Wordsworth – Selected by W. E. Williams, 1950 ★★

Biting Off More than I Can Chew

Reading William Wordsworth became a most challenging reading assignment. If enjoyment was my objective, I failed miserably.

He’s technically brilliant and his words are full of joy. His lyricism, his rhyme schemes, his ability to effortlessly conjure up scenes of awesome beauty – he had talent and vision to spare. His short poems feel weirdly effortless in their genius, their Poe-like flow, and simple eloquence.

And yet while reading them, and admiring their surface beauty, I often found myself bored stiff. Something in the nebulousness of his sentiments, the mundanity of his pastoral settings, the transcendental balderdash, the yawning depths of his profundities had me tuning out.

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

That’s the ending of the first poem in this old, much-reprinted collection by the Penguin Poetry Library, entitled “My Heart Leaps Up.” Suggesting cosmic awe from its opening image of “a rainbow in the sky,” it is verse you often see quoted, even from Wordsworth himself in another poem in this collection.

William Wordsworth early in his writing career, in a 1798 portrait by Robert Hancock. Image from the National Portrait Gallery at https://www.npg.org.uk/collections.

But what exactly does it all mean? I get how a child is the father of a man, taker of those first steps toward maturity, but how does this connect to the “natural piety” idea? What is natural piety anyway, and how does one acquire it?

Perhaps this may help, the opening of his poem “The Daffodils”:

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.

Daffodils in England's Lake District, a familiar springtime sight and source of Wordsworth's inspiration. Wordsworth was born in this part of northwestern England and made it his home for most of his life. Image from https://www.discoverbritainmag.com/daffodil_walks_1_3993501/.

You might call Wordsworth an English transcendentalist, in the spirit of our Emerson and Thoreau, except Wordsworth came first. With Wordsworth here and elsewhere, there is some hint of the “universal eyeball” concept that Emerson famously floated, a suggestion of physical dislocation while contemplating an all-pervading but hidden layer of spirituality.

Wordsworth was different from the American transcendentalists in at least one key respect: His religion. Wordsworth was a believing Christian, a member of the Church of England in good standing.

His poems don’t always toe an orthodox line, asking readers to consider the sermons of the throstle or the linnet. Or in “The Tables Turned,” one of many times in this collection he dismisses learning in favor of forest meditation:

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Then all the sages can.

Is this insight going to hit me before or after the cute little critters begin eating one another? Saying something’s so doesn’t make it so.

This idealization of nature doesn’t supplant but rather augments Wordsworth’s promotion of a benevolent deity. “Yet, by the Almighty’s ever-during care,/Her procreant vigils Nature keeps/Amid the unfathomable deeps…” he muses in “Vernal Ode.”

All this carries a comforting vibe, and is quite beautiful, yet it seldom moves with any force of conviction. At least not with me.

William Wordsworth with his wife Mary, one of his key supports and an industrious writer herself, as this 1839 painting by Margaret Gillies indicates. Image from https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2017/11/13/women-behind-the-words/.

Going back to “The Daffodils” and that famous opening, I am struck both by the image of finding oneself soaring disembodied over a field of wind-blown daffodils and the lack of any meaning beyond that image.

Instead there is an appreciation of static perfection, of ethereal loveliness that breathes upon mankind without notice, as in one of his most famous works, “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:”

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the notion 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.

Tintern Abbey in Wales, an already-centuries old ruin when Wordsworth set one of his most famous poems near it. According to Wikipedia, some 70,000 people visit it annually. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintern_Abbey.

“Tintern Abbey” was a poem I did like. The question of life after death is a running theme of the poems featured in this collection. Not alone that way among poets, but his ruminations on mortality are persistent.

That emphasis does lend Wordsworth greater substance for me. He faces time and again that eternal question, and in a way that pulls me in. He’s no lightweight. But his methods of convincing often center on invocation and repetition, not likely to pull in anyone already convinced before reading. Wanting something to grasp, I felt air instead.

The poems are sublimely well-crafted, though. Reading them, I was aware of an intrinsic sense of rightness, of connection. His “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a romantic’s shot across the bow at modernity which connects with this hidebound hater of the 21^st century:

Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpse that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Perhaps the poems and fragments in this small volume may lean too heavily in one direction, as the same themes appear over and over. Or maybe Wordsworth had a few core ideas he harped upon.

Wordsworth admired one poet above all others, for whom metaphysical questions were also matters not of conjecture but certainty: John Milton.

John Milton, who lived from 1608 to 1674, as painted by John Hoskins. "Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart," Wordsworth wrote in his poem "Milton." Image from http://www.artwarefineart.com/gallery.

Milton is not a poet who has traveled the centuries well. His cultural imprint hasn’t changed much since 1978, when Donald Sutherland in Animal House critiqued him: “He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well to our generation, and his jokes are terrible.”

Milton wrote long, blank-verse poems like “Paradise Lost,” which Wordsworth emulated with less success. Wordsworth’s three-part exercise in epic blank verse, “The Recluse,” was left unfinished at his death, more than 50 years after he began it. What was completed were multiple drafts of the first part, “The Prelude;” and a completed, published “The Excursion,” the second part.

I admit I have never given Milton a fair shot, but if “The Prelude” is a taste of his influence, it will be a while if I ever do:    

The times, too sage, perhaps too proud, have dropped

These lighter graces; and the rural way

Were the unluxuriant produce of a life

Intent on little but substantial needs,

Yet rich in beauty, beauty that was felt.

The above is taken from a section of “The Prelude” ponderously subtitled “Retrospect – Love of Nature leading to Love of Man.” The rest of the poem, at least the lengthy section that fills much of this volume’s second half, is much windy rumination as Wordsworth looks back upon his life at various points.

Wordsworth, as painted in 1842 by Benjamin Haydon. He was made Great Britain's poet laureate the following year, and remained so until his death in 1850, at the age of 80. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Haydon.

“The Excursion” is more of the same, but more agreeable to me. There is more of a story to follow here, about a group of people, named “the Poet,” “the Wanderer,” “the Recluse,” and “the Pastor” who come together to discuss their varied life experiences.

Much of it centers on despondency, a lifetime concern of Wordsworth’s:

One adequate support

For the calamities of mortal life

Exists – one only; an assured belief

That the procession of our fate, howe’er

Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being

Of infinite benevolence and power;

Whose everlasting purposes embrace

All accidents, converting them to good.

At least Milton had the Devil to offer color and contrast to his firm Puritan pieties. Wordsworth has lyricism, beauty, and a keen love of nature to engage you, at least for a while.

But what does it all mean? I think I would be easier on Wordsworth if I didn’t find his vision and philosophy so worthwhile. When he writes of man “trailing clouds of glory” in his “Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood,” a part of me wishes he didn’t invoke God so easily, and explained his reasoning more. I appreciate his stance as a principled contrarian in the Age of Enlightenment, and his digs at Voltaire, but unlike Samuel Johnson he doesn’t really explain anything so much as rhapsodize about it. I wanted to be on his wavelength more. Maybe that’s why he caught me up short.