On a Lark

I find the last lines of Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” to be slightly egotistical. He’s essentially saying “Give me the knowledge of your joy, and I will be a great poet that the world must hear”. It seems focused on what the poet can get out of the relationship with this unseen bird. It’s also kind of odd that he specifically says “Teach me” even just some of the happiness “thy brain must know”. These are words that describe thought and processes that can be learned, not emotion and feeling. This represents the human struggle between the dichotomy of the heart and the mind that the bird does not encounter. It knows and feels, equally, only joy. In earlier lines, the human emotion is besmirched by thought; the deepest joy is still affected by some long forgotten moment of sadness. Alternately, if we never felt pain, we still would not reach the heights of joy that the bird experiences. It has been my understanding in all things that if you have not felt the opposite experience, then your appreciation for the experience is not as acute. Someone who has never experienced the depths of despair has a different experience of euphoria than someone who has traversed through the darkness to emerge into the light. Overall, balance is necessary. Balance between joy and sadness, thought and emotion. Without balance, the “harmonious madness” is just madness, whether it’s someone becoming so focused on their misery that they harm others, or someone so caught up in chasing joy that they harm themselves.

"They wrote it all down to the progress of man"

I’ve always enjoyed Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” because of the vivid descriptions. He uses his words as paint to create an illustration within the mind. It gives hope to those of us that struggle to translate the images in our heads into something tangible to share with others. If I can’t paint it, I might be able to write it.
Beyond that, I like the message within the poem. The Mariner indiscriminately kills a bird, leading to a curse on him and the death of all his shipmates. The curse only begins to lift when he finds it in himself to rejoice in and bless the natural life around him. The poem also ends with this moral:
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
I think this is pretty relevant in a time global warming and destruction. If you kill nature, you kill humanity. People are starting to decide that focusing on the human toll of climate change will force people to recognize the need for change; I say that if people don’t care about the toll it’s taking on animals, they cannot care about the toll it is taking on humans. As part of the same creation, if you lack the capacity to care about one, you lack the capacity to care about the other. Of course, not caring about other humans leads to things like wars fought for control of oil, which devastate both humans and the environment. The oil then contributes to climate change, furthering devastating humans and nature, until more is required, necessitating the start of another fraudulent war. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, but not fueled by hate. Instead, it's fueled by apathy and greed. The destruction is a side effect of greed, and the apathy allows it to be called progress.

Same problems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in “The Nightingale” that man has forced his own sorrow on the song of the nightingale. In reality, according to the poem, the bird is quite cheerful, blissfully warbling away, content with its avian existence. In other words, Coleridge has rejected one projection of human emotion on the nightingale in favor of his own projection of emotion. This returns to Wordworth’s idea of “half perception half creation” of nature, but I’m still struggling with this. I understand the idea that on some level we must project ourselves onto the things around us in order to be able to effectively forge a connection with those things, but where is the line between putting an element of yourself into things in order to experience them and just being self-centered? If I have a hand in partially creating everything, doesn’t that mean to some extent that everything revolves around me? That seems incredibly self-absorbed. If I have partially created everything around me, then the world exists to serve me. Therefore, I am entitled to the things I desire and need. Where do other people exist in this picture? What about the fulfillment of their wants and needs? If the fulfillment of their wants/needs leaves less resources for me, should I begrudge them that fulfillment, or worse, even try to stop it? It seems to me that this type of thinking leads directly to the Madoff and AIG bonuses mess. I want it, and if I don’t have it, I’ll just take it from other people.

Phish in Nature

I did a lot of traveling over my break. I flew into Charlotte, and got a lovely view of the melting snow from the freak storm they had the day before. I drove to Charleston and watched Spanish moss, hanging from the giant trees growing over graves, swaying in the light breeze. My break ended in Richmond, where I was surprised by the vestiges of fall that still clung, as multi-colored leaves, to the deciduous trees as we rolled on towards spring. All of my experiences of observing nature and the world around me culminated, as did my break, with the Phish reunion at Hampton Coliseum on Saturday.
I love Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” because it is the acknowledgement of the things I abhor about modern humanity. People are so focused on consuming and making sure they get their fair share that they miss everything else around them. They are only aware of themselves and their needs. This is also why I love Phish concerts. It is impossible to be “out of tune”. In the explosion of sound and people, there is a unity that sneaks up on you in the middle of a huge jam, when you catch the lights and the rhythm in just the right way. The commonality between you and the hundreds of people surrounding you gently dawns on you in a break in the crowd when you can see straight to the band on stage. You didn't come from the same place and are going different places, but for the moment you are all sharing one experience, and fundamentally the same. It’s not quite the same as experiencing the joy of nature contained in a miniature rosebud or the power revealed in a raging storm, but it is a glimpse into the nature of humanity.