The “Georgian” Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871-1940) wrote the much-loved lines:

What is this life, if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

This is Leisure, a modern sonnet (in his 1911 Songs of Joy and Others), in a long tradition of poetry that reflects on nature, including Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. I’ll hardly be the first to observe that modern life is very far from tranquil, or that people rush through parks or countryside looking only at a tiny screen, or talking on the telephone. (John Fox’s My Musical World, a lifetime in music, page 252, for example.) It’s interesting that Davies anticipated this view of modern life by a century. If we were transported back to 1911, we would surely find it a slow, peaceful and carefree existence, at least if we were lucky enough to be out of poverty. It is striking that the poet’s sensitivity picked up the acceleration and lack of awareness of nature that go with Western culture, all the way back then in Edwardian times.