Title: 10 of the Best William Wordsworth Poems Everyone Should Read – Interesting Literature
Headings: 10 of the Best William Wordsworth Poems Everyone Should Read
10 of the Best William Wordsworth Poems Everyone Should Read
The best Wordsworth poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
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Content: It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day. The things which I have seen I now can see no more …
Philip Larkin once recalled hearing this poem recited on BBC radio, and having to pull over to the side of the road, as his eyes had filled with tears. It remains a powerful poetic meditation on death, the loss of childhood innocence, and the way we tend to get further away from ourselves – our true roots and our beliefs – as we grow older. Wordsworth later wrote of the poem: This was composed during my residence at Town-end, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or ‘experiences’ of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.