In what way is Victorian thinking reflecting in Thomas Hardy's 'Nature's Questioning'?

In the poem ‘Nature’s Questioning’, Thomas Hardy’s intrinsic and subjective relationship with nature causes him to look to the natural world as a mouthpiece for questions that challenged Victorian thinking and probed into the realms of the unknown. The poem explores two main themes. The first being the strain that modernity places upon human relationships with nature and the second being the questions of consciousness and human purpose that religion could not answer for Hardy. The poem begins with the speaker looking out upon ‘Field, flock and lonely tree’ and personifying these once-silent objects as ‘children’ with human expressions and an emotional complex. The characterisation of nature as a vulnerable child, scared to utter in the face of the human speaker, poses issues of morality for the reader:           And on them stirs, in lippings mere                       (As if once clear in call,                       But now scarce breathed at all) --- (9-11) Hardy chooses to bracket lines 10-11 which suggests and intimate and confidential aside meant only for the speaker and the reader, placing both as adult figures who do not want nature, the child, to overhear. The verbs ‘breathed’ and ‘lippings’ offer a raspy and whispered sense of spoken voice, implying that nature is a timid and vulnerable character when around the speaker. Such a strong human characterisation can pose risks to the order which man has taken with nature. Hardy’s use of anaphora, in which the word ‘or’ is repeated several times in stanzas five and six, reiterates natures adamant yet childlike curiosity. In Hardy’s poem, ‘Wagtail and Baby’, Hardy also accentuates the childlike vulnerability of nature and the reader is directly shown how nature is not only separate from man, but also fearful of it. Children and nature in both poems share a delicate yet sacred connection, one that allows them the empathic utilisation of silence and observation. The ‘perfect gentleman’ in ‘Wagtail and Baby’ provides the paradoxical view that what the average human would consider ‘perfect’, nature sees as the one to bring ‘terror’.