Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. –William Wordsworth, b. April 7, 1770.

I began calling him WordsWords back in high school because of his interminable poems, and I must admit that I have never enjoyed Wordsworth as much as just about any of the other Romantic poets. Lord Byron was so dashing and disreputable. Coleridge had an interesting (drug-induced?) imagination and was a great storyteller. Shelley and Keats lived large and died young and wrote shorter poems. Wordsworth just always seemed like the least interesting and most pedantic of all the Romantics. And I must also admit to loving Nature more from a distance than up close and personal.
Nevertheless, now that I have discouraged any interest anyone might have had in reading one of Wordsworth’s poems, I did rather like this one that I found in an old English literature textbook — although I probably won’t take the advice of the poet, nature-avoider that I am:

THE TABLES TURNED

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless–
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.