stionings," "failings from us," "vanishings," and "blank misdealing with the "oceanic"
givings" in a world not yet
sensation of "being at one with
made real, f
the univer
or surel Wordswor
se,"
?'
th uses
which a literary friend had
the word "realised" in it
supposed to be the source of all
s most literal sense. In his note on the poem
religious
emotions, conjecture
he ha
s that it is a vestige of the infant'
s this to say of the experience he refers to:
s state of feeling
before he has learned to distinguish between the stimuli of his own
... I was often unable to think of external things as ha_ving external
sensations and those of the world outside. In Civilization
exi
and Its
stence, and J communed with all that I saw a.s somet�ing not. apart
Discontents he writes:
from, but inherent in, my own material nature. Many umes while g�ing to school have I grasped at a wall or_ tre� to recall mysel� from this Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the
abyss of idealism to the reality. At this time I was afraid of such
outside world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a
processes.
shrunken vestige of a more extensive feeling-a feeling which embraced
H
the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the
e remarks that the experience is not peculiar to himself, which is
external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has
of course true, and he says that it was connected in his thoughts
been preserved in the minds of many people-to a greater or lesser exwith a potency of spirit which made him believe that he could never tent-it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and
die.
more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational con
The precise and naturali
ten
stic way in which Words
h
wort
lk
ta s f
o
t belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless extension
thi
and oneness with the universe-the same feeling as that described by my
s experience of his childhood must cast do�bt �n Prof�ssor Garfriend a
rod'
s "oceanic."
s statement that Wordsworth believed quite literally m the notion of pre-existence, with which the "va�is�ings" experienc� is c?n�
This has its clear relation to Wordsworth's "worlds not realised."
t
nee d
e Wordsworth
.
is very careful to delimit the extent of his belief,
Wordsworth, like Freud, was preoccupied by the idea of reality, and,
he says that it is "too shadowy a notion to be rec
f · h"
�mm�nded t� alt
a
6 In his Studies in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, a Cambridge University diss an evidence of immortality. He says that he 1s usmg the idea to sertation, Andrew Chiappe makes a similar judgment of the quality and degree of
belief in the idea of pre-existence in the poetry of Vaughan and Traherne.
The Immortality Ode
1
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
. . ..-..--
39
----·--··-·-··-·-·-·-··-··-·-·-··-··-··-··-··-·-··-·---··-··
.- .-
-·--·--·-··-·-·---·---.. -·--·-·-··-·-··-·-·-
Hath beautified that flower; already shades
again like Freud, he knew that the child's way of ap�rehension was
Of pity cast from inward tenderness
but a stage which, in the course of nature, would give way to �n
Do fall around him upon aught that bears
other. If we understand that Wordsworth is speaking of a penod
Unsightly marks of violence or harm.
c
Emphatically such a Being lives,
ommon to the development of everyone, we are helped t� see th�t
Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,
we cannot identify the vision of that period with his peculiar poetic
An inmate of this active universe:
power.
.
.
For feeling has to him imparted power
h "
. h'
,, h
But in addition to the experience of t e vams mgs t ere 1s an-
That through the growing faculties of sense,
other experience for which Wordsworth is grateful to his childhood
Doth like an agent of the one great Mind
and
Create, creator and receiver both,
which, I believe, goes with the "vanishings" to make up the
Working but in alliance with the works
"master-light," the "fountain-light." I am not referring to the
Which it beholds.-Such, verily, is the first
High instincts before which our mort�l Nature
Poetic7 spirit of our human life,
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surpnsed,
By uniform control of after years,
In most, abated or suppressed; in some,
Through every change of growth and of decay
but rather to what Wordsworth calls "those first affections."
Pre-eminent till death.
I am inclined to think that with this phrase Wordsworth refers to
a later stage in the child's development which, like the earlier stage
The child, this passage says, does not perceive things merely as
in which the external world is included within the ego, leaves vesobjects; he first sees them, because maternal love is a condition of tig
n a welles in the developing mind. This is the period described i_
his perception, as objects-and-judgments, as valued objects. He does
known passage in Book II of The Prelude, in which the child learns
not learn about a flower, but about the pretty-flower, the flower that-
about the world in his mother's arms:
1-want-and-that-mother-will-get-for-me; he does not learn about the
Blest the infant Babe,
bird and a broken wing but about the poor-bird-whose-wing-was
(For with my best conjecture I would trace
broken. The safety, warmth, and good feeling of his mother's con
Our Being's earthly progress), blest _the Babe,
scious benevolence is a circumstance of his first learning. He sees, in
Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep,
short, with "glory"; not only is he himself not in "utter nakedness"
Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul
as the Ode puts it, but the objects he sees are not in utter nakedness.
Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!
The passage from The Prelude says in naturalistic language what
For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
stanza
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
v of the Ode expresses by a theistical metaphor. Both the
Objects through widest intercourse of sense.
Prelude passage and the Ode distinguish a state of exile from a state ·
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
of security and comfort, of at-homeness; there is ( as the Prelude
Along his infa
nt veins are interfused
passage puts it) a "filial bond," or ( as in stanza x of the Ode) a
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
7 The use here of the word "poetic" is either metaphorical and general, or it is
Is there a flower, to which he points with hand
entirely literal, that is, it refers to the root-meaning of the word, which is "to make"
-Wordsworth has in mind the creative nature
Too weak to gather it, already love
of right human perception and not
merely poetry.
Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
-·-··-··-··-·-·-··-··-··-·-··-·-··-··-··-·-.. -··-·-··-·-··-··-·
The Immortality Ode
--·--·----··-.. -··-·-··-·--··-·-··-··-·-··-·-·-·-··-·-··
"primal sympathy," which keeps man from being an "outcast ...
visionary gleam is not in itself the poetry-making power, and its
bewildered and depressed."
diminution is right and inevitable.
The Ode and The Prelude differ about the source of this primal
That there should be ambivalence in Wordsworth's response to
sympathy or filial bond. The Ode makes heavenly pre-existence the
this diminution is quite natural, and the two answers, that of stanzas
source, The Prelude finds the source in maternal affection. But the
v-vm and that of stanzas rx-xr, comprise both the resistance to and
psychologists tell us that notions of heavenly pre-existence figure
the acceptance of growth. Inevitably we resist change and turn back
commonly as representations of physical prenatality-the womb is
with passionate nostalgia to the stage we are leaving. Still, we fulfill
the environment which is perfectly adapted to its inmate and
ourselves by choosing what is painful and difficult and necessary,
compared to it all other conditions of life may well seem like "exile"
and we develop by moving toward death. In short, organic developto the (very literal) "outcast."8 Even the security of the mother's ment is a hard paradox which Wordsworth is stating in the disarms, although it is an effort to re-create for the child the old encrepant answers of the second part of the Ode. And it seems to me vironment, is but a diminished comfort. And if we think of the
that those critics who made the Ode refer to some particular and
experience of which Wordsworth is speaking, the "vanishings," as
unique experience of Wordsworth's and who make it relate only to
the child's recollection of a condition in which it was very nearly
poetical powers have forgotten their own lives and in consequence
true that he and his environment were one, it will not seem surconceive the Ode to be a lesser thing than it really is, for it is not prising that Wordsworth should compound the two experiences and
about poetry, it is about life. And having made this error, they are
figure them in the single metaphor of the glorious heavenly preinevitably led to misinterpret the meaning of the "philosophic mind"
existence.9
and also to deny that Wordsworth's ambivalence is sincere. No doubt
I have tried to be as naturalistic as possible in speaking of Wordsit would not be a sincere ambivalence if Wordsworth were really worth's childhood experiences and the more-or-less Platonic notion
saying farewell to poetry, it would merely be an attempt at selfthey suggested to him. I believe that naturalism is in order here, for consolation. But he is not saying farewell to poetry, he is saying farewhat we must now see is that Wordsworth is talking about somewell to Eden, and his ambivalence is much what Adam's thing common to us all, the development of the sense of reality. To
was, and
Milton's, and for the same reasons. 10
have once had the visionary gleam of the perfect union of the self
To speak naturalistically of the quasi-mystical
and the universe is essential to and definitive of our human nature,
experiences of his
childhood does not in the
and it is in that sense connected with the making of poetry. But the
least bring into question the value which
Wordsworth attached to them, for, despite its dominating theistical
8 "Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that
metaphor, the Ode is largely naturalistic in its intention.
one case done commodiously done was."-James Joyce, Ulysses. The myth of Eden
We can
is also interpreted as figuring either childhood or the womb--see below Wordsworth's statement of the connection of the notion of pre-existence with Adam's fall.
IO Milton provid�s � possible gloss .. to several difficult points in the poem. In
9 Readers of Ferenczi's remarkable study, Thalassa, a discussion, admittedly specstanza v!n, the Ch�ld 1s addressed as thou Eye among the blind," and to the Eye ulative but wonderfully fascinating, of unconscious racial memories of the ocean as
are �pphed the
"deaf and silent"; Coleridge objected to these epithets as
the ultimate source of life, will not be able to resist giving an added meaning to
.ep1�ets.
irrational, but his ob1ect1on may be met by citing the brilliant precedent of "blind
Wordsworth's lines about the "immortal sea/ Which brought us hither" and of the
mouths" of "Lycidas." Again, Coleridge's question of the propriety of making a
unborn children who "Sport upon the shore." The recollection of Samuel Butler's
master brood over a slave is in part answered by the sonnet "On His Being Arrived
delightful fantasy of the Unborn and his theory of unconscious memory will also
at the Ag
serve to enrich our reading of the Ode by suggesting the continuing force of the
_e of Twenty-three," in which Milton expresses his security in his development as it shall take place in his "great Task-master's eye." Between this sonnet Platonic myth.
and the Ode there are other significant correspondences of thought and of phrase.
I4'2
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
·-·-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-·-··-··-·-··-·-··-··-··-··-·-··-··-··-·-··
The Immortality Ode
143
-111-,•-u-••-n-••-••-••-••-••-H-••-••-111-,1-11-,1-,w-·-··-··-··-H-II
begin to see what that intention is by understanding the force of the
actually is in the field of life. The earth is not an environment in
word "imperial" in stanza vr. This stanza is the second of the four
which the celestial or imperial qualities can easily exist. Wordsworth,
stanzas in which Wordsworth states and develops the theme of the
who spoke of the notion of imperial pre-existence as being adumreminiscence of the light of heaven and its gradual evanescence brated by Adam's fall, uses the words "earth" and "earthly" in the
through the maturing years. In stanza v we are told that the infant
common quasi-religious sense to refer to the things of this world. He
inhabits it; the Boy beholds it, seeing it "in his joy"; the Youth is
does not make Earth synonymous with Nature, for although Man
still attended by it; "the Man perceives it die away,/ And fade into
may be the true child of Nature, he is the "Foster-child" of Earth.
the light of common day." Stanza VI speaks briefly of the efforts
But it is to be observed that the foster mother is a kindly one, that
<
br /> made by earthly life to bring about the natural and inevitable amher disposition is at least quasi-maternal, that her aims are at least nesia:
not unworthy; she is, in short, the foster mother who figures so
often in the legend of the Hero, whose real and unknown parents
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
are noble or divine.11
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother's mind,
Wordsworth, in short, is looking at man in a double way, seeing
And no unworthy aim,
man both in his ideal nature and in his earthly activity. The two
The homely Nurse doth all she can
views do not so much contradict as supplement each other. If in
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
stanzas v-vm Wordsworth tells us that we live by decrease, in stan
Forget the glories he hath known,
zas 1x-x1 he tells us of the everlasting connection of the diminished
And that imperial palace whence he came.
person with his own ideal personality. The child hands on to the
hampered adult the imperial nature, the "primal sympathy / Which
"Imperial" suggests grandeur, dignity, and splendor, everything that
stands in opposition to what, in
having been must ever be," the mind fitted to the universe, the uni
The Excursion, Wordsworth was to
verse to the mind. The sympathy is not so pure and intense in macall "littleness." And "littleness" is the result of having wrong noturity as in childhood, but only because another relation grows up tions about the nature of man and his connection with the universe;
beside the relation of man to Nature-the relation of man to his
its outcome is "deadness." The melancholy and despair of the Solitary
fellows in the moral world of difficulty and pain. Given Wordsin The Excursion are the signs of the deadness which resulted from worth's epistemology the new relation is bound to change the very
his having conceived of man as something less than imperial. Wordsworth's idea of splendid power is his protest against all views of the aspect of Nature itself: the clouds will take a sober coloring from
an eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality, but a sober color
mind that would limit and debase it. By conceiving, as he does, an
is a color still.
intimate connection between mind and universe, by seeing the uni-
There is sorrow in the Ode, the inevitable sorrow of giving up an
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