Looking back 40 years after I first encountered Wordsworth’s magical “Intimations of Immortality,” this poem embodies, sustains, indeed inspires (poetic) reflection, engagement,  and understanding.

In hindsight, I see a youth, nearly a youthful adult, inhibited, inexperienced, intimidated, insecure, unwittingly unable to relax into the marvels of the introspections of the poem.

Three decades and countless turns and returns to the Intimations, with each reading and with the alterations in hopes and fears, encounters with triumph and defeat, joy and despair, peace and distress, with distance behind and the horizons disconcertingly apparent, I at last find myself in the narrator’s shoes. In and from this stance I achieve the comfort that comes with familiarity and empathy.

As with the narrator’s experience of nature, as he casts his eye on meadow, grove, and stream, so do I cast my eye on the readings and re-readings that layer my journey from that initial encounter to my encounter today.