Listening with Wordsworth: some versions of sonic sociability

How does Wordsworth's poetry listen to the sound of nature?And how might readers continue to listen to and with it?In what follows, I focus on several examples of listening in Wordsworth's poetry and pay attention to how a reader might listen to those acts of listening.In the first section of this article, I consider the capacity of Wordsworth's verse to amplify and pay attention to small but surprisingly remarkable sounds through acts of listening which are aware not only of the dynamism of sound itself but also of moving responses to sound.In the second part, this insight is extended to investigate the multiple sonic phenomena of what might now be called a "soundscape".In the process, I emphasize Wordsworth's precision in recording both change and interconnectedness between sonic agents in his poetry, outlining the resistance of his work to flattening distinctions between different modes of being and connecting this to his broader thinking about nature.Finally, I place the sonic sociability that I have identified in Wordsworth's verse into conversation with more recent thinking about sound and the environment.I attempt not only to draw significance from the sounds and the forms of attention paid to them, but also to investigate the role of sound in shaping environmental awareness in a writer who has often been seen as central to the development of proto-environmental cultural attitudes and early conservation institutions.Listening with Wordsworth requires multiple acts of layered listening, not only to the sound of nature but also to historical continuity and difference, as well as to the sound of poetry.