Parker Verhoeff
English 9
Mr. Salsich
5.26.09

Awesome:
An Essay on the Impacts of Awe

Awe is something few people experience in their lifetimes. The word "awesome," meaning full of awe, is now taken for granted and doesn't have half the impact it did a century ago. William Wordsworth and Richard Wilbur are some of the lucky ones; they expressed awe in their poems. Hopefully, I'll experience the same feelings Wordsworth and Wilbur had when I return to my school.

William Wordsworth is in true awe in his poem "Tintern Abbey." He is so taken aback by the beautiful landscape of Tintern Abbey, in northern England, that he feels the way he felt when he was younger. He pays homage to even the "unremebered pleasure[s]: such, perhaps, as have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life." He knows that those happenings impacted him as much as his actual memories. Wordsworth treats "these beauteous forms" as if he's opening his eyes for the first time. He believes Tintern is an "awesome" place, "as is a landscape to a blind man's eye." He has seen his "Heaven." Awe can inspire anybody anywhere to do extraordinary things; it happened to inspire William Wordsworth to write seven pages of breathtaking poetry.

I am graduating Pine Point School this year, and if I were to return in the future It would bring back feelings much like Wordsworth. It would be on a much smaller scale, but It will be nostalgic-FAST nonetheless. I have been going to this school for five long years; all of my middle school years. If I was to return to Pine Point in five years it will bring back all of my memories from an important period in my life. In five years I will already be a sophomore in college, and I probably would have forgotten most of my time at this school. But if I was to return, it will bring back those wonderful memories. Like Wordsworth, I also will be thankful for the things as small as a "thank you," or a "your welcome." William Wordsworth returned to "Tintern Abbey" after a number of years and he truly was in awe, and I believe I will feel similar when I return to my middle school, the most crucial time in my life.

Richard Wilbur's "The Writer" is a poem about a father in awe of his daughter. He just listens to her type away, on her typewriter and he realizes that "her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy." He wishes her a "lucky passage" for the rest of her life. Like Wordsworth, it reminds him of an extraordinary memory. One of a starling, crashing into the window, becoming trapped in the same room his daughter was typing that very moment. "How for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, /We watched the sleek, wild, dark/And iridescent creature/Batter against the brilliance," just like he's watching his daughter battle the typewriter to complete her story. But he's not just watching her complete her story; he's watching her grow up. He's watching her, as he did the starling, "[clear] the sill of the world."-Parallelism It's amazing when you get to watch something progress from the first crash into your home, learn from their mistakes, and finally soar out into the vast, awe-inspiring, wilderness that is our world-3-Action Verb.

Both William Wordsworth and Richard Wilbur have been in a state of awe. I will soon be, given five years time. Whether it's just the landscape, your daughter, or your school, awe is something worth expressing. It is a rare thing that anybody, and everybody should be able to experience.

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Self Assessment

5.28.09- A Five Paragraph Essay on the Effects of Awe

I have been working on omitting any unnecessary words. Also, I am trying not to be vague in my essays.

I believe all of my special tools were correct and apt. My concluding paragraph brought everything together as well.

I might have been a little too repetitive with the word "awe." There also might have been some comma issues that I missed.

GRADE: B