Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us," More on Hirshfield and Romanticism

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



“Most wild American Crows live for about 7–8 years. Captive birds are known to have lived up to 30 years.” (Wikipedia)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning” has me thinking once again that seemingly over-simplified writing and/or flat language can be deceptive. There is an important difference between the merely descriptive word, “simple,” and “simplistic,” which judges something as over-simplified or simple-minded.

I’m not sure which word or concept describes Hirshfield in “Woodpecker” or elsewhere. I've also felt that the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, for example, shifts from profundity and power in one passage to puerile self-parody in the next. Ditto the quality of their work from story to story.

I've often wondered about this business of simplicity as it relates to the ancient Eastern forms and the West's enchantment with them since about 1920 (William Carlos Williams and James Wright, to name two, and now Jane Hirshfield; but the list is much longer than that and includes some of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists.).

Some people say that to understand Nirvana we should think of still water and silence. OK. I kind of get that—the absence of conflict and complexity as a sublime. But if that's paradise or some such perfection, how is a writer supposed to convey it and make it feel desirable as an ideal rather than boring or dead?

Ditto, for me at least, Classicism’s ideals like order, symmetry, balance, rationality, restraint. That's why I've always been drawn to the Romantics and their passion for dynamism, tumult, eerie, scary mysticism, “the one soul within us and abroad.” That seems so much more alive than pale reason and order. But then I’ve never lived or taken part in a revolution. America’s mini-revolution that we call The Sixties had some admirable purposes, but also a lot of phony bullshit, as the advent of Yuppiedom has verified.

Similarly, those old English Romantics proved to be only a short step from Wordsworth's wind-baggery and others' emotional, spiritual quackery in general. Just around the corner was the late Romantic oozing into Gothicism, which could get downright silly. And what about our squeamishness over the question of just how noble the Noble Savage is? I think it was Joan Baez who wrote, “A hero’s a nuisance to live with at home.”

In any case we're back to Classicism and Romanticism—and that icky business of one’s way of being in the world. Once again, it’s not either-or, but in which ways is this or that person or characteristic Romantic and in which ways Classical? For example, most think of Keats as the most classically inclined of the major Romantic poets. Or maybe Picasso as cubist is Romantic in his revolutionary, individualistic new way of seeing the world, but in the geometric shapes he uses to portray what he sees, he is mathematical, precise, drawing between the lines—that is, Classical.

With that to chew on, I offer Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” an orderly poem inasmuch as it’s a sonnet, with classical allusions, but a very Romantic celebration of the Natural, the definition of which might require a tome.


The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Roseanne Cash's C.D., THE LIST

On October 11, I mentioned my inclination to like Roseanne Cash’s new C.D., The List, after her interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. Ms. Cash came across as a down-to-earth, likeable human, and I found it hard to imagine her as the product of such a star-studded life with her father or in her own career. Also, the few passages NPR selected from the songs on The List sounded great—both the song selection and the performances. I bought the C.D., and now that I’ve listened to it several times, that initial impression has been pretty much borne out.

To re-cap, in 1973, Johnny Cash made a list of what he considered 100 essential country songs and gave them to his daughter when she was 18. As Ms. Cash says in the liner notes, however, these are important American songs more than country music alone—for example, “500 Miles” and “Long Black Veil” from the folk tradition.

Ms. Cash’s rendering of those two, by the way, are among my favorites on the album. As she and Terry Gross agreed in the interview, she slows down “500 Miles” so much that there’s a sense of desperation in it. That’s an interpretation that’s valid and could have been lost to us in the wake of all the versions we might have heard by now, some of them pretty homogenized. Also, by “desperation,” I do not mean melodrama; this version has plenty of dignity and self-control, but it’s more earnest than the marshmellow-and-campfire overtones the title might have accrued over decades.

Ms. Cash’s “Long Black Veil” surpasses any version I’ve heard, except for Joan Baez’s, which was my introduction to the song. The simple guitar work (I think that’s her husband, John Leventhal) is perfect—impossible to miss, but not at all in competition with the vocals.

“Bury Me under the Weeping Willow” illustrates another tradition (bluegrass or mountain music) to which Ms. Cash is faithful. Her voice is just right for the song, and she seems to want to honor the tradition, rather than faking it with artificial bluegrass gestures or some jazzed up interpretation on a tune from the hills.

Maybe the nicest surprise for me is the first track, a piece I’d never heard before, “Miss the Mississippi and You.” It’s a bluesy, swing thing, and every note, every move seems right.

My mild reservations about the other songs boil down to two tendencies. First, there’s more modernization than I’d like—some wah-wah, other electric gadgetfying, including some of that growling machine that sounds like a cross between a dinosaur burp and a rhino fart. Shockingly, it appears for a few seconds in “Long Black Veil,” but in each listening I recover enough to soak up the song one more time.

These new-fangled electrics are only occasional intrusions. My second and larger concern is a tendency to slow things down too much, to turn slow songs into dirges—for example “Take These Chains from My Heart.” Or a fast song goes molasses, in the case of “I’m Movin’ On.”

And here’s a note, not a complaint. Surely people hear some of the quality of Patsy Cline in Roseanne Cash’s voice. As Ms. Cash herself noted in the NPR interview, that is a mixed blessing, for there is only one Patsy Cline. In fact, I wonder if the Cash/Leventhal tendency to slow things down too much is an effort to avoid sounding like a Patsy Cline clone. If so, the price is too high. Besides, Ms. Cash’s voice is plenty satisfying in its own right.

As if you need my instruction, please take my comments for what they’re worth. I am mostly unschooled in music, and there’s very little I’ve liked since about 1980. I plan now to look at other reviews of The List to see what people say when they know what they’re talking about.

On the other hand, I love things as various as: several pieces from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well, some of Leonard Cohen’s work, a lot of Odetta and Joan Baez, some jazz, a lot of classical music, practically all of Patsy Cline, a lot of Linda Ronstadt, and a lot of the 1970s country stuff, particularly Willie Nelson singing and Kris Kristoferson writing.

In short, I’m not sure how stuck in the old days I am, but I surely won’t deny a dose of it. So it’s that guy who’s saying Roseanne Cash’s The List is very pleasing, much more often than not, and I hope it sells. This kind of music sweetens a commute and needs to survive.


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