To illustrate the beauty of nature and the nature of Beauty, we turn to a deceptively simple poem by William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Wordsworth’s poem about seeing a rainbow describes the experience philosophers call The Sublime, a trans-rational, super-sensory experience that inscribes an invisible, indelible, and indecipherable signature upon the human psyche, dazzling the mind with incomprehensible wonder and stirring the emotions and imagination with inexpressible contemplation of, and exultation in, Beauty. But the skeptic says, “It’s just a rainbow!” But if a rainbow is just an atmospheric phenomenon with no aesthetic value, why does everyone who reads Wordsworth’s poem understand exactly what he means when he says, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”? Doesn’t our experience with rainbows elicit from us something more than a cold analysis of light and water? Of course it does, and Wordsworth felt the same thrill we feel when he beheld “a rainbow in the sky.”
Wordsworth interprets his rainbow experience as being beyond the merely sensorial and rational. Wordsworth sees the rainbow, verified by the words “I behold,” meaning his eyes understood what he saw. Wordsworth “touches the rainbow,” or shall we say the rainbow touches him, eliciting from the poet a psychosomatic response, some sort of physical sensation in his chest expressive of his emotions – “My heart leaps up.” Surely our reader has seen and felt something similar in Nature that made your “heart leap up,” something that charmed your eye and thrilled your soul, perhaps surveying the Grand Canyon, watching a hummingbird in flight, holding your newborn baby, or seeing “a rainbow in the sky.”
We might use a different expression to describe such an experience, perhaps “That puts a lump in my throat!” But we all know how it “feels” when we observe something in Nature that stirs a powerful, inward, emotional response from us. That raises a very profound question: Does nature – a prismatic rainbow, a crimson rose, or a silver star – does nature inherently possess observable, objective evidence that witnesses to higher truth, namely, Beauty ultimately understood as a Divine attribute? Wordsworth certainly thought so, as did the poet David who declared, “The heavens declare the glory of God!” Nature cannot save us, but it can show us. Wordsworth “climbed over the rainbow” so to speak, and through nature connected with something (He believed Someone) above and beyond what he saw and felt with his physical eyes and emotional sensibilities, something that launched him into a sphere of ethical contemplation that made him “wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.” In other words, the rainbow triggered a religious feeling in Wordsworth, reflected in his phrase “natural piety.” As a master wordsmith and devout Anglican, Wordsworth certainly understood the religious overtones of his term “piety,” which means “filial reverence and devotion,” “affectionate reverence,” or even “veneration or reverence of the Supreme Being.” Only a moment’s thought concedes how observation of Nature inspires transcendent and even religious contemplation in countless poets both secular and sacred, such as Byron and Keats, Dante and Milton. It is perhaps no overstatement that the most memorable poem ever written about “natural piety” is indelibly inscribed upon the collective memory of the English speaking world, David’s “Twenty-third Psalm,” whose images of “green pastures” and “still waters” have comforted millions in their hours of trouble, worry, sickness, and death. Why? Because David’s green pastures and still waters pointed to truths higher than the blue Mediterranean sky above David’s head. As Wordsworth notes, “Poetry is most just to its Divine origin when it administers the comforts and breathes the spirit of religion.”
Dr. Brunson
Headmaster
Paris Classical Academy