Tintern Abbey brings me to ponder a child's attention span. Often, we dismiss a child's capacity to concentrate on any one thing for any significant period of time. However, I tend to think that children, in comparison to most adults, have the superior capacity to focus, especially around the ages of 6-8. Wordsworth says, "For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth." Hmm. Yes, I see where he comes from. Maybe he means youth as in my age currently . . . likely, I suppose.
But have you ever seen a child counting steps, counting stairs, picking flowers, asking why? Trust me, their why's long outlast the mother's patience for answering; they linger on the stairs counting, pondering, examining dirt, whereas the adult climbs the stairs to get to the top and most often fails to note anything extraordinary about the trip up. I remember watching the river when I was young, noting the ripples and the clarity. I also remember caking myself with mud by the creek, laying in the sun until it dried, then getting up very slowly feeling the cracking outer skin I had given myself. I remember sitting in the grass observing little yellow flowers with my friend Micah; I remember talking about how we were afraid of dying, because Claire drowned in the creek behind our house (and yet we still took our annual innertube escapade through the pipe that ran under the driveway . . . always a bit scary and claustrophobic, yet nonetheless thrilling.) I remember ice skating with Micah in our back yard in the winter. But were all these communions with nature thoughtless? I suppose they might have been in the sense that Wordsworth is getting at. Children cannot typically see "the still, sad music of humanity" in the same way of adults. Regardless, children see other things. Also, I think you'd find yourself hard pressed to note an adult sitting out in the grass waiting for ants to surface for viewing pleasure.
The following is my favorite section of the poem Tintern Abbey:
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."
Unremembered pleasures. Corporeal frame. We see into the life of things.From Nabokov's transparent things to Hopkins' inscape.
Inscape...
James Finn Cotter, in his article "'Hornlight Wound to the West': The Inscape of the Passion in Hopkins' Poetry," says that "Hopkins saw inscape as the perception of images in art and nature which open to and link up with other images in order to form a pattern or design not at first detectable" (299).
Cotter confuses me. However, Cotter's words become more clear with the help of Stephen Greenblatt's explanation via wiki: "[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it."
I think it's extremely important that inscape is not static, but dynamic, especially in terms of better understanding Wordsworth's words "I cannot paint what then I was" (Tintern Abbey.) Although we remain the same being throughout life, our inscape shifts and varies its enactment of self. The pattern shifts and moves alongside of other patterns and beings/selves? (ugh I feel that I'm stabbing at thin air.)
Ok.. here's an attempt to look at patterns in Eliot:
BN
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal
pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Only by the form, the
pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
The detail of the
pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
EC
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been.Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the
pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
DS
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another
pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
LG
See, now they vanish,The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a
patternOf timeless moments.
If, as Cotter says, inscape reveals patterns not at first discernable, then patterns must comprise at least part of the unique whatness of a thing. As Eliot shows, patterns shift, move change. They, too, are not static.
