Monday
25 December 2017

— Our tree now up and partially decorated in the living room.

Good Morning All,

Since it is very early Christmas morn, as well as Dorothy Wordsworth’s birthday (see her poem in the Day Book!), I offer you the following old chestnut by her beloved brother, William, whom Rumpole (of the Old Bailey) referred to “the old sheep of the Lake District.”

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth

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. 

I  love this old chestnut for any number of reasons. The first may be the unabashed and unashamed joy Wordsworth brings to the description of the daffodils. It is almost naive, or what a little kid might spontaneously write if he had the poetic skills—the metaphors and hyperboles and rhyme--to make the scene come so alive in one’s eye and ear.

But I also love it (unabashedly and unashamedly) for its Romantic sensibility. Wordsworth and Coleridge and friends believed in the restorative and redemptive qualities of nature. One went to nature to find peace and rejuvenation, pretty much like Miss Dickinson in Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church. The Romantics were not big on finding God in the cathedrals that people had built to honor God (or at least to honor themselves.) When religious people asked them where—if not at church—they found God, the Romantics said in the woods , along the short, on the mountain slopes, in any of the natural cathedrals God provided to remind us of His glory.

But the Romantics also believed that reality lay neither outside ourselves in some objective sort of way, nor inside us in a subjective world limited by our flawed senses. Rather reality lived somewhere in between the outside world and our ability to perceive it. So, the daffodils are not just out there, but are there for us to complete the picture, in much the same way that a painter, musician, or novelist invites us to participate in his or her art.

Finally, the last stanza speaks volumes to me. It is not just that Wordsworth had seen the daffodils. It is not just that the beauty of the daffodils has lifted his language into the beauty of the description, so that his poem is itself a field of daffodils. But it is also that when he is back home, feeling pensive and maybe a little lonely, his “inward eye”, his imagination mixed with memory, allows him to recall the scene, and wed the natural beauty to his own linguistic beauty, wed the beauty of nature to the beauty of his soul.

Or in other words, a thing of the past is never merely a thing of the past. The past can always reunite with the present. If you have been reading these Day Books on a more or less regular basis, you will know what a joy and comfort that dynamic has been for me.

That said, I feel obligated to mention a cartoon a friend showed me some years ago. A man sits on a rock gazing at a dozen or so daffodils. He is writing on a pad. Behind him, a man in a ten-gallon hat and a string tie is looking over his shoulder and saying, disparagingly, “What? You call that a host of daffodils?”

Okay, time to go wrap the last couple of packages and get things started for blueberry pancakes before the kids get up!

Merry Christmas to You All!

Bhekaron

P.S. One Johs snap taken from out on the veranda in our old home and one Holly snap: