Here is a poetic vignette from the Holy Scriptures, taken from the book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, at 43:11-12, and used in today’s Office of Readings:
Look upon the rainbow, and praise him who made it,
Exceedingly beautiful in its brightness.
It encircles the heavens with its glorious arc;
The hands of the Most High have stretched it out.
As a matter of interest the Douai version has the following:
Look upon the rainbow, and bless him that made it: it is very beautiful in its brightness.
It encompasseth the heaven about with the circle of its glory, the hands of the most High have displayed it.
I am not on the whole an admirer of archaic English so I think I prefer the first version, which is from the Jerusalem Bible.
These words were written roughly 200 years before the time of Christ.
Now fast forward 2,000 years or so to the year 1802, when the great William Wordsworth wrote this brief lyric:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
How far we have travelled in 2,000 years! There’s been a Copernican revolution. Jesus ben Sirach, the author of Ecclesiasticus, looks at a rainbow and is delighted by its beauty, and immediately is driven to praise God its Creator. Wordsworth feels something similar to Sirach when he looks at the rainbow, but it drives him not to look at God but to look deep into himself. For the Romantic poet, the self is the subject. For the biblical writer, God is the subject. For the Romantic, the boundary is set by one’s feelings and perceptions. But Sirach, starting with a personal feeling and perception is raised to that which cannot be seen or felt – the Almighty.
Wordsworth’s self-obsession – after all, who else wrote an epic poem about his own childhood? – produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language, so perhaps it is churlish to complain. And, yes, I am fully aware that his religious poetry, which he wrote in later life, is not his best, to put it mildly. But not every self-obsessed person who has come since has really matched up to Wordsworth’s magnificence. We live in the shadow of Wordsworth and the other Romantics, in that feelings are assumed to be normative these days, but the trouble is that our feelings, though deeply held, may be more squalid than ennobling.
The Romantic revolution has run its course. We need to leave behind our self-obsession, our selfishness, and our selfie-obsession too. Perhaps next time a rainbow appears, we should try to react to it in the way Sirach does, rather than trying (and failing) to imitate Wordsworth.
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