Welcome to the August Poem of the Month
This month’s poem of the month is an excerpt from my hands-down, all-time favorite poem. Part of me is surprised that I have never selected this poem in my seven years of the Poem of the Month. Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth recounts the poet’s overwhelming emotions and nostalgia as he returns to a place which held deep, meaningful memories for him.
As I thought about the kids preparing to head back to school (and those who are already in the throes of those magical first days), I thought about the closing of Summer and what it meant to me when I was a kid. For my brother, sister and me, Summers were all about heading up to our family lake house on Lake Eufaula, which literally straddles the state lines between Alabama and Georgia. Even sitting here thinking about the lake house brings back an overwhelming torrent of jumbled memories of my childhood Summers – bottle rocket fights at ten years old, water skiing behind our primary-blue colored boat, and my late grandfather sitting on our beach in a lawn chair with his signature unlit cigar in his mouth watching his grandchildren splash in the water and soak up all of the carefree goodness that was summer. I think we all likely carry similar stories and memories of childhood Summers.
As the grandparents left us, and the ten year old began to grow up, those seemingly endless Summers morphed as we slipped into other phases of our lives. We imperceptibly drifted into high school, dating, college, marriage, careers, kids of our own. Jobs carried us far away from our homes and our lake house, but we always seemed to find a way to return on holiday visits or Spring Breaks or during the Summer to try and give our children those same wonderful memories that we grew up with at the lake house.
I look at my own kids, Alex and Emma, and all of the activities that they have enjoyed this Summer – YMCA camps, family camping trips, Pirate Camp, gymnastics camp, and for Alex, a two week trip to London and Spain to visit his best friend. I am sure that they are creating their own, indelible Summer memories that maybe one day they will try, in vain, to explain to their own children. Perhaps there is a good reason why masterpieces and snowflakes were never intended to be replicated.
As my own parents have aged, and my nieces and nephews begin to head off to college, we’ve decided that it is time for us to sell the lake house. We take with us all of the treasured memories of our time there, but maybe it’s time to pass it on to a another family with a grandfather who sits on the beach in a lawn chair with an unlit cigar in his mouth.
I hope that you have all enjoyed a Summer packed with memories.
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850)
From Tintern Abbey
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
