Natalie Wood and Wordsworth

   Last month Natalie Wood, dead for thirty years, was back in the news.  The investigation of her death--she was found in the California waters off Catalina Island--was re-opened, based on "new information."  Her last evening was spent in the company of actors Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken aboard a small yacht.  The accepted explanation of what happened to her was that she fell overboard and drowned.

   During Natalie Wood's lifetime I had the same interest in her as many of my male mates.  She was a good actress in movies that we liked (especially Rebel Without A Cause) and since she carried herself with an insouciant yet flirtatious bearing, we were careful to cloak our languorous lust.  When we watched her on the screen we welcomed the dark, a fitting setting for desire.  Then she made a movie, which turned on the agonized frustrations of young love.  It was titled "Splendor in the Grass."
   The scene in the film that incorporates the title takes place in a classrooom--a high school English classrooom.  Natalie's character, her emotions roiled by her doomed romance with the school's Adonis (Warren Beatty), is overcome as she responds to the teacher's request that she read a passage from Wordsworth: 

                         What though the radiance which was once so bright
                         Be now for ever taken from my sight,
                               Though nothing can bring back the hour
                         Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                                We will grieve not, rather find
                                Strength in what remains behind;

   She can barely get through it, and runs from the room.

   The passage is from the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth's great poem depicting apprehensions of immortality "from recollections of early childhood."  It is my favorite poem produced by the senior sage of the English Romantic Poets.

   Years after I had outgrown my youthful crush on Natalie Wood, I found myself teaching gifted high school students.  I had assigned the Ode and we were beginning our investigation of its memory and magic.  As a first step I was doing a reading of the whole work in a small auditorium.  In those years, early in the school's history, there had developed among the English team an informal custom of stopping to listen when a colleague was providing a formal reading or was "on fire with the word" in teaching a compelling text.  The custom developed because the classrooms were of the open design, i.e., as little use of doors and walls as possible.  It was easy to pause while walking by, lean on a low divider, and listen.  A colleague did so and positioned himself so that I could see him but the students could not.  That was fine.  But as I approached--in sonorous tones--the lines, "Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;" his face formed a grimace of fervid concupiscence, and he smiled a broad lascivious grin.  "I know where your mind goes when you speak the line "splendour in the grass" his countenance conveyed, intentionally corrupting the quotation.
  
   Now, the "Intimations Ode" is a serious poem and the passage profaned here is prelude to a profound conclusion about mortality and memory.  I was on a precipice.  Giggling and guffaws beckoned.  If I succumbed I would confuse the students and besmirch the poem I loved.  I prayed to Wordsworth.  He sustained my voice and my concentration.  The reading was consummated.  My colleague wended on his wayward way.  Vanquished by a nobler mien.  But he was right.  He did know who I thought of when I declaimed "splendour in the grass."  And still do.