WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: The Tables Turned

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Perhaps you've encountered YouTube videos appearing on your feed to tell you to get off YouTube. In today’s episode of The Poetry Fix, join Erika Kyba to encounter the poetic version of this phenomenon in Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned." Wordsworth seems to exhort the student to do away with his books, seeking nature instead...but is this all that our poet has to say?

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading William Wordsworth's The Tables Turned. Reading this poem is the equivalent of watching a YouTube video that tells you how important it is to get off YouTube. It begins with a call to the student hunched over his books to get up and go outside into nature. The radical claim that Wordsworth makes is that one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can. He exhorts the student to seek real wisdom and knowledge in the natural world. At a first read, it appears that Wordsworth is creating a dichotomy between nature, which exclusively reveals truth, and intellect, which distorts and needlessly complicates all this truth that's right at our fingertips.

But wait a second. Wordsworth's accusation against the meddling intellect is that it mischapes the beauteous forms of things. This idea of the forms comes directly from Plato. Any scholar of Wordsworth's day, and he's addressing the scholars in the first place, would recognize this illusion immediately. So what has Wordsworth done?

He's appropriated philosophical language to talk about nature when his very claim appears to be that we should abandon philosophy in favor of nature. And that's the smallest irony in this poem. There's also the fact that Wordsworth asks us to close up the barren leaves we are reading in order to go be in nature, and does so through the medium of a poem, which is A, printed on the barren leaves, and B, is a form of what Wordsworth is calling in art, a production of the intellect.

This contradiction, which the poet has produced intentionally, prevents us from going with the most superficial reading of the poem. It forces us to ask, what is Wordsworth up to if he isn't telling us to abandon our studies altogether? We might find some help from our American Romantics, Emerson, and Thoreau, as we try to answer this question. These thinkers believed that nature is the source of all truth and goodness, and that we need to return to the source as often as we can if we want to say anything true or good about the world. And that's a potential way of reconciling the contradictions in this poem. Perhaps Wordsworth is not telling us to throw out our books, but rather warning us not to get wrapped up in them at the cost of ignoring the core of reality, the natural world, which has plenty to teach us in its own right.

With all that said, let's dive in. The tables turned by William Wordsworth. Up, up, my friend, and quit your books, or surely you'll grow double. Up, up, my friend, and clear your looks. Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain's head, a freshening lustre mellow. Through all the long green fields has spread his first sweet evening yellow. Books, tis a dull and endless strife.

Come, hear the woodland linnet. How sweet his music. On my life there's more of wisdom in it. And hark, how blithe the throstle sings. He too is no mean preacher. Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, our minds and hearts to bless.

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good, than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which nature brings. Our meddling intellect mischapes the beauteous forms of things. We murder to dissect. Enough of science and of art, close up those barren leaves. Come forth and bring with you a heart that watches and receives. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba.

If you enjoyed this episode, consider following the Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to the PoetryFix at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading Herbert's The Holy Communion.