Poetry for the Soul

With National Poetry Week upon us, I'm reminded of my favorite poem: "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," by William Wordsworth. The poem is long (you probably figured that from the length of the title), written over a two-year period. It's the fifth stanza that most profoundly speaks to me:

V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

What this says to me is that we come to earth in rather the same way a student leaves to college, or a professor takes a year off for a long-awaited sabbatical. Life on Earth is an incredible adventure, but that doesn't mean that Earth is home. The little child in Wordworth's poem knew this. You knew it. I knew it. Then, as Wordsworth reminds us, we forget. Rudolph Steiner said that children before the age of seven have one foot on earth, the other still in heaven: they live in a different, precious, brief reality. It's important that we "fully incarnate," and yet the cost of doing that is losing touch with where we came from.

Fortunately, stanza 5, although the most dramatic and beautiful of the whole poem---I mean, how much more poetic can you get than "trailing clouds of glory"?---is not the end of "Intimations..." and the "sleep and forgetting" is not the end of the story. The mystic poet tells us in stanza 9:

"O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!"

Then he finishes with the famous line:

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

This tells me (lest I forget) that every moment, every breath, is majestic, magnificent, and breathtakingly beautiful. That majesty, magnificence, and beauty is a mere glimmering of all that is, but it's what I have right now, and the more I look for it and notice it and feel it---when I read this poem, for instance---the closer I come to the kind of bliss we used to think was reserved for saints and poets. We were wrong.