I love the Brooks, which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they : 195 The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

200 Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

(19-36) Scan this stanza from the point of view of detecting reflective lines which form the normal metre of the ode. (37-58) The poet physically feels the "wild joys of living." While objectively nature presents such pastoral delights, note the exquisite pathos which subjectively influences Wordsworth. (59-77) Observe the use Wordsworth has made of Plato's doctrine of preëxistence. Did Plato believe that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy"? In travelling westward, the boy continually is "Nature's Priest." The heaven of infancy is the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night which always follows him until he becomes a man. (78-108) In stanza VI, nature tries to make the child forget the glories of the imperial palace. Cf. Robert Browning's "An Epistle of Karshish the Arab Physician," where Lazarus is portrayed as a man unfit for the duties of this life by reason of the three days he had spent in heaven. Wordsworth had Hartley Coleridge in mind in "A six years' Darling." In Shakespere's A. Y. L. I., Act II. 7, ascertain the seven ages of man and compare with Wordsworth's ages. Cf. Pope, Essay On Man, II. 275-282.

Human life is Plato's ἀνάμνησις [remembering] and Aristotle's μίμησις [imitating]. (109-129) Cf. Emerson's "Sphinx," where a babe is thus described:

"Shines the peace of all being,

Without cloud, in its eyes;

And the sum of the world

In soft miniature lies,"

Test the metaphor " Eye among the blind" applied to the babe. The child is haunted by the eternal mind, which has ever presented to man the unsolved riddle, or the pure allegory of the universe. (130-168) Analyse the dynamic phrase (134-135). Wordsworth thanks his past years not only for the delight, liberty, and hope they contained, but also

"... for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings,"

which were always present. Some quotations from the poets will aid in interpreting these difficult lines.

And this from Tennyson, when he wrote with a rapturous gleam in his eye to prove that the miracle of matter exceeds the miracle of spirit:

"Let visions of the night or of the day

Come as they will; and many a time they come,

Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eye-ball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision - yea, his very hand and foot —
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again. . . ."-The Holy Grail.

Or when Prospero, explaining the masque of the goddesses to Ferdinand, shows how much of our real world, if not all, is intangible as a dream conjured by enchantment, where Shakespere by idealism crushes all materialism:

"These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep." - The Tempest, Act IV. 1.

Analyse these phrases, (145-146), and (155–156) :

"Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence."

(164-165) Cf. The Passing Of Scyld in "Beowulf," the Passing Of Arthur, and Merlin's enigmatic words to Bellicent and Guinevere in Tennyson's "Idylls Of The King":

66

where is he who knows?

From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

Cf. Wordsworth's "The Excursion," Book IV.:

"I have seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell:
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the universe itself

Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation."

(169-187) Explain "the primal sympathy." Analyse (186-187). (188–204) In old age Wordsworth loved nature far more deeply than when a boy, because by means of it he could fully analyse death.

"... time is come round,

And where I did begin, there shall I end. . . .”

said Shakespere of his Cassius, who had read aright his forebodings. Infancy and old age are one. Nature is ever greater in didactical power to the meditative man than to the thoughtless youth. The old man, like a child, contentedly moves with his primal sympathy toward death as to a second birth. He reads death as a birth in the setting sun. God is as great in the setting sun as in the rising sun. With the weight of years, animal delight in nature has changed to the "faculty divine," and by aid of this "light that never was on sea or land" he recognises God whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Wordsworth again rejoices in the nature of his boyhood days which had gone with him through the tract of years to make out of itself a lasting heaven toward which he was going. Byron says:

"If from society

we learn to live

'Tis solitude should teach us how to die."

And Shakespere adds:

66

all that lives must die,

Passing through nature to eternity."

Compare the last two lines of this ode with the last two in Herrick's "To Primroses Filled With Morning Dew."

THE SOLITARY REAPER

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass !

5 Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
10 More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
15 Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
20 And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

25 Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;
I listened, motionless and still;
30 And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

(1-32) Analyse the dynamic phrase which tells why the Highland lass sings with tears in her voice.

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

5 Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.