An Accidental Exegesis of Wordsworth

I had a dream a few weeks ago in which I decided that our family would read one poem at the dinner table every night, much in the manner that persons of faith might say a prayer or a blessing. In the dream, we started with “The world is too much with us, late & soon.” I awakened, ordered a tattered old Norton anthology, & a week later, we have sporadically committed the dream to reification, starting with the Wordsworth poem, which reads:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

There are always things in Wordsworth that goad at you or feel like a sort of impatient ellipses bridging one thing to the next rather than something of careful heft, but then there is always something auratically charged too. His is a poetry of trying, of frequent transcendent success, & of occasional boredom with itself. I think that’s why my unconscious mind went to it in this case, & why my conscious one does so often for other reasons. It charts & graphs over a sprawling chronology of work an honest grappling after the numinous. & in the case of this poem, that works in such a devastating way. 

The poem recognizes our failure to bride ourselves to the world that wrought us. Our focus has been our own commerce, our language of surfeit or loss, even to the point that the greatest vulnerabilities of the natural world go unnoticed, or detected by the adumbrated calculus of forecast (the winds will be howling). & in his recognition of divorce from the world, it is only a counterfactual tableau of what it might be to become a pagan that affords him the fantasy of connectedness, even though the grammar of the poem upholds the line of distance & does not permit him to retune. 

I guess that it struck me for much the same reason that living a more typically homebound American life has struck me. The periphery of my thinking for so long was like the page of an avid student’s notebook, scripted & scrawled in every margin, but with the diaphanous conflagration of the natural world’s daily phenomena as they arose & receded. Our breed of thinking generally doesn’t recognize as particularly significant the witness of a gyrfalcon circling overhead, or a porcupine ambling slow along the treeline. It does not necessarily have a transactional quality in that the effect of its witness cannot be measured or said to have a direct influence on whatever actions might be already underway in one’s day. But when those margins are filled, when the parade of details accrues to a point of satiety, they begin to bestow collectively a central meaning on your life, or at least to cast a light or shadow over its recourse. 

I think it works much in the same way that educating oneself about anything does. If you are a student of history, your particular epoch is a wave in a sea you have charted, a tide marching inexorably. If you are a student of math, an integer exists in relation to all others, bracketed, discreet. Similarly, unpeopled & immersed in the world, you interpolate yourself from what circumstances dance around you. Your circumference dizzies, gathering feather & soil & flower. The air you are breathing carries exhalation from passing birds, from dog yawns, leaves in their slow work. Your foot steps on lichen & moss & stratas of dirt & loam & clay & ice & rock. Surrounded by living things, you engage in their contingencies, in their dailiness, in their sense of time. & I miss that, so deeply. I had without knowing it come to depend on it. 

I have clean fingernails now. I notice when I have a small cut or bruise. I don’t go out in the rain. I am changed by this kind of living, much for the worse. & now I send out these missives like grappling hooks to find purchase & to pull myself from the maw of what is not living, what is not alive. 

Wordsworth had it wrong, a miserable revelation that wanted company is all. He was never we. We rarely are, not really. I don’t want anything to do with dead gods, just feather & loam & the breathing world, alive & fulgent & all, all around.