A Sense of Wonder

I don’t even pretend to be a literary buff but there was a poem by William Wordsworth that always caught my imagination. And it wasn’t “the Daffodils” either. “Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood” was composed at Grasmere in the English Lake District aroud 1803. It is a long philosophical ode describing among other things, the “sense of wonder” that children instinctively have in all that is around them. As an impressionable 15 year old, the title itself of the poem was enough to intrigue me.



THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen
I now can see no more”.

Let's learn to look at stuff more with the eyes of a child. Today in our Saturday morning kids programme “os Lusitos”, we did autumn and falling leaves, and it was cool watching kids’ imagination run wild as they coloured in autumn leaves fantastic shades of purple and vermillion. Us adults, we would say, oh yes, the leaves change colour and fall to the ground. There's a simple scientific explanation. More than that it becomes someting of a nuisance to drivers. Children, on the other hand, possess that elusive “sense of wonder” that enables them to perceive the magic and the grandeur of their planet in a way that we have somehow lost as we deal with the prosaic.

Of course I have to quote Van the Man at this point. Anyone who reads my blog will know of my attachment to the music to my compatriot and his longings for East Belfast and the lost world (for him) of the Castlereagh hills. He describes Autumn and the passing of the seasons thus in “A Sense of Wonder”

.........................................“…I said I could describe the leaves for Samuel and Felicity
..........Rich, red browney, half burnt orange and green.
..................Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder
....................Didn’t I come to lift your fiery vision bright

Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder in the flame.

It’s easy to describe the leaves in the autumn

And its oh so easy in the spring

But down through January and February
It’s a very different thing.

On and on and on, through the winter of our discontent.

When the wind blows up the collar and the ears are frostbitten too

I said I could describe the leaves for Samuel and what it means to you and me….”
(Van Morrison "A Sense of Wonder" 1985)

And so the song goes on. The point that I am making is this. Let’s never lose that sense of wonderment at life and love and creation and redemption and us and God. I like to feel that I continue to nurture that sense as I look around me, at nature, at the lives of my friends and neighbours, at marriage and childbirth, sunset and high tide, and a whole host of other daily miracles that we can so easily miss out on, and never see the wonder of it at all.