The World is Too Much with Us

When I was in graduate school, I took a lot of shit for my love of the Romantic poets.  "Reactionary."  "Bourgeois."  Etc.  There are some things that could not be shamed out of me though, and the way Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats touch me is among them.  Yes, I love other, more hip or even more PC poets, but these guys still ring deep in my heart.

I remember when Ernst Bernhardt, who taught my class on Romanticism in my last year as an undergrad at Indiana University, began our study of Faust by saying as a boy in Switzerland he would roam the countryside with a copy of Goethe's epic in his pocket.  He showed us a slide show from his visit to the Lake country when we started the English Romantics, and he was giddy when discussing Wordsworth's Prelude.  Prof. Bernhardt, as I recall, did most of his scholarly work on Robert Southey, but we didn't read a single thing by Southey in that class.  Bernhardt's love was Wordsworth, but making a mark on Wordsworth scholarship and earning tenure, etc. would have been too difficult, so he, like so many scholars, chose a subject smaller, with less abundant scholarship already in place, upon which to focus his writing.

Let me pause here in my memory and allow a moment to reflect how completely fucked up my profession is.

When I began to put this trip together, the image of that boy Ernst was with me constantly as I imagined myself in Wordsworth's England, rereading The Prelude, and reciting Keats to myself.  Sitting here at the edge of this fjord with my guitar or my fountain pen is all part of that same spirit of giving myself up to this incredible natural world and a romantic yearning to get back a deeper, earlier connection to life, to poetry, to a more creative self.  But the giving over to it is not easy; worries about money, about things not getting done, about being a crappy writer and an even crappier guitar player intrude constantly.  Some asthma hit me in the middle of the night--my inhaler took care of the issue and I'm clear this am--but I lay in bed imagining what if I get sick like last year?  Where would I find a doctor?  How would I pay?  Would Ann or Cheryl be able to sleep with me coughing in the room?  Would I have to fly home?  How many puffs do I have left on my inhaler?  Why didn't I bring a backup Advair inhaler?  Is it too late to ask Ann to bring one with her?  Wordsworth had me nailed.

Shutting my thinking off and opening my mind--as in Wordsworth's "our minds shall drink at every pore," where the "mind" is suffused throughout the body and absorbs nature unfettered by thought or language or duty--is incredibly difficult.

So I was up early thinking about these things, and out the window the sun was rising on the other side of the mountain. Though I could not see the sun, I could experience the subtle changes it exerted on the sky and that sky reflected in the water in front of me.  I went up on the top deck and watched the morphing sky and water until time for the day among people to begin.