Poetry

I can trace my love for poetry back to a point before I realized I loved it.  I had a teacher, Mrs. Greenwood, who had us recite 14 lines from Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.  Another distinct memory I have of that class was when we were assigned a book, and instead of a book report, we had to write a poem that reflected the story told within the book.  While I didn’t figure that I did very well, Mrs. Greenwood loved it, and asked if she could keep it, since I was just going to throw it away…

Hindsight.

I now couldn’t tell you what that book was or what I wrote, but there was significance in what happened, because it stuck with me.  And that is what matters, because now I’m a writer, driven by a passion to bring people back to poetry.

And now, for that quote from the great William Wordsworth that has meant so much to me:

“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”

~William Wordsworth, taken from Ode: Intimations of Immortality