Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

By Mary Jacobus

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art.

 
Jacobus discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as Jacobus explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, Romantic Things opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226390680

Book preview

Mary Jacobus is Grace II Professor of English Emerita and former director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39066-6 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-39066-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39068-0 (e-book)

Permission to quote Seamus Heaney, Rilke: After the Fire and Rilke: The Apple Orchard, from District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Permission to quote Alice Oswald, Woods etc. and Autobiography of a Stone, from Woods etc. (©2005), is gratefully acknowledged to Faber and Faber and United Agents Ltd. Permission to quote from W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, translated by Michael Hamburger (2004), is gratefully acknowledged to New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. At the End, Like a Dog,’’ Please Send Me,’’ "When Lightning’’ by W. G. Sebald, ©2004 by The Estate of W. G. Sebald, translation ©2004 by Michael Hamburger and Hamish Hamilton.

Title page illustration from William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808), vol. 1, facing 131. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacobus, Mary.

Romantic things : a tree, a rock, a cloud / Mary Jacobus. pages ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-39066-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) —

ISBN 0-226-39066-7 (cloth : alkaline paper)

1. Nature in literature.   2. Romanticism.   3. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation.   I. Title.

PN1065. J26 2012

809' .9336—dc23

2012003655

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

MARY JACOBUS

Romantic Things

A TREE, A ROCK, A CLOUD

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

the endless store of things

Rare, or at least so seeming, every day

Found all about me

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 1, lines 119–21

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Gravity of Things

CHAPTER 1

Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible

CHAPTER 2

Pastoral, after History: The Apple Orchard

CHAPTER 3

Touching Things: Nutting and the Standing of Trees

CHAPTER 4

Composing Sound: The Deaf Dalesman, The Brothers, and Epitaphic Signs

CHAPTER 5

Distressful Gift: Talking to the Dead

CHAPTER 6

The Breath of Life: Wordsworth and the Gravity of Thought

CHAPTER 7

On the Very Brink of Vacancy: Things Unbeseen

CHAPTER 8

Senseless Rocks

Notes

Index

FIGURES

1.1 John Ruskin, Cloud Perspective: Rectilinear (1903–8)

1.2 John Ruskin, Cloud Perspective: Curvilinear (1903–8)

1.3 John Constable, Study of Sky and Trees (1821)

1.4 John Constable, Cloud Study: Horizon of Trees (1821)

1.5 John Constable, Cloud Study (1821)

1.6 John Constable, Cloud Study (1822)

1.7 John Constable, Study of Cumulus Clouds (1822)

2.1 Albrecht Dürer, The Fall (1510)

2.2 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)

2.3 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)

2.4 Location photo from Tacita Dean’s film Michael Hamburger (2007)

2.5 Albrecht Altdorfer, Lot and His Daughters (1537)

2.6 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees [Apfelbäume] (1987)

2.7 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees [Apfelbäume] (1987)

2.8 Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees (sketch) (Apfelbäume [Skizze]) (1987)

7.1 François Stella, Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome (1587)

7.2 Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805)

7.3 Nicholas Saunderson, The Elements of Algebra, in Ten Books (1741)

7.4 Jan Peter Tripp, Jan Peter Tripp (2003)

7.5 Jan Peter Tripp, W. G. Sebald (2003)

7.6 Jan Peter Tripp, Maurice (Moritz) (2003)

7.7 Louis-François Roubiliac, Sir Isaac Newton (1755)

8.1 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth; with Proofs and Illustrations (1795)

8.2 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (2007)

8.3 Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (2007)

8.4 Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales (1783)

8.5 William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England (1808)

8.6 William Green, The tourist’s new guide (1819)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been fortunate to receive a number of invitations to contribute to special issues, edited collections, and conferences. These opportunities have helped to sustain my longstanding interest in Wordsworth’s poetry alongside more recent concerns. The chapter order roughly reflects the order of writing. Chapter 1, Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible, was commissioned for a special issue of Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 14 (2006), Objects, Material, Psychic, Aesthetic, edited by Sean Homer, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, and Yannis Stavrakakis; I am grateful for permission to republish it here. Chapter 2, Pastoral after History: The Apple Orchard, was delivered as the keynote for a graduate conference, Nostalgia and the Shapes of History, at Queen Mary College, University of London, in June 2008 and presented at an international conference on Sebald at the University of East Anglia in September 2008. Chapter 3, Touching Things: ‘Nutting’ and the Standing of Trees, was written for a colloquium celebrating the work of Geoffrey Hartman at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, in October 2007. Chapter 4, Composing Sound: The Deaf Dalesman, ‘The Brothers,’ and Epitaphic Signs, was commissioned for Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint it here.

Chapter 5, Distressful Gift: Talking to the Dead, was originally presented at a University of Cambridge CRASSH conference, Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, and included in the resulting volume, The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688–1848, edited by Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); it is published here with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The same essay was previously published in Late Derrida, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (Spring 2007), edited by Ian Balfour (copyright 2007, Duke University Press, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of the publisher). A shorter version of chapter 6, The Breath of Life: Wordsworth and the Gravity of Thought, was written and delivered as part of a panel series, Genres of Death, convened by Ian Balfour at the 2008 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference in Toronto in August 2008. Chapter 7, ‘On the Very Brink of Vacancy’: Things Unbeseen, and chapter 8, Senseless Rocks, were both written especially for this volume during the summer of 2010 and take up some of the threads that weave in and out of the earlier essays.

Among the friends, colleagues, and students who have inspired, provoked, or sustained my interest in Romanticism, Wordsworth, translation, visual art, and psychoanalysis, I would especially like to thank the following: Ian Balfour, Gillian Beer, John Beer, Peter de Bolla, James Castell, Cynthia Chase, Anne-Lise François, Geoffrey Hartman, Frances Jacobus-Parker, Simon Jarvis, Laura Kirkley, Reeve Parker, Alex Regier, Clive Scott, Gordon Teskey, Marina Warner, and Andrew Webber. I owe special thanks to Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press for his editorial encouragement and imagination. I am also grateful to Catriona Gray and to the Newton Trust, Trinity College, Cambridge, for practical assistance in preparing the manuscript. No amount of footnoting can do justice to the cumulative effects of reading, listening, and conversations over the years at Cornell University, the University of Cambridge, and elsewhere; known and unknown debts are hereby gratefully acknowledged. Finally, I take this opportunity to acknowledge an enduring debt to my first Wordsworthian teacher: Methinks I see him stand / As at that moment, with his bough / Of wilding in his hand (The Two April Mornings, ll. 58–60).

. . .

Note: All references to The Prelude are to the book and line numbers of the AB-Stage reading text of The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), abbreviated Prel. References to Wordsworth’s prose works are to the volumes and pages of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), abbreviated Prose Works.

INTRODUCTION

THE GRAVITY OF THINGS

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s late poem Gravitation (Schwerkraft), lyric energy’s relation to things—things in flight, clouds, falling rain—is poised between gravity and autorecovery. Seemingly unaware of its own motion, like Rilke’s stander or sleeper, or like poured water, Gravitation is gravid with what it does not say about the self-sustaining force or "Kraft" of poetry:

Centre, extricating yourself

from everything, even recovering yourself

from things in flight: invincible centre!

Stander, through whom earth’s pull

Hurtles like drink through thirst.

Sleeper, from whom, as though

from a crouching cloud, it falls

in large and liberal rain.¹

Things and persons are held in tension by lyric’s apostrophic power: Center, Stander, Sleeper. The centering here is at once centripetal and centrifugal; the force of gravity becomes the sheer force of poetic language to generate meaning—recovering, hurtling, falling as the large and liberal rain of its dissemination on the page.

Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal makes the dead thing that is Lucy appear inhuman, at once untouched and untouchable even when alive: She seem’d a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years (ll. 3–4). Without motion or force, deaf and blind (She neither hears nor sees), Lucy is swept up by the gravitational pull of insensate things: Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees! (ll. 7–8). Newtonian impersonality and first-person lyric collide in the poetic space glossed by my subtitle: The Gravity of Things. The unseen revolution of rocks and stones and trees—all that remains of Lucy—hurtle through the poet’s oblivious slumber. Are such things alive or dead? If they move, do they feel? But perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. As in Rilke’s poem, gravity and language are at once material and immaterial entities; we do not know quite how they work, even if we put names like gravitation or apostrophe to the force or rhetorical figure each invokes. In this sense, Wordsworth’s practice as a lyric poet is proto-Rilkean. Both put lyric poetry’s characteristic activity of naming or invocation into direct relation with the life of things: it falls. The it that falls is the riddle answered by the poem’s title: Gravitation (Schwerkraft). Or, as Geoffrey Hartman expresses it apropos of Wordsworth’s Lucy, It is as if life and death were seeking an interchange or equipoise²—and not only life and death but the nonequivalent interchange of words and things. Wordsworth himself writes: Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling, and not measured by the space which they occupy upon paper. Imbued with passion, they become weighty actors in their own right: "things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion.³ Weighed in the balance of feeling, lyric poetry finds its own level. Gravity falls like rain; words hurtle like drink through thirst."

Heidegger’s thing (in his Das Ding)—a humble jug—is not merely an everyday utensil or container but, etymologically speaking, a potential gathering or place for discussion; his jug becomes a vessel for pouring, outpouring, and hieratic consecration.⁴ Without in any way endorsing the sacramental implications of the Heideggerian thing, the underlying premise of the present volume is that lyric poetry provides a way of thinking about (and linking) material and immaterial things. These things include the no-longer-human Lucy, trees, rocks, clouds, and abstract categories such as translation, history, and lyric poetry itself. Lyric provides a container for both simple and complex emotions, immediate and more elusive modes of perception—hardly the type of thinking traditionally associated with analysis, logic, or linguistic reasoning. Yet these feelings and perceptions form an indispensible element in how we know what (we sense) we know. The essays included here concern moods, internal states, modes of perception and consciousness, or states of being that defy simple definition: deafness and the inability to see; sleeping and not being able to sleep; being alone and being dead; touching and the untouchable. They focus on the materiality of rocks (their hardening or induration) as well as their immateriality (their duration and musicality); the weighty insubstantiality (the visible invisibility) of clouds; and the sense in which trees may be thought of as suffering injury despite their insentience. These things belong to the elusive matter of lyric poetry: things that sound, float, or fall; things imagined as being alive without being animate; things both visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling.⁵

In Wordsworth’s poetry, things that have never spoken fall silent and things that have never moved acquire strange motion. Things that were never alive in the way that humans live are mourned as if they had died, or they strike terror into the guilty imagination. The Wordsworthian lyric also tends toward epitaph, since both human and nonorganic life end in the grave, muted and stilled, however much they harbor intimations of immortality and animism. Even breathing becomes breathing toward death, just as the gift of a poem becomes a form of conversing with the dead. Wordsworth’s lyrics may be buoyed up by animation—dancing daffodils, wind-tossed waves, fluttering leaves—or by the lively movement of the lyric line itself. But they gravitate toward sighs and silence: Sweetness and breath with the quiet of death, / Peace, peace, peace.⁶ Lyric repetition, weighed in the balance of feeling, quiets human passion at the border of breath and death.

Many of the essays included in this book focus on inanimate natural phenomena: trees, rocks, and clouds, things that are endemic in lyric poetry by both Wordsworth and Rilke, where images from nature are at once perceived objects and prompts for thought. Much as Heidegger’s Das Ding alerts us to the jug’s overlooked nearness, these essays also explore states that are often overlooked or form part of the taken-for-granted texture of being alive: breathing, listening, and sleeping. At the same time, they explore states of privation—not being able to see or hear; vacancy, blurring, unconsciousness, or death—along with the sheer resistance of things themselves to being seen, sensed, or understood. This resistance includes the human thing as well as the natural, and even the resistance of the poem to being read. Such modes of being or unintentional resistance accentuate the link between things and poetry. We may think in or through things, and in or through lyric poetry. But thinking of this kind can be abruptly end-stopped when we least expect it, whether by intractable concreteness, by ungraspable abstraction, or by the elusiveness of poetic thought. For instance, Wordsworth’s phrase All thinking things, all objects of all thought confidently invokes a kind of transcendental gravitation or motion and a spirit rolling through all things (Tintern Abbey, 101–2). Yet the ways in which these lines simultaneously make and disclaim the distinction between thinking things and objects of thought pose disquieting questions. What is a thinking thing? What motion impels all objects of all thought? Or is it only the human thing—the distinctive thing called poetry—that does the vital thinking and moving here?

What kind of thing is poetry?⁷ Poetry’s extended metaphorical vocabulary allows things and poetry (like the defended, rolled-up hedgehog of Derrida’s essay) to be thought together and experienced as rebarbative—resistant to understanding, translation, or paraphrase but not to memory, feeling, or learning by heart. All the translator can do (as Benjamin argues in The Task of the Translator) is to offer a distinct version in another foreign language.⁸ Recent thing theory has tended to suggest that we not only think through things but think through their very resistance to our attempts at co-option—and that our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them.⁹ Halting and provisional as such knowing can be, it is also associated with the convergence of pleasure and passion that Wordsworth identifies with metrical poetry itself (the lyrical ballad). The idea of aesthetic pleasure as a form of knowing or education is inseparable from the lyric’s claims to think. Such claims parallel recent attempts to identify the role of feeling in thought and in theory, as well as the kind of thinking that goes on in metrical poetry.¹⁰ Specifically, the essays collected here try to think through things—both literary and phenomenological—that are illuminated by some of the late or recent philosophical writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

For strictly enforced rhetorical and figural modes of reading, any sense of (or in) things is undermined by linguistic undecidability or by alienation from a world of things that is necessarily distanced by both language and consciousness. By contrast, the philosophers I have mentioned are markedly concerned with sense, sensing, and what Wordsworth calls the language of the sense (Tintern Abbey, l. 109). This language (including poetic language) mediates and reflects upon but does not necessarily estrange either the world of things or the world of thought. The posthumously published work of Merleau-Ponty, the later writings of Derrida, and the poetic, conceptless philosophic writing of Nancy, with its singular and finite thinking, have all helped to shape my essays (and thinking) about touch and sight, mourning and survival, sleeping and listening.¹¹ Thinking about or through the contours of such writing will be seen to distinguish the literary-critical practice of this collection from the productive strenuousness of de Manian reading, which focuses on rhetorical figures such as apostrophe and prosopopoeia and has produced a distinctive and important school of writing on Romantic poetry.¹² While these essays come down on the side of provisionality in reading the human thing that I have called poetry and recognize the difficulty of seeing the human thing itself—whether through our own eyes or the eyes of others—they proceed with greater eclecticism and itinerancy. At any rate, their literary-critical practice is best self-described as that of a post-Derridean reader rather than as rhetorical or deconstructive reading. I have let things take me where they seemed to want to go.

Another way of asking, as Derrida does, what kind of thing is [lyric] poetry? might be to inquire, not what poetry means, but what it senses. Can we make sense of it in other than ineffable or transcendental ways, without falling into overreading, on the one hand, or intuitionalism, on the other? Is there an undercurrent in literary-critical thinking to which this question responds? The turn from the social, the spectacle, and the commodity toward material, affective, and anthropological concerns that coincide in the recent burst of thing theory corresponds to a current interest in theorizing, not only the animal, but also the expressivity of the nonhuman and inanimate and the ways in which the material and technological world act on the human, as well as being acted upon by it.¹³ This is not simply a matter of ecotheory inflecting green Romanticism’s explicit concern with the environment or of political objections to an overly anthropocentric focus or even of literary theory’s fatigue with categories such as subjectivity, identity, or agency. Rather, a preoccupation with sense and with poetry as a form of knowing brings with it the recognition that what does not know (itself), or even lay claim to sense, can nonetheless make claims on us—can, literally, make sense. An inanimate world is not a dead world; it may indeed be what matters most when it comes to the long-term survival of human life. Things give meaning to the world; they are not merely given meaning by the uses we make of them or by the symbolic significance we attach to them in our systems of exchange. The sheer heterogeneity of things and meanings, along with the disconcerting capacity of persons to become things or of things to act like persons, forms the shifting texture of unwitting appropriation and anthropomorphism that envelops us every time we make use of a thing or a word, every time we imagine that a toy is alive or preserve an environment (let alone love, hate, or destroy it).¹⁴

Things and language may be alike in shaping psychic and social relations. But, equally, their work is not limited to constructing the unconscious, maintaining the social, or providing symbolic circuits of exchange; nor are they confined to how we understand them. Things look back at us. They may even seem to talk back.¹⁵ Rather than taking us closer to unmediated concrete or physical reality, things and words may take us—as so often in Wordsworth’s poetry—toward a dim and undetermin’d sense / Of unknown modes of being (Prel. 1.420–21). This as-yet-undetermined sense baffles and resists comprehension or redirects attention to the unfamiliar furniture of existence or unremarked detail that escapes any but a focused eye. These essays not only pay attention to ear and eye but also try to bring the listening ear and focused eye of attentive reading to bear on occluded experience or overlooked things. They also pay attention to specifically literary phenomena—to citation and translation, to (self-)portraiture, self-representation, and theories of language—as well as to the visual, aural, and tactile aspects of human experience. They tease out motifs of Romantic elegy as well as pay attention to trees, rocks, and clouds; they explore epitaphic sign-systems as well as read landscape. They are linked by lyric’s proximity to epitaph, along with the question of what it means to survive. Writing one’s own epitaph may constitute a form of privation, akin to deafness and blindness. Or it may open one’s eyes and ears to previously overlooked things.

In the enigmatic Carson McCullers story from which my title comes, a newspaper boy is waylaid in a café by a derelict brooding over the long-ago loss of his wife. I am a person who feels many things, he tells the boy, but he had never learned how to love. After his wife leaves him, he begins to forget what she looked like. Instead, he would see other things: a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. We start at the wrong end of love, he concludes, when we should begin by studying random found things or the features of the natural world: A tree. A rock. A cloud. This is his late-acquired habit, the knowledge that loss brings: I graduated from one thing to another. Day by day I was getting this technique. Perplexed by what he has been told, the newspaper boy concludes: He sure has done a lot of traveling.¹⁶ McCullers’s story is a Wordsworthian encounter, transposed to the world of seedy streetcar cafés: an old man traveling, his tale of distress, and the hapless paperboy in his aviator cap—puzzled by what he doesn’t understand and by the unexpected benison bestowed on him by a stranger. McCullers leaves her readers uncertain whether the old man’s progress through the world of things is the by-product of his wanderings or a slow epiphany. The essays collected here adopt the same method: graduating from one Romantic thing to another, they work on getting the technique.

. . .

Chapter 1, Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible, pairs the poetry of John Clare with the painting of John Constable. Signifying materiality, mood, and the illusionistic expansion that characterizes baroque space, clouds also constitute one of the most elusive materials of Romantic lyric. Clare minutely observed the weather along with his alternating moods of elation or depression, bringing internal states into contact with early nineteenth-century meteorological observation. Constable, the self-confessed man of clouds, responded to this new science of clouds by attending as an artist to what he saw in the sky; his cloud studies take their place alongside what Wordsworth calls moods of [his] own mind, and each one captures a succession of rapidly changing phenomena. Lyric poetry and cloud studies together expand the horizon, while reminding us about the global effects of weather systems and volcanic activity in our own day.

Chapter 2, Pastoral, after History: The Apple Orchard, takes Seamus Heaney’s translations of Rilke’s The Apple Orchard and After the Fire as examples of pastoral’s framing by historical retrospect, in this case, by Ireland’s traumatic sectarian strife. In The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s account of his visit to the poet-translator Michael Hamburger freely appropriates the older man’s childhood exile from fascist Germany. Reprising Sebald’s visit, Tacita Dean’s 2007 film focuses on Hamburger’s relation to his orchard; Hamburger’s reading of a poem in memory of another poet, Ted Hughes, reminds us how poetry is handed on from one writer to another. Sebald’s prose poem After Nature (translated by Hamburger) rewrites his own prenatal history, this time in the light of a scene of conflagration glimpsed in the background of a painting. The backward look of Benjamin’s Angel of History surveying the ruins of the past hovers over this retrospect. Pastoral is always after history; the meaning of the past flares up in the present, or else—as in Gerhard Richter’s Apple Trees series—deliberately banalizes and blurs it.

Chapter 3, Touching Things: ‘Nutting’ and the Standing of Trees, reflects on the greening of Wordsworth in the light of Derrida’s reflections on touch and what Derrida calls tact, the tact not to touch, or the untouchable. Defending the legal standing of trees poses questions about the rights of inanimate things. In what ways does Wordsworth’s so-called philosophy of nature give them standing? A classic legal case in the history of the environmental movement can be harnessed to a rereading of Wordsworth’s injunction with gentle hand / Touch,—for there is a Spirit in the woods (Nutting, ll. 53–54). Chapter 3 explores (non-Heideggerian) ways of thinking about what