Dreaming Time Away

Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply"


"WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

"The eye--it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

"--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,"



I used this poem for a conversation with my class about Plato's Republic. The students cleverly tied it to Plato's metaphysic (particularly to his understanding of the underlying structure of reality). They also talked about how conversation is possible within the individual person since the person is composed of the three distinct parts (reason, spiritedness and appetites).



I was thinking much more simply than they were about learning in isolation v. learning in conversation with others (dialogue form) and passive v. active learning. Actually, this poem, which I'd actually planned for the last conversation, but decided to use this week, worked surprisingly well as Wordsworth and the Romantic poets have some of this platonic idealism in them, but also differ in interesting ways.

Also, I'd gotten confused about the reading assignment, and consequently hadn't done half of the reading. I like being a teacher-ish way more than being a student!