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On an August evening in 1802, the poet William Wordsworth, 32 years old, was walking along the beach at sunset in Calais with his nine-year-old daughter. He observed how she was…
Wait. What does a poet on a French beach at the beginning of the 19th century have to do with this photograph? There’s no beach, no daughter, no France, no Romantic Age poet. Wait. Just wait.
…observed how she was utterly unaffected by the beauty of the scene. He thought about it, and decided it was because, like all children, she was intuitively at one with nature. She was as unmoved by the beauty of the scene as she was by her own beauty. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about the moment. It begins:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration
Now do you see? Breathless with adoration. Quiet, still, serene, hushed…and yet beneath it all, deep emotion, tremulous passion, a spiritul elation that robs one of the ability to speak, to draw breath. Here we have that. A beach, a farm…it doesn’t matter. It is calm and free, a beauteous evening, a holy time.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
