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Posted on August 26, 2010 by June

I think it was in fifth grade or so when our class was introduced to Wordsworth. Though my mom and dad were intelligent and very loving, they were not what you would call “book lovers”. Poems were just what others called poems, and pretty much remote from the substance of my life. That is, until I met up with Wordsworth’s closing lines in his poem” I wandered lonely as a cloud” “…and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.”

Those words hit me, somewhere deep inside, somewhere between my young mind and my heart. That cold, dreary morning on the walk to school, I also “lonely as a cloud” had been lifted from my dismal surroundings by the graceful shape and dazzling yellow of some daffodils. The pleasure of the moment was exquisite. And it was amazing to me that I could experience emotions that had been felt by a famous poet, emotions that had been expressed so wonderfully.

From that time forward, poetry had new meaning for me. Poetry wasn’t just lines of verse written in accordance with established rules, as it had seemed to me at the time. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned of how Emily Dickinson said she knew when she was reading poetry. It went something like: “when I feel as though the top of my head has been cut off, I know it is poetry!” Although I will be 80 on my next birthday, if I am lucky enough to get there, I have never found a better definition. Thank you, Emily, for rejecting all those high fallutin‘, scholarly formulas. I understand what you meant, and you were and are SO RIGHT!