It’s not a very scientific explanation of a rainbow but Wordsworth’s lines have a magic of their own.
They remind me of my connection with the world. That grey skies not only have silver linings but also that out of nowhere a beautiful rainbow can suddenly appear.
It so happened on this blustery walk in Shropshire, I was also blessed by a flock of golden plover, who performed an amazing aerial dance over the fields:
Does your heart leap up when you behold a rainbow in the sky?
You can read Wordsworth’s full poem (it’s quite short!) here.
It’s not a very scientific explanation of a rainbow but Wordsworth’s lines have a magic of their own.
They remind me of my connection with the world. That grey skies not only have silver linings but also that out of nowhere a beautiful rainbow can suddenly appear.
It so happened on this blustery walk in Shropshire, I was also blessed by a flock of golden plover, who performed an amazing aerial dance over the fields:
Does your heart leap up when you behold a rainbow in the sky?
You can read Wordsworth’s full poem (it’s quite short!) here.
When you climb a hill, you sometimes experience a special kind of silence.
‘The Lawley’ is one of the Shropshire Hills – seen on the top right-hand side of the photograph taken from The Long Mynd, also featuring ‘The Wrekin’ top centre left.
As you get higher in your climb, the views become more and more stunning, and the silence deeper and deeper.
It can feel like “a new kind of silence”.
This poem was my attempt to that experience one day:
Wordsworth was born on April 7th, the right time of year for someone who wrote so beautifully about daffodils!
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...
Just down the road from Shrewsbury, where I live, is a tiny but beautiful village called Atcham, where I took a shot of these lovely, cheerful flowers that are still shouting their yellow hoorays everywhere in the UK at the moment…
Wordsworth also wrote about a less well-known wild flower, that is one of the first to bloom – the lesser celandine:
There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine,
That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain;
And, the first moment that the sun may shine,
Bright as the sun himself, ’tis out again!
Here are some beautiful bright celandines, from a walk near Hanwood, Shropshire:
There is such a beautiful world around us, and there is something amazingly cheerful in these bright yellows – I don’t know why!
Perhaps it reminds me of the brightness and yellowness of the sun, our source of light and heat, without which neither daffodils, celandines nor humans could live?
The wild flowers seem to shout out, with Wordsworth – “Life Is For Good!”
Lif4Gd 