{"id":1227,"date":"2010-04-07T12:44:57","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T16:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2010-04-07T21:25:12","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T01:25:12","slug":"my-heart-leaps-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"My Heart Leaps Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

My heart leaps up when I behold
\nA rainbow in the sky.
\nSo was it when my life began;
\nSo is it now I am a man;
\nSo be it when I grow old,
\nOr let me die!
\nThe Child is father of the Man;
\nAnd I could wish my days to be
\nBound each to each by natural piety.
\n\u2014William Wordsworth<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Rainbow\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(painting is a detail from a larger work, The Age of Reason<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Whenever someone in the family mentions a rainbow, my husband launches into this poem. (It\u2019s now inevitably become a sort of family tradition\u2014wait for it….) And today we celebrate the fortuitous birthday of its author, William Wordsworth (1770-1850), born in Cumberland, England.<\/p>\n

Is it obligatory for English poets to have had unhappy childhoods? Wordsworth\u2019s was no exception\u2014his father, mysteriously, lived apart from the family, and when the children\u2019s mother died, instead of taking them in, he parcelled them out between boarding schools and a series of unpleasant misery-inducing relatives. Wordsworth wasn\u2019t reunited with his beloved favorite sister Dorothy for years. The highlight of his dismal schooling (besides introducing him to his future wife) was the holidays, which he consistently spent going long walks in nature and writing poetry.<\/p>\n

At twenty Wordsworth set off on a walking tour of Italy, Switzerland, and post-Revolutionary France, where he became a passionate advocate of the republican cause. In France he formed a liaison with a local girl, but the relationship was discouraged by her parents (despite his having fathered a daughter whom he visited and supported rather erratically over the years). He returned home alone, disillusioned by the increasing violence of the revolution and England\u2019s violent response to it, aimless, without profession, depressed.<\/p>\n

This dark period was finally relieved by a legacy from Raisley Calvert, a sculptor and loyal former classmate, that allowed Wordsworth to support himself while writing poetry. May we all be so fortunate in our old school friends! With a steady income, he was able to form a household with Dorothy and their mutual friend Samuel Coleridge that Dorothy termed \u201cthree persons with one soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a creative partnership that marked the birth of English Romanticism. Inspired by one another, Wordsworth and Coleridge produced innovative, experimental, controversial poetry, and Dorothy\u2019s letters (luckily for literary historians) documented the process. Wordsworth defined poetry as \u201cthe spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings\u201d but his rapture was borne within measured frameworks, among them the sonnet form, which Wordsworth reawakened after its long disuse. In 1798 they published Lyrical Ballads<\/em> (\u201cTintern Abbey,\u201d \u201cThe Idiot Boy,\u201d \u201cRime of the Ancient Mariner\u201d) and Romanticism was up and running.<\/p>\n

The Romantic movement emphasized the value of individual experience, the contributions of ethnic traditions and folklore, the primal power of wild landscape and the wonders of nature, a consciousness of the infinite, and the use of imagination and the senses as a path to spiritual truth. It was a break from the formal elegance, polish, dignity and conservative restraint that characterized the formerly hot movement, Neoclassicism. Instead of, say, a series of elevated dramatic couplets on the epic semi-divine hero of ancient tragedy, we have a lyrical meditation on the soul-response to a sea of daffodils, or to the loss of a much-loved child. A personal perspective on life, the natural world, and mortality.<\/p>\n

Yes…quite a break! taken up by Blake, Scott, and G\u00f6ethe, followed by a whole string of younger Romantic poets and writers (Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hugo, Dumas, Pushkin) and the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau) and later the Victorians (Browning, Tennyson). Where would it end?? Culture as well as politics seems to be an ongoing struggle between the poles of head and heart, with adherents of each movement certain of having achieved a universally valid means of expression. But that is a subject for another post.<\/p>\n

The partnership foundered on a falling-out with Coleridge, a pretty gloomy fellow, as one would expect of someone who writes a lengthy baffling poem about a curse-bearing dead albatross. Wordsworth and Dorothy moved on, settling eventually in the beautiful Lake District, that region abundant in literary inspiration and indomitable tourists. Joined by Robert Southey, the two became known as the \u201cLake Poets,\u201d and Wordsworth married and proceeded to have five children. A sizable household. But a household that, as any other, had its share of suffering, with the drowning of William and Dorothy\u2019s brother, and the deaths of three of the children. Wordsworth\u2019s poetry grew more sober, restrained, and elegiac. In fact in his later years, while serving as England\u2019s poet laureate, he was criticized by younger writers for his increasing conservatism. Suffering and loss does shade and temper youthful abandon.<\/p>\n

Even if you can\u2019t recite a Romantic poem in entirety, you know that your head is filled with lovely memorable fragments (\u201cDear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still…\u201d \u201cI wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o\u2019er vales and hills…\u201d \u201cThe Soul that rises with us, our life\u2019s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar…\u201d) that are part of our literary legacy and that emerge in moments of wonder and joy. For the fragments, for the poetry, for the consciousness that shaped them, and for my husband’s regular recital of the rainbow poem, thank you, William Wordsworth, and Happy Birthday.<\/p>\n


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My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound eachRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,45],"tags":[55,9,66,16,81,61,19],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-painting","category-verse-book","tag-birthday","tag-books","tag-history","tag-jhs","tag-landscape","tag-oil","tag-poem"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eachdayisacelebration.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}