And in eternal summer lose
Our threescore years and ten.
“To humbleness of hearts descends
This prescience from on high
The faith that elevates the just,
Before and when we die,
And makes each soul a separate heaven,
A court for Deity.”
Is not this more in keeping with the whole of Nature, more true to human life in all its aspects, than poetry which dwells merely on the bright and cheerful side of things? If Nature has its vernal freshness, and its “high midsummer pomps,” has it not as well autumnal decay, bleakness of winter, and dreary visitations of blighting east wind? What are we to make of these? Are not suffering and death forever going on throughout animated creation? What meaning are we to attach to this? As for man, if he has his day of youth and strength and success, what are we to say of failure, disappointment, bereavement, and life’s swift decay? This last, the dark and forlorn side of things, is as real as the bright side. How are we to interpret it? Surely, without attempting any theory which will explain it, nothing is more in keeping with these manifold and seemingly conflicting aspects of life than the faith that He who made and upholds the Universe does not keep coldly aloof, gazing from a distance on the sufferings of his creatures, but has himself entered into the conflict, has himself become the great Sufferer, the great Bearer of all wrong, and is working out for his creatures some better issue through a redemptive sorrow which is Divine. Such a faith, though it does not explain the ills of life, gives them another meaning, and helps men to bear them as no other can. This view of suffering, latent in much of Wordsworth’s poetry, if not fully uttered, at last found full expression in these, which are among his latest lines.
No doubt this, and the few other meditative poems, composed in the same strain at that later day, have not the magic charm, the ethereal beauty, of those songs sung in buoyant youth, when before the transfiguring power of his imagination the earth appeared to be