Again, the summer break is allowing me to take time off from the craze of academics. My English teacher was so adamant about our reading works by some of these renowned poets. Wordsworth, she mentioned, you got to read Wordsworth.
If Wordsworth were alive today, would he invoke the name of another great poet from history, as he had invoked John Milton when he wrote the poem “London” in 1802? I assume that some disenchanted contemporaries would say he would, as the world is seeing stagnation of morals, which surely is deficient in the city that he inhabited back then. What could have been the problems that Wordsworth saw in his day that could have distressed Wordsworth? To long for someone who had died more than a century ago means that Wordsworth had considered many names, but no one could be the exemplar of those virtues like Milton’s.
First, the poem –
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
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.
In addition to being a poet, Milton was a statesman who fervently advocated for free speech. Ironically, the world today isn’t shy of opinionating. The birth of SNS has allowed people from all spectrums to weigh in on politics and on something as simple as how to apply makeup. I sense that a buffer between people and electronic messaging has allowed people to step out of themselves. And I suppose a few of them are more comfortable just writing down their thoughts instead of standing before a pulpit.
As for the poem, I read it in two parts. The first, a pessimistic depiction of the then London by Wordsworth. The second, a hope for London’s future with help from Milton. What Wordsworth craves are four ideas – manners, virtue, freedom, and power. Surprisingly, I see some of these in conflict with one another. To have freedom and power may suggest forgoing manners and virtue, at least in the world of the former U.S. President Trump. He had exercised much freedom and power at the office, going back and forth between the two, while throwing both manners and virtue out the window. It is a gargantuan task, then, to embrace them all, to cradle them equally.
The poem’s last two lines impacted me. It reads, “In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay.” In Wordsworth’s view, Milton embodies the ideals of both godliness and lowliest (down to earth characteristics), both virtuous in their own ways, to aspire to the ethereal ideals of gods but to be humble and to remain grounded by appreciating and taking on tasks of the mundane.
I imagine that, during the time when Wordsworth wrote the poem, London was seeing the rise of industrialization and everything that could have been vice followed. Greed and disregard for civic goodness must have stung Wordsworth. But if those were the pains of the day, the world is seeing those pains again now, resurrected fully. Corporate and government greed are rampant, as those forces rarely seek the opinions of the working class or the public at large. And, so, it goes. “London, 1802” could be “Seoul, 2024” or “New York, 2024.” Many of them can be interchangeable. But if there is any ounce of hope, we can pray that, as someone would rise among us, a voice as pure and naked as heaven’s.
