XXIX

Don December 8th, 2008

XXIX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

By now I have made good progress as an English Major in discovering something of the range of what poetry can do.  The English Romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats—teach us how effectively Nature can mirror our own moods back to us and help us to explore them, and they showed how poetry could mirror that mirror.  They thought (see Wordsworth in “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”) that Nature could do more than that, that it had positive content, and so an impulse from a vernal wood could teach us more of moral evil and of good than all the sages can.  From this critical distance it is easy to see that they imported their own propositional content into those experiences, content they got somewhere else.  So must we all do, and find other ways of testing the validity those beliefs than how well they fit Nature’s moods.  What Nature—and nature poetry—can do is to help us find the perfect language for expressing them.

 MEDITATION XIV 

The music of the dripping leaves,

A booming frog, a cricket’s song,

The night-owl’s call to one who grieves

Remind me of that of which I’m bereaved

And that I don’t belong.

And often when the brittle stars

Flame out in Midnight’s deep, dark dome,

Their pristine light, remote, unmarred,

Reminds me of how small men are

And that I’m not at home.

But when I turn, Lord, to your Book

And read the things that you have done:

How although Man your law forsook

You pity on your creatures took

And gave your only Son

To die for an undeserving race,

My stubborn heart’s bowed down

To think of how you took my place

That my weak eyes might see your face

And I, your sheep, be found.

Then Nature has different things to say:

Your handiwork in wood and stone,

In starlit night and rainy day

Remind me of the price you paid,

And that I’m not alone. 

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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