The World Is Too Much With Us - Climate Change is Here and We Have Given Our Hearts Away
Posted on 30 April 2023
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Have we become numb to the world? Have we become numb to the environmental degradation we cause and even more numb to the ensuing climate crisis we are just starting to live through? Have we given our hearts away?
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If so, then it is an existential imperative that we see and feel the world for what it might be saying, what it might have been, and what it might become.
We do so, as our previous post discussed, by adopting the poet's lens. And perhaps, in so doing, we can begin to not "lay waste our powers". Once again, we turn to William Wordsworth:
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The World Is Too Much With Us
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The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
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Let us not be out of tune. Let us not be unmoved. Let us not find little in Nature that is ours. Let us not be too late.
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