‘Into the Life of Things’ – by Bob Heath

‘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.

Remember this? It may bring back memories of dreaded ‘poetry appreciation’ classes at school. Then again, you may never have seen it before! It’s an extract from the best known poem by the best known of the so-called ‘Romantic’ Poets, and national treasure, William Wordsworth. He lived a long time (1770-1850) though most of his best work was completed before he was 40, after which he went into a steady decline, losing, amongst other things, his enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution, which had so inspired his outlook as a younger man. The only real highlight of his later years was his appointment, in 1843, as Poet Laureate.

Wordsworth is one of a number of English writers closely associated with a particular part of the country, in his case The Lake District. He was born there and, apart from his time at Oxford and 4 years in Dorset and Somerset communing with fellow Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…) he lived in the area all his life.

So over time there has developed this image of a rather gruff, serious, intense and eccentric gentleman wandering the Cumbrian Hills, ‘at one with Nature’ and composing nice poems about trees, mountains and pretty flowers. Add to that the thousands of annual visitors to his home, Dove Cottage, and you begin to get a sense of a well established Wordsworth ‘industry’ at work.

‘Twas not always so. The publication of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, WW’s joint venture with STC in 1798, was greeted with almost universal hostility by the literary establishment. Shame really, as the young upstarts’ intentions seemed admirable – to ‘democratise’ the language of poetry and bring it down a peg or to from the rarified air of its intellectual elitism, so that it could be enjoyed by ordinary folk. This was entirely consistent with their ideology, but initially too much for the critics. Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’, arguably the work which consolidated his legacy, was not published until after his death, so fame and reverence were substantially posthumous.

So, back to the daffodils. I taught this many times, to GCSE and A level English Literature students, usually in the context of a ‘Romantic Poetry’ module, which presented the ‘movement’ as a nice package – Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge as the ‘first generation’, the Godfathers; Byron, Keats and Shelly as the young bucks grasping the passed-on baton. Thumbnail sketches seemed appropriate – Blake was a madman, STC an opium addict, Byron and Shelley revolutionary firebrands, Keats a rather fey and delicate victim. And our William ? The Poet of Nature, the Great Communer, The Bard of the Lakes.

And that stuck, and it’s probably why ‘Daffodils’ is the essence of Wordsworth for many people. We imagine our hero encountering the ‘host’ of these flowers, with suitable ‘Romantic’ backdrop of lake, trees and breeze – details of the landscape which bombard the senses, primarily sight and, to a lesser extent, hearing. It’s all to do with the world of forms; beautiful scenes creating (usually) pleasurable sense experiences. We witness this phenomenon throughout his poems, in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (more of which later) and ‘Intimations of Immortality’, for example, where he describes the way his feelings were, as a young man, profoundly stirred by scenes of natural beauty.

Fair enough, but note the past tense here – ‘were’. Something shifted, or rather developed and WW, being a sensitive sort of chap, is not only acutely aware of it, but actually able to express it in poetic form. The essence of this process is here in ‘Daffodils’. Although people typically remember the first four lines (and maybe not much else), and have a mental image of this pretty scene, by far the most interesting section of the poem is the first four lines of the final sestet :

‘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.’

Peace. The charm’s wound up. The experience has been internalised. No longer are we in the realm of the senses and forms but the domain of the ‘inward eye’, beyond mind and form, in a sort of meditative state, a ‘vacant or pensive mood’ in which the self is revealed :‘the bliss of solitude’ and joy prevails : ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills.’

‘Daffodils’ was published in 1807, but Wordsworth articulates this process in earlier poems such as ‘Tintern Abbey’. Its full title is ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13 1798.’ Snappy little title it is not, but it is quite helpful – it specifies a location, gives a date and, most importantly, informs us that WW has been here before – and seen it through different (younger) eyes. It’s all about perception and ‘ways of seeing’. He describes his youthful excitement and passion for Nature, but notes how things have changed for him:

Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, not any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.

Later, he reflects :

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused…

So the experience/memory of a natural scene becomes much more than just a sensual experience; it hints at something much deeper, a tapping into some sort of universal consciousness or unity : ‘ A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things.

A similar sentiment is present earlier in the poem, conveyed in lines of remarkable resonance and beauty :

… that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Anyone who practises Yoga Nidra may recognise this! Although an earlier poem than ‘Daffodils’, it seems way beyond it in terms of subtlety and the communication of a state of higher consciousness, which is what the poet seems to be experiencing and, moreover, one he seems to have encountered more than once. The world of separate forms is transcended and replaced by ‘harmony’ and unity.

Of course, Wordsworth did not and does not have a monopoly on such experiences; Literature provides us with a wealth of similar material, made all the more remarkable by the writers’ ability to convey in words (up to a point) what is essentially uncommunicable and beyond words. Shakespeare’s sonnets, Thoreau’s transcendental revelations, Bede Griffiths’ -‘..the whole universe is a sacrament, which mirrors the divine reality…’ – the golden thread permeates thought and writing, man’s relationship with his inner world, through the ages.

Underpinning and preceding all if this, our sacred yogic tradition conveys a similar message :

‘When, happy with vision and wisdom, he is master of his own inner life, his soul sublime set on high, then he is called a Yogi in harmony. To him gold or stones or earth are one.

He has risen on the heights of his soul. And in peace he beholds relatives, companions and friends, those impartial or indifferent or who hate him; he sees them all with the same inner peace.’ Bhagavad Gita 6.8-9.