The Sentiment of Being

A Commentary on Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book II

I have always loved poetry. Not simply reading it, but learning it by heart – allowing it to live within me, line by line, breath by breath. There is something in this act of memorisation that goes far beyond recollection. A poem taken to heart works inwardly. It settles below the level of thought and starts to move in you – slowly, subtly – delivering its meanings not all at once, but in deepening waves of recognition.

Over the years, I have found that a poem learned in this way does not so much express a fixed idea as unveil something living. It becomes a kind of interior companion – not a piece of language, but a presence that reveals more of itself the more silently it is heard.

I have lived with this passage from Book II of The Prelude for decades. I must have recited it to myself hundreds of times – while walking, sitting, drifting in and out of sleep. And still, each time, it speaks in a new voice. Still, it delivers its meaning fresh.

What follows is not an interpretation in the academic sense. It is an attempt to speak from within the experience that Wordsworth evokes – to follow his language not back into history, but inward into the still, living source from which it comes.

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      Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on,
      From Nature and her overflowing soul,
      I had received so much, . . .

The opening line of this passage carries the gentle weight of time – not time as something measured, counted, or resisted, but as something that quietly slips past, almost unnoticed. The phrase ‘thus while the days flew by’ suggests a kind of absorption so complete that one barely registers the passage of time. It is the time of childhood or early youth, when the self is not yet sharply divided from the world, and so the hours do not accumulate. They vanish into the flow of being. The rhythm of the line – long, lilting, continuous – mirrors this. It neither halts nor hurries, but moves as time itself moves when we are not watching it.