Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky on the Winter Olympics

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• ROBERT PINSKY:

  Here is the English poet William Wordsworth, writing about Winter sports early in the Nineteenth Century. The sport is skating, and the passage is in the first book of Wordsworth's poem The Prelude:

  …………………………………..… to meIt was a time of rapture! Clear and loudThe village clock tolled six, –I wheeled about,Proud and exulting like an untired horseThat cares not for his home. All shod with steel,We hissed along the polished ice in gamesConfederate, imitative of the chaseAnd woodland pleasures, –the resounding horn,The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.So through the darkness and the cold we flew,And not a voice was idle; with the dinSmitten, the precipices rang aloud;The leafless trees and every icy cragTinkled like iron; while far distant hillsInto the tumult sent an alien soundOf melancholy not unnoticed, while the starsEastward were sparkling clear, and in the westThe orange sky of evening died away.

  Not seldom from the uproar I retiredInto a silent bay, or sportivelyGlanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamedUpon the grassy plain; and oftentimes,When we had given our bodies to the wind,And all the shadowy banks on either sideCame sweeping through the darkness, spinning stillThe rapid line of motion, then at onceHave I, reclining back upon my heels,Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffsWheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolledWith visible motion her diurnal round!