Recently, as I was walking to Prospect Park, I turned to the east to check for oncoming traffic. The sun had risen a few minutes before, and vivid, long pink clouds formed wide streaks along the entire visible sky. The unexpected sight was so lovely that I gasped, revivifying the hackneyed expression of "taking one's breath away." I was, in the words of Wordsworth's sonnet, "surprised by joy." The primary emotion that Wordsworth expressed, however, was not joy but grief tinged by guilt.
Wordsworth's poem doesn't specify the source of his unexpected joy. It tells us instead how impatient he was to share it with his beloved. He immediately turned to her to "share the transport," and then he remembered that she was dead, "deep buried in the silent tomb." He castigated himself for having forgotten, even for a moment, that she was gone.
When I recalled his sonnet, my astonished pleasure in the sunrise became muted. I'd tell my wife about the sunrise when I returned from my walk. She'd listen, understand, and enter into my pleasure. But before too long, one of us will be in Wordsworth's position, bereft, yet still wanting to tell the other something.
For years after my mother died, I caught myself wanting to phone her about something, before remembering that she was dead. She's been gone now for almost 60 years, and I no longer find myself wanting to phone her. My father, though, who died a little more than 30 years ago, is a different story. I occasionally find myself wanting to tell him my news. "I must tell Dad," I think to myself and then I remember that of course I cannot. But the impulse to talk to him has become less frequent with time, and were I to live long enough, it would probably die out completely, as it did with the urge to talk to my mother.
Neither my wife nor I is likely to live long enough, after the inevitable bereavement one of us will face, to stop wanting to tell the other something, before a sudden pained realization that the time for sharing is over. After that astonishing sunrise, my recollection of Wordsworth's sonnet made me promise myself to treasure the time we still have together.
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I guess I'm "surprised by Wordsworth" - I knew the phrase only as the title of one of C.S. Lewis' books.
ReplyDeleteMy exposure to Wordsworth was in a college course on the romantic poets taught by a senior professor, H. Hyder Rollins. Much to my pleasure, he paid only cursory attention to the poetry, figuring, I guess, that we could read it ourselves. So he concentrated on the scandalous lives of the poets. Thus from the course I chiefly remember items such as the one about Walter Savage Landor's throwing his cook out the window of his dining room. I don't remember what happened to the cook.
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