Wordsworth (3 page)

Edward will come with you, and pray,

Put on with speed your woodland dress,

And bring no book, for this one day

We’ll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate

Our living Calendar:

We from to-day, my friend, will date

The opening of the year.

Love, now an universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth,

– It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more

Than fifty years of reason;

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts may make,

Which they shall long obey;

We for the year to come may take

Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls

About, below, above;

We’ll frame the measure of our souls,

They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my sister! come, I pray,

With speed put on your woodland dress,

And bring no book; for this one day

We’ll give to idleness.

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure: –

But the least motion which they made,

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

A whirl-blast from behind the hill

Rushed o’er the wood with startling sound;

Then – all at once the air was still,

And showers of hailstones pattered round.

Where leafless oaks towered high above,

I sat within an undergrove

Of tallest hollies, tall and green;

A fairer bower was never seen.

From year to year the spacious floor

With withered leaves is covered o’er,

And all the year the bower is green.

But see! where’er the hailstones drop

The withered leaves all skip and hop;

There’s not a breeze – no breath of air –

Yet here, and there, and everywhere

Along the floor, beneath the shade

By those embowering hollies made,

The leaves in myriads jump and spring,

As if with pipes and music rare

Some Robin Good-fellow were there,

And all those leaves, in festive glee,

Were dancing in the minstrelsy.

               Not a breath of air

Ruffles the bosom of this leafy glen.

From the brook’s margin, wide around, the trees

Are steadfast as the rocks; the brook itself,

Old as the hills that feed it from afar,

Doth rather deepen than disturb the calm

Where all things else are still and motionless.

And yet, even now, a little breeze, perchance

Escaped from boisterous winds that rage without,

Has entered, by the sturdy oaks unfelt,

But to its gentle touch how sensitive

Is the light ash! that, pendent from the brow

Of yon dim cave, in seeming silence makes

A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs,

Powerful almost as vocal harmony

To stay the wanderer’s steps and soothe his thoughts.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur. – Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves

’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone.

                                        
These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: – feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened: – 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.

                                        If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft –

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

    And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all. – I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

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, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. 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,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

                                        Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more

Suffer my genial spirits to decay:

For thou art with me here upon the banks

Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,

My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,

Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee: and, in after years,

When these wild ecstasies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind

Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts

Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance –

If I should be where I no more can hear

Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

Of past existence – wilt thou then forget

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long

A worshipper of Nature, hither came

Unwearied in that service: rather say

With warmer love – oh! with far deeper zeal

Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,

That after many wanderings, many years

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

There is a Flower, the lesser Celandine,

That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain;

And, the first moment that the sun may shine,

Bright as the sun himself, ’tis out again!

When hailstones have been falling, swarm on swarm,

Or blasts the green field and the trees distrest,

Oft have I seen it muffled up from harm,

In close self-shelter, like a Thing at rest.

But lately, one rough day, this Flower I passed

And recognized it, though an altered form,

Now standing forth an offering to the blast,

And buffeted at will by rain and storm.

I stopped, and said with inly-muttered voice,

’It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold:

This neither is its courage nor its choice,

But its necessity in being old.

’The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew;

It cannot help itself in its decay;

Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue.’

And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was grey.

To be a Prodigal’s Favourite – then, worse truth,

A Miser’s Pensioner – behold our lot!

O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth

Age might but take the things Youth needed not!

There was a roaring in the wind all night;

The rain came heavily and fell in floods;

But now the sun is rising calm and bright;

The birds are singing in the distant woods;

Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;

The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;

And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.