I gazed – and gazed – but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought
It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished watching a recorded memorial service online. I toss my laptop over onto the bed and and walk into the kitchen.
“You know, I really wish they could get it right,” I say to my spouse Janyce while pouring myself more coffee at the counter. “My aunt was fun.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
“Just that the priest made too many references to her work as an accountant,” I say.
“I remember being so mad at Cheryl’s funeral,” says Janyce. “The priest didn’t know her.”
Some members of my family are right now attending a memorial mass in Florida and I’m keeping in touch via text and by watching last night’s recorded service posted online by the funeral home. My Aunt died at age 81. She loved birds, and flowers, and family, and having fun. But mostly, she was a true romantic at heart. I mean this in the sense that she would have been able to easily sit at the kitchen table and have a spirited conversation with the most famous of Romanticism’s English poets, William Wordsworth. She got his “emotions recollected in tranquility” idea better than anyone. She kept photo albums in bags in the trunk of her car so at any moment she was ready to travel down memory lane with anyone who would sit and look with her. And she told a story slowly and meticulously, painting a visual picture with words and details and pacing. If you bought her a hallmark greeting card, she would read and relish every single word. She voraciously read books. She loved food and the pleasures of eating, and then talking about what she ate or was going to eat next. She was always up to do something fun and then talk about it extensively after doing it. She truly savored her life.
I found this photo in my iphone camera that I snapped in April of last year. It immediately made me think of Wordsworth’s most famous poem.
In honor of my Aunt Rochelle, I leave you with this today.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils