POEM OF THE DAY

ON a day focused on national destiny, here is a reflection by William Wordsworth on the spiritual journey of the individual, bound up with nature. The conclusion of this great poem (see tomorrow’s extract) is a positive one.

FROM ODE: INTIMATIONS OF

IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY

CHILDHOOD There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore – Turn whereso’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes And lovely is the Rose, The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare, Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. . .

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?. . .

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.