Wye then

Lent Book Club: 24th March 2022

“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798”

William Wordsworth

I’ve seen a painting and read the other Tintern Abbey poem (can’t remember the name of the poet) but I have never actually been there. It is on the list of places I wouldn’t mind visiting.

Today’s poem, written near there, is full of reminiscence and has a sense of “The still sad music of humanity.” I can do nostalgia. I’m not a stranger to melancholy and depression. With the right piece of music on a bright Sunday afternoon I may begin to fill up with nostalgia and sadness like ice cold water filling a bowl. You could say that I get today’s poem, but I don’t really like it. Others, including our author, will disagree.

There are some redeeming features, and Bishop Richard points out that William Wordsworth is a panentheist. That is to say, God is present, and may be glimpsed in all of creation. Certainly I would agree that God is nearer to us than we may think or could imagine – God is present everywhere. The poems offers instances where that presence of God may be recognised, glimpsed or felt: “the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood” and also in the “light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky” and so on. In them all Wordsworth recognises “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.”

My take away lesson brings home to me that what we get from a poem depends on a large part on how we are feeling. I have no particular insights, I’m afraid. I am not really in the mood today.

This year #LentBookClub are reading “Hearing God in Poetry. Fifty poems for Lent and Easter” by Richard Harries published by SPCK. In this book Bishop Harries introduces us to a number of poets and poems. Some may be familiar, some are old and some are new. You may follow the # on Twitter or find us on Facebook.