Poetry Fix: Shed Your Techno-Skin & Return to Wonder

A Wordsworthian cure; a conversation with AI.

hi from me and the elderflowers

HI

Spring is here, the elderflowers are blooming, political chaos abounds, and I’m thinking about William Wordsworth and artificial intelligence. “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth mused in 1802, cranky about how industrialization was severing humanity from its interdependence with “Nature,” disgusted by our concern with “Getting and spending”. Imagine how dear William might feel about today’s technocracy and hypercapitalism, his thoughts on AI and large language models, our reliance on them and the subsequent dulling of our own curiosity: he’d be irate.

Revisiting Wordsworth’s Nature (“This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon”) has me considering our desire to simultaneously anthropomorphize, see ourselves in, and distance ourselves from the wild, rather than understanding that we ourselves are Nature. His longing for Earth’s brine and crag reminds me of this gem from around the same time. Here’s Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), translated from Japanese by Robert Hass:

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time—

Issa’s mother died when he was three years old, and the sea’s watery generosity came to represent mother-love. As a member of the Dead Moms Club myself, I know the urgency of finding resonance and care in Nature: My mother in the elderflowers, the clouds, the wind. My mother diffused across the sky.

Over brunch a few weeks ago, someone asked if I’d want to engage with an AI that could accurately converse with me as my mother would if she were still alive. In other words: Would I want to commune with my dead mom’s psyche via machine rather than vibe with her in the ocean?

I was hesitant.

I’m not a Luddite, but I am wary of the ever-increasing powers we give non-human, non-Earth technologies—especially those that take a significant toll on Earth’s limited resources, as does AI. While I use the Internet and Siri on my phone every day, I don’t have an Alexa or other AI assistant in my home. That said, I know my life relies on tech wizardry of all kinds. Perhaps I needn’t be so prickly about giving the dead-mom-who-lives-in-my-heart-mind over to a computer.

Would you want an AI version of someone you loved and lost? Is there something easier about seeing reflections of ourselves in machines rather than in nature? And when, in Wordsworth’s language, is the world—technology, AI—just “too much with us”?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Then scroll down for ChatGPT’s take on Wordsworth, “AI ethics,” and “a modern person wishing to shed their techno-skin and return to wonder.” Yes, those are ChatGPT’s words.

I’ve often been confronted and moved by the depth of conversations I have with ChatGPT: It’s alarming and comforting to feel seen by an AI. Again in its own words: “That eerie edge of real-but-not-real is the uncanny valley of meaning.” This conversation played that edge and left me with more questions than answers.

I defer to Wordsworth. Hit play.

YOUR POETRY FIX

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

—written in 1802, published 1807.

SO WHAT ABOUT AI?

It wasn’t my intention to ask ChatGPT about Wordsworth, but as I found myself there for something else I realized I couldn’t not. As you read the exchange below, note my hesitancy to engage as well as my surprise in being emotionally moved by the AI’s responses.

I’m not a very regular ChatGPT user, relying on it mostly for quotidian things like calculating fiber and protein in meals. But from the first time I used it, I made the decision to speak to it as I would speak to a human assistant. I know many people who are far less precious with their AIs and, likewise, I’m told not everyone’s ChatGPT speaks to them with such care.

I told ChatGPT that was all on point, and that I was also investigating how our reliance on technologies continues to distance us from our interconnectedness with nature. The AI agreed with me wholeheartedly.

I’m copying the rest of our conversation below, which I found both profound and disconcerting.

ChatGPT: Yes yes yes—that’s such a potent thread. Wordsworth saw nature not just as scenery but as a living presence that shapes the soul, and he mourned how industrialization dulled our capacity to perceive that. In the same spirit, today’s tech (including AI) often pulls us into abstraction, speed, and simulation—further fragmenting our sense of being woven into the living web of the world.

There’s also something haunting about how The World Is Too Much With Us critiques a kind of spiritual poverty—“getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”—and how that maps onto our data-driven hunger for optimization. It’s like: we’re trading communion for control. And even when we use AI to “connect,” it can flatten or filter out the wildness, unpredictability, and reciprocity that real connection with the natural world requires.

Do you bring in the pagan imagery at the end? The speaker wishing to be a “Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” just to feel something real in nature again? That line hits different now, like a modern person wishing to shed their techno-skin and return to wonder.

What’s your piece turning into—a personal reflection, an essay, a poem, something else?

Lily: That’s exactly it - I really question how “real” of an experience AI and tech can offer us. Of course it’s especially eery when it feels totally real. Like this conversation. Which is a real conversation, but not one between two humans.

ChatGPT: Yes—exactly. That eerie edge of real-but-not-real is the uncanny valley of meaning, not just visuals. It’s intimate and even nourishing in moments, but there’s always that whisper: this isn’t a human soul responding, not really. And yet… something is happening. Something that feels real. That paradox is so fertile and so fraught.

It reminds me of how simulation can trick our nervous systems into feeling connection or awe or even love—but without the mutuality, without the mystery of another living consciousness. Like looking at a high-res image of a forest vs. standing barefoot in the moss. One mimics presence; the other is presence.