{"id":70,"date":"2009-04-06T02:32:28","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T02:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/yourcharmedlife\/2009\/04\/poetry-for-the-soul.html"},"modified":"2009-04-06T02:32:28","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T02:32:28","slug":"poetry-for-the-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/yourcharmedlife\/2009\/04\/poetry-for-the-soul.html","title":{"rendered":"Poetry for the Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"180px-William_Wordsworth_at_28_by_William_Shuter2.jpg\"<\/span><\/p>\n

With National Poetry Week upon us, I’m reminded of my favorite poem: “Intimations of Immortality from
\nRecollections of Early Childhood,” by William Wordsworth<\/a>. The poem is long (you
\nprobably figured that from the length of the title), written over a two-year
\nperiod. It’s the fifth stanza that most profoundly speaks to me:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

V<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:<\/p>\n

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,<\/p>\n

Hath had elsewhere its setting,<\/p>\n

And cometh from afar:<\/p>\n

Not in entire forgetfulness,<\/p>\n

And not in utter nakedness,<\/p>\n

But trailing clouds of glory do we come<\/p>\n

From God, who is our home:<\/p>\n

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!<\/p>\n

Shades of the prison-house begin to close<\/p>\n

Upon the growing Boy,<\/p>\n

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,<\/p>\n

He sees it in his joy;<\/p>\n

The Youth, who daily farther from the east<\/p>\n

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,<\/p>\n

And by the vision splendid<\/p>\n

Is on his way attended;<\/p>\n

At length the Man perceives it die away,<\/p>\n

And fade into the light of common day.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What this says to me is that we come to earth in rather the
\nsame way a student leaves to college, or a professor takes a year off for a
\nlong-awaited sabbatical. Life on Earth is an incredible adventure, but that
\ndoesn’t mean that Earth is home. The little child in Wordworth’s poem knew
\nthis. You knew it. I knew it. Then, as Wordsworth reminds us, we forget.
\nRudolph Steiner said that children before the age of seven have one foot on
\nearth, the other still in heaven: they live in a different, precious, brief
\nreality. It’s important that we “fully incarnate,” and yet the cost of doing
\nthat is losing touch with where we came from.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Fortunately, stanza 5, although the most dramatic and
\nbeautiful of the whole poem—I mean, how much more poetic can you get than
\n“trailing clouds of glory”?—is not the end of “Intimations…” and the “sleep
\nand forgetting” is not the end of the story. The mystic poet tells us in stanza
\n9:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

“O joy! that in our
\nembers<\/p>\n

Is something that
\ndoth live,<\/p>\n

That nature yet
\nremembers<\/p>\n

What was so
\nfugitive!”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then he finishes with the famous line: <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

“To me the meanest
\nflower that blows can give<\/p>\n

Thoughts that do
\noften lie too deep for tears.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This
\ntells me (lest I forget) that every moment, every breath, is majestic,
\nmagnificent, and breathtakingly beautiful. That majesty, magnificence, and
\nbeauty is a mere glimmering of all that is, but it’s what I have right now, and
\nthe more I look for it and notice it and feel it—when I read this poem, for
\ninstance—the closer I come to the kind of bliss we used to think was reserved
\nfor saints and poets. We were wrong.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With National Poetry Week upon us, I’m reminded of my favorite poem: “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” by William Wordsworth. The poem is long (you probably figured that from the length of the title), written over a two-year period. It’s the fifth stanza that most profoundly speaks to me: \u00a0 V \u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":177,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-delights-abounding"],"yoast_head":"\nPoetry for the Soul - Your Charmed Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/yourcharmedlife\/2009\/04\/poetry-for-the-soul.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poetry for the Soul - Your Charmed Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With National Poetry Week upon us, I’m reminded of my favorite poem: “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” by William Wordsworth. 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