Is Reading Enough? Essay

Lyrical B onlyads was an observational throw of metrical compositions written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in the late seventeen hundreds. This disk of meters was called experimental because the style it was written in was unlike anything of that time. In this ingathering of poems is a poem written by Wordsworth called The Tables glowering. At first gaze of this poem, wholeness can assume that this is an anti-intellectual poem. Reason for this is in the possibility paragraph when the speaker in the poem tells his fri annul to, quit his books. So why would Wordsworth and Coleridge write a book against books?For starters, this poem is against conventional distinguishing. The mortal that is being spoken to in this paper is probably a mutual person who at that time is under the notion that you can take care everything and anything from a book. The speaker of the poem calls books a dull and endless strife. This pull must earn sound as absurd thus as it does now. In each semester of college so far, I am averaging about 10 books a semester that I have to read, which does gives the impression of endless. However, there are a countless number of books in the world, each with its own set of companionship and information. So can books be considered dull? To top it all off, he goes on to say, Come, here the woodland house finch / how sweet his music on my look / theres more(prenominal) of wisdom in it.Is Wordsworth precept that there is more wisdom in the song of the woodland linnet than in a book? The answer to all these questions is yes and no. A woodland linnet can never teach someone calculus, psychology, or even how to tie ones shoe. However, no matter how much you can read, you go forth never hear the sound of music coming from the woodland linnet. This opinion that one receives from that experience is just as important, perhaps even more important, than reading about it. At the end of the poem Wordsworth goes on to say, luxuria nt of science and of artbring with you a heart / that watches and receives.The words at the end are very peculiar. The heart is not the organ that stores association or gives us sight. Wordsworth uses the word heart to think of feelings because that is what most quite a little associate the word heart with. Wordsworth is formula that one need fully more than just books, and pictures. Watches and receives are also interesting words. When someone watches something, one has to aspect out, and when someone receives something, one takes in. So the words watch and receive imply give and take, action and reaction. In other words, it means interaction. One needs to have this experience of interaction or else they pass on never fully understand.The poem Old Man Traveling (also by Wordsworth in the book Lyrical Ballads) has the same theme of needing experience. This poem is about and senile piece walking and someone is watching him. The person is watching the expressions of the man and saying what he thinks of him. So the person is reading the white-haired man. The person says that the old man is by nature led / to peace so arrant(a) This deduces an image of a happy and peaceful man. The last part of the poem is different than the first.The person actually goes up to the old man and asks him where he is going. The old man replies that he is going to visit his dying son. The old man, then, really is not so peaceful and perfect. There is no means that the person could have derived this from just reading the man, the person needed interaction. So does reading and interaction go hand-in-hand? To one extent it does because reading is a kind of interaction. However, reading is only interaction between the person and the book. information can work with your mind and senses to create a picture in your mind. Nevertheless the only physical aspect of interaction with reading is the holding of the book. Reading offers very little physical interaction.Referring back t o the original poem, the thought process of needing more than books goes a little deeper. In line 28 of the poem, Wordsworth says we take out to dissect. Literally speaking, we have to murder an animal in order to learn it and find out more about it. What is left at the end is a disgusting image of bones and blood of what use to be the animal that was being dissected. This can also connect to reading. In legion(predicate) literature classes, people often have to analyze a particular peace to find out what it really is implying. This means that the students go through with(predicate) line by line, and sometimes word by word, and try to find up with some metaphorical translation for the work. What is left is a social unit bunch of random lines and words witch are the bones of the work, and a whole sea of ink as to what those bones can mean.In doing this, we often murder the original work. So what was once a poem is now a complicated mess. Wordsworth claims that our meddling in tellect / mishapes the beauteous forms of things. Wordsworth acknowledges the incident that as a whole, humans have a desire to learn more, but at times this desire can be destructive. An shell if this is a Seurat painting. If we dissect it, and take it apart, the closer that we look at it we will see a bunch of dots. By leaving it at that, and nett that Seruat is a man whose paintings is just a bunch of dots, then we have murdered the painting. What we have to do after dissecting it, is to put it back to together, and look the beauty in the work, and then take it a step upgrade and say that he did that using pointillism.To take the idea a final step further, Wordsworth says, one impulse from a vernal wood / whitethorn teach you more of man / or moral evil and of proficient / than all the sages can.One can sit down and read all about Buddha and Christ, but again, all that person is doing is reading. In only reading, one can never find out anything through experience or anythi ng new because by reading books, you are never fully up to date because someone had to take the time to write the book and then you have to take the time to read it. This creates a kind of support for ourselves which we our minds are trapped into what the books tell us to believe. In the poem The Dungeon, also in the book Lyrical Ballads though it is written by Coleridge, tells the grade of a person in a dungeon. This is where we put people who kick downstairs us, and Wordsworth questions that in the poem by saying sarcastically, and this is their best cure Wordsworth verbalise that the energy of the person in the dungeon roll(s) back upon his heart / and swig and corrupt till changed to poison. This poem is a story about a person in a dungeon, however this can be taken a step further by saying that this is what happens to a person if they make a mental dungeon. Their thoughts will stagnate and corrupt.In compose Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge and Wordsworth planned on using laym ans monetary value to get their point across. They do not use long inflate words that can confuse some people, because they wanted their points to be gather in and that everyone can understand them. So when Wordsworth tells the person in the poem The Tables Turned to quit your books, understand that he is saying that you need more to life than just books, you need experiences as well.