I see him facing his reluctant audience of white blouses and blue pinafores, hemmed in by the line of white habits and gray wimples. He’s looking into the distance. To whom is he speaking? For surely most of what he says goes over the heads of anyone paying attention, including his daughters, the elder listening to him disinterestedly, concerned more with what his speech implies about her performance and whether she has executed well enough to win, the younger seeking clues to help gain her father’s favor. Sister Josephine is perhaps the only one following him, and she too wears a perplexed smile at times, paused in the act of running the beads of her rosary through her fingers.

Maybe he was really speaking to me all that time ago.

If life is a picture, then poetry is the faint flickering light that illuminates it, he says. If life is a lamp, then the stirring overlapping shadows it casts all around us are poems. We cannot apprehend the one without the other.

And the poet is life’s prophet.

Look around you: we are gathered here now in this bounded space, enclosed by these walls, but we are in reality in a city, in a country, on a continent, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is so vast we can scarcely imagine its limits. We can never comprehend the full extent of the world and the life that surrounds us, even with the most powerful telescopes and microscopes that science can invent.

Adding to the enormity of this task is an additional complication: even with the things that we can perceive readily, we have become so accustomed to them that we can no longer see them clearly. The best we can hope for is that someone lifts from our eyes—at least for a moment—the fog of familiarity that obscures from us the wonder of our being, to create anew for us the universe we have become indifferent to.

No, science is not the answer. The scientist looks at the rainbow and thinks: raindrops, electromagnetic radiation, refraction, reflection, dispersion. We need something different, something that will re-create for us the thrill we felt when we first witnessed a rainbow. And failing that, something that will point out to us what we are missing or have misplaced, and how, if possible, to recover it.

This is where poetry, and poets—prophets!—come in.

“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” Wordsworth writes. “So was it when my life began, so is it now I’m a man.”

How important is it that he continues to experience the rainbow this way? He can’t imagine a life without it. So be it when I shall grow old, or let me die!

And what is it that allows Wordsworth to always feel such thrill on seeing a rainbow? The child is father of the man; and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.