Dancing with the Daffodils - Perception is the Heart of the Matter when Encountering Climate Change

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We are at the stage where we are increasingly encountering climate change in our daily lives and in our immediate futures. How we act now to influence the future course of our world is most certainly a high stakes question. It may not feel like an All Hands On Deck moment, because the passage of time tends to mitigate crises and predicaments as they unfold. But this is such a moment, and for help we must turn to the poets. 

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The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a poem about his startling encounter with a massive sea of daffodils. What is the poem about?  Daffodils? On the surface, yes. Solitude? Afterall, the poem is titled "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". 

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The poem is actually about perception - the perception of a poet, to be precise. The Poet's Perception is a lens that allows us to see and feel the world in an altered way. It infuses meaning and ascribes emotion. Were the daffodils like twinkling stars? To Wordsworth they were. Were the daffodils cheerful and gleeful? Wordsworth thought they were. Were they "dancing and tossing their heads?" Wordsworth thought so. And he felt it, too. And later, looking back, his heart felt it as well, and was able to dance again with the daffodils.

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The Romantic Lens - the one that imagines the world in such a way as to positively affect the heart - is what we are talking about here. Synonyms for romantic include words like idealist, visionary, crusading, utopian. Wordsworth in his Daffodils poem is writing about this romantic lens - where the poet sees the world not as it is but as how he imagines it to be - and because of this shift in perception, the poet therefore feels the world that way too. And furthermore, the poet can relive that feeling as it plays out again on his "inward eye".

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Can we experience that feeling as well?

Poets can help us feel. One might go as far as to say that the poet manufactures feeling by choosing to see differently. And if we view the world through a poet's lens, we may hope to see things differently, and thus feel them - maybe even for the first time.

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Because perhaps it can be said that we have become numb to the world - both its cruelty and its beauties. And if we have become numb to the environmental degradation we cause and even more numb to the ensuing climate crisis we are just starting to live through, then it is an existential imperative that we adopt the poets' lens and see and feel the world for what it might be saying, what it might have been, and what it might become.