William Wordsworth: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers!"
Getting and spending
RLF: Your short poem, ‘The World is too much with us’ deals with something close to your heart, doesn’t it?
WW: Close to my heart, true, and should be close to everyone’s if they have eyes to see and can recognize what is plain for all to see.
We have reached a place in our history, our development as a people worthy of our glorious past, at which none dare gainsay, or so it appears; all are in accord, or so it seems, with the way of the world.
RLF: Which you say is, ‘too much with us’ – what do you mean, Sir?
WW: Why precisely what I say, that the affairs of the world – trade and commerce – getting and spending, to use my own words, are bound upon a course to o’ertake the affairs of the heart and mind.
Our days and our nights are taken up in schemes so gigantic that they make other, more valid and more integral ones to us as human beings, pale into insignificance, as do rays of sunlight through the icy blasts of winter. The one should melt the other, but rather, the rays separate elements – heat and light, freeze o’er and become as nought before the tempest’s wrath.
RLF: What are these gigantic schemes of which you so eloquently speak?
WW: As I have said oft enough ere now; our dealings measured in the currency of the balance sheet and the ledger. Has not our government ordered that private and public investment be channeled into grandiose ways in order that our Empire may flourish unseen to you and I bound within these shores. Are not our navies and our armies commencing warfare to increase our coffers – private and public, and is not our capital, and our lesser cities numbering many becoming nests of the unscrupulous and the dishonest.
RLF: But because a few in number, a very few in comparison to our twenty millions in our towns and in our villages, play this new game of supply and demand, must we all be drawn in – does this follow?
WW: Yes, it does, and although my behest is that it mayn’t, that it will so is surely as inevitable as acorns follows leaves on the boughs of our great oaks. For what is done betimes in London, will surely stir the brains, though sorrowfully not the hearts of some of our brightest and our best youth.
Will they not follow, selling their birthright, a poor bounty that it will become, if nothing is done to right the situation. I am sorely afraid that there will be nought to stand in their way. Man does not live by bread alone, but neither does he live by moral precepts – he is born of woman, and will return to the ashes whence he arose – he can do no other, I have assured myself more than once.
Talking to Mathew, my aging and cheery mentor, listening to him rent the air with admonishing the young, e’en though none could hear a word he spake, we both have not been encouraged by what we daily learn about our fellow man. That numbers have become the new mountain to climb, not words, ideas, notions, or anything remotely akin to love, but numbers – yes, numbers, have become that which is worshipped.
RLF: And why numbers? Which numbers do you mean?
WW: Those little numbers, ever increasing, and lining up in vertical columns neatly on the page, like so many columns of foot soldiers standing in readiness to be commanded forth together to conquer another’s failing industry – those numbers so beloved of financiers and brokers, beavering non-stop in the city to make those numbers work, no matter what falls because of them, taking no account of mankind save accounting him the same importance as land and what is being called plant, and called labour – those numbers.
RLF: Are we to be ruled by them in the way that a man representing little more than one field can sit in his seat in parliament, thus elected, to legislate in his own favour?
WW: That is it exactly, we are to be so ruled and the former places of dignity and noblesse oblige will be defaced and eradicated by balance sheets of these rows of numbers spreading out as far as the eye can see, sweeping all before them in their ruthless and ubiquitous logic until they are resorted to in the stead of even those corrupted representatives in the halls, libraries and offices of Westminster. We are to be ruled by whomsoever or whatsoever can show them to increase as the pages of the history of this land of ours are turned.
The balance sheet will become our winding sheet in its way and in the fullness of time, mark my words well, like the idiot boy we are, we will not stop until it is too late, until all the land, fell and fen, are given o’er to productivity and profit. Anon, it is happening even as we speak.
RLF: How?
WW: That is his lordship’s gamekeeper come to stop a poor woman from collecting dead and dried twigs from the underside of those hedgerows yonder, that mark the boundaries of his land where there usen’t to be any, being common land. See where the gamekeeper stands to block her way, and this a cold winter night which that good old woman has nought to stave off save those mean sticks she has gathered.
His Lordship wants for nought, and neither does the wage-slave he employs to look after his land, but yet they bar the way of the crone to save a halfpenny to fill the sacks full of such the man has tied down in some house or other in town – the bank he calls his own, so full is it with his great bags of money.
Tell me that is not a fine example, not a compleat allegory of that of which we speak. Tell me, is it not?
RLF: It is, Sire, but lo, Goody is mouthing something at his back, and watch how he shivers from head to toe, e’en in his well shod comforts.
WW: No good will come of it, just as no good will come of that treatment of the good old woman at the hands of the cruel agent of capital. The world, as I say, is too much with us!
Robert L. Fielding
Getting and spending
RLF: Your short poem, ‘The World is too much with us’ deals with something close to your heart, doesn’t it?
WW: Close to my heart, true, and should be close to everyone’s if they have eyes to see and can recognize what is plain for all to see.
We have reached a place in our history, our development as a people worthy of our glorious past, at which none dare gainsay, or so it appears; all are in accord, or so it seems, with the way of the world.
RLF: Which you say is, ‘too much with us’ – what do you mean, Sir?
WW: Why precisely what I say, that the affairs of the world – trade and commerce – getting and spending, to use my own words, are bound upon a course to o’ertake the affairs of the heart and mind.
Our days and our nights are taken up in schemes so gigantic that they make other, more valid and more integral ones to us as human beings, pale into insignificance, as do rays of sunlight through the icy blasts of winter. The one should melt the other, but rather, the rays separate elements – heat and light, freeze o’er and become as nought before the tempest’s wrath.
RLF: What are these gigantic schemes of which you so eloquently speak?
WW: As I have said oft enough ere now; our dealings measured in the currency of the balance sheet and the ledger. Has not our government ordered that private and public investment be channeled into grandiose ways in order that our Empire may flourish unseen to you and I bound within these shores. Are not our navies and our armies commencing warfare to increase our coffers – private and public, and is not our capital, and our lesser cities numbering many becoming nests of the unscrupulous and the dishonest.
RLF: But because a few in number, a very few in comparison to our twenty millions in our towns and in our villages, play this new game of supply and demand, must we all be drawn in – does this follow?
WW: Yes, it does, and although my behest is that it mayn’t, that it will so is surely as inevitable as acorns follows leaves on the boughs of our great oaks. For what is done betimes in London, will surely stir the brains, though sorrowfully not the hearts of some of our brightest and our best youth.
Will they not follow, selling their birthright, a poor bounty that it will become, if nothing is done to right the situation. I am sorely afraid that there will be nought to stand in their way. Man does not live by bread alone, but neither does he live by moral precepts – he is born of woman, and will return to the ashes whence he arose – he can do no other, I have assured myself more than once.
Talking to Mathew, my aging and cheery mentor, listening to him rent the air with admonishing the young, e’en though none could hear a word he spake, we both have not been encouraged by what we daily learn about our fellow man. That numbers have become the new mountain to climb, not words, ideas, notions, or anything remotely akin to love, but numbers – yes, numbers, have become that which is worshipped.
RLF: And why numbers? Which numbers do you mean?
WW: Those little numbers, ever increasing, and lining up in vertical columns neatly on the page, like so many columns of foot soldiers standing in readiness to be commanded forth together to conquer another’s failing industry – those numbers so beloved of financiers and brokers, beavering non-stop in the city to make those numbers work, no matter what falls because of them, taking no account of mankind save accounting him the same importance as land and what is being called plant, and called labour – those numbers.
RLF: Are we to be ruled by them in the way that a man representing little more than one field can sit in his seat in parliament, thus elected, to legislate in his own favour?
WW: That is it exactly, we are to be so ruled and the former places of dignity and noblesse oblige will be defaced and eradicated by balance sheets of these rows of numbers spreading out as far as the eye can see, sweeping all before them in their ruthless and ubiquitous logic until they are resorted to in the stead of even those corrupted representatives in the halls, libraries and offices of Westminster. We are to be ruled by whomsoever or whatsoever can show them to increase as the pages of the history of this land of ours are turned.
The balance sheet will become our winding sheet in its way and in the fullness of time, mark my words well, like the idiot boy we are, we will not stop until it is too late, until all the land, fell and fen, are given o’er to productivity and profit. Anon, it is happening even as we speak.
RLF: How?
WW: That is his lordship’s gamekeeper come to stop a poor woman from collecting dead and dried twigs from the underside of those hedgerows yonder, that mark the boundaries of his land where there usen’t to be any, being common land. See where the gamekeeper stands to block her way, and this a cold winter night which that good old woman has nought to stave off save those mean sticks she has gathered.
His Lordship wants for nought, and neither does the wage-slave he employs to look after his land, but yet they bar the way of the crone to save a halfpenny to fill the sacks full of such the man has tied down in some house or other in town – the bank he calls his own, so full is it with his great bags of money.
Tell me that is not a fine example, not a compleat allegory of that of which we speak. Tell me, is it not?
RLF: It is, Sire, but lo, Goody is mouthing something at his back, and watch how he shivers from head to toe, e’en in his well shod comforts.
WW: No good will come of it, just as no good will come of that treatment of the good old woman at the hands of the cruel agent of capital. The world, as I say, is too much with us!
Robert L. Fielding
Posted 17th May in:
