William Oxley reviews Viva la Vida by Peter Abbs Salt (Cambridge). 2005. 93 pages. Pbk. £8.99. ISBN: 1844710890 reviews Wordsworth A reader writes (page 16) that I must have been inundated with comments on the misquotation from Wordsworth on the front cover of Sofia number 75, whose title was ‘The Growth of Common Day’. She rightly points out that Stanza 5 of his Ode on Intimations of Immortality... ends with the couplet:
At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the LIGHT of common day.
However the quotation, ‘the growth of common day’, was not from that poem but from Home at Grasmere: ... Paradise and groves Elysian, fortunate islands, fields like those of old In the deep ocean, wherefore should they be A History, or but a dream, when minds Once wedded to this outward frame of things In love, find these the growth of common day?
A longer extract from the poem is reprinted opposite.
I love this passage with its praise of ordinary life on Earth and I chose it as an issue title rather than the better known phrase ‘the light of common day’ from the Immortality Ode, because in Home at Grasmere the reference to ‘common day’ is entirely positive, whereas ‘fade into the light of common day’ has a elegiac ring to it. Like Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode is one of Wordsworth’s ‘gain from loss poems’.
He laments the loss of his childhood vision: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’ For ‘There hath passed away a glory from the earth.’ But he has gained something:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I chose the phrase ‘the growth of common day’ as a suitable title for an issue with a front cover picture of the Winter Solstice, after which the daylight begins to grow again. The back cover illustration was a drawing of Guantánamo prison with a quotation from the Advent liturgy. As I commented in the magazine, I was struck that the Magnificat Antiphon for the 21st, December, the Winter Solstice, is a prayer to the sun: ‘O Rising One, splendour of eternal light and sun of justice...’ and also that, though no stranger to cruel punishments herself, when the Catholic Church prays in her liturgy for prisoners, she prays for them to get out: ‘Come and release from prison the captive sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.’ The liturgy sees justice as bringing to light.
I was also thinking of ‘the growth of common day’ with regard to the two leading articles, each of which took a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) view, one of the Quakers and the other of the Orthodox Church.
I have reprinted a longer passage from Home at Grasmere opposite, not just as an elucidation, but because it is worth reading in connection with Don Cupitt’s article in this current issue. In his most recent book, The Way to Happiness, Cupitt speaks of his ‘affinity with the young Wordsworth, whose poetry I have been reading for some years.’ I thought the passage quoted was particularly relevant.
In this issue, too, Dominic Kirkham writes about theologians turning in the 1970s to a theology of nature. As usual, the poets got there first! This is true of Wordsworth and nature and I thought of another example when reading in Don Cupitt’s article: ‘Western thought must now return into its own origins, and confront again the question of Being, as it was confronted by the first Western philosophers.’ When ‘old Parmenides the blind’ wrote about Being, he wrote a poem.1 Jesus Christ in Court ‘Italian lawyer Severo Bruno does not usually have such important clients but yesterday he found himself representing Jesus Christ in court in a small town north of Rome,’ The Guardian reported on January 28th. Atheist Luigi Cascioli, 72, has filed a criminal lawsuit against his old school friend Father Enrico Righi, the parish priest in Bagnoregio, who wrote in his parish magazine that Jesus existed. Cascioli says that for 2,000 years the Catholic Church has been deceiving people by perpetuating the myth that Christ was a real person. If the case is allowed to continue, the court will appoint experts to review the historical data, with the gospels as part of evidence submitted. As the court is not many miles from the Vatican, Cascioli joked, ‘It will take a miracle to win!’ 1 See, for example, By Being, It Is. The Thesis of Parmenides by Nestor-Luis Cordero, translated by Dinah Livingstone (Parmenides Publishing, Las Vegas 2004).