Wordsworth frostbitten

“Whereas Wordsworth sees in nature a mystical kinship with the human mind, Frost views nature as essentially alien. Instead of exploring the margin where emotions and appearances blend, [Frost] looks at nature across an impassable gulf. What he sees on the other side is an image of a hard, impersonal reality. Man's physical needs, the dangers facing him, the realities of birth and death, the limits of his ability to know and to act are shown in stark outline by the indifference and inaccessibility of the physical world in which he must live.” Lynen JF. 1960. The pastoral art of Robert Frost. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. It's easy for us to forget our place in the scheme of things. Disconnected from the perils of the living world (fieldwork notwithstanding), in perfect everyday isolation from the predator–prey relationship, we sit back and watch nature on television. Even for those who venture for recreation into the Great Outdoors – the name we have given the environment from which we urbanities have so successfully separated ourselves – the greatest danger is getting lost. Being eaten by something else is a circumstance with which we no longer trouble ourselves. Having freed ourselves from the sharp end of the food web, nature became a thing to be contemplated, a thing of beauty, a provider of spiritual renewal. In 1804, William Wordsworth, England's much revered romantic nature poet, was moved to write Daffodils. Nearly everyone knows the first lines: I wander'd lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils.It takes a cold heart not to feel his joy. Fewer people, however, know the closing lines that confirm even Wordsworth's essential division from the true natural world: For oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils. Our disconnect from nature has led many to seek some re-encounter with it – and with themselves. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, left his home in Concord, MA, built a house near a lake, and gave us Walden. Nature still has those who want to get back to it, live closer to it, be part of it, even worship it. Naturalists and ecologists want to study it, understand it, and preserve it. We would, however, all do well to keep an eye on overly romanticizing it. There is a good reason we put nature at arm's length: the darn thing bites! It is possible to get a little too close to nature! To give but a few examples, in November 2004, 77-year-old swimmer Tyna Webb was killed off the Cape Peninsula (South Africa) by a great white shark that rescue services described as bigger than their helicopter. In June 2008, Reuters reported that Robert Nawojski, a 55-year-old man who lived alone in a mobile home in Pinos Altos, New Mexico, and who was known to bathe outdoors, was killed and partially devoured by a mountain lion. In March 2009, 11-year-old Briony Goodsell tragically became the victim of a saltwater crocodile, while swimming in a river near Darwin, Australia. And in October 2009, two coyotes attacked and killed 19-year-old Canadian folk singer, Taylor Mitchell, while she was hiking in Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Perhaps none of these individuals had an overly romantic view of nature. But such notions seemed to have played a part in the death of Timothy Treadwell. The 2005 documentary drama Grizzly Man covers five of the 13 summers in which Treadwell followed grizzly bears in Alaska, using film Treadwell himself shot. Director Werner Herzog tells how Treadwell, falling into mental instability, came too close to nature. Wanting “acceptance” from “his” bears, he took tremendous risks in approaching them – only to be killed and eaten. Treadwell would have been well advised to have read one of America's greatest poets, Robert Frost. In an analysis of his nature poems, John F Lynen explains how Frost, although he loved and saw wonder in nature, never lost sight of its intrinsic dangers. Lynen writes of him: “There is a fundamental ambiguity of feeling in Frost's view of nature. It is to be feared as man's cruel taskmaster, scorned as insensible, brutish, unthinking matter; yet it is to be loved, not because it has any secret sympathy for man” (Lynen 1960). Lynen quotes from Frost's poem Two Tramps in Mud Time, to drive home his point: Be glad of water, but don't forget/The lurking frost in the earth beneath/That will steal forth after the sun is set/And show on the water its crystal teeth. Speaking humbly in the presence of such great poets, let me offer my advice: go out, enjoy nature, nurture it, protect it, be amazed and uplifted by it...but watch your back!

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