The beginnings of a beginning: Draft 0

Wordsworth’s pastoral poems reveal a verdant landscape in which rustic figures share a special communion with the environment. And yet the relationship between man and nature in these poems while at times harmonious is acutely fragile. As notable as Wordsworth’s ardent praise of the rustic community is its tragic dissolution. Indeed the poet’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads are consumed with images of rural decay, the disruption and despair of families, and the gradual disappearance of the rustic’s uniquely intimate relationship to the land. Michael, The Ruined Cottage, and The Female Vagrant all revolve around the disenfranchisement and subsequent dissolution of idyllic rural families, all of them uniquely situated with the land as farmers, shepherds, and fishermen- figures who’s close kinship with and fluency in the languages of the environment make them at once special and endangered. This repetitive pattern of decay, as I shall suggest, advance an ecological argument about the fragility of human relationships with the environment, and brings to bare important questions about sustainability (I know I need to explain this more…I’m trying to work out my thoughts about these patterns and what they mean.)..........