#21: The Rainbow
A Top-Tenner from Wordsworth
For some unfathomable reason when the British public were invited in 1995 by BBC Radio to nominate their favourite poem, this one did not make the list! The Top 100. See what you think.
The Rainbow
MY heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
The structure is simple. Only nine lines and easily memorable. Yet the ideas it explores engage and uplift all who read it, encouraging deep meditation as to its full meaning.
The poem builds. The natural beauty of the rainbow and its impact on the viewer’s emotions; how that impact is embedded in Wordsworth himself, for ever and always; and his wish for such natural piety throughout his life.
First, a rainbow – who can gaze at a rainbow and not feel a pang of gratitude at being witness to such natural beauty? Not feel their heart lift at the sight of nature’s oil painting in the sky? The colours, the curvature, the context – usually some grey cloud, some blue sky, some shafts of sunlight, perhaps some bracing breeze, some ruffled heads of hair. Memories of a childhood mnemonic – Remain On Your Guard Before Illness Vanishes – for the order of the colours.
The second theme causes us to pause: that the antecedent to one’s adulthood is one’s childhood. This sort of seems obvious, but it does require us to remember that the patterns and scripts that accompany us lifelong are all embedded in our childhood. Childhood is more instructive than adulthood. And this learning sustains us throughout our lives. Our language, our styles of relationship, our personal characteristics, our scripts and triggers, all these and more are founded in our childhood. So, in the poem, the child’s heart leaps up when he sees a rainbow, and this joy is also present as an adult, and as an old man.
The third theme is hardest to interpret: ‘I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety’. Piety is godliness, devotion say, to your religious practices and your God. So, Wordsworth seems to be asking for a life wherein its ages and seasons and personal traits and memories and lines of development flow continuously and harmoniously from beginning to end with a reverent acknowledgement of one’s God, of one’s own nature, and of the natural environment. The poem is bound together as tightly as the colours adjacent to each other in a rainbow.
If Wordsworth wishes for the ‘rainbow effect’ in all his life’s activities, how might that look?
By way of possible answer, our family owns a book titled ‘The Boy in You’, by Marguerite Poland. It is a history of St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown, South Africa. The title is taken from an address by Jan Hofmeyr in 1929 at the school’s Speech Day. ‘I hope you will always be true to the boy in you’. This so much reminds me of Wordsworth’s poem here. ’Be true to yourself and remember that who you are springs from the boy within you’ is Marguerite Poland’s (correct, I believe) interpretation of Hofmeyr’s words. We all have a small boy or girl deep within us; we ignore that child at our peril.
Be true to yourself now, be true to who you once were, be true to who you are going to be.