An appreciation for the wonder of a nature is central to B. Wordsworth’s worldview and to his friendship with the boy. The boy meets B. Wordsworth when the latter comes to his door requesting to “watch the bees” that have taken over the palm trees in the boy’s yard. B. Wordsworth’s interest in the bees signals a crucial preoccupation for him—the wonder of the natural world. This sense of wonder is one that the boy is initially unaware of; he sees the bees as pests and, later, wonders why B. Wordsworth keeps his yard overgrown. B. Wordsworth teaches the boy, more through his actions than his words, that the natural world is a place of wonder that one ought to pay attention to. B. Wordsworth clearly sees the world of nature as something that invites—or perhaps deserves—awe and appreciation, as made evident by his interest in both small, everyday elements of the world (like fruit trees and bees) and cosmic beauties (like the constellations he shows the boy). The natural world is also a way of keeping alive the memory of the dead, such as when B. Wordsworth suggests that he keeps his yard overgrown in order to memorialize a deceased wife and child. The boy’s strong association of B. Wordsworth with nature also comes through when the boy wonders at the end of the story—after discovering that B. Wordsworth’s hut and overgrown yard have been replaced with brick and concrete—whether B. Wordsworth ever truly existed at all. Just as the lush greenery of the yard has disappeared, the boy is filled with a deep sense of B. Wordsworth’s absence. In turn, the story implies that perhaps the most compelling and astonishing thing about nature is that it often feels intertwined with seemingly everything about human life, including the magic of a close personal relationship.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Wonder of Nature ThemeTracker
The Wonder of Nature Quotes in B. Wordsworth
His English was so good it didn’t sound natural, and I could see my mother was worried.
She said to me, ‘Stay here and watch him while he watch the bees.’
The man said, ‘Thank you, Madam. You have done a good deed today.’
He spoke very slowly and very correctly, as though every word was costing him money.
‘Black. Black Wordsworth. White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart. I can watch a small flower like the morning glory and cry.’
He lived in Alberto Street in a one-roomed hut placed right in the centre of the lot. The yard seemed all green. There was the big mango tree. There was a coconut tree and there was a plum tree. The place looked wild, as though it wasn’t in the city at all. You couldn’t see all the big concrete houses in the street.
B. Wordsworth said, ‘Now, let us lie on the grass and look up at the sky, and I want you to think how far those stars are from us.’
I did as he told me, and I saw what he meant. I felt like nothing, and at the same time I had never felt so big and great in all my life. I forgot all my anger and all my tears and all the blows.
He said, ‘Listen, and I will tell you a story. Once upon a time a boy and girl met each other and they fell in love. They loved each other so much they got married. They were both poets. He loved words. She loved grass and flowers and trees. They lived happily in a single room, and then one day the girl poet said to the boy poet, “We are going to have another poet in the family.” But this poet was never born, because the girl died, and the young poet died with her, inside her. And the girl’s husband was very sad, and he said he would never touch a thing in the girl’s garden. And so the garden remained, and grew high and wild.’
He said, ‘But this is a different sort of poem. This is the greatest poem in the world.’
I whistled.
He said, ‘I have been working on it for more than five years now. I will finish it in about twenty-two years from now, that is, if I keep on writing at the present rate.’
You does write a lot, then?’
He said, ‘Not any more. I just write one line a month. But I make sure it is a good line.’
I asked, ‘What was last month’s good line?’ He looked up at the sky and said, ‘The past is deep.’
Our walks continued. We walked along the sea-wall at Docksite one day, and I said, ‘Mr. Wordsworth, if I drop this pin in the water, you think it will float?’
He said, ‘This is a strange world. Drop your pin, and let us see what will happen.’
The pin sank.
I walked along Alberto Street a year later, but I could find no sign of the poet’s house. It hadn’t vanished, just like that. It had been pulled down, and a big, two-storeyed building had taken its place. The mango tree and the plum tree and the coconut tree had all been cut down, and there was brick and concrete everywhere.
It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.
