Of Time and the Phoenix: Shakespeare’s Sonnet XIX

by Jason Anthony Akerman

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with the hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

I write this post the day before my friend Scott’s funeral, the day after Easter Sunday. It is a time of resurrection, but now, at this moment, it is so hard not to see “devouring Time”, like an animal, consuming, destroying.

I knew Scott as a regular at Numbers, a nightclub I’ve gone to since I was in high school. He was a regular, and I knew him for a number of years. For a long time, he had to get around with the aid of a walker and he would sit in his spot in the club near the entrance, and I would sit by him when I wasn’t dancing, and we would talk, especially about our shared passion for movies, science fiction, comic books. I remember one of the last films we talked about was Mad Max: Fury Road. I recommended he see it, and he did, and he enjoyed it. That makes me feel good, that we could share something simple and pure like that.

What I loved about Scott was his passion for life. In that harsh and unyielding desert where he was, where he struggled with his illness, Fabry Disease, he never stopped, he never quit, he kept coming to Numbers, to be in a place that made him feel alive, and it was an honor to share those moments with you, my dear friend. I will miss you. I will always see you there in your spot, always somehow hoping you will somehow appear on those Friday nights, to sit down and talk with me about the latest movie.

And in writing this, my own small shrine in words to Scott, like Shakespeare’s immortal lines from his “antique pen” that still burn with the embers, the fires of life, I pray that Scott will forever be born in all the lives he touched and his memory will not fade, like the phoenix, like Christ, forever risen, forever rising.

And that you are in a better place, and the music never dies.

Scott Tomlin Pagnotto

Please share your own thoughts and responses to Shakespeare’s poetry.

For Dan

Grey by Jason Anthony Akerman

Today, the dark clouds cried

again

over Houston,

cold rain tearing

the soft hours of

morning,

awake.

That Friday night,

February 22^nd, 2013,

you rode

you rode your final ride

through the gates.

Red Bluff Road,

Red taillights in the night,

7:10 p.m.

The endless tailgate parties for the Texans, you

the center, the point,

Lineman for twenty-eight years,

Electric, always a friendly smile,

Always buying a drink for friends and strangers alike,

Always there, at the Volcano. Kay’s. The Marquis.

I will always remember you there at the Volcano, “Hey, man” greeting me,

Your portrait enshrined there in the blazing flowers of color of the Day of the Dead.

Grey mustache.

Grey Goose and tonic. Your drink that I will toast with a friend to your memory tonight. Soon.

The tears.

I hope you are reading these lines somewhere better,

where it’s always happy hour and the drinks never stop, and there is no closing time, no hangover.

And you are riding your Harley,

Flying

Over the blacktops, the Texas backroads.

You were my friend. It was an honor.

I miss you, man.

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Temple

blossom

by Jason Anthony Akerman

breaking inward I
kireji — heart wound petal
blossom, isolate.

Holderlin’s “The Half of Life”: The Decay of the Swans

by Jason Anthony Akerman

519px-Tübingen,_Neckar,_Detail_am_Hölderlinturm_IMG_5073

Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems were read to Adolf Hitler, himself a failed artist, on his fiftieth birthday. As in the poem, “The Half of Life,” we see two halves of a complex, interconnected and often enigmatic duality of existence: art and destruction, love and loss, genius and madness.

Pomological_Watercolor_POM00006857

Like two halves of a pear split down the center, “The Half of Life” splits into two stanzas, a mirror much as the imagistic one of the “wild roses” (line 2) of the countryside “hang[ing] into the lake” (3) as a reflection. Artfully, the word “hangs” blends subtly and gracefully into the “gracious swans” of line 4 directly beneath. One thinks of the long, curved necks of the birds, hanging, as they float in the water.

The pears themselves and the “brimming” (2) of flowers and fruits suggests an Edenic paradise of sorts, and may also reflect the eternal ripeness of the magical garden of Alcinous in Book 7 of Homer’s The Odyssey, with its overabundance of fruit that “never rot nor fail all the year round, neither winter nor summer.” In the same way that Shakespeare’s sonnets about decaying time during an outbreak of the plague live on even today, art has the power to immortalize its subject, with Hölderlin creating in the lines here a perfect sublime image. It is the artfully constructed garden and pleasure-dome of Xanadu in “Kubla Khan.”

'The_Wild_Swan'_by_Alexander_Pope,_1900

The romanticism of nature is further expressed with the swans. Traditionally considered to mate for life, they are emblems of transformative love. “The Half of Life” was published in 1805, just three years after the death of Hölderlin’s one true love, Susette Gontard, whom he called his Diotima, the priestess or seer who taught Socrates the philosophy of Eros.

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In that view, romantic love is a vehicle leading to higher, spiritual love. The lovers as swans are “drunk with kisses” (5) in the excesses of a summer joy, but it is a joy that cannot last in a temporal, seasonal world. They drink from “the holy lucid water” (7) of physical and sexual love and through it are made pure and spiritual, taken to a higher understanding, much like the swans in Norse mythology who drank from a sacred well in Asgard and are thus turned forever white, both for themselves and their descendants. The poet, too, as represented by Hölderlin, drinks from this sacred fountain, much like the sacred river in “Kubla Khan.” It is the eternal wellspring of art and poetry, the source of myth and divine inspiration.

Just as in the film Black Swan, there is the duality of good and evil, light and darkness, summer and winter. And a similar descent into madness, as eventually Hölderlin falls into schizophrenia. At 35 years old, his midlife crisis was the loss of one so close to him; half of his life was over. He was only living an incomplete existence, “speechless and cold, in the wind” (13) in this torn, broken sonnet with its heartbreaking search and questioning at the end of where summer, where life, has gone. In some ways, the poem becomes Hölderlin’s own swan song to the death of beauty, forever transfixing his life. All one is left with, all one hears, in the final winter stanza is “the weathervanes clatter” (14). His direction, his purpose for life, has lost its meaning.

What are your thoughts on Holderlin’s “The Half of Life”?

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Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: A Mythology of Fragments

by Jason Anthony Akerman

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a trip: an opium trip, a fantastic travelogue, and a poetic journey of self-discovery. It is violent, dream-like, sexual; it is the war and struggle to create art.

The poem opens as an exotic dream of the Orient:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”

The infinite meets the finite in this garden of artifice and art, a world of opposites violently joined and united like the poem itself with its intoxicating “incense” (line 9) and lush sensory imagery. It is the violence of sex, death, and creation: temporal yet “holy and enchanted” (14), “savage” (14) but ordered and civilized. It is the world of Kubla Khan, who through war united the Mongol and Chinese empires, bringing civilization and order from chaos.

The pleasure-dome of Xanadu is “twice five miles of fertile ground” (6), encompassing yet beyond the five senses, like Spenser’s Bower of Bliss in The Faerie Queene. It is the fertile ground of the poet in his or her artistic creation, building a “dome in air” (46) through the spoken and recited poem, that as art is beyond the physical: “ceaseless turmoil” (17) made manifest.

Like an addict craving opium (which Coleridge was), the poet longs to be united and consumed by his art; like a “woman wailing for her demon-lover” (16), he is haunted by his unique vision. It is the story of sex, drugs, and rock and roll as the very “doors of perception” are altered.

It is the “vision” Coleridge “once saw” (38) of music and poetry, the “Abyssinian maid” (39) from Ethiopia playing “on her dulcimer” (40), transporting him.

The poet wants to recreate that experience, his opium journey, into music, but he can only share a fragmented vision. As the isolated artist, like Blake, he is apart from society’s norms: people fear him with “holy dread” (52) “for he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise” (53-54). He is a god like Dionysus, a rock star, that has experienced the ecstatic, the divine. That experience is both creative and destructive as we see in the poem, as we see in the orgiastic rituals of Dionysus.

Eventually, Coleridge succumbed to his own vision, losing his close friendship with Wordsworth because of opium, holding at the very end only a mythology of fragments, a dream in ruins.

What are your thoughts on the enigmatic poem “Kubla Khan”?

William Blake’s “The Tyger” as Promethean Vision

By Jason Anthony Akerman

Tyger

The Tyger by William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Even in the modern age, William Blake’s “The Tyger” still has the power to shock in its rawness. It is poetry as archaic mystery, enigmatic reveleation, questioning vision. Even with the title’s purposefully old spelling, it evokes something ancient and primal. One recalls other apocalyptic paintings done by Blake, such as his infamous The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun, which was later used as the basis for Red Dragon, the book and movie featuring Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Here we have a poem of fallen and “twist[ed]” (line 10) experience, a “fearful symmetry” (4) to its childlike Christ-inspired companion piece, “The Lamb,” from Songs of Innocence.

It is the poet, the artist, Blake, who “dare[s] seize the fire” (8), like Prometheus stealing the civilizing gift of fire from Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, to share with humanity. It is the story and underlying mythology behind Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and of his wife, Mary Shelley, in her darker Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. For Blake, that is the ultimate Promethean vision. He is the rebel with a cause, similar to the other heroes of Romanticism: Napoleon, Milton’s eloquent Satan, and that other bad boy of literature, Lord Byron, who was famously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

The artist is a thief of immense power, the essence of fiery creation, as he works to embody his way of seeing. Like Thor, he must use “the hammer” and “the anvil” to forge his art as weapon against society’s norms and “mind-forg’d manacles.” Through his pain and labor, he can produce as in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan, “a miracle of rare device,” an artwork that transports and changes the reader or viewer on a deep level.

Like the power of another animal symbol, the Dodge Ram ads emphasize this theme: “Guts. Glory. Ram.” It is animal as strength and uncontrolled energy. To steal another piece of marketing, this poem is “Built Blake Tough.”

The artist must be like the tiger, daring, courageous, without fear; he or she must go full Kayne West in his or her audacious quest. However, there is always a price. For Prometheus, it was eternal suffering chained to a rock with his liver infinitely torn out by an eagle. In Romanticism, and the gothic, we see the darkness in that propulsive exuberant energy unleashed. And those fires still burn today.

520px-Peter_Paul_Rubens,_Flemish_(active_Italy,_Antwerp,_and_England)_-_Prometheus_Bound_-_Google_Art_Project

What are your thoughts on Blake’s “The Tyger” and its companion piece, “The Lamb”?

Sex and the Countryside: The Wife of Bath

by Jason Anthony Akerman

wife5

Thursday, Feb. 18, 2016
Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue-The Wife Continues pp. 282-300 Vol. A (lines 1-834)
(In Modern English): Prologue:
http://english.fsu.edu/canterbury/wifepro.html

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016
Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale: Another Interruption-The Wife Continues pp. 301-310 Vol. A (lines 835-1270)
Another Interruption (Words Between the Summoner and the Friar)(In Modern English):
http://english.fsu.edu/canterbury/wordsbetween.html
Tale (In Modern English):
http://english.fsu.edu/canterbury/wife.html

The_Wife_of_Bath_Blake Nowhere in early British literature is there quite a character like the Wife of Bath. She dramatically bursts onto the scene in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and, like Shakespeare’s great characters such as Falstaff, almost takes on a life of her own beyond its pages. Her clothing itself is flamboyant: “Her stockings were all fine and scarlet red, / Quite tightly laced, her shoes quite soft and new. / Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue” (lines 458-60). Symbolically, she has “on her feet a pair of sharp spurs poked” (475). She is passionate about life, full of fire and drink, and enjoys it to excess. Like Samantha from Sex and the City, she is powerfully in control of her sexuality.

Her physical and materialistic hedonism is embodied early on: “Blessed be God that I have wedded five! / Of whom I have picked out the very best, / For both their nether purse and money chest” (lines 44-46). Her sexual energy is not something to be controlled by society or the church. It is only natural “in wifehood, I will use my instrument / As freely as my Maker has it sent” (155-56). Importantly, too, she is all about the Benjamins: “For profit, I would all their lust endure, / And I would fake it with feigned appetite” (422-23); even “If I’m aloof, then God send me dismay! / My husband can well have it, night and day” (157-58).

Similar to some Marvel superhero merged with a character from Fifty Shades of Grey, Alison, like Jean Grey as Phoenix, is all about power: “A husband I will have — I won’t stop yet— / Who shall be both my debtor and my slave” (160-61). The physical representation of her power is the whip; as she states: “I have been the whip” (181). This theme will in fact carry over into her tale, giving us a very different view of knights and chivalry.

Thomas_Stothard_Canterbury_Pilgrims_318_x_952_mm

What are your thoughts on the character of Alison, the Wife of Bath, in her prologue? Do you think she is realistic or stereotypical? Do you feel sympathetic toward her or not?

640px-Canterbury_Cathedral_102_Pilgrims

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Faith and Scars

by Jason Anthony Akerman

Lucas_Cranach_d.Ä._-_Die_Enthauptung_Johannes_des_Täufers,_1515

In The Empire Strikes Back, a crucial and transformative scene occurs when Luke Skywalker, during his training with another green nature figure, Yoda, enters “a huge, dead, black tree, its base surrounded by a few feet of water. Giant, twisted roots form a dark and sinister cave on one side. Luke stares at the tree, trembling.” It is in the ruins of this cave, this “green chapel,” like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that Luke has a prophetic vision (including a beheading) and gains wisdom, the knowledge of himself and his own potential for sacrifice or selfishness, good or evil. This is the same symbolic journey of Sir Gawain at the conclusion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Like John the Baptist, Gawain must journey through the wilderness. On the new year, “wild-looking weather was about in the world” (line 2000) with “stinging sleet” (2003) and “whip-cracking wind” (2004). Gawain wears “clothes to fend off the frost” (2015) with his armor “all gleaming good as new” (2019).

However, Gawain is not quite as pure as his appearance would suggest, for he now has the girdle “to save his skin” (2040): “That green silk girdle truly suited Sir Gawain / and went well with the rich red weaves that he wore” (2035-36). Like Luke Skywalker’s change to black clothes similar to Vader’s in Return of the Jedi, Gawain too is perhaps becoming more like his enemy, the Green Knight. The red will symbolically become his shed blood for his abandonment of his professed Christian virtues. When facing death, no helmet, clothing, or armor will be enough, for he will have a “bare neck” (2310). The rich extravagance of the material world, with its Beowulf like feasts, cannot ultimately save one’s soul.

Pedro_García_de_Benabarre_and_workshop_-_Herod's_Banquet_-_Google_Art_Project

The fallen interior nature of Gawain is expressed outwardly in the landscape of the last book. It is a harsh world of danger and ruins. Gawain “scrambled up bankings where branches were bare, / clambered up cliff faces where the cold clings” (2077-78). It is a morally confused gray: “the moors and mountains were muzzy with mist” (2080).

Klosterfriedhof_im_Schnee

Foreshadowing the bite of the axe, the landscape is littered with “saber-toothed stones of such sharpness” (2166). The green chapel is “the devil’s lair” (2186), “a soulless spot, / a ghostly cathedral overgrown with grass, / . . . where that camouflaged man / might deal in devotions on the devil’s behalf” (2189-92). It is the ruins of Gawain’s lost faith.

Importantly, though, while Gawain first flinches at the initial stroke of the axe, by the third one, he fully embraces his fate, living up to the ideal of a Christian knight. The last “ferocious blow” (2311) “just skimming the skin” (2312) “finely snicking the fat of the flesh / so that bright red blood shot from body to earth” (2313-14). Gawain undergoes in the final stroke a symbolic death and sacrifice, reminiscent of John the Baptist’s beheading. The “fat” and courtly excess must be purged in this “openly paid penance at the point of [an] axe” (2392). Further, Gawain’s “confessing” of his “failings” makes him “free from fault” (2391) and “purged, as polished and as pure / as the day [he was] born, without blemish or blame” (2393-94). Only in this way can he be reborn.

After his encounter with death, Gawain is forever changed. He refuses to stay at the castle because he’s “loitered long enough” (2409). He vows not to be seduced by “wily womankind” (2426) and taken off the pure path, as represented by the Virgin Mary on the inner part of his shield. For Gawain, the femme fatale is Eve, Delilah, Salome.

Salome_Dancing_before_Herod_by_Gustave_Moreau

The sign of Gawain’s guilt, the display of his scar and the green girdle, becomes a symbol for Camelot and the future. Like John the Baptist, Gawain fulfills a larger spiritual mission of giving “knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins” (Luke 1:77). Like Christ, he is “thorn-crowned, / bring[ing] us to perfect peace” (2529-30).

Gawain’s story still echoes and haunts today. He is the wounded warrior, home from the wars, battling PTSD and memories that cannot be forgotten. It is a history of faith and scars.

What’s your opinion of the last book of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Was it what you expected?

From Hell: William Blake’s “London”

by Jason Anthony Akerman

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

The bleak, dissolute portrait of London that William Blake paints in 1794 is one of utter darkness, of spiritual death and moral “midnight” (line 13). The poet as artistic creator “wander[s]” through the city, looking for inspiration, hope, but only finds “marks of woe” (4). From the lower working-class poor (the “cry” of the child “Chimney sweepers” (9), whom Blake writes about in other poems) and “the hapless Soldiers” (11) to the upper levels of society (“Church” (10) and “Palace” (12)), all is “blackning” (10). Like the plague-wracked city of Thebes in Oedipus the King or the dehumanizing, polluted dystopia of Los Angeles in Blade Runner, London is enveloped in moral decay and darkness. Like the soot-grimed young chimney sweeps, all are marked and enshrouded in it.

The repetition of the poem is brutal: “cry” is repeated three times, “mark” or “marks” three times, “charter’d” two times. As in a never-ending nightmare, all is monstrous monotony, soul-crushing. In the heart and center of Blake’s London, as in Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us,” true Nature is dead, dessicated. The once limitless visionary geography of the imagination is now “charter’d,” bureaucratically mapped-out, documented, limited, and legally confined: it is Dickens-like and Kafkaesque. Instead of a wild, mythic and surging sea, we have the commercialized, polluted Thames.

Into this chaotic hell into which “the new-born Infants tear,” (15) imagination is chained in “mind-forg’d manacles” (8): society’s messages constantly bombarding and “blast[ing]” (15) us in commercialized technology and mass-marketed apps, in the media, in nationalistic propaganda and rhetoric, a tool of colonialism and ever-expanding empire. It destroys the individual in the machine, in the cogs of “progress.” It is the world of the Borg in Star Trek; the dehumanized, Nazi-like stormtroopers of Star Wars; and the robot oppressors of The Matrix who enslave humanity by feeding it delusions of escape and thereby conquer reality.

The only escape from this institutionalized system of oppression is that of the artist, the free-thinker, the Romantic path offered by Blake as visionary poet. One must like Neo choose the dangerous and less-traveled road of the artist, creating one’s own unique fate, must wander away into the wilds of natural thought and imagination to experience the true, the spiritual.

Which pill will you choose? What path will you awaken to?

What are your thoughts on Blake’s “London”?

William Wordsworth: Calls from the Wreathed Horn

by Jason Anthony Akerman

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The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Like Eminem stepping up to the mic in Eight Mile, or Jimi Hendrix picking up his Stratocaster to play “Voodoo Child,” William Wordsworth helps to usher in the rebellion of the Romantic era with poems such as this one.

In this sonnet, Wordsworth rails against the state of London and the world at this time: a world of slavery, of industrial revolution with its dehumanizing factories and child laborers, and of British colonialism and empire. We will see a similar and darker portrait along these same lines in William Blake’s “London.”

It is an age of crass materialism, of “getting and spending” (line 2) without any soulfulness or spiritual connection to the wider universe. It is a million Black Fridays without end, or Eminem’s Eight mile section of Detroit with its hopelessness and economic devastation. Instead of seeing Nature as a resource, only something to be used and manipulated for commercial gain, the poet here has a more encompassing vision of Nature as something alive and connected, as personified with a “Sea that bares her bosom” (5) or “sleeping flowers” (7). It is the imaginative and regenerative vision of the poet, of the artistic vision, that can reawaken. This is the era of the cult of the individual, the Romantic, the rock and roll rebel who can transport us to a different reality, a new way of seeing. Much like the aesthetics of rap and hip-hop, Wordsworth defined poetry in fact as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Poetry and art is not something you should artificially labor over too much or force; it should flow naturally from out of you, so that you “lose yourself” in the moment and become in “tune” (8) with the universe.

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog

Radically, Wordsworth rebels and blasphemes even against the “Great God!” of Christ (9), wishing rather to forsake Christianity and “suckle” a “Pagan” “creed” (10) that is truer in honoring the vastness and awe of Nature, that allows for imagination and beauty. Like his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who himself goes on a Romantic quest (though fueled by opium) in “Kubla Khan,” Wordsworth craves to drink “the milk of Paradise.” As another Romantic poet, William Blake, offers, and which gives the title to a famous rock band of the 1960s, “the doors of perception” must be “cleansed” to see the “Infinite.”

Significantly, the pagan figures of Proteus and Triton rising from the sea and ancient Greek mythology offer a way of seeing for the artistic imagination. As an ocean deity, Proteus represents the flux and flow of change, of water and metamorphosis, the artistic chameleon aspect of musicians like David Bowie, Madonna, or Lady Gaga, the constant reinvention of self and persona. The ocean itself represents an escape from the fixity of society’s limiting rules, restrictions, worldview. It is limitless, deep, the unconsciousness of the imagination unleashed.

Just as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner takes us on a voyage of self-discovery, the poet here Wordsworth suggests must also delve into interior worlds to connect with the heart of nature, go if necessary against the decorum of society’s conventions. It is the sea as transformative journey, romantic odyssey.

Wordsworth calls us, beckons us, to pick up our mic, our “wreathèd horn,” whatever our artistic instrument, and begin. The beautiful and resonant sounds from his poetic music still echo down to us today in a world that still too frequently has lost touch with the infinite and spiritual.

Fontaine_du_Triton,_place_Barberini,_Rome_(6480988689)

What are your thoughts on Wordsworth?

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