Still sad music
The new biography of William Wordsworth by Juliet Barker has proved the occasion for a beautiful appreciation of Wordsworth's poetry by my esteemed teacher Jeffrey Hart: "The poet of meaning." Professor Hart taught me the glories of eighteenth-century English poetry and prose, casting a somewhat skeptical eye on the Romantic successors of Pope and Johnson. I therefore found this passage of Professor Hart's review especially striking:
In 1798 [Wordsworth] visited Tintern Abbey, and notice the precision of his title: "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798." Every element there is important. The river is important, also the fact that he is revisiting the site he has known, mixing past and present:Professor Hart is a great literary critic whose natural mode is appreciation; in this review/essay he is operating at the top of his form.Five years have passed, five summers, with the lengthWatch out when Wordsworth hears that sound of waters. He seems then to gain access to his unconscious mind, exploring it as the poem proceeds, and at length experiencing an epiphany in the form of profound sympathy:
Of five long winters! And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain-springs...For I have learnedThat last line goes beyond the ordinary world to a moment of aural epiphany. It pushes language, resists analysis. "Still"? Does that mean "silent"? Or "always" sad? Or both simultaneously? Language seems to dissolve. I know of nothing in poetry resembling that line, that moment. Keats's unheard melodies are "sweeter." The "still" sad music of humanity must possess vast depths of sadness.
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity.We notice something about his verse here. Wordsworth has come through the experiments of his Lucy poems, the nursery-rhyme simplicity; has retained the language of speech; and has also done something new with iambic pentameter, repossessing it from Shakespeare and the very different verse of Milton, making it over into his own conversational form. He also has become capable of such a line as "the still sad music of humanity."
Professor Hart is the long-time senior editor of National Review and author of the wonderful new history of NR, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. I hope to take up the book here soon.
