William Wordsworth
One day Robinson Crusoe, the next William Blake, the next William Wordsworth. Thanks to four or five classes cancelled due to snow, my Introduction to Literature class is careening through the 18th and early 19th centuries. But we still had time to stop and contemplate Wordsworth’s wondrous lyric “A slumber did my spirit seal.”
This poem, which has generated diametrically opposed interpretations, at first seems straightforward. Maybe even brutally so. Here it is:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
As I understand it, when his love is alive, the poet feels in a dream state. He is sealed in bliss as she seems impervious to earthly time. Once she is dead, however, he can’t hide from the fact that she is very much a part of both earth and time.
Midway through our class discussion, a student revealed that she had recently lost her father. She understandably didn’t want to talk about it—she was telling us this to explain her refusal to enter into the conversation—but it prompted me to wonder whether what we were saying could be of any help.
[Note: Far more students that one might imagine carry around deep sorrows and serious worries. In my early British literature survey, a student whose mother is battling brain cancer has fallen in love with Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. She is bolstered by Julian’s assurance that love trumps everything and “all will be well and all manere of thing shall be well.”]
The Intro to Lit class divided between those who read the poem as positive and those who read it as negative. In doing so, they replicated a divide within the scholarly community. Both interpretations, I believe, have the potential to provide solace to those who mourn.
Those who read the poem positively noted that whereas the poet once slumbered, now he is awake. Nature has become vivid to him in an entirely new way. Furthermore, his love is not really gone but has become part of a greater union.
I remember feeling something like this after my son Justin died. In a previous series of posts (here’s the first one) I have described looking out at the forest that borders our backyard and being amazed at how life keeps on coming and coming (“in a surge of passion, of pain,” to quote my recently departed friend Lucille Clifton*). There was a kind of solace in this—that Justin was part of a larger process than any of us could understand. My loss was not diminished to the smallness of one man in pain but instead somehow enlarged to something mythic and connected.
Those students who read the poem negatively noted that Wordsworth has been brutally thrown out of the sweet dream in which he has been sealed and is in a state of shock. Rocks and stones and even trees are hard objects, bruising rather than comforting. (“If he were being positive, why mention rocks instead of flowers?” one of the students intelligently asked.) It’s as though he can’t express his pain directly and so resorts to images that speak to a rolling and grinding within. He experiences a cold earth that mocks his earlier dreams as it hurtles through space performing its daily rotation. It is insensitive to lives that exist upon it and now one of those lives is insensitive as well.
Of course, such an expression of pain provides it own kind of comfort, in the same way that the Biblical passage used in Anglican funerals, “for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return,” comforts. Hard and cold images put words to our pain. If someone has written it, we know we are not alone.
My class split more or less 50/50 between positive and negative readings, and some members moved from one pole to the other in the course of the discussion. As we go through life, we may change more than once in how we would respond. The shocks that flesh is heir to will wake us from sweet dreams, and to cope we may find ourselves turning to such poems and interpreting them in ways that fit our needs.
*From “poem in praise of menstruation,” which acknowledges that life’s processes involve pain as well as pleasure, suffering as well as fertility.