simplicity or an escape. I love London passionately but my soul longs for that which we were created to be in commune with. Reason states the practicality of the city but intuition not only yearns for but demands the pastoral. Why should reason always be the driving force? It’s so twentieth century to try and rationalise emotion and responses. Thanks Freud.
The Romantic poets used art to reconcile the relationship between man and nature – words are an expression of emotion, a reaction to nature, which has been filtered through the mind. Response can never be pure because it is always filtered through the inadequate medium of thought, which occurs in words, yet the rationalisation of emotion is often a futile exercise. Reason is detrimental to the soul: it hinders intuition and thus prevents the soul from evolving. When emotion is translated into words, something is lost in the translation –this is inescapable. We think in words, it is the nature of being human, and yet words can’t detract from the core of the emotion: words undermine emotion but the fact of the emotion, at its intuitive core, is undeniable. And real. Almost tangible. That very tangibility is manifested in art, which the Romantics used as an embodiment of the synthesis of man and nature. Romanticism is defined by the search for intuition over reason: it is reasonable for me to live in the city but my intuition tends toward nature. My soul has undergone an evolutionary change; from a yearning for ‘the world’ to a yearning for that which the world seeks to destroy. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in God’s Grandeur, derides man for his inconsequential treatment of nature:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
Wordsworth says, in The World Is Too much With Us, that “We have given our hearts away”, and that is so poignantly saddening. I do not want to give my heart away to ‘the world’. Who am I to deny the yearning of my soul?
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I thought I was a city gal
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her. William Wordsworth
I thought I was a city gal. I’m rethinking. Born and bred and in South Africa, the ‘bright lights and big city’ draw of London was so overwhelming that now I call North London, N7, my home. Two and a half years – a baby, spans of concerts, an influx of history and art, magnificent travel and fab friends – down the line I find myself experiencing a Wordsworthian yearning for nature, for ‘the simple life’. The reason: I have no idea because I have too many ideas. Has motherhood changed me? I know that part of the yearning is a desire to provide an innocent and free life (as far as possible) for my daughter – I am certain that the city will taint this possibility. Perhaps age, experience and I say ‘wisdom’ tentatively, now allows me to appreciate that which I have previously taken for granted. Travel must play a part: it has certainly opened my eyes to the natural beauty that pervades the world, and nature’s grandeur is compelling. Perhaps the yearning is a combination of all of the above. But I think it’s more.
Wordsworth said “The world is too much with us”. Perhaps I am now ready to acknowledge the truth of this statement, and relinquish ‘the world’. My hunger for nature can’t merely be an appreciation, a desire for simplicity or an escape. I love London passionately but my soul longs for that which we were created to be in commune with. Reason states the practicality of the city but intuition not only yearns for but demands the pastoral. Why should reason always be the driving force? It’s so twentieth century to try and rationalise emotion and responses. Thanks Freud.
The Romantic poets used art to reconcile the relationship between man and nature – words are an expression of emotion, a reaction to nature, which has been filtered through the mind. Response can never be pure because it is always filtered through the inadequate medium of thought, which occurs in words, yet the rationalisation of emotion is often a futile exercise. Reason is detrimental to the soul: it hinders intuition and thus prevents the soul from evolving. When emotion is translated into words, something is lost in the translation –this is inescapable. We think in words, it is the nature of being human, and yet words can’t detract from the core of the emotion: words undermine emotion but the fact of the emotion, at its intuitive core, is undeniable. And real. Almost tangible. That very tangibility is manifested in art, which the Romantics used as an embodiment of the synthesis of man and nature. Romanticism is defined by the search for intuition over reason: it is reasonable for me to live in the city but my intuition tends toward nature. My soul has undergone an evolutionary change; from a yearning for ‘the world’ to a yearning for that which the world seeks to destroy. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in God’s Grandeur, derides man for his inconsequential treatment of nature:
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
Wordsworth says, in The World Is Too much With Us, that “We have given our hearts away”, and that is so poignantly saddening. I do not want to give my heart away to ‘the world’. Who am I to deny the yearning of my soul?
Other posts you might like: