I've been working recently on my graduation thesis. The main topic is....dudududuuuuun "Light and Colours" ! Sooooooo original, right? =.=''' but I love it, so I'll work hard to produce something fun and creative. Rumors say that if you make the examiners curious and amused you're on the train to a great final valutation. Hehehe
So far the project is this:
-Focus on: Color therapy- medical use of light;
-phisics: the nature of light- magnetic domain, functioning of the colour therapy's machines;
-Italian literature: interaction between colours and psyche in various authors;
-English literature: W.Wordsworth's "Ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood"
Soooo many things to do...I've started the English literature part but I'm uncertain on the comeout. Do you think you native speakers could give me a hand and check the commentary I've written? Sadly the part of the poem I worked with couldn't be copy-pasted from Word,so if you are curious you can google it
This is it:
From l.59 to 77 of "Ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood" by W.Wordsworth
Different connotations of "light" :
1. LIGHT = GOD'S LOVE
Man is born with an interior flame, a "Star"(v.60) that accompanies him throughout his entire existence. This light, which comes from God's glory, is perceived differently in each stage of life.
The Infant is immersed in it: his memory of Heaven, from which we all come, is still vivid.
As he grows up though he tends to let himself be corrupted by the "Shades of the prison house" -that is, human reason. It is interesting to notice how the poet describes it as a "shade" rather than a "lighthouse" as the previous traditions(e.g. the Enlightenment) used to do: the great tool of knowledge of the human being has lost its function of illumination, becoming but a humble, fallible attempt to describe reality. The poet sadly acknowledges that day after day man travels farther from God's light, until he completely looses perception of it.
2.LIGHT = ROUTINE
As said before, once become fully adult the individual looses contact with his inner Star. Man in fact is blinded by another kind of light, a false, cold, misleading one: the "light of common day". Daily routine is a prison that locks him into a world without colours, without the warm joy that derives from the rays of the divine sun.
Conclusions:
William Wordsworth conveys here one of the most important themes of the Romantic period: the contrast between reason and imagination. As exposed in Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of the Romantic movement, he believed that poetry was "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which derive from the contemplation of a subject, later recollected in a moment of peace and refined with imagination. The poet needs to have the eyes of a Child, and not of a scientist, in order to create something beautiful. That is why he denies the neoclassical concept of "reason": it is no longer an instrument of truth, but an instrument of unhappiness.










