Steeped in Wonder,
Formed in Wisdom
![From "Living at this Hour," the latest weekly column from Dr. Glenn Arbery.
This poem [William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “London 1802”] is moving to every generation that reads it, I suspect, because each generation senses that it has not lived up to its promise. Our institutions (even the Church) and our private lives have forfeited the “heroic wealth” of nobility and “inward happiness,” which too often give way to anxiety and rage. The greatness of our cultural “dower” slips away from us, so that the appeal to Milton, problematic as he is, rings true, especially as Wordsworth characterizes him in the last six lines:
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Wordsworth imagines the aged poet, completely blind for over two decades, persecuted by the monarchy after the defeat of his party and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Milton’s poetic voice was as vast and elemental as the sea, and he composed an epic worthy to stand beside Virgil’s without being able to see a line of it written. His soul “dwelt apart” at a height rare in human achievement—and yet Wordsworth does not end his poem with praise for Milton’s poetry, but instead for the simple humility it took to “travel on life’s common way/In cheerful godliness.” Surely, Milton had that humility because of his long meditation on the fall of the man and the need for grace. What would it look like if achieving the highest things led us to walk without pretensions? May the meditation strike us to the heart.](https://wyomingcatholic.edu/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
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