10 Years After

Slept in but not overslept.
Over the weekend I came close to completing my essay on nature in Wordsworth poetry. I still need to cover a few poems and flesh out the paragraph(s) about "The Thorn" and "Resolution and Independence." I also watched "Spy Kids 2." Why? Well, in my Spanish class we need three cultural credits. This movie, directed by Robert Rodriguez, is suppose to be of cultural note. Rodriguez's El Mariachi would have been better.

As a side note, I was reading through the John Purkis' "Wordsworth" before class began and came across a neat tidbit. The passage about nature was referring to how Wordsworth 'inherits from Locke an intense concern with the visible universe..." Purkis goes on to say "The terminology of Locke is still considered valid to support the argument advanced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: we are referred to 'sensations' and 'ideas', and told that 'falsehood of description' has been avoided, for the object of poetry is 'truth'. In this way, Wordsworth insists, 'Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing.' One of the passages used to show this is from "The Thorn":

And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide...."

The idea of visible universe struck me as something that Wordsworth had talked about some. After all it was in the prelude where he talks about his stay at Cambridge that he describes how from his bedroom above the college kitchens he could view the statue of Newton holding the prism. Even the Norton Anthology text comments that the prism was used by Newton in his study of optics.