Spring Fever

It is finally March, and despite the freak snow fall we had yesterday in Lexington, it feels like Spring is in the air.  Spring is by far my favorite season.  I am not really sure why, but it might have something to do with the fact that my birthday is March 20th, which marks the official start of this glorious season.  I am proud to share my birthday with noteworthy individuals such as Lois Lowry, the author of the classic children’s books The Giver and Number the Stars, as well as Mr. Rogers and Big Bird from Sesame Street.  In addition to this momentous occasion, Spring is also a time of rebirth and new beginnings.  The flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and practically everything is green.  At the risk of sounding overly optimistic and Disney-esque, I should mention that early Spring is also a time of repentance and reflection.

This confluence of natural beauty and reflection always brings to mind one of the definitive Romantic poems, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth.  The Romantics are known for their obsession with man and his relationship with the natural landscape.  In “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth explores the beauty of nature recollected in solitary contemplation.

Quotes from Wordsworth’s famous poem float through my head as I walk through Washington and Lee’s beautiful campus.  I can’t pass by a bunch of daffodils in a neighbor’s yard without thinking of the lines “When all at once I saw a crowd;/A host of golden daffodils.”  Spring truly is a time to sit back, reflect, and bask in the awe-inspiring splendor of nature.

Are there other poems that sing Spring for you?


Senior at Washington and Lee University. Originally from Chattanooga, TN. Majoring in English.

The Dark Sublime

I recently wrote a term paper on the poetic and philosophic conception of the sublime. It was an examination of Wordsworth’s poetry in light of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the subject. Burke believed that the sublime, far from being an experience purely of pleasure and enlightenment, was essentially an incarnation of terror in the face of the incomprehensible. In order for an observation to trigger the sublime, the vision at hand had to be, beyond any other characteristic, obscure. When faced with the obscure, the imagination is given free range to grow beyond the realms of the senses and rationality, and conceive of something otherwise bound by physical reality as infinite.

Some have termed this as the ‘oceanic sense’, so I find it only natural to use the ocean as an example. Objects of great proportions have always been a source of the sublime for poets. What makes the ocean such an excellent source of the sublime is that we can perceive no limitations to its scope. Facing out over the water, once can almost feel the curvature of the earth, and since the opposite shore is beyond our ability to see, our imagination fills the blank space with endless blue. This solved for me a riddle I had encountered in Wordsworth: his preferential fascination with what he could not see over what he could. Wordsworth idolized the imagination, and coupled with Burke’s philosophy it is apparent that the obscure, the dark, and the abyss provide the imagination with its most powerful ability. Seeking to grasp the infinite, it was such obscure images as chasms in a sea of mist, or mountains larger than any mind can logically cogitate, that brought Wordsworth closest to extrasensory experience.

Poetry has always been preoccupied with the sublime, and it seems to me, preoccupied also with those forms and presences that our senses fail to reveal. The Romantics wanted to believe the boundlessness their imaginations conjured from the obscure and the vast was reality—that they were imagining something that is there. But extending this principle to its extreme indicates a dangerous leaning towards solipsism. I now see this struggle in every fragment of great literature I come across: a conflict between the collective, rational reality and the individual, imaginative surreality.

Then again, it’s an acute possibility that I am simply imagining this conflict into the obscurity of artistic language.