Fair Seed-Time
Prelude to a Good Life
William Wordsworth is a name many of us associate with school, if not exactly with education. The preeminent poet of the Romantic Period in England, he lives in our imaginations, if he lives at all, mostly as a stuffy, distant sort of figure, wandering the moors with a heavy tread and pulling at the overtight knot in his cravat.
But this image belies the earthy vitality of his poems, which are far-ranging, intimate, and anything but stuffy. I’ve always loved Wordsworth, and it was therefore a goal of mine to sit down someday with his autobiographical epic The Prelude. Two summers ago, I finally managed it. I’d gotten into a routine of taking my boys swimming at a local pond several mornings each week. We’d hike along a gravel path into the woods, sweating in the humid air and batting the flies away, until we reached the little rim of sand around the expanse of still water. Setting up beach chairs, a blanket, and some snacks, I’d strap on their floaties and toss them in, reaching into my bag for the paperback copy of Wordsworth’s poetry whose pages were increasingly crumpled and packed with sand. I can still remember the pleasure of cracking open the spine while the boys splashed and the cries of a hawk echoed across the water.
Imagine my surprise when, instead of a hulking Miltonic epic of heaven and hell, or a Dantesque trip to purgatory, I found myself in the presence not only of a richly physical and well-rendered story, but also an eloquent and profound commentary on, of all things, education. The title of the poem should have clued me in—its full name is The Prelude, or, The Growth of A Poet’s Mind. Wordsworth is a master at realizing physical experiences. Most of us have read his lovely, scintillatingly sensory poem about the daffodils. What he seems to be less known for is his depth of understanding about mental and emotional development. The chief subject of his personal epic is not what he did in his life, but how he grew into his role as a poet. In other words, it is about his education, and that education had very little to do with classrooms:
…I hasten on to tell
How nature, intervenient till this time
And secondary, now at length was sought
For her own sake.
The Prelude is about how, for Wordsworth, nature slowly changed from an inessential backdrop for his education to the central figure in it. “Fair seed-time had my soul,” he writes in one of the most famous passages, “and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear…”. As mysterious as this process sounds, it resonates with us. Many of us feel (correctly) that this sort of “fair seed time,” characterized by productive solitude and mediated not by screens but by nature, has begun to vanish. For many of us, the majority of our time is spent divorced from our better selves.
It’s striking that Wordsworth, who lived to see the Industrial Revolution sweep through his native England, felt the same pangs of fragmentation and self-isolation that we do today. For him, these were shadows on the horizon. For us, they are omnipresent realities. Far from a sentimentalist, he watched as his peers—and, very nearly, himself—got swept away by the petty cares and occupations of life, cut off from the crucial stabilizing power of nature. Looking at the generation below him, he offered a clear and simple prescription: “May books and nature be their early joy!”
For years, I’ve had a quote from The Prelude on the top of my 10th-grade British Literature syllabus: “Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.” Yet for all the times I’ve read and discussed that line, it took me years to realize where the emphasis lay: “Come forth into the light of things.” In the end, Wordsworth’s epic is a celebration of life lived in touch with concrete realities. For him, experiences in the natural world were not an exercise in smarmy sentimentalism, but an essential catalyst for the growth of the human mind.
As it turns out, modern brain science has validated his instincts: we really do need such experiences to grow into stable, empathetic, happy adults. Therefore, if schools want to graduate whole and healthy humans, we must not only provide people with information. Information is available everywhere nowadays for free. Instead, we should strive to give children “fair seed-time;” a space and place in which to form and be formed.
In many ways, I’ve begun to see the first few years of the Classical Roots Program as a prelude, a sort of preface to a larger national movement to come. I’m not sure if we will end up being the flagship for that movement, but we could be. But our true measure of success will be the habits and lives of the students we graduate. If they learn to seek nature for its own sake, we’re doing something right.
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