I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sat reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran,
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

— William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Brief snapshots of specific facets of nature— butterflies, daisies, rain, a robin in the backyard, and such—are a staple of nature-poem anthologies. Such snippets remain at an observational level and lack devotional potential. Substantial nature poems, however, add an element of interpretation to their observations of nature. Those that do so are known as descriptive- meditative poems. William Wordsworth’s classic poem about his solitary excursion into the woods on an early spring day highlights the dynamics of such meditative nature poems.

Classic nature poems typically begin by situating their speaker in a natural setting. The opening stanza of “Lines Written in Early Spring” places the speaker in a woods in springtime, where he first experiences the scene in terms of its sounds. But the experience is as much mental as it is sensory, as the first stanza already signals through its references to mood, thoughts, and mind.

Nature poets almost always convey a sense of the unity of nature, including the kinship of people with nature, and Wordsworth quickly sets about doing this. His opening stanza portrays the diverse sounds of nature as a musical harmony of blended notes. In a similar fashion, the second stanza links the speaker’s soul to the nature around him. Stanzas 3–5 elaborate on this motif of unity by using the imagery of periwinkle wreaths that trail, or interweave themselves, among primrose tufts and twigs that spread out…to catch the breezy air. Wordsworth also attributes human qualities to forces of nature in order to further connect them: flowers that breathe and birds that play and engage in deep thoughts. Then, having firmly established that these plants and birds enjoy themselves and experience pleasure, Wordsworth is ready to draw a religious conclusion from his immersion in springtime nature.

Although this religious message is concentrated within the last stanza, it is foreshadowed earlier in the poem. The speaker’s soul is activated in the second stanza, and he affirms his faith in the next one. Religious vocabulary ultimately explodes in the final stanza, as it references belief, heaven (which through the centuries has been a metonymy, or substitution, for the word God), and a holy plan. Furthermore, Wordsworth’s capitalization of Nature is meant to invoke God. The religious theme of the poem is twofold: good news about the perfection of Nature, and bad news about human sinfulness. The aphoristic phrase that Wordsworth twice uses to refer to the latter, what man has made of man, has become a permanent part of our storehouse of evocative sayings.

Wordsworth’s poem subtly outlines an action plan for us to undertake. That plan is for us (1) to renew our commitment to experiencing and emulating nature, and, having been appropriately chastised, (2) to repent of the damage that human sinfulness has brought into the world.

The theological underpinning of Wordsworth’s poem is that God created the natural order good but that, after the fall, the human race has done terrible things to itself (which is what the phrase what man [all humanity] has made of man means). A cryptic verse in Ecclesiastes asserts this in kernel form: “God made people good, but they have found all kinds of ways to be bad” (7:29 NCV).

— Leland Ryken, author, A Treasury of Nature