The Tables Turned

.    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   Mis-shapes 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.

Form:

Composition Date:17981.

In the "Advertisement" to the volume,

Wordsworth wrote: "The lines entitled Expostulation and Reply and those which follow [The Tables Turned], arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy." The friend was probably William Hazlitt who visited Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset in the spring of 1798.

See Hazlitt's essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets."