The test of a poem is its persistence in mind.
Likeable poems, like likeable moments, are a dime a dozen, but how many do we recall, store, revisit? Our minds are finicky anthologists, fingering many, preserving few. It isn’t always favorites we retain. Some stick though they irk, like an advertising jingle (Poe’s “The Raven,” comes to mind); we’d remove them from our memory bank to make room for others we prefer, only memory is out of our control. Our memories, like our dreams, are inadvertent, sometimes enraging. Memory fastens on an image like a sweater on a bramble and will not let go.
Wordsworth’s famous sonnet, “The world is too much with us,” is not a poem I cherish, though I admire it. Wordsworth’s voice is too definite, didactic, preachy to my ear; his pain does not plead for my embrace. Literature, like any human relation, is an emotional transaction; vulnerability seduces – it feels good to be needed. Wordsworth tells us how he’s feeling but does not groan in our arms. He asks us to lend an ear but not a hand.
Yet this poem, like many of Wordsworth’s, clings to my brain and noses into my conversation. Why?
Partly it’s what he’s preaching. Our inner life, for Wordsworth, is the one that counts – our feelings, not our facts, constitute our experience. Like Thoreau a generation later, he exhorts us to be still, listen, breathe, quit chasing gimcrack. Our ambition should be serenity, not prosperity. That strikes me as right – but it took me most of my life to practice what these sages preached.
More than what Wordsworth says, it’s how that inveigles. A sublime composer, his music is irresistible. Say aloud the lines below without attending to their sense. Like babes in a cradle, we are rocked by their gentle pulse. The rhymes hypnotize: soon – boon – moon – tune; powers – ours – hours – flowers. One recalls Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” And while one can analyze it, the allure of music defies explanation.
The progression of metaphors underscores the poet’s theme. The grouchy first four lines focus on economics: getting, spending, wasting, a “sordid boon”. But the moment the poet’s attention pivots to Nature, the allusions become amiable, even humorous. The coquettish sea “bares her bosom” to the (presumably horny) moon. The winds which, like over-tired children, have been “howling at all hours,” are now blissfully quiet, “upgathered like sleeping flowers.” All this beauty is happening – yet immersed in displeasing economics, the poet’s deaf to it. “Great God!” he exclaims colloquially, without actually addressing the divine, the way we might say “Dammit”. But the mention of God redirects his attention to actual gods – today’s, with their attention on economics, duties, nose-to-the-grindstone, and yesteryear’s jolly, relaxed, playful, natural deities, changeable Proteus rising from the sea and “old Triton,” that good old guy, blowing his “wreathèd horn.”
“Wreathèd” is a masterstroke. The mythological Triton is typically depicted blowing a conch shell, with which he arouses or subdues the waves. But who nowadays – or in Wordsworth’s day – would have said “wreathèd”, enunciating the second syllable? Nobody. It’s an archaism, harking back to antiquity. Yet try saying “wreathed” without its second syllable. You can’t. It’s an unpronounceable tongue-twister. That one weird word arrests and hurtles us back into a more natural, congenial pre-history. Color me envious.
This is how a lasting poem gets stuck in mind. Message, music, metaphor invisibly collude to ensnare. The effect of prose is prosaic, explicable; of a poem mysterious, inexplicable. We fall for poems as we fall in love, who knows why.
*
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.