Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"

William Wordsworth's famous poem may speak to us these days.

A quintessential English Romantic poem:
Nature, vivid description, musical patterning, individual subjectivity for the sake of universal feeling, memory and its healing power when harnessed with nature, and art for the sake of the soul.

(I disliked the poem as an undergraduate, but have come to appreciate its artful simplicity and application. I have a greater appreciation for thousands of flowers dancing in the sun and breeze too.)


I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

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 the daffodils.

--William Wordsworth

Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man"

THE TOLLUND MAN

I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

-- Seamus Heaney,

from his volume of poetry Wintering Out,
Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 1972.

Bog Man: stoneware; clear glaze.

2009 note: "Just fooling in art class; found myself with this fellow in my hands. (Of course, after all those years in the peat bog, his nose would not be quite so strong.)"

Rest in peace, Mr. Heaney, and thank you for your art, your voice, your compassion.

Blue Man

I love free diving.

Catching the Tide

Here's the booklist for next semester's English 1A:

Daniel Duane's Caught Inside;
Curtis Ebbesmeyer & Eric Scigliano's Flotsametrics and the Floating World;
Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival;
William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea;
Jack London's The Sea-Wolf;
and John McPhee's The Control of Nature.

Of course, there will be additional readings to set the tone and direct the pace of things.  Handouts!

(Also: selected videos on surfing, sharks, marine mammals, ships and shipping, the Mississippi River Delta, storms, volcanoes, disasters, and so forth.)

Barry Lopez: "River Notes" and Questing

I have been crippled by my age, by what I have known, as well as by my youth, by what I have yet to learn, in all these inquiries.  It has taken me years, which might have been spent (by someone else) seeking something greater, in some other place.  I have sought only you.  Enough.  I wish to know you, and you will not speak.  

--Barry Lopez,
from River Notes: The Dance of Herons

I can't say enough how much this slim volume mattered, how much it made complex, made even more emotional and even more intricately verbal my relationship with nature and story, when I first discovered River Notes in Moe's Books of Berkeley, CA, so long ago in 1980.

On this recent rereading -- and River Notes is a book I reread more or less each year, haphazardly, piece by piece over all the months of the year -- I realized how much his chapter "The Salmon" prepared me for the art and artistry of Andy Goldsworthy and for so many of my own efforts in clay amidst sea and creek.

I've witnessed this writer giving a talk and reading one of his stories at least once --"The Mappist," at the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael -- and I took this rather intimate opportunity (such a small venue, a somewhat select gathering) to thank Barry Lopez for his body of work.  I'm glad I overcame my natural diffidence to do so.

The passage above spoke to me when I was a mere youth, not even 20, and speaks to me now, a bit over 50.  I like the appositive defining of age in terms of knowing, in terms of what we don't understand and of what we do, as well as the sad, even bitter tone.  Loss breathes through the passage, through most of the book, and Lopez's voicing of that theme, that truth, caught my ear, and the ear of my soul (if you will), even if I didn't--perhaps, still don't--truly understand wherein that sense of loss resides, takes form.  Recently, I have read an interview with Barry Lopez in which he reveals that the writing of River Notes, though a sequence of fictional narratives, was deeply informed by the death of his mother.

The book takes us from the seaside, the mouth of the river, upstream until we reach the headwaters, the source.  The last chapter, be warned, is entitled "Drought."  I'll hold off saying more, for I'd rather awaken curiosity and intimate mystery.  I have taught two chapters in particular a dozen times, I think: "The Bend" and "The Rapids."  Here's another passage from "The Salmon":

There is never, he reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion.   And as he worked among the rocks in the middle of the river he thought on this deeply, so deeply that had his movements not been automatic he would have fallen off the rocks and into the river and been borne away.

In the summer light, even with the coolness of the water welling up around him in the air, thinking was all he was capable of; and this distraction left him exhausted and unbalanced so that at the end of the day the physical exhaustion he felt was something he lowered himself into, as into a hot bath.  He pondered gentleness often.  And he tried to pry (hefting the stones, conscious of the resonance between the idea in his mind and the work of his hands) into mysteries which remained as implacable as the faces of the stones.


Thank you, again, Barry Holstun Lopez.

River Notes: The Dance of Herons
A Bard Book / Avon Books: New York,  November, 1980.

Voyage-charm: sculpture mix; floating blue glazing; matte finish.   

Sea Monkey See

Sea monkey do.

I'll admit freely that as I've approached fifty, and now turned fifty, I've been taking more self-portraits, trying to get some sense of what I really look like, what I really am like. (We all know the rose-colored or coal-colored glasses of personal melodrama and history.)

And while profile-pic games only take us so far onto the surface of things, we work with the tools at hand.

You may be able to see the water dripping from the camera in the close-ups (click, click) of a few of these shots; after immersion in salt water, the camera must be submerged for an hour or so in hopes of soaking away the salt crystals that could screw up the seals upon opening for recharging the battery and for downloading the pics. I'd been soaking the camera in a small plastic tub in front of this mirror and got the urge to play. Afterwards, I placed the camera back into the tub for further soaking.

I look at these goofy shots and, mostly, chuckle. What vanity to think I'm going to learn anything about myself in such an exercise, and yet there I am, clicking away in front of a motel room mirror after a long day of sun and salt.

Is that my father I see in those features? Of course, but what about mom? Hugh, yes, but . . . George? And, how many selves could I have? Which one (or two) is really me? (I am a Gemini.)

There's something about the camera shot that I can stop and look at that differs from the mere mirror. I am not sure what that difference is, but discovering that is part of the exploration, perhaps even more than capturing these glimples of self.

Sea monkey see. Sea monkey do.

Now if I were a real writer, I'd be working harder to capture these differences and these images in words. Or, so I can castigate myself. More likely, while I am a word-guy and story-guy, the visual world matters to me a lot more than I'd ever realized while growing up and, what, maturing. I've always had a good visual memory (which page is the poem on in the book? right-hand or left-hand side? Rembrandt or Vermeer? Which Vermeer?), but the story I've always told myself involved words, always words words words. Yet even as an excellent student, I tended (and tend) to look out the window. And my other medium is clay; sculpture is three-dimensional, like the best writing, right?

Anyway, while I was playing profile-pic games in that motel in Fort Bragg, I started thinking of how hard it is to convey specific outdoor experiences, in my case diving and kayaking.

I mean, the whole session on the closed-deck kayak, I felt as if I were in a bowl, a giant watery bowl, and no matter how hard or in what direction I paddled, I still couldn't get out of the bottom of that bowl. I can try to explain this by pointing to currents and wash rocks catching and diverting flow, but in my gut there just wasn't a sea "level"; the whole ocean seemed tilted on its side, slightly, just enough to create a visceral sense of imbalance and dislocation. Frankly, I loved it. The sensation was otherworldly, and yet quite common if you spend enough time on the water.

Professional photographers will emphasize the need for that straight horizon, but I must say I prefer sea-shots that tilt. They seem truer to the experience, but then I'm a diver and kayaker more than a hiker or landscape painter on the shore.

"Being grounded" carries a different freight for the boater. Seamus Heaney wrote a great passage on how the floaty boat-edness (my term) that he felt unnerved by came from the very buoyancy that guaranteed his safety. I'll have to look out his original words.

My quest over this summer will be to catch images that convey that sense of meaningful imbalance, that unfreighted lift of sea and sky. Somehow, I just haven't been able to translate via images those occasions when the whole world seems askew, seems tilting. Often, those heavy water sessions look tame to the camera, and there must be a way to figure that untamed feeling.

In the next shot, you can see the wave approaching, but it felt a lot taller than it looks. There are also the matters of mass and speed. This was a fairly mild, though energetic day, so I didn't feel in danger, but I also knew I was a bit of cork bobbing amidst far greater forces. (But that's also why you go out there.)

Perhaps in the close-up (after clicking on the shot), you can see the energy behind the texture. Kelp bobbing about, the waves were moving through; I felt like Sofia, my kayak, was half-horse in this session. More emphatically, the whole surface seemed (and seems) to loom over us.

When I first began thinking of this entry, I thought of the self-shots above as monkeying around, and then I thought of how much I've played with catching images while diving and kayaking for so many years.

I started with simple disposable "submersible" cameras and used them, effectively enough, for years and years. Above, you can see my amphibious Canon Powershot, and lately I've been using a tough submersible Olympus that I found in 25 feet of water off Maui last summer. I have some basic tools, and those tools ought to be enough to catch the sorts of experiences I'm after sharing. Yes, I could throw cash into equipment, but that's not my nature, and anyway it's a vision thing, not a limitation via technology, that matters here.

I need to figure out how to take my shots to get what I want; I need to learn how to shoot so that I can share what I truly see and, more importantly, feel.

Oh, I haven't quite got the words, but I'm throwing them out there in hopes that upon rereading I'll find and make better words. Also, perhaps some of my story here will prove more effective than I'm thinking now.

I felt compelled to share these images, these words, and that compulsion is parallel to what grips you playing on the water, in the water, and under the water. There's something about all that mass flowing that makes any pool session so obviously sterile, no matter how intense the workout.

Otherworldly, I've said, but perhaps I spend too much time away from the more raw forces of nature. Worldly, in the best sense? Natural.

Sea monkey see; sea monkey do. Just one of Mother Nature's sons.

One Poem By Tony Hoagland: "Nature"

My friend Meredith gave me Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, a volume of poems that seems to fit me like my old Batman cape and cowl did, like my fins do now. I'm just in my first reading, so the hedging in the phrasing there, but I certainly want to share this one right away. Read. Read aloud, and enjoy.

NATURE

I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds

that I had when I was ten.

And it has been forever since I pushed my head

under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.

What I had with them was tender and private.

The lake was practically my girlfriend.

I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket.

Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.

The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king

whose name we could almost remember.

Under the rooty bank you could dimly see

the bunk beds of the turtles.

Maybe twice had I sad a girl's name to myself.

I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.

Nobody I know mentions these things anymore.

It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated

among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.

Now I want to turn and run back the other way,

barefoot into the underbrush,

getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.

Down to the muddy bed of the little stream

where my cupped hands make a house, and

I tilt up the roof

to look at the face of the frog.

--Tony Hoagland

P.S. Note how "the frog" works differently, works so much better, than "a frog." And that's just one minor joy of this poem.

P.P.S. Thank you, Meredith.