In Wordsworth’s poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality he writes:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Wordsworth in
this poem leads us in a poetic journey through the phases of life from boyhood
to manhood as the transcendent glory of infancy fades “into the light of common
day.”
Upon
the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it
flows,
He
sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the
east
Must travel,
still is Nature's priest,
And
by the vision splendid
Is
on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Through
life-cycle completion, the journey of human suffering, a new transcendence produces the “philosophic mind.”
What though the radiance which was once
so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing
can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in
the flower;
We
will grieve not, rather find
Strength
in what remains behind;
In
the primal sympathy
Which
having been must ever be;
In
the soothing thoughts that spring
Out
of human suffering;
In
the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic
mind.
In William Wordsworth’s days (1770–1850), the idea of our
existence being rooted in the transcendent, was an accepted worldview as was
the concept of life-cycle completion and faith development. We come from the
transcendent and experience it in our infancy; we lose sight of it temporarily
as we need to attend to the immanent in our daily lives and then through the
journey of human travails, our faith shapes transcendent wisdom, “the
philosophic mind.”
