READIN

🦋 Happy Birthday, Billy!

William Wordsworth is just turning 239 years old today -- he is 200 years and a few months older than I. (In the picture at left he is 28, ten years my junior.)

Wordsworth is a poet whom I'm always thinking I ought to be more familiar with than I am. I know a couple of his poems but I don't really have any clear sense of his persona as an author -- know him better by way of his influence on some of my favorite writers and thinkers. (And come to think of it, here I am thinking more of "the English romantics" than of Wordsworth individually.)

And O, ye Fountains,
Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

-- from "Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood"

posted morning of Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
➳ More posts about Birthdays
➳ More posts about Readings

Respond:

Name:
E-mail: (will not be displayed)
Link:
Remember info	Send