To Wordsworth

playing with high language.

O! What unmitigated blessings you saw
and how the world and its darkness, its building
of rulership, its wars and pervasive consequence all
over ran you, you still in a sister's eyes
found the entirety once again whole, not lost
yet; how innocence is
contagious, how much we hope that
prophecy or scripture might rebuild
and carol your prescriptions for love of
the natural realms, loquacious, insightful measures
and impassioned things, the glow of every spark
there, in that shattered first vessel of collection,
then bursts of sunny fire, orbitual and full
according to their seasoned laws;
there is neither letter, nor interpretation
that stacks near as high as the way the breath
catches in the body, as if spirit were a monarch
butter-flying winged being, netted between
the knotting rib cage, to sing like larks
or nightingales. The paramount moment
when I feel the inner light throbbing,
the mind divine quickening and loosening
those tired and fraying sashes. The miracle
of snow melted into the thick black lens
of eye-lashed sight. It is the moment in the fields
where the light secures the bobbing head of evey blade
of grass, wheat, or willow stand, and for an instant
my walk, interrupted by the blaze of incomprehensible
beauty, becomes perfected pilgrimage, and no
structure for miles. There is not a house where
the vault of first desires, causes, loves or lives
satisfactorily coalesce ,
we fill our lives with thimbles
full of water  and mourn what we mistakenly imply
with our smallness: that a body
cannot encompass all of it, every
heartbreaking swell of this.
Next time, strive not to let the world brandish
its iron grip so hastily upon your young questioning heart,
You must not try to hoot at the owls or build
from wax or wood the form of life, light, or star;
for the answer is already and perpetually present
in the silences that loom joyfully in between,
O, my dear friend - what jagged things words are!

Reviews

[Gnarly Oak]

Finally, poetry that doesn't suck. My, wasn't that poetic.

I think Wordsworth would have been pleased with your ode. He would have been less pleased with a lot of the other s**t on this site, however.

Thank you for writing something worth reading. I love the Romantics. I confess I favor Coleridge over Wordsworth, however. But to each her own.

[Ed Hart]

I certainly got my word's worth...now to the sessions of sweet silent thought...