| Extract |
| I - Perspective, continued |
| The young Wordsworth leads a passionate and principled
existence that he is rebelliously proud to chaunt (as in the
following stanza) was not drummed into him, in his boyhood,
by some classics obsessed, crusty old schoolmaster: |
 |
One impulse from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. |
|
It is as disingenuous of Wordsworth to deny the formidable
breadth, and depth, of his book-learning as it had been of
the great sixteenth century autobiographical essayist, Michel
De Montaigne - whose personal library consisted of over two
thousand books - to state breezily that 'I could indeed wish
to have a more perfect understanding of things, but I do not
wish to pay the high price that it costs... and I turn to
reading only at such times as I begin to be tired of doing
nothing.' The (rarely acknowledged) extent of Wordsworth's
book-learning at Hawkshead Grammar School and St. John's College,
Cambridge, is discussed at length, in chapters 3 and 5, respectively,
of Kenneth R. Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover,
Rebel, Spy.
|
| Anyhow, whether one says 'in spite of' or 'because
of' all Wordsworth's book learning, the mystic connection of
nature and the human soul also permeates the 1802 ode, Intimations
of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. In this
poem, the child's intense (but by no means strained) receptivity
to life's initial inrush of sensations is reverentially explained,
by the poet, to be something that dulls down with age. Hence, |
|
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
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,
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. |
| This has retained and renewed its spiritual heat,
even into the late twentieth century, and can still thaw the
iciness out of one's nihilism, or agnosticism, or whatever other
pre-millennial chills have motivated even those with the bleakest
modern vision. Philip Larkin confessed, in an interview, how
he had once been moved by this poem, for a few moments, out
of his usual mode of perfectionist pessimism: |
| Wordsworth was nearly the price of me once. I
was driving down the M1 on a Saturday morning; they had this
poetry slot on the radio, "Time for Verse". It was a lovely
summer morning and someone suddenly started reading the Immortality
ode, and I couldn't see for tears. And when you're driving down
the middle lane at seventy miles an hour... I don't suppose
I'd read that poem for twenty years. It's amazing how effective
it was when I was totally unprepared for it... |
| Other poems, that the reader new to Wordsworth
ought first to read, include Resolution and Independence (1802):
basically, Wordsworth's inspired, and versified, method of beating
manic depression; and his sonnet 'Composed Upon Westminster
Bridge' (1802), in which the city of London is captured in an
early morning state of uncharacteristic repose. |
| The Preface to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads should
also be given serious consideration by the Wordsworth initiate.
It is still relevant today as a cultural critique, especially
when it vents, at length, its author's feelings about the unprecedented
proliferation of books and newspapers, and the adverse effects
on society of the all too readily available bad literature. |
 |
| |
|
|
|
