Disturbed.

Our reading of Wordsworth was a little difficult for me at the beginning. I struggled with making the transition between the law/political science side and going straight into the world of poetry. But I think I've made a connection now...

If there is anything that one can gather from Wordsworth's writings, it is his display of Nature. So I began to wonder...does Wordsworth believe in natural rights? I believe so.

In his poem "Lines", there are a few lines (ha! that's funny) that struck me. Beginning in line 93, he says:

...I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply infused...

In "Ode", Wordsworth writes in stanza V:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises within us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

In stanza IX, he continues:

...power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

In the First Book of "The Prelude", line 401 begins more thoughts on the spirit of man:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things --
With life and nature - purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

In all of these lines, there is a ringing of the unnatural - 0f the Divine - of eternity. Wordsworth obviously believes that while we are a part of nature (and at points he displays nature so lovingly that he almost seems to worship it), we are somehow separated from it. We belong to another world. There is a desire, a passion, a longing, a "presence that disturbs" us. So if we, then, are part of the eternal plan of GOD - if we answer to a standard that rules but is outside of nature - then we must have that standard engraved into our hearts. If GOD is good, if He is holy, if He is perfect....if He is RIGHT...and we are made in His Image, then has He not put inside of us the yearning for Him - for RIGHT? This is where I believe natural rights begin, with a yearning to be the way GOD made us. GOD made us to be free - accountable only to His love. He made us to love in return. He made us to be responsible. He made us to be in perfect communion with Him and therefore with the rest of His creation. Then we fell...

...and now we have to seek for the Right in the world - in nature. We have to find what "natural right" is. Whether it's life, property, freedom, the pursuit of happiness...the desires are there. The longings did not diminish with the fall. They just became harder to satisfy. Perhaps if we pursued GOD - our only Right - we would be fulfilled instead of seeking the rights that stem from Him. Then we would be "disturbed" with His Presence. How beautiful that would be...