After two weekends devoted to the poetry of the late Seamus Heaney, we are continuing the thread by holding aloft one of his masters, William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
Seamus Heaney wrote transporting essays on the poetry of other poets, and today and in the
days ahead, we will post excerpts from one of his favorite poems, The Prelude by William Wordsworth, all of them from Book One, devoted to the poet’s “Childhood and School-Time.” In an article in The Guardian (February 10, 2006), Heaney wrote of Wordsworth’s achievement as “the largest and most securely founded in the canon of native English poetry since Milton” and described the poet as “an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern writing, a finder and keeper of the self-as-subject.”
In his beautiful sonnet sequence, Clearances, written after his mother’s death, Heaney enshrines with exquisite delicacy key moments in his childhood closeness to her. He cherished Wordsworth’s feeling for the centrality of childhood in the life of a poet, particularly the “uncanny moments.”
“It is not until Yeats,” Heaney wrote, “that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge, and bardic representativeness are so truly and resolutely combined.” And not since Yeats did we have the gift of another until Seamus Heaney.
Here’s our first selection from The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!
(Portrait of Wordsworth in 1798, around the time he began work on The Prelude, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
