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.