The other day, in my discussion of our Word of the Week, we were in New York City at the turn of the last century, with children of all ages having fun in the snow and on the ice all the night long, as reported by the sharp-eyed and large-hearted lover of the city, Jacob Riis. And now imagine, if a winter’s night can be so glorious in a city before the automobile took over everything, what it might have been for the boy William Wordsworth, in the rugged and beautiful Lake District of northwestern England, in the 1770’s and 1780’s, when the only sounds you heard at night came from the wind, or from nocturnal birds and animals, or from human beings, walking, chatting, at their work or on the road — or, if they are boys in winter, whooping and shouting as they skate on the frozen lake.
If you go to the Wordsworth museum at Grasmere, where he and his sister Dorothy lived, you can see the pair of ice skates he wore. I don’t think they are like what Hans Brinker wore in the story that bears his name. They’re just a pair of soles, with a steel blade, stout rather than sharp, attached to the bottom. You were supposed to strap the skate onto your shoes by leather thongs from each side. Skating, apparently, became popular in England when the exiled Stuart king, Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660. Charles had picked up the hobby while he was living in Holland — and really, in those days, if you lived in some place like Amsterdam with its many canals, skating was the fastest way to get somewhere, and you might well see a woman on skates returning home with groceries in a sack. In December 1662, the diarist Samuel Pepys, another fellow whose eye lit upon everything, was crossing Hyde Park, where, he says, “I first in my life, it being a great frost, did see people sliding with their skates, which is a very pretty art.” And skating is the action in my favorite of Norman Rockwell’s four-seasons illustrations of “Grandpa and Me,” with Grandpa the old man executing a nifty figure-8, while the beagle is splayed out on his paws just trying to stand up, and the red-nosed boy, hands on his knees, looks on in happy admiration.
But the poem! I’ve chosen an early scene from William Wordsworth’s biographical epic, The Prelude, which he began in 1798, working on it for the rest of his life, and leaving it still incomplete when he died in 1850. It isn’t a set of reminiscences. It’s meant to be a record of spiritual, intellectual, and personal growth; the development of the soul, in someone who felt the hand of God in nature and who traced his promptings in the mind of man. What makes the poet? For Wordsworth, it is that mysterious and divine influence, and everything good or beautiful or true or awe-inspiring contributes to this mighty river, from the “meanest flower that blows” to the sight of London throbbing with power above the Thames, from an old beggar on a dusty road to the honorable scholars at Cambridge, where stood a statue of its most illustrious son, Newton, “with his prism and silent face.”
If we ask, “What has happened to poetry and art in our time?”, we might ask first, “Who is involved in the world of sky and mountain, sea and star?” Or, “Who is out in the world among men at their work, when you can talk as you strain your muscles to their utmost?” Or, thinking of today’s Poem of the Week, “Who is out skating under the night sky with children whose shouting reechoes from the lake to the sky?”
Wordsworth on skates — can you imagine it? His sometime friend and later critic, Thomas De Quincey, wrote in 1854 that “the poet of The Excursion sprawled upon the ice like a cow dancing a cotillion.” But sometimes, as the poet says, he would turn his attention away from the rest of the boys, or he would skate past them on his own, caught up in the great power of the world, and he felt the call of danger and desire, and hope and fear and love, though when he was only a boy he could not put any of those feelings into words. And maybe that is a good description of a certain kind of poet: he feels the longing to say what cannot be said. “When I consider the work of thy fingers,” said a poet almost three thousand years before Wordsworth lived, “the moon and the stars which thou hast set in place, what is man that thou art mindful of him?” But the God who has his eye on the sparrow will visit even a boy on skates, with all the cliffs resounding about him.
And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, I heeded not the summons: — happy time It was, indeed, for all of us; to me It was a time of rapture: clear and loud The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about, Proud and exulting, like an untired horse, That cares not for his home. — All shod with steel, We hissed along the polish’d ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din, Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud, The leafless trees, and every icy crag Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the image of a star That gleamed upon the ice: and oftentimes When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks, on either side, Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion; then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short, yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round; Behind me did they stretch in solemn train Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.
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