ABSTRACT
Why in the world would we destroy the world in which we live, our ownworld, our only world? What drives that destruction? Why can’t we stop it?
William Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’ (1800) cannot answer these questions; perhaps no poem could. But this 54-line poem might help us to begin to think about them, about questions of human-environmental interaction and ecological destruction, and about the ways in which literary study in recent years has started to be transformed by such concerns. In ‘Nutting’, the speaker recalls an occasion when, as a boy, he ‘sallied’ from his home to gather hazelnuts with ‘A nutting crook in hand’. He remembers ‘forcing’ his way through the uncultivated countryside, through woods and ‘pathless rocks’, until he comes to ‘one dear nook / Unvisited’. It is, he recalls, ‘A virgin scene’ and he stands there awhile, ‘Breathing with such suppression of the heart / As joy delights in’. This bower is, he thinks, a place where the seasons pass, year after year, ‘unseen by any human eye’. He sits down in the bower enjoying the murmuring of a brook, his heart ‘luxuriat[ing] with indifferent things’ (ll.3-39); but after a while he gets up:
The poem ends with what might appear to be a rather weak ‘moral’: we should adopt a ‘gentleness of heart’ in relation to nature, ‘for there is a Spirit in the woods’ (ll.53-4), the speaker declares. More powerful, alarming and provocative is the shock of this sudden, unmotivated and violent destruction. In Western literary and other culture, ‘nature’ is often fundamentally distinguished from the human and, at the same time, gendered as female and even as maternal (as in the phrase ‘Mother Nature’). There certainly seem to be indications of femininity and motherhood in Wordsworth’s description of the womb-like bower before it is defiled: it is a (feminized) ‘virgin scene’ but it also features hazels hung with (maternal-sounding) ‘milk-white clusters’ (l.18). The poem has consequently been read from the perspective of psychoanalysis as an expression of a child’s rage (his rage and love, his rage because of his love, or need) for his mother, in terms of the desire to destroy what gives him physical, emotional, spiritual nurture. And it has been read in terms of sexual violence, as a kind of ‘rape’ of a feminized nature. It should also be said that, in keeping with the sexual suggestiveness of Wordsworth’s language, there is also a case for seeing the bowers and the hazels as phallic and virile: ‘not a broken bough / Droop’d with its wither’d leaves . . . / . . . but the hazels rose/ Tall and erect’ (ll.15-18).
