Long Walks with Grandpa Wordsworth
I mean, it’s something to do
Last month, I began a project that occurred to me last year, that I never thought I would actually start! I guess I really have got that bored! I really felt that I needed something on the side of my thesis work, to be chipping away at slowly. I need to feel that I am making progress on my PhD, and while that is happening, veeeery slowly, I can also know that I am making progress on getting to know my English poetic heritage.
And apparently, that starts with Wordsworth! Through my audible subscription, I downloaded “The Great Courses: The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets” which has about 12 hours of lectures. Immeditately I could tell that this would serve as an excellent “spine” for this project. I started working through it slowly, and was amazed to realize, that as I should have expected, I was aware of only the tip of an enormous iceberg. So, so many things that I never knew about. So many beautiful things. So many enriching words!
So this is where my English Romantic Poets Project stands now (we are in Phase 1: Wordsworth). I have listened to the first three lectures on Wordsworth, but I can’t listen any further until I read the Prelude (an epic poem that is also his autobiography —-an absolutely huge undertaking that I can’t really foresee doing anytime soon). However, until then I have the adorable book pictured above, which has a little story attached to it.
This year, I’ve been able to spend a bit of time at home with my family, and help my recently retired mom on a house-decluttering journey that she has embarked upon. First we started with the books. She has kept everything from her own studies and a book club that she was part of for several years. I was able to keep all of the poetry books that interested me from her B.A. in literature in the mid-1970s, and so my shelves are luxuriant now with all the Romantic poets, Frost, Dickenson and Milton (I know—me—and Milton! Who would have thought!) Maybe someday I’ll see what all his dusty holy hype was about.
So its lovely to have this old book, in excellent condition, published in 1965 to work from. It’s a selection of Wordsworth’s works—ummm, he wrote steadily for about 60 years and produced A LOT. I don’t expect to be a completionist with this project, I only desire to be well versed in his…uh, verses.
I think this book is just the ticket, although about 1/3 of it is taken up with The Prelude and some “prefaces” to various poetry collections he wrote, that I do not plan to read. Already I have discovered an amazing poem “A Night Piece” that I knew from the first instant will remain a favourite forever, and I might try and commit it to memory. It’s wonderful—celestial in theme and just perfect in phrasing.
That’s the thing about Wordsworth, even when I don’t really need so many poems about children (and often, their mortality) and some tales of wandering around sylvan dells seem to be a lot of the same, every few pages there is a line where you sit back and think “yep—that’s about the best way that has ever been said. End of.”
I am enjoying almost everything I read in this book, very slowly in the mornings. I also have an audiobook that was one of the free offerings on audible, that consists of about 3 hours of a selection of Wordsworth’s poems read out (in a VERY posh voice, omg, the last line of one of the lucy poems is read out as “rolled round with rocks and stones and tree-HAASSS”), which I will also chip away at. Between it and the above textbook of poems, I think I will achieve a very well rounded view of Wordsworth.
In general, I think it is so interesting that Wordsworth just—-knew his calling. He was like—I’m going to write poems about nature and humanity and I’m just going to do that. Until I die. And—that’s what he did! Eventually he was even lauded for it in his lifetime and became the poet laureate of England. He sort of received money by chance whenever he needed it (an inheritance freed him up when he was young) and then later he achieved a cushy job, that seemed to leave him plenty of time to write (I’m not sure if “being the royal postmaster” was actually something he had to do/if there was somewhere he had to go in the morning), but anyway, he settled down, with a wife and kids and his sister living with him (more on HER in the future!) and he wrote. Now, I don’t know much about Lord Byron, but Wordsworth seems to have lived the opposite lifestyle of Lord Byron!
In so spending his life, Wordsworth built up this huge corpus of literature, which is our gift. We can pull from it, consult it, spend time in it—there isn’t a lot to necessarily respond to in it anymore— although every once and awhile he slips in something about how all men are equal and they all ought to love each other—which was revolutionary at the time. It’s just this big “trove.” And much of it is lovely, and some of it is morose—but hey, even more of it rhymes!
He was a lucky mortal. To know what he was meant to do, and to not have been obstructed in the doing of it.