Here are some thoughts on some of Wordsworth's poems.
"Goody Blake and Harry Gill"
The story about the man who wanted to catch the old woman stealing his wood. The moral? Fairly straightforward: don't be so stingy—it has consequences.
"Anecdote for Fathers"
This is another story told in a poem. A father for all practical purposes forces his son to answer a question for which he has no answer. Finally, the boy makes up something. There are things in life that cannot be explained; we have likes and dislikes that require no explanation. By trying to explain some things we may actually do ourselves and others a disservice. For you students "Anecdote for Fathers" is a good poem to cite if your parents ask you a question you don't want to answer. Let me know how that works. :-)
"Lines"
I like the lines, "And bring no book, for this one day/We'll give to idleness." What is idleness? Is it laziness? Here is a line from Pascal's Pensées. He wrote,
Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.
Idleness involves thinking, contemplation and meditation. It is being above doing. Pascal also wrote, "I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."
While reading these poems by Wordsworth I noticed this theme (idleness, leisure, solitude) constantly. Here are some examples:
Oh! grant me Heaven a heart at ease(pg. 45)
What is a "heart at ease"? How can one be content? How can we, in this world of busy-ness, rest peacefully?
The homely sympathy that heeds
The common life, our nature breeds;
A wisdom fitted to the needs
Of hearts at leisure(178)
What is a "common life"? It's the life most of us lead. It's the life most of us will continue to lead. But it's also an attitude, one can lead an uncommon life (celebrity, famous politician, well-known novelist) and yet still maintain the kind of life that is "fitted to the needs/Of hearts at leisure."
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business . . .(192)
Who are these "children round her knees"? Maybe it is just having the time to be quiet (i.e. not busy) with your children, to have the leisure to enjoy books, laughter, convesation and food together. Later in the same poem Wordsworth asserts that these are "the stalk/True power doth grow on . . ."
The world is too much with us: late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers(194)
This is one of Wordsworth's more famous lines. The desire for material things so easily distracts us from what is important. Wordsworth considers the contemplation of nature of far more importance than wealth and cannot understand how one is unmoved by the natural world that surrounds us. Is wealth the problem? Certainly not, the problem is man's overemphasis on wealth above all else.
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude(214)
Leisure is a kind of freedom from attachment, any attachment that distracts us (Pascal would say, "diverts us") from what would nourish our souls. It might be money, but it might also be the lack of money. The culprit is not the circumstances that we find ourselves in, but our reaction to those circumstances.
There are many books that deal with this topic of leisure.
In No Man is an Island Thomas Merton writes,
If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life's leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.
In The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang writes in his chapter "The Importance of Loafing," probably one of my favorite chapter titles of all time,
Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise. The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully.
Sebastian de Grazia gives us a definition of sorts in Of Time, Work and Leisure,
It[leisure] may be difficult or easy, pleasant or unpleasant, and look suspiciously like hard work, but it is something he wants to do. That is all.
Later he writes,
The life of leisure leads to a great sensitivity not to truth alone, but also to beauty, to the wonder of man and nature, to its contemplation and its re-creation in word or song, clay, colors or stone.
Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician and philosopher, wrote in his essay, "In Praise of Idleness,"
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things.
And lastly from Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, a book I also quoted from last week, we read,
. . . the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.
All of these books, Russell's essay comes from his book, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, can greatly contribute to an understanding of leisure and expand on Wordsworth's own idea of it. A couple of other related books are Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville and Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski. I expect everyone to read these and the above books in conjunction with this Literature Unit . . . just checking to see if you're awake. As you can probably figure out this is a favorite topic of mine.
"Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" on page 77:
feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and love.
What are "nameless, unremembered acts"? Who has greater influence in the world: great men, say like Abraham Lincoln, or unknown men and women, say like their parents or more to the point: you or I? There is a great passage about this in George Eliot's (Her real name was Mary Ann Evans.) Middlemarch. It's the last sentence of what is considered her greatest novel.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
It is important to note that Wordsworth and Eliot tell us that these "unremembered" and "unhistoric" acts are not "trivial." They may be the reason for the good that is in the world and at least partly responsible for the good that we experience everyday.
