We Are Tied To The Sea

Top: J.Crew, Skirt: Mango, Shoes: Fossil

Today I read Wordsworth's "Lines Written In Early Spring" for the first time since I was in high school and had several different realizations. I was originally struck by the darkness that goes without description...still undeniably known by all those that read this poem.  This time I found myself focusing on a different line that lead to another tangential thought.  Here is the second stanza in the poem:

"To her fair works did Nature link 

The human soul that through me ran; 

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man."

-Wordsworth, 1798
(Broadview Anthology of English Literature)

Before I reached the haunting last line, I was already fully intrigued with the idea of the human soul being linked with a personified "Nature."  For whatever reason I do not remember this line hitting me as forcefully when I read this poem a few years ago (and this is strange, since Wordsworth's position as a Romantic infatuated with nature seems all too defined in this line), but it reminded me of something else I had read once.  A John F. Kennedy quote from the remarks he once gave during the America's Cup in 1962 came to mind: 

"I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because...we all came from the sea.  And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean...We are tied to the sea.  And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came."
(jfklibrary.org)

The notion of a soul linked with that surrounding us is a powerful idea.  I have lived by the sea my entire life, and I have as much respect for these oceans that have been my neighbors as the people I have called my friends.  

I believe we are a part of this earth and to be aware of such ancestry is essential in a world of people seemingly bent on exhausting what we were provided with.