Inspired by Cervantes

 

         BOOKS:  A  DREAM

While he was sitting in a rocky cave

By the sea-side, perusing, as it chanced,

The famous History of the Errant Knight

Recorded by Cervantes, these same thoughts

Came to him; and to height unusual rose

While listlessly  he sate, and having closed

The Book, had turned his eyes toward the Sea.

On Poetry and geometric Truth,

The knowledge that endures, upon these two,

And their high privilege of lasting life,

Exempt form all internal injury,

He mused; upon these chiefly: and at length,

His senses yielding to the sultry air,

Sleep seiz'd him, and he passed into a dream.

from "The Prelude" by William Wordsworth

Surprised by Joy

Selected Poems 

by William Wordsworth

“Surprised by joy- impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport-- Oh! with whom
But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?"

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

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.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay: 

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood, 

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.” 

― William Wordsworth, "I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud"

One can conjecture that the earthbound melancholy of the poet’s pensive mood (line 20) is transformed into its opposite, the sensual, cheerful sanguine humor which is associated with the element air. As fire and choler are the opposites of water and the phlegmatic humor, so air and the sanguine humor are the opposites of earth and melancholy. Since air (wind) and water (waves) are so prominent in the poem, one finds oneself with another Garden of Eden built of the same two elements that John Milton used to build his doomed Eden in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). It is no accident that five lines near the start of the 1805 version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), written within a few months of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” subtly echo the final five lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden with the world “all before them”; providence is their guide as they take their “solitary way.” In The Prelude, Wordsworth writes that the “earth is all before me”; even if his guide is only “a wandering cloud,” he says, “I cannot miss my way.”

Writers on Reading

William Wordsworth

from Personal Talk

          Wings have we,--and as far as we can go,
          We may find pleasure: wilderness and wood,
          Blank ocean and mere sky, support that mood
          Which with the lofty sanctifies the low.
          Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
          Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
          Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
          Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
          There find I personal themes, a plenteous store,
          Matter wherein right voluble I am,
          To which I listen with a ready ear;
          Two shall be named, pre-eminently dear,--
          The gentle Lady married to the Moor;
          And heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb,

                 -  "Stanza III", from Personal Talk by  William Wordsworth

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

from  Books Unread

The only knowledge that involves no burden is found, it may be justly claimed, in the books that are left unread.  I mean those which remain undisturbed, long and perhaps forever, on a student's bookshelves;  books for which he possible economized, and to obtain which he went without his dinner;  books on whose backs his eyes have rested a thousand times, tenderly and almost lovingly, until he has perhaps forgotten the very language in which they are written.  He has never read them, yet during these years there has never been a day when he would have sold them;  they are a part of his youth.  In dreams he turns to them;  in dreams he reads Hebrew again;  he knows what a Differential Equation is;  "how happy could he be with either."  He awakens, and whole shelves of his library are, as it were, like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth but once, and then passed away.  Under different circumstances, who knows but one of them might have been his?  As it is, they have grown old apart from him;  yet for him they retain their charms.

        -  from Part of a Man's Life by Thomas Wentworth Higginson 

Childhood and Culture

What's in a Childhood?

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Four years ago I attended a lecture by Seth Lerer, Professor of English at Stanford University, on Children's Literature presented at the Newberry Library.  He discussed the literature of childhood with examples of iconic books.  I was reminded of this lecture yesterday when I heard Katia Mitova, Instructor, Basic Program, the University of Chicago, discuss "What's in a Childhood?", at the First Friday Lecture presented by the University of Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center.
In her lecture Ms. Mitova focused on six ways of looking at childhood:  As a period in life; as a way of being; as an historical concept; metaphorically; ideally; and as an archetype.  Briefly the period she identified as childhood was the ages of 3 years to 12 years old.  It is this period of one's lifespan that is usually referred to as childhood.  The question presented in the lecture was how we should look at this.  As a beginning?  Is it a ladder from which one falls into adolescence and adulthood, never to return?  Or can life be looked at like an archipelago with islands of experience that can be visited and revisited?  She discussed the concept of a goal-oriented life contrasted with a process-oriented life as one aimed at "good deed" or "good reasons", respectively, as presented in the work of Donald Woods Winnicott (Playing and Reality, 1971). 
Poetic references were an important part of the lecture.  For example, the concept of childhood as a "way of being" was introduced with William Wordsworth's famous poem, "My heart leaps up when I behold", which contains the ironic line "The child is father to the man".  Childhood as metaphor may be seen in Alexis de Tocqueville's conception as America as a child of Europe in his work Democracy in America.  Childhood as an ideal ranges from the notion of childhood innocence, Rousseau's depiction of childhood, or the questions of childhood that mimic those of philosopher of any age, such as  "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
This wide-ranging lecture touched on the notion of happiness in Aristotle and Plato's discussions of play; but Ms. Mitova also referenced the ideas of Gareth Mathews as he presented in The Philosophy of Childhood.  Other ideas considered the notion of the freedom of childhood and the loss of it with the onset of compliance with rules and structures during late childhood and adolescence.  
Can we recapture or reexperience the outlook of a child at play?  Perhaps we can, as Johan Huizinga suggests in his famous book, Homo Ludens:  "The child plays in complete--we can well say, in sacred--earnest."  For the adult, "The player can abandon himself body and soul to the game, and consciousness of its being 'merely' a game can be thrust into the background.  The joy inextricably bound up with playing can turn not only into tension, but into elation." (pp. 18, 20-21)

Image at top from Charles Dickens Museum

Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga.  Beacon Press, 1955.

Poem for Today

Ode 

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

by William Wordsworth  

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

    The earth, and every common sight,  

            To me did seem  

    Apparell'd 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.

If you like the opening stanza you can read the complete poem here:  Wordsworth's Ode

The Solitary Reaper

William Wordsworth composed "The Solitary Reaper" on this day in 1805. The poem was partly inspired by Wordsworth’s 1803 walking tour of the Scottish Highlands in harvest time. The second inspiration was a sentence in a book by his friend, Thomas Wilkinson, describing a moment during his own harvest walk: "Passed a Female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more." In such moments of "low and rustic life," Wordsworth believed, "the essential passions of the heart find a better soil” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). The poem's final stanzas:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again!

Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending;

I listen'd, till I had my fill;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore

Long after it was heard no more.

Source: Today in Literature

Wordsworth & Coleridge

"an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted. . ." (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800)

The first edition of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was published on this day in 1798. A historic moment in poetry, it is the high-water mark of perhaps the most famous collaboration and friendship in literary history. The two remained close for another decade, but the fault lines were by then well established. Dorothy Wordsworth took up much of her brother’s emotional life, and after Wordsworth married (on this day in 1802) there was even less room for Coleridge. This became especially clear when Coleridge attempted to live in the same house with the other three, while maintaining his old, opium-fueled pattern of wild plans and dark moods. The poetic record shows the strain: in 1807, while Coleridge was publicly proclaiming his love and need for “O Friend! My comforter and guide! / Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!” (lines from “To William Wordsworth”), Wordsworth was penning:

A Complaint

There is a change—and I am poor;

Your love hath been, nor long ago,

A fountain at my fond heart's door,

Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

What happy moments did I count!

Blest was I then all bliss above!

Now, for that consecrated fount

Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,

What have I? shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden well.

A well of love—it may be deep—

I trust it is,—and never dry:

What matter? if the waters sleep

In silence and obscurity.

—Such change, and at the very door

Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH