Note: Andy Newman will be teaching Creative Writing: Awakening Wonder with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Bradbury this summer for Kepler. Class begins June 29.
“Read William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ for tomorrow,” many a teacher in many a classroom has said over the years, though, if reports from the front-lines with incoming college freshmen are to believed, “many” is quickly becoming “a handful.” [1] Although numerous reasons could be cited for this decline in secondary schools — a decreased emphasis on English literature; a turn toward contemporary teen-focused works; the setting aside of poetry (and other literature) for more nonfiction — I have to wonder if a primary reason is in the reading of the poem itself. That is, once the students have dutifully followed the teacher’s simple directive, are they able to appreciate or understand Wordsworth’s lyrical poem? The words (most, anyway) should be no problem. But the poem itself? Can the students enter its world? Or are the doors barred to the world Wordsworth formed for them? Are they locked for many a teacher as well? Understanding a short lyric such as this might seem an easy feat. But, as the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, it would do us well to contemplate what it takes on the student’s side for him or her to truly engage and appreciate “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as well as what the teacher might do to assist the willing student.
To begin matters, we had best follow the teacher’s instructions so as to refresh our own memories.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with daffodils.
The student, it is hoped, reads this more than once before class, for a poem read only one time is a poem read not at all. Once barely orients the reader to the lay of the land. If we want to know a patch of ground for more than just another bit of dirt and vegetation, we have to walk it repeatedly, our senses open to the world around us. The same is true for entering the world of the poem. At the very least, the at-home reading ought to be supplemented by the recitation, preferably at first by the teacher, of the poem, and given the length, not once but multiple times. The students need to hear, feel, embody the melodious drumbeat of Wordsworth’s iambic tetrameter carrying them through the lines. They need not know an iamb from a ham at this point, but they must be able to hear it and take the time to let Wordsworth’s lyric captivate them.
This is the price of admission: attention. No ticket, no ride. Sadly, many a student will be turned away before they are even allowed to pick out a horse on the carousel. They will refuse to slow down in order to take the poem on its own terms. From a quick read or two, gathering a word here and a phrase over there, they will cobble together a tangled pile of meaning and call it good: Guy out walking likes flowers. Some may glean another stick, adding it to the pile: And makes a good memory. That will do it. The flashing lights, pulsating music, barking carnie, these from the next booth will draw our student. And he will be gone, the barely glanced daffodils of the Lake District now nothing but a receding yellow blur.
A student paying attention is cooperating with the teacher in learning. The teacher may cajole, entice, even dance a little jig to gain a student’s attention, but if the student shuts down, there will be no learning, for it is a cooperative enterprise. “Attention,” the Catholic philosopher Stratford Caldecott insists, “is desire; it is the desire for light, for truth, for understanding for possession.” [2] Does the student desire light, truth, and understanding? Does the student want to make those part of himself? Every human person has desires. The mark of the virtuous is that the desires have been properly ordered. Will our student think truth can be found in a poem or at all outside of capital S Science? The chances of an affirmative reply are slim. “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” begins philosopher Alan Bloom in his now-classic 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. “If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2=4 . These are things you don’t think about.” [3] A longtime professor at the University of Chicago, Bloom lamented the relativism of his students. It is tempting to chalk the unfortunate turn of events up to the tempestuous 1960’s, and Bloom himself zeroes in on this culprit, also fingering the influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger in the American academy, but Mortimer J. Adler had similar observations at the very same university in a 1940 essay. The students
have already had enough education to be suspicious of Plato and Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and John Locke. They react at once against these, or any other authors, who write as if truth could be reached on moral matters, . . . They tell us [Adler and fellow teacher Robert Hutchins, then-president of the University of Chicago], emphatically and unanimously, that ‘there is no right or wrong,’ that ‘moral values are private opinions,’ that ‘everything is relative.’ [4]
No matter where we peg its origin, relativism is no new ailment; nor is the body academic likely to be healed of it anytime soon. Our students imbibe this from infancy, so it is no wonder that the youthful reader of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” might find it categorically impossible for truth to be found within its lines.
If we move to truth in a narrower sense, that is, discovering what the poem means, we will not find any surer footing, at least initially. Again we run into the wall of relativism, which, in this case, shares space with the barricade of laziness. Texts can mean anything. Interpretation is just an opinion. There is no right or wrong answer. Students pick this up seemingly from the air — and from their teachers. Curiously enough, relativism equals less work, which, in turn, might explain some of the worldview’s popularity. There is no need to grapple with a text if its meaning is ultimately either unknowable or subjectively determined. This circle of sloth and relativism can be broken if the emphasis is placed on students having to make a case for what the poem means from the poem itself, not what they think it means. There will be disagreements, some students can be taught to realize, but these disagreements center on the text and occur within the frame of the text. Such readings provide an entry point for the willing student to the world of the poem.
No background is, or should be, necessary to appreciate the poem, but for this particular work, the back story can be helpful to introduce students to how a poem is made and what philosopher and teacher James S. Taylor calls the “poetic view of things.” This view “calls for the subjectivity of the knower to become engaged with the the object of knowledge.” In this case, Wordsworth is the knower and the daffodils are the object of knowledge. “It is in this way that the habit of poetry,” Taylor continues, “the habit of the poetic view of things, takes raw experiences and forms them into essences.” [6] With “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” we know the raw experience from which Wordsworth formed the poem. On April 15, 1802, Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, recorded in her journal that the two of them
were in the woods . . . [and] we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. [7]
That spring day in the Lake District proved enchanting for the Wordsworths. But the daffodils dancing in the wind were but a moment, and like any other, they were washed away by the tide of time never to return. The Wordsworths could revisit the scene, maybe did, but never the moment. “[E]xperience itself by itself cannot be repeated,” Taylor explains, and therefore “is simply lost. But the poetic impulse to imitate that leads to form the poem, . . . that causes one to reflect on experience, gives to experience repeatability and thereby becomes real knowledge.” [8] Wordsworth the poet reflected upon the experience, giving it shape and form. Now in the form of the poem, the lost moment is preserved and can be passed onto others — even, fast-forwarding two centuries, to the student who may not appreciate what is to be gained within its lines as well as the student whose heart, beating in tandem with the speaker’s, “dances with the daffodils.”
Before teachable students can appreciate the poem, there are additional hurdles to clear. “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills . . .” If the natural world has provided little more than an obstacle one must cross to go from Activity A to Activity B, or manicured to provide the playing surface for soccer, students will be at loss to understand why the speaker would be drawn to the hills and valleys. Long before downward-gazing students were illuminated in cell phone-glow, the professors with the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, in the 1970s, found their students were hindered from appreciating literature and philosophy by their modern upbringing. [9] In fact, “an entire preindustrial culture was missing from these students’ experience, and in its place was our familiar modern life, artificial and insulated more and more from direct experience with nature and reality.” [10]
Some four decades removed, the problem, if anything, has grown exponentially, as have the layers of mediation between students and nature. Personal screens, the stuff of science fiction in the 1970’s, now prove all too real and enthralling; dopamine rushes are but a like or share away. Who needs a meandering, wandering walk on a spring day? The students addicted to technology, for starters. They need a connection to the non-pixelated, the real. And perhaps some will wonder what the fuss is in the poem and find their eyes opened to the concrete reality around them.
The language provides some barriers as well, most of which can be fixed with a visit to dictionary.com. Jocund, pensive, gay (in the sense and period of the poem) [11], these a student with a modicum of curiosity or diligence can decipher. “When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils . . .” If this line slips by, so will much of the poem, especially the final stanza. Host? Again, a visit to a dictionary will solve the matter of definition, but the association with angels? Will students fill in the gap between word and concept? Or will the rich tradition of the Bible having been denied, purposefully or carelessly, in his or her upbringing prevent this connection and leave the student with nothing more than words on a page? The divine hovers in Wordsworth’s vision, never landing at times, and at others hardly discernible, but always in communion with the natural world. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” provides no exception. The hint of the divine, an intimation, visits in this line with the daffodils, providing a context for the speaker’s experience of wonder and beauty. “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way /They stretched in never-ending line / Along the margin of a bay: / Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” A beautiful, wondrous sight before him, Wordsworth
gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with daffodils.
Later the moment of the daffodils comes to him, not he to the moment through reflection, providing comfort and joy. The moment lives again because it has a life of its own. The spiritual sense may be murky to student-readers. But hope is not lost. A road back can be found, for Wordsworth’s experience is one universal enough for any attentive student to nod in recognition. Certain moments mysteriously abide, even if their true, deep import failed to register at the time, and have a way of finding their way to our consciousness across the years. Wordsworth called these, in the Prelude,
. . . spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence—depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse—our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired . . .
Such spots of time can replenish and renovate the soul [12], worn down by day-to-day life and the trafficking in “false opinion.” These spots bring water to the parched desert of the mind.
Students desperately need this water. They need it, I freely admit, more than they need to read Wordsworth. But Wordsworth can open a path for the attentive student, a path not easily found, if at all, in the ephemeral flash and splash of contemporary culture; and Wordsworth is part of an inheritance of which they are ignorant and to which they deserve acquaintance. Obstacles abound for a student on the path to such waters. Some pilgrims refuse to leave the inn. Others tire of the journey before it has barely begun. And still others wander off. As guides, teachers must have real hope, a hope that transcends an easily disappointed (and disproved) optimism. The hurdles between today’s student and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are real. But if teachers face the reality of those hurdles — facile relativism, sloth, the dearth of unmediated time in nature, the language barrier, the spiritual deficit — there will be those happy few who will discover what was in that poem and around them all along: that guy who really liked flowers, why, he knew something and that something is worth knowing and experiencing.
Andy Newman will be teaching Creative Writing: Awakening Wonder with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Bradbury this summer for Kepler. Class begins June 29.
NOTES
[1] “Most of my best freshmen Honors students have never heard of Tennyson, much less had their imaginations formed by his eminently humane and approachable poetry. That is no reflection on Tennyson in particular. They have also never heard of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and any number of the great artists in what is supposedly their mother tongue.” So laments Anthony Esolen, cultural critic, translator of Dante, and college professor. I can second his lament from my own experience with freshman and sophomore college students. Esolen, Anthony. “After the Exile: Poetry and the Death of Culture.” Public Discourse. July 24, 2018. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/02/18617/. [2] Stratford Cladecott. Beauty in the World: Rethinking the Foundations of Education. Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2012, 30. [3] Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, 25. [4] Mortimer J. Adler. “This Prewar Generation,” Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind. New York: Collier, 13. [5] James S. Taylor. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education. Albany, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press, 84. [6] Taylor, 84. [7] Wordsworth, Dorothy. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Volume 1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42856/42856-h/42856-h.htm. [8] Taylor, 84. [9] In the the two-year IHP, “everything . . . was, in one way or another, the result of the awareness of the poetic mode of knowledge. This was the awareness of wonder, in the books and in the teaching, and the awareness that these texts and much of the teaching needed to point the senses and emotions toward the objects of delight and wonder.” Philosophy, for instance, was not so much analyzed and taught as experienced: “Plato and Cicero . .. were always read and commented on in the literary mode, never in terms of argument or debate. The atmosphere was intended to be meditative, not disputatious.” Taylor, 148. [10] Taylor, 149. [11] “A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company” of the daffodils; “For oft, when on my couch I lie /In vacant or in pensive mood . . .” Wordsworth, 15-16 and 19-20. [12] Wordsworth, it is true, uses the word mind in the quoted passage, but it is equally true that he freely references the soul on numerous occasions in the Prelude; moreover, his conception of the human mind transcends any reductionist, materialistic account which equates the mind with solely matter in motion.
