The Soul’s Journey Home · Storyflo

This week, we explore Chapter 14, ‘Wordsworth and the Longing for God’, covering pages 129 through the middle of 133.

Wordsworth’s great ode offers a precise poetic map of the movement of consciousness as it descends into finite experience: from the infinite, self-aware being that is ‘God, who is our home’, through the gradual crystallisation of the separate self, to the progressive dimming of the original transparency as the forms of waking life solidify. The longing that runs through all human experience, the search for happiness, intimacy and peace, is understood here as the desire of the finite self to return to the freedom and fulfilment of its source, even when that source is no longer directly felt. The longing itself is the testimony: something of the origin is always carried within.

The resolution offered in this chapter takes the form of a recognition rather than a remedy: that consciousness itself has never been obscured. What appears as forgetting or ignorance belongs entirely to the perspective of the apparently separate self; from the perspective of consciousness, there is no veil, and there has never been one. The self that feels far from home and the awareness that has always been home are, in the end, the same.

(The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)

From William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home:Heaven lies about us in our infancy!Shades of the prison-house begin to closeUpon the growing Boy,But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,He sees it in his joy;The Youth, who daily farther from the eastMust travel, still is Nature’s priest,And by the vision splendidIs on his way attended;At length the Man perceives it die away,And fade into the light of common day.

There are poems that seem to know more than their words can hold. Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is among them. It is often received as an elegy for the luminous clarity of childhood, a lament for something that the hardening of adult life gradually dims. But the poem carries a deeper current. In its fifth stanza, Wordsworth maps with striking precision the movement of consciousness as it descends into the form of a finite mind, and in doing so he touches the same understanding that the great contemplative traditions of the East have long held at their centre.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

The image of birth as a sleep and a forgetting points towards something that most of us sense but have never quite looked at directly. The self that enters the world arrives already saturated with its source, carrying what Wordsworth calls ‘clouds of glory’, the residue of infinite consciousness from which it has freshly emerged. ‘God, who is our home’ refers here to the infinite, self-aware being that is the ground of all experience; and the word ‘home’ carries the recognition that this being is what you most essentially are. The forgetting is real, but it is never total. Something of the source persists in the self that has emerged from it, embedded like a memory too deep to be located in time.

The Soul’s Journey Home · Storyflo