A Sense of Wonder - English Version

A luminous chapter, between poetry, prayer and landscapes of the soul

William Butler Yeats once said: “By correcting my work, I correct myself.” And perhaps this is the deep breath that runs through A Sense of Wonder, Van Morrison’s fifteenth studio album, released in 1984: a work that looks back without nostalgia and forward without haste, choosing as its compass mystery, gratitude, and a mysticism rooted in the earth.

We are in the heart of the 1980s, a time when pop music was beginning to lose its sense of anticipation and depth. Van Morrison, on the other hand, chooses the opposite path: the path of interiority. With A Sense of Wonder, he ideally closes the cycle of the Warner Bros. albums (from Into the Music to Inarticulate Speech of the Heart) and opens another, more mature and meditative. As Rolling Stone USA wrote, it is “a grand act of synthesis and overview, affirming the artist’s sense of place and self in terms of his Celtic roots.”

Indeed, the album immediately presents itself as a spiritual mosaic. The title track is a hymn to wonder, to nature, to the mystery of simple things. Morrison lists street names, landscapes, memories, real or imaginary characters, in an evocative flow that recalls Astral Weeks and the Joycean stream of consciousness: “Morrison calls out a jumble of street names, colors, characters and raw, unintellectualized feelings in the free-associative style,” reads the American review.

This expressive freedom, however, is never abandonment: rather, it is the search for a higher order. In Ancient of Days and The Master’s Eyes one perceives a clear spirituality that does not take refuge in dogma, but entrusts itself to silence, light, and gratitude. The latter song, in particular, is a small masterpiece, in which Morrison weaves together “a beatific affirmation of belief” with questions full of nostalgia and sweetness: “Why didn’t they leave us to wander through buttercup summers?”

The album opens with Tore Down à la Rimbaud, an emblematic and personal song. The reference to Arthur Rimbaud is not only literary but existential: the French poet who stopped writing at twenty-six becomes, for Van, a kind of mirror. The song was born during a period of creative silence and took nearly ten years to be completed. “Ironically enough,” Van recalls, “reading that Rimbaud had stopped writing made me start writing again. It’s the song that took me the longest ever to finish.” And you can tell: in the distilled time of each word, in the controlled measure of the arrangement, in the voice that seems to sing from a place suspended between the present and memory.

The poetic heart of the album also beats in Let the Slave (Incorporating The Price of Experience), in which Van sets William Blake’s words to music, turning them into a modern oratorio — dry but solemn. His voice declaims and sings, crossing the written word with respect, faith, and intensity. Unfortunately, another song inspired by William Butler Yeats, Crazy Jane on God, could not be included due to legal restrictions: “It’s a shame,” writes Rolling Stone, “since the deleted song’s refrain and Morrison’s extraordinary musical setting evoked the revelatory wonder and mystery at the heart of the LP.” But even without that piece, the picture remains luminous.

The sound of A Sense of Wonder is enveloping, measured, at times contemplative. Alongside the historic band, playing with its usual jazz-like empathy, we also find on two tracks the Irish ensemble Moving Hearts, which lends the atmosphere an even deeper connection to Celtic tradition. The overall effect is that of music that breathes with the earth and with the sky, that becomes both prayer and storytelling.

Two splendid covers complete the journey: Ray Charles’ What Would I Do Without You, transformed by Van into “a hymn of gratitude and confession”, and Mose Allison’s If You Only Knew, an elegant jazz parenthesis with a nocturnal flavor.

A Sense of Wonder is a record that asks for time, listening, and attention. It is a work that does not seek to impress, but to accompany. One that does not aim for instant illumination, but feeds on the silence between words. And precisely for this reason, now more than ever, it deserves to be rediscovered. Forty years after its release, it still sounds like an open path through inner woods, where poetry is not an end in itself, but a tool to grasp what escapes us: the beauty that remains, the light that returns, the sense of wonder.

Dario Greco