This section considers a sample of Wordsworth’s finest lyric poems after Lyrical Ballads, poems that entwine memory and imagination, loss and fortitude. In ‘Resolution and Independence’, Wordsworth stages a crisis in his career as a poet and a man. After initially evoking a scene of natural beauty and harmony, the poet‐speaker finds himself subject to ‘fears, and fancies’ (27), ‘Dim sadness, and blind thoughts’ (28), chilling thoughts of what the future might hold: ‘Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty’ (35). In this dejected state of mind, reflecting the intense dialogue with Coleridge begun by the first four stanzas of ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ and continued in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, he describes an encounter with an old leech gatherer (in its original form the poem was called ‘The Leech Gatherer’). As a result of this encounter, one that is at once ordinary and uncanny, the poet is able to resolve the agitation and confusion of his ‘untoward thoughts’ (54). The old man’s courage and sense of purpose inspire the poet to conclude as follows: ‘“God”, said I, “be my help and stay secure; / I’ll think of the Leech‐gatherer on the lonely moor!”’ (146–7).
As is hinted, even in that seemingly cheerful close, the poem combines tones and effects. It gives the continual impression of accommodating disparate feelings and thoughts. Prayer and resolution join hands here, and a key word in the self‐admonishing last line is ‘lonely’. The adjective takes the reader back to the previous stanza in which Wordsworth indicates how the leech gatherer’s prosaic words (‘Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may’, 134) affect him:
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me:
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently … (134–8)
Wordsworth’s response is characteristically internal. What matters to him and gives force to the poetry is that this response opens a window onto another ‘lonely place’: the imaginative mindscape conjured up after the crucial verb ‘troubled’. To be ‘troubled’ in the way evoked in the next three lines, where each line pushes through newly expanded frames of awareness, might frighten another poet. Indeed, the passage contains an element of fear, especially in the image of the old man as a figure ‘Wandering about alone and silently’: both the strong stress on ‘Wandering’ and the evocation of a lonely silence prove haunting. For Wordsworth, however, the moment bears witness to the sublime capacity of his own imagination.
In its use of the seven‐line, rhyme royal stanza employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, and by Thomas Chatterton in ‘An Excelente Balade of Charitie’, from whom the Romantic poet borrows the alexandrine in the final line, Wordsworth’s poem employs to the full possibilities offered by the form of developments, diversion, ‘wanderings’, processes of imaginative ‘resolution and independence’. The poem aims to synthesize, but it is honest about the tendency of its materials to pull apart, as in the ruefully awkward rhyme that closes stanza VII. The stanza has brooded on predecessors such as Thomas Chatterton, ‘the marvellous Boy’ (43), and Robert Burns, before it concludes: ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness’ (48–9). ‘Gladness’ tips over into its rhyme partner ‘madness’ with a wry sense of inconsequential necessity.
Again, in the elaborate comparison between leech gatherer, stone, and sea‐beast, discussed in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Poems (1815)’ (610–11) as illustrating ‘the conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination’ (610), the writing makes us as much aware of the labour involved in triangulating the three elements implicated in the simile as in the ‘just comparison’ which Wordsworth claims his words achieve. It is a self‐conscious process, and yet one alert to the degree to which writing evades complete rationalizing. The clinching line, ‘Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead’ (71), both builds on and holds in suspension the account of the ‘huge Stone’ (64) as seemingly ‘a thing endued with sense’ (68). Indeed, the process of comparison brings out the poet’s need to validate his imagination’s life. It is a later simile that suggests that the poet’s imagination really is alive, when the old man is said to stand ‘Motionless as a Cloud … / That heareth not the loud winds when they call; / And moveth all together, if it move at all’ (82–4). There, the old man’s stillness is conveyed through a rhythm that seems to face obstacles in the way of forward movement and momentum, before, having scaled the caesura of the final line, the cloud and the man do coalesce and the resulting figurative compound ‘moveth all together’.
As Coleridge saw, though not with complete sympathy, the poem is typical of Wordsworth in its movement between tones and styles.1 It is at every moment open to the accidental, to changes of direction that can feel like graspings after hope or meaning, yet it reveals a shape and an order that correspond to the poet’s attempted journey towards greater comprehension of his predicament and vocation. Paradoxically, greater comprehension involves recognition of a visionary troubling that brings about its own ‘incomprehension’. From the start, the poem reveals an openness to the uncertain, even the unsettling, but the fact that natural harmony is restored after the storm at night suggests an initial faith in a cyclical order of things and a capacity to be delighted by the present. Yet almost as a reflex reaction against both those objects of faith emerges the fear that the cyclical will give way to a despondency‐inducing linearity and that the present will darken into an unhappy future.
At the heart of the poem is Wordsworth’s ability to do justice to the accidental and chancey in life (‘But, as it sometimes chanceth’ (22) is how he heralds the onset of burgeoning fears for the future), and to his sense that design of a kind, possibly design intuited or shaped by the poetic imagination, is at work in the experiences that make possible his poems. So, here, though he introduces the encounter with the old man as if there were varying possibilities of understanding it – it might be ‘a peculiar grace, / A leading from above, a something given’ (50–1) – all three options suggest a gift beyond the poet’s will, made available to him in the act of writing a poem. The poem does not despise the work of the will: fortitude and resolution are clearly prized and reaffirmed as virtues. But with great delicacy it rehearses the workings of a consciousness that realizes that its form of control must accommodate awareness of much that resists the will.
The poem’s capacity to stage a journey, then, to turn and return, is central to its status as a major lyric. A small example concerns the hare, which appears three times in the poem. All three moments involve varying angles of vision. Wordsworth first mentions the hare in stanza 2; skilfully, his rhythms run their own races as he renders the creature’s exuberant, lithe vivacity:
The grass is bright with rain‐drops; on the moors
The Hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; which, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. (10–14)
The language shows to advantage Wordsworth’s descriptive gifts. Much has to do with the language’s ability to be a medium for movement; it has its own ‘running’ vigour, demonstrating sharpness of attention to what is physically rehearsable, the hare’s springing across the bouncily firm yet squelchy ‘plashy earth’. It is, at the same time, potentially symbolic. In the words ‘Raises a mist’, Wordsworth suggests the aureole, the halo of lit‐up steam that the hare’s darting run generates and, also, the ‘glittering’ that may be conferred as well as discerned by the poet’s eye. It is a remarkable image, both kinetic, in its suggestion of energy, and holistic, in its marrying of delighted poet and self‐delighting creature. If we are to believe the poet’s descent into dejection we need to trust his capacity for joy.
The second mention of the hare in the third stanza abruptly shifts tenses: ‘I was a Traveller then upon the moor, / I saw the Hare that raced about with joy’ (15–16). ‘I saw’: the brief phrase renarrates the poet’s response to the hare. It turns out to have been in the past; we have shifted to a retrospective state, one in which the hare is ceasing to be a creature and is becoming an emblem as the poet, in his third mention of it, makes clear his willed desire to be happy: ‘I heard the Sky‐lark singing in the sky; / And I bethought me of the playful Hare: / Even such a happy Child of earth am I’ (29–31). The movement back into the present tense in that last quoted line sounds (calculatedly) over‐asserted, and inaugurates the drama of poetic consciousness staged in the remainder of the poem. Part of that drama, it might be noted as a clue to the peculiarly objective nature of Wordsworthian subjectivity, is a recognition that there is more to the world than the poet’s sense of it.
In ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, begun before the composition of ‘Resolution and Independence’, but not finished until two years later in 1804, Wordsworth produces his major lyric poem about the mind and the world, about human beings and their spiritual aspirations, about memory, about poetic vision, about death and birth, about the human heart, about God. The themes are huge, and Wordsworth implies the ambition of the poem in the epigraph he attached to it in 1807, the Virgilian phrase Paulò majora canamus (Let us sing a somewhat loftier strain). Yet the poem is not on its stilts; it is no mere copy of eighteenth‐century odes on large abstractions. From the start, the poet’s involvement is first‐hand, personal and felt on the rhythm’s often monosyllabic pulses. The initial note is elegiac: ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light’ (1–4). The lines are in touch with lost wonder, as is brought out by ‘Apparelled’ where the word implies a clothing now inexplicably gone. Instead, the poet’s condition is one in which lost vision is dominant: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’ (9).
The line is affecting as few other lines in English poetry manage to be. It is a mode distinctly Wordsworthian, in its almost stumbling honesty, unignorable depth, restraint, and heart‐piercing directness – all controlled by a poetic intellect aware that words such as ‘see’ and ‘things’ have resonances. The poem’s refusal to give over completely to mourning is evident in the wording of the line in which, as Oliver Clarkson points out, ‘I now can see’ has a residually affirmative suggestion, allowing us to ‘catch a glimpse … of the shimmering world that is “no more”’,2 and in the minimally positive suggestion of ‘I have seen’. It will emerge, as the poem stages various twists and turns, including the attempted rallying of stanzas 3 and 4 after the numb restatement of loss in stanza 2, that the very fact of having once ‘seen’ ‘things’ is enough for the poet to construct a compensating answer to the questions which conclude stanza 4: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’ (56–7).
Those questions have significantly different meanings. The first asks, with a superb rhythmic mimicry of yearning (a consequence, in part, of the opening trochee and the subsequent re‐establishment of expected iambic stress in ‘fled’), about the fading of the ‘visionary gleam’; the second enquires, less heart‐brokenly, about the present dwelling place of ‘the glory and the dream’. ‘Where is it now’ suggests the significance of the poem itself as a space whose ‘now’ accommodates utterances of absence and compensatory recreations. It is, after all, through language that the poem has been able to speak powerfully of what reminds the poet of loss, doing so with special vividness in the dramatic transition that takes place just before stanza 4’s concluding questions. Here Wordsworth turns away from his attempt to affirm current pleasure in natural joy and asserts, ‘But there’s a Tree, of many one, / A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone’ (51–3). The focus on the ‘one’ tree, the ‘single Field’, is typical of Wordsworth, a poet who values singleness, uniqueness, the unreplaceable nature of the experience.
Yet as tree and field ‘speak of something that is gone’, they serve as tactful forerunners of the poet’s own labour in the poem. Wordsworth’s ability to ‘speak of something that is gone’ forms the basis of his hope that loss is not absolute. In stanza 5, he draws, by way of a Christianized Platonism, on the idea of the soul’s pre‐existence and imperishable spiritual destiny. Thus, he is able to assert:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar. (58–61)
The image lends the underlying idea the flavour of a ‘conceit’ in Metaphysical poetry. Wordsworth entertains the idea vividly, even magisterially, and he elaborates the sustaining image with great assurance. Yet the poem seems to operate here differently, less urgently than in the opening four sections, more rhetorically. This is not to impugn Wordsworth’s religious sincerity, but to note how, in order to solve the enigmas mooted at the close of stanza 4, he has recourse to an idiom that allows him to use the first‐person plural and to conquer distress through metaphor and assertion.
The art of the poem, indeed its beating heart, is that figurative devices never conquer experiential distress in any facile way. Even here the initial grandeur gives way to the reappearance of anxiety, sensed as it is repelled: ‘Not in entire forgetfulness,’ writes Wordsworth, ‘And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home’ (62–5). That may seem confident enough, but the opening lines curve towards the conditions they outlaw (that is, ‘entire forgetfulness’ and ‘utter nakedness’), while the phrase ‘God, who is our home’, seems more pious statement rather than uplifting promise. The rest of the section dwells on the inevitable encroachment by ‘the light of common day’ on ‘the vision splendid’ which accompanies the young man, still ‘Nature’s Priest’ (72), even though beset by ‘Shades of the prison‐house’ (67). Cleverly and sadly, the image of ‘clouds of glory’ passes into an account of its banishment. Wordsworth uses the image of a light extinguishing a greater light which will be crucial to Shelley’s poetry, especially in The Triumph of Life.3
Stanzas 6 to 8 maintain this emphasis on the loss involved in growing up. Stanza 6 sees the ‘Earth’ as a foster‐parent, determined with mistaken kindness to ‘make her Foster‐child, her Inmate Man, / Forget the glories he hath known, / And that imperial palace whence he came’ (82–4). The ‘imperial palace’ comes across as emptily sonorous, and the stress is on Earth’s determination to make her ‘Foster‐child’ ‘Forget’; even the span of lines between ‘known’ and its rhyme partner (‘own’ at the end of the stanza’s first line) speaks to the erasure of memory taking place. Stanzas 7 grieves with affectionate mockery over the way in which a child of six throws himself into the roles played by human beings, ‘As if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation’ (106–7). Conceit is now charged with fantastical seriousness, as Wordsworth laments in 7 that the child, a ‘best Philosopher’ (110) and ‘Eye among the blind’ (111), should ‘provoke / The Years to bring the inevitable yoke’ (126–7). Those opening apostrophes to the child are lines derided by Coleridge for being absurd, but the reader senses that Wordsworth means every word of it, that he does believe in the child’s near‐wordless access to a vision denied to the adult.
At the same time, it is the adult poet who is able to articulate such a belief in a poem of great generic inventiveness, one that reworks the irregular stanzas of the Pindaric form and the tripartite structure common to that form. Wordsworth’s very praise of the child communicates an almost agonized sense that his own perspective stands outside that of the ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest, / Which we are toiling all our lives to find’ (114–16). It is this subliminal awareness that precipitates the final movement of the poem, begun in stanza 9, when Wordsworth breaks away from despair to voice a ‘joy’ possible only to the remembering adult:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive! (132–5)
The lines effect a movement towards grave joy, a joy that is no less persuasive for being minimal, residual, a question of ‘embers’ kept from turning into ash only because of ‘something’ still living, because of the fact that ‘nature’, human nature it would seem, ‘yet remembers’. ‘What was so fugitive’, the last line implies in its use of ‘was’, is no longer quite so ‘fugitive’, and yet the ‘something’ and the ‘What’ are hardly manifest in any clear way, as the following lines bring out, enacting the poet’s investigation of the ‘intimations’ present in childhood. These intimations unsettle confident poetic utterance, and Wordsworth’s appositional phrasing goes about and about, redefining, reformulating as he speaks of
obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprized. (144–50)
What incites ‘Perpetual benedictions’ (137), it turns out, are trauma‐like experiences associated in adult life with the earliest stirrings of poetic imagination. Wordsworth’s lines are themselves ‘Fallings’ and ‘vanishings’, not least in the way they appear to search for words to describe experiences that defeat words; but his ‘questionings / Of sense’ might be glossed by his episodes such as his mental state after the boat‐stealing recounted in Book I of The Prelude (1805), when he knew a ‘blank desertion’ (422). These are moments when he felt ‘Blank misgivings’, misgivings he attributes to the fact that he was ‘a Creature / Moving about in worlds not realized’. ‘Creature’ reminds us that he is the product of a Creator, ‘God, who is our home’, and the ‘worlds not realised’ suggest, hauntingly, that ‘the light of common day’ had yet to endow all it fell upon with structures of reality. The ‘worlds’, and the plural indicates the world‐making which the child engages in, had yet to assume a falsely sturdy objectivity.
The later poet rejoices in these earlier experiences that have bequeathed ‘shadowy recollections, / Which, be they what they may, / Are yet the fountain light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing’ (152–5). The second line makes clear that these experiences are unknowable; ‘shadowy’ associates them with the insubstantiality of vision. But uncertainty is the basis of confident declaration; those ‘shadowy recollections’ serve, with conscious paradox, as ‘the fountain light’ and ‘a master light’. The passage gives way to an extended image of what ‘our seeing’ and hearing are still capable of in adult moments of vision when ‘Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither’ (166–7).
The poem is, throughout, able to move convincingly and with affecting eloquence between doubt and assertion. The final affirmation of stanza 9 is the more convincing for the note of despondency that has been warded off in previous lines that speak of ‘truths that wake, / To perish never; / Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, / Nor Man nor Boy, / Nor all that is at enmity with joy, / Can utterly abolish or destroy’ (158–63). There, threats to the ‘truths that wake’ are given full scope in the writing, which brings into play, as it explicitly seeks to send packing, the fear that the truths may ‘perish’, or be the objects in human beings of an impulse to ‘abolish or destroy’. Wordsworth stages a central conflict in the stanza when he rhymes ‘joy’ and ‘destroy’.
Comparable interplays of feeling animate the concluding two stanzas, 10 and 11, the first of which returns to the spring morning addressed in stanza 4, only this time doing so ‘in thought’, a recognition of the journey travelled since childhood and in the course of the poem itself. Movingly Wordsworth reasserts the living, ongoing reality of loss, accepting that ‘nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower’ (180–1), yet articulating an acceptance, at once stoic and compensatory, of his newly found, precarious equipoise: ‘We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind’ (182–3). The stanza refers to ‘the faith that looks through death’ (188) yet the poem does not settle for easy piety. It is grounded in the human, all‐too human reality of a poet who loves the natural world, but knows quietly it is insufficient to sustain the visionary intimations whose guarantee is ultimately their own reincarnation in this poem. Finally, though, in stanza 11, after re‐establishing his bond with natural things (‘Think not of any severing of our loves’, 191), Wordsworth concludes, not simply with a reassertion of the imagination’s power, but also with a restatement of the common humanity in which he shares, without which that power would be worthless:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (203–6)
Those ‘thoughts’ are the final use of a word crucial in the poem; that they lie ‘too deep for tears’ opposes the weight of ‘custom’ which is ‘deep almost as life’ at the close of stanza 8.4 Wordsworth links the ‘human heart by which we live’ to his individual capacity for grief‐inflected vision, ‘To me the meanest flower’. Throughout, ‘to me’ has been the signature of the poet’s authenticity of response. That it surfaces at the end brings out how Wordsworth’s Ode thrives on and owes its authority to its ability to speak profoundly both in personal and in general terms.
A fusion of the personal and the general occurs in two overtly elegiac poems by Wordsworth: his ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’ and his sonnet ‘Surprized by Joy’. ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, sparked into being by the death at sea of Wordsworth’s brother John in 1805, is written in alternating rhymed quatrains in iambic pentameters, a metre suited to the poem’s theme: the poet’s previous association of Peele Castle with a calm, untroubled sea, and his new recognition that Sir George Beaumont’s picture of the Castle surrounded by a ‘sea in anger’ (44), is valuable because it is a representation of ‘what is to be borne’ (58).
The poem hinges on a majestically sorrowful key‐change. It spends a good while lovingly evoking the calm idyllic picture the poet would have produced, ‘if mine had been the Painter’s hand’ (13), were he to have sought to capture his original response to the Castle and its surrounding sea. As the poet approaches the present, he begins to establish his distance from any sense of life as being ‘Elysian quiet, without toil or strife’ (26): a vision now recognized, in exquisitely melodious rhythms, to be seductive and unreal, the product of ‘the fond delusion of my heart’ (29). Then comes the key‐change, one that involves the stoical acceptance of loss:
So once it would have been, – ’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control;
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul. (33–6)
In these lines the hiding places of Wordsworth’s power make themselves manifest: the articulation of breakthrough moments of recognition, the entwining around one another of loss and recompense, the ability to breathe fresh resources of feeling into ordinary English words. Here the revitalized energy lent to ‘new’, ‘gone’, ‘nothing’, and ‘deep’ are examples. Above all, his poetry associates itself with permanent human states in a uniquely personal way, as is shown by the movement from ‘humanized’ – that is, the poet is made to realize his kinship with what he will call ‘the Kind’ (53) – to ‘my soul’. The poem bids farewell to ‘the Heart that lives alone’ (53), yet it does so with the authority of a poet who knows all about the lure of proud aloneness, even as he finally speaks uncoercively on behalf of instincts his readers will find themselves wishing to acknowledge, if only for the duration of the poem: ‘Not without hope’, the poem concludes, with an affecting use of a double negative, ‘we suffer and we mourn’ (60). The repetition of ‘we’ lends a wholly convincing nobility to our suffering and our mourning, conjoined activities, so the line persuades us, that are accompanied by a bare but tangible inkling of hope.
In ‘Surprized by Joy’, Wordsworth writes a sonnet in response to the death of his daughter Catharine, who had died at the age of three. The poem is a modified Petrarchan sonnet, with alternating rhymes in the octave, which matches the poem’s fascination with ‘vicissitude’, a long Latinate word that attracts a great deal of attention to itself in the arresting opening quatrain:
Surprized by joy – impatient as the Wind
I wished to share the transport – Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
‘Vicissitude’ comes from a Latin word vicis meaning ‘turn, change’, and in context Wordsworth’s usage comes closest to OED 3 (‘a change or alteration in condition or fortune; an instance of mutability in human affairs’) or 4 (‘alternating succession of opposite or contrasted things’). Wordsworth’s rhyming captures the ‘alternating succession’ of feelings that is central to the poem – which operates both by registering the surprise of ‘joy’ (presumably a surprise because infrequently experienced by the poet after his daughter’s death) and its saddened aftermath, the poet wishing to turn to his dead daughter to ‘share the transport’ with her. It works, too, by coupling with those feelings the sense of surprised but stoically anguished repetition. The sestet suggests that the ‘pang’ (10) he subsequently felt, after realizing it was impossible for his daughter to ‘share the transport’ with him, was equalled only by the time when the poet ‘stood forlorn, / Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; / That neither present time, nor years unborn / Could to my sight that heavenly face restore’ (11–14).
Miltonic resonances from ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ contribute to the effect of this ending. Milton imagines re‐seeing his late espoused saint, only to be cruelly disillusioned: ‘Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight / Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d / So clear, as in no face with more delight’ (10–12) only for his waking to mean that ‘she fled, and day brought back my night’ (12).5 Wordsworth, taken back at the poem’s close to a point implicitly worse than ‘the worst pang that sorrow ever bore’ (10), knows that nothing can ‘restore’ his daughter’s lost ‘face’, and yet the poem remains both cleanly surgical in its evocation of grief’s muddled vicissitudes and deeply affecting in its irrational, powerful intuition that his daughter, ‘long buried in the silent Tomb’, in some way survives, if only through the fact of poetic memorialization.