Selected verses (1 & 5) that are close to my heart...
Intimations of Immortality
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;-- Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
Yes, it's a wonderful poem, fit to be set alongside his 'Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey' which has a similarly pantheistic, speculative, and ecstatic quality. This raises the question, to what extent to esoteric studies and initiation itself help us to recapture the usually lost qualities so well depicted in those verses. It is evident at least the Wordsworth believed in reincarnation. To us today that seems divinely logical, though in his day it must have been a great novelty, especially in the England of the early nineteenth century.
Reincarnation is becoming much more acceptable now. I guess this is a logical assumption to make when one starts to believe that one survives death. The medium and haunted shows on TV now are very popular. The times, they are a changing.
(Even Stephen Hawking admitted recently that he believed in other life existing elsewhere in the Universe and time travel!)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home -Wordsworth
