Wordsworth's Green Spectacles

by Lee Evans

"On the 28th of April I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, and disfigured by green goggles."--Emerson, "English Traits."

I

The Spectacles looked old and out of date;
One lens was yellow and the other blue.
So what the critics said perhaps was true:
The young Romantic withered, and was great
But in the first ideals that he embraced--
Quite sallow in the works of his decline.
And then I wondered how this life of mine
Might seem to those who judged it in a state
Divorced from what the Spirit in me knew:
So I removed my spectacles a while,
Replacing them with Wordsworth's, and did view
One Nature focused in a flux of Green,
Combining Youth and Age in every scene.
I laughed, and stayed the critics with a smile.

II

From one old civil servant to another,
This calling card I leave upon your door.
Your home a tax collector can afford;
And mine, a lowly clerk's house, is its brother--
Though not as elegant: I have no other
In which to raise your ashes back to life,
To read alone or out loud to my wife.
I claim equality as Nature's lover,
And climb the stairs your study to review;
See Windermere across the misty hills;
Your garden of four acres; rocky mews;
The terraces you graded on the slopes;
And Dora's Field, where you had placed your hopes,
Though now without her golden daffodils.

III

The Dove sat "brooding on the vast abyss,"
And in its beak an olive branch held out
Two hundred years at Town's End, on the route
They took that winter's eve when candles hissed
The frigid darkness into shapes against
The corners of the rooms. Here, words were born
That Coleridge praised and Byron held in scorn;
Here etched in time were common incidents.
The window through which Walter Scott escaped
To breakfast at the Swan Inn, sick of gruel;
The children's' bedroom, papered with the news:
Epiphanies domestic; counter weights
To Fancy's and Imagination's climb
Toward prophetic heights of the Sublime.

IV

The Mind beholds the world that it receives
From out its store of karma from past lives.
Transfigured in this mirror, all things strive
To reconcile themselves with present deeds,
Projecting inward Nature outwardly.
Imagination frees the struggling Mind,
Which mastering its erring senses five,
Pervades the world with Love, and is redeemed.
The Poet read his Bible in this light,
So far as to conceive Man's fall from Grace
To be his alienation from that Might
Transcending Self and raising Time and Space
In one Apocalypse, through Nature traced
In tasting, touching, smelling, sound and sight.

V

Now what can be the name of "Nature's God"
But that creative power which conforms
The outer and the inner to its norm,
Transfusing them together in one Word
That comprehends the universe, adored
In all its moral beauty? Headstrong churls
Should not be handed such a priceless pearl;
For them, the stern Archangel's flaming sword
Must guard the gates of Eden that stand sealed
Within each man until he knows the Law
To be that very Nature which, revealed
In lichen's grip and scholar's gravitas,
Surrounds him like miasma or a dawn:
The world his own Imagination yields.

VI

'Tis Man creates the God who is his Love,
Pervading every creature with it till
Its Providence envelops barren hills
And flooded valleys, clouds that drift above,
The crawling serpent and the brooding dove,
The lioness devouring her prey,
The warrior whose vengeful fury splays
His neighbor's skull with axe of sharpened stone.
No God exists if not through Love that cares
For every being as its only child,
O'erflowing from the will of One who dares
To contemplate his enemies as friends,
Indifferent to no one; who intends
No more to live by hate and fear beguiled.

VII

Whatever happened to the Poet's claim,
In the prospectus of his epic work,
That he would pass beyond the veil and look
Where neither chaos nor Jehovah's name
Deterred from its ascent the Mind untamed?
That Wanderer whose pious Christian views
Compelled the inspiration of the Muse--
What vision had he into such an aim?
The Worthy Ones who walk the now and here,
See only in their seeing what is seen,
And in their hearing only what they hear;
And so with taste and touch and smell, perceived
Through virtue of cognition. Verily,
All they who truly wander know this Sphere.

VIII

I carried my own burden up the steep
And well worn Coffin Trail, forward in time,
Away from Grasmere's churchyard; turned aside
Once, to avoid a decomposing sheep
That lay the shadow of Nab Scar beneath.
All dogs attacking livestock, a sign warned,
Would be shot down. Too early by some weeks
For Christmas carols, I spied Rydal Cave,
Then sat upon a stone slab where pallbearers
Would rest their load before they reached the grave.
And lo! Within me the resplendent Mere
Arose: a precious gem that I shall frame
In memory as long as Light remains.

IX

No matter what Optometrist prescribes
What Spectacles for eyes that strain to see,
The world that each man brings to sight with these
Depends upon the Nature of his Mind.
And so your Wordsworth cannot be like mine,
But I must read in him the worth of Words
That from my Inner Ear my Thoughts have heard,
As Ocean's murmurs through a conch shell wind.
Each man amends his Opus constantly,
For good or ill: Why blame him when he molds
That vessel in a form that will dispense
The Wisdom he has echoed from the Sea,
In terms that his own life and times present?
The Laureate's true crown is this same goal.

X

The throbbing of my head was from the strain
Those artificial lenses gave my sight.
I had to take them off, to get the right
Perspective on the insight I have gained.
For even though one's vision be quite tame
Compared to what great Genius has wrought,
No substitute is there for what is brought
From one's own wisdom, even though in pain.
No spectacles can ever be contrived
That they may not be taken off and cleansed,
Or put back in their cases 'till the time
One's Spirit seeks them to reveal its ends.
I take or leave my Master, and so prove
The Nature of his noble solitude.

Copyright © Lee Evans 2008