Issue 62

Wordsworth gave us some worthy words about this mystery in his poem Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. He had been standing on the banks of the River Wey in South Wales—the River Why, one might say— and was overcome by the landscape’s beauty. He was seeing it for the second time, because he had last visited the place…

“Five years have past;
five summers, with the length
Of five long winters!”

In the poem, written on his journey home, he thinks about he had seen the landscape and how he sees it now. It gladdened his heart and mind in couple of different ways, and one of them, he tells us, is that:

“To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

So there it is: the “burthen of the mystery”— this “weary weight of all this unintelligible world”— transmuted, by the eye that is willing to see, into the life of things.

At TBLM, we call such willing eyes “readers”, and for you, we have gathered a collection of experiences that store, in their own private ways, their author’s encounter with this forever unresolvable mystery and a glimpse into the life of things. It took us forever. It took us no time at all.

Welcome to Issue 62 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.