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.
—from "Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth
Most people believe that, in essence, we humans don't change very much as we age. We grow up, go to various schools, travel, get jobs, husbands and wives, singularly or serially — and when we meet old friends we haven't seen in decades, they say, "Well, you haven't changed a bit!"
All that work, all that study, all that experience — and we haven't changed a bit.
This is discouraging, but, I believe, false. We really seem to be talking about personalities here — and that has some truth in it: A cheerful child, even in the face of adversity, often becomes a cheerful adult — not necessarily optimistic, but generally good-natured. A naturally affectionate adolescent still gives hugs and kisses to those standing within reach. A hot temper stomps along as one grows. But we are different people.
In our last column, I mentioned that our lives, maybe even personalities, were changed by the poet William Wordsworth when we visited his ancient home in England. We came home and very soon after downsized from our spacious modern ranch house into a Wordsworthian cottage.
From a normal perspective, our cottage can seem both dark and uncomfortable. (It is dark and uncomfortable.) Our furniture's mostly wooden and old, and we've never put in modern lighting. You'd think an artist and a writer would want a bright cheery house, but this murkiness seems to suit us — although usually cheerful enough, we both have something molelike in our dispositions.
Wordsworth's house was also small and dark, perched above Grasmere Lake (for our part, we can see Big Bayou from our dining room windows), and although when I was young his poetry wasn't my cup of tea, I drink him almost daily now, as his Collected Poems is on my night table. These days I'm much less interested in, say, Allen Ginsberg's scatological drug-and-sex-fueled Howl, preferring Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence. (I'm not claiming this is good, but it's a definite change.)
Last week we were actually drinking to Wordsworth: his birthday was April 7th. He often wrote poems contrasting youth and old age, perhaps because he, born first and dying last, bracketed his fellow Romantic poets — Wordsworth (1780-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821) — whose life spans improbably fit within each others' like a set of Russian dolls.
The changes I see in myself, both domestic and literary, are linked to Wordsworth. When I was young, his poems seemed weak and watery: old-fashioned; rhymed; "proper." I was excited, in 1956, when Howl came out; I liked its energy, its "bad" language that shocked my teachers, its revolt against the conformity of the 1950s — but that in turn has bred its own kind of conventionality.
Of course, Wordsworth's poems are the same, only my taste has changed; after all, there are many kinds of teas. In James Joyce's Ulysses Buck Mulligan tells the story of old mother Grogan, who says to her friend Mrs. Cahill (who appears to have criticized her tea as weak), "When I makes tea, I makes tea. And when I makes water, I makes water." "Begob, ma'am," says Mrs. Cahill, "God send you don't make them in the one pot."
Wordsworth, who championed the words of common and rural people over literary fanciness (leading inexorably to the language of Ginsberg and the Beat Generation), would have liked that. Although suspicious of people in general and cities in particular, he believed in the power of nature to make us better, to invigorate us with its repetitive beauty and power.
In early morning, when Jeanne and I walk by Lassing Park, and the sun is rising, the birds beginning to sing, the trees emerging against the sky, we forget the headlines, our criminal legislature and stone-hearted governor: the world has possibilities! And I think of Wordsworth's great "Intimations of Immortality Ode" and the "soothing thoughts that spring / out of human suffering."
And I think, let's roll up our sleeves. Bring on those teacups!
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.
—from "Resolution and Independence," by William Wordsworth
Peter Meinke will be reading at USF Tampa, Marshall Student Center, Rm. 3707, 7 p.m., Wed., April 13; and at the Jimmie Keel Regional Library, Tampa, at 2 p.m., Sun., April 17.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2011.