With National Poetry Week upon us, I’m reminded of my favorite poem: “Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood,” by William Wordsworth. The poem is long (you
probably figured that from the length of the title), written over a two-year
period. It’s the fifth stanza that most profoundly speaks to me:

 

V

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

 

What this says to me is that we come to earth in rather the
same way a student leaves to college, or a professor takes a year off for a
long-awaited sabbatical. Life on Earth is an incredible adventure, but that
doesn’t mean that Earth is home. The little child in Wordworth’s poem knew
this. You knew it. I knew it. Then, as Wordsworth reminds us, we forget.
Rudolph Steiner said that children before the age of seven have one foot on
earth, the other still in heaven: they live in a different, precious, brief
reality. It’s important that we “fully incarnate,” and yet the cost of doing
that is losing touch with where we came from.

Fortunately, stanza 5, although the most dramatic and
beautiful of the whole poem—I mean, how much more poetic can you get than
“trailing clouds of glory”?—is not the end of “Intimations…” and the “sleep
and forgetting” is not the end of the story. The mystic poet tells us in stanza
9:

 

“O joy! that in our
embers

Is something that
doth live,

That nature yet
remembers

What was so
fugitive!”

 

Then he finishes with the famous line:

 

“To me the meanest
flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do
often lie too deep for tears.”

 

         This
tells me (lest I forget) that every moment, every breath, is majestic,
magnificent, and breathtakingly beautiful. That majesty, magnificence, and
beauty is a mere glimmering of all that is, but it’s what I have right now, and
the more I look for it and notice it and feel it—when I read this poem, for
instance—the closer I come to the kind of bliss we used to think was reserved
for saints and poets. We were wrong.