known how intimately the two poems are connected; the circumhe has a moment of insight or happiness, talks about it in the lanstances of their composition makes them symbiotic. Coleridge in his guage of light. His great poems are about moments of enlighten-poem most certainly does say that his poetic powers are gone or going; he is very explicit, and the language he uses is very close to 2 Wordsworthian and Other Studies, Oxford, 1947.
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The Immortality Ode
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- •
..
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ment, in which the metaphoric and the literal meanings of the word
Wordsworth himself can now no longer see in the way of Fancy;
are at one-he uses "glory" in the abstract modern sense, but always
he has, he says, "submitted to a new control." This seems to be at
with an awareness of the old concrete iconographic sense of a visible
once a loss and a gain. The loss: "A power is gone, which nothing
nimbus.3 But this momentary and special light is the subject matter
can restore." The gain: "A deep distress hath humanized my Soul";
of his poetry, not the power of making it. The moments are mothis is gain because happiness without "humanization" "is to be ments of understanding, but Wordsworth does not say that they
pitied, for 'tis surely blind"; to be "housed in a dream" is to be "at
make writing poetry any easier. Indeed, in lines s
distance from the kind" (i.e., mankind). In the "Letter to Mathetes"
book of The Prelude he expressly says that the moments of clarity
he speaks of the Fancy as "dreaming"; and the Fancy is, we know,
are by no means always matched by poetic creativity.
a lower form of intellect in Wordsworth's hierarchy, and peculiar to
As for dreams and poetry, there is some doubt about the meaning
youth.
that Wordsworth gave to the word "dream" used as a metaphor. In
But although, as we see, Wordsworth uses the word "dream" to
"Expostulation and Reply" he seems to say that dreaming-"dream
mean illusion, we must remember that he thought illusions might
my time away"-is a good thing, but he is ironically using his interbe very useful. They often led him to proper attitudes and allowed locutor's depreciatory word, and he really does not mean "dream" at
him to deal successfully with reality. In The Prelude he tells us how
all. In the Peele Castle ·verses, which have so close a connection with
his reading of fiction made him able to look at the disfigured face
the Immortality Ode, he speaks of the "poet's dream" and makes it
of the drowned man without too much horror; how a kind of supersynonymous with "gleam," with "the light that never was, on sea or stitious conviction of his own powers was useful to him; how, inland," and with the "consecration." But the beauty of the famous deed, many of the most critical moments of his boyhood education
lines often makes us forget to connect them with what follows, for
were moments of significant illusion; and in The Excursion he is
Wordsworth says that gleam, light, consecration, and dream would
quite explicit about the salutary effects of superstition. But he was
have made an "illusion," or, in the 1807 version, a "delusion." Prointerested in dreams not for their own sake but for the sake of fessor Beatty reminds us that in the 1820 version Wordsworth dereality. Dreams may perhaps be associated with poetry, but reality stroyed the beauty of the lines in order to make his intention quite
certainly is; and reality for Wordsworth comes fullest with Imaginaclear. He wrote:
tion, the faculty of maturity. The loss of the "dream" may be painful,
and add a gleam
but it does not necessarily mean the end of poetry.
Of lustre known to neither sea nor land,
But borrowed from the youthful Poet's Dream.
IV
That is, according to the terms of Wordsworth's conception of the
three ages of man, the youthful Poet was, as he had a right to be,
And now for a moment I should like to turn back to the "timely
in the service of Fancy and therefore saw the sea as calm. But
utterance," because I think an understanding of it will help get rid
3 We recall that in The Varieties of Religious Experience William James speaks
of the idea that Wordsworth was saying farewell to poetry. Proof the "hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms, to
.
fessor Garrod believes that this "utterance" was "My heart leaps up
use the term of the psychologists," the "floods of light and glory," which char�ctenze
so many moments of revelation. James mentions one person who, expenencmg the
when I behold," which was written the day before the Ode was
light, was uncertain of its externality.
begun. Certainly this poem is most intimately related to the Ode-its
132
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
The Immortality Ode
133
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-•--••-•- ••-••-••-••-•-••-•-••-••-••-••-••-••-••-u-••-••-••-1-111
theme, the legacy left by the child to the man, is a dominant theme
on earth. And "sullenness" I take to be the creation of difficulties
of the Ode, and Wordsworth used its last lines as the Ode's epigraph.
where none exist, the working of a self-injuring imagination such as
But I should like to suggest that the "utterance" was something else.
a mor1ern mental physician would be quick to recognize as a neurotic
In line 43 Wordsworth says, "Oh evil day! if I were sullen," and the
symptom. Wordsworth's poem is about a sudden unmotivated anxword "sullen" leaps out at us as a striking and carefully chosen word.
iety after a mood of great exaltation. He speaks of this reversal of
Now there is one poem in which Wordsworth says that he was
feeling as something experienced by himself before and known to all.
sullen; it is "Resolution and Independence."
In this mood he is the prey of "fears and fancies," of "dim sadness"
We know that Wordsworth was working on the first part of the
and "blind thoughts." These feelings have reference to two imagined
Ode on the 27th of March, the day after the composition of the raincatastrophes. One of them-natural enough in a man under the stress bow poem. On the 17th of June he added a little to the Ode, but what
of approaching marriage, for Wordsworth was to be married in Oche added we do not know. Between these two dates Wordsworth and tober-is economic destitution. He reproaches himself for his past
Dorothy had paid their visit to Coleridge, who was sojourning at
indifference to the means of getting a living and thinks of what may
Keswick; during this visit Coleridge, on April 4, had written "Defollow from this carefree life: "solitude, pain of heart, distress, and jection: An Ode," very probably after he had read what was already
poverty." His black thoughts are led to the fate of poets "in their
in existence of the Immortality Ode. Coleridge's mental state was
misery dead," among them Chatterton and Burns. The second spevery bad-still, not so bad as to keep him from writing a great poem cific
fear is of mental distress:
-and the Wordsworths were much distressed. A month later, on
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
May 3, Wordsworth began to compose "The Leech-Gatherer," later
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
known as "Resolution and Independence." It is this poem that is, I
think, the timely utterance. 4
Coler�dge, we _must suppose, was in his thoughts after the depressing
"Resolution and Independence" is a poem about the fate of poets.
Keswick meetmg, but he is of course thinking chiefly of himself. It
It is also a poem about sullenness, in the sense that the people in the
will be remembered how the poem ends, how with some difficulty of
Fifth Circle are said by Dante to be sullen: "'Sullen were we in the
utterance the poet brings himself to speak with an incredibly old
sweet air, that is gladdened by the sun, carrying lazy smoke within
leech-gatherer, and, taking heart from the man's resolution and inour hearts; now lie sullen here in the black mire!' This hymn they dependence, becomes again "strong."
gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak it in full words"5-that
This great poem is not to be given a crucial meaning in Wordsis, they cannot now have relief by timely utterance, as they would not worth's life. It makes use of a mood to which everyone, certainly
every creative person, is now and again a victim. It seems to me more
4 I follow Professor Garrod in assuming that the "utterance" was a poem, but
likely that it, rather than the rainbow poem, is the timely utterance
of course it may have been a letter or a spoken word. And if indeed the "utterance"
does refer to "Resolution and Independence," it may not refer to the poem itselfof which the Ode speaks because in it, and not in the rainbow poem, as Jacques Barzun has suggested to me, it may refer to what the Leech-gatherer in
a sullen feeling occurs and is relieved. But whether or not it is actuthe poem says to the poet, for certainly it is what the old man "utters" that gives the poet "relief."
ally the �imely utter�nce, it is an autobiographical and deeply felt
5 The Carlylc-Wickstccd translation. Dante's word is "t,·isti"; in "Resolution and
Independence" Wordsworth speaks of "dim sadness." I mention Dante's sinners
poem wntten at the time the Ode was being written and seeming to
_
simply to elucidate the emotion that Wordsworth speaks of, not to suggest an inhave an emot10nal connection with the first part of the Ode. (The fluence.
134
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Immortality Ode
1
.. -·-·-·-··-·-··-··-··-··-··-·-··-··-·-··-··
35
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meeting with the old man had taken place two years earlier and it is
The first of the two answers ( stanzas v-vm) tells us where the
of some significance that it should have come to mind as the subject
visionary gleam has gone by telling us where it came from. It is a
of a poem at just this time.) It is a very precise and hard-headed
remnant of a pre-existence in which we enjoyed a way of seeing
account of a mood of great fear and it deals in a very explicit way
and knowing now almost wholly gone from us. We come into the
with the dangers that beset the poetic life. But although Wordsworth
world, not with minds that are merely tabulae rasae, but with a kind
urges himself on to think of all the bad things that can possibly hapof attendant light, the vestige of an existence otherwise obliterated pen to a poet, and mentions solitude, pain of heart, distress and
from our memories. In infancy and childhood the recollection is relapoverty, cold, pain and labor, all fleshly ills, and then even madness, tively strong, but it fades as we move forward into earthly life. Mahe never says that a poet stands in danger of losing his talent. It turity, with its habits and its cares and its increase of distance from
seems reasonable to suppose that if Wordsworth were actually saying
our celestial origin, wears away the light of recollection. Nothing
farewell to his talent in the Ode, there would be some hint of an
could be more poignantly sad than the conclusion of this part with
endangered or vanishing talent in "Resolution and Independence."
the heavy sonority of its last line as Wordsworth addresses the child
But there is none; at the end of the poem Wordsworth is resolute in
in whom the glory still lives:
poetry.
Full soon thy Soul shall haYe her earthly freight,
Must we not, then, look with considerable skepticism at such inter
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
pretations of the Ode as suppose without question that the "gleam,"
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
the "glory," and the "dream" constitute the power of making poetry?
-especially when we remember that at a time still three years distant
Between this movement of despair and the following movement
Wordsworth in The Prelude will speak of himself as becoming a
of hope there is no clear connection save that of contradiction. But
"creative soul" (book XII, line 207; the italics are Wordsworth's own)
between the question itself and the movement of hope there is an
despite the fact that, as he says (book XII, line 281), he "sees by
explicit verbal link, for the question is: "Whither has fled the visionglimpses now."
ary gleam?" and the movement of hope answers that "nature yet
remembers/What was so fugitive."
The second movement of the second part of the Ode tells us again
V
what has happened to the visionary gleam: it has not wholly fled, for
The second half of the Ode is divided into two large movements,
it is remembered. This possession of childhood has been passed on
as a legacy
each of which gives an answer to the question with which the first
to the child's heir, the adult man; for the mind, as the
rainbow
part ends. The two answers seem to contradict each other. The first
epigraph also says, is one and continuous, and what was so
intense a
issues in despair, the second in hope; the first uses a language striklight in childhood becomes "the fountain-light of all our day" and a "master-light
ingly supernatural, the second is entirely naturalistic. The two parts
of all our seeing," that is, of our adult day
ancl o
even differ in the statement of fact, for the first says that the gleam
.
�r mature seeing. The child's recollection of his heavenly home
exists m the recollection
is gone, whereas the second says that it is not gone, but only transof the adult.
muted. It is necessary to understand this contradiction, but it is not
But what exactly is this fountain-light, this master-light? I am
sure
necessary to resolve it, for from the circuit between its two poles
that when we understand what it is we shall see that the glory
that
comes much of the power of the poem.
Wordsworth means is very different from Coleridge's glory,
136
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
·-·-··-·-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-·-·-·�
�-··-·-··--·-··-··-··-··-··-·-··
The Immortality Ode
137
--·-·-·-··-··-·-··-··-··-··-·-·-·-·-··-··-··-··-·-·-··-·-··-··
which is Joy. Wordsworth says that what he holds in me�ory as the
guiding heri
illuminate another idea-using it, as he
tage of childhood is exactly n
says,
�t the Joy of childhood. It
"for my purpose" and
i
"as a poet." It has as much validity
s not "delight," not "liberty," not even hope -not for these, he
for him as any "popular" religious idea might have, that is to say,
says, "I raise/The song of thanks and praise." For
a kind of sugg
_ what then does he
estive validity.
rai
We may regard pre-existence as being for
se the song? For this particular experience of childhood:
Wordsworth a very serious
conceit, vested with relative belid, intended to give
...
a high value to
those obstinate questionings
the natural experience of the "vanishings." 6
Of sense and outward things,
The naturali
F
stic tone of Wordsworth's n
ailings from us, vanishings;
ote suggests that we shall
Bl
be doing no violence to the experience
ank misgivings of a Creature .
of the "vanishings" if we con
Moving about in worlds not realised.
sider it scientifically. In a well-known essay, "Stages in the Development of the Sen
He menti
se of Reality," the distinguished p
ons other reasons for gratitude, but here for the moment I
sychoanalyst
Ferenczi speaks of the child's reluctance to distinguish between
should like to halt the enumeration.
himself and the world and
We are told, then, that light and glory consi
of the slow growth of objectivity
st, at least in part, ?f
which
differentiates the self fro
"que
m external things. And Freud himself,
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