Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"

In my teens and twenties, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) might have been my main portal into the world of poetry, although in recent decades I’ve found him verbose, pompous and sententious. Even so, there are parts of The Prelude and the Intimations Ode (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”) that still stir me and capture my own thoughts or impressions. 

I’m writing this in the wake of some country drives in the hilly parts of Ohio (south and east of Interstate 71), which—don’t laugh—are a little like Wordsworth’s Lake District in the north of England.

At about five pages, the entire Intimations Ode might be too long for those not inclined toward Wordsworth’s philosophizing, but here is the link for those who'd like it:
     Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

And here are some parts of the ode that I still find relevant and important:

            There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                              To me did seem

                      Apparelled 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.

                                                            I raise

                      The song of thanks and praise

               . . .  for those obstinate questionings

               Of sense and outward things,

               Fallings from us, vanishings;

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,

And of course there's the famous passage that provided the title for the 1961 movie Splendour in the Grass with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood:

      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,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

I’m now aware that secluded woodlands and farms might be ideal places for odd, foul, or criminal human behaviors, as well as the worship of nature and deities. They are certainly places for working your ass off. Awareness of such realities is part of the sadness of growing up, which Wordsworth addresses in the Ode.

 

However, pastoral scenes still stir me more than art and architecture do. I’ve never lived on a farm or in a remote area and I know nothing firsthand about the details or hardships of such lives. But for me the best manmade sights, sites and occasions in city life have never matched nature’s offerings, where there seems to be plenty of green, open space, variety, peace and silence, until I really listen—at which time there’s a festival in every field, every woods. Or are those the sounds of tornadoes or species slaughtering each other, which is necessary, for them? 

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

Poetry: Maurice Manning's book, Bucolics

With two confessed Wordsworth lovers being good enough to offer comments recently, I tried to find a suitable poem of his to post and talk about. But the best Wordsworth is too long, and to my ear, his shorter poems are just too reminiscent of Hickory Dickory Dock, on top of didactic content, even when I try to allow for two hundred years of changing tastes and the fact that Wordsworth’s "language of the common man" was a breakthrough in its time.

But I do like a lot of his more ambitious thinking about nature (The Prelude, “The Intimations Ode,” and “Tintern Abbey”), and as I’ve said before, I feel some attachment to the old guy as one of my first icons when college days dropped the poetry balloon on my head.

So out of regard for both Wordsworth and nature, here’s a compromise. I’ve been posting poems I like or admire, but they’re also pretty famous, safe, mainstream work. For a change of pace, here is Kentucky’s Maurice Manning, a contemporary and unique voice as far as I know, in nature poetry and poetry in general.

Believe me, my skepticism goes on red alert when a poet experiments as much as Manning does. My first question: Does the material need to be presented this way, or is it an affectation, a choice to seem rather than be a new perspective or a new style?

The poems I’ve read in Bucolics strike me as accessible, authentic, and compelling. Of course, I don’t mean that Manning is the primitive, eccentric persona speaking the poems (by the way, his other books don’t bear much resemblance). But the voice he’s found and exploited in Bucolics seems earned and urgent, not some empty or faked gesture at an Appalachian pastoral.

As for form, at first I chose just to accept Manning’s decisions about line breaks as unconventional and arbitrary; I've thought that about plenty of other contemporary verse. Then I looked more closely and discovered a fairly regular iambic tetrameter in poem after poem. So there’s a more traditional music here than we might have expected, a logic governing line structures that might have seemed a chaotic ramble. To my ear and brain, the rhythms help to create in the speaker an actual character, a developed sensibility. It seems right that in his theological conversations, his queries, his wonder, there's a sense of music—maybe country gospel harmonies, maybe mountain music.

Theological? Yes, I think most readers will find themselves seeing the poems' recurring “Boss” as a god, and the poems become a rustic speaker’s questions and monologues directed at his deity.

If you don’t like the poems, you might yell “Fraud!” If you approve, you might whisper, “Magic.” Or, “Holy cow. That took guts.” Or, “How did he do that?” Literally, holy cow. Holy horse, holy pasture, holy rock and stream.

These selections come from the online Virginia Quarterly Review. Whatever else you choose, please try Numbers 1, 5, and 6. I’m really eager to hear reactions—agreement or disagreement. For better or worse, you won’t hear anything like these poems anywhere else anytime soon.

Here’s the link to copy and paste in your browser:

<"http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/winter/manning-eight-bucolics/">


<"http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/winter/manning-eight-bucolics/">








* *