Wordsworth, original sin, and the Beats

Reading further into Wordworth's poetry, I am struck by the strangeness of his perhaps most famous poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality - so different from all so-called nature or pastoral poetry up to that point. Wordsworth takes the ideas he'd put forward in Tintern Abbey (see yesterday's post) and other writings - the joy he had felt when alone in nature when he was a youth and his capacity to re-create that joy in a later visits to the sites where he had wandered when young - and now suggests that the capacity to enjoy nature is with us at birth and diminishes over the course of one's life. We are born "trailing clouds of glory" but as we age we become more dark, corrupt, cynical, removed from the beauty of nature: "Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing boy." This is the opposite of the Xtian ethos - birth in original sin. WW posits birth in complete innocence, the moment of birth being our closest approach to god, and the process of life consisting of increasing distance from the original innocence - "where ere I go/...there hath past away a glory from the earth." Therefore, he sees the purpose of his life and his work to be a conscious act of recovery of his original innocence, of taking joy in the beauty of nature - in a sense, a journey - with a nod to Blake - of experience to innocence. We have the capacity to regain the glory of birth, but doing so requires attention to the natural world, and what today we would call meditation, perhaps even mysticism - I don't think WW knew much or anything about Asian religious practices, but he would have admired them greatly if he did; it took more than a century but we can see what so many English-language writers and artists in the mid-20th century picked up on both Romantic poetry and Asian religion - Ginsberg in particular.

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