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.
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