The Child as Nature Personified

            On Tuesday morning at the beginning of song practice I had the taste of soap in my mouth that became worse when I drank water. I must have not rinsed my hands properly after washing them and then got soap on my denture before putting it in. I was okay though after rinsing my mouth at the sink.

            I finally tracked down the alternative lyrics to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Elisa”. He wrote two sets of lyrics to the same song but only one version is prominent online. It has a great melody so I’m looking forward to learning how to play it.

            I finished my second reading of all of the Wordsworth poems in the Norton Anthology and returned to working on my paper about the representation of childhood in the Wordsworth poem, “We Are Seven”. I expanded it from one page to two although I still haven’t established a thesis and organized it into arguments supporting it. I’m sure those things are there in what I’ve written so far and so I just have to pull them out and dress them up properly. Here’s what I have so far:

In William Wordsworth’s poem, “We Are Seven" the lively verse, paced in iambic tetrameter, the simple language and the style of alternate rhyming causes the poem to read like a nursery rhyme, written in a manner that a child could understand. The light verse serves to soften the impact of the poem’s subject of the death of children and keeps the poem from being dragged down into the sense of numerical loss that the adult speaker is advertising. The uncomplicated presentation also performs the function of providing a means by which an adult reader can grasp a child's perspective as the poet understands it. Wordsworth is using elementary diction to speak to the buried innocence of an adult reader.

The narrator insists upon the reality of death and the absence that results when a loved one dies, but the child he is speaking with still feels the presence of and a sense of communion with her lost siblings, having no feeling that the size of her family has diminished. The narrator is confused by her attitude because he will accept only life as he comprehends it and attempts to put a crack in the little girl’s certainty. He rejects her conclusion that all of her siblings are still together and that there is no distinction between her living in her mother's house, those that reside elsewhere, those that are traveling and those that are lying in a grave.

A division is maintained between the attitude of the child and that of the adult narrator. He repeats the same question in lines 61 and 62 as if he has not heard her answer in lines 27 and 28. She does not wonder at death but only at the narrator’s inquiries.

             In the exchange between the girl and the man, her depiction as being fully confident is ironic, since children are expected to defer to an adult’s superior knowledge of the world. The child represents wisdom that the poet aspires to: an understanding that one does not need to be near people to feel communion with them, even if they are dead. This is not necessarily a child’s true attitude towards death. Wordsworth is using the cottage girl to represent simple wisdom, which he thinks is accessible to every adult. He establishes that the child is of nature before the narrator asks her how many siblings she has. This suggests what her attitude towards her dead siblings will be before the inquiry is made. The poet aligns the child with nature because for him the natural world is the matrix for unadulterated human nature. The child is the personification of nature. In line 37 she declares that her two dead siblings have green graves. The greenness of the grass over their graves indicates that life is present and so here the poet draws a direct connection, a continuum between her and all of her siblings whether dead and near or alive and physically distant and between human life and natural life. As long as the girl can be alive, be nourished, be maintained and be playful then there is shared being with those she has played, worked and supped with. Her siblings were and so they are. They were seven and so can never be five. She visits her brother and sister’s graves, sings to them and has no cognisance that they are gone.

            Wordsworth presents the narrator as not being able to see the forest for the trees, except in this case the forest is a family and the trees are each sibling, but it is the same principle.

           

I grilled five slices of back bacon and had one for dinner with some little potatoes.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. The story begins with a flashback of a small ship in a storm at sea and a woman screaming. Next we see a beachcomber named Dorian finds a bottle with a note inside. It is supposedly written by the late Agatha Alder, accusing her nephew George of murdering her. Dorian takes it to George and sells it to him for $50. George’s alcoholic wife Karen wanders in to his office drunk and George slaps her for not staying on her side of the house. His secretary Sally tells him to leave Karen alone and quits. That evening we see Sally sneaking into George’s office to retrieve the note from the bottle. She doesn’t seem to notice that George’s dead body is also in the room. She knocks something over and the security guard comes running. Sally runs down the beach toward the water. The security guard fires a warning shot and releases his Doberman. She begins to swim but the dog goes in after her. Meanwhile Perry Mason and his detective Paul Drake are returning on Perry’s boat from a deep-sea fishing trip and they hear the shot. Through binoculars they see that the dog has almost overtaken Sally and so they drive in to intervene. Paul dives in and rescues Sally. She admits that she broke into George’s desk to get the note, which she shows Mason. They drop her off at her car and then go back to the marina to dock. A policeman informs them that they are putting up roadblocks to capture a woman who murdered George Alder. The next day Lieutenant Tragg comes to see Perry because he knows that a boat rescued Sally and that his boat was in the vicinity. Meanwhile Sally arrives in the reception area of Perry’s office and she is moved his library until Tragg leaves. Sally is shocked to hear that George is dead. Mason has Sally stay at his place while he investigates. He interviews George’s widow and he and Paul also go to a Mexican restaurant where Agatha Alder’s former maid, Nina works. As this season progresses Paul Drake is used more and more as comic relief and in this case the humour comes from Paul trying the chilli and finding it painfully spicy. Tragg goes to Mason’s apartment and arrests Sally for murder. In court Mason accuses Nina of murdering Agatha because $10,000 went missing the day she drowned and shortly after that she had bought the restaurant. Nina says that Agatha had actually given her a different $10,000 earlier than her death. Finally Mason uncovers that George’s wife Karen is the one that put the note in the bottle and tossed it to sea. She is also the one that bludgeoned George to death with the fireplace poker and she was glad she did because she was free, at least for a little while.

            Sally was played by Peggy Castle who was Charlotte Manning the femme fatale and psychiatrist in the first Mike Hammer movie.