The Final Lecture: 2003

The "Final Lecture" of Clint Hirst, Professor of English

UDM Honors Program Induction Ceremony and Dinner
October 19, 2003

We are here to celebrate your induction into the Honors Program. I look at you as you begin your adulthood, and think back to when I began mine. It was during that period that I first took a course that seemed to address the important questions about myself and my world. It was a course in 19th century British romanticism, and Wordsworth was the original spirit of that movement. As a young man he had witnessed the French revolution, an episode that seemed to promise the end of traditional injustices and bondage. Looking back on those years, Wordsworth wrote:

. . . .
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

And that was true for my times too. John F. Kennedy had just been elected president and had offered us a new vision, a hope for a better world. The civil rights and the feminist movements were beginning to promise freedom to millions of individual Americans and to free America itself from shameful systems of prejudice and discrimination. Robert Kennedy seemed to show that even the rich and powerful might try to use power for the greater good rather than the privileged few. We were, many of my contemporaries thought, about to join in building a brave new world.

Then Jack Kennedy was murdered.

Then Martin Luther King was murdered.

Then Robert Kennedy was murdered.

Then Vietnam overwhelmed all other concerns in the country.

Then discouragement replaced confident hope.

Then everything seemed different, more complicated, darker. Charles Dickens' description of that revolutionary era then seemed more appropriate--"It was the best of times, he wrote, "it was the worst of times.

It was then another of Wordsworth's poems, one called ode: intimations of immortality offered further perspective on my own times, seemed written by someone who understood my disillusionment and offered a way to look at my world. This poem describes Wordsworth's efforts to reconcile his conviction that he was in fact a spiritual, immortal being with his growing awareness of how earthbound, how imperfect, how mortal he and his world actually were . . . perhaps you too are becoming more and more aware of the essential unsatisfactoriness, the imperfection of our mortal world . . . perhaps Wordsworth can still speak to you and me today.

Wordsworth starts by expressing his feeling that something essential is missing from his world:

I

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

He goes on, recognizing the beauty that remains but insisting that a fundamental change has occurred:

II

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

He continues, offering a final symbolic image of our loss (perhaps a loss very like the loss felt when we were expelled from the garden of Eden):

-But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Then he offers a metaphorical explanation of the human condition:

V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

This all seems to me to express Wordworth's conviction of the infinite value of the individual despite earthly discouragement and woe. But he goes on to indicate that eventually, as we move out of our childish innocence and become adults, the years will bring what he calls "the inevitable yoke" and advises that:

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

And so, from our youthful optimistic idealism, Wordsworth says, we finally become burdened with all that mortal flesh is heir to, our idealism hardly a memory . . . And yet life continues. How do we go on? Wordsworth finds deep consolation in what the world offers to the experienced adult.

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
. . . .
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

What he means I think, is that we learn to perceive the essential connection between people and people and between people and god-what he calls the primal, essential sympathy. It is this fundamental spiritual connection that makes our mutual understanding of each other's travails and our acceptance of our physical mortality not only bearable but in fact the basis of our nobility. It is this ceaseless striving for the ideal despite its evident impossibility that gives light and hope to an otherwise dark world.

It is my fortune to be in daily contact with you who are still trailing your clouds of glory. I get to witness your potential as it is still unfolding and see how you, all unawares, brighten the world for those around you. You in the honors program-unusually able and unusually willing to accept the extra challenge-do this so much more than most. You bring us gifts daily.

I hope you find a subject that excites you. I hope you have dreams of making a difference. I hope you find a purpose that will give your life meaning and satisfaction. I hope that with them you will find the belief that will make the darker times seem only to renew and increase your deeper understanding of the value of the spirit and people around you. I wish you well.