Lighten up, yo

"A slumber did my spirit steal"
Those opening words get me every time. This is one of my favorite poems, and its simplicity, beauty and meaning mesh together to make a morbid peace that leaves you feeling at complete ease with our mortality. Wordsworth's use of alliteration in the first line create this soft, peaceful state in your mind that lulls you into a sort of softness, as if you were being sung to sleep by a guardian. This is what he is trying to make you understand what he feels death feels like. It isn't a violent ripping of the soul from the body, but a gentle, quiet taking of it in the night, while you don't even notice it, you are changed. The imagery of the soul being lifted from the body and the idea of the body being left behind with the rocks and trees and the dirt lends itself to the naturalists that were emerging at this time and changing the views of the gothic forms of literature. We were no longer in the time of the obsession with the dark and when death was viewed as a coming of the soul into a blackness of the unknown. Wordsworth is vocalizing the peacefulness of death's coming that should put our minds at each, we are all mortal, we are all made to live and die, and whether you believe in an afterlife or not, or whether your soul lives on without you or not, this is what we should all accept our lives to be. Wordsworth leads us into the time of the World Wars very well, when pretty much all of British poetry was about our mortality and the idea of our mortality being for a cause: the victory of good over evil. This poetry was beautiful and strong and perspective changing in the strongest sense.

So again, I tell myself, lighten up yo.