 Let me start by saying something about being in Washington where I worked for Bernie for six years. I found Washington a very strange and hostile place. I actually liked a lot of the people there. I'll speak louder, sure. I found Washington is, can you hear me now? Strange and hostile place. I like the people I met there, but as you might imagine, Washington is not non-piliar, and people have very little connection to anything except other people in Washington. And I would get very upset in meetings the first two years when Bernie was in the Senate. I worked on the Education Committee, and then afterwards I was just Chief of Staff. I'd get very upset that people would be talking about education who'd never been teachers, who had no idea what went on in classrooms. We need tests. I'm going to talk about tests today. We need tests, and we need to make sure people know these things. And I kept thinking that's not it at all. And in those days we had these kind of precursors of cell phones called blackberries. And I would pull the blackberry off my belt, and I would type in words where it's night type of a poem, and I'd say, listen to this, and I'd read them a poem. Well, it didn't work very well. But I think I'll read you a couple of poems I read to them. And then afterwards I thought these people are really out of touch with what, this is not a diatribe against Washington. I actually like many of the people I work with. But whatever it is that is part of human life, how we live, how we learn, what we think about dying, how we relate to other people, they're not interested. They're interested in policy, and they learned about policy in graduate school. It's a very strange way in a way to run a country. So I started up a list of people who I send poems to. Cynthia, who's in the back, gets them, right? My wife gets them. And I'm going to pass around a list asking for your name and your email. I won't sell it to anybody, give it to anybody. If you want to be on that list, it's an opt out list. You can get off the list easily. Every two or three weeks I send out a kind of, I don't know, it's an essay about a poem. I talk about a poem and it's meant for people who don't know much about poems, which is all of us. And people who are very proud of themselves. Walt Whitman says, have you felt so proud to get at the meanings of poems? Meaning that he's a Democrat because everybody counts, not just people who teach poetry like me. So I send these out and I'd be very happy if you'd sign up. I have about over 3,000 people listed. Some are dead names, I don't call them out. So it's probably about 2,200. So largest poetry list in the United States, actually, which tells you something about poetry. So I'm going to start out talking about Washington as I just did and about sending out that list. In my sense that Wordsworth was important. And I'm going to talk about Wordsworth as a poet, but also Wordsworth as a shaper of who we are today. Because I think he's- The lights above turned out. Oh, sure. Better. Okay, now you're going to have to read the poems in front of you by the dim lights, but they'll be up here too. So I worked in Washington and I had this sense that people didn't really get how people felt about things and how they dealt with the problems of their lives. And I discovered, now that I'm retired from teaching at UVM, that I think I'm really interested in the history of ideas and also the history of feelings. Today we think everything is in practices and how people cook dinner and what they shop for. But I think ideas and feelings as expressed in artworks like poems and music and paintings and sculpture, I think those things really matter. And that's the way in which I'm going to talk about Wordsworth. And I'm going to start off being really full of ideas in philosophy by looking at Wordsworth through a philosopher. So we're going to look at Wordsworth through the lens to start with a philosopher I came to pretty late in my life named Johann Gottfried von Herder. He was a German philosopher, kind of forgotten, much too hard to read, 70 volumes, all in German, even in translation, they're unreadable. So I approached him through a historian named Isaiah Berlin who wrote a book about what he called the counter-enlightenment, pardon me. The enlightenment was what we think of as the 18th century. It was called by other names with the enlightenment or the age of reason. There are people as it went along who said, maybe reason ain't so good. Maybe we need something else. And one of those people was Herder. And I mentioned him because Wordsworth's great friend in contemporary was a man named Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And Coleridge was known as a transcendentalist. He got everything from Kant. And I thought, oh, that must be Wordsworth. I don't think so. I think Wordsworth got a lot from Herder, whether he read him or not. And Herder, if you go through all of his stuff, which I haven't, but I've read Berlin 90 or 100 pages of him, and I've read a bunch of Herder, he has three central ideas which I want to introduce and then we'll turn to Wordsworth's. One is something called dasa-bulk, the folk, the people. Got a little bit perverted under Herder. A lot perverted, the Nordic race. But for Herder, it meant that the place where culture resides, the place where culture is made, the place in which we live and think and breathe is among other people, not big poets, but the people. He would have a great influence, although I don't think he ever read him on Walt Whitman, one of my favorite poets. He also said that we talk too much about ideas that are also feelings and we have to consider feelings. Both of these folk and feelings are going to be very important to Wordsworth. If you don't think Herder was important, you all remember the era of folk music, right? In the 1960s, right out of Herder, right out of the child ballads which were collected after Herder. Folk tales from the Grim Brothers, right out of Herder. So folk, feelings, and then he was terribly interested in language. He thought language is what we lived in and used and that's gonna be terribly important to Wordsworth. Now here's Wordsworth, as you see, he was born in 1770. Here's the horrible thing, oh poor Wordsworth. He wrote all his great poems between 1797 when he was 27 and maybe 1805. And after that, he lived for another 45 years, he became Poet Laureate, he wrote maybe one good poem, right? He had this, he wasn't a youth anymore but this young maturity when he wrote great poems and then he stopped. And it's one of the things about poems that is truly miraculous. I sent out a thing to my poetry list about a poet named Artur Rambeau, who was a French poet. He stopped, you won't believe this, he stopped writing poetry when he was 18 years old. He was one of the great French poets and I'm sure you all know that Keats and Shelley died at a young age, Keats at 26, Shelley at about 30. So Wordsworth wrote from about 1798, we're gonna look at poems from 1798 to 1802, just those four years. And he died only in 1850. Here's the young Wordsworth famous portrait, kind of dreamy thinking of things. One of the miraculous things about Wordsworth, I just don't know how to deal with this. I read a couple biographies of him and one of them, I can't remember the name of it anymore, said all of Wordsworth's friends when he was in college knew he was the guy. He was the genius of the age. He did poorly in college. He didn't accomplish anything. But they said this guy thinks about the world, feels about the world differently from the rest of us. So that's what I'm going to try and talk to you about, how he felt and thought about the world. Here's Wordsworth, a famous line of his. He's a great writer of lines. He said, we poets in our youth begin in gladness, but thereof come in the end to despondency and madness. And I'm going to suggest is that youth and not the young poet of 18, but the youth of five and six that is central to Wordsworth, we will spend the rest of our time together about that. Here's the old Wordsworth, as far as I can tell, he spent the last part of his life fiddling with his chimney so it would draw right so his house wouldn't be filled with smoke. Now, he did a remarkable thing. I had a teacher in college who said, oh yeah, I hear Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, one of the great moments in English poetry. I didn't believe it. I believe it now and we'll go into that. But the Lyrical Ballads, which was a slim book of ballads or four poems and stances of four lines we'll go into Ballads in a minute. He wrote it in 1798, he wrote an introduction in 1800 and he wrote another introduction for the third edition in 1802 and that's what this is quoted from. It's an extraordinary piece of writing and mainly this is a lot of good things but mainly he says he doesn't want to be a poet like we think poets are supposed to be. Lots of flowery language. That's what they used in the 18th century. Some of you sometime in your past may have read Alexander Pope. Has anybody read Alexander Pope? That's what I thought. A couple of years ago I reread Alexander Pope. That guy was phenomenal. But everything he wrote was in couplets, two lines, each two lines rhyme with each other and then two lines rhyme with each other and another two lines rhyme with each other. Seems so outmoded and he wrote in fancy language. I'm there just spectacularly good. And having reread Pope, I noticed it lots of 20th century poets writing couplets too. They just are not what is called in-stop. There's not a period at the end of the second line. They just keep on going to the next line. Something kind of nice about couplets. Anyway, words where he says I'm not gonna use showy language, I'm gonna use ordinary language. The language that people speak. Sometimes called the vulgate more often in our own day called the vernacular. So he says the principal object then, I need my glasses, I've been taking them off. This is from the process. The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life. Whoa, that's gonna pass by, right? Just ordinary stuff that happens every day. Not people on ramparts holding off the barbarian hordes, just ordinary stuff which I think is extraordinary. He says, and to relate or describe throughout as far as was possible in a selection of rap language really used by men, like what we talk every day. I have proposed to myself to imitate and as far as possible to adopt the very language of men, use of sexist men and women. His best friend at that time was Coleridge and his other best friend was his sister Dorothy. I ask what is meant by the word poet, what is a poet, to whom does he address himself and what language is to be expected from him? Those are great questions. I wrestle with them all my life and he says he is a man speaking to men. Use common, ordinary language. So we're gonna turn to a poem called We Are Seven. And I choose this because it's one of the lyrical ballads and it's about as simple as a poem can get. It's an arithmetic poem. You don't have to turn on a lot of right cells during this poem. A guy sees a kid and he says, how many are you and your family? And the kid says seven. And the kid relates to her here and to her here and to her lying in the church yard in her burial plots and me. He says, well, you got seven kids and two are dead, you're five. She said, no, we're seven. He said, no, you're five. She says, we are seven. He says, no, okay, two from seven, it leaves five. It's an arithmetic poem. That's the whole poem. And we're gonna go through it. Now, you have it in front of you. It's an extraordinary poem. It's a ballad and I'll refer you to the third stanza here because it starts out, you know, with bad line means that a certain part of the line is missed and great poets violate the very rules they set up, so sometimes they're more or less syllables than we expect. But a typical ballad stanza runs like this. In fact, it's called a ballad stanza or it's also called a hymn stanza or it's also called a common meter, and it has alternating lines. We can grow fancy of iambic heterometer and iambic perimeter, three, four, stress syllables, three stress syllables. It rhymes A, B, A, B, the first rhyme, line right at air, rhymes with fair and clad, we're glad. You see that child, not in that stanza. I said that was an odd stanza. Curl and curl and standing head. And it'll go throughout the poem, right? So it's a ballad. That's the form of ballads. He's going back to an old form. He's not writing those wonderful couplets of popes. He's not writing the great blank verse of Milton and of Shakespeare, although later in the volume he'll write a poem in blank verse, which we'll see. So it's a ballad and I think we wanna kind of cross out the first stanza. He wrote it, but in it he's telling us something and afterwards he shows us what he tells us at the beginning. And if you wanna be a writer, some of you are writers, showing is always better than telling. Show something, it's better than telling somebody what it is you have to say. So I'm gonna read the poem and you're gonna see it. It's all about arithmetic. It doesn't seem hard. It seems kind of almost childish. There aren't any words in here that a second or third grader wouldn't know. This is an ordinary language and ordinary stuff about a guy and a girl, right? And yet I think it's an extraordinary poem. It's one of the hinges on which our whole culture turns. So let's look at the poem. A single child that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb, what should it know of death? I met a little cottage girl. She was eight years old, she said. Her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered around her head. She had a rustic, windland air and she was wildly clad. Her eyes were fair and very fair. Her beauty made me glad. Sisters and brothers little maid, so's the guy. How many may you be? How many? Seven in all, she said and wondering, looked at me. And where are they? I pray you tell, she answered, seven are we and two of us at Conway Dwell and two are gone to sea and two of us in the churchyard lie, my mother, sister and my brother and in the churchyard cat, excuse me, and we need to go on, right? And two of us in the churchyard lie beneath the church of the yard tree. I heard of myself. Two of us in the churchyard lie, my sister and my brother and in the churchyard cottage I dwell near them with my brother, with my mother, right? Two in Conway, two at sea, two in the churchyard, me. Seven, ah, I can count, I'm a kid. And he says, you say that two at Conway Dwell and two are gone to sea, yet ye are seven. I pray you tell, sweet maid, how this may be. I mean, two of them are dead, certainly five. She says, then did the little maid reply, seven boys and girls are we, two of us in the churchyard lie beneath the churchyard tree. You run about, my little child, your limbs, they are alive, if two are in the churchyard laid, then you are only five. Two are dead. That's not the most complicated of poems. And yet, and yet, I have much to say about this and you'll see much in this. Their graves are green, they may be seen, the little maid replied, 12 steps or more from my mother's door and they are side by side. And then she says, and I hang out with these kids, right, even if they're dead. She says, my stockings there I often knit, my kerchief there I hem, and there upon the ground I sit and sing a song to them. And often, after sunset, sir, when it is light and fair, I take my little bowl of porridge, my little parencher and eat my supper there. The first that died was Sister Jane in bed she moaning lay till God released her of her pain and then she went away. I want to just pause here for a second. I knew of two very, very great poems I actually thought. The light is not working. No, I wasn't close to it. I knew of two very great poems. I thought of bringing them in, you know, it gets too confusing. But if you want, there's one by John Crow Ransom called Janet Waking, where a girl wakes up and finds out her favorite chicken is dead and it ends up and would not be instructed in how deep is the kingdom of death. Kid just doesn't get death. And then there's another poem, even greater by Elizabeth Bishop called First Death in Nova Scotia in which her cousin dies and she just doesn't get it because she's four or five years old. And that is what's going on here. This kid doesn't really get death. She goes and has dinner with them and sings to them and tells them stories. So in the churchyard, she was laid and when the grass was dried together around her grave, we played my brother John and I. And when the ground was white with snow and I could not run and slide, my brother John was forced to go and he lies by my side. How many are you then? You know, guys, you know, he said, he gets it, right, they're dead. Even if you eat supper with them. How many are you then? Said I, they two are in heaven. Quick was the little maid's reply, oh master, we are seven. He says, right, he was really upset. He said, she don't you get it? They are dead, those two are dead. Their spirits are in heaven. It was the wrong words way for still the little maid would have her will and said, nay, we are seven. And there you have it, that's the poem. So why do I think and why should you think? Not just me, this is such an amazing poem. Well, I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day who was gonna teach this poem. He said, why do you like this poem? I said, well, you know, I think the poem is really about childhood and how childhood is utterly different than adulthood. Yeah, no, I'm not gonna talk about that. So I don't know what he talked about. I guess that their graves are green and so life is eternal or something. No, no, no, no, I think really, really, really what we learned from this poem is something that people never, ever understood before. That we all understand. Comes right out of where it's worth. The children think differently than grownups. They live in a different world than grownups live in. This kid thinks they're seven and he thinks they're five and he thinks they're five because he has logic and reason and arithmetic. We all have logic and reason and arithmetic. But the little child doesn't and the child thinks differently than he does. And out of that recognition that children don't think like grownups comes much of what we know, right? Comes everything in Freud. As far as I know, Freud didn't read where it's worth but he should have. We'll discover this later. We'll get another poem which is even more Freudian. And I don't mean Freudian in the sense of Freudian, he loves sex. No, children are important and what happens to them is important and they think differently from us. You can see how this is in its own way an attack on the Enlightenment. It's not all reason and logic. It's also how we feel about things and she feels that they're seven and all his logic says they're five and there's no intercourse, conversational intercourse between them. They live in different worlds. So this poem in very simple language about a very simple kind of girl it's about how human beings maybe are not, maybe we're more complicated than we think. I was gonna say not as complicated as we think. Maybe we're more complicated. Maybe in addition to all of our logic and rationality we have other things. And I'm gonna stop for a moment and tell you the story of Wordsworth's life and how this poem came into being. Wordsworth went to college as a mediocre student and he went out to work but he didn't really find a New Yorker. A college friend of his got sick and died and left him a chunk of money so because he was a, everybody thought he was quite a remarkable person. So he went on a walking tour through Europe and he ended up in France in 1789. Whoa, that was a year to be in France. He says, Bliss wasn't then to be alive but to be young was very heaven. He says that in Aprilion. So there are two revolutions going on at the end of the 19th, 18th century. Just as we're about to turn, no, the end of the 18th century. Just as it's about to turn into 1800 and forward that would be the 19th century. One revolution which was going on in England and we don't think about all the time was called the Industrial Revolution in which instead of people spinning yarn in their houses and machines to spin yarn and machines to weave cloth and the whole world we live in today, everything we use and consume except maybe the food we eat is a product of the Industrial Revolution and a lot of the food we eat comes from tractor, tractor, plowed farms and big trucks with refrigeration on them. So the Industrial Revolution was coming into the world and it meant people moved from the country into this city. So little towns suddenly overnight became huge megalopolises and while that revolution which displaced people was going on, there was a political revolution. I mentioned the French Revolution which followed ours by 13 years, ours was 1776, France was 1789, but ours was a kind of, you know, we were wanted to liberation from the mother country who was a colonial revolution against an imperial power. The French wanted to overthrow their government. They wanted to kill the king. They wanted to do away with monarchy and institute what was their phrase, égalité, liberté, fraternité, equality, liberty and brotherhood, that's what the French wanted. So, I think it was very lucky to be a very, very, very great poet. I'm talking about a really great poet. You have to live in very poetical times where somehow society is trying desperately to find its way forward and he lived in such a time. So, he didn't really participate in the French Revolution. He watched it. He had a good friend who told him about revolutionary politics. He got very excited. He went back to Britain. The democratic government turned violent, figured out that you could use guillotines. The old order, the ancien regime was reestablished. Words were, God, depressed. I mean, the French Revolution seemed to point the way forward and it had failed. What was he going to do? And his answer, which we're gonna see in these poems, although he writes about it at a great length in this long poem he wrote in 1805, began in 1798 called The Prelude. His answer was that if we wanna figure out why we're so depressed, when we started out so well, right? When we poets and youth began in gladness, if we started out so well, where do we go wrong? That's the heart of Wordsworth's poetic endeavor and it's the heart of what we've been trying, I think, to do forever since. How do we get back to what's really important? Because certainly, I don't mean to insult anybody here, but it certainly can't be a president who lies 30,000 times or 15,000 times in two and a half years. You remember when we were in grade school, all of us, right? George Washington, the president, what did we know him by? He never told a lie and now we got all these lies. How did we get here? I'm not folding Trump, God knows, I don't like Trump, but this is not a bash Trump time. This is how did we get to a time when lies and people staring at screens and misinformation and confusion, do you know that crimes of desperation, suicide, drug addiction, and what's the third one, alcoholism, are wiping out a generation. Life expectancy of Americans is declining right now, because so many people have lost hope. We could talk about the reasons for it, I've got reasons for it, but the fact is that people have lost hope. And Wardsworth was one of the early peoples who lost hope and said, what's the future like? And so he came up with some answers. One was suggested by this, maybe we should look back to when we were children, we were maybe glad. When we thought that there were seven and not five, maybe we'll find out more about that later. So here are two poems I used to, I would actually read from these poems to my colleagues in the Senate. Expostulation in reply means expostulation of fancy term, it's a statement in reply. It's gonna be a colloquial, it's a two person poem you'll see by the quotation marks separated by one, stands a description. And at the beginning Matthew, his friend says, hey, Wardsworth, again not a hard poem. Wardsworth, why don't you read some books? You think that you're the first person who ever walked down the face of the earth? I mean Plato was here before you and Socrates and Aristotle and Sophocles and Escalus writing dramas, the Bible was here, people wrote the Bible, Shakespeare was here, Milton was here and why are you just sitting around instead of reading? You could spend your time profitably, I'm sure. Some of you had parents who told you when you were young, stop lazing around, read, come on, learn something from all the people who went before. That's what Matthew says to Wardsworth, right in the beginning of this poem and he's absolutely right. I mean I'm a teacher, I spent a lot of years teaching books and yet Wardsworth knows he's also absolutely wrong. Why William on that old gray stone? So he's sitting on a rock, right? Why William on that old gray stone and thus for the length of half a day, why William sit you thus alone and dream your time away? Stop daydreaming, get to work, read some books. Where are your books? That light bequeath to beings else forlorn and blind. You would be lost and blind if you didn't have books to guide you. That's what those lines say. Up, up and drink the spirit breeze from dead men to their kind. I mean read some play-doh and you'll be okay. You look round on your mother earth as if she for no purpose bore you as if you were her first born birth and none had lived before you. Don't think you're the only one who ever lived. Learn from these people. You know, they really knew a lot and thought a lot and read books. One, now here it says, stands up description. You notice again, we're in four lines, stands as A, B, A, B. One morning thus by Esquite Lake, which is, that's where Wordsworth grew up, is in the north of England in the so-called Lake District. North, it's between England and Wales. One morning thus by Esquite Lake, when life was sweet, I knew not why. To me, my good friend Matthew Spake. And thus I made a reply and that's what I said back to him. It's not a long poem. The I, it cannot choose but C. We cannot bid the ear be still or our bodies feel where they be against or with our will. With bodies, we have senses, we take things in, right? We can't stop that. So maybe books aren't all there is. I mean I'm seeing and hearing and feeling and touching and smelling. Nor less I deem that there are powers which of themselves, our minds impress that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness. Oh my God, I would never, ever, ever have taught my students this in class. I mean I think it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they pay all this money to go to college to learn from teachers who read books. Just sit around on a rock and take it in. I mean, come on, I think he's right. I mean I would say that to students but not class. Now when I said assignment for next time is to read this. Thank you mid all this might be some, says Wordsworth, of things forever speaking that nothing of itself will come but we must still be seeking. While we're always looking for things, why don't we just kind of be in the world and take it in. Every time you go to the woods and stand and look at trees or look out at the snow on the branches or listen to birds cheep, you're doing what Wordsworth advice, you're just taking it in. Then ask not wherefore here alone confessing as I may, I sit upon this old gray stone and dream my life away, my time away. So that's the end of the poem. One guy says, read books and the other guy says, you know, there's all that stuff out there that can impress us. I'm gonna skip the next slide which just repeats one of those stanzas and has a wonderful line. I'm gonna skip it because I'm not hooked into the internet. It has a wonderful line from Groucho Marks who says to Margaret, whatever her name is this big one, Margaret Dumont. His brother has just left the bedroom and he sneaks out from under the bed. She's like, but were you just here? And he says, well, who are you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes? Well, Wordsworth is saying, maybe we wanna believe our own eyes. So here's the next poem in the book, expostulation reply, this is called The Table's Turned where he speaks to Matthew. And he says, up, up my friend and quit your books or surely you'll grow double, right? The book you and, I don't know, real you. Up, up my friend and clear your looks why all this toil and trouble. I have to stop here. This stanza to me, I'll confess to you, when I first read Wordsworth, I thought he really sucked. I mean, he was so boring and so unvarnished and so unlike a poet and so I'm able to do things that I just couldn't see him. I mean, it took me a while to open my own eyes and see what was there. And I think this next stanza is just gorgeous and it's so simple, right? But we all know, it's about a summer day in your evening when the sun is going down and the yellow light of the dying sun suffuses the fields. He says, the sun above the mountain's head, a freshening luster mellow through all the long green fields has spread his first sweet evening yellow. Not complicated. I think pretty gorgeous. I really do. I think it's as good as a poet can write and yet there's none of that fancy stuff that, you know, when you write poems, you want to read big words and impress people. I want to teach books to the dull and aimless strides coming here to the woodland. Lin, Lin, it's a finisher, but in pregnancy's what things are. How sweet is music? On my life there's more of wisdom in it. More wisdom in a bird song than there is in the book. I mean, you know, mostly older children go to college and they pay $200,000 not for them to college and can you imagine saying that? But there's more wisdom in listening to a bird than what they'll learn in school. That's what he's saying. At heart, cow, blithe, the frostal sings, he too is no mean preacher. Come forth into the light of things like nature being your teacher. There's a lot of people who think that Wordsworth is a nature poet. And I suppose in some sense he is, but that diminishes what he is. He's saying that there's something better than books. Emerson, who clearly had read Wordsworth, said, who would read books when they can read God directly? And we all know that feeling being at the top of a mountain, maybe about to slide down on skis, maybe just having cut the top and looking out, or being in the woods, or watching trees bud in spring, and thinking, yeah, this is what's going on. All that stuff in books about pieces and antithesis and synthesis and ideas. So he says, let nature be your teacher. Again, he's spontaneous wisdom. He's sitting in that great study and just being passive and taking it in. She has a world of ready-wealth, of life. Sorry, but. No, I lost this, right? Lost your mind. So I'm just gonna put it right here. I'm so sorry. She's so happy. Put it right here. You're very nice. Thank you very much. She's sneaking up on her knees, right? Just your mind a little bit different. If you don't mind. So nature has a world of ready-wealth, our minds and hearts to bless. Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, truth breathed by cheerfulness. And now he's gonna soar, and now he's gonna go even farther. He's gonna say, one impulse from a springtime wood may teach you more of man of moral evil and of good than all the sages can. Why would God throw an impeachment and all these lawyers are talking these big complicated arguments and words were saying just go out in the woods and think about it and you'll figure it out. Sweet is the lore which nature brings our meddling intellect misshapes, the beauty forms of things we murder to dissect. Let me stop at that line. When we wanna take things apart, when we wanna dissect them and cut them, like we wanna dissect a frog or a embryonic pig or maybe even a human being, we have to kill them first. We don't dissect live things. And one of the problems with reading poems for many people is that in school, the poems were dissected, where's the metaphor, where's the simile, what's the rhythm, what's the, you know, everything was taken apart and nothing was ever put back together again, right? And he's saying, no, no, we, ooh. In order to take things apart, we have to kill them first. Why shouldn't we encounter the living thing? Enough of science and of art, close up those barren leaves. That means leaves of a book. Come forth and bring with you a heart that watches and receives. These are both, these poems are of a piece. They're about the wisdom that is to be found from just looking and feeling and feeling for oneself. I won't go into it now, it's disturbing me very greatly that we had this, we, maybe not us. I have trouble, some of you have trouble with the internet and all these things, but it's intruding on what we call privacy and individuality and autonomy. Everything about us is known and cataloged and run through things called algorithms. Who am I? I don't know anymore, right? And so, but work with us saying, you know, you can maybe feel yourself if you allowed yourself to feel and cut off all that extraneous stuff like the stuff we learned from books. I'm not opposed to books, I've told you that. But this is a change, a revolution how we feel about the world. That not all the answers are to be obtained by thinking and by reason. That maybe feeling ourself and what we want and what we need and who we are, maybe that's essential to getting to where we want to be. So I'm gonna go on to another problem. Oh, this is also in lyrical balance. So last one, they had, oh, well I have two more problems. I wanted to do this poem first. This was in the third edition of lyrical balance. It's part of a group of five poems called the Lucy Poems about a lover supposedly who knows, nobody knows. I think it's the most perfect poem ever written in English. I think it's perfect because what it has to say it doesn't say. So I'm gonna read it to you. As Lumber 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 the birth diurnal course of rocks and stones and trees. The first thing we've noticed is that you know, we just sometimes want to reread upon and think about it. The first thing we've noticed is that the tenses change between the first and the second stanza. Tensa and that well. The first tense is all in the past tense and the second stanza is all in the first in the present tense, right? Did, had, seemed as opposed to has, hears, sees is rolled. There's a difference between the two stanzas, past and present. And if we go to the poems again, the first stanza is full of poems that had to do with appearance. Seeming a slumber did my spirit seem, right? Right? I'm, I'm sleeping. Had no human fears. How can a human being not have fears? She seemed now. No motion has she now. No force, all right. And the third thing we'd see is, is all those negatives in the third stanza. The slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years. Keep one space. No motion has she now. Lot of negatives. No force she neither hears, nor cities roll around. Then earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, what happens in between the two stanzas? That's what the whole poem's about. It's not in the poem. Oh, I was asleep. I had no fears. She seemed like time wouldn't touch her. No motion has she now. What's happened? It's a question. What's happened to her? She died. The poem is about the death of this woman he loves and it's not even in there. It's in between the stanzas. So the poem is about her death and it's so hard, this poem. I mean, I get the first stanza, right? How did she be? Extraordinary, beautiful, right? It's like I was asleep. With like I was asleep, a slumber did my spirit seal. I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years. Is there anybody here who doesn't feel the touch of earthly years? Come on. Time touches us all. It can't be true. It's a seeming. And then he goes, no motion has she now no force. She neither hears nor sees. She's dead. And that means astonishing final lines. Rolled around in her styrenal course with rocks and stones and trees. I have three questions about those, one of which I can't answer. I don't know. I don't know what the difference is between rocks and stones. I guess stones are smaller, but I don't know why he puts them in there. Stones have to be a little mysterious. To me this is mysterious. Maybe you can tell me when I come to my conclusion. What's the difference between the two nouns and trees with rocks and stones and trees? What's the difference between rocks and stones on the one hand and trees on the other? Trees are alive. Trees are alive. So we have something that is, whoops, in fact alive, right? And things that are dead. She's dead and yet there's a live thing. And then it says, it seems like a contradiction. No motion has she now no force. That's what the first line of the stanza says. And then last line he says, rolled around, or third line, rolled around. If she has no motion, how can she be rolled? Like rocks, like rocks. Well, rock doesn't have motion either. How is it rolled? The earth is, the world keeps spinning. Yeah, the world keeps spinning. I mean, none of the reasons for people to turn to poems and novels and dramas and paintings and operas. The world is not always so simple as the rationalists would have it. You know, the great law of logic is the law of the excluded middle. It is either red or not red. Can't be both at once. Can I move something here? I'm sorry, everybody, but I'm gonna put this right here. No, this will be fine. So the poem allows us to see if she's dead and yet I suppose she's part of some larger cycle of continuing resistance. Wordsworth was, in fact, he really liked Spinoza, who claimed that, right? That there's a universal ongoingness. I don't know. I mean, it's too much for me to hold Wordsworth and Spinoza in my head at the same time. But that's what's so gorgeous about the last line. She's dead and yet things go on without her, but also with her. No matter motion, has she now? No force, she neither hears nor sees, rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees. I'll read the poem once more. Such a beautiful poem. A slumbered in 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. And since I don't have forever, I'm gonna skip the next two things. I'm gonna read three poems of 1802, and actually I couldn't, after I created this slide, I couldn't move these around. I'm gonna start with this one, then go to this one, and then this one. So this next one is the poem everybody knows when in English newspaper did a poll of which poem its readers knew the best. This was the one they said. Now this was England, of course, but now you probably have a little heard this poem, right? And I'll start out by saying this actually happened to me twice in my life. We have peak experiences. Once, I was with some friends, in a high hill in Italy, and we were walking, and all of a sudden there were daffodils everywhere. And another time, I was with my wife, we were driving in the hills and mountains of Portugal, and we stopped, and there was a hillside all covered with I think there were crocus. But the hillside was blooming, where you didn't expect it to be. So this poem is about how the poet is out walking one day, and he walks by a lake, and he sees all these naturalized daffodils, right? Just a lot of daffodils, like a lot of daffodils, like hundreds of thousands of them, you can play with them to the Milky Way, all these yellow things out there. It's a kind of trite poem until the last stanza. It really is kind of trite. I saw all these yellow daffodils, they were great. Okay? I wandered, and he's wandering around. You know, this is the guy who likes to sit in a rock and not have a plan, and he's wandering like a cloud going through the sky. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats or on high or veils 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. I could look without it. Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way, they stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay. 10,000 saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they outdid the sparkling waves in glial. Give me a break, Wordsworth. He's not always great. Happier than sparkling waves. Oh yeah. A poet could not but be gay in such a joking company. I gazed and gazed, but little thought went wealthless show to me had brought. And here's where the poem leaps into something extraordinary that we all, I think, believe afterwards, and if we don't, we're the poorer for it. For oft, when on my couch sofa, when on my couch I lie in vacant or impensive mood, they flash upon the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude. And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. It's this memory of the past when things were gorgeous and beautiful that can, I'll use the word he uses in the prelude in the key passage, that can vivify or fruitify, make fruitful his life. When he is feeling vacant, empty and pensive, by that pensive I think he means a thoughtfulness that we would equate with depression. You can correct me if you think I'm wrong. All of a sudden when I'm lying there feeling I'm in a city and life sucks. All of a sudden I remember those daffodils and how gorgeous and wonderful and full of bloom the life can be and I am made new again. Because I see them in memory, the inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude. Only when we are alone with ourselves can we remember such things. Next comes a poem which I did not put on the sheet I handed out, it's on a little extra sheet I gave you. This is, I'm as big as you've noticed on major claims. This has the most stunning line in the whole history of human poetry. It's a line that I never failed to be shot by. And it's about a rainbow. You all know this poem, right? My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky, it starts, right? I love rainbows. When I was a kid I loved rainbows and now that I'm grown up I say, oh, there's a rainbow and when I grow old I will love rainbows and if I don't, I might as well be dead. That's it. That's the whole first two thirds of the poem, right? My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. That is a great line, right? Does a heart really leap? No, but we know what it means, right? My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began so is it now I am a man so be it when I shall grow old or let me die. And then comes this line that is just so amazing. The child is father of the man and I could wish my days to be linked to each by natural piety. What? No, can't be. Fathers have children. Children do not beget fathers. And this is so contrary to what we all believe we know is the deepest of truth. We all grew up in families. Every human being grows up in a family or a surrogate family and the child is a child and the parent is the father or the mother. And he reverses this. What we thought we knew. The child is father of the man. Here it is highlighted for you. What he says here, what he means here, what he understands here, what he's come upon here, what has changed for human beings ever afterwards is that we understand inside us is the child we once were. Freud said, oh, when you're a kid have trouble with toilet training, have trouble with your father, have trouble with your mother, have trouble with touching things and sex. Well, that's where all your neuroses started. You can like Freud or not. But this notion that inside this, again, this is counter to the enlightenment. Inside this serious faking person, right, think of all those lawyers in the impeachment hearings. Inside them all is a kid saying, we understand that's who we are deep down inside. We don't let it show much. I have a friend, I'm gonna be very politically clear. I have a friend who said, you know, when Hillary Clinton said of Bernie Sanders who I used to work for, nobody likes him in the Senate. He said she was being a junior high school kid all over again. Nobody likes you. Maybe a moment of truth for her. We all have within us parts of our past and it's only as we come to terms with that past that we can come to terms with ourself. You don't have to be a Freudian to believe that. If you wanna find out who you are and what you are and why you deal well with the world or don't deal well with the world, a lot of it has to do with your childhood. We all know that. And people didn't know that before Wordsworth. There's this guy who through his thinking and feeling his way through the world changed the way we think and feel about ourselves. Okay, one more poem and then I'm done. Confession. This is a sonnet, 14 lines. Has an octave and a sestet. Only the octave is gonna be a half line, it's long, not eight lines. And the sestet's gonna be five and a half, not six. And the confession is I taught a graduate seminar once on politics and poetry and I spent my entire time in this seminar again and again. This is a test case going back to this poem and looking the first eight and a half lines which are brilliant. There's no better diagnosis of what tells us than Wordsworth provides. And I thought the last five and a half lines which begin great, but I thought that was so much empty rhetoric. I couldn't understand why he'd end such a good poem with such bad ending. I've changed, I not think the ending is great. So here's the poem, I'll read the whole poem then we'll look at the two halves and then I'll be done. The world is too much with us late and soon getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away. A sordid boon. The sea that bears our bosom to the moon the winds that will be howling at all hours and are up gathered now like sleeping flowers. For this, for everything we are out of tune it moves us not. Great God I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outpouring. So might I standing on this pleasantly have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea or hear old Triton blow his reed and horn. Let's look at the two halves of the poem. First half you can see, it's just you could disagree. Maybe when I'm done you will want to disagree. I think he nails us. This is it. This is our modern world. Too much Walmart. Too much Amazon. Too much money. Too much busyness. Looking at screens. The world is too much with us. Late and soon getting and spending. I only got a little living. We got to spend our money at Walmart, right? We lay waste our powers. And we no longer feel ourselves to be extraordinary human beings. We're just workers and buyers and sellers. Little we see in nature that is ours. We have given, we've become middle class and we've given our hearts away. Pretty bad bargain, a sordid boon he says. This sea and now he's got some imagery. Okay, Poetsune's imagery. And he's thinking of the sea in front of him and the ocean and the sea is reflecting off the ocean. The sea that bears her bosom to the moon. The winds that will be howling at all hours but now are kind of quiet. Everything is calm, right? The sea that bears her bosom to the moon. The winds that will be howling at all hours and are gathered now like sleeping flowers. The winds will later they'll blow but right now they're like flowers. Well, kind of budded, right? We don't get it, we don't get it. For this, for everything we are out of tune, it moves us not. I mean, that's his diagnosis of modern life. We're so involved in getting and spending that we no longer feel the things that could and should move us like the natural world. Maybe even like the love of other people. We're just caught up in all the stuff. We watch TV, we read newspapers, we go to the store, we have to make a living, we have to worry about our checkbooks and we lose sight of the things that could anchor us in what is real, which is the natural world and our place in it and what we value. So that's what I taught for a semester. I kept coming back to this poem. How does Mark see it? How does Grouchy see it? How does Freud see it? How does, we did a whole lot of theorists. But then look at what he does in the statistic, which I didn't like, great God, I rather be a pig and suckled in a creed at one. That's because before I thought about it, Wordsworth is writing this in 1802 in a very, very, very Christian society, in a very modern society, in a very religious society. And he says, but I wouldn't dare say to you, because I am not. He said, I'd rather be a pagan. I'd rather not have all that Jesus stuff and the one God. I'd rather be like the Greeks, the universe is people by many gods for them, but they're alive and near and tingling. And for me, getting and spending, it moves us not. He says, great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed at one. I'd rather believe in some old religion. I had a friend, my wife and I had a friend in India who came to teach in the United States. And I never forget the first class she taught about India. She says, you know, we have to understand about India. Is Indians have a whole lot of gods? They don't just have one. The Greeks had a lot of gods. I mean, there's not about India. The Greeks had a lot of gods and he said I'd rather be a pagan because if I were standing on this kind of pleasant meadowy hillside, this pleasantly have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. I wouldn't feel as lost because the world would be peopled with animation, with things that I would feel the world was alive and moving even if these were strange gods like these minor seagods, Proteus and Triton. I would feel the world rather than if we go back one. He says, we are out of tune, it moves us not. So for Wordsworth, the great discovery and here I'll really end, the great discovery was that by looking back to childhood, to what is within us when we take in the world in a kind of spontaneous way, to nature, to a time that was earlier than our own, I mean, maybe things work better. Maybe we can find the source of what will give us strength as we move forward. Otherwise, we're gonna live in dejection. That's the title of my college. Otherwise, we're gonna live in a world for which we are out of tune that moves us not. So here's this poet writing in 1798 to 1802, who is shaping an understanding of the world that we inherit and shaping what is still, I think, our understanding of how we can move forward in that world. Find ourselves, listen to ourselves, listen to what we hear when we go into the woods. Pay attention not to the noises around us but the voices, the still voice within us. So thank you very much. Questions, comments, did you like Wordsworth, was he okay? Was he okay? Before that, wait a minute, was Wordsworth okay? I mean, okay, go ahead. Okay, I wanna give you some folks from my period. Two days ago, I was invited into the living room of a great, great girl in my neighborhood who writes poetry, and she had sent one of her poems, something like, what does it mean to me and then about her life? To music, and she sings it, she's very good. And then when I leave here, I'm going to see a young man who gave the poem and prayer opening for the legislature this past week or so. And his poem was very much like Wordsworth's story. The trouble was one to the ending, separate connection with the earth. And I'm going to get a copy of that. So things are going on with the young people. That was more of a remark than a question. If I could tell me about a summarized write done. There's a young woman in Montpelier, not very old, who writes poems and sings them. And there's a source of hope. Oh yeah. And then there was a guy who went before the legislature and said, everything sucks. Like Wordsworth says, right? Did I get it right? I don't know what you said. There was somebody who went before the legislature and said, everything sucks. Oh, I haven't heard from her. Oh, I thought that's what it was saying. No, no, I'm sorry. She went before the legislature. No, I don't know that. We missed it. We can pass the mic around. Questions. Pardon me for getting it wrong. It's not my question. Do you write verses? Can I ask a question? Question there was, do I write? The answer was no. So-so, I can't take it out. Wordsworth, he was really productive when he was younger. How did he support himself? He was productive when he was younger. How did he support himself? Yeah, he was just old age, yeah. Said a good question. He was productive when he was young and then he lived to an old age and how did he support himself? You know, you can do things when you're young and live off it the rest of your life. I haven't managed to do that. But we just saw the passing of Kobe Bryant. I mean, he did everything. I mean, that was hope. He would do other things. But he was a great basketball player when it was 25, you know? He could have retired then and lived off being Kobe Bryant for the rest of his life. So, the answer for Wordsworth is he, his poems, which didn't sell very much at first, became more and more acclaimed and he became more and more famous and he became the poet laureate and everybody wanted to have him come lecture, do this or that. You know, you can make a living off that. It may not be the best way to go on being a productive poet, which he wasn't. So, he kind of built off a reputation and lived, literally lived off that reputation afterwards. Is that good? I have a takeaway. That image of the woman rolling with the rocks and trees, that would be a thing that I take away. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's really powerful. So, thank you for having me here and I'm happy to enjoy it. Thank you very much. I want to say, I live in Burlington. I've lived in Burlington for most of my life. So, in unfit the years. I've always thought Montpelier was a better place to live. So, you're very lucky to live around here. Thank you very much.