We Break for Wordsworth

Rydal  Hall, Photo Credit Carrie Steingruber

Goodbye Edinburgh, hello Rydal! For the past few days, our little EngSem family has stayed at Rydal Hall, a historic manor house in "the heart of the English Lake District" (www.rydalhall.org). The Hall is within hiking distance of the famed Dove Cottage, poet William Wordsworth's home and place of inspiration for about a decade in the early nineteenth century (http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/). Between Croquet matches and nature walks, students have been entertained by bouts of badger watching (a pub nearby is famous for the family of badgers that has taken up residence in close proximity to the building) and generally been enjoying the warm sun and pleasant weather. In the words of Professor Jody Allen Randolph, "It's kinda glorious."

Dove Cottage, home to Wordsworth
from 1799 to 1808

Classes also picked back up again this week, with every class meeting and the entire group coming together yesterday evening for a a special reading of Wordsworth's poetry. Faced with a spotty wireless connection and a poem Wordsworth wrote about the modernization of his own era, our own Professor Paul Delaney even recited his own special version of "The World Is Too Much with Us:"

The world wide web is too much with us; late and soon,

Posting and Skyping, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see round Rydal that is ours;

We’ve exchanged our hearts for IP’s, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The badgers that will be prowling at all hours,

And loom about us now past sleeping flowers,

We virtually view on YouTube or iTunes

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

A Luddite heaped with technologic scorn

So might I, standing ’neath these tow’ring trees

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Berwick rising near the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The original can be found here: (http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/736/). Tomorrow our group leaves for York and bids farewell to the Lake District, but our short stay here has already generated countless adventures and many memories of good times. We will all miss it dearly.