But the part about having been composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey has led to a lot of speculation from people trying to identify the exact route that Wordsworth took through the countryside above the ruins of the abbey. And he hasnt told us the answer yet but hes created a delightful sense of anticipation, first by saying its got something to do with looking, and then giving us the context of the still sad music of humanity, a really resonant and mysterious phrase, which again suggests that the answer may be some kind of recompense not just for his own loss, but also the sadness of the whole human race. But he never tells us exactly what this something is. Who is the real me? Next, we should mind the gap between Wordsworths older and younger self. But the paradox, of course, is that the passage Ive just quoted is about the most un-egotistical writing you could possibly imagine. And what are these gifts? All he can do is say where this something dwells, which seems to be basically everywhere: Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean, and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. He says I cannot paint / What then I was, emphasising the distance between the two selves. The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colours and their forms, were then to meAn appetite: a feeling and a love,That had no need of a remoter charm,By thought supplied, or any interestUnborrowed from the eye.That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more,And all its dizzy raptures. Its not as dramatic or intense as Shakespeare nor as sinuous and convoluted as Milton. Dante describes the same problem at the start of his Paradiso, where he says he has ascended into the highest, brightest heaven, but he who comes down from there cannot speak of what he has seen, because memory cannot follow where the heart has been. In addition to all the latest in comics talk, the show also features creator interviews, listener responses, contests, and trivia, lots of trivia. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. Marvels Wolverine: The Lost Trail is an epic quest that takes place in the Louisiana bayou. And in an earlier part of the poem he goes even further back, and remembers himself as a boy: (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,And their glad animal movements all gone by,). And here hes being absolutely true to the mystical experience. And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean, and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. And one of the great things about Wordsworth, certainly at this stage of his career, is that he didnt reach for the easy answer, he laid out the experience as he saw it and as he heard and felt and thought it. And of course it would be possible, and I think the later Wordsworth was tempted to do this, to translate the Wordsworthian something as God, to try to bring Tintern Abbey safely within the bounds of conventional Christian thought. Player FM AndroidiPhoneWeb , To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. Later in the poem, Wordsworth even describes himself as a worshipper of Nature, which would have been pretty outrageous if taken literally. Ryan Jennings ran from the horrors of Crayton 18 years ago. He was born and spent his early years in a house next to the river Derwent. And when he does mention the tall rock and the mountain and the wood, he describes them not in themselves but in terms of what they meant to him: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colours and their forms, were then to meAn appetite: a feeling and a love. Not for thisFaint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other giftsHave followed, for such loss, I would believe,Abundant recompense. But I think weve probably have quite enough blank verse for the time being. Or what Wordsworth called gaudiness and inane phraseology, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads. And of course, poets have worried at this problem over the centuries and theyve made various attempts to find words for their experience, and I think Wordsworth has got as close as anyone to the heart of the matter. Even now, on the increasingly rare occasions that you find poetry reviewed or discussed in the mainstream press, at least in the UK, then quite often the journalist wont say much about the actual poetry but they are quite likely to praise any sign of raw emotion as a sign of authenticity, and this is still very much in the tradition that Wordsworth and his peers began. And this is another way in which this collection is at the root of modern poetry. New episodes every Thursday, from Symphony Space. The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colours and their forms, were then to meAn appetite: a feeling and a love. So if Miltons verse is like a mountain stream, I would say Wordsworths is like a river winding between the hills. Always moving. Youd have to be a saint to avoid it. Dozens of humans and mutants have gone missing, including the mother of a teenage boy, Marcus Baptiste. So before we bid a fond farewell to blank verse, lets just pause and have another look over the countryside we have just traversed, in the company of William Wordsworth. Remarkably, the long poem that is now considered his masterpiece, The Prelude, was not published until after his death. Their composers or singers were often illiterate and anonymous, and the ballads were basically public property. So he takes full advantage of enjambment, and of pauses in the middle of the line, of varying the metrical pattern for expressive effect. theres a waterfall, theres a little sparrow, there are some primroses, whatever. And by all accounts, Wordsworth did not avoid this temptation; particularly later in life, when he was lauded by all and sundry, he was criticised for excessive pride in his own achievements. So this immanent, all pervasive, deeply interfused divinity was considered incompatible with the transcendent divinity of 18th century Christianity, the idea that God is completely independent of the material universe. And the book was a bit of a slow burn, it was mostly ignored or ridiculed when it was first published, but over time it has been hugely influential on the way we have written poetry and thought about it for the last two centuries. Because this kind of poetry is really the default mode of poetry that we have pretty much to this day a relatively short poem I mean Tintern Abbey does go on for several pages, but its still short relative to the Odyssey and Paradise Lost and King Lear. And like the Romantics, we very much prize authenticity and sincerity and the expression of powerful feelings. Now is is coming back to face his greatest fears and search for answers. And for obvious reasons its generally abbreviated to just Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth and Coleridge set out their stall with the title, Lyrical Ballads, which alludes to the ballad tradition which you may recall we looked at back in Episode 22, with the anonymous ballad The Unquiet Grave. As we saw then, ballads formed a great oral tradition, of popular songs and stories that were handed down through the generations for hundreds of years in many cases, before they were written down. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. So were going to change gear, and look at a very different style of poetry that Coleridge made entirely his own. Sometimes funny. With Weapon X in close pursuit, Logan and Marcus must team up and Scheer Intelligence features thoughtful and provocative conversations with "American Originals" -- people who, through a lifetime of engagement with political issues, offer unique and often surprising perspectives on the day's most important issues. The book was a self conscious effort to break with the past, to simplify the language of poetry and to get back to what they considered its roots. Because one problem Wordsworth faced was that he had a genius for describing his own inner life, his thoughts and feelings and memories, which could easily tip over into self-obsession and self-regard. He famously said that a poet should be a man speaking to men; in other words they should get down from their pedestal, and instead of writing in high-flown poetic diction, they should aim to express our elementary feelings by talking about down-to-earth subjects with characters and images drawn from everyday experience. This poem was published in 1798, fairly early on in Wordsworths career. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. So that word therefore is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because hes saying that moments of vision like the one hes just described are the reason he loves nature so much, and that nature is The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Hes absorbed the techniques of Shakespeare and Milton, two poets that he knew inside out and revered, and he was very consciously following in their footsteps, particularly Miltons. So, instead of trees and flowers and sheep, you focus on mountains, waterfalls, a storm sweeping across a valley things that give us the sense that were in the presence of something bigger and vaster and more awe-inspiring than ourselves. And todays poem, as I say, was added at the last minute and became one of the cornerstones of the collection, and really helped to establish Wordsworths reputation as a poet. Right at the start of the poem hes walking through a landscape and looking at its beauty and its triggering memories and thoughts, in this case his memory of walking the same route five years previously, as well as Thoughts of more deep seclusion. And this is the point where categories like psychology and philosophy and religion, and even poetry start to feel a bit irrelevant. Everyone knows that Wordsworth was a great nature poet. But what can you expect of a worshipper of nature? New episodes are released every other Tuesday. Comic Geek Speak is the best podcast about comic books for fans and new readers alike. But lets face it, thats not what the poem says. The world's top authors and critics join host John Williams and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. I cannot paintWhat then I was. And I for one can never read this passage without a sense of recognition, of being grounded in or reconnected with something that I kind of instinctively know. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woods,And mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye and ear, both what they half-create,And what perceive; well pleased to recognizeIn nature and the language of the sense,The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being. And all of these things stimulate the senses and also the emotions and eventually memories and daydreams, and if youre really lucky, moments of clarity and insight. And returning to the text of the poem again, Id like to pick up on Wordsworths use of the word sublime, where he says, a sense sublime. And I dont think we need to sugarcoat that or avoid it. But whereas Dante experienced his vision by soaring off into the sky, Wordsworth finds his by walking among the hills and rivers of the Wye Valley. WNYC, New York Public Radio, brings you Soundcheck, the arts and culture program hosted by John Schaefer, who engages guests and listeners in lively, inquisitive conversations with established and rising figures in New York City's creative arts scene. And this is very characteristically Wordsworthian, as is the fact that the poem gives us a dual perspective on Wordsworths life, as the older poet looks back at his younger self: I cannot paintWhat then I was. And so moving on to Wordsworth, his is a very mature form of blank verse. And in fairness, I dont think Wordsworth would have had a definite theological or philosophical position in mind, and nor should we expect a poem to provide one. And for me the experience of reading Wordsworth is very like going for a walk. At the start of the earliest version of The Prelude, he describes the Derwent as the fairest of all rivers, that loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurses song. 54 views, 2 likes, 0 loves, 3 comments, 2 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Bell Shoals Church of Christ: Bell Shoals Church of Christ was live. What I think is so powerful about this passage, is that its so surprising and yet so relatable. So at the same time as youre walking through the countryside, the physical landscape, youre walking through your own memory, your thoughts, and your feelings about those thoughts your own self. So weve seen the dramatic in speeches by Marlowe and Shakespeare, and last month we looked at the epic, in a passage from Miltons Paradise Lost. And then we get this absolutely extraordinary passage: And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean, and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms. So I think he is exploiting his poetic licence here to the full! The only thing I would say in Wordsworths defence is that if you have a gift for describing your own experience in immortal verse, then egotism is an occupational hazard. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. But he was also a great psychological poet nature and the mind are constantly intertwined in his poetry, and there are even moments where the mind and nature seem to become absorbed in one another. And of course, thats not what he would have been told in church, where they would have recommended a different guide for his moral being. The poems full title is Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798. Or was the younger self the real me? 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His blank verse in particular feels like an extended ramble, where he often starts off by describing the sights and sounds of the natural world around him, and then before long hes describing the memories and thoughts and feelings that arise in him as he walks. So he says that other gifts / Have followed and provide abundant recompense for his loss. And I could easily keep going in the blank verse vein by reading some of Coleridges beautiful blank verse conversation poems, which are quite similar in tone and length and preoccupations to Tintern Abbey you know, lots of walking through the countryside, thinking about nature and friendship and memories and epiphanies and so on. So theres a sense of a divided self here, and the question naturally arises: who is the real self? And she's not the only one. His insights, his mysticism always feel deeply grounded and centred, even when hes evoking setting suns and the ocean and the blue sky, it feels like theres an earthly centre of gravity holding it all together. And youve probably noticed, its not a ballad at all, but a reflective, meditative poem written in blank verse. A Mouthful Of Air: Poetry With Mark McGuinness From Tintern Abbey By William Wordsworth thirty-seven In an Artist's Studio by Christina Rossetti. Is it the person I, in inverted commas, am now, looking back at my younger self? Recent episodes have included features on Michael Jackson,Crosby Stills & Nash, the Assad Brothers, Free daily dose of word power from Merriam-Webster's experts. And with Tintern Abbey, we are in the presence of the lyric, the more musical, personal and reflective mode of poetry. Obviously, the clue was in the name, when Wordsworth and Coleridge called their collection Lyrical Ballads. But beyond that point, he ends up producing something that wouldnt look too out of place if we inserted it into the Sermon on the Mount or the Bhagavad Gita: So if we wanted to find a justification for the egotistical sublime, and lets face it, we dont have to, we can just enjoy the poetry. And I think in this portrayal of the walking experience, Wordsworth is very accurate. So its quite amusing to think of the great poet striding through the landscape so lost in thought that he didnt realise how far he had walked, with all the literary critics and guidebook writers stumbling along behind him, struggling to keep up.
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