The world is too much with us

I'd stayed up late, watching a documentary about a troubled Romy Shneider instead of reading a book. So when I turned turned off the light my mind was scrabbled  and I had that feeling that sleep would't come because of the screen 

Sleep came and I woke up to this; my own, personal Newgrange.  The sun in perfect alignment with the canal, back lighting the ancient green oak at the end of the street.

Bernie and I took to the hills, Mu accompanied us (virtually, from her bed in Burren).  And while we were talking and I was walking through the oaks in Christmas wood, I had an epiphany. A soft green light and the path lined by white wild flowers and a feeling that nature was doing what it's always done.  In that epiphanic moment I was a child again,  back in the '70's, before climate change was front page news and everything followed it's natural course.

I thought about this photo and realised that I'm surprised every morning that the sun continues to rise in the East, as if we've tortured the planet to the point that its axis will spin out of control and the sun may not even come up at all.  I realised the fear we live in all the time; not of Cuba or the Cold War, or Thatcher, Reagan, Putin, Brexit, or Trump, but just that one day we may lose this beauty for ever. 

Up there, in a fraction of a second,  I was ten years old again, stripped of fear and full of hope.  

I came home and googled Romantic poets and the Industrial Revolution in order to see how they'd all coped.  

And there was poor Wordsworth.  What would he make of us now?

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.