Both Wordsworth in his Intimations Ode and Emerson in his Essay entitled “Experience” acknowledge the individual’s struggle with feelings of blindness and lack of insight. Each describes a kind of divine reality and light from which the individual can feel hidden. However, the location of this divine reality and light and the manner in which it can be accessed is radically different for these authors: Wordsworth envisions this divine reality in a pre-birth location. He uses landscaped map imagery to describe a heavenly sea from which the soul and individual emerge to travel farther westward and inland as the sun sets. The travelling and aging man moves with successive steps farther and farther away from this divine sea of souls. Reconnection to light and truth comes by looking back in memory over the landscape of experiences to the child playing on the edge of what Wordsworth calls the “immortal sea”. For Emerson, divine reality is not located in the past. Divine reality is part of what he calls “Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost” (295). It is the “ineffable cause” that animates all life, a universal and all pervading pantheist-like soul. Rather than be found by looking back through a succession of time this divine reality is coexistent with the individual--though still somewhat hidden and not fully comprehended. Emerson thus uses the idea of a body rather than a map to describe the human condition in relation to divine truth. The way to hope and consolation through darkness for the authors is best understood in relation to these concepts.
man oh man it gets even better, i speak even MORE in depth on sunrise star-rise beaches and brinks of sea soul eternities.................................and the experiences of the westbound man are like weighty chains because they make him aware of his MORTALITY and bog him down in prison imagery where luckily memory comes along which lets him look back and connects to his INNER CHILD who is also his FATHER and from then on it's rainbows and sprinkles.
