Frozen in the Winter of our Discontent

How Shakespeare and Wordsworth Map the Journey from Medieval to Modern

Great poetry reveals the world. When you place William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 beside William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," you're not just comparing two great poems. You're seeing the soul of the West transform.

Written two centuries apart, these poems map the journey from a world bound by love to a world unbound outside our head. From a cosmos where man fits snugly as a living microcosm to a universe where man floats lonely, disconnected, dislodged; flung into the middle distance. Like Simon and Garfunkel observing America from a New York subway in their mind.

It's the difference between being home and surviving exile.

The Microcosm of Love

Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 73 in 1601, the same year he wrote Hamlet. This older, wiser Shakespeare could summarize and solve the human condition in a sonnet.

Sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Listen to that music. Every line its own contained rhythm, each punctuated and complete. Like lyrics in a song, each phrase a perfect jewel of sound and sense.

But more than the music, notice the movement. Shakespeare looks at the fall, the approaching winter, and sees himself. He is like a tree stripped bare by the season's change. He is the twilight fading in the west. He is the glowing fire sitting on the ashes of its youth.

He is a part of the cycles of the cosmos because he is a microcosm. He understands that man is a small universe reflecting the large universe. The cosmos goes through cycles, and so does he. The world has seasons, and so does his life. He fits. He belongs. He is woven into the fabric of reality.

And what holds it all together? Love.

"This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

Even though this life is temporary and fragile, love attaches us to the temporary things because they are worth cherishing. Love holds the microcosm to the macrocosm. Love eternalizes the temporary.

The Dislodged Soul

Fast-forward to 1804. William Wordsworth writes "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,"

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.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

We've entered a different universe. England has become a global empire, the population has moved from rural to urban, the scientific revolution has mechanized the heavens. And the change has dislodged Wordsworth.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills.”

Right from the opening, there's distance. Separation. The speaker floats above the world like a cloud, disconnected from the landscape below. Where Shakespeare identified with the world around him, Wordsworth is alienated from it.

Listen to the difference in sound. Where Shakespeare's lines are contained and complete, Wordsworth flows through lines, his punctuation scattered mid-verse. You read from punctuation to punctuation, not line to line. The very structure of the verse reflects the dislocation of the soul.

When Wordsworth encounters the daffodils, "a host of golden daffodils / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze," he should be able to enjoy them. A poet, he says, "could not but be gay in such a jocund company."

But he can't. "I gazed—and gazed—but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought."

The Internalized World

The tragedy of Wordsworth's poem is that beauty has to be internalized before it can be enjoyed. He can't take pleasure in the daffodils while he's with them. Only later, lying on his couch "in vacant or in pensive mood," do "they flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude."

This is the opposite of Shakespeare's microcosmic vision. Where Shakespeare moves toward the world in love, embracing even the temporary things, Wordsworth moves away from the world, into himself. He has to swallow the daffodils into his mind, make them a permanent mental possession, before he can enjoy them.

The daffodils themselves are emptied of meaning in the process. They become raw material for private experience. The world turn’s Shakespeare’s eye out in love. Wordsworth can only enjoy the daffodils once they're no longer daffodils but memories of daffodils, mental constructs under his control.

The Great Dislodging

What happened between 1601 and 1804? Everything.

The world that Shakespeare knew was still fundamentally medieval. Most people lived where their families had lived for generations. You married someone from within ten miles of your birthplace. You attended the same church where your great-great-grandfather's tomb stood in the yard. You had a place, a position, a role in the cosmic order.

By Wordsworth's time, that world had shattered. The Industrial Revolution had moved people from rural to urban. The scientific revolution had mechanized the cosmos in the imagination of the masses. Newton proves that the heavens and earth operated by the same physical laws, Kant popularized a mechanistic understanding of the universe. The political revolutions had dislodged people from their historic relationships to monarchy and required them to be politicians through representative government.

People were no longer rooted in place, in family, in cosmic order. They had been dislodged—from their geography, their history, their understanding of their place in the world.

Dislodged from the world, all pleasures are indirect. Pleasure is manufacture privately, internally, in the solitude of your own consciousness.

The Romantic Response

Wordsworth was one of the Romantic poets trying to find a way back to the world after this great dislodging. The Romantics said, "Perhaps emotions can reattach us. Maybe beauty can reconnect us. Maybe my response to nature can heal the split between self and world."

But as a young man, Wordsworth didn't yet have the resources to make that reconnection work. He had left the church, gotten into nature mysticism and revolutionary politics. When the French Revolution turned into a bloody mess, he went through a period of existential crisis.

Only later—by 1815—did Wordsworth return to orthodox Christianity and spend his final decades as a devout believer. And it's no coincidence that his poetry got better as he got older, while so many other Romantics either died young or saw their work decline.

Because the only way to truly reattach to the world is through Christ, the incarnate Son of God. God attaches himself to the world in Jesus by taking on flesh and becoming part of the story. When we're attached to Christ, we're attached to everything. He is the integrating point of all things.

The Modern Predicament

We live in the aftermath of this great dislodging. We're still Wordsworth on his couch, trying to manufacture meaning in the privacy of our own consciousness. We're still floating lonely as clouds, disconnected from the world around us.

We see this everywhere: in our obsession with creating our own identities, in our inability to commit to places and people, in our tendency to consume experiences rather than inhabit them. We've become vampiric creatures, going around sucking the world dry of meaning because we're empty, bottomless pits of meaninglessness ourselves.

But we also see the alternative in Shakespeare's vision—the possibility of living as microcosms of the macrocosm, of finding our place in the cosmic order, of being held together by love that makes even temporary things eternal.

The True Spring

The movement from 1600 to 1800 was a movement into winter—the winter of dislodgement, disconnection, and spiritual exile. But winter is not the end of the story.

T.S. Eliot, writing in the twentieth century about his own journey from dislodgement to faith, called it "midwinter spring"—those moments when spring breaks through winter's grip, when grace interrupts exile, when the meaning of the seasons peaks through the freeze.

Because the actual reason God set up the cycle of seasons is that he is a God who brings life from death. Spring is the annual reminder that resurrection is possible, that winter doesn't have the final word, that the dislodged can be re-lodged, the disconnected can be reconnected, the exiled can come home.

The question is: Will we remain floating lonely as clouds, manufacturing meaning in the solitude of our own head? Or will we rediscover what Shakespeare knew—that we are microcosms of a cosmos overflowing with meaning, held together by a love that even of the temporary?

The choice is ours. But the seasons keep turning, and every spring whispers the same promise: winter is temporary, resurrection is coming, and love is stronger than our dislodgement.