Bosca Dubh
mostly shadows and linesone impulse from a vernal wood
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”
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April 16th, 2009 at 9:54 am
lovely pic. but the poem is rendered helpless and naked by the glaring omission of its resolution. for instance, a later phrase in this passage is, “we murder to dissect”, which seems to imply that man and ‘vernal wood’ have nothing particularly in common with each other than circumstance. there’s a lot to man and to ‘moral evil and of good’ that just cannot be learned by gazing on a pretty flower. however, given the way
’sages’ behave these days, i could see the misguided need to seek better counsel in nature. so the implicite interpretation of this poem belies the readers need to ‘misshape the beauteous forms of things’ to think one is being instructed to find moral wisdom good and evil
April 17th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Thanks, Tom; I agree, the second stanza of “Tables Turned” is the more interesting one, used on the next picture.
I’m an unrepentant historicist, so I read Wordsworth as responding to the Baconian project of conquering nature through science; there might even be a reference to the practice of vivisection in the last line, where dissection does indeed approach murder, but that’s pushing it a bit far. At the very least, Wordsworth is suggesting that systematically taking nature apart “misshapes” the organic interactions of things, and we cannot understand the whole merely by isolating its parts.
As a Romantic, Wordsworth surely thought there were moral lessons to be found in contemplating nature; it was this idea upon which the Victorians crashed when they observed that nature is often brutal and violent (e.g., Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw,” from “In Memoriam”). I’m far less sanguine than Wordsworth about getting moral lessons from “nature’s lore”; though I think the impulse Wordsworth describes is a valuable one, observing how human beings behave in society is a much more useful path to wisdom of good and evil.
Of course, the real reason this poem appears under this photograph is that “pretty purple flower” doesn’t make for a very interesting title, and “Tables Turned” is one of the poems that has been stuck in my head for more than twenty years. Whatever the implications of Wordsworth’s philosophy, he certainly strung together words in a very nice order, and there’s a value in the enjoyment of poetry on that level alone.