WHAT REMAINS BEHIND, WHAT MOVES AHEAD
Youth, being still oblivious‑‑ at least, mostly‑‑ to the decline of the body, the upheavals and disappointments (as well as the rewards) of love, the repeated pain of separation, the ubiquitous dialectic of good and evil (what Wordsworth called „dialogues of business, love, or strife“ ), is wise, according to many, for daring to see life as entirely in the realm of the possible, the limitless, the unimpedable („Delight and liberty,“ says Wordsworth, „the simple creed/ Of Childhood“ ). As that great poet so eloquently describes it:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
But life‑‑ tethered, earthbound, mottled with good and evil, hope and disappointment‑‑ intrudes (or, one might argue, rescues us from such ethereal, extra‑human bliss), bringing with it the inevitable and at‑first‑disappointing questions:
Whither is fled, the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
And those at‑first‑dreadful „Shades of the prison house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy,“ convincing him, alas, that „nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.“ The „visionary gleam“ is gone, the wisdom of youth revealed as an illusion (only, of course, in retrospect), and what strength‑‑ i.e. what more enduring wisdom‑‑ is to be taken from life now must be found „in what remains behind…the primal sympathy… the soothing thoughts that spring/ Out of human suffering.“
What remains behind, however, is also what looks ahead‑‑ namely, „the faith that looks through death, (the) years that bring the philosophic mind.“ It is precisely this that Keats‑‑ whose „heart aches“ and whose „drowsy numbness“ pains his senses, who „cannot see what flowers are at my feet“ as he longs for the ecstasy of the nightingale’s song‑‑ lacks, and why he is „half in love with easeful Death.“
Wordsworth, on the other hand, embraces „what remains behind“ and, unlike Keats, survives into old age. Not only can he see the flowers at his mortal, earthbound fee, but
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
What remains behind‑‑ of „primal sympathy“ and „human
suffering,“ of „the faith that looks through death“‑‑ allows Wordsworth to move ahead while Keats can only cry, forlornly, „Adieu! Adieu!“ and, once the world of childish illusion is gone, ends in a state of doubt as to his very consciousness‑‑ „do I wake or sleep?“
Which of these attitudes is truly the wisdom of maturity, and which the folly of youth, is answered best by the one who survived to move ahead into the light of what remained behind:
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.
This „light of common day“ is not a light by which to
leave this mortal world. It is, however, a light so possibly scorching as to melt one’s heavenly wings.