This song is the finale of the hip-hop Broadway sensation Hamilton, known for its emotional and poignant lyrics and inspiring historical backdrop. This song takes place immediately after the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton (during which Hamilton was shot and killed), and opens with an earlier line from George Washington ("You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story"). After that, Hamilton's sister-in-law and close confidante, Angelica Schyluer, introduces the people who worked with the ten dollar founding father--mostly his adversaries--as they recount the tireless effort he put in to make this country great. Finally they ask "When you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?" The ensemble answers, "Eliza." Elizabeth Schyluer was Hamilton's devoted wife, and the story being told on stage is a much hers as it is her husband's.

Throughout the show, Eliza frequently mentions "the narrative:" "Let me be a part of the narrative," "I'm erasing myself from the narrative," and finally, now, "I put myself back in the narrative." She goes on to tell how she combed through her husband's hundreds of writings, interviewed the soldiers who fought with him during the Revolutionary War, raised funds for the Washington Monument (Hamilton and Washington were close friends), and wrote essays against slavery (a cause close to the heart of Hamilton's best friend and fellow solider who was killed in the war, John Laurens). Angelica helps her in this endeavor, but Eliza outlives her as well. However, she never stops telling her husband's story. The final act she tells us about is establishing the first private orphanage in New York City.

Hamilton never lets us forget that we are talking about men and women who wanted to create an independent country out of thirteen colonies, and it was so much harder than winning a war with a global superpower. As Hamilton states in the previous song (as he is dying) "What is a legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you'll never get to see." The show itself would not have happened if it weren't for Lin Manuel Miranda (who is responsible for the music, the lyrics, and the book, as well as playing the lead role) happening across an exhaustive biography of Hamilton and becoming absolutely enamored with the history. Even that book would not have happened if it weren't for Eliza.

Wordsworth's poetry is filled with questions about the soul and whether or not we live on after we die. Hamilton can't answer whether or not there is an afterlife, or if we all have souls, or what happens after we die, but it does prove that our work, the marks we leave on this world, however slight, live on. All the characters that seem minor in the musical were real people, from the Loyalist who debates with Hamilton, to the founding fathers we all learned about in school, to Aaron Burr, who is a part of the story as an observer, and as an omnipresent force who knows, with mounting dread, that he will have to face his friend in a duel one cold morning, and can do nothing to change it. Our actions have reactions. We might not all be able to write financial systems into existence, but we can all do something to change someone or something else. With or without souls, our lives have meaning. Telling ourselves that there is an afterlife is comforting, because nobody wants to believe that this is it for all of us. In so many ways, it's not. Most of us won't have books or Broadway shows bearing our name, but we can all do something that means something.

This song ends with Eliza taking a step forward and gasping, and many fans have theorized that this act is the most poignant fourth-wall break in the history of theatre; Eliza is seeing the huge crowd, all of which have come to see her husband's story told. Her efforts were not in vain, and all the good work that these people did will never be forgotten. They live on, and thanks to the brilliance of their modern, musical counterparts, Hamilton is a smash hit that is sure to be a Broadway must-see for a long, long time.

Though we never touched on the topic during our class discussions, some scholars (Andrew Bennett among them; see the selection by him in our Norton editions of Keats' poetry), have examined the British Romantic writer's investment in writing as a means for achieving immortality. For sure, most writers want to believe that their poems, novels and plays matter, that they make a difference in the lives of individual readers and, perhaps, in the institutions, policies and social practices that characterize their historical moments. They might also be interested in living on through their words, however. Though Wordsworth's soul concluded its passage through this world in 1850, an expression of who Wordsworth might live on through Tintern Abbey and ithrough the Immortality Ode. When we read Wordsworth's poems, readers experience an intimacy with something that seems to exceed the the black markings that appear on the white pages. Perhaps these poems remain infused with something fundamentally Wordsworthian.

P.V.

This clip is from the end of the movie Rent. Mimi, a drug addict with HIV, has been living on the streets for the last few weeks, and her friends have finally found her. She is suffering from hypothermia as well as being malnourished and going through withdrawal. While talking with Roger, her boyfriend, she seems to slip away, but as he holds her, her hand twitches, and she wakes up. She says she was heading towards a white, warm light, and that she saw their friend Angel, who had AIDS and died a few months before this event. Mimi explains that Angel told her to "turn around" and listen to the song Roger had written for her.

We've been discussing near-deaths experiences in class and I felt that this clip fit in well with that, but Rent itself is about not having a lot of time. Of the seven main characters, four of them have HIV (Roger, Mimi, Collins, and Angel), and all of them (with the exception of Joanne) are living in poverty. Collins was fired form his job tutoring at MIT for trying to tell the truth about HIV and AIDS; Roger's girlfriend killed herself after discovering they both had the disease; Angel was a drag queen making money off playing the drums on the street; Mimi is an exotic dancer at a club in Alphabet City.

Throughout the movie, Mark is shown with his video camera, trying to create a documentary. When he, Collins, and Angel attended a Life Support meeting for people living with HIV, we hear one of the main points of the film in their affirmations: "There's only us. There's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No day but today." For the people living with this disease, today was all they had. There was no telling when their bodies would betray them and give out (through the movie we see people slowly disappearing from the meeting). When Mimi first starts flirting with Roger, he keeps telling her to "come back another day," to which she counters "no day but today."

One man at the meeting even says that he has trouble having faith that he could still have a live because he relies on intellect and science. However, "reason says I should've died three years ago." Science and faith sometimes conflict, but they don't have to. I think if Wordsworth were alive today he'd appreciate Rent, because of the powerful message of seizing the day because of the uncertainty of tomorrow. The final scene of the movie, which takes place a few minutes after Mimi wakes up in this clip, shows the remaining friends watching Mark's documentary and alternating repirses of different songs; one half of the group sings the Life Support affirmations, while the other half sings parts of the song "Will I:" "Will I lose my dignity? Will somebody care? Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?" This transforms into the song "Without You:" "I die without you." It shows that even though things are okay now, for this moment, they probably won't be tomorrow (in fact it's widely speculated that Mimi dies shortly after the events of the movie), which is why it's so important to remember that there is no day but today.

Wow! Upon first reviewing this clip, I was struck by what looks to be an echo of Frankenstein: in the novel, specifically Elizabeth's body draped over the bed after the Creature strangles her; in the James Whale adaptation, the moment at which the Creature signals that it is alive through a twitch of its fingers. I know the topic of this particular libguide is Wordsworth, but perhaps you should consider thinking about this potential parallel.

P.V.

"It's not gruesome. That's immortality, my darlings."

This clip is from the show Pretty Little Liars. In the first episode, Alison goes missing, and her four friends (Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hannah) separate. When Alison's body is found, the four reunite to grief and to solve the mystery of just how and why their friend died. This scene is the four friends looking at parts of the memorial that will be built in Alison's name. This leads to a flashback from a previous summer where the girls are at the beach. Aria says she wishes they could pick an age at which to stay forever, and Ali responds that the only way to do that is to die young and "leave a beautiful corpse."

Can you make a connection to the Lucy poems? In the poem Strange Fits of Passion, Lucy might be a young adult, perhaps around the same age as the young women in the film. In the remainder of the poems, despite the fact that her "race has been run," Wordsworth seems to indicate that she retains a child's identity

P.V.

The third Star Trek film, Search for Spock, takes place after the death of Captain Spock in the previous movie Wrath of Khan. His casket is launched into space at his funeral, eventually landing on the Genesis planet, which had been newly created by the detonation of a terraforming device. After detecting strange activity on the planet, scientists David Marcus and Lieutenant Saavik discover that the Genesis Device has resurrected Spock, albeit in the form of a child and without his memories. Spock’s father, along with Kirk, find that Spock transferred his katra (the Vulcan word for soul) to McCoy before his death; in order to be laid to rest properly, Spock needs both his katra and his body, and thus the crew of the Enterprise, against the odds, to accomplish this task. At great cost--Kirk loses both his son and his ship retrieving his friend--Spock’s katra is reunited with his body and he is wholly resurrected.

Like most of its science fiction counterparts, Star Trek relies on huge advancements in technology, depicting a future where man and machine share an ever-growing symbiotic relationship. Kirk is incredibly devoted to the Enterprise, often claiming his love for the ship is the most important bond in his life (though this is, of course, refuted by the events of Search for Spock). Such concepts about machinery would suggest that the species featured in Star Trek would subscribe solely to materialism, but Vulcans, a race devoted to logic above all else, not only believe in dualism but prove its existence through the fal-tor-pan, the rite that unified Spock’s body and katra. This dynamic is an interesting one to contrast with Wordsworth’s arguably materialistic views and their connection with nature--Star Trek provides exactly the opposite commentary. Though one would expect dualism to best correlate with a connection to nature, Star Trek argues that dualism can not only exist but thrive in a highly mechanical world as well.

And, since Spok has devoted his entire adult life to subjecting his Human to his Vulcan half--thus moving closer to the world of computerized machines--it seems ironic (perhaps paradoxical) that, from ancient times, Vulcan culture has privileged the preservation of the individual's katra. The travail of being brought back from the dead and having his soul re-embodied results in a more humanized Spok--the one we see in the following movie in the series--and I am reminded that the Vulcan katra apparently needs a body. In the Immortality Ode we learn that the soul enters the world, infuses every fiber of the child's being, but apparently becomes a less visible influence on the individual as he or she moves through life. The trade-off, though, is that personal experiences and perspective temper that individual's collective being and, perhaps, cultivate it--change it in some fundamental way--so that once the soul leaves it has perhaps grown. We will see Keats weighing this same possibility.

P.V.

Heaven is For Real, by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent, follows the Burpo family as they discover that their son may have had a near-death experience. A true story, Todd Burpo details his life as a pastor in Imperial, Nebraska, several months after Colton--three years old at the time--had emergency surgery. As time goes on, the boy begins describing more and more memories from his visit, he claims, to heaven. While such talk of his time speaking with Jesus might be dismissed as mere childish imaginings, Colton seemed to recall certain events and people of which he should have no knowledge. He speaks of an unborn sister he met in heaven, who knew him and was waiting for the rest of her family to meet her for the first time, despite the fact that his parents never told him about his mother’s miscarriage. He can identify pictures of his great-grandfather at a young age, even though he’s never seen the pictures and he died thirty years before Colton was born. He even knows exactly what his father was doing at the time of his surgery--angrily speaking with God in the hospital prayer space. Colton’s descriptions of heaven forever change his family’s perspective on life and their relationship with God.

Like Wordsworth’s portrayal of the innocence and yet agelessness of children, Colton’s account of heaven mostly depicts kids of all ages. Those who die as children, says Colton, stay children, while the old become young. Interestingly, we tend to view childhood as a guarded, innocent time in life, and believe that it is as we grow that we realize what reality and the world is truly like, but Wordsworth and Colton offer different perspectives. If people either grow or stay young in heaven, where our eternal souls live, then isn’t childhood a better representation of reality? Wordsworth’s poetry describes childhood as something everlasting, carefully preserved in our memory; Colton’s account only supports this, suggesting that childhood is an inherent part of us, our most base selves. Thus in both illustrations of age and agelessness, youth and immortality are one and the same, destined to continue on despite the mortal life spans of our bodies.

My question: if youth is restored to those who rise to heaven in the afterlife, do their life-experiences remain intact, since those life experiences, Wordsworth would seem to argue, are what bring depth and nobility to the individual and, perhaps, cultivate the soul? In Wordsworth, the child is father to the man, but the child lacks the parent's life-shaping, life-altering experiences. I am reminded of Lucy in her many iterations--an evanescent creature of movement, yet a static figure in the speaker's mind. Does the spritely Lucy who roams the heath recall any part of her own apparent suffering and death--or has that experience been rinsed clean from her person? In a letter we will be discussing in class, Keats supposes that children who die return to God as they are--raw intellects. Adults, who have passed through this vale of soul-making we call the world and have become individual souls, return to God with a unique identity. 

P.V.

I absolutely love his book, and found it to be better than the movie! It moved me to tears, it left me in awe, and most importantly it left me wondering. I am Catholic, as well as hopeful that Heaven does exist. But, similarly to the parish in the families church in the novel, what would I do if someone told me they had seen Heaven and met God? Would I stay true to my religious beliefs like I have been taught or would I question it because it is a miracle not many claim to have lived? I hope I would chose the prior, I would rather live a hopeful life and dream of a Kingdom after death. As for Dr. Vatalaro's question regarding the youthful deceased life experiences, I think that their life-experiences would remain intact once in Heaven. I would even go as far as to say that they grow mentally once they die. I believe our souls are capable of growing constantly and Heaven should not limit that, especially if the body and the soul truly are separate entities. While Wordsworth might not agree with me, I do not think there is anyway someone could tell either of us that we are wrong with definitive proof. There is science, and then there is God. Things we know now, we didn't know 50 years ago. What, or who, is to say we don't have souls and those souls are incapable of existing without a tether to the natural world?

B.S.

The class discussion we had on this made me start to think about the fact that it is a child having a near death experience and his faith in God. Wordsworth discusses the way children have a greater understanding of life and death than adults already. I think this circumstance adds something to this conversation, because the little boy ideally already had a higher connection, but then expands this wisdom when he becomes living breathing proof that miracles (or even just plain, old-fashioned good, luck) can happen. The adult in "We Are Seven" questions and undermines the statements of the little girl in the poem, insisting that she is wrong. Understandably, the adult doubts the little girl because she cannot prove the source of her wisdom. For those who are or claim to be religious, the little boy in Heaven is for Real should have some authority on that whole life-after-death debate. The boy saw heaven and was dead for a small amount of time and then returned to life on Earth. For anyone who worries or is curious about what happens when people die, this little boy's experience should be taken as more than just childhood "wisdom" (or nonsense). Wordsworth believed that youth is where all the wisdom is, and if he had a chance to hear this child's story, I am sure he would have seen it as valuable and explored the possible meaning to answering the dualism-versus-materialism debate. A material/ physical existence is all that living people ever know and so they fear losing it. Dualism allows for existences to be continued or enhanced after the material molders away. The boy in Heaven is for Real appreciated his physical life more, knowing that, while there is a chance to lose it, it is traded in for something better.

-B.K.

The film Lucy explores the common myth that humans use only 10% of our brains, illustrating what life would be like if we could theoretically harness all of our brain power. In the movie, Lucy is captured by a mob boss while working in Taiwan and has bags of a valuable drug sewn into her stomach, which are then broken and released into her bloodstream when she is beaten by one of her kidnappers. The drug, as explained by a medical doctor, is often given to fetuses during prenatal development; the longer it remains in her system, the more Lucy and her abilities begin to change. She develops advanced forms of telepathy and telekinesis, and can even travel mentally through time. At the end of the movie, as she reaches 100% brain power, Lucy’s body disintegrates and she disappears into the space-time continuum.

    While Lucy may at first seem to be entirely dissimilar from Wordsworth’s poems about immortality as reflected through nature, the film’s emphasis on humanity’s intrinsic relationship with the world around us prove the opposite is true. Throughout the entire movie, the interest in such a mind-altering, powerful drug--Lucy is constantly chased by the lackeys of her once-captor mob boss--suggests a heavily materialistic view of our bodies. Victor Frankenstein and real scientists of the Romantic period often believed that the human body is a machine, and the way Lucy’s abilities strengthen and advance as she gains more control over her brain only seems to support this idea. However, the closer she gets to 100%, the more in tune she is with the world around her, and the more appreciative she is of nature and the universe--if not providing dualist commentary instead, these scenes obviously change the way we typically consider materialism. Poems like “Old Man Traveling,” “Resolution and Independence,” and fittingly the Lucy series evoke a similar sense of the indivisible connection between nature and man, one that transcends  us and our mortality. Lucy’s final words, “I AM EVERYWHERE,” illustrate this bond, revealing the ways in which materialist philosophy extends far beyond mechanical, hollow depictions of humanity, and embraces nature.

A powerful clip. I can't help but wonder if any of the people involved in the conception of and/or making of this film were at all inspired by Wordsworth's Lucy poems. If not, what a fascinating coincidence we have here.

P.V.

While I realize that it may be hard to draw a bridge between a popular sci-fi network show and the ideals of Wordsworth, it is not so far fetched to look at the anticipation of our souls moving on. After thinking about the dualistic nature of many of Wordsworth's poems it struck me that there were many similarities to the dualism encountered while watching one of my favorite shows, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate SG1. In the show the expedition teams, who travel to different worlds by means of a condensed wormhole device, encounter beings that exist without a physical form. These beings are said to have ascended to a higher plain of existence and in doing so they now exist as pure energy. In essence, their souls live forever.

In the video below one of the main characters of the show Stargate S-G1 is shown to ascend. He is then able to live as pure energy and later returns to the land of the living because when he allows himself to let go of his physical form he is able to truly understand the mysteries of life. The video below and the result of the main character ascending are not so different from what Wordsworth is trying to convey in his poems because in rising to a plane of acceptance we are able to live in our eternal youth.

-Rachel

I also really enjoyed this series. I find it interesting that we never witness an ascension in any of the Wordsworth poems we have discussed. Mathew and the Leech Gatherer suffer, but Wordsworth never projects their lives into the future; as in the case of  Lucy, he affords us glimpses of the affects their lives have on the speaker once they are gone. The Leech Gatherer as you recall is at one point in the poem almost frozen in time and space, looking more like a large stone by the pond than a human being. One wonders why Wordsworth didn't venture to represent the moment at which the soul vacates the body. Contemporary science fiction--at least the Star Trek variety--envisions an explorable universe filled with many creatures, some of whom have evolved past physical existence. Putting Christian salvation myth aside, perhaps the absence of an influential context is what kept Wordsworth from taking that next step.

P.V.

The song "Clouds" by Zach Sobiech highlights the positive immortality that emerges from the mortal misfortunes of the individual. In the video, Sobiech's sad story is intertwined with his positive tune and lyrics and, in hearing it, we are able to know that although Sobiech's life came to an end four years after he was diagnosed his memory remains alive and well. It is through his message that we find the positive results that come from children that are challenged by the harshest adversities. 

While Sobiech's song doesn't directly speak to Wordsworth's ideals and attraction toward dualism, it does seem to echo his poem, "I wandered lonely as a cloud."

   " I wandered lonely as a cloud 

    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

    When all at once I saw a crowd,

    A host, of golden daffodils; 

    Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

    Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

The poem speaks to the distant stance that Zach takes while thinking about what will be left behind when he is no longer there, while also maintaining the idea that though this boy was beyond the "sweet spot" of youth he exists in a realm where he will never grow old. Both the song and the poem evoke questions regarding the division of the body and soul and that, though they exist in a symbiotic relationship, the soul doesn't necessarily need the body to survive.

Rachel MacKelcan

This video persuades me that suffering can and often does have the capacity to enoble us. It also encourages me to believe that we are more than what we appear to be. (You might, by the way, be interested in listening to Warren Zevon's final album.) Concerning the link to Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely, I'd like to observe that the experience to which Wordsworth alludes (which occurred during a rainy April walk with his sister, Dorothy) is not portrayed in the poem as a misfortune, but as a gift on which he can draw at less immediate, perhaps more pensive, moments in the future. The specific moment at which he recalls the excursion with Dorothy demonstrates his mind's capacity to act upon its own inspiration, without the intervention of external stimuli. One complaint many writers had with early iterations of materialism was that it speculated that the mind is purely passive--not active and interactive. Here, Wordsworth's personal experience--the operation of memory, imagination, and powerful feeling--revivify him, raising him, maybe, to a higher plane of experience.

P.V.

The idea that we crave immortality, whether it be in a physical or corporeal form, is perfectly conveyed in Christina Rossetti's poem "Remember."

And a poignant counterpoint to The Search for Spok.

P.V.