The Winds of Wonder

A Slumber did my Spirit Seal

By William Wordsworth

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This is a deceptively simple poem, with just two short stanzas, mostly with monosyllabic words, with 8-6 syllables in the pairs of lines. Let us scan it first:

A slum|ber did| my spi|rit seal;|

I had| no hu|man fears: |

She seemed| a thing| that could| not feel|

The touch| of earth|ly years.|

No mo|tion has| she now,| no force;|

She nei|ther hears| nor sees;|

Rolled round| in earth’s| diu|rnal course,|

With rocks,| and stones,| and trees.|

The beats are simply iambic with a spondee at the beginning of the seventh line providing extraordinary weight to the concluding line, with three emphatic iambs. The alliteration of the first line has a sober soothing appeal setting the quiet composed tone for the piece.

This quiet composed tone does make one think that here is “creative sleep of the senses when the ‘soul’ and imagination are most alive.” Coleridge described the work as a “sublime epitaph” written by the poet for his sister Lucy. In fact it appears in the group of Lucy-poems providing sufficient justification for such a view. Could that “she” in the third line refer to her? “If it is an epitaph, tells Amal Kiran (KD Sethna), it is sublime.

However, he refutes such a conclusion and makes a convincing case for “spirit” of the first line of the lyric as “she”, the “spirit”, not here neuter “it” but feminine “she”. He writes: “There is a subdued sense of the tragic or else a deep a deep simple pathos”.

But the special thing about the lyric is, Sri Aurobindo, almost going out of the way, makes a special reference to it in his Synthesis of Yoga. He sees Vedantic-spiritual shades in it:

“We must not only see God and embrace Him, but become that Reality. We must become one with the Self in its transcendence of all form and manifestation by the resolution, the sublimation, the escape from itself of ego and all its belongings into That from which they proceed, as well as become the Self in all its manifested existences and becomings, one with it in the infinite existence, consciousness, peace, delight by which it reveals itself in us and one with it in the action, formation, play of self-conception with which it garbs itself in the world.

“It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can do more than conceive intellectually of the Self or of God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realisation is. For, first, we see that he had the vision of something in the world which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious force and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms and manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only the vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which its presence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital, physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being but in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile rock; and, finally, that he even occasionally attained to that unity, that becoming the object of his meditation, one phase of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem A slumber did my spirit seal, where he describes himself as become one in his being with earth, ‘rolled round in its diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.’ Exalt this realisation to a profounder Self than physical Nature and we have the elements of the Yogic knowledge. But all this experience is only the vestibule to that suprasensuous, supramental realisation of the Transcendent who is beyond all His aspects, and the final summit of knowledge can only be attained by entering into the superconscient and there merging all other experience into a supernal unity with the Ineffable. That is the culmination of all divine knowing; that also is the source of all divine delight and divine living.

“That status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart through love and by the senses through beauty and by the will through power and works and by the soul through peace and joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and infinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.”

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-status-of-knowledge

In Wordsworth’s there is no culmination of “all divine knowing” although he becoming “one in his being with earth”. The Vedantic-spiritual has in it always the flaming of the spirit, tranquil and calm or blazing with the fire of superconscience.