William Wordsworth « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘William Wordsworth’ Category

Entry 1294 — A Break from Difficult Art

Monday, December 9th, 2013

Today it’s back two centuries to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” when he speaks of having felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime  Of 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 impels  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,  And rolls through all things.

And this from his sonnet about the beauteous evening:

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea;  Listen! the mighty Being is awake,  And doth make with his eternal motion  A sound like thunder--everlastingly.

In these two poems, Wordsworth, it seems to me, connects to what I am calling the Urceptual Under-Presence, although his conception of it differs from mine in important respects, and is much more vague than mine is–or perhaps I should say as I hope mine will be.  This Under-Presence is what I think many identify as God.  I think of it as something evolution gave us to cope with the vast meaninglessness of the universe–a personification of it we carry around in our heads it as a comprehensible being, false but soothing.  But it is also a powerful–and valid–metaphor.
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Sonnet « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Sonnet’ Category

Entry 1294 — A Break from Difficult Art

Monday, December 9th, 2013

Today it’s back two centuries to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” when he speaks of having felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime  Of 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 impels  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,  And rolls through all things.

And this from his sonnet about the beauteous evening:

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea;  Listen! the mighty Being is awake,  And doth make with his eternal motion  A sound like thunder--everlastingly.

In these two poems, Wordsworth, it seems to me, connects to what I am calling the Urceptual Under-Presence, although his conception of it differs from mine in important respects, and is much more vague than mine is–or perhaps I should say as I hope mine will be.  This Under-Presence is what I think many identify as God.  I think of it as something evolution gave us to cope with the vast meaninglessness of the universe–a personification of it we carry around in our heads it as a comprehensible being, false but soothing.  But it is also a powerful–and valid–metaphor.
.