THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 28

The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked
by the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to
the straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world.
Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow,
a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, had
there broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would
not grow, nor shade linger there -

"This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine."

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these
arid woodland ruins--cruelly, because the common sight of the day
blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less
tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign
beauty of this stanza especially -

"The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves."

We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of
that "reverential care," the visible alteration of nature at the
scene of suffering--an alteration we are obliged to dispense with
every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether
Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--upon such
grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no
more than a fictitious sign or a false proof?

To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large
meshes--so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause
the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only
supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.


YOUTH AND AGE


Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan--a poem that wrests the secret
of dreams and brings it to the light of verse--I place Youth and
Age as the best specimen of Coleridge's poetry that is quite
undelirious--to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his
undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it
is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness
of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the