This is the
fifteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce)
non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my
focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or
four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and
biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The general introduction to the series titled
“Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.
Wordsworth’s
poetry is readily available on line, but I have included the short lyrics and
appended the longer “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality.”
After altering
the face of poetry with his collaborator Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads
and writing poems that English-speaking students continue to find in their
textbooks, Wordsworth continued writing for sixty years, producing a quantity
of verse rarely read today. At the age
of twenty-four he was a youthful radical (in politics as well as poetry, though
not in religion) who declared in a letter, “I am of that odious class of men
called democrats, and of that class I shall forever continue,” yet he later subsided
into such respectability that he was ultimately named Poet Laureate (after
Southey’s thirty-year reign), a post he accepted only after assurances that
nothing would be required of him. He was by then a solid Tory, opposing, for
instance, civil rights for Catholics, and objecting to industrialization as a
reactionary who imagined an earlier harmonious pre-capitalist agricultural era
governed by an unerring national church and benevolent barons. Browning lamented his defection in “The Lost
Leader” writing “Just for a handful of silver he left us/ Just for a riband to
stick in his coat.”
Yet his earlier work not only transformed
English poetry, it provided a sort of manifesto with a program for innovation
in the preface to Lyrical Ballads.
There he declares his rejection of what had become the standard figures
of poetic ornament including conventional “poetic diction” such as “personifications
of abstract ideas” and all cliches, “in themselves proper and beautiful, but
which have been foolishly repeated by bad Poets.” He means to substitute a fresh take on what
he observes, saying “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my
subject” and “to adopt the very language of men.” In contrast to the cerebral pleasures of
neo-Classical verse, Wordsworth declares that “the end of Poetry is to produce
excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure.” His description of the process for distilling
experience into art is the most often quoted line in the essay: “I have said
that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
He thereby
exposed himself to critics who, accusing him of being prosaic and raised an “outcry
against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language” in his
work. It is a measure of Wordsworth’s
success that the difficulty now in reading these poems is not their use of
unpoetic language, but rather that what had once been so unfamiliar has come to
exemplify a poet’s voice that what had once been jarringly fresh now seems in
its turn trite.
Wordsworth’s
poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” perhaps the most reprinted of all his
works, provides an excellent example not only of the decay of material at one
time fresh and exciting but which now seems hackneyed due to the success of the
Romantic revolution. This lyric also
illustrates Wordsworth’s notion of how the poetic process grows from raw
experience through reflection.
I wandered lonely as a cloud,
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The speaker
begins as an isolated observing eye, “lonely” and aimless, yet as much a part
of the scene as a cloud. He is suddenly
struck by the vision of bright flowers which seem to dance and exult in their
own existence. The glimpse of the
beautiful order they represent is then linked to the cosmos by likening them to
the stars. They seem not just beautiful,
but “sprightly” and “jocund,” making the poet “gay” in sympathy. He then recalls the scene later at leisure
and the flush of glad emotion returns, a feeling he hopes to approximate in the
reader who has sympathetically followed his experience as well. He calls contemplation “that inward eye/
Which is the bliss of solitude,” as it allows him to recapture his joy, though,
of course, some have found only depression “in vacant or in pensive mood.” For Wordsworth people are good, the world is
good, and the daffodils merely a readily accessible entry to that
realization.
When Lyrical
Ballads was already being prepared for printing, Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy did a walking tour of a portion of the border between England and
Scotland after which he wrote a long poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey” with which he was so pleased he included it in the forthcoming
volume. (The text is appended following
endnotes.) This contemplative piece,
sometimes called a “conversation poem” as it uses informal language to address
a silent listener, has affinities as well to the ode as understood at the time
with a three-part division and its lofty and exalted mood. In it Wordsworth describes the progress of
his soul toward sublime beauty and truth through his love of natural scenery
and of his sister Dorothy.
Organized not in
stanzas but in verse paragraphs, the first emphasizes the wild character of the
neighborhood with the abbey’s ruins. In
spite of the fact that the Wye valley already in Wordsworth’s day has coal pits
and ironworks, for the poet all is natural or very nearly so. Thus the cultivated orchards “lose
themselves/ ‘Mid groves and copses,” and the hedge-rows are “hardly
hedge-rows.” Even the smoke of cottages
strikes him as though it might be due to incidental intruders like himself,
vagrants or hermits.
He enjoys the contemplation of nature, but
returns home to savor his memories even more deeply.
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—
(26-31)
Apart from recalling the past
pleasures he has experienced, the poet feels such rumination is morally
beneficial, encouraging “little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and
of love.” (35-36) Most sublime, however,
is a sort of mystic philosophic insight.
another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight 40
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
(37-50)
Wordsworth traces the progress of his own
appreciation of nature which sprang from a purely sensual joy with its “aching
joys” (82) and “dizzy raptures” (83) which now seems “thoughtless” (91). Upon mature reflection he can discern “the
still, sad music of humanity” (93) in what had been simply “an appetite: a
feeling and a love” (81). Though later
fiercely loyal to the Church of England, he here approaches pantheism, seeing
in natural beauty a “presence” (95) “that rolls through all things” (103). His mysticism falls short of the certainties
of rapture, however. He is beset by “somewhat of a sad perplexity” (61) and
must qualify his enthusiasm with such phrases as “if this/ Be but a vain
belief,” (51-2). In spite of the
recognition that the senses “half-create” (107) our impressions, he is certain
that nature provides
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. (110-112)
The poem concludes with a tribute
to the poet’s sister Dorothy, a significant contributor to his work, in whom as
well as in the hills and valleys he can see the glory of nature. The tone turns then elegiac as he imagines
his own death after which he hopes that his memory may provide a service for
her soul similar to her presence now for him.
[with] healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!
(145-147)
Like the brief daffodil lyric “Tintern
Abbey” demonstrates the role of poetry in producing “the bliss of solitude” as
the appreciation of natural and artistic beauty alike generates a feeling of
the sublime. This was no abstract
conviction but for Wordsworth a daily reality.
His friend Thomas DeQuincey who, as a user of opium knew what addiction
was, declared that Wordsworth hiked about with a compulsion that resembled the
alcoholic’s thirst.
Wordsworth continued pursuing the sublime afflatus
he considered essential to the highest poetry, but which he also required for
peace of mind. In his great “Ode,”
subtitled “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”
he provoked criticism with his Romantic revaluation of childhood. Instead of considering children as imperfect
adults, slowly perfecting the skills and gathering the experience that bring
wisdom, Wordsworth maintains that they are at first “apparell'd in celestial
light.” (4) Having lost “the glory and
the freshness of a dream,” he laments that “the things which I have seen I now
can see no more.” (9) Though the poet
may recapture sparks of the old numinous glory, he feels that “there hath
pass'd away a glory from the earth.” (18)
While the poet can infer a grand cosmic
affirmation in the birds’ “joyous song” and the prancing of lambs (19-20), he
is himself struck by a thought of grief due to the uniquely adult human quality
of self-doubt and then rescued by “a timely utterance” (22-23). Though the signs he describes are of the
natural world, it is significant that his release from anxiety is enabled not
by a sight, but by an utterance, surely the same remedy he had earlier found, not
the natural world alone (which would have been sufficient in childhood) but in poetic
contemplation. While the Shepherd-Boy
(36) is intuitively in harmony with the “jollity” at the symbolic “heart of
May,” (31-32), the conviction that “all the earth is gay,” (29) the poet,
though uplifted by the natural scene, yet feels a painful loss, a gap between
his sometimes “sullen” (43) mood and the “fulness” of the “bliss” (42) of the “blessèd
creatures” (37) around him. He
plaintively asks,
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(57-58)
Though the child comes with a sort of
perfect intuitive wisdom from God (66) into this imperfect world, the loss of
vision begins immediately and progresses into maturity. With wonderful memorable phrases Wordsworth
maintains that we begin “not in entire forgetfulness” (63) but “trailing clouds
of glory” (65). “Our birth is but a
sleep and a forgetting” (59) as “the prison-house” (68) of ordinary fallen
consciousness forms about the youth until the grown “Man” perceives that his
original inspired vision has died away. (76)
One could scarcely challenge rationalist
neo-Classical attitudes more directly than by this claim of infant
enlightenment. Just as the Romantic sensibility
celebrates uncultivated landscapes, it privileges the uneducated, the child,
the poor, the primitive over observers whose very sophistication has caused
them to lose sight of the most important realities. This reversal of values is familiar today in,
for instance, the assumption that oral cultures such as pre-Columbian Native
Americans possess knowledge lost to mainstream culture.
For Wordsworth the adult is an “Inmate” (83) who, distracted by earthly
pleasures, has forgotten “that imperial palace whence he came.” (85) From “new-born blisses” (86) an individual
turns to the business of life; the “little actor” (103) learns a role by
“endless imitation,” (108) while losing touch with his or her own original
nature.
The poet erupts then in excited praise for
the young child who for him is “the best philosopher,” (111) still in touch
with “the eternal mind,” (114) a “mighty prophet,” and a “seer blest.” (115) He finds it ironic that the young are
typically eager to grow up, to accept “the inevitable yoke” (129) at the cost
of “blessedness.” (130) As a consequence
they find themselves “toiling” (117) their entire lives to recover that divine
light.
At this juncture, for the first time,
Wordsworth points to the basis of his anxiety: mortality. For the child he claims “Immortality” (119)
is constantly present, unquestioned, giving a sense “of heaven-born freedom”
(127) while his elders are “in darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.” (118) He gains “benediction” (139) by recalling his
childhood though he claims that it is not “delight and liberty” (141) or
“new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast” (143) that that he recalls
which is most important to him, but rather a certain elusive but powerful mysterium
tremendum.
those obstinate questionings
Of sense and
outward things,
Fallings from us,
vanishings;
Blank misgivings of
a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised
(146-152)
In this sense of “the eternal
Silence (160), he finds the “fountain-light of all our day,” the “master-light
of all our seeing.” (156-157) The memory
of that revelatory insight enables vision in maturity.
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought
us hither,
Can in a moment
travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
(168-172)
With this lovely image the poet becomes
elated, crying “Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!” (173) As he cannot entirely recapture the
“splendour in the grass,” or “glory in the flower,” (183), he must make do with
“strength in what remains behind” (185) through cultivation of “the philosophic
mind” that “looks through death.” (190-191)
Though he has “relinquish'd” the “delight” the child experiences, it has
been replaced with the “more habitual” (196-197) if “sober” (202) view that
acknowledges mortality. (203) While his
vision is chastened by experience, nature remains the portal through which he
may re-experience the transports of his childhood. "To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." (207- 208)
Though the poet maintains that a
philosophic acceptance has replaced the unthinking ecstasy he attributes to
children, this adult vision seems both mysterious and emotionally darker. Neither the quasi-pantheism some of his
early work implies or the orthodox Anglicanism he came to defend would wholly
answer his timor mortis. He
remains troubled as he must get by on hints, half-remembered sensations,
“intimations.” Not only the “joys,” but
also the “fears” (206) of the human heart inform his perspective.
Death is also the problem in Wordsworth’s
five “Lucy” poems in which a beloved, variously identified with a lover, perhaps
Mary Hutchinson, with his sister Dorothy, or with the poet’s inspiration. These lyrics, written in simple language and
using ballad meter, seek to reconcile in simpler terms the coexistence of death
of love and beauty.
Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known
Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eye I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head!
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”
The poem opens by seizing the reader’s
attention with the announcement of the theme as “strange fits of passion” which
he will “dare to tell” only to fellow lovers.
It is almost like a supermarket tabloid promising juicy stories
inside. This tease lends an edge to the
otherwise commonplace opening scene of the lover traveling one evening to visit
his beloved who, he tells us, “looked every day” “fresh as a rose in
June.” As he rides on, the moon is
sinking to the horizon behind her cottage.
While observing it, he falls into a waking “sweet” dream. As the moon with apparent suddenness drops
out of sight, he emerges from his reverie with what he calls a “fond and
wayward” thought that causes him to cry out “’O mercy! . . .if Lucy should be
dead!’” The identification with the
bloom of nature with which he started has altered with the recognition that,
just as the moon goes through its cycles, every person, however beloved, must
die. To experience the joys of love, one
must make oneself vulnerable to the pain of loss.
Yet why is this “strange,” a thought one
must “dare” to reveal? Surely the
realization of mortality and the changes brought by time may for some sharpen
love. All the pleasures of this life are
seasoned with the knowledge that they are ephemeral. The point is often made in ancient Greek
lyrics and in the words of the preacher who said one should “Live joyfully with
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity.” However, for Wordsworth the thought of death
is worrisome enough that he tries to trivialize it, calling it first “strange”
and then “fond and wayward.” “Fond” is
certainly may be, since it is natural to be anxious about the well-being of
loved ones. The adjective “wayward,”
though, implies that the consciousness of mortality is a random and irrelevant
thought to the lover. The poem’s
conclusion indicates that it is not, however, easily dismissed.
This and the other Lucy poems are among
the most anthologized of Wordsworth’s lyrics and probably shape many people’s
notion of what poetry is. While few may
glance at even the first of the eight thousand lines of The Prelude, the
poet’s spiritual autobiography, a great many have found a measure of truth and
beauty in his short poems
His influence is not limited to people’s
remembering his daffodils or his Lucy from school days. In many significant ways, the Romantic
revolution has not ended. Many moderns
assent to Romantic assumptions when they think intuition and emotion more
meaningful than ratiocination or consider traditional tribal people to possess
insights lost to the civilized world. Even
the preference for wild countryside over tended gardens is a Romantic
choice. High-flown language remains
suspect, and much poetry today uses highly colloquial language without fear of
a reaction like that of the reviewer of Lyrical Ballads who attacked
Wordsworth’s “perverted taste for simplicity.”
Even for many who have not read him at all, Wordsworth and his
contemporaries set new standards or taste and ideas that not only persist but
have come to be the standard against which newer poets have rebelled. Aware that his poems were “materially
different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed,”
Wordsworth asked that his reader “in judging these Poems . . . decide by his
own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the
judgment of others.” In fact, rather
than replacing literary convention with a simple sincerity, a directness that
need not be interpretation, he constructed a lasting alternative code, a new
form of beauty.
Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey
On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye
during a Tour
July 13, 1798.
Five years have past; five
summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I
hear
These waters, rolling from their
mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.*—Once
again
Do I behold these steep and lofty
cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene
impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion;
and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the
sky.
The day is come when I again
repose
Here, under this dark sycamore,
and view 10
These plots of cottage-ground,
these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their
unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose
themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple
hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once
again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly
hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these
pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and
wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the
trees,
With some uncertain notice, as
might seem, 20
Of vagrant dwellers in the
houseless woods,
Or of some hermit's cave, where by
his fire
The hermit sits alone.
Though
absent long,
These forms of beauty have not
been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's
eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid
the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed
to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations
sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along
the heart,
And passing even into my purer
mind 30
With tranquil
restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such,
perhaps,
As may have had no trivial
influence
On that best portion of a good
man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered
acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less,
I trust,
To them I may have owed another
gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that
blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the
mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary
weight 40
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd:—that serene and
blessed mood,
In which the affections gently
lead us on,
Until, the breath of this
corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human
blood
Almost suspended, we are laid
asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by
the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of
joy,
We see into the life of
things. 50
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how
oft,
In darkness, and amid the many
shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the
fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the
world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my
heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned
to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer
through the wood
How often has my spirit turned to
thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd
though[t,]
With many recognitions dim and
faint, 60
And somewhat
of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives
again:
While here I stand, not only with
the sense
Of present pleasure, but with
pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life
and food
For future years. And so I dare to
hope
Though changed, no doubt, from
what I was, when first
I came among these hills; when
like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by
the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely
streams, 70
Wherever nature led; more like a
man
Flying from something that he
dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For
nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my
boyish days,
And their glad animal movements
all gone by,)
To me was all in all.—I cannot
paint
What then I was. The sounding
cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the
tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and
gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms,
were then to me 80
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter
charm,
By thought supplied, or any
interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time
is past,
And all its aching joys are now no
more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not
for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur;
other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I
would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have
learned
To look on nature, not as in the
hour 90
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing
oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of
ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have
felt
A presence that disturbs me with
the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense
sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of
setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the
living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind
of man, 100
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects
of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the
woods,
And mountains; and of all that we
behold
From this green earth; of all the
mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they
half-create,*
And what perceive; well pleased to
recognize
In nature and the language of the
sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts,
the nurse, 110
The guide, the guardian of my heart,
and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor,
perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should
I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me, here, upon
the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my
dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy
voice I catch
The language of my former heart,
and read
My former pleasures in the
shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little
while
120
May I behold in thee what I was
once,
My dear, dear Sister! And this
prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did
betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her
privilege,
Through all the years of this our
life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so
inform
The mind that is within us, so
impress
With quietness and beauty, and so
feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither
evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of
selfish men, 130
Nor greetings where no kindness
is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily
life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or
disturb
Our chearful faith that all which
we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore
let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary
walk;
And let the misty mountain winds
be free
To blow against thee: and in after
years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be
matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy
mind 140
Shall be a mansion for all lovely
forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and
harmonies; Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or
grief,
Should be thy portion, with what
healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember
me,
And these my exhortations! Nor,
perchance,
If I should be, where I no more
can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild
eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then
forget 150
That on the banks of this
delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so
long
A worshipper of Nature, hither
came,
Unwearied in that service: rather
say
With warmer love, oh! with far
deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then
forget,
That after many wanderings, many
years
Of absence, these steep woods and
lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape,
were to me
More dear, both for themselves and
for thy sake. 160
Ode
Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood
THERE was a time when meadow,
grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a
dream.
It is not now as it hath been of
yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now
can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes, 10
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a
glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a
joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound 20
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought
of grief:
A timely utterance gave that
thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets
from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the
season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the
mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the
fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
30
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy
shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!
Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard
the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your
jubilee;
My heart is at your festival, 40
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I
feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines
warm,
And the babe leaps up on his
mother's arm:— 50
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd
upon,
Both of them speak of something
that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary
gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the
dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our
life's Star, 60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we
come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our
infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin
to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence
it flows, 70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from
the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die
away,
And fade into the light of common
day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures
of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own
natural kind,
And, even with something of a
mother's mind, 80
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her
Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he
came.
Behold the Child among his
new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy
size!
See, where 'mid work of his own
hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's
kisses,
With light upon him from his
father's eyes! 90
See, at his feet, some little plan
or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of
human life,
Shaped by himself with
newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or
strife;
But it will not be long 100
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another
part;
Filling from time to time his
'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied
Age,
That Life brings with her in her
equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Thou, whose exterior semblance
doth belie
Thy soul's immensity; 110
Thou best philosopher, who yet
dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the
blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the
eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal
mind,—
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives
to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of
the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o'er
a slave, 120
A presence which is not to be put
by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the
sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in
waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in
the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy
being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost
thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable
yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness
at strife? 130
Full soon thy soul shall have her
earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a
weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as
life!
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in
me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to
be blest— 140
Delight and liberty, the simple
creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at
rest,
With new-fledged hope still
fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not
realized, 150
High instincts before which our
mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing
surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all
our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our
seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in
the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths
that wake, 160
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor
mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with
joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that
immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither, 170
And see the children sport upon
the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling
evermore.
Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a
joyous song!
And let the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your
throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was
once so bright 180
Be now for ever taken from my
sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of
glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death, 190
In years that bring the
philosophic mind.
And O ye Fountains, Meadows,
Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our
loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel
your might;
I only have relinquish'd one
delight
To live beneath your more habitual
sway.
I love the brooks which down their
channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd
lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a
new-born Day
Is lovely yet; 200
The clouds that gather round the
setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an
eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's
mortality;
Another race hath been, and other
palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which
we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its
joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that
blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too
deep for tears.
