Intimations of Immortality by Wordsworth - Essay Example

Contemporary Poetry A study of Victorian poetry, especially the work of Wordsworth, reveals a concern with the passing of time and the loss that accompanies age. This concept is illustrated in the first stanza of his “Intimations of Immortality” in which he states: “There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light.” The suggestion here is that he has grown beyond such innocent joys and can no longer appreciate them in the same carefree way he had before. In other words, something special has been irrevocably lost through the passage of time and the aging of the poet. For many contemporary poets, Wordsworth remains an inspiration as they continue to investigate their own feelings of loss and aging. However, they necessarily approach the subject from a more contemporary viewpoint that has only become more abstracted and disorganized with the increased speed of modern life. These ideas can be traced through the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara and Rae Armantrout. Elizabeth Bishop employs imagery of the modern world to highlight the loss of youth and loneliness that she finds in the contemporary madness of everyday life. For example, although “Filling Station” is a playful exchange exploring synonyms, she uses the everyday image of a backwater gas station to investigate ideas of deterioration, loss of beauty and the feeble attempts of someone to cling to the pure. Everything within the filling station is “oil-soaked, oil-permeated / to a disturbing, over-all / black translucency” (3-5) which is only interrupted by a small stack of colorful comic books that “lie / upon a big dim doily / draping a taboret” (23-25). The metaphysical question, “Why, oh why, the doily?” (30) emphasizes the sense of lost meaning that is embodied in the presence of something beautiful in this world of aged mechanics. While the sense of self is represented in the presence of the doily and the small plant near it, it is nearly entirely subsumed by the oil and grease that permeates everything in the shop, turning all into a postmodern concept of cyborg automaton. The loneliness of the self is complicated by feelings of guilt and shame only acquired through the passage of time and loss in Bishop’s “Five Flights Up.” While the guilt permeates the poem, the memory of its cause does not make an appearance, indicating the inescapable nature of it in the new world. Any joy in the bird’s or the dog’s greeting for the new day is immediately questioned by the human voice, “You ought to be ashamed!” (17). This harsh statement, coming so quickly upon the rise of the sun, reminds the reader that the human being must always remember, must always awaken to a new day still troubled by the issues that were faced yesterday and remains dogged by the persistence of memory. Time brings no relief for the losses that have been sustained. Entering the world of “One Art”, Bishop exudes a sense of loss that is impossible to avoid. From the first line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1), she delivers what seems to be almost a lecture, given by one with a great deal of experience, regarding how one can begin to lose everything that was once precious to them. To become an expert, it is suggested that the reader practice “losing farther, losing faster” (7), and the content is no longer just material objects, but time, hopes and dreams. Through the list of things this expert has lost, she has managed to live through all of them because even if she no longer has the things themselves, she still has the memory of them. While she misses these things, the loss has not been a disaster. With the change in refrain from “not hard to master” to “not too hard to master,” survival is questioned. With her last line, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” (19), she makes it clear that she has not been writing for the reader, for the student or even for the ‘you’ described in the poem, but rather for herself as she tries to come to grips with the loss and the pain enough to survive. Frank O’Hara manages to capture a similar sense of the loss and loneliness accompanied by the passage of time and the forgetting of oneself. He indicates the many days he sits by it, watching it flow past, indicating a great passing of time in terms of days and years as he wraps himself up in it. “My very life / became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings” (7-8). As he discusses the progress of the river to the sea, he indicates that is his final destination, creating a metaphor for his life, aging and embarking on the journey to the far shore beyond death. Although it seems a tranquil passage, “for a moment my strengthening arms / would cry out upon the leafy crest of air / like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain / would go through me” (12-14) as memory seized him and he attempted to escape the numbing, floating experience in which he’s been engulfed, only to be pulled back down into the depths of humanity. The loss of the self is further described in his “Three Penny Opera” in which none of the characters have a real or lasting existence. Penny is “free and fair”, but “her jewels / have price tags in case / they want to change / hands” (4-7). Her identity is further confused through the multiple meaning of the title, in which it is suggested there may be more than one Penny. The reality of both Penny and Mackie are questioned as being perhaps nothing more than shadow or a trick of film while Mackie himself only gains meaning occasionally. Despite this lack of meaning or sense of self, even this has been lost through the passage of time and exists now only in memory, as is indicated in the last two lines, “Those / were intricate days.” In yet another poem, O’Hara expresses the bone-tired weariness that frequents the many people of the working class in his address to the “Radio.” Memories of youth, happiness and energy are gone now “when tired / mortally tired I long for a little / reminder of immortal energy” (2-4). The sense of self is lost in the automatic actions of trudging from desk to desk during the workweek as time passes on unnoticed. In this poem, he is chastising the radio station for playing energizing music for the shut ins during the week while treating him to dreary music that only reinforces his automatic sense of self. Despite this, he continues to argue that art can provide the uplifting inspiration he seeks with his many references to great modern composers and the surrealist painter de Kooning. Armantrout discusses the intentional loss of self involved in the act of reading as she highlights the ways in which the writer brings imaginary places into existence, allowing readers to forget where they are for a moment. This concept of a journey, introducing a time element to the text, is emphasized through the metaphor of the train, but this train is “almost nothing like the ephemeral realizations with which we’re familiar.” It is instead an invitation to the self, “an intrusion of privacy” and a voyeuristic thrill. This last element reasserts the reader’s sense of self as a touch of embarrassment rises when it is realized that one has been trying to peek behind the text of the words to see into the author’s brain illustrated through the analogy of the school girl removing her clothes for the camera. But this attempt at connection has also failed, cut off by the final line “But this is getting us nowhere,” leaving behind the sense of loss as it is realized that the connection with beauty is severed and was always incomplete. This failure to connect completely is the topic of “Almost” as well. Consisting of two distinct segments, the poem is nevertheless a unified whole as Armantrout illustrates the difficulties found in trying to form an understanding with another person. Beginning with the loss of memory regarding words said, she indicates this might be a good thing as “if they were retrieved, verbatim, we might not acknowledge them” (2). However, the emotions of these conversations, the tenor (4) or the soul (5), remain in the memory, creating a fabric of feeling and preserving a sense of self. Although it’s suggested in this early portion of the poem that the conversations might have been angry, the second stanza of this segment turns the attention to the happy joking conversations they’ve had that serve to preserve the memories over a greater span of time. The second segment seems to be independent as Armantrout discusses a billboard she’s seen in which it was necessary to search for the product despite the sign’s slogan “When size really counts.” In the final line, she tells her readers, “I stand behind these words,” challenging them to “come find me” and acknowledging the ease with which anyone can become lost. In “Write Home”, Armantrout again expresses the loss of self in the very act of writing to preserve it. The first segment of the poem indicates how personal the writing is: “In order to write / You have to fall in love / With your own thought / Every time” (1-4). That this thought is the essence of the self is expressed in the second segment, when Armantrout reveals that much of her thought comes from the dream state, often regarded as the uncensored part of the brain. Yet, this self is lost even as the pen hits the page “as if each repeated / letter / were merely / the bearer of nostalgia” (13-16). Thus, while writing is the means by which she captures the self, even this is little more than memory and something special has been lost. Throughout all of these poems, the attempt to capture the self is repeatedly made, repeatedly lost and repeatedly depends upon memory to preserve some sense of it before it slips away completely to the ravages of time. This echo of Wordsworth’s sentiments is, however, tinged with the images of the modern automated world as opposed to Wordsworth’s nature. Rather than being related to miraculous creations of nature, the self is now more often related to the mindless behavior of machines that have long lost their wonder in the mundane reality of a human-created collection. Memory is both cruel and benevolent yet always reductive while the sense of self is constantly shifting, grasping and attempting to understand as it trips through time and space. Thus, while the themes have remained the same, they are now profoundly different. Works Cited Armantrout, Rae. Up to Speed. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Bishop, Elizabeth. Geography III. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978. O’Hara, Frank. Meditations in an Emergency. New York: Grove Press, 1957. Read More