"In these my lonely wanderings I perceived / What mighty objects do impress their forms / To elevate our intellectual being."
— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Work Title
Date
w. 1795-1796, first published 1842
Metaphor
"In these my lonely wanderings I perceived / What mighty objects do impress their forms / To elevate our intellectual being."
Metaphor in Context
Osw.
Give not to them a thought. From Palestine
We marched to Syria: oft I left the Camp,
When all that multitude of hearts was still,
And followed on, through woods of gloomy cedar,
Into deep chasms troubled by roaring streams;
Or from the top of Lebanon surveyed
The moonlight desert, and the moonlight sea:
In these my lonely wanderings I perceived
What mighty objects do impress their forms
To elevate our intellectual being;
And felt, if aught on earth deserves a curse,
'Tis that worst principle of ill which dooms
A thing so great to perish self-consumed.
--So much for my remorse!
(p. 128)
Give not to them a thought. From Palestine
We marched to Syria: oft I left the Camp,
When all that multitude of hearts was still,
And followed on, through woods of gloomy cedar,
Into deep chasms troubled by roaring streams;
Or from the top of Lebanon surveyed
The moonlight desert, and the moonlight sea:
In these my lonely wanderings I perceived
What mighty objects do impress their forms
To elevate our intellectual being;
And felt, if aught on earth deserves a curse,
'Tis that worst principle of ill which dooms
A thing so great to perish self-consumed.
--So much for my remorse!
(p. 128)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Jonathan Wordsworth's "As with the Silence of Thought" in High Romantic Argument (Cornell UP), p. 44.
Citation
See Robert Osborn, ed. The Borderers (Cornell UP, 1982).
Date of Entry
08/26/2013
