"For spreading truth, and making love expand"

Erwin Canham's book "Commitment to Freedom" was written 58 years ago, exactly 50 years after the founding of The Christian Science Monitor. So this newspaper is now 108 years old. 

Opening up Canham's book last night, I was intrigued to read the first 5 lines from a short but powerful poem by the Romantic English poet William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850). Wordsworth was born the same year as Beethoven, and of course the year James Cook set foot on Australia. 

Here is the entire poem:

Illustrated Books And Newspapers

by William Wordsworth

Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attribute,
And written words the glory of his hand;
Then followed Printing with enlarged command
For thought -- dominion vast and absolute
For spreading truth, and making love expand.
Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute
Must lackey a dumb Art that best can suit
The taste of this once-intellectual Land.
A backward movement surely have we here,
From manhood, -- back to childhood; for the age --
Back towards caverned life's first rude career.
Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!
Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear

Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!

I love to think on such concepts as "discourse", "written words", and "printing" as vehicles for "spreading truth, and making love expand"! Canham's excerpt finishes there, and the rest of the poem may not be quite so highly toned (!), but it's interesting nonetheless, to contemplate his reasoning, which seems to indicate mankind's preference for the visual image over the heard thought contemplated.

Whatever message we deem is ours in reading this poem today, I love the idea of "spreading truth, and making love expand".

Juliet Swannell