Motion and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.
As I was flipping through the pages to get to “The 1805 Prelude”, I stumbled across “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways”, which in my opinion is an odd name for a poem. So of course I read it. “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” concerns society’s rapid embrace of industrialization and technology, and the ways that modernization lays opposite to traditional Romantic ideals. Wordsworth begins the poem by conveying the scaring of the natural landscape, the scars that humans have left behind. In this poem, “Nature” is symbolically feminine while technology is a masculine force. Thus, Nature’s feminine and maternal force is no match for the masculine force of industrialism; Nature embraces industrialism’s “harsh features. In a way, I find this poem interesting in relation to Wordsworth’s other works, especially “The 1805 Prelude: Book First” because of the way it portrays human’s interactions with nature. In a lot of the poems we’ve red from Wordsworth, most recently books 1 and 2 of “The 1805 Prelude”, we’ve read about Wordsworth’s escapes into Nature. Him using it to escape the humdrum of city life and return to his child hood. But what about nature’s escape from us? Nature has no means of escaping what we force it to endure. So we as humans, admire its beauty, while simultaneously destroying it with our “steamboats, viaducts, and railways”. So in a way, I found it ironic that Wordsworth writes about escaping into Nature, while Nature has no means of escaping us. Wordsworth’s poem “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” shows a different side of nature while also painting a bleaker picture of what Nature is becoming, rather than that of tales of stolen rowboats and night skies.
This is such an interesting poem in comparison to the others we have read by Wordsworth! Many of his pieces feature a narrator who is concerned with the relationship between humans and nature, so this piece fits in very well with his collection. However, it is ironic to me that the narrator in “Nutting” takes part in this destruction that many other narrators in Wordsworth’s pieces frown upon. Even though the narrator comes to realize his destruction towards the end of the poem, it’s still interesting how his narrators tend to focus on human nature and Mother Nature intertwining.