When Wordsworth visits Wendy's

I'm tempted to begin it was a dark and stormy night, but the icy rain has stopped and the road is clear and the wind is growing less gusty. The last night of November of a cold, dark year, and I'm the only customer sitting in Wendy's just off the interstate in Nowheresville, Ohio, eating chicken tenders and fries and wishing I could go back in time just one hour and sit instead in an acoustically perfect performance space that had seemed apparelled in celestial light, where my daughter's choir, accompanied by a small orchestra, sang a lovely arrangement of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" with the glory and the freshness of a dream. 

By the time I've driven an hour down the road, though, the music has faded and my eyes are tired and I need to get off the highway, so here I sit eating my solitary supper to the accompaniment of random clangs and the murmurs of kitchen workers and the continuous shooshing of passing traffic, and with Wordsworth I concur that there hath past away a glory from the earth.

William Wordsworth probably wasn't thinking about the mundane squalor of modern fast-food dining when he wrote the poem that's made me so pensive. Its full title, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," immediately reveals that it's not a young person's poem, but I'm surprised to find that Wordsworth was just thirtysomething when he wrote it, significantly younger than I was when I studied it during my second stab at grad school. I don't remember being particularly impressed with the poem at that time, but perhaps I wasn't yet ready for the kind of nostalgia the poem evokes--or maybe the poem is improved by the presence of ethereal sopranos and a French horn.

Double vision: what I experience when I've been driving too long without a break, and what Wordsworth experienced when he visualized the world through the eyes of his childhood self while viewing his childhood self through his jaded adult perceptions. My heart is at your festival, he tells the youth, and The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.

Or maybe he just wishes he could feel it all again, feel the child's innocent joy in nature unmediated by the knowledge endowed by experience. He reaches for the joy (while I reach for another French fry, dip it in ketchup, try to savor the crunch and saltiness as if I haven't tasted it a thousand times before)--he reaches for the joy, I say, but gets distracted by a Tree, of many, one, / a single field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone, and he's not talking about French fries: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

The door opens. A gust of wind blows in a tiny old man accompanied by an even tinier older woman. They step up to the counter to squint at the small print on menu board, so the minimum-wage worker behind the counter patiently recites a litany of sauces--honey mustard, sweet chili, barbecue, ghost pepper ranch--but the old folks don't strike me as the ghost pepper type. They settle for ordinary ranch. I chose the sweet chili sauce myself. Why not take a walk on the wild side for once?

Trailing clouds of glory do we come, insists Wordsworth, but I don't see any glory following behind the little old couple, or behind me either. Where did it go? If we come into this world with bits of star-stuff stuck to our ankles, it seems to rub off awfully quickly. Sure, Heaven lies about us in our infancy, but in the very next line Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy. I wish I could remember the tune the choir sang, the rhythm and the harmonies that made these words lodge in memory so that I couldn't shake them through miles of busy city traffic or the roar of passing trucks. The music trailed clouds of glory, but At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.

The light in Wendy's is common enough but harsh and garish, illuminating exhausted faces of customers and workers. We should be at home but the road stretches ahead of us as we act out our daily rota of obligations. Wordsworth sees the child eagerly assuming roles of responsibility with costumes and customs that stultify his creative soul. Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight / And custom lie upon these with a weight, he warns the child, so why so quickly constrain freedom behind a mask of conformity?

Outside, a semi-truck makes a sharp right into the truck stop next door, trailing clouds of diesel exhaust. Does the truck-driver cherish within his soul the fugitive embers Wordsworth wrote about? Is it possible that, Though inland far we be, / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither? I'd like to hear the mighty waters rolling evermore, but all I hear is traffic, and more traffic, and more.

The French fries are gone, finally, and so ought I to be. I've had a long and lovely visit with the family and I have to teach first thing in the morning, so now it's time to pick up my tray, trudge toward the trash can, and head out the door for another hour of driving. I wish I could remember the music, feel again the joy and peace I felt as I sat in the pew surrounded by people as my beautiful daughter lent her voice to Wordsworth's words. By the time I've fought my way through the dark, cold night traffic, I will have forgotten everything.

What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now for ever taken from my sight, and who really cares if this Wendy's melds in my mind with every other fast-food joint I'll ever visit, Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, of music and light and beauty, good fellowship and friendly smiles and fierce hugs from my youngest granddaughter, We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind--and here I'm certain Wordsworth wasn't talking about Wendy's. I walk out the door to my car, echoing the litany of the poem's closing lines:

    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.

Goodnight, Wordsworth. Goodnight, Wendy's. Goodnight, kitchen workers and little old couple and truck drivers. Perhaps there has past away a glory from the earth, but despite the dark we still can find strength in what remains behind.