Today they brought me a message: Wordsworth was dead.
“My God,” I said. “My God. I can hardly believe it.”
“Just as you like” they answered. “Take it or leave it.
He has sunk into April as into the depth of a lake,
Leaving his eyes ajar in the house of his head.”
“Are you sure,” I said, “that you haven’t made a mistake?”
“Oh no,” they said, “not a hope. We knew him too well,
A gloomy considering bloke with the nose of a preacher:
A poet in fact, with a charming affection for Nature:
Milkmaids (you know) and the shadows of clouds on the land.
His work is carefully studied in college still.
We shall not forget nor forgo it, while colleges stand.”
And I said, “I grant you that Wordsworth lies chilly in Grasmere
And his bones are absolved and dissolved in the tears of the rain.
I grant he is one with the plant and the fossil again,
His flesh has gone back into soil and his eyes into stones
And the roots and shoots of a new life push each year
Through the sad rotten fragment of his bones.
“But although each Spring brings a newer death to the bones,
I have seen him risen again with the crocus in Spring.
I have turned my ear to the wind, I have heard him speaking.
I shrank from the bony sorrow in his face.
Yet still I hear those pedagogic tones
Droning away the snow, our old disgrace”
“My God,” I said. “My God. I can hardly believe it.”
“Just as you like” they answered. “Take it or leave it.
He has sunk into April as into the depth of a lake,
Leaving his eyes ajar in the house of his head.”
“Are you sure,” I said, “that you haven’t made a mistake?”
“Oh no,” they said, “not a hope. We knew him too well,
A gloomy considering bloke with the nose of a preacher:
A poet in fact, with a charming affection for Nature:
Milkmaids (you know) and the shadows of clouds on the land.
His work is carefully studied in college still.
We shall not forget nor forgo it, while colleges stand.”
And I said, “I grant you that Wordsworth lies chilly in Grasmere
And his bones are absolved and dissolved in the tears of the rain.
I grant he is one with the plant and the fossil again,
His flesh has gone back into soil and his eyes into stones
And the roots and shoots of a new life push each year
Through the sad rotten fragment of his bones.
“But although each Spring brings a newer death to the bones,
I have seen him risen again with the crocus in Spring.
I have turned my ear to the wind, I have heard him speaking.
I shrank from the bony sorrow in his face.
Yet still I hear those pedagogic tones
Droning away the snow, our old disgrace”
by Dom Moraes
