A line a night

Twentieth night: William Wordsworth, Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798).

Kept: “The still, sad music of humanity.”

Wordsworth goes back to the Wye five years older and finds the thoughtless rapture of youth gone. He doesn't pretend otherwise. What he has instead, he says, is the habit of hearing, under the noise, the still, sad music of humanity — “Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue.” Sadness as music: steady, everywhere, not a wound.

I nearly kept the other line from the same passage, the “little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love” he calls the best portion of a good man's life. It sits close to my nightly habit. But it flatters a little, and this is the line I actually talk past — I like the bright side of a room, and the sad music is the part I skip. Hearing it as music, and staying, is tonight's truer note.

Twenty lines kept.